Future Present: The Autobiographical Ramblings from the Little Man in the Boat

By Morgan Burton Johnson

Synopsis of Future Present

This book, set against of the backdrop of his partners decline and death from AIDS, relates the review the author experienced of his life when confronted with this tragedy. It is told in anedotes, stories, and insights with his poems (18) and paintings (104) while relating how he found himself in a life of art, found his poetic and artistic voice, as well as his discovery of his sexual identity as a citizen of the twentieth century.

Excerpt of Future Present, Chapter 2, Awaiting The Message

I havent met much evil. Nor have I been involved with it. The closest act of evil that Ive completed came through alcohol, self-loathing, precious love and fetid jealousy, and fatigue. Actually, not to water it down, the prank was more wicked than evil, evil being hell-bent and wicked just a treacherous warning. Evil has no escape; wickeds wretchedness contemplates safety and pardon because of its cleverness.

I was living below the Smokies, below the spot Dollywood now stands and where one finds Cades Coves dead end--the first geographical dead end Id run into, in the Riverhouse*. First floor, southern front apartment on a street paralleling the river in downtown Knoxville. With alcoholic, classical piano-playing Rick. We had fled across the country, drinking days into nights into street lamplight, and had managed to enamor a less-than-self-assured young college student to us by being les deux avec les bon mots--artists struggling through capitalism, lashing out in self importance. We were, at least to this bookish waif, the jetsam of an over-flowing tempest of corruption: too good to be noticed.

It worked well for us, being idols. We worked, Rick and I, diligently to dispel this false idolatry by long discussions of self-admonishment, hope and assurance to him that by being patient, he would find himself, and hence, we would earn his worship.

And Sam was sweet. Eager. A curly headed raggedy Andy. Floundering sophomore,lithe and with no distinct shoulders, waist or height: just there, big-eyed and listening. How he longed for acceptance--which he had at his very intelligent fingertips if only hed relax--and for the excitement of being recognized. For what, I cant remember, but given the stature of Rick and me in his eyes, Im not surprised that we enjoyed him if the rest of the world had no defining shelf for him. At twenty-three, his was a big request.

Yet it was his whining that finally wore me down: he was once and forever aching over the non-events in his life. No matter that he was truly smart, could read and write in three languages and had the instinct of art. No. He was spinning as a moth on cold cement, no direction but the endless circle, flicking dust.

What I did was not in any way planned--our days werent: they revolved around the bottles we could score--but now I can recall that Sams haphazard appearances, rapping at my frosty gallery window, were beginning to interrupt the frequent painting hours I spent watchful for Rick to return from his shift of waitering at Annies Place. And Sam quickly learned the timing of being there, at the apartment just long enough before Rick arrived to deplete my concentration by questioning me about all the fine odds and ends collected in dust about the apartment. And how and why I was incorporating them into my still-life paintings such as Distilled Life* and Entente.*

I considered him primarily Ricks friend, which allowed more than the usual annoyance. Why did Ricks friends have to like me? He admired that I stumbled from painting subject to subject, seascape to still-life, and I remember that he had never known, until Notes Falling*, that calla lilies grew wild...somewhere. In Tennessee, they were imported from hothouses; it had not occurred to hi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 3, 2003
• ISBN: 9781477180037

Morgan Burton Johnson

Morgan Burton Johnson was born in Santa Monica, California, on November 25, 1952 to parents Roma Burton (publicity: RKO, MGM Pictures; west coast editor, Seventeen Magazine) and Arnold Morgan Johnson (freelance Hollywood photographer: Modern Screen, Variety). He received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla in 1974 after attending the Lycee du Universite au Dijon in Dijon, France, where he received a Certificate of Foreign Studies in culture in 1968. Although he has received little formal education in art or writing, his artwork is refined and varied, including the mastering of the techniques of oil on canvas, linen, glass, cardboard and wood, watercolor and water media, palette knife, collage and encaustic painting. His styles range from classic realism, pointillism and fauvism to abstract expressionism and minimalism, all reflecting the diversity of the twentieth century. His impressionist and divisionist painting has been the object of his awards and shows, combined with his interpretive poetry. He has written four other books, Condemned To A Life of Painting Pretty Pictures (a trilogy novel with poetry and paintings), 1994; Trees of Other Colors (poetry with paintings), 1994; Circle of the White Buffalo (novel), 1996; and Memories of Aunt Aura (biography), 2000. The artist started painting at age eight, receiving paid commissions at age twelve. He has completed several murals, two of which are located at the UCSD campus in La Jolla, with one a competition design winner for Discovery Hall, Revelle College, 1971. He has been published in the San Diego Union (1971), the La Jolla Light (1976), the Advocate (1978), the Long Beach Tribune (1978, 1996), the Medford Tribune (1993), the San Francisco Bay Times (1994), National Library of Poetry (1997-2001), Who’s Who in the West, Who’s Who In America, and Who’s Who In The World (1997-2002), and is included in two books from American References Publishing: The California Art Review, 1990, and American Artists: A Survey of Leading Contemporaries. He has owned and operated the MorganJ. Gallery in San Diego’s Francis Family Building (1974-75), and between 1975 and 1990 worked in retail and manufacturing management. He currently works in fine art restoration, writing and painting in southern Oregon.

Book preview

Copyright © 2002 by Morgan Burton Johnson. 16077-JOHN

Library of Congress Number: 2002093688

ISBN #: Softcover 1-4010-6929-0

Ebook 978-1-4771-8003-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Book Designer: Rick Contreras

Art Director: Mike Nardone

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

"Thousands, careless of the damning sin,

Kiss the book’s outside, who ne’er look within."

Cowper

Though plagued by the imperfection of my memory,

I dedicate this book to my tireless friends

who have managed to survive

my zealous jabs of humor and crusty frankness

and found and nurtured the giving soul within.

And to Donald Gene Machado who taught me the meaning of unconditional.

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Genesis

Prologue

The genesis by which I compiled this book augurs no linear history, but simply tells: stories, anecdotes, ideas, knowledge, the mistakes and the lies of my life thus far. It pulls from my memory of childhood until 1995, the time of this writing, and will include editing occurring in 2002 that has eliminated the presentation of many paintings, some still inferred by italics. This is not an assemblage of contiguous thought; it doesn’t occur that way anyway, so why confuse the issuance with structure and reason?

The idea herein is that all knowledge is here now. Here and Now. Simple enough, except that our brains, while mostly by percentage unused, can’t deduct or dictate that knowledge...yet. (We are still evolving...) And given the myriad of combinations of our communication media, the totality of it will never be realized by just one brain or encyclopedia of brains, no matter how small the computer chip or extensive the book shelf. Accordingly, this eventual fact can not refute that the knowledge isn’t here now. What we must realize is that we are the process of time; time is not a function we are in. What we conveniently call Time is only the knowledge, our recording of birth, change and death.

I will not argue that we don’t alter our world. There are boats here that once weren’t. And buildings, and roads. But the stars, the molecules, the ideas: they own forever and destiny. They, unless we completely consume them, will not reveal or exhaust our potential. It is up to us to ferret them. It is up to us for ourselves and for no other reason; only then can we realize that all knowledge, all facts, were always here awaiting discovery by (our) birth, growth and demise.

And it is this nature of the human being that sets us apart: to understand and record our experiences by changing and exchanging molecules, by building a bridge or a library, eating an apple, by writing it down, by assuming there will be a future to read what is written down. It is with understanding that we can sleep at night. Yet it is acceptance without understanding at which we are so poor. If knowledge has no history we can unearth, we are dumb to listen. We manage no understanding, no knowledge, without placing it in a history or timeline. So this book’s theme is no small request of mine for you to attempt. It is an horizon exchange: put acceptance first, and understanding will follow.

It is the purpose of this book to elucidate the knowledge that forever and all is now. I can imagine that; you must accept it. But I can only tell of them with my universal, using my language of depiction. So that is my goal here: to strike a few of the common chords that unite us all, to portray our birth and change, our cycle of gathering knowledge. The telling of death as lifegiving, using mortality as metaphor.

So, when is the future present? What is a future present? How does a future present? How does a future become (a) present? And who could give a future present? Is the word ‘present’ a gift or a point of reference? I will let the reader decide. Just by putting one word before the other, with both words’ meanings dependent on one another in continuum, defines and links them, making a third concept, independent of the two separate words and their singular meanings. Thus, just as molecules, finite and reused, they sit rearranged, making our senses the last—and only—idiots to figure out what they once were before our invention of them. It is only man that will not accept the world ‘as is’ around him and consequently rearranges it, building and digging at the same time. Going in opposite directions at the same time, trying any method to understand. That is why I produce paintings and poems of the same name; to ferret the idea.

The period of now that this book reflects is roughly the decade of the 1985 to 1995. It will, however, reference all my life thus far: the bits and pieces of assemblage that, strung together, make up what I now know of myself. It will also occasionally reference my loosely autobiographical work Condemned To A Life of Painting Pretty Pictures (referenced from this point on by an asterisk) completed in 1988 and printed in 1994. This decade started with my acceptance of a job that put me in the trenches in the war on AIDS, and moved on to the birth of my relationship with Donald Machado, a true love, in January, 1988. Inevitably, the change that followed resonates in the paintings and poems of that period. Most of these words were written down during my witnessing of Donald’s mortality while contemplating my own from the disease AIDS, but as I have said, the information was always present, just unrecorded. Summarily, this book chronicles death as change, mortality as transformation. Here, I have presented a coarse look at my small life, and it is not for the squeamish.

Making the future present requires work, but is not a compilation of new ideas, for it was all already here...

Morgan Burton Johnson, 2002

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Horizon Exchange

Chapter 1

The Ethic of Work

The ethic of work is honesty.

It is 3:12 a.m. and I am sitting up coughing, cursing the small distant lights in the cloak of night that have grown in number. I don’t remember so many visual interferences to the safety of night when I first moved here, and without my glasses, the lights appear monstrous and pulsating, glimmering as heat in what should be a calm sleepy black. I wish for a world where they weren’t; I suggest a different dawning, an older internal light, not the safety of rural barn lights set off by motion-detectors, by which to see. For the internal is where the present comes from. And falsely lit by man’s fear of the dark it will be faded, and not its true color.

This is how I believe, and have acted from the beginning of my art. My ethic of work. I wanted no instruction, no outside illumination. I had to start in black. I wanted to hear myself. I believe my art is full and best grown by my own light; it would be tainted if allowed any instruction, however gentle. Because of this belief I have floundered in and out of art galleries, museums and art associations, and have reached for no great friends in art, and have had only three friends who were painters. A mark of a true insecure misanthrope, or, perhaps, myself as an only child. I’m sure much was probably lost for this tact. All history records the friendships that have battered and honed the best artist/painter minds. How much beautiful interconnectedness there is in this history, from the traveling Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari to the Impressionists and on to those painters today who are commissural with reproduction. Without this stitch art societies would not have formed. Yet today art is available without stepping into the group, allowing art artifice and capitalism to mushroom feigning a blossoming. Perhaps thats why art records them and not those like myself? It must be our own choice to be excluded.

And this is the salt in the phlegm I cough tonight, always believing I have the obligation to spit out those lights, to darken the world to hear myself, feel my own source. The obligation and the right.

I think the opportunities were there, once, to have met les importantes. I’ve lived in Los Angeles, San Diego, the self-congratulating South, the San Francisco bay area, and now the Pacific Northwest. I’ve entered competitive local, regional and national shows and been accepted, won awards, been shown in museums, joined associations, served on committees, and traveled four times to Europe thus far. Have I thrust myself on them, those that could propel me into the light of recognition? No...well, maybe: I