Class consciousness

I came across this interesting quote from Barack Obama:

“I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/07/070507fa_fact_macfarquhar#ixzz1U0tuCJYn

Perhaps I am less understanding than Obama; I fret about the extreme protectiveness of their short-term interests the very rich demonstrate around the world, their willingness to risk revolution, epidemics, even environmental catastrophe, through their unwillingness to invest in public goods such as sanitation, public infrastructure, social housing, decent food, drinkable water, clean air... the list goes on and on in places like Brazil, Pakistan, First Nations reserves in Canada (oh yes, even in the Great White North).

But what's even more dispiriting is the enduring false consciousness that makes possible the sanctimonious and self-righteous attitude the very rich in the Third World take towards beggars in the streets; perhaps not all that different than the glowering disregard in affluent countries for 'welfare queens', refugees, gypsies, the homeless. Maybe Marx and Gramsci were right and we really are imprisoned in our class consciousness, incapable of seeing people who don't go to the same country club as having the same rights as us, deserving of our precious tax dollars.

A friend who was caught up in the tsunami in Thailand a few years ago tells the story of a crowd waiting to be evacuated from the disaster zone, most bereft of passport, money, clothing, yet sharing sips of scarce water with each other.  The locals, he says, were especially generous. And then there were a few Westerners who wouldn't share the shirt off their back for someone with acute sunburn.

A rather scary metaphor as we burn together on this afflicted planet.

Rivers and fountains

As I re-publish Genghiz in Love this summer, I am flooded with gratitude for the writers who influenced me at the fertile time when I wrote that novel.

The other day, I wrote a recommendation for Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which was so strong an influence that I originally named my own novel Anastasia's Slave in allusive tribute to the earlier masterpiece. (Oddly, I first heard about Bulgakov from Salman Rushdie at a book reading for The Satanic Verses, weeks before he was forced to go into hiding.) Reading Bulgakov felt like listening to the subversive sound of triumphant trumpets in some dour government office block; his high-spirited and chivalric ode to the power of the imagination trills through the daily din of deadened words.

Proust was another major influence, I'll write more about that later. Alain de Botton is right, if rather obvious and didactic, in pointing out that reading Proust can change your life. For a period of about 18 months in Prague, I stopped reading anything else besides the Remembrances of Things Past. I'm not sure if I would recommend reading Proust as a cure for heartbreak, but it does work.

When I am immersed in the sheer scope of a great writer's oeuvre, I feel like Huck Finn floating on a raft in the middle of the Mississippi, a great inland sea whose pull is so strong that we mostly consider its vast surface, the distance between its banks, the length it traverses until it meanders into delta, estuary, ocean.

What we often ignore in our bird's eye view of the river's coiled flow is the magnitude of its depth, its murky tides, and at its bottom the porous bed through which its unique minerals and contaminants seep into the groundwater, the collective unconscious of our culture. Proust, Bulgakov, Twain have fed me and countless others, the Duchesse de Guermantes, Professor Woland, Tom Sawyer live and breathe cheerfully within me, giving life to new characters jostling yet to be born.

Hence the futility of the quest for fame, as if a spring could architect itself into a fountain.

Seeing the obvious

I try to see the obvious. Things that are so present in our reality that we can't even see them anymore... which is close to the best definition I've ever seen of the 'unconscious'.

This is not an esoteric insight, necessarily. Here's an example. At lunch today my therapist friend Erin mentioned that almost all of her clients are women. I asked why. She seemed puzzled. The conventional wisdom seems to be that women just are more likely to ask for help, look for support, reach out in times of need. That's just how the gender works - isn't it obvious?

I suggested there might be another explanation - maybe women need more therapy and support because they are actually more in need of therapy and support. In a world where women are disproportionately the target of violence, rape, abuse and systematic discrimination, it makes sense they might actually need help more than men.

Want evidence? Check out the "Trafficking in Persons Report 2011" released by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today. You can find it at http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2011/index.htm

As a man, I'm spending some time these days facing uncomfortable truths about the extent to which I am complicit in a world that is unsafe for my mother, sister, partner, and friends who happen to be women. When I ogle or stare at an attractive stranger, I am turning her into a piece of meat, ripe for re-packaging into a plastic coated dismembered doll - all legs, breasts, and dolled-up face, ready for the soft-porn fashion industry, hard-core online pornography sites, and potentially even for physical slavery and murder. It's a rather obvious feminist insight that we've done our best to ignore as a culture for at least two generations now.

Sadly, the obvious isn't always pretty.

Guernica / Memoir Manifesto

Guernica / Memoir Manifesto

A common platitude...

"There is a common, albeit dimwitted, platitude held dear by activists of a socialist persuasion that globalization has increased rheumatism and other ailments due to the decline of bee populations worldwide. In contrast to this perfidious belief (which perversely refuses to celebrate Divine intervention in still further elevating Man in the Great Chain of Being, not to mention preventing pesky stings), my free-market friends and I are even more convinced that empty beehives will provide excellent opportunities to increase the sale of dentures as honey-deprived children in the benighted Third World seek other forms of sugar highs. Capitalists of the world, unite!"

- Ronald Rand ed., Contemporary Sermons In Honour of the Almighty Dollar, Argonaut Press, p.20

Legend has it...

"Legend has it that, tired of hiding within the cavernous folds of the interior of the ceramic statuette, Babalou La Pouce began his epic journey towards its gaping jaws, armed only with his trusty toothpick and a rusty fourchette. Alas, almost four months later, ill and starving, he realized the fullness of his deception and cursed himself for being such a ninny as to think the mouth might actually be open."

- from Legend Has It... Argonaut Press, vol. 10, p. 1226.

Be warned: the authorities will not pay

"Any stranger, be it man, woman or child of average mind, who is foolish enough to venture out by himself looking for a cafetiere or other Western kitchen appliance or contraption in this dark and dismal quartier of a godforsaken border town is likely to meet a sordid ending at the hand of some sullen bloodthirsty villain of Turkish descent out for his pound of flesh. Be warned: the authorities will not pay for cremation."

- from Tell It Like It Is: The Unvarnished Guide to Suleymania, Argonaut Press, p.1226

Harry Potter, Knight of Pentacles

I watched the latest Harry Potter film (Deathly Hallows, part one) last night after reading the last four books earlier this week. It will take some time to digest this mammoth tale.

I found particularly evocative and beautiful the animation rendering of the tale of Death and the three brothers who respectively receive from Death the gift of the elder wand which can defeat any other, the resurrection stone, and Death’s own cloak, which allows its wearer to be invisible, even to Death. The shadow figures reminded me of cave drawings or Tim Burton’s elegant elongations.

In the book, Harry and his friends Hermione and Ron discuss which of the three Hallows they would choose. It is intelligent Hermione, rather than Harry, who chooses the invisibility cloak, the humble and wise option chosen by the youngest brother (always the survivor in the classic structure of fairy tales). Harry, for his part, confesses his preference for the resurrection stone.

This choice seems odd, until we realize he already in fact possesses the invisibility cloak, which has saved him and his friends on many adventures. The resurrection stone, on the other hand, offers Harry what he most desires – the opportunity to bring back his lost loved ones, the parents who died when he was an infant, and the parent-surrogates he repeatedly loses, including his godfather Sirius Black and his mentor Albus Dumbledore. Harry, like Frodo and many other reluctant heroes before him, is the Knight of Pentacles, fallible and weak, unclear in vision (the eponymous glasses) yet doggedly persisting against all odds – for he has been chosen through suffering, not because he has chosen this arduous path. The defining question of this form of Quest is: why me?

Love and loss define Harry, just as the pathological search for power is the essence of his arch-enemy Voldemort, constantly grabbing other men’s wands as he seeks the elder wand, which he believes is the ultimate weapon. Voldemort’s mutilated nose reflects the obvious phallic connotations of this need to compensate for a missing masculinity. This need is echoed in Ron’s preference for the elder wand. There is a particularly poignant moment when Ron is tormented by his insecurity about whether is loved by his parents, desired by Hermione. Don’t they prefer Harry over Ron, who wouldn’t, really? While Ron comes through the test, as we know he will, even after the downfall of Voldemort, Ron still has some regret that Harry will return the wand to Dumbledore’s grave rather than taking on the traditional alpha-male role of master, King.

In fact, Harry (‘the boy who did not die”) is more Christ Child than King Arthur – allowing other near-peers such as Ron and Neville to wield the sword of Gryffindor to fight evil, while he breaks Voldemort’s spell through willing self-sacrifice. The resurrection stone is made available to Harry “at the close”, and he is able to walk to certain death in the ghostly company of his loved ones. Once he has received their solace and the reassurance that their love will endure after death, he is able to let Voldemort destroy that aspect of himself which craves life, the seventh of the Horcruxes in which Voldemort has displaced his own shattered soul.  After a long conversation in the bardo state with Dumbledore, Harry makes the Boddhisattva choice to return for the sake of all the others still engaged in the fight.

Although both Voldemort and Harry have met Death and crossed the bridge to the other side, Harry, like the youngest brother, no longer clings to life, and so is no longer mastered by death, unlike poor Voldemort, who kills again and again, striking out in his frantic quest to secure some form of enduring survival for his own undead corpse. (Speaking of the undead, Helena Bonham Carter does a fabulous comic turn in the movie as the bad mad knife-throwing aristocrat Bellatrix Lestrange, Voldemort’s frenetic, chaotic and disconnected anima, dishy and dishevelled as she threatens and tortures the young witches who are drawn to Harry - Athena-like Hermione, intuitive and cool Luna, and his true love Ginny – until good mother/grizzly mama Mrs Weazley puts an end to manic childless family-mocking Bellatrix. I’m looking forward to seeing that fight sequence in the last movie.)

This penultimate film ends with a neat counterpoint between Harry cradling dying Dobby in his arms, able to mourn his dead, as opposed to Voldemort violently robbing Dumbledore’s grave to grab the elder wand which he gloatingly raises to the sky, powerful but ignorant, unaware that this potent erection will bring neither victory nor release.

In the archetypal struggle between love and hate, we know who will win: prefigured on each previous encounter between Harry and Voldemort, the depiction of their final fight is perfunctory, almost anticlimactic.

Mysterious Muse

I worked last night on cleaning up the soundtrack for a video project. Those sliding adjustments helped me conceptualize a three dimensional 'reward graph' for a coaching client this morning. One form of creativity feeds another, and that (hopefully) feeds another person's creativity as well. O mysterious muse - thank you.

Midway on our life's journey

Tonight I finished the painting that has been blocking my easel for the last eight months.

Eight months of despairing confusion. I knew in some inchoate way what the painting was about - trees shuddering in the wild winds of a winter night, evoking the night sea journey - yet there was no energy there for me, not even the pallid pull to completion, the bourgeois artist's petit mort. It felt like painting - more primal to my life than speech - had left me forever.

A few evenings ago, I got it, the image's connection with the opening stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

che la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant' e amara che poco e piu morte;

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself

In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell

About those woods is hard - so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel

The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.

(trans. Robert Pinsky)

These are the lines I've scrawled on the surface of the painting in thick arterial crimson. For I too in my fortieth year went through crisis; yet for me, death was not bitter, rather a beautiful being who occasionally comes into my arms to dance, lyrically. I feel like I've come out the other side, reborn; and hopefully, this painting completes that phase of birthing.

Rust Anima

Pablo Picasso observed it would be interesting to take photographs of a painting while in process, to capture its complex organic emergence. Here are two moments for viewing - one obliterated forever yet preserved in digital form; the other as 'final' as any work can ever be, yet subject to physical decay.

My anima wanders - sometimes leaving me deserted for months at a time. This week she has made an unexpected visit, an intense ferment of feeling. Intoxicated, suffering, the paint drips darkens coagulates like heart's blood, undrunk, unwanted. Another Pablo (Neruda) provided this torn lament, scribbled onto the painting, an appropriate epiphany:

Those who wanted to wound me wounded you,

and the dose of secret poison meant for me

like a net passes through my work - but leaves

its smear of rust and sleeplessness on you.

I don't want the hate that sabotaged me, Love,

to shadow your forehead's flowering moon;

I don't want some stupid random rancour

to drop its crown of knives onto your dream.

Bitter footsteps follow me;

a hideous grimacy mocks my smile; envy spits

a curse, guffaws, gnashes its teeth where I sing.

And that, Love, is the shadow life has given me:

an empty suit of clothes that chases me,

limping, like a scarecrow with a bloody grin.

- Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets, LX (translated by Stephen Tapscott)

Two self-portraits

Seven years separate these two self-portraits. I finished the one on the left (Cubist Self Portrait) earlier this week in a flurry of intersecting vertical and horizontal brush strokes. Twenty minutes of rapid wrist work to complete a painting that sat glumly on my easel for six months, blocking all efforts to move beyond. In those six months I traveled to Barcelona, read both published volumes of John Richardson's biography of Picasso, and studied the blue, rose and cubist periods in detail, not knowing what for. Now I know, dimly: a new direction in portraiture has opened for me. Ghostly, the image glows through, like an X ray, unlike the firm fleshy visage of the younger me in the self-portrait on the right. Have I dematerialized, becoming ectoplasm or phantasm? They say the body completely renews all its cells over a period of seven years. Perhaps they never return with the same self-confident solidity.

Truth

This painting is one in a series of six inspired by Chinese calligraphy. The underlying ideogram (executed in sumi ink) poses a basic concept. Ink spatters and successive overlays of red tones in acquarelle pencil and water colour problematize the strength and durability of the central motif, without ever succeeding in totally obscuring it.













The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it,
yet it doesn't create them.
It pours itself into its work,
yet it makes no claim.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn't hold onto them.
Since it is merged with all things
and hidden in their hearts,
it can be called humble.
Since all things vanish into it
and it alone endures,
it can be called great.
It isn't aware of its greatness;
thus it is truly great.

Tao te Ching 34.

Shakespeare in white

Earlier this year, I dreamed that I was having an interesting conversation with a female painter. I was looking at the paintings on the white walls of her loft and realized that all the paintings were white, creating space for attention to texture, the material substance of paint and the act of painting itself.

Over the next few months, I paid homage to the dream and the lineage of white paintings created by Ryman, Rauschenberg and others, by putting together a series of white multimedia pieces, compiled of chalk drawing, fashion magazine cut-outs, autumn leaves, straw, scrawled calligraphy, charcoal, coloured chalk, layered over by successive washes of white acrylic paint.

This Shakespeare painting is my favourite image from the white painting series. Each white wash bled the underlying chalk drawing of the ubiquitous image of Shakespeare, obscuring and partially obliterating like time, history and death, the forces evoked in Sonnets 11-12, which are also inscribed on the painting:

XI.
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest

In one of thine, from that which thou departest;

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestowest

Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.

Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:

Without this, folly, age and cold decay:

If all were minded so, the times should cease

And threescore year would make the world away.

Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,

Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:

Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;

Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:

She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby

Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

XII.
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer's green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.