discomfort. (unpleasant to say it, but somebody had to.) by changing places and circumstances, cat-sitting for a week in berkeley and roaming the streets and museums of san francisco. we're not talking extreme deprivation, just a change in routine, the house cold, the bathroom upstairs, walking to the subway past the homeless posing as demonstrators and kids flooding out of the high school for lunch.
what happened? people started talking to me out of the blue. a couple before a flamenco concert, a pretty grad student from san francisco studying in paris and complaining about the bus service. another time a woman from philadelphia asked me where to get off for golden gate park. she praised the transportation system! and said, 'how wonderful to live in a clean city.' yes, i remember years ago a pop bottle exploding on the top of our family car passing through her town.
i found myself joking with strangers, complimenting them on their work, in other words i came out of my shell in some way that encouraged people to speak with me. what a pleasure. that hasn't happened in a long time. and it's all because of discomfort. back home in my little room, i don't have to go anywhere. i'm not pulled out into the world of Titian and Pissaro, not stunned by a beautiful painting by Manet and a couple by Watteau.
in fact, i had a small epiphany. after gazing at photos in the realistic manner, not to mention aisles of art in the same style, i stumbled on a little cezanne. i'd never understood his appeal to picasso and the moderns. this time he felt absolutely refreshing, me seeing his piece as an abstraction. what a relief from all these wonderful, ordinary, expected versions of reality. abstraction lies behind every work of art, yet it took cezanne to bring it forward.
yes, here in my little nine by twelve foot monk's cell, lovely trees out the window, the bathroom and hot water a step away, the Internet service like lightning, heat in winter, coolness in summer, a soft bed, food a quick fix, i tend to rot away in my thoughts, my very pleasant daydreams. this time, coming back, i asked myself, 'where have the last thirty years gone?'
a few photos and watercolors from this expedition, the revolving door, and that is definitely meant metaphorically:
www.pbase.com/wwp/door
www.pbase.com/wwp/door2
'
now wait a darn minute,' i can hear you saying. 'that may be true for some people but not for me.' debt is like death, or the ten commandmants, everyone insists on an exception. 'we need money for college, to buy a house, to invest in stocks. money makes money.' hmm, that's not what i'm hearing from the newspapers and my friends.
take an education, for example. students leaving school after five years twenty to forty thousand dollars in the hole. how long will it take to crawl out of it? what options have you surrendered, like back-packing around the the world or meditating in an ashram? ultimately, you become a conservative by virtue of your pact with the bank. you may demonstrate against the government out of frustration: 'i was too young. i didn't know. you evil folks wrote checks for me.' tell it to the judge.
or buying a house. yes, property changed humankind forever, and i think for the better, ie. it created individuality. no longer were you merely a tribal entitiy. and now i'll reveal the truth, my family in bondage the whole time i was growing up. yes, i remember my mother writing she couldn't even buy a candy bar, adding insult to injury since her family lost their wealth in the great depression. we closed off rooms in winter, slept with hot bricks, bundled up in warm clothes. when my father exited the bus from the east where he'd applied for the army, he almost fainted, not having eaten in three days.
and when food in short supply, the kids fight over it, identifying it with love. we survived borrowing money from my uncle walter, the batchelor. in the end i paid a terribly price for it, my personality undergoing a complete change when i lived with him and alcoholic uncle luzerne. driven inward by the feeling i must conform to their wishes, all of us indebted to him, i couldn't fight back and psychologically knuckled under and succumbed. read the letters exchanged with my family at the time: www.pbase.com/wwp/son
yes, a faustian bargain feels good at the time, saying to yourself, 'i will never have to pay it back.' alas, the truth quite otherwise. the sword of damocles may very well hang over your head for the rest of your life.
many moons ago, peter smith, head of university arts & lectures, said, 'what's needed is a center of energy.' in terms of the real world, this person provides the drive making things happen, whether it's a product, service, or religion. and, alas, i'm not one of these people. i'm the idea guy. when it comes to mustering community forces, i'm an utter dud.
i've been browsing through the coming jobs war by the ceo of the gallup polling group, jim clifton. usually i shy away from war books, however i figured i'd give this a shot. as usual, the book contains one premise: entrepreneurs needed. the innovative may announce, even begin, a revolution. the audience-builder has to create desire in the hearts of consumers. the author sites many examples of inventions turning into also-rans. i think of the lcd, invented by americans and ridden across the finish line by the japanese.
anybody advising steve j. about phones, music services, and pads, said, 'hey, stevee, these dead territories, why re-invent the wheel.' the rest history. building a better mouse-trap not time wasted. the rats continue to climb aboard a sinking ship, for that is what the gallup guy gallops toward. 'we need thirty percent of the world's smartest to survive. health care killing us. school dropouts, how they going to help pick us up?'
you know, the trouble with starting a business is you have to work all the time. it's so much nicer to collect a paycheck and have another life. mercifully, i've been able to do it. psychics tell me i've had so much responsibility and seen so much destruction, i get a vacation. i'm not sure inventing the device blowing up atlantis qualifies me for an easy time. well, life is not fair. i'll take what i can get.
usually, i've lost my jobs through boredom: bagging groceries, pulling chain for a surveyor, sweeping a dime-store. as long as i can dream while working i'm free. god-forbid i should be supervised! how i got through this lifetime i'm not sure. true, i'm a workaholic when it comes to writing, theater, art, photography. let me drive myself insane, even if i lack the skills and desire to make fame pay.
if you find the entrepreneurs at fault, you'll have to build your own factory for cannonballs. those will always be needed, even if it's been done before. take choreographers for example: www.pbase.com/wwp/dancepics
like most mortals, at seven and eight i started creating categories, putting cats into this one, socks into another, girls into several. i couldn't help myself. the world overwhelmed me with too much information. for example, ten billion stimuli hit our eyes every second. of those we can actively recognize forty and deal with four at most. we create a life day by day, editing out what we fear or doesn't seem useful.
lately i've spent time with two friends devoured by conspiracy theories. these occupy their minds to organize the world. as usual, nefarious political and financial people conspire to get everything, to steal from us, to make us suffer. unfortunately, it's true, though the upper one percent would never agree. 'we're creating job opportunities.'
yet, what's really happening in the minds of my friends? the making sense of the world by adopting a system which keeps their busy minds occupied. and when i watch people pouring over the bible in cafes, i think the same, 'they've reduced life to this particular, very comprehensive and confusing book from which you can justify anything.' luckily, it evades science, economics, anything which might prove even more difficult to assimilate. again, frantic intelligences being absorbed in a complete universe.
any paradigm can be proven true. that's the beauty of it. all you have to do is accept a few basic premises without proof and the rest follows! this, you have to admit, completely ingenious. what it eliminates is doubt, ambiguity, and the hell of independent thought. and, of course, i would like to suggest an alternate route.
CANDLE
Surely you weren't meant
to be born here in this
kitchen, waiting for
the ants. Old Greek poets
sang of dresses falling
from lovely limbs, the moon
bouncing off the water.
Sanskrit sages denied
anyone could resist the
flute of Krishna, tunes
fluttering through the perfumed
leaves. Married women
dropped wedding rings,
shyness, customs, the
husband's heavy sighs,
to slide out the door
into the forest. And if
you find yourself doing
the same, open the poems
of Bhartrihari and drink
the deep silence of the stars,
burn like the candle
you left far behind
watching in the window.
taking in all the evidence: www.pbase.com/wwp/poems
it's painful giving people advice on how to live. they never do what i say. yet i can't stop it. for example, two fellows yesterday, both basically out of jobs, early thirties, upset about what to do next. one burdened by student loans, he can't even imagine what he might want. the other, just fired as the head of a theater in a state of shock. and i couldn't hold myself back, poor guys.
'go to saudi arabia for a year and pay off your debt.' 'figure out how to get to england and establish a career.' my god, these are big chunks to swallow. everything seems incredibly beyond reach when you're depressed. and you may be down in the dumps unexpectedly, me for example. this week a 200 dollar brake job on my truck turned into a 1000 dollar one. i offered to give the cashier at the car dealer my blood instead of cash. she didn't go for it.
okay, let's break this down into bites. at five years old you liked to dress up, 'who shall i be today?' you're on the edge, slaving as a cook, but you can do it. salvation army's just a block away. acquire an outlandish wardrobe and be a drag queen at breakfast, join the local people doing mad fashion shows. and as for you, having had england as your playpen at five, you can start stealing english silver from antique stores and eat off it every evening. be a thief of time.
He did not dare touch the coffin
a passion in glass
a lesson in perfection
He
did not dare hope
for anything so living
as love
in the flesh
He satisfied himself with eyes
Imagine
the shock of the dropping
the cracking of the coffin
Snow White
jarred awake from the land
of her dreams
into his
We think of ourselves as victims
yes
that's a good beginning
victims
Everything done to us
birth was done to us
nobody asked
death was done to us
we resisted
personally
Eyes were done to us
and noses
socks and shoes
we didn't ask to live
in houses and pants
streets were done to us
circuses and cotton candy
beer and brothels came to us without our asking
We took them
we took it all
what else were we supposed to do
the androids have been asking for you: www.pbase.com/wwp/android2
this comes as an incredible shock to someone who wrote his first good play at 23 about van gogh and gauguin in the south of france. mainly, cause like most of his generation, he accepted van gogh as the image of christ, sacrificing himself for the beauty of art.
here's a quote from the news: In Van Gogh: The Life, a 976page doorstop published this week, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith say it's more likely that the celebrated Dutch post-Impressionist painter was the victim of an accidental shooting. The suspected perpetrators: a couple of teenage bullies obsessed with American cowboys and playing with a gun, and protected on his deathbed by van Gogh claiming an act of suicide.
oddly, in a way this makes him more of a saint, refusing to disclose the identity of his killers in order to protect them. yet, any disturbance to our view of an icon unsettling, to say the least. t0 those who wish to believe in the artist as hero, especially the artists themselves, this comes as a blow. we've always prided ourselves on suffering until dead when we're discovered.
with the myth exploded, how can we continue to live in 9 by 10 rooms, storing our drawings and manuscripts in a rented storage space (me)? true, had van gogh lived another year he'd have found himself celebrated and paid as a painter, the saintly image discarded. and who was it said, 'many have quit just as they were about to succeed?'
let's face it, the art-world overwhelmed by the productive slaving in their studios. once they could have made chairs, pewter dishes, walking canes. alas, these occupations have gone the way of horse-drawn buggies. everyday i look through design and art books at the bookstore over my cafe americano. and for all the liberation of post-modernism, the power of a van gogh and gauguin missing.
duchamp created the copy of the copy as artifact, and his command incredible prices. television cannibalized the movies and history. starting in 1950 every attempt at art a facsimile of the past. what has artistic freedom done to us? confused the whole picture!
van gogh and gauguin in the south of france: www.pbase.com/wwp/flame
and that was part of my original intent. we moved thirty times by the time i graduated high school, age 16. and it included two years in the utah desert and two years in germany. this formed a habit it never occured to me to kill. i unconsciously followed a family tradition, all the while telling myself, 'a poet has to be a citizen of the world.'
we re-create memories. turns out they don't really exist. this makes having a pile of shards quite exciting. for example, the day i received the telegram telling me my father died unexpectedly. after calling my mother, i said to myself, 'i'm going to enjoy this day.' yes, we think once our parents gone, we'll be free of them. i've been wrong both times.
i wandered over to the berlin zoo. looking at captured animals in the grey light couldn't have cheered me up. and i recall a cheap eating house where clients feasted at communal tables. what i remember: the wire-rimmed glasses of the fellow sitting opposite me. actually, my stunned state didn't allow much reflection.
or the day bali finally turned sour for me. a german guy told me it would, after awhile. the ceremonies which had been bright and exotic, lost all their color. the garbage in the gutters overshadowed the kids painting florid pictures. i'd overstayed my welcome, my senses surfeited, the pimples of the populace now showing through.
i figured in old-age i'd like a lot of memories, and how true it's become, as long as i can leave out nostalgia or the desire to change anything, like the time the girl in amsterdam finally agreed to make love with me and i'd gotten so angry i took my revenge by walking out. how stupid can you be! or the bleak goodbye to renate before she committed suicide.
in a good mood you can choose the high times, leave out the turbulent stomach or the aching back carrying a pack. often i simply remember a street corner in bangkok, a weary museum guard in istanbul, the look of bottecelli under glass. each gives me a thrill. i was there. i saw it all. and with a little editing the past charmed and bright.
the planning for a trip, the memories a few days after, this is all you really want. the actual journey full of potholes. and once you get home, the photos gradually replace the adventure. yes, you traveled the world. doing it on the cheap, you got down with the people more than once too often. these aspects of the facts can be deleted. the young save up a wealth of magical details, hitching through ireland and crossing the border into guatemala, photos of wanted guerillas all over the guards' walls, as they fingered high-powered rifles, staring at you.
