215. YOU CALL THIS A SUSTAINABLE WORLD?

From the Archives

(April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is?

Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night on the eve of my trip to NYC. It rained all day (again) and my grass is suddenly very high (something I can do nothing about till next week).

My drive home from the theatre tonight was a journey through a foggy undifferentiated landscape that no more than suggested a sustainable world (whereas my pals' experimental Chekhov interpretation that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world).

My favorite local theater staged this adaptation of Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as “a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.”

(Ponder that.)

The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one sister masturbated whenever the subject of work came up. Oh I looooong to work. I really looooong for work, she moaned.

How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play when his message has squashed you flat into your seat?

(And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer at least momentary transcendence.)

Came home to play around on my keyboard and then stare at my cello and guitars and twenty-four-volume art encyclopedia set—at this stuff that can occasionally make my existence seem meaningful.

There’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler, sitting beside me on a shelf. And Vita Sackville-West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir’s biography, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, Kafka’s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown’s Fay and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.

Plato’s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light and Warren’s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather in entirely too long.

My worn paperback copy of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue planes of Sartre’s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions (since Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him there as I cogitate, demanding that Søren face the implications of personal action in this purposeless universe).

Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch” y’all.

My Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur’s Brief History of Everything and Carolyn Forché’s always nearby Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Ernest Hemingway still sneers from The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america’s war on words offers cross-continental evidence that our bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorder.


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Meanwhile, the dada exhibit in DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of getting there, let alone considering firsthand the artists’ interpretations of their culture-destroying world ravaged by war.

Bet my favorite fur-lined cup is there, too.

(Yeah yeah. I know this is an exhausted image now—just a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had sufficient faith in humanity to be outraged by the fact that, left to our own devices, we have a tendency to sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china and pick each other’s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean—or to at least satirize them wickedly well.)

Then there’s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex.

Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed herb greens, bag of Brussels sprouts (which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return), an unopened packet of good goat cheese.

A good meal, but that’s probably more broccoli than I can eat in a day, even if I do cook it in some good sesame oil and garlic and have it with tempeh for breakfast.

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And now it’s morning and various experts are announcing that the possibility of frost is officially over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds weeks ago and will plant them in earnest when I return from the city.

That’s not my worry right now though. For the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast and head to the airport.

So I’ll end with a poem:

WILD SWANS
by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying.

23. THE TIME OF THE TURNIP

From the Archives

(March 2005) Have been thinking about the Dada movement. The urinal is the obvious symbol for this style and people latch onto it (although I prefer the fur-lined cup myself), but Dada is so much more than what is represented by either of these images. Yeah, it was an exhaustible style—and quickly so—but I love that it existed.

The Dada Manifesto that Hülsenbeck and Raoul Hausmann wrote in Berlin in April 1918 called for an “international revolutionary union of all creative men and women; for progressive unemployment through the mechanization of all fields of activity; for the abolition of private property; for the provision of free daily meals for creative people and intellectuals, for the remodeling of big-city life by a Dadaist advisory council; and for the regulation of all sexual activity under the supervision of a Dadaist sexual center. These proposals were put forward at what George Grosz called 'the time of the turnip.’”

Now I don’t know what I think about any council regulating my sexual activity, but I do recognize these artists’ disgust with the world around them. They experienced destruction in a way that is hard for Americans to fathom, knew that structures which had stood for thousands of years could be destroyed in an instant, how easily this destruction can result in permanent loss. (Think of those Catholic icons that were desecrated or destroyed in Shakespeare’s time, the cultural loss that resulted from the ruler’s need to force a particular belief system on a nation.)

The Dadaists’ disgust with the world around them symbolized their recognition of the fact that the visual images we hold dear continue to be subject to the whims of any slack-jawed pilot’s trigger-happy finger and our ruler’s good graces. That’s the point behind the Mona Lisa with a mustache. The Dadaists didn’t disrespect the painting/da Vinci so much as they lamented the reality that its existence is tenuous—that its existence is subject to the whims of people who could care less about art.

Dadaists confront the randomness of destruction in their works, and mourn a world where destruction is commonplace.

Duchamp’s Questions:
What is the irreducible element in language?
What would constitute a truly modern dictionary?
How should an index of all knowledge be organized?
To what extent can chance be given its freedom in the arts?
What are the verbal equivalents of colors that cannot be seen?
Should not every government have a Ministry of Coincidences?

Coincidences. Artists recognize the symbolic relationships between seemingly disparate elements, establish connections that some people simply can’t see until the artists point these connections out. This can resemble schizophrenic or delusional behavior, especially if the artist isn’t articulate enough or in touch with her unconsciousness enough to makes these connections resonate with others.

Now, between my mother and my sister, let me just say that there is too damn much schizophrenia in my family. Within the last month, for example, I have received a letter from my sister outlining, in detail, how her reconciliation with her ex-husband would bring about the end of conflict between Israel and Palestine, how their reunion will end the Iraqi conflict. I know that this is delusional thinking but am a logical person and therefore try hard to trace her connections, try to figure out how she reached these conclusions—which, for some reason, is important to me. And, even though it continues to be fruitless, I try to point out the logical inconsistencies in these conclusions.

My father’s approach to delusional behavior was, at first, frustration, but this quickly turned into appeasement. There was a period of time when my mother wrapped everything in plastic wrap. You’d sit on your bed and slide off it because she’d wrapped the mattress in plastic wrap (to keep some kind of evil something—germs?—inside it) when you weren’t looking. She had a witch hazel stage, too. And a tin foil stage. I came home from school one day—without a friend, thankfully—to find the entire piano wrapped in tin-foil and my father and sister and mother just sitting in the room there with it. Daddy was reading the paper across from the silver monstrosity, in fact.

There was this unspoken agreement in my family that we were supposed to pretend that the most extreme behavior was normal, that we were supposed to ignore that elephant sitting in the living room, but I could never do this. Excuse me, I inevitably said, but has anyone noticed that the fucking piano is wrapped in tin-foil!???