After a period of illness in which we thought we might lose her, my mother has revived! Her monologic dementia is back on full throttle while often interrupted by wonderful, if not curious moments of lucidity. I arrive on Sunday afternoon. She’s been put down for a nap but prefers to talk and cannot fall asleep. I sit down with my clipboard, ink pens and an accordion fold.
“Hello, Mom.”
“Hello. And where have you been.”
“I am here,”
“Do you think my mother can come and take me home?”
“I don’t think so.” I begin to draw while I let the pen lift & swirl variously about the panel as her voice rambles on. Then she looks up at me.
“Do you think I can just go out and die?”
“I don’ think so.” She begins to cry. Which I think is good. Crying, I was told by Philip, one of her caretakers, means that she is remembering things, or, it can also mean that she is crying because she realizes that the dementia is destroying her memory. It brings on a terrible sadness.
“I cannot do anything,” she acknowledges her helplessness. This is someone who was never not doing something.
I show her the first panel. “Look, mom. Look what I made.”
“That’s nice, very nice. You are pretty smart aren’t you?”
I do not know what in the drawing makes her think I am smart, though I appreciate the flattery.
Then her dementia takes over.
“Can you see the man up there.” She squints and looks at the ceiling. “He took my money.”
“No I cannot see him.”
I leave the room for a while to get a drink of water. When I reappear she looks pleased.
“Can you speak English,” she asks.
“Yes I can speak English.”
“Your enunciation is very nice.”
“Thank you,” I say. When we were very young she would reprimand me and my brothers if we did not enunciate each of our words with attention and care.
“You know how to get your tongue around it,” she adds. This person, my mother will do everything not to give up her fidelity to speak carefully. Even if, and that’s most often, she can no longer come up with the word she wants, she will use whatever words she can access to come close to what she wants to say. You know how to get your tongue around it is another way of saying you know how to both capture what you want to say, as well as enunciate it clearly. She will not let the absence of a ready language defeat her.
Three weeks ago she was so weakened I never thought she would get back to this point. Amazing what a refusal to die - combined with some modern medicine - will again provide!
By this time I am able to she show her the finished accordion fold.
“That’s nice. Very nice. You must be smart.”


Panels 1, 3, 5, Talking with Mom, 2:30-4:00pmAugust 29, 2010 (Accordion Fold)

Haptic: An Infinite Letter to You
Sweetheart Point; Greensprings Farm, Ashland, Oregon
10-12am, Sunday, August 15, 2010

Amazon Review

Today, as I do when I can, I visited by mom. At 94, during the last two months, she has begun to decline considerably. She spends much of her time sleeping. Awake, her dementia is such that though she can recognize me, we can have little in the way of conversation before she either drifts back to sleep or into an world of repetitious adventures in which an imaginary friend and she are lost and unable to find their way out of the darkness. Often she asks if her mother can take her home. Yet, once in awhile she arises to an attentive level of consciousness, particularly when I have made a haptic drawing in her presence. Two weeks ago she opened her eyes very wide in response to a new one. “Oh, that’s beautiful.” she said. “Can you make me another one.” (A friend joked that she must have been Jewish in a former life. A few days ago, while she sat at the kitchen table methodically turning the pages of a National Geographic, I began to sing obnoxiously loud while I drew.
“Shooh, Shooh,” I heard her say. I looked up to see her hand pointed at me. “Shooh, shooh,” she repeated. “That’s enough,” she commanded, put her hand down and shut up again. Ordinarily, however, I often hum in synchronicity with the various sounds that pour from her mouth as she naps or tries to fall asleep. These sounds, their pitches and slow rhythms feed the contours and character of the lines that feed from my pen on to the page. In fact I am quite persuaded that though we do not communicate in any conventional sense that she is quite aware of my presence in the room. There is a kind of heart to heart communication between us, one that I feel in the tenderness within my chest. Sometimes, indeed, the whole rapport is quite primal, particularly when instinctively, almost as a child again, I find myself repeating, “ma,ma, ma, ma” then “mm, mm, mm, mm,” while the pen continues to mark and fill the page.

I been thinking about Towers and Columns, particularly Ann Hamilton’s Tower, Brancusi’s Infinite Column, the Trajan Column in Rome, and David Nash’s column (name?) that is currently installed at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I visited each earlier this summer and I am particularly attracted to the way these various works infect our sense of attention to the landscape and, in so doing, the way they heighten the interior experience of consciousness, particularly the one that comes with the act of looking and being in their literal physical presence. I do not think I am alone in this experience. My blog pieces on Ann Hamilton’s 87 foot highTower at the Oliver’s sculpture ranch in Northern, California, remains by far one of the most frequently visited sites on this blog.
[http://stephenvincent.net/blog/?p=617]
Unlike the external view of Brancusi’s singular Infinite Column (below), the Hamilton tower has it both ways, inside and out. Her piece is extraordinary in the way that it embraces the landscape - the slanted empty window frames indicate an interior world but reveal nothing as to the content of that interior. Then, once inside, however, after crawling through a bottom slot entry, you find yourself, depending on the position of the sun, standing over a dark or reflective pool of water, the opposites sides of which form the bases of a double spiral staircase. Rising up to the landing around the top rim of the tower, one is offered a 360 degree view of the upper end of the Alexander Valley landscape.

Brancusi’s Infinite Column spellbinds the eye by its repetition of the planes of its geometric sawtooth. The purity of its intention - mathematical in a way - assures a progression into the sublime and/or cosmic. There is nothing ajar in the work that might mitigate or distort the power of this progression. It’s shape is singularly ecstatic.

If there is an interior world to the Brancusi column that may offer the potential for shadow, for human disturbance, nothing is indicated as such. For that potential, one must go back to the Hamilton and learn of the ways the Tower has been used for performances (theatrical, dance and musical); different mediums have used water and light, and the spiral staircases to explore a complex range of subjects and materials. This was Hamilton’s intention, as I understand it; not to create a singularly iconic and/or sublime tower that might be simply revered for its aesthetic proportions and qualities, but to create and insist on a a space that would permit other mediums to use the circumstances in and outside of the tower as a way to make more profound articulations of whatever might be of human or other issue. Unlike my sense of the Brancusi, the Tower in that provides is an infinite cradle of aesthetic possibilities, private and public

David Nash’s Trunk and Buttt clearly takes its lead from Brancusi. Made of a redwood trunk, it’s geometric shapes are carefully sawed in ways that are also reminiscent of Ellsworth Kelly’s work.

Trunk & Butt by David Nash

Yet, it is inaccurate to say this piece is entirely mimetic of the work of either artist. First, the shades of red and vanilla white colors within the wood are alluring and deeply sensual. Nash is insistent that the eye be taken in by the fresh charm and tones from the recent saw cuts. But it is more than “charm” here.

Detail section from Trunk & Butt

In way quite similar to Brancusi - the plane of the cuts take the eye into the horizontal waves created by and within “the lips” of each of the trunk’s sections which further enhances the piece’s sensual character. But looking even closer - unlike Brancusi’s polished marble surfaces - the interior ebb and flow of the wood’s grain elevates a level and sense of time within the piece itself. The lines become a kind of cardiograph of a natural life whether or not that life has any correspondence to our own. As this piece ages, of course, it’s tonal character will continue to change from its current almost “youthful” sense of juice. Indeed, ultimately, the wood may well become shaggy with gray age. Looking even more closely, however, even as much as one might dwell on the work’s visual pleasure, I find this experience to be ambiguous. Like the seductive waves of an ocean, the lumber is, conversely, also intensely inhuman. Nash and his chain saw might play its tree trunk like a master musician’s refined use of bow on a violin ways that make transparent the trunk’s interior contours & various chromatic features, there is nothing even obliquely anthropomorphic, or humanly soft and compelling about the timber’s presence. We are drawn close but simultaneously held back. Any awe - like looking at the beauty of a large, wild bird - is pushed back by the proximity of its literally hard materials.

(Title? Piece by David Nash)

Yet, the context of Yorkshire park, its hedge and tree filled grounds, compel us to look at Nash’s particular kind of tower in the presence of his other works, including the grounds and ever-changing sky that surrounds it.

Title? Work by David Nash
In the case of the current exposition, unlike the Hamilton or Brancusi works, the presence of Nash’s other pieces democratize the space; our eyes cannot but look backwards and forwards across the lawn to see other objects - some purely geometric, some looking animal like. The Yorkshire circumstance,does not permit a sustained sense of reverence as one may have particularly for the Brancusi These Nash tower ’siblings’ keep the mind busy, the consciousness active, even unsettled. What we might be get from the complexity provided inside and outside Hamilton’s Tower, we can get from the play of clouds, light, and the intense presence of other works. Does interaction provide a ‘human drama’ in any traditional, theatrical sense? I don’t think so.

Though Nash’s early work provided an anthropomorphic sense of play, in these large outdoor and indoor works (not permitted to photograph), I believe, with some exceptions, we are introduced to a much more inhuman landscape in which actual nature - no matter how much more revealed, and awesomely so here - it is an acknowledgment of nature as a presence that may well have nothing to do with us (no matter how our machinations may screw it up, try to destroy it, make it over, whatever). Whatever, Nash does now is a raw revelation of the character of nature, not the character of us. I came away with almost a “spook” sense of distance from the creatures, these works, that his work has revealed unto the human eye. So, as say different from the more human centered theater of Hamilton’s Tower, or Brancusi’s provision of an experience of the sublime, Nash is busy giving us another kind of theater, one in which the actors - trees et al - emerge with their own sense of potency from the play of nature, one that is ultimately stronger - one begins to realize - than any of us! Which accounts, no doubt, for the deep respect that Nash gives it.

Undoubtedly more will emerge here, but I appreciate any private comments along the way. The public comment box does not work, but my email address is in the upper left sidebar.

A carefully wrapped luminous scarf of light; an iconic mischief pulls the eye up short. Malevich, circa 1917, I suspect, would have sprung for this. The way certain hearts manage the dark.

[Painters’ scaffolds & veils at late dusk, Church Street near 23rd, San Francisco. Neighborhood Anthropology Series].

As it has become my ‘haptic’ practice, for the next couple hours, I let my pen register the communal pulse, at least, the way I experienced the groups rhythms, moves, and contours. etc. Here is what emerged:

To learn more about the curricula of nonsite discussions, as well a responses to this particular one, go to “nonsite collective” via your favorite search engine!

Haptic: Lawrence Kearney, poet, reading at Books & Bookshelves, 15th & Sanchez Streets, San Francisco. 7:45 - 8:30pm, July 14, 2010

Haptic: Duncan McNaughton, poet, reading at Books & Bookshelves, 15th & Sanchez Streets, San Francisco. 8:45 - 9:30pm, July 14, 2010

Note: My Poetry Reading Haptics have been limited this summer to just a few readings. Most of work in Europe took place in landscapes and urban sites of one sort other. And much of that took place in blank accordion fold books, though not all. More of that to come later.

On one very rainy afternoon, I went the Centre Pompidou to sit variously in front of the windows surrounding the reconstruction of Brancusi’s atelier. I had always been spellbound by pictures of the sculptor’s ‘Endless Column’. And I had been deeply taken by Museum installations of his bronze and stone abstract, archetypal sculptures of birds and eggs. But the studio introduced other shapes as well. Most significantly, in terms of this story, the saw tooth shadow shape across from my hotel room was reaffirmed in a series of wooden sculptures; one after another, the abstract shape reappeared as if the angles were the feathered serrations on a bird’s wing in the midst of alighting or descending.

The sight of this connection between the wall shadow and Brancusi made me wonder if such shadows were equally important to Brancusi as they were for Kelly. Most often Brancusi’s sources are cited as coming from his awareness of the use of abstraction in African masks and art. Indeed, we can see parallels (below) between the rhythmic repetitions of the abstract “ridges” on the gazelle’s backm and the sawtooth “ridges” on Brancusi’s “wings”.

The closeness, however, of the sawtooth staircase shadow to these the ‘wings’ in his studio makes me wonder if, consciously or not, like Kelly, whether or not Brancusi was also equally attentive to the Parisian world that was right before his own eyes, including the the City’s staircase shadows. Whether or not that was true, it is hard not take an uncanny pleasure in this possible association. Indeed, when I read a little more about Kelly, I discovered that he had also met Brancusi during his stay in Paris in the 1950’s. Almost serendipitously, or in reverse manner of exploration, I sensed I had come upon an influence and relationship without any prior knowledge of it. But then, without thinking too much further, it’s clear that Kelly - in addition to making the camera and photographs of shadows as a visual resource - is also clearly shaped by the influence of the geometric shapes of other older European and Parisian artists much present in the 1950’s - Arp, Calder and Miro among them. Nevertheless, it was/is fun to discover where, comparatively, what the shadow of a staircase might lead you! The way abstraction, particularly, whether with the Gazelle, or wing, or staircase, is still rooted in the physical.

This is not what it’s about.

Nor This

Nor

But

And its promise of a secretive interior passage

Leading one into a righteous, but perhaps
realistic message of destruction and terror:

And the residual evidence of a once
beautiful somebody, some even say
a lost muse, who was once a neighbor.

Not to totally worry. An omen
of local recovery lies close!

Yet, we still cannot find her anywhere,
(on the street, in the museum, or at home), a-mended
or not. Rest assured, however, this story
will continue to work on it - her discovery -
digging as much as we can, high and low,
through the night when we must,
and will do so to the end and bottom of our days.