n 1978, as I turned
fifty and my mother no doubt felt her death approaching, she
wanted a last trip to St. Maries, the town in northern Idaho
where her family had emigrated from New York; where she'd grown
up, and where I'd been born those fifty years before in the house
her father had built.
Alienation from one's roots definitely
leaves one not 'up-on-the-news'. For the first time in my life,
I saw the house by the river where my mother had grown up before
grampa built the new house. When I drove to see the place of
my birth, the green meadows, the pond issuing forth, the stream
in its glen, what I saw was it filled in and paved over into
a street of small town slums. The land had been sold off and
there were dead autos in yards, trailers, the whole bundle of
twentieth-century garbage. The shock was palpable in my chest.
I was afraid, especially, of the hostile teens, (more dangerous
than New York, where crime is business and therefore predictably
less dangerous) laying about the porch rails by a window of the
room where I was born.. They and the trash, dead cars, trailers
in otherwise vacant lots, seemed the personification of a century
from which the future had been removed; the hope and promise
of American freedom rendered as trash as the waste accumulates,
radioactive garbage piles up, knowledge of its lethal consequences
unaddressed by politicians, industry, science. The future has
been taken away from our people. The are no rewards or consequences.
During the nineteen-fifties newspaper front
page fear maps, doing new Atom Bomb Scare to follow that dead
Communist Scare, I dream of being in a white Directoire
temple of Venus with San Francisco laid out beyond the columns.
It was the view of City Hall from my studio at the Wentley. There
is a whoof! The city is melting from a moment of bright light,
down the walls of the temple, a painting failing to cling to
its support. This old dream is recalled when I dream in 1978
that I am in my grandmother's garden by the house grampa built.
On a porch in my mind which has transported from later in my
life, to St. Maries, in the place where we would sit by gramma's
garden in the house's shade. On the porch's wide rail, before
one of its corner columns, a carved black bird in the austere
Egyptian style. (I had not yet found my life in the motherless
sculptor-architects, Horus and Moses.) Though black all over,
it had a 'nun's hood', like many birds do, which seemed to scintillate
with turquoise light, as if punched with holes like IBM cards
behind which the light moved. I later found braille in the design
of the lights. "Couldn't you see!" an aunt said in
another dream. My eye was drawn to the sky at my left where a
black dirigible very slowly moved. Its readerboard lights were
also blue, the deep turquoise of the bird's hood, and were in
cuneiform that I could read and understand. A movement draws
my eye back to the porch. Leaning on an elbow in the in the foreground,
is a crow, in a Brechtian tuxedo, lit cigar in hand, broad smile.
The movement that draws my attention is a really pronounced wink.
Twenty years of research fruitless, only recently to awake from
a geriatric TV nap to see my crow teaching Dumbo to fly on a
TV screen.
Last October, mother's stroke and the family
shenanigans around it drop me into another Depression. I am reading
Yeats' Autobiography, and am grateful to find I'm not
the only soul to have been burned out of the theatre. In later
years, I heard from Joe Martin the story he doesn't tell in his
book, of counting money in the box office, not another soul in
the Abbey Theater, when it came to him to ask himself,
"What am I, a Poet, doing here, counting
money?"
While reading in him, I heard my name called
out, "Bob" At first it sounded like some supernatural
voice, the voice of God. Then I heard the timbre of my father's
voice in it. Later, I heard my own voice in some electronic accidental
feedback and realized my voice has the timbre of my father's.
More and more frequently, since 1955, I
had been doing scattered reading in Proust. In the summer of
1980, I started on the first page and read Recherche from
cover to cover. While undergoing a nervous breakdown. Yet.
My continued stay out of New York in the
West of America can be excused, I tell myself, by Tennessee's
ten years, outside sanity, on the 'West Coast'. Never before
had I fully realized the meaning of 'nervous breakdown' with
no recourse but to enter therapy. Wanting to cry in the canned
goods brought to mind Alan Brody's character on the edge of tears
choosing a can of corn in his novel, Coming To. My counselor
urges me to take the First and Bell studio. I do. I sleep on
hard floor of the lofted platform under the ceiling until I get
a mattress. But I have space to work! The ideal image I had of
myself then was in an apron standing at a table leaning over
a painting or a frame, evenly lit by wonderful daylight windows.
And now, here they are, tall, wide and overlooking Elliott Bay
and Puget Sound.
When I was at the wall and paint began
to move beneath my hand, I was in another world than Northern
Europe's Guilds. Robert no longer existed. Like a phoenix, an
unnamed self arose from the paint, invisible and as diffuse as
an aroma, out of this world, crystallized and concentrated like
the diffuse universe into the elements and their pigments.
I am! Yet what I am who cares,
or knows?
My friends forsake me like a memory lost.
I am the self-consumer of my woes;
They rise and vanish, an oblivious host,
Shadows of life, whose very soul is lost,
And yet I am--I live--though I am toss'd
Into the nothingness of scorn and
noise,
Into the living sea of waking dream,
Where there is neither sense of life, nor joys,
But the huge shipwreck of my own esteem
And all that's dear. Even those I loved the best
Are strange--nay, they are stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has
never trod--
For scenes where woman never smiled or wept--
there to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Full of high thoughts, unborn. So let me lie,--
The grass below; above, the vaulted sky.
-John Clare
Written in Northhampton County Asylum
Having fallen asleep while lying on our
new velvet sofa to study the bomb dream of 1935 that I'm working,
I have a nightmare, obviously born of one of my New York muggings.
Alone on a mile wide paved square, I see two armed baddies coming
from the distance. There is no place to take refuge. In my paralysis,
I unlock my fear-ridden chest with courage to cry out "Help?"....Louder
perhaps?
"Help" Try again. "Hel..."
"Wake up Robert. You're dreaming"
says my dear friend, Kevin. Ah, having a lover is having someone
to wake me from nightmares.
My inclination is to think that the allure
of parental love and mother, is to lure the infant into life,
to eat and be a bigger animal, a bigger piece of food for the
next higher species. And to look for eyes that look back so lovingly
to find an Other to conspire in incarnation. In the case of man
the animal, a strapping youth is able to work harder than a child.
Or fight a war. An archival shot on TV last night of a bloodied
skinny naked 18 year old (a big looking 15) on a stretcher in
Vietnam. One sees who is the real fodder of war. No wonder the
Tories don't like abortion.
Now, I'm well into painting every day by
agreement with my shrink. It was here I discover that Pollock
drew for his doctor because he was talk shy and the works he
made and brought into his sessions made an opening to discuss
matters working their way up into consciousness. It is called
The Talking Cure.
In January, in New York review of books
I encounter a review upon republication of a work by Ranier Maria-Rilke
called Letters on Cezanne. The first letter describes
a pomegranate and pear on his writing desk. The day the show
of Rodin's Salome drawings opens, he has to get to it
through rooms filled with Cezannes in that 1906 obituary retrospective.
They were the first he had seen and he was so struck to discover
of these paintings that he remained in Paris for the run of the
show, visiting and writing of it in his daily letter home to
his wife.
Rilke's most resonant passage to me was
when the trees of a Paris street turned into a Cezanne painting
he was walking through. From the first day's reading I was catapulted
into blue to draw with it as I had thirty-five years earlier.
Retro as these moments of discovery want to be and the unexpected
places I was led by them, opened new insights into Cezanne. Seeing
the surreal through him led me particularly to a new understanding
of the small drawings from 1975 forward. I saw that the search
into myself that had led me to understand that art is and has
always been my mentor, showed me the influence there of Paul
Cezanne, but not in the usual way. What I realized this decade
later, is that the act of making a painting or drawing releases
the surreal; that my earlier astonishment to see the powerful
meaning in the negative spaces of my work and realize I was drawing
things whose shapes surrounded a shape in the form of material
my psyche wanted to come through in the work.
So. Also in Cezanne. I saw the great face
of the sky mother overseeing the grand bathers; the Gauginesque
idols in the quarry at Bibemus. I wasn't nuts. Dr. Reed, without
comment, also saw them, if somewhat dismissively. Or is that
couchside manner.
Can one trust these epiphanies? I remember
the transport of those moments. Earthshaking. But then I recall
an exhibition I painted in one year, definitely not enough time
for this 'slow study' to make twenty paintings. Frequent ecstatic
moments that proved to my later eye, to have led to a rather
thin group of works. OK for perception, I guess, but not moments
to work from. Yesterday. Today, they don't look so empty.
Yet, a matter of importance coming up in
therapy would lead to intensely concise works made of common
shapes with shared meanings. As when I got my first bicycle at
twelve. Jerry Lieber knows,
"Is that all there is?"
Later that same year, I encountered Merleau-Ponty's
beautiful essay, "Cezanne's Doubt". The first epiphany
I had with that great philosopher, was to follow him through
Madame Cezanne's account of her husband's pacing about the hillside
for a long time before suddenly stopping and exclaiming,
"Aha. I've found my motif!"
Something about the presentation of the
scene and its idea (or its translation into English) made clear
the meaning of Motif as motive in its sense as motivation.
We had come up in America with the idea of motif as a
piece of subject matter and the elements of its shape convenient
to make a design. Here in Merleau-Ponty, we are back to the root,
the stimulation of the artist's imagination by what he sees before
him and its power to motivate him, as it did Papa Cezanne, to
undertake the labor, resonating between his inner reality and
that thing outside himself that interests him today. But I had
gotten to see apples in the folds of Mt. St. Victoire before
I read in Cezanne that he was seeing them too.
Reading further in Merleau-Ponty, his concept
of Embodiment brilliantly captures the elusive workings of the
brain as it locates itself in space by lines extended from its
body's fingers, feet, eyes, nose, every protuberance continued
to infinity, thereby releasing us from the prison of meat where
we live. We erect a geometry of Space within our minds where
metaphor is born. Such is the sense of relief we experience to
see a great space visible out a window into which we can release
our 'lines', stretch them. A replication of that space or a distant
one conceived and alive to the eye before a painting on a windowless
wall does not replace that experience. Rather, the emitted light
from a painting's color impacts the retinal edge of the brain
in a reversal of the process, inward, as in meditation. A good
painting is a spectacular view of color itself. Color's wavelengths
operate as metaphors for distance based on penetration of layers
in the cones of the retina. Hence, abstraction's power. A window
on Mind.
Glass, as in spectacles is a barrier to
this direct experience of art. A sheet of glass works differently.
By reflecting the viewer, it confuses the two experiences, mirroring
and exercise in space, with each other. I see my paintings best
with spectacles (appliances new to my geriatry) off. It is color,
the direct penetration of the vitreous humor by photons and the
retinal excitement shivering up the optic nerve to the brain
that reminds us of reality. The nameable content of the work
can be absorbed in seconds, details as afterthought when measured
against the blast of actual colors raying into me, unblocked
by a physical, no matter how transparent, barrier.
Merleau-Ponty's assembly of Cezanne material,
surprisingly new to me then, illuminated where it wasn't confirming,
much of what I'd gone through as an artist, and especially, in
relation to Cezanne, the little drawings of the seventies, and
works done since the Rilke Letters. Rilke had reawakened
Cezanne in my heart and Merleau-Ponty affirmed and embellished
my understanding of the way Cezanne's influence worked its way
through so many painter's works into later history, growing there,
I now know, even into the twenty-first century.
I get a drawing lesson from William S.
Burroughs.
