·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

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?