·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

                               ...The ocean
           does not mean be listened to...  

Panels from an accordion-fold volume (24 panels/12 haptics), Ocean Beach, San Francisco, November 2006.

Wet. Unabashed. Forthright. Open. It seems ridiculous to give her a name, an abstraction. What gives is beauty. The wetness that one might touch there, kiss there, lay ones tongue. Yet one does not.

The birth of awe is in the eye. The birth of the world washes there.

To look closely. To be in awe. To be awash.

To be there. To want the world - at once - to go inside.

***
An Eucalpytus - after an intense rain - found in Guernica’s Parque de los Pueblos de Europa, city of Franco’s legendary bombing, and inspiration for Picasso’s painting of that name, the work that explores the horrors of war, it’s victims, its unfettered violence. So lovely to find: the flipside of horror, torture, the screaming calamities of the world news. Trees. The fundamental life giving beauty of the tree, this tree, this unabashed protectorate - mother, father combined. The sexual. The sexual wet. Awash there. To go and be awash there.

As if to rediscover an eternal lover, to pause, to murmur, thank you, thank you, then, as one inevitably must, to move on. Folding. Unfolding.

A while back, I read my (91 year old) mother Wallace Steven’s The Emperor of Ice Cream. She indicated she was impressed by the size of the title. Taking care of her on this last Friday evening, she was in a cheery, alert mode. “Yes,” she says, when I ask her if she wants to write.
“Well, lets write one about The Emperor of Ice Cream.”
She immediately gets going, while I try to keep up with my pen, putting her words down into my journal.
“How do you know where the Emperor is?”
She pauses.
“The Emperor is not able to go up.
His difficulty or the things that keep him from going up,
keep him from taking a temporary…”
Her voice trails off as if she is lost. After a long pause, she begins again.
“I tell you this.
When you are doing those little things
and get them to other things,
you can get a lot of people interested
because they are anxious to see
what’s going on in the world.”

I don’t know if she is talking about how she composes with words, or if she is remembering the art of having been a politician.

I change the subject. I want to see if I can get her to improvise off words or phrases that I provide as a stimulus. I give her pairs of words as prompts (the ones underlined). I chant them musically, as a call out to get a response. We go in fits and starts. Sometime she feels compelled to make an aside about possibly related or unrelated things, sometimes her family members who are treated as if they are alive. When she says she is “dumb”, I have learned that it means that she cannot come up with the words that she wants. It is her way of saying that the tank is empty.

Blink, Blink
That’s his button.

Button, Button
Where are you?

You, You
I think because I am heavy on my heart,
I am not as good as I should be.
My mother is much better than me
in all this kind of stuff.

Stuff, Stuff
Is.
I have not been doing anything creative
for so long, I am really quite dumb.
If I say that, my father gets
quite angry with me.

Wow, Wow
Crow, Crow.

Bark, Bark
No one home.

Home, Home
Watch me run.

Run, Run
What is your problem today?

Today, Today
Tonight, Tonight

Hello, Hello
You’re a serious fool.
But I am one with you.

Goodbye, Goodbye
Why, why, must we fly?

Fly, Fly
What is this guy
High in the sky?

Sky, Sky
Can you tell me why?

Why, why
Do I find an ashen junk field
None of us can evade.

We stop at that. It’s hard not to think she has come to dwell on a vision of death.

I start to read back what she has written. Immediately she stops me to comment on the part about The Emperor of Ice Cream.

“He makes his material so delicious that people cannot resist it. People who you don’t expect to be making speeches about ice cream - and his other parts - are what impresses me.”

I then read to the finish.
“That’s very nice,” she comments. “Did you write it?”
“You wrote it,” I say.
“You wrote it,” she insists.
I don’t talk that way.
I wish I could.”

Like her comment about the Emperor’s irresistible, delicious ice cream, it’s hard not to imagine she is not also talking about the pleasure in putting together words and making them sing. At least I want to think so. For her to also acknowledge her powers would also be a pleasure.

Last week I had the good fortune to stay on a “ranch” outside of Ashland, Oregon. In terms of haptics I had decided to Work Large. In Arcata - on the way up - I bought a 20 x 30 inch piece of archival paper, as well as a new black Micron pen and a Micron Brush. Sadly, I recently learned that the Sharpie pens I have been using are not “permanent ink” as they describe themselves. In fact - learned from the kind store clerk - the ink contains destructive acid and the black will fuzz out and turn different colors over time. Nothing like the need for Language Police to patrol the commodities in Art Supply stores. Oy, the trials of a novice haptic maker!

On this particular afternoon, around 6 o’clock, the wind was pouring through, circling about, and rigorously shaking branches and leaves in an old, huge gray Oak under which I did my work on a glass table. If you look close you can see the reflections of leaves and branches. My ears were also picking up on the chirps of multiple kinds of birds, the water rushing through the irrigation canal, the trucks down shifting, occasionally in a sustained shriek, while coming down the Moutnain pass across the valley. Then there were the rapid tempearture shifts - between chill and warm - among the different rhythms, force, and variant directions of the wind :

When I finished the work, I looked up into the branches of the still agitated tree. It’s amazing - I thought - how much an Oak can give you once get into the world (whorl, whirl) of one. It’s kind of special to be so embraced! Oddly enough, or not, when my father died, for several weeks after I found myself looking up into the limbs of tall firs and pines overlooking my neighborhood. Impulsively I found myself wanting to be picked up into their arms - as if I were a child again, and my father would pick me up into a final embrace and goodbye, then let down into the world again.

(This site will be quiet for the next 10 days. I am off to Bilbao with my partner - Sandy Phillips, curator at SF Museum of Modern - who will help open her Somei Tomatsu show, which makes it final appearance, after a three year world run, at the Fundación BBK , one of the City’s other museums. So farewell for awhile).

Just home from taking care of my quite aging mom this evening (91). Her sense of immediate cognition is descending, but her lucid moments still surprise me:

“So this is it?” she asks. We are about to eat some dinner. She looks out over the table, almost as if into space.

“What do you mean?”

“Everything is broken.” It’s as if she sees an entire universe broken into pieces.

She stops, unable to say more, or advance on what she perceives. She seems exhausted. I put her to bed early. She falls to sleep immediately. I return an hour later to find her awake and ready to talk into the dark.

“I guess we cannot do what we wanted to.”

“Write poetry?” I actually do not have a clue as to what she is imagining.

“Can you sit beside me. I think we are the only ones left.”

I sit beside her and pet her forehead.

“Did you know how much people like your poems?”

“Is that true? I didn’t know I write poetry?”

“You dictate the poems and I write them down. People appreciate them all around the world.’

“Is that true?” She sounds delighted at the possibility of such public attention which she suddenly turns into a lament. “I will not live long enough to know.”

“How’s that for a concept? All around the world?” I try to keep her spirit on the upside.

“Yes, that is a concept.”

Her sense of irony - a thinly disguised, bittersweet humor - remains unbending about her current condition. No matter her possible public success, she will not be able to appreciate it. It is so much now unlike the old days, when she was a politician and could easily find her name and her battles - win or or lose - documented, even celebrated in the local Press.

And this success and interest in her poetry - this kind of victory - though the knowledge of it clearly gives her a sense of surprise and momentary joy - will be for a public that will elude her knowledge and her touch. The idea of that loss clearly hurts. But then again, next time I talk to her, she may or may not remember that she has made poems at all, and will be again surprised when I read them back to her!

A week ago - on the phone with her - I asked her how she was doing?

“Not so well,” she said, and then delivered an admonition, “Don’t let old age get inside you.”

Amazing, nevertheless, I find, how she continues to thread her way between hard wisdom, memory loss and death. The way I am left to record the trail.

Some might find a Frida Kahlo skateboard a bit over the top, considering the physcial pain that she had to suffer, and of which she made some very strong paintings from the sustained impact of a devastating injury. Paint translated metaphorically into the challenge of being a woman artist in a still male-centric culture of art in the 20th century.

Peter Manson, the poet, reminds me of Duchamp’s Reciprocal Readymade: “Use a Rembrandt as an ironing-board.” That no doubt caused outrage among high culture gate keepers, as the Kalho slate board no doubt will offend those who mystify her stature and iconic significance. To the contrary, I suspect the skateboard is actually a liberating gesture, letting Frida roll out from under the weight of the statuary into which, it seems, she has become so embedded and stultified.

Get out of that window, back on to the street and Roll On, Frida and, while you’re at it, give us a triple double-axle leap and, when you land, jack your thumbs straight up into the air!

Shop Window, Encantada Gallery of Fine Art in San Francisco, 904 Valencia Street, San Francisco

Hot Art? Heat & Art get challenged here. What is the man pointing out in that black, slightly corrugated, swirl of glass? Why do those transparent orange and no-color vases look like potential vessels of lethal stuff? Why are he and she dressed in 50’s drag - the most favorite sexually repressed era of the 20th Century? Actually, why did Eros take a walk off the set in the 1950’s?

What is this image about? What is he trying to tell her? Why is she so delighted? Is it - his finger on the glass - something vaguely ticklish, ovarian? I don’t have a clue. I don’t know if I want to have a clue.

On the other hand, it’s kind of nice to have something so retro, so superficially happy, so untroubled. Nobody in this picture is in the National Reserves. Nobody is going to Iraq. Someone else must be taking care of the children. It’s just plain, happy suburban bucolic. Sweetly astonishing, here, rolling quite spontaneously up in front of the eye at the corner of Mission Street and Chavez (San Francisco). A pause, then the bus, grinding its gears, ready to head up the hill, going West. The fog coming back in. What an image to carry, carry into the cool evening, the dark Hot Art for everyone.

What is comparable between political repression in the 50’s (McCarthy, the ‘Red Scare’ and all of that), and the official, as well as self-censorship of expression under the current regime? Do not Bush, Cheney et al represent the rebirth of the 50’s? Why does this picture hit so awkwardly close to home? Or the repeat of a former, pre-60’s home?

The way John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, Janis Joplin, Mick Jagger - one knows the list - would rise to become such a treat. There, were also the poets. But most know that list, too.

Homesick, anyone? Eros must be floating out of the deck somewhere, or we be in big trouble. Methinks.