One evening, Rockwell’s son, Peter, who was sick in bed, asked his father to entertain him by drawing some clowns. Rockwell resisted his son’s entreaties, claiming he could not draw without looking at a model or at a photograph. He needed to gather objects in front of him, an array of things to look at. He went cold when he tried to draw an image from his head, as he said. He was afraid of what might come out if he allowed himself to fall prey to his imaginings. He was the most nervous of realists, a painter who felt vulnerable when he shut his eyes. [1]
And so, why am I excited about citing this? Deborah Solomon writes one of the most amazing passages I’ve ever read in a biography. She puts her 2 cents worth into Rockwell’s biography; after all, she’s an art critic as well. “He was the most nervous of realists, a painter who felt vulnerable when he shut his eyes.” The Antithesis of Myself. All the time, I shut my eyes to envision a character, or performer of my body of work. My characters and I thrive on vulnerability.
I look at Prince Nehemiah’s New Visions Vision-Wall, closing my eyes to watch the Fight-Dance unraveling. With eyes closed, I watch another member of the Supra-Hero Troupe donning the proper apparel at the Fight-Dance Convention at the Ascencia Coliseum, delivering his left-hook, roundhouse right, then an upper-cut. I hear, with my eyes closed, the repeated&reiterated fight-dance audio and his clear crisp punches echoing throughout the vast coliseum. I’m hearing the high&low pitches of the villains’ moans and groans. With eyes closed, Ascencia is home. By the time you read this, the Fight-Dance Competition at the Ascencia Coliseum is over; and if you hadn’t missed it, you could’ve won it! Ready to take this evolutionary journey with me?
Could you be ready whenever I pull your name from a hat? Could you be ready for me to bless you long after I pass onto another sphere in relative obscurity? “The world rewards artistic achievement with indifference, if not ridicule. . . .no amount of success can stave off sickness or death.” [2] Could you then realize that I was always willing&able to withstand the ridicule when I was alive and well and writing? When I’m dead and gone, not only are you not ridiculing me, you’re using my creations and inventions as textbooks at the University of Diversity. Could you discover that there was never any time when I realized “that it was the artist’s fate always to be sacrificed to the spirit of the age?” [3]
Matthew Arnold, in his Essays in Criticism, says “There is more power and beauty in the well-kept secret of one’s self and one’s thoughts, then in a display of a whole heaven that one may have inside one.” [4] Could you then realize that I was always more than willing&able to be on display? I’m inviting student performers from the University of Diversity to read my intellectual property and create magical moments with my characters every day. Every day spent on campus, at the University of Diversity, is Independence Day. The mechanism begins when you become willing&able to play for a living. The mechanism begins with two or three minute punch- drills that evolve into the Fight-Dance.
One day I will once again move to another world I choose to know. Going with me shall be the Lad with the painted-on cat-whiskers whose face beams when he catches me looking at his cat-whiskers in front of the library. He could be ATOM!, my son-in-disguise. I know you are out there somewhere. Meanwhile, with the Double Diamond roughness in his voice, “The” Adonis shall meet me just in time for the Fight-Dance Competition on 31AUG. He shall become moon-glow, no longer moonbeam, and he’ll show not tell when and where the magic of Ascencia begins.
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[1] Solomon, Deborah. American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, NY, 2013, p. 231
[2] Robertson-Lorant, Laurie. Melville: A Biography, Clarkson N. Potter/Publishers, New York, NY, 1996, p. 437
[3] Ibid, p. 162
[4] Ibid, p. 526
