An Uncanny Magic

 

I was exhausted, a sputtering candle, but here in the Quinault Rain Forest the Mother Trees, the great firs and cedars, the moss and ferns rekindle me. This forest is uncannily magical.

 

To pick a place on a map, choose its likelihood, and drive 800 miles to stand among the trees. And connectivity flourishes as hidden fungal networks feed the plants in exchange for carbon and weave a hundred species into a living fabric. Connectivity & Diversity & Reciprocity, inseparable - what Gaia teaches me.

I have a sudden - sight? An imagining? Could I have dreamed or seen a photo of a woman in a dog hair blanket, single feather in a sleek bun, selling tightly woven baskets? They learned that white people wanted to own…..to keep, to place behind glass. 

 

Dream and myth merge with the deep shadowy silence. Is that the woman picking berries in the photo I discovered so long ago?

 

I imagine a longboat of fisherfolk, or a single man standing at the edge of the lake. And I remember the masks that we once saw by firelight, and how they became Spirit. Days later, on the Coast, we find Quin-i-ault art and I think of the time 54 years ago when I discovered the art and the peoples of this coast,

   

and we discover the contemporary Tlingit artist Israel Shotridge, who carries on the tradition with his many-eyed Thunderbird, Salmon & Whale. Ah, Thunderbird, who makes lightning, brings the rainstorms that create this uncanny magic.

 

 

But I also feel the same pain as I feel in every formerly indigenous space. They never believed land could be owned till we took it, till we said Mine, a word that only exists in the language of ownership. But Israel Shotridge is a We who holds those who carved and painted before him, maskmakers, polecarvers, paddlepainters, drumstainers.....

How did I come to this blessing, I who could once barely walk to the corner, or make it from the parking lot to the College? Now almost 80 and  able to hike a trail. I still remember the first path I fell in love with when I was 8. It was only beaten down grass across an empty lot, but there it was, destination. And here the trails are soft with the layers and leavings of millennia, and a trail's destiny leads  to creek-fall.

 

Outside the door of our cottage is an immense fir tree that will not yield to my camera.  When I stand under its 50 foot circumference, it is a shelter like no other. I will take a handful of its deep green moss to add to the basket that Lina Jane Prairie made for us. And a handful for my friend who also talks to trees. If only I could speak the language of the great strands of fungi, the hyphae, who taught the firs and ferns, the pines and maple how to connect without saying a word.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Then The Cranes Come....

  
It is Elul a question mark of a month  we ask who        and how and what we have harmed. I've said they  they have harmed the earth   then I said we  we have damaged the earth    and now I say I   I have harmed the earth and each day I chant
                             deforestation
                      degradation  
                  extinction
              pollution
and I pray for Her  (out on my deck in the fire-sickened air) and name one   fracking   toxic waste
after another but there are more ways we have damaged the earth than there are days of Elul  tomorrow is the last day of Elul and there is more to name before the New Year begins 

California is on fire   are the gods in retreat watching our mourning our grief our worry   have they decided there is nothing they can do for us since we are their hands?                           

A bird lands near me
  the simplicity of sweetness      the bird flies up to the tree which the fire department says is too close to the chimney  

On New Year we will dip an apple in honey                              But for now?

Two things I had to learn before I found sweetness -             1.The endangered Siberian crane called Omid in Farsi which means hope winters in rice fields on the Caspian sea.                2. When a Muslim leaves on a journey the Koran is held over their head to ensure their return.                                                                    

In her painting Naeemeh Naeemaei wears the white of cranes  she holds the holy book over the head of the bird   over the head of Omid   over the head of Hope                            

    

                      

     
                         

  

                          

The Art of Protest

Gee Vaucher Liberty

     In dark times when people have suffered, when ugly wars have ravaged people and place, when there has been economic depression, attempts at suppression, racism and other injustice, movements have risen that  attempt to change the direction of history.
 
    I’ve been thinking about this for a while: Right now there is a Resistance involved in a daily struggle with the regime in Washington - a cabal that threatens democracy itself.  There are movements fighting against all forms of intolerance, and others struggling with the forces that are destroying the planet.  But we need the artists, the poets, playwrights the authors who highlight these issues in a form that speaks more creatively than editorial and polemic.
 
    From the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes' Lysistrata to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, theater has been a force for protest and change. Picasso’s great painting Guernica depicted the destruction of that town by Nazi bombers. The American artist Ben Shahn  painted the political outrages of his time. He also used his art as a way to bring people together. Where are the artists of our time who provide the images we need?


    Sometimes satire and caricature perform that function. A mental scan of of history brings us back to Greece, to the fifth century B.C.E., and the comic playwright Aristophanes, whose masterpiece Lysistrata uses the comic stratagem of women refusing sex to their soldier husbands to create a peaceful truce between the Athenians and Spartans. (That this play could be produced during the Pelopennesian war is some tribute to a culture that gave neither power nor place to women, and whose empirium was as dear to Athens as empire is to any modern colonial power.)

We now have the satire of the late night shows, with their nightly piercing of all the hot air balloons floating from the White House. 
But we need something beyond monologues - something to hold onto. I think of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, satirizing the  worship of nuclear power in 1964.  And I remember reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, a brilliant anti-war novel.

    I think of John Steinback’s  The Grapes of Wrath which drama-tized the plight of the people who were forced to leave family farms during the depression, where drought had turned productive land into a dust bowl. Steinbeck wrote the story of how they became migrant workers living in tents and desperate for work. 

Cover by Ben Shahn

And then there is Picasso’s Guernica, which is often considered the greatest work of political art in the twentieth century. 
The painting was commissioned by a revolutionary body that understood the power of uniting a great artist with a popular cause: Picasso's Guernica  was the response to a delegation from the Spanish Republican government, who asked Picasso to paint a mural for the Spanish Republican Pavilion built for the 1937 World's Fair.  
At first Picasso was going to choose a nonpolitical theme, but the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by the German Air Force occurred shortly after  the request, and that aerial terror catalyzed his imagination. The painting is neither narrative nor a blasted landscape. It is unreadable accept symbolically, but the images and the terror speak to us in the modern idiom Picasso painted. 
                          

    And there is Ben Shahn, whose paintings were both calls to action and graphic images of injustice and suffering. From the Sacco & Vanzetti case, where two men with radical political beliefs were tried and executed for a murder they didn’t commit, to the suffering of Japanese fishermen who died from radiation poisoning, Ben Shahn was our graphic conscience. 

The poetry of protest has been a powerful force - and it need not be written by « professional » poets. Visions of War, Dreams of Peace is an anthology of poems written by military nurses who served in Vietnam, a book created to raise funds for a Women’s Vietnam Memorial. « Dusty » was the pseudonym of one of the poets, who suffered from PTSD when that acronym did not yet exist.  
    
Like Emily Dickinson
tucking tight little poems
into the corners and crannies
 of her father’s home
 I tuck their names
 into the crevices
 of my crenellated heart.  

    Rupert Garcia also served in Vietnam. He came home and attended San Francisco State University, receiving the first of three degrees in art, and many awards.  He joined with other Chicano and Latino artists, bringing their experiences into the art world. They were also involved in protesting the disproportionate number of minorities who served in Vietnam.  Garcia, inspired by German Expressionist art of WW I,  created both triptychs and diptychs on the theme of war, especially Fenix , which includes the death symbol of modern wars - the « chopper ». 

       
     Dana Schutz  is a contemporary artist whose imagery has been controversial. A large painting of Emmet Till in his coffin was derided by many, who questioned this provocation from a white woman -  but in this time of police shootings and Black Lives Matter, she evokes one of the tragedies that inspired a nation's sympathy with the Civil Rights movement. 
    Schutz's large bold, brightly colored Cubist/Expressionist canvases attempt to evoke the zeitgeist of the time. The paintings display us in our narcissism and despair, and though they are not narrative, not inherently political, they speak directly to what America has become since the last election. Schutz wrote:
  “I want to make a painting about shame. Public shaming has become an element in contemporary life. You can take a picture of someone and post it online, and thousands of people see it. We’re so ashamed, about so many things, and I think for a candidate to be without shame, like Trump, is really powerful. His lack of shame becomes our shame.”
                                     

Shame

    Finally, there are the remarkable prints created by Pipelines and Borderlines  https://www.pipelinesandborderlines.org/ It is a non-profit organization that educates the public about the consequences of consumption and production of unsustainable energy."  The group consists of artists from North and South America who create traveling exhibits of  fine art - hand pulled prints that are profound visions of what we are facing.
                                               

Heart of the Monster, Ed 2017

      More art please! More images that inspire and move us, that we can rally around. Let art, in all its many forms, be the partner of Resistance.

                          

 

 

 









                                 

Summoning Ghosts: The Art of Hung Liu

Oakland Museum of California  March 16 - June 30

September 2001, Oakland Museum of California

                                                          
 "I feel like I'm using my painting as a memorial garden."
         
         I started to write “The theme of Hung Liu’s work is...” - when I realized that the word “theme” is totally inadequate. It reminds me of essays for English classes, not the lifelong work of a woman whose goal is the resurrection of the dispossessed.
         So many of the peoples of the world experience deprivation and exile. The artist or writer may reinstate them in their old world, describe their suffering, or reshape their identity. It’s one part excavation, one part re-creation. 
      
        Though she left China and came to study and live in California  in 1982, most of Hung Liu’s dispossessed are, not surprisingly, Chinese. She researched archives to find photos of those who are not even a footnote to history.  Peasant laborers (without the smiles of socialist realism), women soldiers (without the muscles and heroic stance of Maoist art), the poor, the grieving elderly, the 'comfort women' used by Japanese troops during WW II, prostitutes, the exiled, war refugees. 
                       
       “In terms of true inspiration you need to discover, to excavate, to peel off the layers and try to find out what was there that got lost, for there is always something missing.”
   Summoning Ghosts: the Art of Hung Liu, University of California Press, 2012, P. 101
 
         Hung Liu found photos of young prostitutes. Those photos of anonymous teen-age girls were used as advertisements during the end of the last dynasty. She rescues them from obscurity by painting their portraits with great affinity and affection, and lends them a friendly cow, her symbol of humanity, for companionship.
       

The Cow and the Girls, 2007 Artnet

        Millions of Chinese were displaced by war and government policy during the twentieth century, and Hung Liu's work focuses, as always, on the human element. I found the painting By the Rivers of Babylon, a portrait of an exiled family, particularly moving. I’ve known the psalm that begins with those words since I was a child:
    “If I forget you, O Jerusalem , let my right hand wither; Let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you,
     if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even at my happiest hour.”

       There are so many Jerusalems! So many who have fled ancestral lands, been forced out of homes.

By the Rivers of Babylon, 2000, Artnet

         Hung Liu’s work, however painful her choice of subjects, is beautiful and lush. The painted surface is as multi-layered as life itself,  and the measured, deliberate dripping of paint adds another dimension, another texture. Look closely at By the Rivers of Babylon. Children are eating from colorful Ming dynasty bowls! 


       That imaginal juxtaposition appears in so many of her paintings. A young girl, bent over with heavy burdens, is surrounded by doves, fantastic bird wings, and painted Buddhas. Cranes and blossoms and butterflies surround whores and wounded warriors. It is not prettifying, but a loving adornment of the dispossessed. She holds the opposites: the heron in elegant plumage or the inevitable blossoms of  Chinese art - juxtaposed with poverty and displacement. 
    
        I was so moved by a series of simple paintings. I wish I had photos for you. Each day the artist painted some object in her mother’s home during the 49 days of mourning after the elderly woman's death. She painted useful objects, like the kitchen tools her mother used every day, each object made eloquent. Hung Liu is a woman who understands the need for ceremony, but she invents rituals for her own soul’s particular journey. 

         And then come the paintings of a flame, one after another. The spirit kept alive. The soul guided by light on its journey. An ancient impulse to light a candle to accompany grief.  One painting, one candle, after another.
    





                                 

Myanmar: Version One

Leg-rowing fisherman on Inle Lake (Leah Shelleda)

      What strange people we are! Absorbed with the latest technology, then flying off great distances to see folks living traditional lives.

      I have yearned for ancient ways and lives that are sustained not by wealth and toys, but a love for the earth. This yearning has been tempered by all the subsistence-based villages I have visited or lived in, where people have barely enough to eat and suffer from ill-health.
       

Photo by Bill Fulton

     But the village in Mon State was different. It was along the Thanlwin (not a typo) river, and we reached it by boat. The wood and bamboo houses had strong roofs to protect against sun and monsoon, and were well-maintained. 

(Paste made from the Thanaka tree is used to decorate faces)  

The market was filled with the many fruits and vegetables they grow plus several varieties of rice and fish. The children were bright eyed and healthy and the women didn't look look 20 years older than their age.                         

The reason? A surplus, which provided for a full-time school, medicine and a few trucks. The source? A "sawmill" for cabinet and boat builders who used traditional techniques, and relied on a variety of different tree species to make a beautiful product. The "sawmill" consisted of a  belt-driven circular saw we estimated to be 50 years old, and an ingenious system of pulleys. I doubt that they were paid sufficiently for their labor, the people were still relatively poor by Western standards, but the village was self -sufficient and thriving, and impacted lightly on the surrounding environment.                                                                     

Photo by Bill Fulton

         We thought a lot about choice on this trip. What if the children in the village wanted to be doctors or teachers in their kleptocracy of a country?  Would any ever have the opportunity to travel, as we do? Surely you couldn't blame any young person in Myanmar for wanting to leave the country and join the the well fed and stylish world they see on TV. All they want is opportunity.  

      Let me tell you about Poppie, who we met in Kiang Tong. He had studied physics, loved science, but where was there a lab for him to do research, or a teaching position? 

Photo by Bill Fulton

He supports his family selling ice cream in summer and working in the tourist industry in the winter. He has wonderful enthusiasm and what we came to call RBS - Remarkable Burmese Sweetness. Poppie took tourists to see the Akha tribeswomen in their extraordinary silver clad bonnets or trekking to the longhouse of the Loi people.Younger women were beginning to dress in tee shirt or blouse and longyi (sarong) like most Burmese, and what would happen to his business if tourists couldn't photograph colorful villagers? And then there was the shivering and sweating of his chronic malaria, the expensive drugs, and a government totally unconcerned with providing cheap mosquito netting, at least for the little ones.

    Is choice a developed world luxury we  overestimate? Are we lulled into a pleasurable stupor by the innumerable brands available to us, equating freedom with all we can buy? 

 

Thanks to Canal One - "Too Many Logos"

    There are different kinds of hunger. In the 1970s emigration was allowed from the Soviet Union, and many came to the Bay Area where I live. We talked about the 'babushka ladies' who came to the supermarkets and slowly walked the aisles just looking - women who had once waited in line outside a store that was rumored to have bread or beets that day.  

Thanks to geardiary.com

And here was abundance: bins of fresh vegetables even in winter, whole aisles of every variety of bread, cracker or cookies, steaks and chops and poultry piled in freezers.                    
 
      Were the women walking those aisles with the wonder that Bill and I experienced in the Shwedagon, the main temple of Yangon? Our hunger for ancient beauty and spirit was fulfilled as we walked through the temple. We realized that families and friends gathered on the vast marble promenade as though it was a park or a public square, or the marketplace. It is not a place of hushed reverence. Laughter was as present as chanting,  and as frequent as prayer. The glorious temple was a staple of their lives.

Photo by Bill Fulton

         I've been thinking of all those who have come to the U.S. 
        and Europe to feed their families, and of all the Americans 
             and Europeans who travel to South East Asia, flying
                     thousands of miles to feed their souls.
                                     
   



  
      






 




        

   

     

The Plane Tree & the Woman Born of a Doe

Plane Tree in Winter  Bill Fulton Photos

       Every year the Plane tree across the street re-leafs later. It's May and there is just a bare hint of that new early chartreuse. Every year I ask myself "What if there were no new leaves, if the tree couldn’t do the labor of creating buds any longer?" I love the Plane tree's canopy. It spreads across the street where I have lived for 20 years, and gives such an abundance of green. It reminds me of the street where I grew up in Detroit, the elms forming a long meet-in-the-middle tunnel the length of the block.  Here in California lush greenness is spring-brief, then the rains stop and the hills slowly turn brown.

       Yesterday a neighbor said Peter-the-Tree-Man wants to take the tree out, it’s sick, it’s old, it’s dying - and I am close to tears. The neighbor says “So things die, trees die, they’ll plant another one”, and I give him my try-smile, say “See you later” and walk away.  I’ve learned that trying to get this neighbor, who loves all art that tribes create, to care deeply for these plane trees, or take in what they mean to me, is a poor use of my time.  

     Bill & I have dealt with diseased plants. We were able to save our pear tree. When the blackened leaves that give the disease its name, ‘fire-blight’, appeared, we knew we would not give the tree up easily, and we treated and pruned and special-fed - and yes, talked to it (sang actually) and it lived. It seems to be hard for me to remember that plants, as living things, have life cycles and illness - they are not forever, as art can be, though even art is subject to decay. A few years ago, at the temples of Angkor Wat I wrote:
                                     

Tree Growing out of  Temple  Bill Fulton Photos

 The silent struggle of rock and root.
Huge trees growing out of temple stones.
What doesn’t grow cannot free itself.
What cannot die will outlast roots.

     And speaking of art, I’ve been working on a poem based on Kiki Smith’s art. Again. I hadn’t looked at the book of her work for a while and felt that it still held another poem. Ah the bronze of those sculptures, the endurance of metal. One sculpture is a woman stepping out of the body of a wolf,  the other is a woman born of a doe, her feet still held in the deer's birth passage.

Kiki Smith, Rapture, property of the artist/Pace Wildenstein Gallery

 

Kiki Smith, 2002,  Born, Sarah Norton Goodyear Fund

They are preserved for as long as what-cannot-die doesn’t succomb to rust. Perhaps that is a part of my love of art - its endurance. The ability to conserve, to preserve, to restore, to renovate. Unlike the tree, there is no given limit to its time. But then I look again, and I see that the woman stepping out of the wolf is just on the brink, but can never be fully free, and a woman has been born of a doe, but that silent, fleet beauty will hold her feet forever.

      The visual arts are caught at the moment, in the metaphor, as a symbol. The beautiful butterfly Smith has created in one sculpture will remain - but the butterfly's power for us includes the stages it went through on the way to becoming. And of course all art is not beautiful. I am reading David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land. It is an anguished tale that gathers you into itself and takes you on a journey that is fraught, and one doubts the possibility of redemption before the journey ends - and should the journey/book even be completed?


     I cannot abandon the natural world for art, though I know many have done it, and I taught alongside them.  I cannot abandon art, cannot stop reading what I need to know, because it may cause anguish. I must live in both worlds, and suffer the pain I will feel when Peter tears down that tree limb from limb. When I’m walking I will not see that canopy from a distance, not see the winter sunset between its bare branches, when the sky is stained glass and the tree is the black leading.

    Just as I must both suffer what is happening to the earth and still enjoy the beauty of the planet. I must hold the opposites.  Over and over life gives me more possibilities to learn that. To practice it. Who knows what the next challenge will be.

  Metamorph  ising


                           for the artist Kiki Smith


Metamorphosis means more than once
as it is with egg  larva  pupa  butterfly
as it is with some lives when larval stripes
and slow ripple are shed again and again
then comes the mimicry of dead leaf
till finally chrysalis splits  and out flutters
wet-winged splendor

I saw a woman born of a doe
I saw a woman step out of the body of a wolf
There is return

Gaia I know you are wounded
it is hard for you to breathe
I dreamed you shed your scarred
strip mined surface
and underneath was skin
the pink of healing

Now you must rest
and all of us   wolf  doe
woman  man  become pupa 
In our silk cocoons
we wait
suspended
                                               
    
                                                                                      
               
                                            

Lynn & Leah: A Dialogue in Art & Poetry

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images

        I had the pleasure last month of spending an afternoon in the gallery of Lynn Alicia Franco's home, among her multimedia sculptures.  I wrote about her art, which had captured the heart of my sometimes finicky muse. We decided that I would do a blog of her art and my poems. 
              Lynn Alicia is a Jungian psychoanalyst, and besides her private analytic practice, 
              she teaches, supervises and consults for The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley, 
              and for candidates and interns at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.                                                                       


                Alchemerical

Bill Fulton Photos

What if you could sculpt whatever you dreamed?                        
What if your voice spoke in clay
the way some speak in numbers  
the way I siphon ink from tears and the sea?                                
What if all that you dreamed
couldn’t be shaped in clay 
couldn’t be fired?
What if it needed grain
needed the density of a growing thing?
What if you could also carve wood  
and join wood to clay 
as earth is joined to tree   
and still keep the fire?
        

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Image

                A Good Catch

     Of course you sculpted the pelican
     with a fish in its mouth
     golden fish   treasurefish
     Of course I must write
     about hunger
     about the skimming flight   the dive
     the misses  
     
     His fishline arcs  goes taut  
           tight pull of lifestruggle
                golden fish   treasurefish
                     bringing it home
               

           
                                     
                                           

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images


                   
                



            

                                  
                     Cloth-in-Clay

             You travel among tribes
             where weavers star
             in the play of identity
             and O those intricate designs!
             You sculpt a man with a ceramic belt
             patterned in a hieroglyph of clay bits
             Is this a code? Is there a key
             to your language?

   
  
 Naked  not nude 
 
    What is the difference?
         A man paints  sculpts   gazes
               at nudes
             A woman makes herself
                   naked
                 To make a self
                    And here you are
                      a bare Medusa-headed
                         surf rider on a drift of wood
                            with seashell pink
                                 ceramic wings 
                                    Or are they fins?
                                         Either way
                                               you fly!                             
                                    

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images

                                                                                      
                                                                                             
                                                                                    

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Image

A Pair of Ravens
Medievals believed 
the pelican                         
pecked her own breast
to feed her children
Bird as symbol   bird as Christ
Here one raven pecks 
the chest of another 
till the heart is exposed
And we humans know who does that
don't we?

                                                        

John Lund  photo ©2009 JLW Images

                                                 Death & the BuddhaBabe

                                                           The clay hand
                                                       large enough to hold
                                                      a cracked human skull
                                                         has soiled knuckles
                                                             dirt under nails
                                                            as if it dug   hard
                                                              and gloveless
                                                             into the grave
                                                                  Facing
                                                             hand and skull
                                                              a roselipped
                                                                blue-eyed
                                                               BuddhaBabe
                                                             and on his cheek
                                                                a crystal tear

                                                            Oh  I almost forgot
                                                          the BuddhaBabe’s arms
                                                            are raised in surrender                               

Bill Fulton Photos

          Arcadia

Part goat  part man
Lynn’s Pan                 
relaxes on the mantle                                                   
one leg crossed over the other
shaggychested  shaggyhoofed
and yes the lower arms  the hands
are hairy   but what about the….
I get up and
look between his legs
and he’s all man
Pan  pandemonium  panic
I  call it
wildhearted glee