THE SON

Some say Burkhart is a real SON of a bitch. The tragedy is that he even believed that himself for a long time, being told that his mom abandoned him when he was two because she was "a bitch and a whore." Actually she was a war bride and her husband went off to defend our country. When he didn't come back home, she threw in the towel, as well as the young Burkhart, and took off for whereabouts unknown. That's what the growing boy was told back then. The full truth was that his father was the one that abandoned him and as his mother, during the height of World War Two, thereby condemning them both to a life of separation and misinformation. Father had gone elsewhere to begin a new life for himself, but it was made to appear as if he was missing in action.

Still, the young Burkhart grew up with admiration for his "missing" father, an interest which soon lagged once he learned that the man was still alive and well with another family, having fathered a son who went on to play pro football for the Pittsburgh Stealers. How apt. He had stolen Burkhart's childhood and given it to another Stealer.

Without a real father around, Burkhart put in his own version of one, and became one with him. But his mother was another story; he both yearned for the missing love she (supposedly) left with, and at the same time, hated her for (supposedly) abandoning him. He was 55 before he learned the truth about his childhood…

“Freddie, did you eve find out what happened to your real parents?” asked the 86-year-old foster mom on one gray Mother's day in `97. “Sure… I found out that my dad never really died, but was alive and well, Captain Burkhart, chief engineer on the S.S. Ontario, and a family man.” “Well, no… I mean, what really happened to your mother… did you ever find out?” “What do you mean, 'What really happened?'” “Well, do you remember when you first came to live with us, you were nine, and we used to take you to the Frisch's Big Boy Restaurant ever weekend… and there was this real nice waitress there who used to bring you toys…” Oh know… realization came in a flash! “Don't tell me… that was my mom? But how could you justify keeping us apart?” “We thought it was best, Freddie.”

No, his mother had not abandoned him, but lived in the same neighborhood where he grew up, being denied any contact by the foster family he had been pawned off to - which the boy later learned was his father's brother and his wife. Burkhart had been living with his Uncle the entire time, accepting the lie they fostered on him about his father, when in fact he had abandoned ship and was not every worthy of the favors these humble people honored him with. To protect the family name… of all things. Burkhart grew up to abandon the years of coalmines and riverboats for a name more worthy. Still, his true mother was now long dead, the poor deer woman, forever denied the love she felt for her son. The realization came slow…it had been she who was abandoned for all those years, not he. (Is that good grammar or what!)

As a result of his misguided youth Burkhart subsequently turned his back on every institution that might have loved and nurtured him. It was a choice, desperately difficult, that took on the absurd proportions of a life lived in the shadows, without love, without support, without light. In that desolate landscape he pioneered an art of hope, relying on his own resources, by placing his faith in God's abundant promises.

The year was 1979 and the original grant ($250,000) was divided between eight artists - who received a total of $68,000 - and six administrators who received the remainder of the money - a whopping $182,000! You do the math. Burkhart did the obvious: Spent a $1,000 on some darkroom equipment and a case of cheap whiskey; returning the rest of the money to the State. No one had ever done such a thing before, and the Ohio Arts Council threatened to sue the artist. But then the State had never done that kind of thing before either, so they just blacklisted him instead. Alas, he had thrown away an exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum and an acceptance that most artists work a lifetime to covet!

Actually, he spent most of the money on whiskey, wine and beer - plus an occasional bag of pot. It was a party! Having successfully turned around the previous dozen years of debauchery and hard core chemical dependence -- including intravenous drug use, hospitalization and a self induced lobotomy of premier proportions - Burkhart decided it was time to coast. But it was soon discovered that nothing had been turned in his favor; permanent tissue damage had set in, and the daily blackouts and withdrawals got worse, and the jail sentences longer. What had begun as a rebellious facade in his teenage years had finally revealed its insidious nature to the world as a mockery. The true Spirit had been bottled up inside and replaced with a constant 100 proof imitation that had finally overwhelmed him and begun to turn very real on its own terms, manifesting sickness and dis-ease within the stupored body and world of Burkhart.

On one such visit to jail Burkhart had had enough, and literally drew his way out of jail. Assigned to the laundry detail, he began to sketch the prison walls on a piece of tattered cloth that had been torn from a bed sheet in the out dated machinery. It became his Shroud of Turin, on which he smeared the blood of 17 ball point pens, in shades of blue and green and violet, depicting the cracked windows and deteriorating walls of the old Civil War Penitentiary in Cincinnati Ohio in which he had come to be locked for a 30-day sentence of public drunkenness. When one of the guards confiscated the drawing as contraband, the undaunted Burkhart continued his rendering on an equally contraband sheet of meat wrapping paper supplied from the kitchen by a cellmate. Burkhart once referred to the drawing as a blend of a 30-day sentence and a prayer, literally drawn by the Hand of God. He was fond of quoting Whitman in this context: "I discovered that the hand of God is really my own hand, and that the Spirit of God is my own brothers..." (“…and all the women, my sisters and lovers!” goes the remainder of the quote)

On the 17th day of incarceration, he ran out of ink and contacted his attorney, a young handsome public defender that secured him an immediate audience with the original judge in the case. As Burkhart boarded the bus back to court, the inmate population laughed while he waved good-bye and assured them that he was through serving time and would not be back to finish the 13 days still due the State. They did not laugh at him, but with him, because they too knew he was done with the derelict's life. The judge wasn't so easy to convince, however: "Mister Burkhart... didn't I just sentence you to 30 days at the Workhouse?"

That was 1976, the end of an era. But it was still only the beginning of the end, as the artist had yet to overcome the pain that an earlier error thinking has fostered on him. He used his newfound freedom to lock himself tight into another jail - his continuing addictions with drugs and alcohol. "Those fucking hippies ruined me," Burkhart ruminated on a life gone badly. "Rich kids who appeared momentarily in the streets to rip off that knowledge, only to use it for safe return home to their parents, while leaving the rest of us to pay the piper." It was true that they had stolen the secrets that wise men often become fools to communicate. Yet these young punks of both genders had been careful to remain free, in order to pursue their tyranny and overthrow of the only government they could yet fathom -- their parent's unfair rule over them.

To Burkhart it was all bizarrely reminiscent of the Circus Maximus, the old Roman Court where the Christians were fed to the lions - it was the same old story: the truth being eaten alive by liars. The hippies smiling as they watched from windows covered over with the purple haze of their free love and drug euphoria, while sick and dis-eased men like Burkhart and the other "criminals" paid off the great and combined karmic debt for a society in denial.

Considering that a whopping 85 per cent of the incarcerated are there for alcohol and drug related issues, the real crime has always been allowing these young people to return home, unrepented - unchanged -- and take up their hypocritical places within that phony society their own parents had likewise built on the same dead premises. It's the Devil's Design, no less, created to cover the truth at any cost, so that they might live temporarily in the lap of luxury, while their newly formulated languages of political correctness allow them the appearance of concern.

But there was no place for the Prodigal Son Burkhart to return when he finally left the jails and institutions. There was still no family on the horizon, nor was there yet any appreciation for the sacrifice he had made of himself, as he sought diligently to fight the impulse to make a sacrifice out of somebody he knew and disliked. “Why not create a family out of the misplaced dreams of the Hippies!” he reasoned: A true communal life that opened its doors to everyone -- not just the handful of handsome young people pursuing ecstasy on testosterone and LSD. Shit... you could go to a Klan Rally and drink beer and smoke cigars at the foot of a 40-foot high cross if that's all it took to be part of a Love Generation. Love generation? Like many other groups of people on this planet, they generated about as much separatism and alienation as they could in order to support their own narrow perspective. If you agree with them, you're in; if you don't... you are the enemy. Ha!

But nobody is the enemy in a true community. How misled were poor Adam and Eve... our early examples of the original parental formula on which the family is patterned? They so wanted to know Good and Evil that they "begat" two sons to live it out the dichotomies for them, so they could stand back and take notes and theorize. From Noah to Darwin, from Freud to good old Cliff Note, the all-superior parents continually define their own superiority by the cataloguing of the mistakes of their children. Life is always lived vicariously in a world that rejects the truth and imposes its own shallow understanding in its place. Over and over the parents exercise their own vain pretenses by forcing them on their children and then sitting back and watching it all unfold in all the wrong ways, meting out the appropriate reward or punishment as formula. Alas, the children always come to their own and turn the tables.

But Burkhart's version of Utopia was mapped out by a small child who came to live with him for nine years, to show him the way back to the Garden and the Father's revelation. Although the child is gone now six years, he continues to welcome her every month in and as the hundreds of young people who appear at his door with their friends... "Look who we brought home this weekend, dad!" their smiles communicate to him. And so he gives them a place to express themselves, to share what they have learned since the last visit, to give him a warm hug until the next time. And that gives him the ultimate purpose in life -- after they have gone he finds his way into the kitchen to clean up after them and prepare the way for the next mess they will make. But the messes they make are becoming less and less, as he watches them learning to provide for their own needs, to pay for the coffee and tea they consume, as they share weekly in the context of each other's lives. And they too have tempered his vision, enlightening him to the new generation - reminding him that we are always generating the new -- by leaving their artworks on his walls: artworks that make the walls transparent with their fantastic visions of another world beyond this one. Have you ever visited the Burkhart Underground on Sunday? Then you know what I mean.

own terms. When the worst of the worst appear at the Underground to play music or recite poetry, Burkhart sits rapt and at attention, and gives them his all, allowing the images and sounds to wash over him and through him, taking the same delight as they, even though others in the room are covering their ears, or leaving to go upstairs. "How could you listen to that shit, Burkhart?" they later ask. "Because it is what I do best; because my home is not built on judgments." When he was 14, because his adopted parents did not understand his own talents, they signed him away to three years in a Reformatory, to re-form him in their own image. Of course he never went back to their home. Rather than being re-formed, he became all the more committed to the form he was assuming as an artist. Burkhart wants you to assume your own form too! That is why some people like him: Because he allows them to be themselves.

Perhaps they are in need of teaching, that's all. Who are they that take issue with a momentary state of awareness expressing itself? They need teaching, because all life is about learning to move past oneself and into greater degrees of awareness. And the reason it is greater? Because it includes more of the other person's viewpoint, that's all. "When I was in grade school, I had no idea that they were infiltrating me with their doctrine of a flat earth upon which anyone who approaches the edge is punished. Later, as I entered high school, I understood immediately that they would inculcate me in the notion of a round earth, on which I could repeat over and over the same cycle of vanity on its face. Quickly I exited their teachings and stepped out into a world of my own making, one that is flat, round -- and yes, hollow -- depending on who or where I am, and with whom, at any given moment. Reincarnation… "Move over a few inches, buddy. We are no longer stuck in a straight line to nowhere but the finish line. We are capable of heading anywhere the Eternity advertises itself: forward, backward, sideways." And so back to the beginning Burkhart went for instructions… and he began again to receive them.

When King Solomon sought wisdom from God, at the beginning of Ecclesiastes, he was in possession of everything else that defined a king. "Solomon..." God asked him, "You have served me well, so how may I reward you?" "With wisdom, Lord..." and lo and behold, in the very next verse, Solomon begins to squander his kingdom, beginning a twenty year episode of drunken debauchery in which he completely throws away his kingdom and enters the world of the commoner, a journey which coincidentally took twenty chapters to describe. At the end of the book, God came again to Solomon and found him lying there on the side of the road, broken and beaten and finally sobering. And God again spoke: "Solomon, Solomon... what have you gotten yourself?" Today he would've gotten a bed in an alcoholic ward, or a prescription for Prozac. But Solomon rose to the occasion and also spoke: "I have gotten the wisdom you promised… I have seen and experienced the world as other people do."

He was quick to understand that living with people is not an occasion for judgment, but for learning. Solomon himself stated, "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. I have learned that the only salvation is to do your work and acknowledge God as the doer." Anything else is to partake of vanity: The all too familiar I am it, and you are not is the conclusion. I am right, and you are wrong. Well... come on now... aren't we all really just two sides of the same coin, minted by a God who is both the Congress and the Federal Reserve rolled into one, authorized to spend our lives to purchase a new world for the children to explore. Well… aren't we?

In the final summation, Burkhart is a Modern Icon. Partly because Burkhart is writing this, yes. But more to the point, because he is no longer part of the equation -- playing the part of one who equates -- but has removed his designs to allow the Spirit transit. That is the point of the formation of all formulae in the first place. He does his work; he thanks God for the doing. He is famous, but has no use for its false benefits. A benevolent Creator meets his needs, and if anyone else benefits from it, then blessings to them as well. He has no issues with a fame that will take place after he dies, because he is fully concerned with the present life and the making of icons that will occupy future generations with their enigma.

No. It is never the end, only the beginning. And each of us has that (continual) decision to make, to honor the Ancient Debt, like Jesus took on the Cross, to live & die for the sins -- ignorance -- of the world in which we find ourselves. Me, I'm going outside to do it right now, to shovel 16 inches of snow from the front of Burkhart Studios on this wonderful morning, January 31st, 2002. It is a job that the caretaker is being paid to do, but always succeeds in avoiding. The thanks I will receive for fulfilling his duties in his absence will be the wonderful smiles of the very old women who pass by and whisper to my 60-year old ass, "Oh thank you, sonny, for thinking of us this morning." (And by the way, it's now 24-hours later and I shoveled the snow from the combined sidewalks of the entire half block of property that is owned by my landlord… so happy I am to have a home.)