Pix & Texts, Poetry, Commentary, Politics, etc.
Haptic: Ned Sublette reading from The Year Before The Flood at Green Arcade, a new (great) San Francisco bookstore (Market near Gough). Great voice fleshing out New Orleans, the fertile cradle of this country’s most joyous and most deadly and constant celebration of the Baroque.
October 29, 2009.
Tree Haptic:Cosmic
So much, as a way of looking, continuously connects back to William Blake’s to see the universe in a grain of sand.
Haptic Alphabet: Letter “U”
Today, while I took care of my mom, I made the letter “U”. Currently I am in the process of making a Haptic Alphabet. We sat at the kitchen table. Most of the time, while I was drawing, she looked at different pages in the National Geographic magazine. Occasionally she looked over at my drawing in process.
“What do you think of it, Mom?”
“That is very nice,” she would answer, each of her words succinctly put. Then she went back to her reading.
When I thought I was finished with the piece, “Do you think it is done, Mom? Do you think I should do any more?”
She looks closely at the work. “Oh, no, don’t do anymore. If you do that it will break!”
That was lovely and unexpected. It’s as if she viewed my “U” as fragile as a literal vase that - with the additional weight of more ink strokes - might well fall over and break into pieces. Taking her advice I did not add another mark, then asked her to pose for a picture with the drawing. A veteran politician, now matter how old, she never refuses to rise to the occasion and have her picture taken!
My mother holding the haptic letter “U”.
Haptic: Bark, Ponderosa Pine, Dolores Park, San Francisco
For some, this may take a leap of the imagination. But the shapes here remind me of dyed figures of American Indian dancers that one sees drawn on to the leather sidings of tribal tents; celebratory dances in which men wear deer hides with heads and antlers still in tact. If I once knew, I am now no longer sure of the intentions of those dances - whether they preceded or followed the hunt, or whether or not the intention was to invoke the spirits of the deer in order to bring them close in for the hunt, or to thank those spirits for having provided the tribe a deer to kill in order for the tribe to secure its nourishment.
I do love the way these spirits have left the mark of their ancient presence on this particular bark. I also like the notion that every piece of history inevitably leaves one kind of mark or other on the natural landscape, including this piece of bark that, ironically, so resembles the ancient parchment on which some of the first histories were once written.
Thanks for visiting! It is always nice to see you.
Just joking. It was curious this early evening to see the shadow of this surveillance camera reflected back on the venetian blind in the window of a new condo in the neighborhood. The blinds, as you may well know, are often associated with voyeurism - the jealous lover looking through the slightly tilted plastic louvers while trying to keep track on the desired one. In French, “la jalousie” is the ‘one in the same word’ for such blinds. It is sweet to capture the two technologies, one floating on top of the other.
Haptic: Renee Gladman reading from her new, yet unpublished novel for the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, October 15, 2009
I listen to my mother breathing. She’s 93. She is taking an afternoon nap in her bedroom. I am in the ‘family room’ making this haptic. The sounds of her breathing are projected over the speaker on the the audio-surveillance system. My pen strokes follow the coarse sound, the circular movement - in and out - and the constant, then variable rhythm of each breath. In listening so closely, matching each breath with a pen stroke, I become aware that I have become at one with her breathing, but it’s not just my mother breathing. It suddenly seems as if her breathing - in and out - is the whole world breathing in its most fundamental, primal form and that I and everyone else, no matter where we are, each belong to this breathing motion that precedes time, creates time, and dissolves in time; then, just as inevitably, the creates the next breath, one wave upon another, peaceful, then turbulent, then various, as if our lungs are both at one and a mirror of a global ocean of air that is endlessly turning over and over again. And the rhythm of the breathing is the rhythm, so various and full, at the source and birth of every living thing.
And there, the haptic unrolling before me out of my pen with each breath.
And the thought of my mother, as she ever so slowly begins to pass from the world of her body, that she will pass, as all of us, back into the larger world to an eternal mother that is constantly breathing.
When I arrived to day, my mother looked up at me somewhat skeptically from her kitchen chair. “And who are you?”, she asks.
“I am your son, Stephen, Stephen Vincent.”
She looks at me more closely.
“Do you still fit inside your name?”
I was not sure how to respond to the question but it gives birth to the thought that her own body, in possibly the not far future, will also no longer fit inside her name. That she will leave us with her name only.
“What is your name?” I ask her.
“I am Barbara Vincent,” she says. I am a little relieved. She does not always remember, or, in fact, when reminded, will say she does not know that person.
Ah, the waveries of growing older, dissolving. Breathing.
To take a close look at the canyon walls
within Yosemite, granite may well be
the original home in which letter shapes,
haptic marks, were cut and formed
by the force of now ancient glaciers. Note
the indelible imprinted shapes
left by fallen talus. One can practically hear
the diverse accents, echoes, luminous
& dark tones, as well as the implications
of harmony and melody similarly occurrent
in a well chiseled, well made, solid poem.
In addition to trees and birds
one suspects the ancient, original
scribes must have closely studied
these shapes to construct and shape
unique alphabets and then to consecutively
link letters into particular formations
in order to create the pronunciation
of sounds accurate for scrolls on
to which they scripted their poetic,
prophetic and/or legal intentions.
Some Speculative Thouught, A Note:
In examining the haptic marks as manifested
within Yosemite’s granite surfaces, we can see them
as the residual incisions that have been made
from within and/or reflected on
the external face of the granite body
in response to a sensation created
by an external or internal force. To the
degree that our own bodies are variously
similar to other natural bodies, it is only
logical that the language (the vocabulary)
of one would feed the structure of the other.
It is only natural to conjecture that the primal
formation of language first emerges when
one body was torn from another as was true
in the aggressive thrusts and withdrawals
of glacial movements. The primal haptic marks
made and left by those original breaches (which
actually continue to be made ‘boulder by
falling boulder’ off the local Yosemite walls)
then would constitute the origins - making
marks - for the letter forms at the origins of script.
Indeed, the classical art of carving letters into granite,
so favored by the Romans, is said to be a natural
outgrowth of the evolution of letter shapes
initially discovered in the granite quarries
that formed the architectural building blocks
in the early buildings of Rome.
****
Some additional thoughts:
This entirely speculative discussion, however.
does not yet, at least, consider myth as another source
for alphabets in the making. For example, there is
the ages old story of a magical golden horse
that once roamed the earth. However, during
the ice age, in a fatal misstep, the horse
was captured and frozen into a fast moving glacier.
In Yosemite, high upon the canyon walls - as no doubt
in other sites considered sacred - the horse’s spirit
occasionally appears, a luminous golden presence.
It is said this horse is celebrated as the haptic source
at the origins of the granite alphabet, and, as much as
any great muse, it is also said this horse, apparently prancing,
young and fired up, has always been favored by poets.
It was such a pleasure - an awesome one - to find him or her
alive and alert on the canyon walls of Yosemite!
***
In the nineteenth century, it was common to speak of
this Canyon in deific terms. God - or, at least,
the extraordinary geological shapes - were Biblical
manifestations. Indeed the spire of El Capitan, for example,
was considered to be evidence of God himself. For visiting artists
such as Albert Bierdstadt, Yosemite Valley was experienced
as a “Divine Workshop” from which one could reflect God’s
presence in the Canyon in paint on canvass.. In the 21st Century,
whether or not one is a believer, it is still possible to get
an occasional divine clue, a revelation
of the presence once so deeply viewed and felt.
Foot of Vernal Falls, Yosemite
Liberty Cap - Photo by Sandra Phillips - October 3, 2009.
On the north edge of Yosemite, the peak was once famously photographed in the 19th Century by Carleton Watkins taken from this same angle.
Haptic: Yosemite in Resonance Stephen Vincent October 5, 2009
