Ode to an Aged Artist - Part 5

(I figured out recently that if you click on the picture you can get a larger version of it. If you click on the enlargement, you get a good close up that will let you see the texture of the surface and the details of the painting.)

Monday, August 10

Here come the roosters! I love roosters. When I was living in Honduras they were everywhere and not a day went by that I didn’t actively admire them.

“Damn,” I’d say to myself or to Deb. “There’s a handsome bastard,” meaning I’d just spotted a rooster with dramatically shaped plumage, an eye catching comb, intimidating spurs, and a combination of iridescent colors that took my breath away. Some of these guys stood knee high to me. Occasionally, I’d run across an aggressive one, but usually they gave their full attention to scratching and pecking and doing the other thing roosters do. Only a few had the time to spare to charge a gringo.

I saw a rooster

with feathers of Spanish

luster:

black and white cloth

was the stuff

of its shirt,

knee britches,

and arching tail feathers.

its feet sheathed

in yellow boots

displayed the sheen of defiant

spurs.

The

proud

head

crowned

with blood

intensified

its scornful stance:

a statue

of pride.

I love Neruda’s “Ode to a Rooster”, but my perception of roosters is very different from his. The cock he anthropomorphizes so eloquently is a regal character, a kind of benign monarch or the barnyard. Neruda describes him finding a crumb of bread which he passes on to his hens, “keeping nothing for himself / but pride...”

I’ve observed a lot of rooster behavior and I’ve seen nothing that I’d describe as generous or even unselfish. In fact everything in a rooster’s behavioral repertoire seems to have to do with satisfying a limited number of biological imperatives: scratch, peck, scratch, peck, jump a chicken, scratch, peck, scratch, peck, jump a chicken.

Oh yeah, and crow. I don’t know what the biological imperative behind crowing is, but I’m sure there is one.

Remember learning that roosters crow at dawn? Forget it. They crow any damn time they feel like it. However, at dawn they crow in unison, every one in town and there are hundreds, thousands.

Interestingly, in the US, when roosters crow, they say cock-a-doodle-do, but in Latin America they say ki-ki-riki-ki.

Here’s Neruda on rooster sex:

swift movement

of love, ravishment

of feathered shadows,

I praise you,

black

and white

rooster,

strutting

sum

of virile rural honor,

father

of the fragile, egg…

He got the “swift”, “ravishment” and “strutting” right. The rooster jumps on the hens back, pens her head into the dirt, flaps his wings wildly three or four times, and he’s done. The hen gets up, shakes herself off, and goes back to scratching and pecking. The father of the fragile egg struts around bragging about what he’s just done. I know. I am anthropomorphizing, too, just like Neruda, but you watch a rooster right after he’s jumped a hen and tell me that he not thinking, “Yeah, baby! That’s what I’m talking about. I gave it to her good! Call me the love machine.”

Maybe roosters are viewed differently in every epoch. Writing in the fifties, Neruda described a dignified, benevolent, patriarch, a kind of pre-feminist cock. I’m a sixties/seventies/eighties kind of guy. I think about equality, self-determination, and empowerment for the hen. And yet I love roosters and think they are beautiful. Maybe my rooster admiration is post-feminist.

What's A Guy Like You Doing In A Blog Like This?

I started Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man at the beginning of January. It is a yearlong project of self-portraiture and writing to mark my sixty-fifth birthday, which will happen on May 14. This is the year I officially become an old guy and the blog is one means of paying attention to an important milestone in my life. My original concept was that I would document the year by creating a self-portrait once a week and writing a reflection on aging. Now I am one quarter of the way through and it feels like a good time to do some assessment and course correction.

A guy I know, Jeff Elsbecker, sent me an update of what he has been up too over the last year. He is an artist and designer. The document he emailed me was a well put together collection of words and pictures telling about his art, his teaching, and his family. It included a sweet story of taking his son out for his first legal beer on his twenty-first birthday.

In a subsequent email, Jeff wrote me, “I'm always conflicted about sending out my now semi-annual 'journal entry'. It's basically the same as a 'Christmas letter'. The reluctance may be midwestern self-effacement. Maybe it's low self-esteem. Maybe it's a healthy check on being egotistical that I should listen to.

Beyond whether I should do it, I have a continuing curiosity as to why I do it. The urge to blog … hmmm . . . where do you think that comes from? Why do you? “

I wrote back to Jeff as follows:

I decided to do the blog for a few reasons:

1. I wanted to pay really close attention to this year in my life. I think of turning sixty-five as a big deal. Like your son’s transition to manhood at 21 that you wanted to pay attention to. This year is my transition to being officially old. Oldguyhood?
2. For quite a while the idea of doing a series of self-portraits as a way of documenting a year had been floating around in my head. I tried it once before. Actually, I tried to do one a day for a year, but I ran out of steam around #30. One a week seems more manageable
3. I love to write and this gives me a discipline that keeps me at it.
4. I thought other people would find it interesting and maybe get something to think about out of it.

So how has it been going?

For me, great! I love doing this blog.

Coming up with a self-portrait a week is a challenge. I’ve been fudging it by using old ones and portraits that other people have done of me. I may bend the rules even further and say that since any artwork is a self-portrait on some level, this painting of roosters counts. (I gave one of my rooster paintings to a friend for his birthday and wrote on the back, “Old Roosters: Too tough for stew, but still able to cock-a-doodle-doo.”)

I am very gratified and stimulated by the comments that people share with me. For example Jeff wrote:
"I wanted to comment when I read your first entry, way back, but didn't explore how to sign up and then just kept forgetting to check in.
In particular I was thinking about Miss America. As a kid she was the icon that we males were to desire. And it wasn't an egregious duty, at least for me. The point where I jerked the end of my leash was when I realized if I pursued her now I'd be a pedophile."

This is a good point for you to share your assessment of Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man. I’d love to hear comments, suggestions, questions, and/or criticism.