Black Forest

A picnic had been prepared by us with everything we would need for an overnight sojourn if required. Isabel and I drove; she had been here before. She has been anywhere and everywhere particularly if a wolf pack has ever traversed a particular terrain. Isabel, I’m convinced now, is a she-wolf disguised in human form. Some humans are closer to animals than to people or I should say, more trusting of animals than people. Laws of nature are ingrained in Isabel. She had seen that these iron miniatures in Vienna had caught my eye. I was compelled to purchase a few specific creatures from an out of the way art shop. Leaving Vienna she said, “we need to get you into the forest Clyde. Nature paints as well as any of your respected masters”.
With that statement she was exacting her plans into place. The Black Forest if I hadn’t been before I’m certainly am now convinced is alive with stories, or tales, or legends. Can legends be real life happenings concurrent to this modern age, but always on replay if you can cross dimensional space? I’ve been pondering. On the way into the Forest, Isabel informed me about the many editions of folk tales or fairytales that the Brothers Grimm had compiled. They had been compiling since the early 19th century. What I found noteworthy specifically was that the brothers were linguists. They stumbled into this gathering of stories, which are now read slightly less than the Bible and Shakespeare. With all of this historical information being explained to me on our drive, I wasn’t positive where I was being led…after the picnic and sufficed to say with Isabel’s picnics you can’t pinpoint which herb or which root or which mixture of both is affecting you. For the most part it can be subtle- for the most part. But then there are always those times when you feel as if you’ve walked into a painting and the painting comes alive, well this was one of those times. There I was in a waking dream state and the Forest was holding all possibilities open for me. I’ve never had a fantasy of being on a game show, any kind of game show where you can pick to experience what’s behind a curtain or what’s behind a door or how much money is printed on the inside of the box. The idea of getting it wrong makes me hyperventilate. But here I was watching Isabel’s long graceful arms reflecting the moon in the full light of day, forming an arch and pointing to different paths that I could take in the forest. I asked her “Can you tell me what each path holds for me?”
“No Clyde I can’t tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t know what each path holds for you. It depends on your choices at every turn.”
I looked around; there were seven choices. In retrospect I believe now that there were seven tales, or stories that I could have walked into. I walked onto one and then something in me thought- I need to choose a more complicated path. So I crawled over some fallen wood, silently Isabel followed me and I looked at her and said, “Can you tell me the path that I didn’t take”.
She smiled and said, “You chose not to walk into the story of Snow White and Rose Red.”
I was disappointed I must say I’ve always loved that story.
I looked at her and said, “Can I go back and have that one”.
“Do you really want to?”
I said, “No I’ve chosen this one”.
“Alright then you will know soon enough.”
Within about fifteen minutes or so, there was no doubt in my mind that I had walked into Little Red Riding Hood. Hour after hour we got deeper and deeper and deeper into the story, watching it all happen before our eyes. I began to consider with every step the word Predator. This word gets used a lot in the animal kingdom. It is a word that when I say it, I don’t see animals. There is a specific set of eyes. I didn’t see the wolf for one moment, as anything but a representation, a human predator and that face will be different for each person that walks into this story. With different twists and turns on the path, I began to figure out that my choices would play out different versions of the story. I never knew how many versions there were of Little Red Riding Hood. As I approached the final chapter of the story, I heard the trees whisper- there is nothing to be afraid of, girls will become women, and no predator can stop that. Many hours later Isabel and I sat under the stars talking about the experience. She reached out for my hand and then took both of them, looked me in the eye and said, “You made the strongest choice you possibly could Clyde. You didn’t walk the victim’s path. Do you understand how you took control of the situation”?
I looked up at the darkness of the sky, the trees were still swaying, there was a warm breeze. We were staying in a little town within the Black Forest. I had chosen a version of Little Red Riding Hood that I had never heard before. You don’t know what you’re choosing until it is upon you because you walk onto a stone or around a tree and all of the sudden you’ve walked into the next dimension of the fairytale itself. How Isabel finds these worlds, I don’t know. But once you’ve made your choice you can’t walk back through the portal when you cross over into another chapter of the story. Then the events play out before your eyes. In this way you are a participant although you’re not one of the characters themselves. Little Red Riding Hood was in front of me at all times, just by inches. And she couldn’t hear me, but I could hear her as well as all the other characters and creatures. In this version, my little red riding hood saw through the wolf’s disguise, tried to escape by tricking her grandmother with the excuse that she needed to defecate and did not want to do so in her “grandmother’s” soft bed. The predator grandmother allowed my little red riding hood this quick release if she promised to come back instantly, while tying a string from her devouring paw to the little girl, around little red riding hood’s wrist. Clever Red slips the string over something else and got away.

Use of Light

I had needed more time in Paris so until recently I had stayed on. After having played my first show, I had to come to terms with the reality that I’ve waited my whole life to express certain emotions about certain events about certain people. After this show, it was agreed that I stay in Paris and process this intersection of feeling. Not until I immersed every chakra of my whole being as I walked through the Musée d'Orsay did I begin to consider my real father. Not my stepfather or as Pip calls him, my step-monster, but really consider my birth father. He was an artist. Yes he is still alive. No we have never met. My mother had come to study in Paris from the States. He was married; she was feeble and ill. It had gone on for so long. A small group of painters had moved around him. It was she who was a model in several of his paintings that I have observed from afar. There’s not a lot to tell really. She got pregnant. He couldn’t leave his wife. She fled back to America, never looking back. She remarried when I was 12; at 13 I moved in with my Gran and with my Granddad- to this day, the healthiest choice I ever made in my life about anything. I understand him more now. To watch people look at his paintings, I see him through different pairs of eyes without the rejection. I’m beginning to get to know him by studying how he works with light. There’ve been so many visual artists in my life and I wonder if that’s because I just wanted to be close to him. Not for long, not to be the center, never that. This morning it was early as we drove into Vienna. I had slept with art books that are filled with masterpieces. Isabel encouraged me to learn about my father as an artist, not as my father as a man through the eyes of my mother. Not as a father that never knew his daughter. This is a beginning of an unknown relationship. Now how I was privy to such an intimate scene that I’m about to write of is a mystery, or was it fate. Through friends of Gran in Paris, I was invited to a family evening. I watched a little girl try and play the piano; no it was more like an electronic keyboard. The names of the notes had been taped to the keys. Someone had been trying to teach her. What a great idea I thought, although sticking pieces of tape on Tori’s Bose with the keys written out even for the most precocious little girl in the world, would probably be the right idea but definitely on the wrong keyboard. Still, I filed the thought to tell her anyway. She’s always up for a good idea even if it’s not one she applies to herself. So here I was, enthralled by the teaching methods and the little girl, Sophie. She got mad. I mean really upset. She threw herself on a chair nearby hiding her face, she started to cry. A happy quiet kind of man sat down at her small keyboard coaxing her back to it, no lie. This patient human sat with her and sat with her, ignoring the party, ignoring the grown ups- Sophie, Sophie we try again…go glower. Let’s start slower. We need a metronome, oui. But Papa …And so it went- back and forth, encouraging her with kindness and gentleness they began to make progress. She was still upset and I smiled. I woke up today in Vienna, smiling again with a new patience and many art books studying a painter’s use of light.