Both.

In my Father's house there are many mansions.

The 26-minute mark launches Fred and Barney into 15 minutes of giggling about our country's rogue foreign intelligence agency ...

A popular Government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.

James Madison, from his letter to W. T. Barry, 4 August, 1822

Trust no one.

Dark.

John F. Carlson, Woodland Silence, 1903

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,

and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,

and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

Wendell Berry

Between.

Carlson, Stillness in Moonlight, 2012

The DAVENPORT LUNAR ECLIPSE

Overlooking the Mississippi
I never thought I'd get this old.
It was mostly my confusion about time
and the moon, and seeing the lovely way
homely old men treat their homely old women
in Nebraska and Iowa, the lunch time
touch over green Jell-O with pineapple
and fried "fish rectangles" for $2.95.
When I passed Des Moines the radio said
there were long lines to see the entire cow
sculpted out of butter. The earth is right smack
between the sun and the moon, the black waitress
told me at the Salty Pelican on the waterfront,
home from wild Houston to nurse her sick dad.
My good eye is burning up from fatigue
as it squints up above the Mississippi
where the moon is losing its edge to black.
It likely doesn't know what's happening to it,
I thought, pressed down to my meal and wine
by a fresh load of incomprehension.
My grandma lived in Davenport in the 1890s
just after Wounded Knee, a signal event,
the beginning of America's Sickness unto Death.
I'd like to nurse my father back to health
he's been dead thirty years, I said
to the waitress who agreed. That's why she
came home, she said, you only got one.
Now I find myself at fifty-one in Davenport
and drop the issue right into the Mississippi
where it is free to swim with the moon's reflection.
At the bar there are two girls of incomprehensible beauty
for the time being, as Swedish as my Grandma,
speaking in bad grammar as they listen to a band
of middle-aged Swede saxophonists braying
"Bye-Bye Blackbird" over and over, with a clumsy
but specific charm. The girls fail to notice me -
perhaps I should give them the thousand dollars
in my wallet but I've forgotten just how.
I feel pleasantly old and stupid, deciding
not to worry about who I am but how I spend
my days, until I tear in the weak places
like a thin, worn sheet. Back in my room
I can't hear the river passing like time,
or the moon emerging from the shadow of earth,
but I can see the water that never repeats itself.
It's very difficult to look at the World
and into your heart at the same time.
In between, a life has passed.

Jim Harrison

Cultivated.

Carlson, Fading Twilight, 2016

If George Carlson had been keeping field notes in his shirt pocket — hand scrawled in pencil, referencing variations in color, tone, value, light and pattern — his method when hiking solo into the “channeled scablands” of the Pacific Northwest — the morning in question, which unfolded from the doorway of his red Swedish-style farmhouse in Idaho, might have been described like this: 

5:30 am: Carlson, by habit, has risen like a crepuscular animal. Suffusing the indoor human space behind him is another Invention by J.S. Bach. Ahead, as he steps outside, an advancing sun, still dim, seeping forward into a sky holding a muted moon. The twilight fills rapidly with live dulcet birdsong, amping up slowly to mezzo-forte; whitetail deer, closer and pensive, have just emerged from the backwoods; farther out, an elk mother and her yearling extend the sightline into middle ground; the wapiti, holding cautious in profile, are well aware, as Carlson is, of mountain lion and bear presence, the cryptic big cats and bruins never far away, though for now, unseen.

The Bach piano piece flows through Carlson, spilling out toward a distant horizon as he interprets what he absorbs. Fading night has not yet yielded to morning; the artist’s cultivated space is edged by real tooth and claw wildness; tranquility is charged with expectation. 

Carlson is listening to the composer and translating sonic notes into his own repertoire, visual ideas gelling in his head. He is too humble to draw a direct parallel between himself and Bach, though if an outsider delves deeper, pressing Carlson, one soon discovers that the same kind of structure Bach mastered in classical music informs Carlson’s approach to composition.

At age 68, nine years ago, Carlson returned to his original love — painting — four-and-a-half decades after he had become sidetracked by sculpture and acclaimed for it, believing his diversionary foray into three dimensions wouldn’t last as long as it did.

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