Not Research, But MeSearch

        I am on Level D in U. C. Berkeley’s main library. This is where the art books are kept. I reach into the backpack I use for book runs, but the notebook with the title and call number of the book I want isn’t there. I’ve left it at home in my purse.  OK, I’ll look it up on Oskicat, the online resource.  But what’s the artist’s name? I can’t remember. One of my favorite living artists, gone!  Now what? Do a search under contemporary German artists? Ah, at least I remember where he’s from. But that search might take forever. The name Hundertwasser keeps repeating in my head but it’s not him. My artist is alive and German, and Hunderwasser is Austrian and dead. Then suddenly it comes to me - Anselm Kiefer!! Yes! Except that I’ve just said Yes! out loud in a study area and 5 students look up at the crazy lady. I pantomine an apology that may or may not translate across cultures.

     I start a title search, don’t rem -ember the title, change to an author search, and start down the long list of books by and about this prolific artist, till I recognize the one I want. But I don’t have a pen to write down the long call number. I will have to ask the least forbidding, least intently focused of the students to borrow pen or pencil. The one
I choose looks at me as though I’d asked for her colorful earflap hat, or her laptop - or something antique, like a quill. She finally fishes a pen out of her backpack. I realize I don’t have any paper either, and I can’t bring myself to ask for anything else. Ah, but I do have gum! I can take out a piece, and write on the white side of the wrapper. I do that, return the pen, and find the book, blessing John Dewey and a lifetime of libraries for making this part easy. I take the elevator back up to the exit level. I did remember to bring my library card. I can check out my book. Victory is mine.

              
 
            

Collaboration, Occupation & The RSVP Cycle

           Finally finished! The art Bill and I collaborated on for 5 months is now up on the wall. His art, my poetry, and artistic decisions made by both. Though we each create independently, we learned so much from collaboration, that we couldn't working on our own,  How to blend, without diluting. How to speak up for what doesn't work in a loving, non-alienating way. How to assist and take direction from each other. How to work with new processes (beeswax!) in a really patient way that respects that one of us is faster than the other. How we are both gentled and transformed by the process.
    
     It is almost too obvious to write of our highly competitive global economy, and how that com- petitive spirit trickles down to our relations with one another: Who has the best and latest? How even an art form as remote from popular culture as poetry can become a competition for prizes and positions - trophies on a mantle, as one poet wrote.

           I’m very interested in collaborative models, and  I turned to one called the RSVP Cycle, created by Lawrence Halperin in the 1960s. I have written about the Halperins before - Lawrence, the legendary landscape architect,  and his wife and collaborator Anna, my 91 year old equally legendary dance teacher.        

       The RSVP cycle was a way to make the process of design and the choreography of a performance less autocratic, and more inclusive of those involved - the clients, community and dancers. I think it is adaptable to many other activities as well.
                                                                               
      R is for resources, “both human and material.” The question is what’s available? For example, what is available to the Occupy movement? Computers, internet, Twitter, cell phones, open space, human ingenuity, and common concerns. If you can’t use amplifiers, the combined force of the human voice repeating the words of the speakers creates community as well as amplification. The intangible must be continually addressed:  What are the objectives?          

Larry Halperin at his completed Levi Plaza in San Francisco

    
       S is for Score, and the focus is on “design, participation, events and activities.” As a choreographer, Anna tells her dancers what she wants them to achieve; the vision she has - but not how to achieve it. The dance itself arises from the internal and group process of the dancers. Adbusters, the Canadian group that first put out a call for activity like the Occupation, did not specify content or process. The Assembly of the Occupation, which meets daily, decides issues.
                                              
      V is for Valuaction. People’s feelings and belief systems must be incorporated into the process. The needs and desires of the clients,  community or dancers, must be part of the process and the decision making process itself, must “respect, acknowledge, and incorporate these values”. We can see this operating in the Occupy movement.            
                           
    P is for Performance. The result of R, S & V is the product, and how it evolves over time. If we think of the cycle as a problem to be solved, the solution should be organic and “non-static,” and defined by those who use it, experience it, and appreciate it.
                       
    Despite the highly competitive global economy, I pray for more and more collaboration on so many levels - it is our key to survival on this planet.

   All quotations from the web site Bridge Over the Abyss
   http://redseven.wordpress.com/rsvp-cycles-lawrence-halprin/

Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead

                                                             
       I just finished putting up our Day of the Dead altar. Candles, marigolds, a sugar skull wearing a mariachi’s sombrero, and traditional Mexican figurines - skeletons dancing, teaching, sitting in a booth at a restaurant, death in normal places, because in Mexico death is normal, not something to fear.

     The photos are up: parents, grandparents, the recent dead, like our dear friend Aldo who could go nowhere without music. For a week after he died, both Bill and I kept hearing his favorites. The sound so filled the house that when a group of women arrived I actually warned them that the house was haunted by music. There is a group photo on the altar of that extraordinarily lively bunch, my father’s family. Though I haven’t seen many in decades, they are instantly present - and thoroughly themselves. I miss them and mourn them.

     You know I’m not Mexican, so why do I have an altar?  Is it mimicry, Latina-wanna-be, the spread of Day of the Dead ceremonies throughout Northern California? It began in Mexico
in 1963, in late October -

     My friends at the national university (UNAM) tell me it is time to purchase calaveras de sucre, sugar skulls, for those I'm close to,  with their names written in frosting. They are in the windows of every bakery. Julio and Rosana tell me we will be going to the island of Janitzio in the state of Michoacan for Día de los Muertos. Then I might really begin to understand their country.

    We take a second class bus to Patzcuaro, and a boat to the island. The sun is setting. The silvery lake turns orange, the color of this holy day. A parade of torch-lit fishing canoes passes us. The fisherman are performing a ritual of gratitude, and we watch a ballet of butterfly shaped nets.

     After Mass, a crowd of the P’urhépechas, as the people call themselves, emerges from the church, and immediately a group of men grab sticks from a pile, use them as canes, and begin the Danza de los Viejecitos, the little old men. They are very convincing, and very funny, and my friends tell me this was a Pre-Columbian dance to the sun god. I don't ask them why this particular dance was used to honor the sun god, and I still don't know the answer.

      And then the procession begins. Men, women and children are carrying torches, candles and tall wooden arches covered with cempasuchil flowers, the orange marigolds that have been used to honor the dead for milennia. The color symbolizes the earth, and it is these flowers that will guide the spirits to both the home altar, and the one they are now creating on the graves of their ancestors.
                                                                                               
     Baskets of fruit are placed next to the grave, the wooden arches, like blossoming sculptures, are erected over it, and tall tapers placed around it. And then the chanting and singing begins - the night is all and only candleglow and sound.

    There is only this place, and those voices. It will last till dawn, and we will remain, without sleep, but not the least bit tired. And the light and song are no longer outside us, we are no longer curious observers. The ritual has entered into me, become me - and it has remained there ever since.

Tonight I will light orange tapers on my altar, and sing to my dead.                                                                            




                            








                                                                                                                                                     
 

   
   

  
    
                  

The Land of Chac Mool, the Rain God

         We have friends who travel the world looking for people who still follow the old ways, play ancient instruments, and dress in something handmaid, bright colored, patterned, beaded or embroidered. They have visited the Omo of Ethiopia who decorate their faces and bodies with minerals and plants and flowers every day, and the Tuareg of the Sahara, swathed in dyed blue cloth the color of parrots.                                       

Omo of Ethiopia

     You could call it voyeurism if they didn’t care so much about endangered cultures - which they all are. We’ve done some of that travel ourselves. I was able to go to Rajasthan because I promised my husband we would find the Rajput gypsies, whose music and dance he had fallen in love with in the film Lacho Drom. And we did.

      But after Christmas we will travel in our own hemisphere, to the places I first explored in 1963 as a student and volunteer - places where temples and pyramids, costumes, languages, song and dance are as unique, and “exotic” as anywhere I’ve been: the states of Yucatan and Chiapas in Mexico.
    
      In the fall of 1963, a friend and I traveled on third class buses, bush planes, and the “camioneta” - a  specially outfitted vehicle used by the planning dept of the museum of anthropology. We purchased embroidered ‘huipiles’ from Chamula women for their full value. We bounced down the dirt roads of Chiapas in ancient jeeps and pick-ups, and watched the Chamula men in their ribboned hats go off to town,

Chamula of Chiapa

while the women carried great loads of firewood back to the village.  We traveled with monks who had studied the Mayan codices in the Vatican library,  and were warned by Gertud Blom, the aging European “empress” of San Cristobal de las Casas, not to seduce them - her way of insulting our American youthfulness.
We saw the ruins of temples adjacent to waterfalls, and realized that acres of surrounding hills were unexcavated ruins. We were volunteers, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the forest people to stop getting their water from the rivers infested with onchocerca volvulus, a nematode that causes blindness. We were unsuccessful because they laughed at our “scientific method”, which was  culturally inappropriate - and I still feel guilty about it.

     I couldn’t learn enough about the Yucatec Maya - their hieroglyphics, now deciphered, their architecture, art, religion - and their calendar, whose wrongful interpretation by Westerners has led to the belief in a 2012 apocalypse. The Mayans were one of the subjects of my graduate oral exams    - though a great deal of what I learned has been refuted, but I’ve managed to keep up.

Maya of Yucatan

      I so look forward to introducing Bill to “my” Mayan world  - and to explore with him. I hope to take the boat trip on the Usamacinta river to the ruins of Yaxchilan, which I did not see in 1963, and has been calling to me since. I don’t know what it is about that river and those ruins that I have to go to, but I will find out.

     Meanwhile, let me introduce you to a poem by a Quiché Mayan poet from Guatemala, Humberto Ak'abal.

The Grandmother

The night begins,


when the moon

—Grandmother of the villages—


comes out with her lime-white candle


to light up the silence.



The darkness


hides in the canyons,

the small birds


roll up their songs

and the trees


lie on their own shadows.

The grandmother


who hasn’t slept for centuries


sinks


into the eyes of the night.


Apple Strudel, Neuroscience and The Old One

        I have few beloved memories from childhood. One that persists takes place at my grandmother’s dining room table. The table is massive, one of those old world mahogany tables with carved legs.   My grandmother, my mother and two of my aunts are standing at each side of the table, like points on a compass. There is a slab of dough in the center, and they are very cautiously pulling and stretching it into a rectangle. They are making strudel the old way. It cannot be rolled, and they believe if they tear the dough it will be ruined. 

     There are ceramic mixing bowls filled with apple slices sprinkled with lemon, so they won’t turn brown.There is another bowl with a mixture of sugar and cinnamon to sprinkle over the fruit. I am kneeling on a chair with a handful of raisins, and it will be my job to scatter raisins over the apples. I am watching very intently, so I’ll know how to take my place at the table when I grow up.

                                                             

    But which aunt is the fourth woman? I cannot picture her. When I think back to that time I am unsure that the four women could ever have been at my grandmother’s at the same time. One never  came,as far as I remember, and the other - how could those long, perfectly painted and pointed nails stretch dough?  But I can still feel the raisins in my very young hand. It must be a real memory, I tell myself,  I have never looked up the recipe for strudel, (at least I don’t think I have), so how would I know it had to be stretched?                       

       Neuroscience says that the mental images for memory and imagination arise from the same place in our brain. If that is true, than memory is even less trustworthy than we think. Cognitive psychologists add that we don’t remember an actual event - just our last remembering.  New memories are just a reiteration of the old ones - not the original event. Am I just remembering a fantasy?
    
      And then there are mirror neurons. These are special neurons that are activated when we watch someone doing a task, as well as when we are doing it ourselves. Allegedly,  this is how we learn, even as infants - a mother can stick out her tongue to the baby, and the baby will imitate her.  My hands know the right way to stretch dough, and could I know how to do it if I hadn’t seen it?

       I loved to watch my mother bake - watch her stir, beat, whip, pour batter evenly into two cake tins. Those motions came naturally and easily when I began cooking years after I left her kitchen. Was that the result of mirror neurons?
   
      There are some memories that I cannot doubt.  The memories of what my family went through when they learned of the Holocaust, and found out who was missing, still run deep in me. In the poem below, I added imagination to the laments and stories, and I included material from a dream - a dream that contained a fable (My Muse says it was actually she who provided the entire poem, and I wouldn’t dare contradict her.)
                   
           The Old One

When Russia was invaded the Old One wept every night
She looked at her husband and said the name of someone
from the village they had left   and they remembered:
He with the ridiculous hat
She with the crooked wig

Her kitchen became that village in Russia
and everyone in it     the butcher  the egg man
the Rabbi’s red-haired wife   sat down at her table
The Old One brought out the precious porcelain
the good silver    delicacies baked only for holidays 
strudel  honey cake   the angel that rises on egg white wings
served on ordinary Mondays or Tuesdays   
and the stories    the cackling  
the interruptions    to get it right
and the fear    the palpable fear
that the stories  were already
over

"Portrait of the Crone at her Food Processor"

Collages by Bill Fulton

       It is 5:20 on a Friday afternoon. I have been out on my deck all afternoon  writing false starts. No real inspiration - the only thing that has arrived are a couple of squirrels, a raucous jay and my cat who gets into a chorus with the squirrels - they chatter and she hisses. I feel like joining them. I could be the third line in an interspecies fugue.

     We have to leave for dinner at 6. I need to  get organized, get dressed - and a First Line arrives from the Muse.  I type it, and she sends more, this feels Right, I can’t just stop, could She/I (not to mention the jay, the squirrels and the cat) hold on to the The Rest till tomorrow? I could Get Back To It when we return this evening, or, maybe I could cancel our plans?

     It is now 5:40, and I’m getting dressed, running the lines through my head, so I won’t Lose Anything Important...maybe I could take out my Little Notebook and write during dinner. I picture myself in the restaurant writing with my right hand and dropping salad on myself with the left. I could bring an apron. Wear old clothes….

     Welcome to my world. The song says “When you’re hot, you’re hot, and when you’re not, you’re not”, but I like to believe I can summon the Muse. She laughs and prefers the word “prepare”, as one would for a religious service, or important guests, the newlyweds William and Kate, for example, or a Nobel Laureate. The house has to be orderly - not perfectly clean, she shares my impressionistic, astigmatic view of the world - but orderly. Everything put away. My desk has to be cleared off, though I haven’t written on it since I bought it.

     She also likes a little chocolate. For a while she wouldn’t appear for anything less than 70%, Dark and Imported. Now it’s chocolate blueberries, available at one place only, which is miles from my house. My muse is happiest Out of Doors, next to a river in a rain forest

Photo by Bill Fulton

                                                           
near exotic ruins, within sight of a mountain range, somewhere that costs a lot of money to get to. Fortunately, she is willing to appear on my deck.. She once haughtily informed me that she wouldn’t be caught dead performing in a café on a laptop with “dingy people” (her words), unless it overlooked the sea.    

Photo by Bill Fulton

                              

     The Muse. I have been known to name everything - animals, cars, the dishwasher - but she has never announced or accepted a name. When I once referred to her as Sophia, Wisdom, she told me to get over myself. She believes that her origins are in the Ancient World, but where exactly, I don’t know.

      She adores mythology, from any culture, and prefers to mask and cloak the uncomfortable realities of my life with a convenient archetype or deity. Take aging. I’m at the point in life where it is better to hide the week before Thanksgiving and avoid the country, so my emerging turkey neck won’t tempt a hunter. My muse has turned eagerly to the Crone to handle this phase. Not the fearful, wart-faced tempter of Snow White, with her poisoned apples, but the wizened, liberated Old Woman of the Crossroads.

The muse can be very generous to me. No cauldrons or broomsticks for this crone -
she’s willing to provide me with modern conveniences, as she does in

     Portrait of the Crone at her Food Processor  

Old wood stove under her skirt    
she still flirts   to sweeten the pot
the base of her broth is calcified bone
knowledge levels a quarter cup of fear
she slices decades of laughter
adds centuries of sorrow      
finally dices the old secrets
Only the moon knows her true name  
only the moon will remember

"Portrait of a Woman Weeping"

             Picasso. Revisited. An exhibit at the De Young. Another exhibit at SFMOMA  features his work. Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris have edited and translated his journals into poems. (Pablo Picasso: The Burial of the Count of Orgaz & other poems, Exact Change, 2004). I order the book, curious and wanting a new inspiration for my own work by the artist I have returned to again and again.  “Poetry Unhinged” Michel Leiris calls it in his Afterword, “closer to Dadaist nihilism than to surrealism”. Was that Picasso’s desire, to destroy meaning? We know how he broke from the past, but nihilism? I won’t continue without giving you a sample, and I’ll choose at random:
        the slender sojourn of the secret price of pain simmers on the
        low fire of memory where the onion plays the star it
        detaches itself from its lines having read and reread the past
        but at the crack of the riding-whip caught straight in the eyes (p.98)
“the secret price of pain simmers on the low fire of memory” is a wonderful image, but my brain, which looks for continuity, for meaning, for revelation or narrative, gives up, as though I have entered a dense labyrinth with no center, no way in - but there is always a hint of minotaur, for he wrote during the same period
    “If all the roads I have been down were marked on a map and joined
     up with a line, would it not represent a Minotaur?”  
                               (Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musee National Picasso, Paris
                                Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. P. 141)

Minotaur and His Wife

       The minotaur, half bull/half man, at the center of the labyrinth, the garden. What, I ask myself, if there was no censor, no conscious linear narrative, between oneself and the maze of images, feelings, and archetypes that make up what is usually hidden, would that explain the fecundity and astonishing flow of his imagery? Another random selection:
     entangled in the rainbow of their feather oxen plowing up the
     flames of crystal of the howling that perfumes the angles and
     the curves snared by the web of nails and begging help……..(P. 206)
The selection covers a page, and these pages were written daily - a kaleidoscope, a display of fireworks, or simply an inventory, or what comes in with the tide. Imagine a basin that is never empty, but the source is unknown.
      Years ago I concentrated on Picasso’s experience during the war years in order to understand the relationship between art and terror, which is so strong in the 20th century. The ‘macho’, the womanizer accused of sadism, of feelings of omnipotence, the toreador lover, and endless innovator experienced terror during the Spanish Civil and World War II, a terror he was ashamed of. Here is a selection from his journal:
        "....sky....fear and anguish...what horror what distress and what cold
    in the bones and what unpleasant odor ....wing.... ...desperate cry...
    girl dead of fear....black liquid [rains]...the dead fall drop by drop....
    clouds shit...horror and despair....wing[ed tank stuck in the blue sky...
    the nest of vipers...the desperate cries of birds...the infinite center of
    void on the skin torn off the house.... 
                          (Picasso and the War Years: 1937-1945, Ed Steven A. Nash, 
                          Thames and Hudson, 1998, P. 57))
The savagery of the war resulted in paintings of literal butchery:

Sheep's Skull

     The Spanish painter Zubaran painted racks of lamb, and the skull was a frequent subject of Spanish and medieval painting in general, as a symbol of vanity or the brevity of life. But Picasso’s skulls still had their meat on them. His overburdened psyche found release in art, and despite the Occupation, and the warnings and threats he received, he continued to paint what he felt.
     In 1942 the wartide was turning. America had entered the war, the allies had invaded North Africa, and the Nazis were facing defeat in Russia. Picasso began the drawing for Man with a Lamb, and you probably have seen the result, the bronze which currently is on exhibit at the De Young:

                Lamb of God? Good Shepherd? Abraham’s sacrifice? Picasso would only say “there's nothing religious about it at all. There's no symbolism in it" and that he just wanted "a human feeling, a feeling that has always existed." (Ibid, P. 112) The sculpture remained in his studio for the rest of the war, and if postwar visitors wanted a photo, Picasso posed next to the sculpture. I think this was a victory - over the panic-stricken, butchered imagery that had taken him over, and he took pride in this victory. He had overcome hell and returned to the simple humanity of everyday life.  “Dadaist nihilism”? I don’t think so. The urge to annihilate, in the man, in the world, was overcome.  
At least in that instance. In that world. At that time.  


Portrait of a Woman Weeping  

That ridiculous hat
her face made up 
in prisms of comic book color
those petrified animal eyes
The face of  Europe
breaking and weeping -
The woman    Dora Maar
the cruel brushstrokes of her lover
her crystalline surface   shattered
What man can watch a woman weeping
without seeing his own death?