Dale Williams Barrigar

The Sky to Talk About by Dale Barrigar

(All images by Dale Barrigar)

“You’re soft as glass / and I’m a gentleman / and we’ve got the sky to talk about / and the world to lie upon.” – Townes Van Zandt

Getting back to nature is not what most people think it is and this MISUNDERSTANDING causes too many people to not get back to nature when getting back to nature is probably the single most important thing many of us could ever do right now.

Too many people believe that “getting back to nature” equals what Ubiquitous Advertising (and now social media in all its octopus-like tentacles and forms) has told them it is.

In order to get back to nature, you do not need to purchase expensive hiking boots and a new backpack and the right clothes and the right walking stick so that you look like you are a nature buff.

You do not need to climb Mount Everest or fly on one of “their” toxic airplanes to a “nature” destination that is filled with tourists just like you.

You do not need to swim to the bottom of the sea nor hike back into the literal wilderness so far so that you do not see any other humans for forty days or more and end up dying of starvation.

You do not need to purchase a mountain bike; do not need to buy rock-climbing equipment; do not need to buy expensive guns in order to slaughter animals with, or a boat so you can hunt down fish; nor do you need to purchase a jeep; a surf board; or a tent and camping gear, in order to get back to nature.

If you are outside right now, glance up into the sky and really notice it and what it’s doing right now; then step to the nearest green thing around you (even if it’s been made that way by humans) and notice how this green plant grows and interacts with its environment, giving back good and taking bad out (you can FEEL this around a plant if you want to). We wouldn’t be here at all without them.

If you are inside, move to the nearest window somehow and open it if you can. If you can’t, it’s okay. Study what is happening in and through the window, whether it be sun, clouds, night, moonlight or starlight or whatever the light (from the sky) is doing.

Even if you couldn’t open the window, you have gotten back to nature when you noticed (and engaged with) the natural light (or its opposite, darkness); and the natural light is always there, even when it’s combined with a human-caused light, which is, after all, also part of nature, because humans are part of nature.

If you can’t move right now, turn away from what they call “the world” and enter so deeply into yourself that the world falls away and there is nothing but self, so much so that “the self” disappears – and you realize that you have been here all along and always will be even after whatever else happens happens. (And it is going to happen anyway whether you like it or not. This is part of what they mean when they say, “Let it be.”)

Nietzsche famously wrote, “Stare into the abyss long enough and the abyss will stare back into you.”

Most people misunderstand that quotation and think it’s a negative, and terrifying, thing.

It’s actually the most positive thing one could ever hope to imagine.

Dale Barrigar

Communing with the Dead; or: Fearful Symmetry by Dale Williams Barrigar

“What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

– William Blake

NOTE TO READER: This is a philosophical kind of literary essay. That is why it is written in such an awkward, simple, friendly, open-hearted way. (1,000 words.)

There are enough technocrats in the world. Them and their billions and billions and billions of followers, who follow them because they follow the Golden Calf ($).

Some of these technocrats even believe that God is a computer game, and we are the characters.

These are some of the “smartest” minds in the world, in a technical sense. And their religion of the computer game matches real religion minus all of the redeeming qualities.

The world needs more philosophy, art, and religion, much, much more.

Philosophy, art, and religion are not the same things.

You need the first thing to build the second thing and the first two things take you to the third thing without you even knowing they are doing so and the third thing (which is the most important thing) continuously feeds back into the first two things, which are then strengthened accordingly, which makes them feed back into the third, and the process goes on into the future strengthening the philosopher, artist, and religious adept who is all the same one in different guises that sometimes meld with each other.

PHILOSOPHY = a mental way of living on this Planet and making it through without tearing your hair out (too many times) or hurting anyone else (as much as possible). It is a way of being, and the best philosophies do not even have names because they are so individualized and psychologically specific. The best philosophy for your life belongs to you alone and only aspects of it can ever be shared with anyone else alive on the Planet in any way. This is one reason why some of us end up communing with the dead so very, very long and very often.

LITERATURE = communing with the dead. Literature Is communing with the dead. It is not, totally NOT “canonical.” It is anything but academic. Literature itself is communing with the dead in a way that’s more alive than anything else. When you read Christopher Marlowe and get him, living ghosts are crowding your brain, including the ghost who created it all, most of all, Christopher Marlowe, who remains the single greatest creation of Christopher Marlowe, who is far more alive than most living humans are. Another reason why some of us end up communing with the dead so often is because so many of the “living” ones around us are dead. (It can be like Vincent Price in the 1964 film The Last Man on Earth.) Marlowe lived and died like his fictional creations lived and died. That is honesty.

Not all of the writers a good writer reads are dead; but the majority are. It is one of the very few known situations in life where your power increases vastly, slowly, and steadily after you are no longer here in the flesh.

(“So long lives this and this gives life to thee,” said the man who learned more from Marlowe than any other.)

ART= LITERATURE. Literature is the first art, and it started with the first meaningful grunt or groan that led to the First Word, when one human said it to one other human and that other human understood and said it to the third human and then they all understood, together. And next time, they did it again with the same sound, which was called The First Word. Now we have “language;” AND LITERATURE IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF LANUAGE. (The English language, the largest human language in the world, has a vocabulary so large it is technically uncountable.) You cannot create art without a philosophy of life. The philosophy of how to live (and how to stay alive) comes first, then living it, then saying it to someone else in a memorable way, which is literature, and takes forever to master and understand. Without a philosophy of life that comes first, you cannot create art, which takes a lifetime to perfect. The effort to live with the philosophy, then create out of it eventually (while practicing along the whole time), leads to feelings of real religion (leads to the artist becoming a religious adept), defined in the next paragraph.

RELIGION = imagining the possibilities beyond what our senses tell us in a serious, individual way. It is like a “sixth sense;” an invisible third eye; a soul feeling; something you turn to; NOT someone else’s rules; anything BUT someone else’s rules; everything that is NOT someone else’s rules, at the deepest level. Harold Bloom’s metaphor for this is “the oldest part of one’s self.”

REAL RELIGION does not involve other humans in the sense that everyone needs their own internal religion that no one else can understand or relate to or take away from them under any circumstances, and that means any circumstances. Then and only then can it be shared with any other humans in any way, including writing, which, in the end, only scratches the surface (but is enough up to a certain point; not after).

Harold Bloom called the above “a religion of one.” This turns you into a king or a queen on the face of the earth even if your pockets are empty and you have nowhere to stay; even if they have you behind bars, symbolic or literal ones (or both).

ALL THE PROBLEMS the world is having right now ARE CAUSED BY a scorching lack of philosophy, art, and religion in their truest senses. None of these things are only for an elite, they are for everyone in their own way. The theaters of Marlowe and Shakespeare were thronged with groundlings.

In the state of nature everyone is a poet but now hardly anyone knows it and almost no one acts like it. That is why the “smartest” minds in the world believe we are all just characters in a computer game.

END NOTE: In order to avoid being surveilled, all you need to do is step away from their machines. There is still PLENTY OF ROOM to do this whenever you want to – in the Americas.

Dale William Barrigar

Fail Better by Dale Barrigar

Samuel Johnson said: “I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.”

This is true only up to a certain point in the life of an artist.

After a certain point, it is no longer true, because the real and true artist stops caring (eventually) what the public reaction is, or is not, to his, her or “their” works.

But that is not true either. The real artist never really stops caring. (When I say “artist” here, I intend “literary artist,” but any kind of artist can also be substituted, including an artist of life.)

The artist does stop caring about the reaction to their works in the sense that she or he, after a certain point, is going to keep right on doing it anyway with immense rewards to none other than The Self no matter what the public does, or does not, say. And the real artist always has her or his eye on the future far more than the present, because the real artist is creating the next step in human artistic evolution and he or she has no choice but to aim for the future in order to do what she or he needs to do. “Fail again. Fail better,” said Samuel Beckett, regarding the “success” and inevitable failure of such near-superhuman trials and endeavors that can be envisioned by internally picturing the statue of David by Michelangelo. It all sounds grandiose and ridiculous to the average modern ear (which is most writers) and that is why real artists now are so often seen as some kind of holy fools by the rest of society. (See The Idiot by Dostoevsky, especially the first hundred pages.)

The artist does not stop caring in the sense that there always needs to be some sort of living dialogue going on to create the work.

In other words, ONE Good Reader is far more valuable than a trillion shallow, crap readers who don’t understand, can’t understand, won’t understand, will never understand, and what’s more, don’t want to understand!

The first one will feed your art (and therefore your soul), while the second category will turn you into one of THEM (or worse) (if worse is possible).

Because all of this is also about the Soul of the Individual Human vs. The Machine, which is the most important World War of our time. (Everything else important falls under this category.)

And it begins NOW.

Everything before this was only preparation.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

And a cool tune…

The Preachers by Dale Barrigar

Dolly Parton’s grandfather inspired her entire life in numerous ways. He was a wandering preacher who also played music. In many parts of Appalachia, preaching and music and religion and happiness and the Good Book all go together. Dolly was a gorgeous flowering of all that.

Their kind of religion is not the bad kind of religion. It is not even the judgmental kind.

It is the life-giving kind, the happy singing kind, the joyful kind, the everything-will-be-okay-including-DEATH-ITSELF kind.

In this kind of religion, anyone who suffers in any way at all is seen as holy instantaneously (more holy than they already were), and as someone we should all LOOK UP TO, not pity. Even children. ESPECIALLY CHILDREN.

There is little pity in this kind of religion.

What there is here is LOVE. Just love. Only love. All love. And love is the only thing there is. Even when it doesn’t LOOK (or feel) like it at all. You don’t even have to believe in God.

The best preaching never happens in churches, as Dolly’s grandfather knew very well.

It happens on the streets, on the sidewalks, in the parks, in the mountains, in the cities, or anywhere just one person suddenly feels the Holy Ghost inside and decides to connect with another “just one” person who also feels the Holy Ghost within themselves. These are epiphanies, moments, flashes of sunlight from behind the dark clouds, not constant things; but they leave an afterglow.

You can be gay, you can be trans, you can be black, white or green, you can be any color or creed under the sun or above it, you can be anything you want to be and already are.

The best preaching is informal, brief, fast, sudden, spontaneous, and OFTEN WORDLESS.

It often happens in less than a single second, with a single glance of the eyes. And then you pass on by. You always pass on by.

All it takes is two willing people who will remember one another even though they don’t even know each other’s names.

Dale Williams Barrigar (images by DWB)

Lady Gaga and Joanne by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“Every heartbreak makes it hard to keep the faith.” – Lady Gaga

In some of her guises (or disguises), Lady Gaga is a true inheritor of the Dolly Parton legacy, just like Whitney Houston (who died because she couldn’t slow down).

Dolly and Gaga both stood and stand around 5 feet tall in their bare feet. Such connections between artists are somehow not meaningless, and are worth noting (and studying) (or I wouldn’t notice, note and study it). (Chekhov studied his actors very carefully from behind the scenes.)

As Lester Bangs would’ve told us all too, were he here at the moment (but I’m sure he’s somewhere else), the attached musical performance is, without any doubt whatsoever at all, one of the greatest American musical performances of the twenty-first century: and probably of all time.

In this single performance, Lady Gaga joins the late Elvis, and opera singers, at the highest of high heights. Wow!

Notice that she doesn’t dance around while singing. That’s because you can’t dance when you’re singing this good.

But notice how she acts. Her gestures, expressions, movements are part of why this is such great a performance.

But this performance should be studied three ways. One: listening to just the music. Two: watching the video while listening to the music. Three: watching the video without the music.

You should also study, for sure, her beautiful backup singer, especially her eyes.

(And listen to the crowd.)

People like Lady Gaga can’t operate, at all, without people like her backup singer: and the crowd (the small crowd, that is).

Kafka wrote brilliantly (but every unpublished word that fell from his midnight pen was brilliant) about how Sancho Panza and Dapple are just as important as Don Quixote and Rocinante – if not more so.

This performance begins with these words (her eyes hidden in shadow beneath her cowboy hat): “My name is Lady Gaga. Tonight if you could just call me Joanne.”

Lady Gaga just had her first baby at the age of 40!

Congratulations, Gaga and Joanne, at every level I can possibly think of and imagine!

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

Your Cheatin’ Heart by Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

“The time will come when you’ll be blue.” – Hank Williams

It is hard to see someone crying (mostly genuine) tears over you even as you know they’re cheating on you (even though they won’t admit it to you) as you say, with great and utter finality, “I’ll see you around.” Your own tears do not appear in the moment; they appear, unannounced, years later, when you are long gone, somewhere else.

Willie Nelson, perhaps the greatest heir of Hank Williams of all time, used to cheat on all of his wives, all of the time.

And all of them would catch him at it. And the thing is, HE WOULD NEVER, NEVER, EVER admit it, not even when the women placed the red-handed evidence right in front of the Red-headed Stranger’s face.

And I know how that goes. It is called “acting” like nothing ever happened, and some of us are (just naturally) as good at that kind of acting as Marlon Brando was at the art kind of acting (and he is the greatest American actor of all time, alongside Marilyn). (Addiction is a great teacher of acting: “No, OF COURSE I haven’t been drinking again,” etc. etc. etc….)

The song, “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” is a song that has been said to literally DEFINE ALL OF modern American country music.

Hank dictated the lyrics to his fiancé, about his recently ex-wife, as they rode/drove in a car from Tennessee to Louisiana. The lyrics suddenly appeared before him, almost as in a dream, all in their full glory, and he just let them come out, while she wrote them down. When something like that is happening to a person like Hank, you don’t take time to criticize, IF you understand him at all, which she did. (Hank also died in a car not too long afterward – literally.)

His voice as he sings this song is powerful, brokenhearted, and hillbilly. The powerful and the brokenhearted are utterly raw and natural. The “hillbilly” is/was entirely an act, but a brilliant act, like a Shakespearean thing.

Hank was also one of the first people to take the cowboy hat out of the American West and move it on over to the US South. Now, cowboy hats are everywhere down there, like in Nashville (even though they kicked him out when he was alive). Yes, the cowboy hat thing is because of Hank, who sometimes called himself Luke the Drifter. And that is just one reason why (just one reason why) he really is the Shakespeare of American country music. Country music, along with the blues and folk, created rock and roll. Just one reason why Willie Nelson is great is because of how he combined “hippie” and “redneck” and turned them into something all-new.

When Ray Charles sings this song, his voice is sad, slow, sweet, stately, surrendering-to-the-moment, soulful: “truth and beauty,” to quote John Keats, who has a lot more in common with Ray and Hank than most people will ever know (or care to know). Just one reason why Ray Charles is great is because he could sing ANY kind of music with utter conviction, which is also Shakespearean.

SHAKESPEARE HIMSELF WROTE AT LEAST 100 SONGS.

Dr. Dale Williams Barrigar

Ramblin’ Man by Dale Barrigar

“I love you, baby / but you gotta understand, / when the Lord made me / he made a ramblin’ man.” – Hank Williams

The song “Ramblin’ Man,” written and sung by Hank Williams, ends with these words:

“And when I’m gone /

And at my grave you stand /

Just say God’s called home your ramblin’ man.”

Hank was 29 when he expired in the back of a car being driven by a college kid he’d hired on the way to another gig in the middle of America.

Exhaustion, chloral hydrate, morphine, alcohol, amphetamines, nicotine, caffeine, probably a few other drugs, and very, very little food for a very, very long time can be said to be the direct cause/s of his death, i.e. his sudden heart failure in the middle of the night in the back of a car blasting across the American heartland.

Neil Young, who’s 80 now (the age Dolly Parton was when she passed on), and who had his own big-time drug and alcohol problems, and who is a direct descendant of Hank Williams, like Dolly, Leonard Cohen, and Bob Dylan, once said in a song, “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.”

Machine Gun Kelly (MGK) says in his song “27,” “They say I need to slow down, but I don’t know how.”

Those twelve words strike me as being one of the best explanations for the 27 Club I’ve ever heard.

The best singers do not sing only about themselves, just as the best writers do not write only about themselves – they sing and write about all of us, very often when it looks like (on the surface) they are writing or singing mostly about themselves, like Hank in “Ramblin’ Man.”

AND IT’S UP TO US TO MAKE THAT IMAGINATIVE CONNECTION, INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK IN OUR COMFY CHAIR WITH OUR EXTRA-LARGE BAG OF BUTTERED POPCORN AND TOSSING SPITBALLS AT THE ONE WHO IS TRYING SO MUCH HARDER THAN WE ARE.

And some real artists (everything in our world is either real or fake), when they live long enough, learn how to slow down – at least enough, for a while.

(The song “Ramblin’ Man,” as performed by Hank, is very close to a spoken word poem, which is probably why Sam Shepard loved the song so much and used it so often.)

In honor of these departed kids and others of their ilk, whether “famous” or not, HERE is a list of twelve members of the 27 Club. They weren’t all 27 exactly (at their passing). Some were 29, like Hank, or 26, like Mac Miller and Nick Drake, or 25, like Tupac Shakur. (8 of 12 were exactly 27.)

Hank Williams. Robert Johnson. Mac Miller. Tupac Shakur. Janis Joplin. Amy Winehouse. Brian Jones. Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morrison. “Pigpen” McKernan. Nick Drake. Kurt Cobain.

Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

I Saw the Light by Dale Barrigar

“…like a stranger in the night…” – Hank Williams

This week Saragun Springs celebrates the spirit of Dolly Parton through a celebration of the music of Hank Williams, because DP loved Hank Williams and because Hank Williams is the William Shakespeare of American country music.

Bill Maher said a lot of obnoxious, hypocritical things about Dolly when she died. His comments show that he, like everyone who laughed along with him that night, judges life through the material lens of the Golden Calf ($) only.

Dolly, I do believe, was different.

As a cultural figure in American life, she was the counterpart, in many ways, of Willie Nelson. Both artists cross boundaries almost like no one else.

Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are literary geniuses, but it cannot be said that either one of them reach “all” audiences in the way Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson do.

In their ability to be popular with (almost) everyone, Dolly and Willie are more akin to Elvis and Johnny Cash than to Dylan and Cohen.

There are many people who do not like Bob Dylan for a huge variety of reasons and, before he died, there were many, many more people who did not like Leonard Cohen either.

They thought Cohen was BORING and gloomy and confusing, IF they thought of him at all, which they rarely did.

(Cohen’s status changed radically with his comeback tour in 2008 – 2013 and then after his death.)

One of Dolly Parton’s favorite songs by Hank Williams is called “I Saw the Light.”

She performed it many, many times.

As with Robert Johnson, Hank’s music sounds old-fashioned at first; IF one is not listening carefully.

“I Saw the Light” is not just a Gospel song, and you do not need to “believe” in Jesus, or even God, to get a lot out of this song.

This song is about a privileged moment.

A privileged moment here does not mean what “privileged” means in the currently politically correct sense.

It means an epiphany, which is an intense, life-giving realization that doesn’t last forever but has strong echoes and reverberations.

Being “in the zone” is another way to put this in modern terms.

Wordsworth called all this and all these: “spots of time.”

They do not last.

But they leave a lingering resonance.

True and real artists cannot, and would not, ever, create anything at all, without privileged moments, epiphanies, being in the zone, having spots of time.

You can choose to take these spots of time to the next level and believe in life after death, like Dolly and Hank did and Bob Dylan does.

Where the white people live/d Jesus is depicted as a white guy and where the black people live/d Jesus is depicted as a black guy and in Japan he’s depicted as a Japanese guy and in India he’s depicted as an Indian guy and in Mexico a Mexican and for Native Americans he’s a Native American, and so forth. He’s the greatest shapeshifter who ever lived or ever will live. That’s just one reason why there are four canonical accounts (four perspectives) on his life none of which agree on all the details.

Michael Jackson, Elvis, The Beatles, Donald Trump, are NOT the most famous humans on the Planet and have never been the most famous persons on the Planet and never will be the most famous persons on the Planet, and not even close, although there are many (who are in the wrong on this) who have said they are the most famous persons on the Planet.

Jesus is the most famous person on the Planet. And he has been so for at least 1,500 years. His spirit was alive among humans long before he actually put feet on Planet Earth.

Sometimes I wonder why that is.

There’s something deeper going on here.

And just because we cannot see it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Dale Barrigar

And how about some bonus Hank from some of country’s Big Names

One Writer’s Life (Lately) by Dale Barrigar (Images by Dale Barrigar)

“The earth’s proper scripture could be carried on a three-by-five card if we weren’t drunk on our own blood.” – Jim Harrison, from After Ikkyu

INTRO NOTE: This little article about five photographs appears to jump around a lot; but that is only because it is an EXPERIMENT in attempting to capture the process/es of one writer’s mind during a mini-siege of controlled thinking.

I repeat: THIS IS AN EXPERIMENT. In the same way that scientists do experiments is this. (We know as little about the mind as we do about the entire universe which is just one reason why I believe Mind Experiments are productive.)

Henry David Thoreau once said: If I knew anyone better than I know myself, I would write about them (instead of writing about myself.)

Second Intro: These five pictures are called “One Writer’s Life” for six simple reasons.

ONE: I write in my car (a small, fuel-efficient vehicle), a lot, by hand, while roaming around, or ferrying my kids around, from work to school and back again, sometimes while actually driving.

I can drive like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen. There are a trillion things in this world I’m no good at, at all (even unto the point of being mentally deficient at some level, at least by this society’s standards), but driving is not one of them. (Writing an essay about all the things I’m not good at is on the agenda.)

TWO: I spend a lot of time in the northeastern Illinois fields roaming around with and sometimes without my three dogs, and writing, by hand, on paper, with multicolored pens, in all four seasons, which I love equally well. (Every time I try to pick my favorite month, I remember that all the other months are equally good for different reasons.)

I use many-colored pens because I like many colors (it makes the page/s look alive and vibrant, and reminds me of my heroes, Van Gogh and Walt Whitman), and because it helps me tell what the hell is going on in the packed page/s later (if and when the pages don’t fall out of my pockets for someone else to find, or not find, later).

THREE: I watch a lot of documentaries about writers in my down time, when I’m too tired to read or think on my own.

(I have (almost) no regular furniture in my small, fuel-efficient apartment, and if I did have it, I wouldn’t use it (which is why I don’t have it).)

FOUR: I write outside, as stated previously, a lot, including at night. I rarely use an umbrella even in the rain because my uncle, who was a Marine sniper in the Vietnam War with two tours of duty (and later regretted his actions but felt he was serving his country at the time), told me that Marines never use umbrellas unless it’s holding one over someone else, and I admire that kind of humble, dutiful, rock-solid toughness; but I still find umbrellas beautiful for some reason, I think because of my fondness for Asian culture and some of the beautiful paintings I’ve seen.

The lonely plant here, reaching toward the stars (not touching the stars: reaching toward them) is a symbol of the real (and HUMAN, all-too-human!) writer.

The stars are not of this world; and at the same time, they are the only thing that’s truly important in this world at all.

FIVE: In the mode of William S. Burroughs, that great Kansas aristo-cat who always wore an Army jacket and baseball cap in his later years, I sometimes toss together half-assed collages of writers when I’m not writing.

At the present moment (I counted) I have 103 pictures of various writers (and a few other artists, especially Van Gogh (who was also one of the greatest writers of all time, just pick up his letters and dive in anywhere), Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Marilyn Monroe, and Joan Crawford, one of whom reminds me of my mother and another of whom reminds me of a few someone/s I won’t talk about right now) up all over in my apartment.

Many of the pictures are small, like postcard-sized and so forth.

I see them much more than I see any other humans these days except strangers on the street and my kids, and sometimes their friends, etc.

SIX: Real writers are more introspective and self-conscious, and less publicly performative and pushy, than all other kinds of artists (in general, or mostly) and many of them definitely fit into the category of “neurodivergent,” and many of them in many more ways than one, too. And many of them are always dodging and disappearing around corners, like Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson, were both equally wont to do, on a regular basis.

Hurray for the Human Writer, the Outsider Observer who cares (and struggles and strives) and can get it all down in words!

They call/ed Jesus “The Word” because they knew he is the greatest writer who ever lived, bar none.

Paul first spread The Word’s teachings through the word. (Open his letters anywhere and dive right in; Kurt Vonnegut repeatedly called himself a “Christ-loving atheist”; Charles Bukowski said, “Jesus had style.”)

Literature is the deepest, most profound, most complex, and longest-lasting Art form (without any doubt whatsoever at all).

Almost all of the greatest military generals in the history of Planet Earth (from Alexander the Great to Napolean to Ulysses S. Grant) have known and acknowledged this fact.

Michelangelo, and Picasso, and Rodin, all also acknowledged this fact.

They were all obsessive readers of Literature, and either were, or wanted to be, Writers.

Dale Barrigar (Words and Photos)

The Eyes Have It by Dale Williams Barrigar

This here shaggy dog is headed to Jensens Island in the middle of Big Bearskin Lake in far northern Wisconsin.

I am not aware of whether he knows the details of all that, but he isn’t used to being on boats and one thing is certain from looking at these photos: even though he isn’t used to them, he isn’t scared, either.

That’s because he has a fearless and bold nature that makes him plunge into situations such as these almost (not quite) without thinking twice.

He’s also jumpy and paranoid in certain ways, hyper-aware of what’s going on around him and the best guard dog, when it comes to people, you could ever hope to meet.

He doesn’t care about material objects or possessions or probably even money, near as I can tell, as long as he usually has a full belly when needed and somewhere to lay his head, also when needed.

But the people in his life – he would die for them if he had to, without thinking twice.

There are many people in this world who would say, and do say, that a Dog is just a dog.

Anyone who attributes spiritual properties to their animals, like I do to mine, and like the Chippewa of northern Wisconsin used to do (and some still do) to theirs, will think that such people as that are lacking something in their nature. Not that they aren’t fully human, but yes that they are humans with cold (or at least colder than they should be) hearts.

For me, one look in his eyes tells you instantly that there is a lot more going on in there than some people give him credit for.

In some ways I even believe that he’s much smarter than your average, run-of-the-mill, boring, materialistic human – and very much so, at a level that cannot be scientifically tested or verified at all – and is even more true for all of that.

Words and pictures by Dale Williams Barrigar and, of course, Boo