·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Noe’s Bar, 5 - 6 PM, December 31, 2008, San Francisco

May the forces be with us - who and wherever we are!!

& for those in want of a more quiet cast of mind, a haptic made this week during a walk up the Oak Mine Trail, Calistoga, while sitting among the wet, rain filled trees (Madrone, Ponderossa Pine, Maple & California Oak).

Happy New Year
Stephen Vincent
January 1, 2009

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Wall Blanket, Bartlett Street between 21st & 22nd Streets, San Francisco, 2008

I am not sure - over these past several years - why my eye is drawn to ‘homeless’ blankets - particularly around Dolores Park and my local Mission Neighborhood in San Francisco. Maybe it’s the combination of shapes, the colors, and the particular circumstance in which I find the blankets - occupied or either temporarily or permanently abandoned. Frankly, I find the shapes quite human - as simple as that. It’s as if any particular blanket gives a short hand history into the life and character of its current or most recent owner. But, it’s more than a pedestrian voyeurism. In the case of this blanket, who is or was the owner, he or she who has the eye for such an attractive color and pattern, and who so carefully ties up the fabric and braces it against the wall? Is it an act of ’sculptural art’ - for the public, you and me, to enjoy? Indeed the figure appears as if is an over-sized Japanese doll, an orphan carefully abandoned. Or, more profoundly, does she appear more similar to a solitary, Japanese woman in an 19th century etching, where the figure - arm, shoulders, torso and waist leaning into the mottled gray wall - evokes a disappointed lover confronting the totality of her state of rejection? And, even if we accept any of these ‘negative’ interpretations of the figure’s circumstance, as a viewer, how are we supposed to also accept the sensuality of shapes evoked within the blanket’s birds and leaves, its curves and internal turns? Aren’t we hit with a paradox? One view luring out a patronizing compassion for ‘the subject’, while the other compels a desire to embrace, in a sense, to ’seduce’ or otherwise explore and - as if an old-fashioned imperialist - exploit ‘the oriental object.’

There is no answer, really! Sometimes the beautiful and peculiar are quite enough without all this speculation. Don’t you think? To take in, to visually partner with the blanket without entertaining ‘a single thought’ as impossible as that may seem.

*****

Cumberland Steps, below Sanchez Street, San Francisco, 2008

We rise & fall to grieve & dream.
Who is this shrouded figure? Why does the eye engage so quickly?
Solid & fluid. Fluid & solid.
Head tilted, hands clasped over the knees:
Dream ladder or, in this case, a stairway. As if this one had,
at some point, risen to be received somewhere up there
only to become faint of heart, or, by some force, rejected.
It’s impossible to know the actual cause of sorrow. Maybe
a field of dreams - so desired and wanted - was not such,
but a baleful place, a land of defeated souls offering nothing
but a horrifying loss of illusions. Who knows?
This icon - as so the figure appears - articulates not a word. Surely,
however, a sign of warning: loss is a permeable, fluid thing,
a constant offering, no matter how entrancing &/or beautiful,
its visible (here) manifestation.

*****

Blanket, 18th Street, Dolores Park, San Francisco, 2008

Dream Knots. A knotted night, no doubt. The blanket knotted,
the tree knotted. We know this person. He or she never
quite wakes up.
A body in which each daylight move is a series of cramped nodules.
Nothing is fluid. Everything - large to small - is a hard lump. In fact,
we are known to call this person a lump. No,
more than a lump. Indeed, a multiple-lump.
The dream is to open each nodule with a sharp knife.
A careful slash! To pour the body forth in green vine and branch.
To sooth the unborn worlds of the living.
Again & again, to say good-bye to each nodule,
each, ever so hardy, knotted lump.

*

Blanket above Trolley Tracks, Dolores Park, San Francisco, 2008

Someone got up this morning - a light or dark-eyed stranger - and left
a luminous trace. What was so dark, goes light: white gentle waters
in shallow furrows, eddies and ebbs. Who got carried here -
not far above the trolley tracks - through the channels of the night?

The eye witnesses & does not declare to know, only, if so moved, to ask.

***

Blankets, edge of walkway, Dolores Park, San Francisco, 2007

Royalty of a sort, purity of another, abandoned, tucked together:
Exile provides it’s own punctuation marks. No, it is not nostalgia
for a prior country, some altar piece where Monk’s, through careful
discipline and execution provided the presence of a Holy Other.
Those were cloths of a different, now lost time. In Exile the eye is
a rag picker, putting things together, one at a time. This one here,
that one there; a good combination breeds a certain, momentary bliss.
In the open, outside the once well-made Temple, today, wandering,
these (the tuck, is it care?) two colors (maroon and white)
this punctuation, this ancient grammar, will be as good as it gets.

Yesterday, Saturday, was Small Press Traffic’s Tribute to Beverly Dahlen, a lovely event in which I and several other poets presented various kinds of praise for her work. She followed our ‘footsteps’ with a reading of works, most of which had never been published in book form. The haptic pen was at work most of the afternoon - this piece is in direct response to Bev’s reading.

Fanny Howe appeared twice this past week for the San Francisco State Poetry Center. On Thursday, December 4, she gave a reading from several of her volumes and some new work at the main campus. On Saturday evening she delivered the George Oppen Memorial lecture at the Unitarian Center at Geary and Franklin Streets in the City. I am not about to paraphrase the depth and intent of each occasion. However, I will say that she and I are born within a year of each other, 1940 and 1941, she on the East Coast and I on the West. We share in common the experience of being born at the onset of World War II during which we our early childhoods were both embraced by the war hysteria and dread that informed domestic family life, particularly those living within the vulnerable cities of either Coast combined while our fathers and/or uncles that enlisted to fight either the Germans and Italians in Europe and/or Northern Africa, of the Japanese in the South Pacific. As such young children it was to live in a space of darkness punctuated by occasional photographs and unspoken fears. (Unlike, say, someone like Tom Raworth where the bombings over England were quite real - both in the onslaught and the visibility of the destruction.)

Fanny’s George Oppen Memorial lecture - taking a view into the history of the War’s impact - religious and philosophical - sought to put a name on that invisible, undefinable childhood space in which the family became divided and, in her case, the connection across the Atlantic to and with the world of Europe was so damaged. That paraphrase probably makes it too simple. In concrete terms, she used the occasion of the lecture to explore the relationship of the work of Simon Weil (essayist and keeper of journals) with George Oppen (poet and keeper of journals.) Imagining both figures almost as ships passing in the night, Simone Weil - a participant in the French resistance - escaped the Nazis via Marseille in 1941, only to return to resume the fight in England, where she died from TB in 1943. Oppen enlisted and in 1943 arrived to fight in Europe also through the port of Marseille .

Fanny’s lecture, essentially, tackled the similarity of issues faced by both Oppen - in many respects a secular Jew, but in no way ignorant of the teachings - and Weil, the Catholic, who was a constant critic of the Church, and grounded her Catholicism in her studies of the sacred traditions, particularly Hindu, of India. From an early age (12?) she began to have a working knowledge of Sanskrit. Without a transcript I am not about to accurately trace the connections Fanny makes between the kinds of consciousness that evolve and manifest in the work of both writers. In common, the war tests their in faith human kind is tested and worn down, if not practically obliterated, during which their perceptions and consciousness of the world are ground down to become as sharply refined as though perceived through a perfect glass lense, albeit, as Oppen puts it, as though he had passed through the proverbial eye of the needle.

From the point of view of drawing - making these haptics - it was delightful to let the pen, so to speak, partner with the wandering, exploratory thread of her Fanny’s voice. (As Bob Grenier, also born as myself in 1941, told me later, she could have read from the phone book and he would have still listened). She indeed permits the work - both the poetry and in her essay - to create a tonal space that, particularly in the case of the lecture, creates a third player in which we are not only focused on the interplay between Oppen and Weil, but given an infusion and drawn into Fanny’s own consciousness and presence in the world.

Joseph Noble, poet Reading at Books & Bookshelves, San Francisco, November 18, 2008

Colleen Lookingbill, poet Reading at Books & Bookshelves, San Francisco, November 18, 2008

Haptic: My Mother Leans Towards Death

I made this piece while listening to my mother - now 92 years old - try to fall into sleep.
It is hard work for her, this falling to sleep. For a while she is quiet, then speaks. I am not in her bedroom. I am in the backside of the house in what we call “The Family Room.” A small audio-surveillance network transmits her voice through a small speaker. A few minutes before - wishing her goodnight - she had been full of fright and on the edge of weeping. To soothe her I get her to sing several rounds of “Row, row your boat”. Sometimes together, and sometimes she takes over to sing a round by herself. Finally she becomes quiet in what seems like sleep.

Now she is waking again to speak. “Please, will somebody help. Dear God, will somebody help me. Please help me.” It’s painful to hear her pleas. But now she switches to splicing in phrases from “Row, row your boat”:

Merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream
Please dear God
Help me
Will somebody
Merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream

As she speaks, the haptic also begins, the pen responding to the stresses and strains in her voice, the twists and turns, the rhythm. Then she pauses and switches to reciting numbers
1,2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…..

Amy, one my mother’s caretakers during several days a week, tells me that one time while they were taking a drive, my mother finished part of the numerical count with a question:
1, 2, 3, 4: what therefore?
She repeated the phrase - pun et al - a couple of times before resuming an extended count.

My brother says that at night she switches back and forth between numbers and letters. This last week he was brought up short when, two-thirds the way through the alphabet. he heard her say:
… p, q, r, peculiar… in an astonishingly quick leap from the associative sounds of the letters into a corresponding word of similar sound.

Later, on the phone, I tell her what David told me what she had said.
“Peculiar? That’s right,” as if to confirm the association was an accurate one.
“Mom,” I say, “You have a peculiar imagination!”
“That’s true. And don’t let anyone take it away from me.” She speaks as if her imagination is a piece of valuable property vulnerable to theft.
“Mom, I also have a peculiar imagination.”
“Yes, you do. Don’t let them take that away from you either.”

Tonight, after she stops asking for help from God, the alphabet, Row row your boat, her voice takes on a new tone and direction which I have not heard before.
“Can someone tell me where I am?” She begins a series of questions.
“Can someone tell me why I am in this place?”
“Can someone tell me what I am supposed to do?”

It’s as if her psyche has entered - at least temporarily - a new realm, one in which an initiation is about to take place. It’s hard for me not to listen and imagine that these queries are part of the condition of consciousness after the point of death. Of course, that can only be conjecture.

Of course, I continue to make this haptic while she speaks - the pen pauses, then the lines extend themselves with the contours and breaks between her questions.

I have sometimes written about the haptic, at least my practice of making haptics, this drawing, for example, as a way of partnering with the sensations and presence of the immediate world. With my mom, the haptic becomes a way to partner with her path as she veers, ever so closely towards closure. Though, given her good health (low blood pressure & no internal organ dysfunction) this could go on for a long time! Well, more language to hear!

Huge Haptic: 30 x 40″ (vertical)

Today I finished the Huge Haptic(at least I want to think I finished it!). The piece - in terms of the way it emerged during the past month - reflects and archeology of musical impulses, particularly the work of Albert Ayler (The Impulse Years), John Coltrane (A Love Supreme) and Eric Friedlander (Black Ice & Propane) . Of course, the piece in and of itself is an undecipherable archeology of sources and inputs.

Yet, what the new President promises - and what is even possible given the constraints of the collapse of the global economy - remains a mystery that will not really begin to unfold until his January inauguration. I suspect that sense of mystery - the presence of the man versus the darkness of the time, and more importantly, what will unfold out of the darkness - drew my eye to this window below:

Barack Hussein Obama / Election Poster in Window / 18th Street at the Intersection of Fair Oaks Street, San Francisco; November 11/11/08

The Ultimate Mother Ghost is the one in chains! At least - after a shiver of recognition - that is the thought that crossed my mind when I came across this one up in Isleton, a Delta levee town on the Sacramento River, northeast of San Francisco. Initially, actually, the location of this apparition did not matter. It was just a hard core recognition of the ghost of a woman, a substantial, large person, who, even if she seems to be a smiling and welcoming spirit, also represents a history of repressed, psychologically enchained women who, just by the accident of sight, is right there, crashing into my psyche! (Of course, on some ‘universal level’, her presence may represent the lineage of all the unspoken mothers that reside in the memory of each of us, male or female). She, even in this photograph, still gives me a good spook!

The Delta by legend, it is said, is full of Chinese ghosts. In 1875 there were once 1500 Chinese inhabitants of Isleton, now there are very few. The weather beaten raw fragile architecture of the halls, shops and living quarters remain - and it is one of the doorways that I find her. After working in the early gold mines, and building the western portion of the Continental railroad, the Chinese workers, (the majority of whom many might say were California’s western definition of slaves), mostly men without women, except for Chinese imported prostitutes. The men who stayed and continued to work in the fields - asparagus, pear pickers etc.- picked the produce to be shipped down the River to the markets in the Bay Area.

Amazing, how in Pineapple Joe’s, a Isleton restaurant for decades , a flicker of the Chinese presence remains. I like the way the physical and vocal presence of the one waitress, and member of the owner’s family. She talks to me non-stop about the state of the nation, children, schools, working 7 days a week, and those who don’t work and yes, I was not going to bet which way, she voted for Obama. The pride in the presence of her face, indeed, I sense, reflected in the rising face and shape of the building just across the street, positioned not far from the street level presence of the ancient ghost of the enchained mother!

Always interesting to catch the juxtapositions and parallels on the street, wherever!
A 19th century China both near and far.

There are days like this when the street offers vision, where you want to wonder if the eye is piercing into the soul and future of this country and/or globe. Or, possibly more so, when our eye is led to witness the cosmic space encircling the immediacies over and around the Earth. Where, in this apparition on the literal street, there is a ring of crimson around the darkness, while a golden meteoric orb hangs on the immediate horizon. Where the apparition is so concrete and present -here on a house painter’s test board leaning up against the blue wall of a porta-potty. Oy, does anyone really need all this information??!! Well, it - the vision - is maybe the contemporary version of William Blake’s finding ‘the universe in a grain of sand.’ Why not here, on the streets, as well?? I mean why not update Blake - with local materials - constantly?

Speaking of wrestling with the Cosmic - and what may be responsible for the object and kind of attention I give this photograph - I am reading the brand new, and I recommend Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin translated by Maxine Chernoff & Paul Hoover
(496 pages (6 x 9 paper) ISBN: 9781890650353
$24.95) .

It’s an unconscious mystery, I find, the way reading in a book will subsequently guide a fresh attention of eye, ear and reflection. Holderin! So long buried in the roots of romantic poetry. Who would have thought?

Roberto Vargas, poet, Third World Poetry Reading in Commemoration of the Strike, San Francisco State University, 1968, October 30, 2008 ; Stephen Vincent, Haptic.

I had neither seen Roberto Vargas, nor heard him read since 1976 (or so) when he left San Francisco to join the Sandinista Guerrillas in Nicaragua to fight the forces of the U.S. Government financed Contras. (Back in the Reagan years!) It’s remains a full biography that I cannot accurately reiterate. Roberto now works as consultant for CITGO to provide social programs and inexpensive, winter heating oil to schools on the Atlantic seaboard. It was great to see him as lively and quick on his feet as ever - and, indeed, a walking repository of activist memory, and such a refreshing large world view, the likes of which has been smothered during these Bush years, and the likes of which much of the world waits for Obama to begin to transform. Pray, etc.(i.e. act), that we not be disappointed!
Obama is a verb. Let’s make sure!