6.8 Monk Plays Oceanside

8 June 2020. Monk Plays Oceanside.

The first time around with this--maybe 1997—much more playful. The sly thrill of just being able to conjoin the two—Monk and the Beachside Stadium, or thereabouts. Which never happened, of course—that corrosion of salt air. Concrete bleachers and rusting metal. But I remembered it again today, needing something much less distinct, something full of wandering, if only in the line.

I should never have let it go—the painting, that is—like letting go a part of myself. Maybe because it was connected with Peter—the loss, regret. But also a kind of honesty, which increases over time. Vision of him standing by the barbecue, when C’s family visited, looking up and smiling—that Peter smile. She has it in a special frame, needs a little repair. He was tending steaks—a venerable task—you could see he enjoyed it. Not just the cooking, but the being part of things…

Monk’s face as he plays, eyes rolled upwards into his head—drunken but not from alcohol. That inner state he taught us, but with flat thumbs and a defiant smash. Hard to understand, from such a distance, what that meant—that absolutely full-bodied intensity, foot pumping the pedals, on and off the floor, almost leaping…

Set here against the Buena Vista lagoon, blurring towards the ocean. Late afternoon, sometime in the fall. That smokey light, with whatever’s left of the sun half-disappearing into mist. Very still. Tells you you’re home.

6.7 Taking the Knee

7 June 2020. Taking the Knee.

I resist the phrase--the way the culture so easily recapitulates itself for commercial purpose (in this case the media)--but the act itself is too important--and shows in the image, no matter what we call it. And in any case, major league football is big-time business, so who could expect otherwise? However, everyone in this line-up is doubly valent--each player a part of the group--that's implicit--and at the same time an individual. That is, you see the meaning of this moment expressed on their faces--in their postures as well. For each one of them...

Can we read this? What's seen on each face? And how does someone like me (a white boy) show it? I think of Winslow Homer--his indelible painting, Gulf Stream--with the figure of the Black Man lying stretched across the deck of a de-masted sailboat--the sea roiled with sharks (there's even some red in the water) and far in the distance, a sailing ship that will almost certainly never spot him. Doomed. But still, Homer treats the man's face with dignity--even if there's a great deal of anger in his resolve. A lost sailor? A shipwreck? An escaped slave? The date of the painting is 1899, so we're 30 years after the Civil War--and who knows how literally we should take this thought--but viewed as "unrecognized guilt" (thank you, Charles)--at least on Homer's part-- we have a point of entry...

How different with the faces of the football players. Their resolve shows not so much anger as hope--in the same way The Star Spangled Banner can almost inevitably bring out something of this feeling--the way the heart lifts at its first strains, even when we know better...

And why not-- they should  have hope--they've been taught to win... Will teach us how to win, too...

6.4 Nymph and Shepherd

4 June 2020. Nymph and Shepherd.

Precisely in that interval between art and life, and just yesterday--I could hardly believe I was witness--a young deer, over by the back fence, up on her hind legs, reaching for new leaves on the ivy. An image I'd seen so many times over the years--but always in a painting, Titian's Nymph and Shepherd. A very late work--one of those rough, open-ended canvasses--among my very favorites--I'd found it in a catalogue picked up at one of the used bookstores in downtown Oakland, nearby the old studio--so that would have been in the early 1980's. Reproduced in black and white, from an obscure picture gallery somewhere in Hungary. At least that's how I remember it.

Which is how it was then--knowledge of such things being hard to come by. Inadvertent. Happenstance.  Even the museum obscure. Whereas today images of paintings are so readily available--there's even a Wikipedia article on this one, listed as being in the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm Collection, now in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum, with an accurate color reproduction showing all of Titian's subtle warm-cool tonalities.

When I first found the painting, even in black and white, I already sensed it was crucial. Came at the time I was looking at a lot of Titian--as a kind of guide-- the way he let the painting itself precede the drawing--the massing of form rather than the Florentine outline. That Venitian sensibility--color over linear edge. (Which may seem funny, today, since I've allowed myself to return so much to line in these drawings--but the malerische is in there too--hidden away in all the erasures and pauses...you can see this especially when they're enlarged, becoming a kind of autobiography.)

The meaning of Titian's painting became apparent as well--or at least the way I understood it. Two young figures, shepherd and nymph, reclining in the foreground, music, love--while close behind,  buttressed on a slope, a broken tree. Just one living branch--and reaching up to seize it, the figure of a deer. (I'd say young stag from the look of his male appurtenances.) I would have been in my mid-thirties then, but I knew Titian was speaking to me--clearly he'd painted himself here, reaching up for that last branch. (He'd have been in his eighties at the time--this was painted a year or two before he died.)  I found the arc of time in  the painting astounding--and Titian's vigor--how he saw himself as a painter, even at the end...

_____

Yesterday's deer was astounding, too--I'd seen them reach of for plumb branches before, of course, deer will do this--but yesterday's pose was exactly the same as in  the painting. And just after I'd been talking with a friend about the meaning of ultimate things--and the phrase choose life. The story of the midwives again, the vigor of the young Israelite mothers. It's a matter of what one choses to focus on, always, in the balance--an image of opening...

6.2 Soldiers and Police

2 June 2020. Soldiers and Police.

And where are the images now? Two days, and the time of quiet has vanished. Was it real to begin with? That is, founded? An artificial respite, occasioned by the virus--for the first two months, everyone seemed to agree. But then a modern impatience set in. "They're all sitting together, on blankets, no one has masks," C told me, describing the park at the top of Orpheus on a recent evening. "I left..."

I agreed, of course--but then we can't leave the entire century. Even as we carry all centuries past, each one with its retelling. Goya's Third of May still holds. The animation comes through even in a sketch--the diagonals, of course--but they're the result, not the cause. Of a time lived, rather. On the side opposite, Giorgione--the watchman figure in The Tempest--replacing a woman's figure prior. That the origin of a militia could be maternal? No urgency in the pose, though. A watchman of dreams...

The middle section? Well, maybe they haven't told me their story yet. Whose doing? Who knows the story, that is? Thinking about the Mary Frank on the cover of a recent NYRB--saw it again this morning. An African figure leaping across the gap between two rocks. She's drawn him in silhouette--evocative, always--and the rocks are real, that is, they're fragments of photographs. She made this just last year--at 87...

Hope still...

_____

Note: Found the Mary Frank image on DC Moore Gallery site. It's a detail from a collage painting, As You Can See,  made in 2018-19. And the rocks are actual rock--not fragments of photographs. Oil, acrylic, graphite, paper and stone on board, 49-1/4 x  96 inches.

5.31 Young Racoon

31 May 2020. Young Racoon.

A visitor just now, and I'm so used to seeing Goose, the neighbor cat--that this came as a surprise. The same coloring, yes, but then the lift to the shoulders as he made his way through the high grass--not domestic. You know right away. A certain roughness--Chris Alexander's phrase for one of the necessary elements in a good design--a good anything, really--the roughness corresponding to something alive, something not completely controlled. Yes, we give in to the gods--whatever they may demand...

Evenings here of old--when a string of them would parade into the kitchen--the first alert little head peering over the top of the stairs coming up from the back door--two dark eyes set in a black mask, The lady of the house would welcome them, after a fashion, of course. I once had to scoot out a whole family of who were aiming to occupying the downstairs room. Babies included...

But most memorable of all were the visits by Rashi and Tosfos. Talmudic scholars, both--even if they were also in the possum family. Their favorite place being underneath the back side of the couch. That took some doing on my part--a long bamboo pole--just enough to prod them gently into action. I don't know who was most startled--after all they could hear me coming--but a wild living creature like that--in the living room--what can you say?

_____

Gary Snyder--in his excellent book, The Practice of the Wild, describes how his family would open their Yuba River cabin for one month of the year to all creatures who wished to visit. Indoor deer, for example--or a stream of fire ants making their diagonal across the wooden floor. However, even the Snyders hedged their bets--flour and staples were secured in a strong trunk--and I'm not sure what they did about bear...

_____

That's the shelf-like bracket mushroom there behind--growing out from the trunk of the mimosa tree. It's gotten quite large now--just the right size for a raccoon umbrella...

5.30 Rastaman

30 May 2020. Rastaman.

People would say elders, but that's sentimentalizing, and when you look at these faces, there's something more essential going on. Yes, some are old enough to remember even Leonard Howell--the Rasta founder--maybe not quite to the beginning, in the '1930's, but from the late 1950's, say, when Pinnacle (the Rastafari redoubt in the hills above Spanish Town) was intact--and lived through it's destruction, with the exodus to the slums of Kingston (Back O'Wall, the Dungle, Trenchtown).  Materially, a time of great privation--and the lives of most of the Rastas then were extremely poor--but also characterized by elements of real hope--the mission to Africa in 1961, the dream of repatriation, then Jamaican Independence in 1962--and the indelible experience of Haile Selassie's visit to the island on April 21, 1966.--thereafter known as Grounation Day. And the music emerging in parallel--Ska, Rock Steady, Reggae, and the way it reached an audience far beyond Jamaica... The world of Roots Reggae--the Skatalites, Burning Spear, the Ethiopians, and of course Bob Marley--the spirit of that music reflects this great opening...

But Jamaica's political situation turned increasingly corrosive, with nonstop gang violence egged on by both of the primary political parties (the Rastafari were neutral, but everyone was drawn in, regardless.) And then the emergence of Jamaica's drug culture, extremely violent--the trade soon enough exported to the United States--so that the world of Roots Reggae was replaced by that of Dancehall--also reflective of its time. Louche, flashy, dangerous.To the degree (as described by writer Colin Grant) that when Bunny Wailer appeared on a Kingston festival stage in 1990, he was met with a hail of bottles and stones. The crowd didn't want what him. Hard to fathom, less than ten years after Bob Marley's death--but not if one follows all the changes...

So, these faces, still from the time before--as was much of Rasta culture, I'm guessing. And then their age as well--so that the natural arc of life can be seen there too. Giving them (at least to my eye) not so much an antiquarian feel as the mein of dignified survivors. The world that nurtured them has disappeared (including the death of Haile Selassie--Jah Rastafari--however one interprets it.)
_____

A parallel: remembering my father's face on the 26th of December, 1991--sitting on the living room couch in Oceanside. He would have been 87. The television  was on, and as we watched, the Soviet flag was being lowered, in Moscow, for the very last time. The symbolic end to another era--the one he himself had lived through (having fought on the Bolshevik side in the Russian Civil War). I wondered mightily at the time what it meant for him to see this--his feelings, after those many years of commitment and hope. But as carefully as I looked at his profile, and as much as I wanted to know, I couldn't tell...

5.29 Met Robert

29 May 2020. Met Robert.

A painting from Robert arrived this morning. Landscape above, with trees reflected in water--a slow river, late fall, or maybe the very end of winter, with snow in patches—the colors ochre and sienna, merging into darkness on either side--blasted almost, as of the image were appearing in a flash of light, the feelings contradictory. Below, a long row of windows and doorways, in Warsaw--or maybe one of the very old neighborhoods in Amsterdam--many of them boarded up. War traces visible on the walls, stone work and exposed brick. He's run  them all together, side by side, so that their continuity also expresses time. And from one dark opening, painted en grisaille, a woman's face. Robert's note above tells me the street is Ul. Grzybowska 29--still standing then, in the Ghetto, from a photo he made in 1968--but that the figure is the sister of his father, Webster-von Parera. Between the two a band of black with a phrase painted in Yiddish script: gedenk in zey un frey zich mitn lebn. To think of you and free you with life...

Did I ever know her name before? The van Parera is Portuguese. Jewish, in all probability--like one of the family names inscribed on the wall of the wintershul in the 'Snoga, Amsterdam’s old Portuguese synagogue.  Robert would sometimes tell me that his father had Portuguese roots, but the name itself now illuminates this connection.

My dear friend. We first knew each other in Warsaw, and all these traces fit together, for both of us-- lived and understood. Which of course he knows, too, even if it's now another 30 years we haven't seen each other.

I first drew his more dramatic self, with deep set eyes, looking out from the side. But the melodrama wasn't right, so I reworked it to show him in a more pensive mode, spectacles on his nose, thinning hair, thoughtful, a little askew. Or is it just the drawing? I like to think of him this way, regardless--like one of the beautiful characters in a Wim Wenders film, always close, almost reachable...

_____

Note: Quite fortuitous (more than that, really) that I'd done the Ulica Glogera drawing just yesterday--and then Robert's painting arrives this morning. Together with what he writes. Our circles have always been joined this way...

5.28 Ulica Glogera

28 May 2020. Ulica Glogera.

Urgent need to begin again. Desperate even, after two days solid dealing with outside matters (contractors, the city, the beautiful oak tree in back--all vis a vis my very decent neighbors, but still, but still..). All resolved this morning--quite amazing, really--and I sat down to begin a drawing. But the pull of the everyday kept interceding...

So, there I am (above) reaching out again--is it for a place to start (as in today) or for all time? Always the sense that somehow I intend both. You can't hold your arms like this without invoking duration. Maybe it's because a friend queried me recently about final things, and of course I turned once more to the story of Jewish midwives in Egypt, the word hayot, which I always think of as meaning alive. (It's a one-time occurrence--hapax legomenon--so meaning depends on context.) Vigorous, perhaps. Full of vitality. A matter of focus--where one wants to look...

Then the figure with suitcase appeared. From Poland, inevitably, which means it's also me. Ulica Glogera, one of the streets I lived on in Warsaw--in Ochota, an old neighborhood--and a quick look shows that there are views even today that appear much the same...

I wasn't really thinking about this--the point being to get a drawing going, the flow of association matching the movement of the lines, the erasures, which are what tell me, finally, what the drawing means, (towhee, always)--but it's a beautiful early summer day here-- the warm air,  light breeze--same feeling as when I'd walk out of the apartment in Warsaw fifty years ago--an old structure, pre-War--onto the leafy street, set in an arc, with paving stones, beautifully detailed facades--playing Supraphone Corelli on my Czech phonograph (I still have the album) which felt so appropriate and true...

And now all these times have merged, layered together--but each detail remains distinct, distinct...
_____

Reading late last night--one of David Hinton's new versions of Tu Fu. He's eliminated all the rhetoric, it seems--just the images from the poems, juxtaposed, set in a world of ancient China. His world, I should say, in the way he repeatedly reaches for that connection. But I'll go with him in this. The vision is too valuable---the  cosmos enjoined...even if in part his own...

5.25 Towhees on Tacoma

25 May 2020. Towhees on Tacoma.

But that is one place I notice them in particular--maybe because I'm just getting started with the walk, setting out up towards the hills, and everything's fresh. Towhees go with fresh, I think--or is it just my association? In the morning, for example--I'll see movement outside the window, and sure enough, it's a towhee hopping about at the edge of the pine needles, where the ground opens up towards the terracotta bowl. Some water there from when I filled it this morning--and some luxuriant gray=green moss growing nicely between the bricks.

Started Tu Fu last night, after David Hinton's introduction the night before. Gazing Up at Sacred Peak, "For all this, what is the mountain god like?" How much I'd forgotten--this world he's created. What a pleasure to enter it again. Anticipation...

But can we ever know, really? What's in the mind? The skein of thoughts and connections so elaborate and vast--even when they're at their simplest--so that we trudge along, lightly, on the path...


_____

This world he's created. Three meanings, I see now--first, the mountain god, then the poet, Tu Fu --and then David Hinton, in his translations. I was thinking of Hinton, but the ambiguity serves a purpose...

5.25 Parked Car Chorus

25 May 2020. Parked-Car Chorus.

They’re always there—except that we ignore them, to the degree possible. Late model metal, with polished trim, fresh from the wash. Except that my own model—rather dear—was stolen last fall. From right in front of the house, mid-October, 8pm. Alesia across the way saw it happen, as the five young guys jimmied the door, jumped in, and off they went…

Do songs go with cars? Well, why not? Especially late-model songs—the popular standards that everyone (else) seems to know (various  Beatles, BeeGees, Margaritaville—jovially re-written with alternate lyrics to match the times. (Coronaville, for instance.) It’s a gesture that doesn’t reach me—these mild ironies as a means of self-defense. Presented in good spirits, however, so that you feel like a spoiler to object. Not that I didn’t give it a try--what with Salley Gardens and Goodnight Irene. No takers, though. Is it because the old songs are simply old hat? Or is it their inescapable sincerity? Or maybe it’s the meaning of the words—just not a time for lost love, or death by morphine, or I wish you was never born. Everyone wants the positive.

So, I find myself returning once again, at least subconsciously, to H.G. Wells—The Time Machine, the film version, which I must have seen in about 1960, the year it was made. Ynot would have been 15—just the right age to ponder the Morlochs and the Eloi. Actually, the Morlocks are the only ones I remember—had to look up Eloi. Do the good-guys always lose? What is it about their role that’s not gripping? Not true enough to the full range--including what (Jewish) tradition calls the sitra achra—the Other Side. Those undeniable forces that rain darkness. (I wrote, unavoidable at first...) What Czeslaw Milosz meant by evil. Which is part of the stream…

The songs do touch on this, in their necessary ways. And now am filled with tears. Who’s to deny it? C’s response—That’s why people sing the blues—and she’s right, of course—especially those who recognize that their world is the blues…

And for the rest of us…?

______

On another note. The music itself transcends all this, thank God. Let It Be, for example. Revisited by the chorus as Dr. Fauci, which I have yet to sing. A genuine pleasure to learn and to play. I think Paul McCartney knew this, of course. Love being pretty close to divine. (Mother Mary comes to me…). And now--can’t believe it—I'm trying some Burt Bacarach. Wobbled through the melody on concertina the other night, and C got it right away. What the World Needs Now. Almost makes me tear up, to be honest—not the meaning per se, but the beauty of the way he put the music together—felt it, let it happen. (The words were by Hal David. Did they follow? See below.) So there’s a truth here. Even if discovered only now...

_____

For the record: The car was a 1989 Honda Civic Wagon. I'd bought it for Betsy, who at one point had the front seat turned into a zucchini garden. You'd look in and see all the flourishing plants. And, apropos of the Beatles--how did I ever manage to not  learn them? Peter always said they were the best...  So, why not now?
_____

Note: What the World Needs Now Is Love.  Turns out I have it exactly backwards. Burt Bcharach, in his 2014 autobiography writes that he and Hal David had the main melody and chorus by 1962--but that it another two years for David to come up with the lyrics for "Lord, we don't need another mountain." "Once David worked out the verses, Bacharach said the song essentially "wrote itself" and they finished it in a day or two."  (Wikepedia.)

5.24 Son de la Bahia

24 May 2020, Son de la Bahía.

Approaching the little park at the corner of Peralta, I hear the music first--from Mexico, of course--and almost in the same moment see the two figures on the plaza below, positioned perfectly against the trees. I recognise them, of course---the harp playyer is Nidiaz a neighborhood friend. It's Cinco de Mayo (the balloons around the entryway to Talavera a reminder) and the line of people outside, well-spaced, waiting for pick-up... Some of the women (and their daughters) can't resist dancing...
_____

 And then on Friday evening, again. Nidia seated with with family and friends--all of them her brood, in a way, for she's a mother hen. La reina de las gallinas. With her jarana player alongside, and sitting nearby, on the railing ledge, someone who looks almost familiar --she lowers her bandana a little, and I see that it’s Estefania, from the México class years ago. She's decided that the corporate life as an investment house gopher in NYC isn't what she wanted after all--and now she's back, five years later, playing sones. Nidia gathers people like this--part of her gift.

I used to see her with the ensemble  in full mariachi attire, near the Albany pool. climbing into a van, about to head for a quinceañera. The Mariachi Femenil Orgullo Mexicano. But now it seems that these sones-indigenous folk songs--have taken hold of Nidia's musical imagination. Plus she's learned to play the harp ("My teacher gave me no choice, but now I'm very glad I did...") They come up to the little Peralta park sometimes to hold forth. Such a delight to approach on an evening, after a good walk--the sound first, then always the red flower in Nidia's hair, her forthright smile...and the music, unfailing.

She told me once she's actually from Argentina--with Guarani roots. The Guarani, who survived the strictures of the Spanish Jesuits by applying their musical gifts. How one survives in the Bay Area these days, too, perhaps. She went to Cal in  anthropology (I learned only recently) and it seems she does community arts with the Albany schools--but it's clearly this musica mexicana that she loves best...
_____

Another connection, which became apparent in reworking the drawing. (The left side went though several changes.) One of Titian's big paintings from Ovid--the story of Acteon, the huntsman, who surprises Diana and her maidens in their bower. (Titian shows Acteon pulling back a curtain--a touch of  domestic theater set in the Veneto woods. ) Angered at the surprise, Diana dashes water into the intruder's face--Acteon will soon be turned into a stag...


Maybe a little of a carry-over from C today, tending the koi pond, tired but happyy. The fish like the new streams of bubbles...


_____

The posted name of Nydia's ensemble is Los Soneros de la Bahía.

5.23 Tending the Fishes

23 May 2020. Tending the Fishes.

The call of a single crow—which takes us to a garden far away. Perhaps not quite so far as that of the the Queen of Sheba, on her royal divan, in Yemen it's said, but to the edge of a quiet pool in the great Southland, nonetheless. We’re all gathered, of course, with implements set out for the rescue—the blue pan, just as Melinda would have it, towel and wash, and Jimmy alongside, mildly curious, whereas in the background, la curiosa alongside one of the chickens, looking on, while perched on the green urn, a raven. A friendly raven. And not so far off, on the edge of the planting bed, we see the hoopoe, who's flown in from afar, a letter in hand--from the King no doubt, standing there in the cool of his studio in the North. Is he wearing clothes today? There was a time when not, just his royal nakedness, all exposed, with the visage (even then) of Oscar, his father, and Oscar's smile as well...

We celebrate these happenings. The koi will be cured--ojalá--Jimmy will enjoy a new Petco ball, sweet Odette her long rest there on the slope next to the flowers. Gen is somewhere nearby--the physician's assistant  for today--and Adam as well--but the scene here must needs belong to Cinde Lou, the Queen alone...

5.23 Solano Angel

23 May 2020. Solano Angel.

Looking at the Cimabue last week, the garments he fashioned for his angels—the most prominent element being the haloes of gold—emphasized no doubt in the reproduction, but still central to his meaning. Where in the Giotto, all significance has been transferred to the human plane—the weight of their bodies, clothing. At first you don’t notice the shift—both paintings are magnificent—but it’s here we encounter the beginning of our own era.

I’m not really sure what that means today. We learned in college to see it as an arc towards some kind of deliverance, understanding—where truth and language would see us through. Never mind the history of the last century—two grotesque wars, deemed impossible, but there they were—and now, given the choice between humanity and money, it becomes the same choice again. (“I’d rather die than kill the country.”) Call it the socialism of death—or the tenth crusade, whatever. But reason is not the point here…



So why dwell on it. Better the garments of angels, like this figure, wandering Solano after the rain.  I’d seen the white tarp pulled up over his head, and glimpses of his narrow form—like someone from the Maasai reserve—and then our lives were joined for a moment when he requested a dollar.

Should I have shared my entire kingdom?
_____


C yesterday evening, remembering the story of Dorothy Day—her co-workers at the Catholic Worker house in New York, doubting the true neediness of some of their clients. She gestures to one such man, “He is Christ, you know…”

I wouldn’t have seen it this way—although Rabbi Citron always taught that if asked, one gives. And in Yerushalayim, at the  shul in Mea She’arim, the alms-seekers were always so honored—even if this could be done with only the smallest coins…

____

My grandfather, Chaim Dubowsky, in the desert backcountry east of San Diego. He was working a gold mine—this was in the 1920’s—but fell ill. My father went to care for him, managed to carry him to El Centro, where he lay feverish with pneumonia in a rented room. “I made a garment for him,” my father’s words—how they registered. A piece of canvas folded in  half, sewn along one long seam. A garment, he said…

A garment for an angel…

5.23 Begin Again

22 May 2020. Begin Again.

Yes, always a good idea--and things can change. A truism, but still important to remember. The patterns we so much enjoy--they're also our confinement. Return to find something new, maybe that's a better approach. For instance, the sound of Andrew's voice just now, from over the fence. An attorney, teaching law at Cal--you hear it in the timbre, and the articulation of his phrases. And yet he's young, so the bounce is there, too--lifting at unexpected moments with each utterance. I don't really hear the words, just the sound of his confidence. At ease with making sense. Can't quite decide whether it's a distraction--but why not notice?

Like the muslim man yesterday outside Rivoli on Solano. Sliding himself into a sedan, the door ajar. I see his cap first--that characteristic short cylinder, unadorned--a funny way to describe it, I admit--and then follow to his garment--a dun-colored kurta--which confirms his faith. Maybe Afghani, though? Should I not recognize the difference?

I try not to make assumptions, that's what the young Palestinian woman said, at a time when I very much needed to be reminded. Assumptions that close us into a form, even as it recapitulates the world.

Better the young couple on the right. They cross the Alameda together, hand in hand.  I wondered at that--clearly a case of youthful infatuation, way too young to be permanent, and yet the way she offered him her hand--and the casual assurance with which he took it, spoke of forever.

At one point she reached around and moved her phone to the other pocket of her shorts, Felt for the pocket on the right, tucked it in with assurance. Make sure not to slip. I felt that I should know why she'd done this--shifted the phone--but it became clear I had no idea--no idea at all...

_____

She played a song on the speaker as they walked. Sounded like his music, too. And just now, the dove, calling out somewhere nearby...

5.21 Tre Modonne

21 May 2020. Tre Madonne.

Thinking about it later, the first image that came to mind was Susan herself, sitting there against the patterned wall, holding little Genevieve in her lap, a little to her left. I saw both their faces, the calm on Susan's, her smile--and all felt right in the world. Calm and majestic, even--I'm not sure why--the formality of their pose, or maybe how it was framed...

The occasion being brother Geoffrey, his role in Starving Artists, a film from 1997, which Susan was showing to a group of freinds, gathered together on Zoom this way, peering into each other's lives for a moment as we watched, as if side by side. The view into the rooms, some people eating dinner, others turning tend to this or that, some of us simply sitting comfortably, hand on cheek...

Geoff, still young ("the sexiest man alive," a comment that flashed by) along with so much else, the story looping in and out of itself, playfully convoluted, filled with references to previous scenes--songs, laughter, murders and kisses, all jumbled together in an improbable Buster Keaton sort of way--with doors opening into hallways like clown cars, nothing ever quite resolving--but then somewhere that was the point, a celebration of ongoingness, where the neighbors are killing people, and the heavies arrive vis singing telegrams--along with the touching impossibility of love...

They're all 23 years older now, ourselves included, and Geoffrey has departed from this plane--but to peer back this way into a life-being-lived, even in play--well-lived, with friends and companions, inventing a future, re-making a now...
_____

Susan's pose, with Genevieve, was it the Cimabue madonna--or the slightly later one by Giotto.  Bill Midgette showed them to us, side by side, in one of those evening gatherings for the handful of art students at Reed. That would have been sometime in1963, he was fresh back from a Fulbright year painting in Italy, new etching press in hand, now in Portland. (He was later at St. Anne's.) We were blessed to have such a teacher--even if we didn't quite know it at the time.  The conversation seemed so natural--his questions so real. And he genuinely wanted to know what we thought...

5.21 Toy Store Window

21 May 2020. Toy Store Window.

It was after a day of rain last week, at the end of the afternoon, and the sun had come out, with that beautiful late afternoon light. This figure, tall and narrow, making his way up Solano, now paused in front of the toy store window. Still covered in a white tarp, even though the rain had stopped. He called out to me, just after we'd passed, "Do you have a dollar?" The opening unexpected, and so immediately direct.

The tarp was pulled up over his head, formless, which I knew would be hard to convey. And his face--I only caught a glimpse--narrow just like his figure, reminding me later of what C had read from Out of Africa--the young Maasai warrior, standing on one leg, his other foot propped at the knee. Stark and elegant. But this man was an American, destitute, wandering the streets. If he shared any such lineage the connection was ghostly...
_____

Started the drawing yesterday afternoon, on new paper, which felt so different--even though I'd used it on the Analects for many years. Maybe the tooth--the way it holds the pencil marks, or maybe that the plain 20 lb. bond is nicely slippery in a way I've grown to like.

Reworked many times--the Strathmore rag is resistant, holding all the changes, so that a skein of lines from all the previous drawings remains--and I lose my way. But this is where it stands for now, so let me accept it, even when the results are so impossibly ambiguous.Which is what I want, in a way--that loss of intention, but still it's a challenge in the moment, as I try to hold on...

Maybe because I'd read about Susan Rothenburg this morning--she died in Galisteo, New Mexico. I'd imagined her life there many times, having always admired her paintings--and the parallel way she spoke about them. As direct as asking for a dollar--and just as accepting... As in the story...



____

Original introduction, with first version of the drawing (Prophet of the Toys):

My last angel--if I can be the one to refer to him that way. My last friend, better said. Standing in front of the window of the toy shop on Solano. Five Monkeys, always bright inside, with track lights aimed down at the color-filled array, shelves brimming--so that each grown-up who enters shares in the return--the delight in possibility. An untrammeled sense of play, where the biggest challenge is being ready to have fun...

Trying to remember my father's toy store, for that year or two, in San Diego--right downtown. Long before the days of malls and shopping centers--on a regular city block, alongside the office supply and sewing machine repair. I was about five, and desperately wanted a model train set--there they were, right on the shelf--but was told that I 'd have to earn the allowance money to buy it. Which I did. A kind of lesson, I knew, but which seemed very much in contradiction to my father's urge to have the store in the first place--two great wishes pulling in opposite directions...

5.12 Children's Game

12 May 2020. Children's Game.

Just visible from under the fence, a perfect sphere, just the bottom part, that is--caught in the narrow space behind neighbor's house--behind the row of pittosporum--it probably rolled in there with no one seeing, now overlooked, maybe forgotten. Somehow I like the idea--this remnant of a children's game--like hearing the neighbor family's voices on the weekend, so unusual to have everyone home, gathered together. Diana's in particular--she must be about four now, her questions quite alert. Not surprising, given two highly alert parents--but it's more than that. You sense the surround they provide, the enclosure, opening to possibility.

The ball is cerise--but everyone on this side takes it in stride--another facet to the blooming spring. For the jay it's a complement to his own finery--that dusky blue--and for the titmouse--well, she has more important bathing chores. And besides, Goose may be lurking about, so one small eye must be kept open...

I made a photograph as well--for if seen just right, the ball could also be a slice of moon. Brought low now, as in the Sappho poem that C read to me on Friday evening. From Out of Africa. A parable, really--the old Chinese woman with the parrot, words repeated over many years, but only now understood...

The moon and the Pleiads...

5.11 Substation Encounter

11 May 2020. Substation Encounter.

Right there, in front of Kim's Cafe, on the most nondescript block in the whole run, I heard my name being called. Well, a touch farther up, actually--in front of the gate of the PG&E substation--pale green wood, with those unusual metal embellishments along the top, I've walked by hundreds of times, often wondering what went on inside...

The perfect setting, of course--and yes, it had to be Noor--we were fated to re-meet this way, after almost two months of lock-down--hidden away in our respective lairs (I'm trying to picture her's from the one time we talked on FaceTime and she walked me up the back stairs, past the inventions and the plants...

She's waving, animated, and I head across the street, brought up as if by a magic wand at that 6-foot limit--like some kind of naval patrol at the outer edge of the established coastal waters--or otherwise we'd have given each other a giant hug.

This seclusion thing pulls you in--at least for me--not just the physical distancing, but everything else put on a kind of hold--waiting to see what will emerge. I'd like to say what kind of clarity, but you become less and less sure--the original extension was until May 15 (C's birthday, of course!) but it's become quite apparent that there will be fits and starts, recurrences, ongoing unknowns--without the most basic guidance, other than  open up, which reads as code for boost my numbers. You inevitably imagine how someone else might speak to this--the compassion and dignity required--a demonstration of caring, that is--caring about the entire fabric of what it means to live together.

Easy to turn to cynicism--the failures of capitalism and a market economy (e.g., where are the masks on Amazon?) but it's not really about that so much as a vision of who we are. The same question Alicia posed when we were sitting together in the kitchen here at the very end of February. What did people feel in the 1930's that brought them together...?

____

However, there are moments... Re-meeting a friend is a very good thing--a delight, those first few words, like water in a dry canyon, after the first rains. And today we do have some rain--here in May, even--as if the wadi were flowering...

_____

Note: Image of Noor in Sarajevo--that was my start, but her gaze there contained a question, where yesterday's was all open-hearted. So, many erasures and restarts--it's problematic to draw a 26-year old! Maybe we ended up with a smallish Samarian goddess...?

5.11 Goodnight Irene

11 May 2020. Goodnight Irene.

Could be a devotional painting from the French Renaissance--a troubador figure recast as St. John the Baptist, but no, we're at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz, tbe year is 1987, and it's Ry Cooder and his Moula Band. The button-box is Flaco Jimenez, of course--I'd forgotten--adding his norteño harmonies after each verse. The song--Goodnight, Irene, and they're in it for the long haul--including back up singers (the appealing guy with widely-spaced front teeth), a tinkly keyboard (well, the song was originally tin-pan alley) and even a horn section (okay, saxophone and trombone) but the effect is perfect--and their extended rendition (something like 8:27) filmed and edited by Les Blank, is a classic. Maybe most of all because of how Ry Cooder sings it--reinventing the phrases we've all heard a million times, and giving them his own beautiful immediacy...

Down to the scraggly white tee-shirt, an East Hollywood touch--and he looks like a child, but he's been at this for more than 20 years. The solos flow from one player to the next--Ry Cooder's orchestrating--and the audience is there at each turn--each note even, knowing that the evening is drawing to a close--more than  that, really, an entire epoch, and you have to celebrate--be grateful, that is--for each moment as it comes...

There was debate about this when I suggested the song for the 6 o'clock get togethers on Miramar. In fact I already knew what was coming. How did Tanya put it in her email, "I picked the least depressing..." which is, I suppose, one way to look at the matter--but the beautiful thing about folksongs--and about Goodnight Irene in particular--is how they don't edit out. Everything's there--drugs, alcohol, threats and murder--along with love, dream kisses and longing. How not? There were no psycho-therapists in Mooringsport, Louisiana--Leadbelly's hometown--just poverty and black folks--until the discovery of East Texas oil suddenly opened everything up. Exploded. Probably brought the minstrel shows where Leadbelly (or another Ledbetter brother) first heard it--Irene Goodnight, written by Gussie Lord Davis, a black songster on Tin Pan Alley in 1886...

You can follow all these traces--always fascinating, the idea that everything has a point of origin--but in fact it's the music that counts--each time you pick up the guitar and gather everyone in a circle at the end of the evening--something magical in how each person present realizes that we're all there together again, voices lifted, even if it may be for the very last time...

"Please sing me one more song..."

5.10 Laurel Lane II

10 May 2020. Laurel Lane II.

The tree may be a way in--a venerable pine, as in the old Chinese poems. Behind a wooden fence, where a small room has been built onto back of the house on the corner. Dark wood, with one tall, narrow window. Maybe a study or a studio. Inside, quiet, just a single rice-paper lamp hanging from the wood-beamed ceiling. Always a feeling of peace...

But I couldn't remember the story, from many years ago, when we'd make this same walk--someone distinguished, a Berkeley professor, but I wasn't sure it was this house--and I couldn't recall his name. Always meant to inquire, but there was never anyone about, just the largish dog snoozing inside the front window, a great dane, who looks up sometimes as I pass...

This is the problem with stories. They can get so elaborate. And here I am already weaving back through the layers--why the house seems so familiar, wondering yet again about the small room in back, the hint of mystery to the whole thing.

Which fits with one's thoughts while walking...
_____

The house, it turns out (I looked into this) belonged Ron Takaki, a much admired teacher at Berkeley, and central to the founding the ethnic studies program. Born in Hawaii, to field-worker parents, he grew up during WWII, enduring the taunts and prejudice of those years, and understood first-hand "the inequities in Hawaii's tough and ethnically divided plantation system." Experiences which later animated--gave focus to--his distinguished work as an historian. And to his campus activism--and his ongoing and deeply held belief that learning about other cultures--other shared cultures--thinking and writing about them with critical acumen--could in itself become  a revolutionary act...
_____

"He embodied kindness."  "I don't think I ever heard him utter a word of anger."
____

About the figure. The importance of remembering these stories, of honoring them. Making them a part of yourself--as a way of sharing. Nothing literal here--a kind of play, even--you remove your hat, make a small bow. Ron Takaki, sitting alone in that quiet room, might have smiled...

5.8 Toast the Pub

8 May 2020. Toast the Pub.

Toast the Pub, he said--but that was in an email from Minnesota--and the night before he'd painted his vision of a wolf-man. Homo homini lupus, that's what it brought to mind--because of the eyes--but "on the cusp of a smile,"Jeremy wrote. A good place to be, on the cusp of a smile. As with many evenings (and sometimes late afternoons) in the confines here--a veritable treasure. The Pub. I think I went in there the first time even before we moved to the neighborhood--so it's going on half a century. The original "Schmidt's Trading Company" had an interesting selection of old pipes, displayed in the same flat glass stand-up case that is still there--now with jars of self-roll smoking tobacco on top, and a temporary place for one of the their eccentric draft beers. You wait in line until the barkeep is ready--studying the chalk-board list and trying to remember yet again the difference between pints and half-pints


There was rembetika on the stereo player one time, I remember listening with surprise--and it turned out that the girl behind the counter was a fiddle player with The Disciples of Marcos (I asked)--she'd put it on to absorb some tunes while she poured...

We'd meet there--the ambience led to a relaxed conversation. I'd be sitting at one of the thrift-shop tables, watching for Jeremy to come up onto the porch--I always wondered how he got over from the grad student housing, predictably a little late--but then Jeremy's halo of wild hair, and his shoulders, slightly hunched, maybe it was cold, maybe it was his mood--maybe none of the above--and he'd deposit his rucksack alongside a chair, and soon we were in the midst of one of his stories about the Mercer family and their big-money support of right-wing causes--Jeremy always had all the details--but soon enough, a book or two would appear, and then a whole pile on the table--things picked up at Moe's, he told me--Cezanne, Hopper, maybe even Degas. No predicting what would emerge from that bag, except that he loved them all--just as when I visited his apartment a few times (the poetry sessions) and there were stacks and stacks--on the side table, overflowing the shelves, down onto the floor--only the kitchen was spared. And then the readings would start. He told me he'd done these evenings ever since college--gathered people this way, impromptu, nothing in the event planned out, except that Jeremy always seemed to have a nicely clear sense of what he wanted to share, when it came his turn...

It fit with the Pub, too--makes me want to write down all the friends (students, too) that I'd met there over the years--I see their faces, and I think I can remember where we sat each time...

_____

Note: The Pub is closed up, along with almost everything else, as of March 15. There's a hand-written card on the sign in front, "by order of Gov. Gavin Newsom, until further notice"--something like that. An unexpected libertarian sentiment? Let's toast the re-opening, regardless...

5.7 Homeward Bound II

7 May 2020. Homeward BoundII.

Paul Simon, from the Swedish television broadcast, in 2018, more than half a century after he first recorded the song. And again, fascinating to re-engage with him, at this interval--I don't think I've paid much attention since Simon and Garfunkle days--if then. Dylan always seemed the more taut, the more compelling...

Which is certainly still true--but there's something in Paul Simon's presence--he once  referred to this as sincerity (in relation to Dylan's irony) but I think it was more the appearance of guilelessness. When you read how much he's made on his song publishing rights, you realize that guilelessness is anything but the case. On the other hand, his edginess about his reputation ("not number two...")--his insistence at so many turns--provides a counter to the inevitable melodic sweetness of his voice. Which he can't resist.

You see this on the street here, as people sing the song. The slightly raised eyebrows, together with  the touch of melodrama on home. Recognizing that meaning can't be willed, even through grace...

_____

But in another way, it's more interesting to draw Paul Simon than to draw Dylan. To see him be who he is--which despite all the success comes in part as an admission of failure...

The song however remains beautiful...

5.7 Homeward Bound

7 May 2020. Homeward Bound.

So many things missed--on purpose, as best as I can recall. The songs seemed too middle-of-the-road, the sentiment too easy--they appealed to a generalized sense of the alrightness-of-things, with just a touch of angst, carefully moderated and assuaged. As opposed to Artaud, let's say--not that we could emulate Artaud, even at our most extreme. The arrival of the plague ship at a port in medieval France, that kind of thing--but still, the very extremeness was compelling. As if all that was taken for granted--the ease of life in middle-class America, the availability of everything, nothing the result of a struggle. We didn't know what that struggle might be, actually--only imagined it--or better, yearned for it...

Maybe that's why walking one of those first mornings on the edge of the street market in Buenos Aires (I was not quite 16), where the wash-down water stood in small pools at the curb--fetid, robust, so urban--from a place that implied vitality. Little did I know, of course, what had preceded all this, the years of hope, chaos...
____

Here I am at maybe nine. The drawing makes me a little younger--that's because the shape of the head was what carried me in--a shape which must be lodged in memory from the twin paper-cuts made of Peter and me at the Del Mar Fair. Framed side-by-side, always there on the wall of my parents' bedroom. A kind of acknowledgement...

Like the hoopoe bird on the wall at C's...

I'm holding a wooden puzzle box--one of those extemporaneous gifts given to us by my parents over the course of our drive from San Diego to San Francisco. Early April--both our birthdays, so the day-by-day gifts were a special kind of excitement.

I can remember the feeling of the wood (one of those 50's imports?) and the way the parts slid back and forth. And also the tension of the challenge of figuring it out. Which had to be done in real time. None of this understood then, but it must have encouraged a pattern of curiosity--acting on curiosity...

Like learning a song--even this morning, the Paul Simon--he's seated with a group of handsome Swedes on a television stage--the setting intimate, nicely lit for atmosphere. The host asks him to play a song, and a guitar appears. Then first acoustic notes--still rather sophisticated, the way he handles them--and then those even-and-odd rhythms, engaging, lulling--he's sung it so many times, but you can still see him finding something new...


_____

Note: Buenos Aires--when I was not quite 16. Also, on the shape of the head--Ernst Gombrich would say that we learn how to make a picture by learning the schemata--the shapes of the heads in those paper-cuts. Richard Wollheim would counter that it's a matter of seeing in--the artist make a line, a mark--and in the same instant the meaning appears. The drawing here reminds me that of course it's always a combination of the two...

Note II: Homeward Bound (with alternate lyrics) has been a staple here for the 6 o'clock Miramar sing-alongs. I decided to learn it. Out of curiosity, I looked into Paul Simon--Bob Dylan--I'd forgotten the tension. And the Graceland controversy. It was actually good to revisit all this from a fresh point of view--especially after watching Simon on the Swedish sound stage, in 2018, looking a touch worn, but still with that same sense of distance--maybe suspicion--as if he never quite knew what to make of people's reactions to his songs. His human presence, however--which I'd come to to learn the song--was compelling. Maybe because of the above...

5.5 Brahms Impromptu

5 May 2020. Brahms Impromptu.

Not entirely sure where this will take me. Listening now to one of Toscha Seidel's early recordings---the Brahms First Piano Sonata, II--the Adagio, with Arthur Loesser's piano--from 1923 or so. Toscha was my godfather--from the war years, when so many artists of note ended up in San Diego--as if the entire country had been tilted up onto one corner, and everyone available rolled southwest.

Oscar and Alice--my parents--were great hosts--their dinner parties around the long banquette (built in clear redwood by my father) in the house on California Street, overlooking the harbor--the Convair aircraft plant somewhere below. Where I was born--but that was 1945--which must have felt like a part of the new beginning. I'm sure some of that came to me, too,  by osmosis. (So why now the reverie? Maybe also a new beginning...?)
_____

Yesterday evening, a little warmer, walking down Solano at dusk, the sound of a violin. I've listened for it many times--I think I always do, if only subconsciously, ever since I first heard the person playing so beautifully, high up in the apartment building on the corner--the one with the pokey exposed elevator and unexpected chamfers to the roof. A very accomplished violinist, extraordinary, really, when you consider that we're on a nondescript business block in North Berkeley. But so be it--the sound--the intonation--unforgettable. I stopped there in front, by the Thai place (still take out) that Myron and I visited once, years back--and stood on the edge of the street, looking up to locate the source. A open gazebo passageway--on the top floor, with rattan screen attached along the railing. Which registered (unconsciously, at least) as a wattle fence--as in so many of the old Chinese poems, an image of countryside seclusion, if only because the poet had found a place of respite beyond the city's red dust...

Two small figures, high above--they saw my wave--and then my doffed hat (a theatrical gesture, but this seemed only right!) and the one called out for a request. I couldn't place the right sonata, though, so I called back, Hungarian Dance--which was apparently understood just as I'd intended, for then, after the briefest pause, the notes of the Brahms poured forth...
_____

Note: The player, a young Asian woman--I've never seen her face. The Thai place--Sweet Basil. And Myron, my dear friend from Reed, all theater and story...

Toscha Seidel was a Russian-born concert violinist, a student of Leopold Auer in Saint Petersburg. He and Jascha Heifitz were contemporaries. Story has it that Auer would refer to Jascha Heifitz as "my angel," and to Toscha as "my devil." I have a very early memory of him sitting at that California Street banquette, his intense personality, wild hair in all directions. When Peter and I would play by crawling along the top of the back, Toscha would object--strenuously. Only room for one prodigy at a time...
_____

Tell the story of Aunt Stelly (Toscha's wife) and the trip to Portugal--only not right here...

5.3 And Peter

3 May 2020. And Peter.

Well, you can't want these things too much. After all, who's judging, now? Not my dear brother himself--he'd probably lift an eyebrow at the dear, although inside he'd like it. Maybe C--she always says his name softly, with her particular lilt--Pee-tah--bringing him back in that way each time...

And it is a matter of bringing him back--now that it's been twenty years, a little more. This very month, May 10, when Shelley called me, told me I needed to come...

So, we had those four months. Yes, it was a choice. I packed up my paints, right at the end of school, put them in a bag, got on the plane. Seemed so necessary--what else could I have done? But sometimes necessity verges on miracle... How did C put it, in the hospital room, He can come and live with me...

_____

A generosity of spirit. Yes, we must love each other...


 _____

Note: Shelly, a long-time friend, from high school and before. The last words are from the Auden poem, We must love each other or die. He took them out at one point--thought them untrue. But these truths have a way of shifting back and forth...

5.3 Family

3 May 2020. Family.

Seems like everyone is having a bath this morning--first, the lady house finches, then the mister, who makes a quick appearance to check in on them--and now the towhee, my friend. I greet them when I'm walking in the evening--each one, as if I know them. Which in a very real sense I do. A pleasure..

We look for pleasure, of course--especially when it's a part of meaning. This picture of my mother, for example, taken in a backyard in San Diego in the 1920's. Already as I knew her from first memories--wide forehead, almost squarish, but at the same time with a roundedness that was alert and appealing. She'd pull her hair back in braids, tucked in on either side of her head--I always return to them. Yes, that's how they wore their hair then, but more particularly, it was Alice...

She chose the name herself. Sarah wouldn't do. Theodore Roosevelt's daughter--an independent spirit. ("I can either govern the country, or I can govern Alice--but not both at once...") My mother found that meaningful, even though she lived before such views could be taken for granted. (Can they now, even?) So that when I read some of the term papers she wrote for a journalism class at San Diego State in the 1950's (she went to college very late--always a dream on her part) I was surprised by how seriously se seemed to take the often quite pedestrian comments of her professors, noted in the margins--since I knew she was no doubt better read in all regards...

C has my mother's dictionary. The big Websters 3rd, always open on the stand my father made for her. I sometimes think to cover it, to protect the pages--but C knows better--that the book needs to live...

_____

Made the drawing yesterday evening, after a walk, in the half-light, here at the table. Berating myself for why, yet again, I was working from a photograph, which so easily reduces to just information--here the last thing I'd want, of course. But then another smudge or two and I forgot all that--something came together, and all of a sudden, there she was...

5.2 Through Time

2 May 2020. Through Time.

Once again, stymied by intention. It had occurred to me, well, if I want to talk about description, I could just as well make another drawing and begin again. But then that’s what happened—in the literal sense. No staying on topic, I’m afraid—the drawing begins, and we go to some place new. As here, for instance—the table got wider and wider until it seemed to incorporate the entire horizon (I’ve since erased it back a bit)—but that made a place for the second figure—who, of course, is my mother, as a young woman, her hair braided up on either side of her head (sometime in the 1940’s). Which also has something of the Chinese, although I couldn’t date the fashion there. A culture a little bit on the formal side—made cautious (or at least more self-aware).

So you see, Solano Avenue has disappeared entirely. As I knew it would. “My evening walks”—too much of a shtick—and the minute they’re so designated, they vaporize. Or become worthless. No, worthless is too strong—better said, something to react against. The walks themselves are beautiful, if a little exhausting, but to force them into a pattern with words is against their nature. So we’ll let them be. No On Solano, no A Guest of Time—although I do like the latter—because it rings true with the Chinese again. Tu Fu. Guest of Rivers and Lakes (thank you B). I looked up Florence Ayscough a few days ago—it was her book that highlighted the phrase, in 1934. But today there’s more, of course. Because you can find out just about anything.  So that Rivers and Lakes becomes jianghu, a word-couplet with a long and meaningful history.

But you know, the simple meaning is there, too. Maybe like Gary Snyder, his Highway 99 poems. I read them in Warsaw—transported—they brought me home in an instant…
_____

So, the drawing continues. The writing as well, God willing. But as for the corrals of titles, we’ll have to let them be. Or make them spontaneous, like everything else…

5.2 Drawing, Writing

2 May 2020. Drawing, Writing.

Well, the drawing comes first. But is that true? The kernel of something can be in the memory--and in fact, the memory then becomes a part of the drawing. So why try to sort it all out so carefully, when what's happening is almost always more of a give and take. Which is one reason I've struggled with attempts at giving this project a name--much less a description. Yes, Time and Around will keep everyone at bay (not the right image--they're not wolves!) or maybe just provide me with an umbrella to continue. A tent--as in the big tent. But at the same time, it feels that I should be able to state more directly what I'm doing. Realizing now, of course, that stating is in the doing itself.

So, here I am at the table by the window. Perhaps the Black Tea Window (from March 24) says it better--leaves out the insistent I.  But on the other hand, it was fun to use the machine in front of me (set on Facetime) as a kind of mirror--so that I could see the shape of my hand holding the pencil. Always hard to figure that out without a model! And suddenly, voilá--I see it. And just enough to make me forget about all these name cares! The shoulders are a bit hunched--that's from the distortion on the screen, too--and the head I'd drawn largely before looking. so it's a combination, in any case, and in that sense true...

The smaller figure, next to the tree, comes from many years ago. In the middle of Berkeley, a breakfast place on Shattuck, near University. I enjoyed starting the morning there, before heading to the studio in  Oakland. The owner was a Persian man--we had a kind of friendship, developed over the year or two I was in attendance. And in fact, when I'd get up to leave (after the fourth cup of coffee) he'd walk out with me, and offer this gesture there on the sidewalk--both arms up in the air over his head, a farewell. Said that's how they did it at home... There was an expression that went with it, I think... but what I remember now is the gesture.

The place (the building still there, no doubt) was called The Terminal Inn. I liked that, too...

5.2 Umami Window

2 May 2020. Umami Window.

Reworked last night--the weight of the lines, and then the figure of the woman. Too pale before--a skein, abstract--nothing dense enough to hold the meaning. But these balances are essential, and sometimes pale tales us everything. Also, I let go of her face--which was maybe too sweet. But no face would return--I didn't want her to be empty, but she also needed to be herself.

Walking in front again yesterday evening, I saw a youngish woman getting into a car--realized it was the Unami person--so I greeted her, told her how beautiful the store was--especially in the days of quiet, when all one sensed was the presence of the fabrics and hangings in the windows, the room itself in darkness. She thanked me, of course--it's as much an act of sharing to make a place like this as with any other work of art. Melanie, she told me her name. I told her I'd made a drawing that morning--delight. But then I went home and changed it--so here we are now with all of these strands!

The figure could be C. I think that's a good thing--even if it makes no story sense. Maybe she needed to be here?

____

Here's the writing from yesterday, before changing the drawing:

A dark interior—and then, one day, the living presence—a ghost or spirit, moving between the rows and stands of cloth— beautiful muted fabrics, displayed inadvertently in a permanent half-light, on hand-made shelves, just a hint of their discreet colors. And then, one day, a young woman—bending over to adjust something, rearrange a woven basket, oblivious to street, the shop still closed, but looking in, you sensed the change even before catching sight of her shadow—it’s too easy, but yes, like a flower, in early May, as if predetermined by the heavens, when everyone should begin to reemerge…

But where will the quiet go? The stillness that accompanied this time? It’s not fair to lament. The bustle is mandatory. But to hear a blast of hip-hop on a car stereo, driver door ajar, as the owner dashes into the burger place—his audio presence continuous—well, you’re reminded that this “cultural moment,” this “change in civilization,” will come with some dips and lulls…

I dread it, actually. Even though the quiet is unearned. Caused by a sudden aberration in the wrap and weft. Or is it an aberration? A muted, almost imperceptible apocalypse—one we never thought to enjoy…

But what can we learn from this time? What a didactic question. We learn from everything—like the photos of the girl in LA, manufacturing masks with a small crew, one-off, in her clothing shop in Silver Lake—a bright-spirited type, but with eyes that are a touch hard. Maybe clear-minded is a better word. How not? When the train of history goes around a bend, there are those who fly off…

_____

Note: The train of history quote is from Lenin—something my father used to say in defending the imperatives of change.

5.1 Parable with Camelia Blossoms

1 May 2020. Parable with Camelia Blossoms.

I’d say they’re like tears—except that the fallen blossoms are bright red, heaped there on the sidewalk in front of a white stucco wall. Just the winding trunk and a handful of remaining flowers on the low branches above. Unexpected, the color—seen first, then the plainness of everything else, although the alcove has elements of theater, just like life, awaiting a play...

A Hungarian prince, perhaps—maybe a Russian, who lives nearby, in one of the apartment buildings, next door to the nursery with a window overlooking the street. He hears voices in the morning as his neighbors gather in the garden below, to drink coffee and Turkish tea.

His beloved lives nearby, in a tiny room above the Oaxaca store. It can be noisy, with the early trains, but she’s arrayed her  window table with many plants, and the place feels peaceful. Now she’s come out to greet him, walking on the avenue, or is it that he’s encountered her by chance? Or sees her in a dream? There’s an element of fairyytale here—because the story is so implausible—but as they reach out to each other, all the plainness disappears, and they’re in the hoopoe’s bower…

The messenger hasn’t far to fly—they’re not really very far apart, you see—but the hoopoe has become a part of the story—a necessary presence, whose letters and flights make more and more certain the truth of their love.

And now the world has caught up with them—how not?—the prince can no longer dash so easily to her room—there are proclamations and warnings about... So, for the present, the hoopoe must needs stay with them, as the prince and his beloved sit together in the evening, side by side, and converse over a small screen…

Yet whatever the distance...