A story – this red-headed girl very late on my first night out on the Italian Line’s Christoforo Colombo – saying she was glad she was on this trip because she feared her engagement back in Scarsdale was a horrible mistake.
So she takes this ring – saying, when I met you tonight I knew I’d have to do this. She takes the ring and hurls it into the North Atlantic.
This is what I wrote the other night
.
NO! – fiction! – ring not over the rail – and deathly afraid of stopping with anyone anywhere – and, well outside fiction, did not stop on that ship until I met the wrong woman – the wrong girl, a laughing, loud non-redhead, a Texan, I could hear my brother (who was also on his way to Europe that summer but safely on a British Cunard liner), my brother and others say “How charming” – my brother – the family I came from of to little use to me when I met people outside fiction –
The ring was there – and it did feel like she had put me on the spot – saying that meeting me this night convinced her she would have to get rid of the ring – put me on the spot so firmly that she ¬might have firmly cast the ring into the North Atlantic in the course of our necking at the boat deck rail—necking as the Chistoforo Colombo was moving toward the South Atlantic. She might have thrown the ring.
But she didn't.
I see her – this picture of her in reality that is on and in my brain – as clearly as if it were hours ago that the sky over the ocean, over us, was turning red with the dawn – actually a range of colors from hot orange to luke-warm purple – this dawn still so clear it could, this dawn, have been a just-passed dawn, not a dawn that was just-passed fifty years ago – her, the picture of her, with something of my own aspiration and my own suspicion of commitment in her, but still her, whom I can never really know, not me, whom I hope to know. And although I see her hand, just disentangled from me, held out – slightly pink, slightly freckled – to display the ring – her hand in memory slightly scented – I do not, do not, do not, do not see the other hand disentangle and slide the ring off and hurl it into the ocean. This is fiction. This is me running from myself. This is me falsifying, like my literary enemies, so as to get the focus off myself, off what I know – me so filled with aspiration and – excerpt for the effects of the night’s Strega and the brandy – so unsure, at not quite 21, just feeling my way, though in favor in my mind of total immersion in the flow and life and sex and beauty and love and death and grandeur – but instead I am, then and when I wrote last night, just putting a toe in – running into the coward's shelter – fiction!
For she does not take off the ring with the fingers of the other hand disentangled from me and she does not lean back while still in my arms and throw that ring into the ocean –
And although I wrote it I do not see a diamond of a size so large that it would signal my family, if they were somehow to see it, that she did not come from Our Kind of People. It makes a point, making the diamond that big, but it diminishes the story.
Helps me run from the story, from unbearable beauty and aspiration and the ever-present possibility of betrayal.
As I write I see her soft hair, her soft hand and her light eyes, and I smell the ocean and I remember her own scent, and I feel aroused by her that night – though I will not, that night, choose her over all others I seek – for this is not precisely the picture I seek – her skin lightly freckled, like mine though unlike mine soft and lightly scented –
Though not shiny and clear and olive as in the fiction I write in my head but must not turn into lies on paper – her skin not nearly Italian enough.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Friday, November 2, 2007
WRITTEN WORD 15 – Writing in Museums
In that time when I couldn’t stay out of the museums it seemed to me that up till now my range had been surprisingly small. I had thought of myself as man who knew art – ever since a great awakening in Paris at 16 when I suddenly knew the location of very painting by every Impressionist in the Jeu de Paum – which was on the expansive Place de la Concorde with it grand spaciousness and white marble.
“Impressionist” was a word I had not seen or heard before that summer, for I was coming from houses where there were no serious pictures on the walls, just decoration. But my mother had memories from a junior year abroad, and an appreciation, and I wondered why it had not gone further.
I had known neither the name of the group, “Impressionists,” nor the names of its members, but they took me over immediately. And 35 years later, when I verged on despair because my writing could not help me, I still knew exactly which direction in which room in the Jeu de Paum to look to see Renoir’s Girl on a Swing – which I thought of as a girl not on a swing but meeting me on a path – or the Monet poplars – or the depressing little Delacroix works added there only for art history purposes – or Manet’s magnificent people – an artists’ picnic on the grass, one of whose members was a nude artists' model – as appealing in her way as, straight ahead and to the left in the next room the calculatingly languid, inviting, high-class whore Olympia, high on the wall so you had to tilt your head up to see her.
The next summer I was on an exchange program in Holland and I did take in the Rembrandts and Franz Hals. And as a 21-year-old journalist I discovered Edward Hopper in Chicago, his Night Hawks, not yet so well known, new to me then, like people I had seen in many lonely diners – but in those first years after college – the journalism years, the two years in the army, and the unpublished novels and sometimes actual sometimes languid girls – in the first years after all that and I had landed in New York – a place on East 13th Street which was still the Lower East Side, not quite the East Village yet, I had taken pride that my beautiful, bright new girlfriend Vannie was an action painter – and we were in and out of museums and galleries every rambling Sunday —but in the 35 years between that first time in Paris and the time in which my life was unfolding in startling new ways in front of works of visual art I found that my range had not much increased – that it had not gone beyond the Impressionists and some, but hardly all, of the 17th century Dutch and, yes, Hopper and, with Vannie, a few people new in the fifties – deKooning and Franz Kline if not yet Jackson Pollack and Phillip Guston– and so everything I was looking at now, 35 years after Paris – these rooms in all the museums in New York – became in my mind as clear as the small Jeu de Paum still was –
Most of what I saw now, including things I would have thought would have been familiar , was brand new to me – Raphael, Hobbema, Durer, Daubigny, Bellini, Francia, Kandinisky, Andrea del Sarto, Sheeler, Tintoretto – and so many others—
As new to me now as Manet and Monet and Renoir had been when I was 16. And I knew now just where to look in the Brooklyn Museum – a far wall – for Daubigny, and in the Modern – off the left in the next to last room – for René Magritte – and to the left going into the permanent collection at the Guggenheim the big Pisarro, and in the Frick, one room over from Bellini’s St. Francis, for the Claude de Lorrain, and two rooms on and to the left in the Frick, next to another charged Hobbema, the Constable White Horse.
And although when I was 16 and found myself still trapped in the family even in Paris –my life had expanded in the Jeu de Paum. And now I wondered why it had not expanded further.
Any more than in the years I made my living writing did I let what I wrote go much beyond what I planned to write.
Though after the time living in visual art it became as hard – and as unlikely – for me to keep things in place if I returned to writing as it had been in the past to let what I wrote take its own direction.
For example – I thought I would write a traditional story about the horrors of boarding school – set in my boarding school, Holderness, Georgian buildings in the New Hampshire lake country. But I discovered while writing, that in actuality it was in boarding school that I got my first clear taste of freedom – and what I might become.
And I tried to write about the overall perfection of my summer life in our family’s intensely formal enclave – those big houses with striped awnings and white bird baths – in the otherwise unkempt and scruffy White Mountains of New Hampshire. And I could not stuff down what I knew, for the writing put me back again in Hobbema’s dark, unsafe woods instead.
In the years that followed I often wrote in museums. The how-to-write books almost always say that writing must be grim and gray and lonely, hard work for which you must grit your teeth and tighten up all sphincters. You must be willing to sit for hours every day of your life in front of blank paper or a blank computer screen whether or not anything appears on the screen or on paper.
By now I have known an infinite number or writers, back from my days working for what were billed as big-time magazine and newspaper companies to my days consorting with fellow writers when my own books were being published, to these years working with writers in our workshops who are willing, unlike most academics and critics, to treat writing as an art and go deep into concrete reality, that material that the writer, the artist, knows best, the writer’s actual life. Nothing can stop writing more effectively than the command to spend three hours each day staring at something blank. Almost none of the all the writers I know do anything worthwhile trying to work that way.
And I still find museums the best places in which to write.
“Impressionist” was a word I had not seen or heard before that summer, for I was coming from houses where there were no serious pictures on the walls, just decoration. But my mother had memories from a junior year abroad, and an appreciation, and I wondered why it had not gone further.
I had known neither the name of the group, “Impressionists,” nor the names of its members, but they took me over immediately. And 35 years later, when I verged on despair because my writing could not help me, I still knew exactly which direction in which room in the Jeu de Paum to look to see Renoir’s Girl on a Swing – which I thought of as a girl not on a swing but meeting me on a path – or the Monet poplars – or the depressing little Delacroix works added there only for art history purposes – or Manet’s magnificent people – an artists’ picnic on the grass, one of whose members was a nude artists' model – as appealing in her way as, straight ahead and to the left in the next room the calculatingly languid, inviting, high-class whore Olympia, high on the wall so you had to tilt your head up to see her.
The next summer I was on an exchange program in Holland and I did take in the Rembrandts and Franz Hals. And as a 21-year-old journalist I discovered Edward Hopper in Chicago, his Night Hawks, not yet so well known, new to me then, like people I had seen in many lonely diners – but in those first years after college – the journalism years, the two years in the army, and the unpublished novels and sometimes actual sometimes languid girls – in the first years after all that and I had landed in New York – a place on East 13th Street which was still the Lower East Side, not quite the East Village yet, I had taken pride that my beautiful, bright new girlfriend Vannie was an action painter – and we were in and out of museums and galleries every rambling Sunday —but in the 35 years between that first time in Paris and the time in which my life was unfolding in startling new ways in front of works of visual art I found that my range had not much increased – that it had not gone beyond the Impressionists and some, but hardly all, of the 17th century Dutch and, yes, Hopper and, with Vannie, a few people new in the fifties – deKooning and Franz Kline if not yet Jackson Pollack and Phillip Guston– and so everything I was looking at now, 35 years after Paris – these rooms in all the museums in New York – became in my mind as clear as the small Jeu de Paum still was –
Most of what I saw now, including things I would have thought would have been familiar , was brand new to me – Raphael, Hobbema, Durer, Daubigny, Bellini, Francia, Kandinisky, Andrea del Sarto, Sheeler, Tintoretto – and so many others—
As new to me now as Manet and Monet and Renoir had been when I was 16. And I knew now just where to look in the Brooklyn Museum – a far wall – for Daubigny, and in the Modern – off the left in the next to last room – for René Magritte – and to the left going into the permanent collection at the Guggenheim the big Pisarro, and in the Frick, one room over from Bellini’s St. Francis, for the Claude de Lorrain, and two rooms on and to the left in the Frick, next to another charged Hobbema, the Constable White Horse.
And although when I was 16 and found myself still trapped in the family even in Paris –my life had expanded in the Jeu de Paum. And now I wondered why it had not expanded further.
Any more than in the years I made my living writing did I let what I wrote go much beyond what I planned to write.
Though after the time living in visual art it became as hard – and as unlikely – for me to keep things in place if I returned to writing as it had been in the past to let what I wrote take its own direction.
For example – I thought I would write a traditional story about the horrors of boarding school – set in my boarding school, Holderness, Georgian buildings in the New Hampshire lake country. But I discovered while writing, that in actuality it was in boarding school that I got my first clear taste of freedom – and what I might become.
And I tried to write about the overall perfection of my summer life in our family’s intensely formal enclave – those big houses with striped awnings and white bird baths – in the otherwise unkempt and scruffy White Mountains of New Hampshire. And I could not stuff down what I knew, for the writing put me back again in Hobbema’s dark, unsafe woods instead.
In the years that followed I often wrote in museums. The how-to-write books almost always say that writing must be grim and gray and lonely, hard work for which you must grit your teeth and tighten up all sphincters. You must be willing to sit for hours every day of your life in front of blank paper or a blank computer screen whether or not anything appears on the screen or on paper.
By now I have known an infinite number or writers, back from my days working for what were billed as big-time magazine and newspaper companies to my days consorting with fellow writers when my own books were being published, to these years working with writers in our workshops who are willing, unlike most academics and critics, to treat writing as an art and go deep into concrete reality, that material that the writer, the artist, knows best, the writer’s actual life. Nothing can stop writing more effectively than the command to spend three hours each day staring at something blank. Almost none of the all the writers I know do anything worthwhile trying to work that way.
And I still find museums the best places in which to write.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
WRITTEN WORD 14 - The Awful Romans
In that time when everything was changing and even before I had started to draw, for what seemed like the first time since childhood, the lampshades in my apartment were lined with of those different colored Metropolitan Museum buttons that proved you had paid something to be allowed into the Met on a given day (my payment never close to what the dishonest signs implied was a big required entrance fee, though in fact was only a donation – a donation of any amount, mine rarely being as low as a penny and never more than a quarter, for I suddenly needed the Met every day). I needed the Met and the Brooklyn and the Guggenheim and the Whitney and the Frick and the Drawing Center and an infinite number of galleries – the places where even before I picked up a pen or brush, I was experiencing these unfoldings in my life for which words had not yet come – unfoldings that never would have taken place if I had stayed with linear ways of writing - with silly A to B to C nonsense that “the men of measured merriment” (a great Sinclair Lewis term) always sum up, and usually make nice, in come contrived way at the end.
For many months I hardly noticed the Roman room, which at that time you had to pass through on your way down a corridor lined with strange ancient Cypriot statues of helmeted people with blank eyes. I would move off to the rooms on the right and on the left where all the Greek statues were placed, some grand and perfect in an archetypal way. The classic period ones never reminded me of anyone I had known in life, though some late ones, animals and old women, seemed true to individuals, and by the time of this later so-called degenerate Hellenistic period there were nude women not just nude men; there were actual people in the statues and they did not all look the same as in the earlier, still revered, archetypal statue people. And there was a grave-site relief stone carving of a bigger than life young, touching, surely once nurturing woman, draped but so soft and lovely even though the stone nose was missing, looking out with a sad expression on her face – a farewell scene, the plaque said, one of the few curator-written plaques in the Met that seemed to have anything to do with the pictures or statures they claimed to be describing.
Then on each day I would transition from the Greeks to coffee in a big cool cafeteria that looked like something that came from Alexandria or Atlantis – it had a fountain in the recessed center – and after coffee I would move quickly through Oceania and New Guinea to the newly opened 20th Century wing that was annoying the critics because it had art that was not yet, to them, in the canon – and this included the wonderful Hopper, the mundane Hockey, and the thought to be too common Curry and Kent, and virtual unknowns, including an artist named Walkowitz who had a painting that was a wild swirl of cities and mountains and a society-looking girl from an earlier time – a scene that an artist I knew had alerted me to for she found it a portrait of my life.
I would follow a passage to the 19th century and then cut back through a corridor of photographs, with a detour to a romantic Renaissance courtyard with Bernini figures and sexy Rococo girls and a silly nude Bacchus playing his violin – and then on to the big staircase and up to the European paintings, which now seemed profoundly like what home could be, if home could be with Rembrandt and Bellini, and after that maybe over to the strange light-hearted courtyard with its bank building façade and tight-ass trumpeting angel pulpit and its, in colorful but near stultifying good taste, Tiffany things – and on to the American wing, and pornography from early America (a sweet, naked marble white girl captive with her wrists bound just before a raping at the hands of fearsome Indians). And then back to the art that went deep.
And for months going to the Met nearly every day, often twice a day, I did not see the Roman busts as I went through the Roman room – which it should have been impossible to miss since you had to go through it to get to the Greeks or to have coffee. Those portraits of prominent Romans – intelligent faces without pity, cheap irony without any understanding.
And then one day I stopped and saw where I was, and knew, though the curator plaques implied the opposite, that the Romans had no art unless you counted these mug-shot portrait busts, these very precise renderings of emperors and their wives and relatives and hangers-on the way they wanted to be depicted – otherwise no art except grandiose, though not grand, buildings for cruel administrators – except copies of the works of their betters, the Greeks - but nothing else except these mug shot busts ordered up by the very people they portrayed who gloried in their cruelty – these cold busts of clever, heartless people whose appeal I knew too well.
And it seemed to me, though I was doing my best now to avoid fixed ideas, that right now these Roman figures had far more weight than the idealized figures of the Greeks. Romans figures, not the idealized archetypal Greek figures, let me capture my life in ways that thrust me into the worlds I had forgotten I knew – and would know far better when writing returned, not the old writing with constant epiphanies and resolutions such as never happen in life but rather the writing that could unfold after I had had time painting, letting in what would come, not just filling in blanks, not just trying to do something that was like something else, actually doing something that was something else – not just like any model or anything else anywhere. This in this time when I did not even think about depression, and followed the need to encourage what might come that I did not know yet, including messages that came from darkness. I cannot practice art, I knew know, unless I know the worst as well as I know the best.
That day when I paused in the Roman room I heard myself expressing gratitude that that ancient world had died. That world that produced those faces, the world that was proud of those faces – thank God, although I did not then believe in any god –“Thank God,” I heard myself saying aloud, while all these cruel emperors and hangers-on and consorts, including some who could have been my closest associates, looked out from a distant past which could have been the recent past – they looked out and turned their stares on me.
I did not think of myself as Christian then, but "Thank God," I said aloud, "that Christianity came along when it did."
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
WRITTEN WORD 13 - Reality of Summer Days
When I counted them later while taking stock, it would seem like I had had a lot of dates in the museums – from someone I’d known in Beirut to someone I’d just met at the Art Students League, but in context these dates were so rare as to be outside the picture, for I was in the museums more than once a day, for many, many crucial months, and in memory I was almost always alone, seeing art works and my life in challenging and harsh and soft new ways.
I stood in front of one of the Met’s Hobbema’s while an escorted group came through and they were being told about how every leaf on the trees in Hobbema’s 17th century forest looked real and brought up a gentle summer day – this scene in very dark woods that I very gradually, realized were not at all safe and gentle and summery. I found myself complaining to myself about myself – how could I, a man so attuned to nature, I asked myself, how could I not respond to this moving evocation of a placid summer day in a clearing in gentle summery woods?
Right behind the Hobbema there was a door leading to a high balcony surrounding a bright and airy courtyard, many stories high and lit with real light from a sweeping skylight and a wall of glass that brought in the park from outside. A place with benches upon which to sit and contemplate in the middle of this airy courtyard what seemed to me light-hearted bits and pieces of popular art – an actual Greek revival bank façade from somewhere in the Middle West, colorful if rather nice-nice works in Tiffany glass, and an amusing carved church pulpit with circular steps and on the top an extremely tight-ass angel heralding some version of something with a trumpet. In this imaginative courtyard, which felt like a holiday place, I felt better. But then I went up on the balcony again and back in that door to old Dutch paintings, and I stood again looking at the summer day woods scenes, and I was no closer to being able to enter what I still thought must be the immensely appealing Hobbema world.
That night and sporadically for succeeding nights my dreams took me to those 17th century woods in the Dutch lowlands – those woods that in dreams were so very dark, so deadly dangerous, woods in which I became lost - woods that I knew now once existed in lowland Holland, but now for me were morphed with the dark high altitude woods of my often dangerous childhood in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.That place that in memory, as memory was meant to be in my family, was supposed to the mold for perfect summer days.
I kept returning now to the Hobbema’s because they had something I had to see – something that took me to dark places that lay deep in my heart and mind, so deep down they had nearly been forgotten, and now I was back there – pictures on the wall of museums taking me back. For the darkness and the danger were so clearly there now. And it was so freeing now that I could see it. Matisse’s Piano Lesson did this for me too – that woman hovering above the imprisoned child at the piano, whose child’s glance nonetheless goes to a smooth bronze woman, one of Matisse’s own small sculptures playing a role in his painting – the naked bronze girl as warm as the hovering woman is cold.
And then I hunted up the Arshile Gorky’s that had deadly sexuality – especially his non-representational paintings of exposed thorns and razor sharp edges, genital shapes of domination that are a diagram into the necessity for suicide – far more so than his early painting in the Whitney of his mother in Turkish-held Armenia, shown close to when she died of starvation in the genocide time.
Then I was drawing and painting myself, studying around the clock, and I tried to do a black, threatening lizard-like figure of what I thought I would find more threatening than anything else – a scaly black armor-wearing stranger who would stop me and torture me. But this lizard figure morphed into an enigmatic woman with a sweet but also strong face and luscious bare shoulders, the woman appearing from some strange place as I painted, appearing standing high above a perhaps mythical landscape that I found myself portraying, a landscape I was not aware I had ever seen before, just as I was not aware there was such a smooth bare woman who would, like a lizard, appear when I felt under threat. And she was standing, so smooth and bare, high above this unending landscape of jagged mountains and deep gorges with zigzagging waters rushing through.
This was when I was not writing because my writing had become so predictable, if saleable, that it was of no use to me and, I knew, would be of no use to anyone else. In my writing in the time when I decided to stop writing,the scaly stranger would have been set in place so there could be no surprises - like something dead.
But then I began to wonder what might happen in writing if I just let what was here appear, let the scenes and the connections come, get out of the way of my art in writing as I was doing in visual realms.
But at this time I thought of all literary things with distaste – control things that were in the world of rigor and order and forced conclusions, so rarely in realms of art. In this time when life had never been better, so soon after life had seemed to be winding down – this time now. I was in and out of museums and galleries and then painting classes and life drawing sessions from the dawn to the middle of the night – coming and going to and from my one-bedroom apartment with a view over rooftops in the south, this apartment that I had turned into a studio, wide shelves added for art materials, everything removed from the walls except my drawings and paintings, my perspective studies and my color wheels, my anatomical diagrams and soft flesh pastels, the main bed removed to leave space for easels and armatures and plaster casts of humans or their bones or muscles, and a drafting table.
I would wake up at dawn on a daybed and know what was around me. But also know how the landscape of my life had changed. How seemingly safe people in my personal landscapes past and present and future had been revealed as betrayers, even molesters. How neo-Victorian family members – intelligent, sometimes honored, cautiously Ivy League – family members who had seemed at worst comic in their stuffiness had turned into people who now seemed like characters in horror stories. Despite their veneer, they had left in their wake molestation and addiction and hopeless depression, and the often violent early deaths of sons and daughters.
In the early morning I would lie on the day bed for a time in a suspended state, as if there has just been a major death and as if, if I kept my eyes closed, I could pretend it had not happened yet.
Lying on the daybed in what was now my crowded studio, my eyes shut, remembering, then, other paintings visited and revisited for the hope they gave me. Matisse’s harsh but still connected piano lesson – Deibenkorn’s capturing of life-giving color, Joan Mitchell's exuberance, Manet's reality, and Daubigny, among the painters new to me - his use of green in river bank scenes causing me to breathe deeply with happiness, and remember something wonderful this time that I knew once and had nearly forgotten, and had not, in my professional writing life, had words for. Knowing now that this was what I wanted,both the light and the blackness. This I should write about, and to get to the light I had to go through those woods again.
I stood in front of one of the Met’s Hobbema’s while an escorted group came through and they were being told about how every leaf on the trees in Hobbema’s 17th century forest looked real and brought up a gentle summer day – this scene in very dark woods that I very gradually, realized were not at all safe and gentle and summery. I found myself complaining to myself about myself – how could I, a man so attuned to nature, I asked myself, how could I not respond to this moving evocation of a placid summer day in a clearing in gentle summery woods?
Right behind the Hobbema there was a door leading to a high balcony surrounding a bright and airy courtyard, many stories high and lit with real light from a sweeping skylight and a wall of glass that brought in the park from outside. A place with benches upon which to sit and contemplate in the middle of this airy courtyard what seemed to me light-hearted bits and pieces of popular art – an actual Greek revival bank façade from somewhere in the Middle West, colorful if rather nice-nice works in Tiffany glass, and an amusing carved church pulpit with circular steps and on the top an extremely tight-ass angel heralding some version of something with a trumpet. In this imaginative courtyard, which felt like a holiday place, I felt better. But then I went up on the balcony again and back in that door to old Dutch paintings, and I stood again looking at the summer day woods scenes, and I was no closer to being able to enter what I still thought must be the immensely appealing Hobbema world.
That night and sporadically for succeeding nights my dreams took me to those 17th century woods in the Dutch lowlands – those woods that in dreams were so very dark, so deadly dangerous, woods in which I became lost - woods that I knew now once existed in lowland Holland, but now for me were morphed with the dark high altitude woods of my often dangerous childhood in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.That place that in memory, as memory was meant to be in my family, was supposed to the mold for perfect summer days.
I kept returning now to the Hobbema’s because they had something I had to see – something that took me to dark places that lay deep in my heart and mind, so deep down they had nearly been forgotten, and now I was back there – pictures on the wall of museums taking me back. For the darkness and the danger were so clearly there now. And it was so freeing now that I could see it. Matisse’s Piano Lesson did this for me too – that woman hovering above the imprisoned child at the piano, whose child’s glance nonetheless goes to a smooth bronze woman, one of Matisse’s own small sculptures playing a role in his painting – the naked bronze girl as warm as the hovering woman is cold.
And then I hunted up the Arshile Gorky’s that had deadly sexuality – especially his non-representational paintings of exposed thorns and razor sharp edges, genital shapes of domination that are a diagram into the necessity for suicide – far more so than his early painting in the Whitney of his mother in Turkish-held Armenia, shown close to when she died of starvation in the genocide time.
Then I was drawing and painting myself, studying around the clock, and I tried to do a black, threatening lizard-like figure of what I thought I would find more threatening than anything else – a scaly black armor-wearing stranger who would stop me and torture me. But this lizard figure morphed into an enigmatic woman with a sweet but also strong face and luscious bare shoulders, the woman appearing from some strange place as I painted, appearing standing high above a perhaps mythical landscape that I found myself portraying, a landscape I was not aware I had ever seen before, just as I was not aware there was such a smooth bare woman who would, like a lizard, appear when I felt under threat. And she was standing, so smooth and bare, high above this unending landscape of jagged mountains and deep gorges with zigzagging waters rushing through.
This was when I was not writing because my writing had become so predictable, if saleable, that it was of no use to me and, I knew, would be of no use to anyone else. In my writing in the time when I decided to stop writing,the scaly stranger would have been set in place so there could be no surprises - like something dead.
But then I began to wonder what might happen in writing if I just let what was here appear, let the scenes and the connections come, get out of the way of my art in writing as I was doing in visual realms.
But at this time I thought of all literary things with distaste – control things that were in the world of rigor and order and forced conclusions, so rarely in realms of art. In this time when life had never been better, so soon after life had seemed to be winding down – this time now. I was in and out of museums and galleries and then painting classes and life drawing sessions from the dawn to the middle of the night – coming and going to and from my one-bedroom apartment with a view over rooftops in the south, this apartment that I had turned into a studio, wide shelves added for art materials, everything removed from the walls except my drawings and paintings, my perspective studies and my color wheels, my anatomical diagrams and soft flesh pastels, the main bed removed to leave space for easels and armatures and plaster casts of humans or their bones or muscles, and a drafting table.
I would wake up at dawn on a daybed and know what was around me. But also know how the landscape of my life had changed. How seemingly safe people in my personal landscapes past and present and future had been revealed as betrayers, even molesters. How neo-Victorian family members – intelligent, sometimes honored, cautiously Ivy League – family members who had seemed at worst comic in their stuffiness had turned into people who now seemed like characters in horror stories. Despite their veneer, they had left in their wake molestation and addiction and hopeless depression, and the often violent early deaths of sons and daughters.
In the early morning I would lie on the day bed for a time in a suspended state, as if there has just been a major death and as if, if I kept my eyes closed, I could pretend it had not happened yet.
Lying on the daybed in what was now my crowded studio, my eyes shut, remembering, then, other paintings visited and revisited for the hope they gave me. Matisse’s harsh but still connected piano lesson – Deibenkorn’s capturing of life-giving color, Joan Mitchell's exuberance, Manet's reality, and Daubigny, among the painters new to me - his use of green in river bank scenes causing me to breathe deeply with happiness, and remember something wonderful this time that I knew once and had nearly forgotten, and had not, in my professional writing life, had words for. Knowing now that this was what I wanted,both the light and the blackness. This I should write about, and to get to the light I had to go through those woods again.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
WRITTEN WORD 12 - Insomnia
I toss around. I get up, have a fake cheese snack, fake cheese so I will not die with clogged arteries, and then I try again. Back in bed I look at the old clock radio whose tape player has not worked for years. When I went to bed it was midnight, and I have to be up at eight so there had been time for a full nights sleep. But now it is 3, and then 4, and I see daylight creeping in from behind the shades. Almost no time left, and I have a lot to do in this day ahead. Better take a pill – though it might be even better to have a cigarette.
I toss and I turn, kind of drugged up now, and it would really be much better if I can smoke. I haven’t had a cigarette in over 20 years. But when I had my last one it was at the end of that day’s regular three packs. So who knows when the lung cancer will strike.
That past comes in. A cigarette on the edge of the desk. All desk edges had cigarette burns. A cigarette right after making love. “Fucking” was the word even way back when it first became relevant to me, a word back then, and sometimes now, more thought and acted upon than spoken. Leaning over to some night table somewhere and finding the cigarettes. Probably putting two in my mouth at the same time so that there will be one to pass on to the girl, in the style of Humphrey Bogart, who must have had an incredibly long list of women fucked. I am not getting any closer to sleep. Maybe I can try what I used to do for sleep when I was in an upper bunk at Ft. Benning in the silly peacetime army. I would think in chronological order of every girl I had ever fucked – which had been a very short list until the months just passed in Indianapolis at the time the Indiana Legislature was meeting. A sweet red-headed whore named Cindy in a flea bag hotel. And then the list got longer just before I was drafted, for I spent those last weeks in Batista’s Cuba. But the list is still short enough so that it needs women almost fucked, and then women I was determined to fuck one day, especially women whom I had not met yet, women in my imagination. But this is not helping at all. Could it really have put me to sleep at Ft. Benning fifty years ago? Of course I am now beside my beautiful wife whom and love and is sleeping peacefully – not in a bunk in the barracks.
I toss and I turn. There are still so many loose ends in my life, going back into the deep past. Was I or was I not molested as a child? Does Aunt Betsy count? Three months behind on the mortgage. Isn’t it time I made money from writing again? Writing is probably all over for me. And the old Volkswagen Golf, its left front tire has a not so slow leak, and there is a strange screeching sound that starts when I pull out of the driveway and does not stop for five minutes, and the whole car shakes and rattles when the speedometer passes 50. And my twin brother, with whom I have been through so much since childhood, my brother the good twin, not so much fun as me the bad twin, and really quite dangerous – the CIA and an even worse Defense Department agency – in Southeast Asia in two periods when I was there on the other side. And up well into middle age, well after I became published, he was still sending me ads from a Washington paper for door-to-door salesman jobs or entry level jobs in grim business writing. He has been sending me classified ads like this for thirty years. And what if it should turn out he was right about me all along. And an ear-nose-throat doctor has just told me that the ringing in my ears is there because something is “asymmetrical,” which calls for an MRI, and I know what that means.
I used to be able to lie in bed and my memory was so good I could put together whatever it was I was doing on any day in the year if I could figure out where the week started.
I groan at the thought of every book or magazine article or pamphlet or web article about how to overcome insomnia. Very light exercise before sleep. Use the bed only for sleeping! Tighten your head muscles, then neck, then shoulders, down to the tips of your toes. Take a hot bath. Have a snack, but not too much. Rid your life of caffeine. Go to bed at exactly the same time every night. Keep the window open. Always keep it shut. Use something from nature – valerian or melatonin or L-tryptophan or a homeopathic concoction. And nothing works. Nothing.
Everything in life open ended. Cathy, whom I loved, then Vannie, whom I loved, then Judy, whom I loved, then Bonnie, whom I loved, and my first wives, Anne and Brenda, loved them too, and then more of the might-have beens – Tina, the girl with net stockings, the pretty freedom fighter in Nicaragua, and on and on and then all the way back to earliest times, to Sandie, and most of all to Kitty. I could stay up all night dreaming of Kitty in that time when I was 15 and it looked for the first time that life would work out.
I wonder now if anyone but me has noticed that those giveaway pamphlets about how to sleep that you sometimes see in doctors officers are produced by drug companies that sell sleeping pills. Certainly everyone has noticed that a good percentage of the anti-smoking TV ads are produced by Phillip Morris, a company whose life depends upon people being addicted young to nicotine, and that the most visible ads for moderate drinking come from Budweiser.
I am feeling coldly logical now. Something is falling into place that should go into the book on writing I am writing. It goes like this: If the pill companies have an interest in promoting insomnia, and the cigarette companies in seeing that nicotine addiction flourishes, and Budweiser needs binge drinking for its bottom line, what about the hidden motives of the owners of writer’s magazines and publishers of how-to-write books who say all writers should sit for three hours a day in front of computer screens even when the screens are blank? Or that everything will be fine once you learn to use hooks and epiphanies and closures in all your stories.
I toss and I turn, trying one side and then the other. In my mind I see steel shelves at Barnes & Noble holding books with advice on how to write and how to overcome writer’s block. They must weigh a ton. You could get killed if they fell on you.
Monday, October 29, 2007
WRITTEN WORD 11 - Without a Family
For a time I had gotten away with writing without context. I of course ignored advise that I use my experiences from my childhood. When I wrote a novel that got published – that event that nearly all who write think will change their lives forever – I let my characters spring into life as if born as adults.
The novel had three main characters – the hero, his friend, and his girlfriend, and many side characters, many of them beautiful women since the novel was set in late sixties Bangkok, in a time of wild erotic happenings and cloak and dagger things, and constant assassinations - so much going on that neither my new agent nor the editor who accepted the book for publication seemed to notice that no one in it had had a childhood. The main character was me, living by my wits. The girlfriend was Marcy, an American who had dropped out of an Antioch Colete work-study program in Tokyo to work in a night club and had come to Bangkok with a CIA man who wanted me dead. Actually my twin brother was in Bangkok then too, working for a Defense Department agency geared to helping Southeast Asian armies work over their countries’ peasants. I was clearly on the other side, which made me and my brother to a considerable extent enemies – not unlike how it had been when we were children He didn’t appear in the novel, neither as child nor man, though so many of the people I knew in Bangkok had cameos. And I kept things moving so fast that neither the agent the nor the editor noticed that no one in the book could have had a childhood since no one in the book had a family.
I got away with this once, but soon afterwards – while living in a claustrophobic Middle Eastern place – I could not do it again. I had signed a contract, and took more advance money, to do another novel, using the same agent and with the same editor. It seemed to me a fitting sequel to the last book, but the opening chapters were sent back by the agent with angry letter. He did not question that the writing was mine, but he just could not believe the life I was portraying. It was as if I had made a clumsy attempt to make up an implausible story. Although this was a novel, although this was fiction, it still had to be more believable than what he had seen. The background of my main character – who happened to be in his mid thirties like me then, and who had done the same things I had done – was so unconvincing, he said, that the story was clearly based on nothing real.
And then the agent said he wondered why in the narration there was nothing at all about where the character had come from, nothing about his childhood, family or background. I did not think then that this was a significant question, though I did remember what Berta had said in Manila about my Florida childhood stories. Now, it seemed, the agent and editor were as off-base as Berta.
Actually this lack of a family of origin was the only part of that novel-in-progress not based on fact. It was only later I realized that the manuscript could not possibly have rung true to the agent, for in life there can no such gap. And maybe that was why the rest of the story seemed artificial to him too.
But where was the public, I asked myself, for anything so uninteresting as my family?
It was much later that it became clear to me that at that time I had not been writing so much because of what I needed to say as because I wanted to keep on having work published. I needed to be A Writer. Strange, I had thought, that this agent, who enjoyed a great deal of success with works that were commercial, should think I was getting it wrong.
The character in my book whom the agent said was not believable, the one who seemingly had sprung to life fully grown, had traveled to the heart of Borneo on the Kapuas River in a time of ritual cannibalism. He had been in insurrections in Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Greece and Malaysia, even though he was not a soldier and not really a war correspondent and did not work for any intelligence service. He had somehow crossed Africa alone from Khartoum to Fort Lamy, traversing a thousand-mile stretch for which maps showed small villages but no roads. Most recently, although he had a poor sense of direction, he had flown small planes for recreation in areas – Lebanon, Cyprus – where you might encounter anti-aircraft artillery if you went a few moments off course. At various times he had already, before coming to the Middle East phase, lived in Slovenia, Greece, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines – as well as the, to him, equally foreign Indiana and Georgia. And, after leaving a boozy, gray, socially correct college, he had gone through a rapid career in wire service journalism, then put in nominal Army time as a draftee while continuing as a newsman, and then gone on to independent adventure. And this was only the start of what had happened – jail in Mississippi in the Civil Rights time, for example, and an unexplained, even to himself, period moving between the Canary Islands and Malta
These were matters already dealt with in the opening chapters of that autobiographical novel I was writing. But there were so many other matters that were not in it.
Without a family, the character in the book again could not have a twin brother, like the author’s twin brother, who was in the C.I.A. and worse. He could not have a first cousin, maybe it was two or even three first cousins, who, like the author’s cousins, had killed themselves. Nor did he, like the author, have a cousin who had been an armed kidnapper, nor a cousin who was in and out of battered women's shelters and had been fucked and beaten by her brother from the age of 7 until she was 16. He did not have a father who as a child had been left with governesses at Christmas while his parents toured Europe. And he did not have a mother who had spent a crucial part of childhood in courtrooms where her father was on trial for political shenanigans. And he had not been raised being told he was slow and stupid. And, moreover, without a family there were no family drug and alcohol problems.
And my character had not spent the summers of his formative years in grandiose, quite beautiful and intensely formal mountain houses where most in these houses, isolated from other human contact, spoke with fake British accents. And he did not have a father who published light personal experience books about big happy families of regular people, nor a grandfather who wrote well-received sexless novels – writing that was so important that no others in the family, it was understood, need ever write anything themselves.
The novel had three main characters – the hero, his friend, and his girlfriend, and many side characters, many of them beautiful women since the novel was set in late sixties Bangkok, in a time of wild erotic happenings and cloak and dagger things, and constant assassinations - so much going on that neither my new agent nor the editor who accepted the book for publication seemed to notice that no one in it had had a childhood. The main character was me, living by my wits. The girlfriend was Marcy, an American who had dropped out of an Antioch Colete work-study program in Tokyo to work in a night club and had come to Bangkok with a CIA man who wanted me dead. Actually my twin brother was in Bangkok then too, working for a Defense Department agency geared to helping Southeast Asian armies work over their countries’ peasants. I was clearly on the other side, which made me and my brother to a considerable extent enemies – not unlike how it had been when we were children He didn’t appear in the novel, neither as child nor man, though so many of the people I knew in Bangkok had cameos. And I kept things moving so fast that neither the agent the nor the editor noticed that no one in the book could have had a childhood since no one in the book had a family.
I got away with this once, but soon afterwards – while living in a claustrophobic Middle Eastern place – I could not do it again. I had signed a contract, and took more advance money, to do another novel, using the same agent and with the same editor. It seemed to me a fitting sequel to the last book, but the opening chapters were sent back by the agent with angry letter. He did not question that the writing was mine, but he just could not believe the life I was portraying. It was as if I had made a clumsy attempt to make up an implausible story. Although this was a novel, although this was fiction, it still had to be more believable than what he had seen. The background of my main character – who happened to be in his mid thirties like me then, and who had done the same things I had done – was so unconvincing, he said, that the story was clearly based on nothing real.
And then the agent said he wondered why in the narration there was nothing at all about where the character had come from, nothing about his childhood, family or background. I did not think then that this was a significant question, though I did remember what Berta had said in Manila about my Florida childhood stories. Now, it seemed, the agent and editor were as off-base as Berta.
Actually this lack of a family of origin was the only part of that novel-in-progress not based on fact. It was only later I realized that the manuscript could not possibly have rung true to the agent, for in life there can no such gap. And maybe that was why the rest of the story seemed artificial to him too.
But where was the public, I asked myself, for anything so uninteresting as my family?
It was much later that it became clear to me that at that time I had not been writing so much because of what I needed to say as because I wanted to keep on having work published. I needed to be A Writer. Strange, I had thought, that this agent, who enjoyed a great deal of success with works that were commercial, should think I was getting it wrong.
The character in my book whom the agent said was not believable, the one who seemingly had sprung to life fully grown, had traveled to the heart of Borneo on the Kapuas River in a time of ritual cannibalism. He had been in insurrections in Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Greece and Malaysia, even though he was not a soldier and not really a war correspondent and did not work for any intelligence service. He had somehow crossed Africa alone from Khartoum to Fort Lamy, traversing a thousand-mile stretch for which maps showed small villages but no roads. Most recently, although he had a poor sense of direction, he had flown small planes for recreation in areas – Lebanon, Cyprus – where you might encounter anti-aircraft artillery if you went a few moments off course. At various times he had already, before coming to the Middle East phase, lived in Slovenia, Greece, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore and the Philippines – as well as the, to him, equally foreign Indiana and Georgia. And, after leaving a boozy, gray, socially correct college, he had gone through a rapid career in wire service journalism, then put in nominal Army time as a draftee while continuing as a newsman, and then gone on to independent adventure. And this was only the start of what had happened – jail in Mississippi in the Civil Rights time, for example, and an unexplained, even to himself, period moving between the Canary Islands and Malta
These were matters already dealt with in the opening chapters of that autobiographical novel I was writing. But there were so many other matters that were not in it.
Without a family, the character in the book again could not have a twin brother, like the author’s twin brother, who was in the C.I.A. and worse. He could not have a first cousin, maybe it was two or even three first cousins, who, like the author’s cousins, had killed themselves. Nor did he, like the author, have a cousin who had been an armed kidnapper, nor a cousin who was in and out of battered women's shelters and had been fucked and beaten by her brother from the age of 7 until she was 16. He did not have a father who as a child had been left with governesses at Christmas while his parents toured Europe. And he did not have a mother who had spent a crucial part of childhood in courtrooms where her father was on trial for political shenanigans. And he had not been raised being told he was slow and stupid. And, moreover, without a family there were no family drug and alcohol problems.
And my character had not spent the summers of his formative years in grandiose, quite beautiful and intensely formal mountain houses where most in these houses, isolated from other human contact, spoke with fake British accents. And he did not have a father who published light personal experience books about big happy families of regular people, nor a grandfather who wrote well-received sexless novels – writing that was so important that no others in the family, it was understood, need ever write anything themselves.
Friday, October 26, 2007
THE WORST THING
The one consolation when I did that final travel writing project more than 20 years ago was that there are even worse things that people do and call themselves writers. Most business “writing” falls in this category, for reimbursement goes well beyond the free accommodations given to travel writers in exchange for lying. In most, if not all, business writing you are being paid directly or indirectly to lie to promote clients who do harm.
The next step down is ghost-writing – which is a way out for people scared to death of their own stories.
And one step below reducing yourself to another person’s ghost is the pretentious falsification of what is real in the name of fiction.
At the bottom is falsification of your own story.
I speak not just as an observer. I speak with the authority only a once active alcoholic has when speaking of alcoholism.
The next step down is ghost-writing – which is a way out for people scared to death of their own stories.
And one step below reducing yourself to another person’s ghost is the pretentious falsification of what is real in the name of fiction.
At the bottom is falsification of your own story.
I speak not just as an observer. I speak with the authority only a once active alcoholic has when speaking of alcoholism.
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