Surreal Pillow
In the quiet before the day begins in Santa Fe, Today truth stirs like restless horses.
April 23, 2025
Can’t sleep this morning. I can never sleep in the morning anymore. This is good for the work… not as good when I just need rest.
A small bird has woke early too. He is chirp-chirp-chirp—it is too early to feel loss or longing, he must simply be filled with the joy of life.
I read that if birds are singing, one can feel safe. They perceive no threat and so one’s own chance of danger is less. At least external threats. Methinks they cannot read my mind. The little bird looks into the window directly and pierces my gaze.
Or can they?
I was reading about Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz’s relationship and marriage. It’s fabulously romantic, how two artists met, had an affair, made art and love and their union propelled them both to great(er) fame and attention over thirty years.
Reading a few of the thousands of letters they sent each other, it’s easy to get tumbled into the kaleidoscope of emotion they both felt. And did a great job of writing down.
As an artist, there is a latent belief that I could have fallen into a torrid affair that led to a lifetime of rich fulfillment and satisfaction.
But, I fell into a normal kind of love. The kind that is consistent and challenged and comfortable in its expectation. The kind where you pour yourself out for her needs and sometimes realize you’re perhaps neglecting your own. But she pours herself into you.
And you spend your life in this sort of yo-yo. But you don’t mind because you’re a man of obligation, and finding pleasure in fulfilling your obligation is a very man thing to do. Desires are for children. And artists.
The seduction of fantasy is what gets us all. It is the engine of the human economy. Making someone believe in the superiority of the unreal and in the process discard very tangible and serviceable realities. And people.
The arc of the universe is long. But it bends toward good. The arc of fantasy is equal in length, but it is bent toward emptiness. Even bitterness one might say. For every good man who tries and does what is good and right for the sake of goodness and right, there are a hundred who plunge headlong into the cold deep pool of ache. Of fantasy.
I am pulled from my artistic reverie by reality when she stirs next to me. A long groaning stretch while grunting ‘what time is it?’
‘Just after 5.’ I whisper.
‘Why are you up so early?’ Her stretch complete and climbing up for the press of nature.
‘Hm—just… walking in my mind.’ My quiet reply.
She lies next to me and all of my being is drawn to her. Not magnetism… it is gravitational. We fit together so well when we spoon. I, a giant next to her diminutive curled form. She is warm and soft and quiet.
Quiet. The birds morning song has ceased. Did he sense tension? Or just get sleepy?
In the predawn shadow, I observe her soft form. Red velvet below, black cotton above. I am struck by how loud my hand is as I slowly stroke the expanse of her back. I focus on that spot, her left shoulder, that always itches. Her spot, she calls it. ‘Scratch my spot.’ She will sometime say, and I know the map. No compass needed.
This moment is the definition of warmth and comfort and I think of how all of the wealth in creation cannot buy this kind of contentment.
I know she agrees when I hear the soft hum of sleep has reclaimed her conscious mind. And that gives mine an elevating dopamine rush. I am levitating over the big soft bed now. Borne by love, desire and satisfaction. It is a complex emotion. But an enjoyable one. Not in the carnal or sexual sense. But spiritual.
That place beyond flesh and blood, beyond human thinking even. I have pierced that veil of realities and exist here between dawn and dark, between lust and love, real and imagined. Liminal suspension.
I can see and feel everything. Every moment of my life. Of the lives of those I love. Especially those I love more. Glories. Failures. Pains and exultations. Futures. It is all here in this eternal moment.
Bask.
Bask.
Bask.
And it all spills out of me in tears and shudders. I cannot stay here. This ecstatic existence. We are not made to. Like the face of God, some things are not meant for man. This moment does not kill me though. It merely makes my heart and spine glow while whetting my face.
On the wall there is a big colorful Indian holding a peace pipe. He is distorted and cartoony. His face is forlorn. Natives are always depicted forlornly. But the colors of his render indicate a bright and happy presence.
The colorful effigy does not move, but I feel him. His eyes seem stitched from threads of history—centuries of exile, of losing one home after another. And now, here he is, immortalized in kitsch on my wall, reduced and reimagined into something palatable. But his voice is strong.
“Little man,” he says, “do not linger where dreams make fools of men. Little man, come back. Come back. You are where we are not meant to be. Your home, your love needs you. I once looked as you do, the way God made you. I climbed the cliffs for the view and forgot the foundations. Dallied too long and now am lost forever in this threshold realm and filled with madness.”
He looks toward the bed, where she sleeps.
“But that warmth—the kind that holds you at 5 a.m.—it’s not a dream. It’s the thing that saves you.”
His countenance solidifies, he is being reclaimed by the real, all he says is, “Don’t become me.”
The colorful Indian is right. I come back to the world I know. I do not turn to look—I already know his face: amused, saddened, eternal.
He knows the cost of yearning. He knows what happens when you dwell too long in dreams.
I find my corporeal self still safe and warm. She, wrapped tightly and born by slumber. I have now sketched the doorknob in my journal as the gift of day begins to splash photons diffused and confused on every surface they can find.
I recall my internal intercourse about the two famous lovers. How they asked no questions when they met on the cliffs above the sea of desire, passion and want.
Georgia and Alfred certainly stripped naked and went headfirst into those inviting waters. The warm invitation of fantasy masking cold reality.
They were both drenched with longing from the start. She, at 28, before she fully understood the world. He, at 52, long after he not only knew it but had lived a full life with a family.
The start, as all beginnings are, was delicate and beautiful. Like a blossoming morning glory tinted with dew. Reading as their fixations and longing grow and fully engage is riveting.
Punctuating their budding passions is the book of Stieglitz’s photos of Georgia. Beautiful black and white chloride plates of her youth and vitality. You can see he was smitten with her eyes, her hands, and her body.
Between the writing, his photos and her paintings, one gets the sense of the freight train of obsession that drove them into one another so completely.
It drove her physically across the country to New York. From Chicago, Texas, New Mexico, Virginia and North Carolina just to be in his presence. Oh! God! The power that is in a heart to spend months of planning and days of travel for just a few hours in the same space as someone else!
That first hug is explosive.
To smell them, touch them. Be with them. Technology has not given a surrogate for being with someone in which we are in love. Small totems and words of affirmation are wonderful. But pale compared to a presence.
I know this from experience. No doubt you do too.
Alfred was driven to abandon his marriage of a quarter century to Emmeline Obermeyer with whom he had a daughter. This was no mere lark either, as Emmy was the real money in the family and kept his gallery, 291, going, building him reputation and ego. He too had an inheritance but it paled compared to the money from her father who was a brewing magnate.
Wine makes the heart of mortal man rejoice, and some it makes rich.
But, all of this wonder and thrill and endorphin-inducing lust was not to last. The blush of first love passes too quickly.
Could they have captured that energy and maintained it over the course of their marriage, they’d have truly been a thing of legend.
But they could not. My understanding of their cooling is sketchy, but goes like this:
O’Keeffe wanted the solitude of the southwest and hated the city. Stieglitz found the bucolic life boring and loved the city. And women.
They would both go on to take lovers. Hers were speculated, his had a name. Dorothy Norman. All three of the women of record in his life were significantly younger than he.
Talk about a type.
I am the same age as Stieglitz when he met O’Keefe. And I was the same age as O’Keefe when she met Stieglitz. To say I understand them is valid. Spiritually, emotionally and experientially.
I have been them both. However, I chose a different path than either.
There are brilliant and alluring things about their story, but I can see the stress on Georgia’s face in the later years after Alfred took Dorothy. It was no doubt equally devastating to Emmy as well when he took Georgia.
Passion and lust and fantasy. Oh, my!
O’Keefe once said that she never saw a thing that she wanted that she did not immediately take.
This has a mythic, sort of cowboy ethos about it. Attractive, that danger. But I wonder if in doing so, she didn’t give up deeper things.
The loudness of a hand pressing across someone back in the early hour of the day. The confidence in being able to tell from the tone of a question if it is a question, or a directive. The quiet conscience of drinking from one’s own waters.
The next time I visit the Indian in the liminal plane, I’ll ask him if he knows. But I think I already do.
When I turn from myth and memory, from O’Keeffe and Stieglitz, from desire and doubt and liminal visions, I’ll find her beside me. Still here. Still soft and warm and real.
In the end, to love and be loved is all any of us need.
To be someone’s home.
#essay #travel #memoir #osxs #confession #dreams #storytelling #write #100daystooffload
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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