Helen

I spent last night laughing out loud with my sister about the holes in the kitchen wall of the house where they all lived years before I was born. My sisters, early acclimated to tornado weather and our parents’ fights, used to pretend that the two, fingertip sized holes were made by an outlaw’s bullets—shots gone astray when the saloon girl grabbed the gunman’s arm as he swung his six shooter up from his hip, aimed right at the head of her true love, the intrepidly handsome gambler.  In actuality, those little beady eyes of vandalism had been made by a kitchen fork, the two pronged, sharp as an ice pick kind that my mother had intended for my father’s heart.

I’ve seen my father duck at the last minute. He was agile and still enjoyed a good goad long after the affair with the fork was history.

“A towel?” he roared in laughter when once she threw a damp cup towel across the kitchen, “Is that the best you can do? Oooooh, my knees are a’knockin’ now!” And so she threw a baking dish at him. Corning Ware does, in fact, break, though it cries out its end with more of a clang than a shatter.

As the ringing of breakage subsided, we discovered that she also had a pot lid—more clanging, that—she had a phone book, she had a can of spray paint for some oddball reason, she had an electric mixer, and, finally, a can of creamed corn, which just grazed the bobbing top of his bald head and left a bloody skid mark. I won’t say what came next, but it all ended with a typical Kraft spaghetti dinner and a puzzle on the table afterward. Storm rolled in, storm rolled on and now we laugh about Helen's stories, like one about the three months that we ate nothing but grits because she had a food compulsion and couldn’t have other edibles in the house.

 Or the time, many, many years later, when, after weeks of begging her second husband to get rid of a raggedy fishing shirt given to him by his first wife, she set it on blazing, lighter fluid fueled fire, “Wear the piece of shit now, you old sonofabitch.“

Or the time she drove her huge boat of an Oldsmobile down the wrong side of I-35 for ten miles because, “No one in their right mind would go all the way down to the exit! I only wanna go right there. I can see it from here, and the cars coming this way can dadgumwell see me!”

Once, when I was small and she thought I was too sick to take care of at home, she bundled me up, took me to the emergency room and told them I was having seizures. I wasn’t, but when I said this to her, quietly, secretively because I knew not to contradict her in front of anyone, she simply said, “Well, if you were having seizures, how would you know? You’d be out of your head. So, for all you know, you were.”

Then there was the night she poured a can of gas on our neighbor’s fruit tree because he’d asked her to move our garden hose from along the property line so he could mow. Gas is hell’s water: the tree died.

There was the time she broke into our old apartment to steal back our piano, and the time she pretended to be Navajo so we could shop at the government commissary, and the time she went out for a weekend trip and didn’t call for six weeks. Meanwhile, I was home, alone, with strict orders to ration my food and not to tell a soul.

And the year she moved and threw away every picture of any of us that had ever been taken.

Or the time she showed up at my house a week before my wedding with a car, a big car, full up to the roof with packages of toilet paper and a huge, anchorishly heavy black plastic garbage bag of pennies.  She had decided to leave her fishing shirt husband and move in with me and my intended. “I tried to bring stuff you’d appreciate. I can’t help it if this is what I thought of when I thought of living with you.”

Once, she took up a collection from the old folks at her retirement village for a hardship that was really a whim to drive back to Texas on a revoked license in a car she’d begged us to take care of and then called the police and reported stolen. She got kicked out of the retirement home, wrecked the car, and lived to pawn her diamond rings and accuse the housekeeping staff at her new retirement village of theft.

 Then there was the time she reported her home care aide to immigration and very nearly successfully had him deported even though he was from Utah.

Or the day before she died, when I got in my car, after hours of sitting with her in her room at the last stop group home, and discovered a hornet buzzing around inside with me, slamming itself in a rage against the windows. I pulled over and flung my door open, running to what I imagined a safe distance until it found the way out of its trap.

In life, there was no safe distance from this bottomless drink of radioactivity and vinegar-spiked Everclear that was the woman I would have called mother if it hadn’t felt so much more natural to simply call her by her name—she defied the boundaries of the superficial roles of life. She was all her, for her.

Last fall, I wrote a story about a woman who finds a way to murder her son-in-law by reporting a petty crime to the police as though he were a suicidal terrorist. My grad school advisor worried that the woman was too willing to hate for no reason, too disposed to behavior beyond the normal range of eccentric thought. I worry about writing so many older female characters that are simply batshit crazy. But they are mean in a funny way, from this distance.

Last night, I sat laughing with my sister because we were savoring again the shock of the first time we realized that when she did things like throwing pronged forks at our father’s heart, she meant in that moment to kill him. Her commitment to her actions was whole and in its wholeness elicits a kind of awe.

I would like to be as committed to my actions as she was to any one of the thousand inexplicable violences she perpetrated, any one of the hundreds of thousands of incidental curses she leveled. Laughing at it all is a silver net, and maybe this semester, as I grad-school my way through the year, I will find a way to write about her bad beauty. And it will be funny horror, hilarious gore, a genre for Helen.

Love & Whiplash

In 1934, the great Polish writer, Bruno Schulz—who has become a kind of art totem for me—wrote a letter to Julian Tuwim, a famous poet, thanking the man for promoting Schulz’s book, Cinnamon Shops (The Street of Crocodiles). While affectionately praising his poet benefactor, Schulz speaks candidly of the painful love one artist harbors for another:

“When you came to Drohobycz years ago, I was in the audience: I stared at you with rebellious hostility, filled with gloomy worship […] Certain of your poems drove me to despair with helpless admiration then. I ached—reading them over and over, heaving uphill that heavy boulder of admiration which, just before the top, unable to keep its grip on the steep incline of delight, came hurtling back down each time. They annihilated me, those poems, but at the same time they brought on an exhilaration, a presentiment of triumphant, superhuman powers that would one day be at the command of the happy, unshackled person.” (1)

Just last summer, I had the opportunity to attend readings by Rebecca Brown. Her openness, the wilding visions inspired by her words, seemed to offer a profoundly personal permission to create with like courage. I felt the swelling yelp of words, of pictures, of weird sculptures made from glass and wire and bear traps. All of us in that room, I thought I heard her say, were charged with the order to jump up, break the windows, smash the chairs, scratch up the floor boards and build with the bits something jagged and new and rougher enough to tell the truth. I sat rapt, brimmed with new energy for the work to come, at once vital and yet weirdly dry mouthed from the zap of understanding that I won’t ever write like that.

When I was in my early twenties, I saw an exhibition of the late works of El Greco. His eyesight failing, the old master had worked on his oversized images with his head cocked to one side to favor his better working eye, a technique that altered the frontal perspective of saints and patrons, great cities and angelic episodes, twisting everything eerily clockwise. To see the images unskewed, in emulation of the artist, the viewer was obliged to tilt, chin over, sightline right to favor the upside eye. At just the right angle, up and down balanced precisely with back and forward, the cliffside of swirling color and light snapped to its true muscular armature and all but walked off the wall, out into the comparatively flat air of Dallas in autumn.   The annunciation over, El Greco’s Mary looked down, burning with secrets, unlocked her stiff-angled limbs and climbed off the wall. She walked away, not caring a whit that I was running behind full of questions.

I admit that I was strangely depressed after that experience—in a full-hearted way that made me glad to know what was possible but certain that my own painting was useless, all original beauty having been long ago cast onto canvas—once you’ve been ignored by El Greco’s Madonna, you know that there is little left for you to do with your paints that hasn’t been already exceeded.

Familiar, then, were the feelings that emerged from listening to Rebecca Brown read. I fell in love with her words, and instantly, by implication, disenchanted with my own. This happens every time I fall in love with some new art, artist, or rumor of perfection.

In fact, reading Schulz provokes the same internal argument to abandon creative fervor as prospective projects grow pale and flimsy next to the unearthly brilliance of his prose. I snap from one state to the other—inspiration whiplash being so common to my experience that I will admit being enthused and then immediately crashing when looking at something I did myself—and I know I’ll never do again. Not that I have work to compare to Bruno Schulz, but I have written stories and painted paintings that sometimes feel like my size two jeans circa 1978, just...beyond me, from the very moment I finish them.

I am helped by looking at it as something that can be addressed by therapy. The Sisyphus in me may go on rolling his stone up and running like hell when it chases him back down, but on the way down, if I type an essay, start a story, paint a mandala, and revise some dialogue, the running doesn’t wind me nearly as much. The work is therapeutic fortifier. The stone has its gory moment, but I always catch the next infatuation with art, rise up and resume the hill.

(1) Ficowski, Jerzy. Letters and Drawings of Bruno Schulz: with Selected Prose. Trans. Walter Arndt and Victoria Nelson. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1992. Print. 

The Atom of Artsy

Yesterday, I took my band of thieves to the park to curl the winter grass between bare toes and chase the hours over the hump of a crowing hill, the high spot of late sunlight where the boat tailed grackles set a twanging, static-calling watch for the first glimmering star. They point their beaks up like antennae tuned in to the sky, as though they could be an alien race under our noses, waiting for their mothership. To the dismay of many neighbors, nightly they sit there and build, noise on noise in scraping cacophonic layers until, at some indiscernible signal, they ascend the two pine trees on either side of the hill in one breathtaking cry of flight.

The first birds were dotting their roost while my daughter was gamely striking up friendships with children, toddlers, grandparents, and groundskeepers. Most of my attention was spent sussing up whoever the little bee was buzzing around at any given moment, but I chatted off and on with other parents. The grownup conversation fiddled and flowed, when in the middle of an idly begun chat about nothing much, I suddenly winced to alertness at a chuckled question about my child that reached out and pushed me:

“Well, you say she’s artsy, are you guys trying to steer her towards the sciences?”

Accurately, literally, what I had said to this grass patch friend was that my little girl loves art, both looking at it and making it. The comment seemed in keeping with the playground chat, mostly constituted of halfheartedly mulmed thoughts on the various school break pursuits of little girls. Within that pink sweatered and soccer ball dotted context, I had remarked that my child loves art.

Defensive maternal posturing aside, this question is a box of ugly treasure, for it forces contemplation of the balance between aesthetic purity and objective pragmatism.

Clarice Lispector, the great Brazilin writer who gleefully drew the aesthetic event horizon as a trans-dimensional gangplank, prompted one of her most mysterious narrators to explain the scale and scope of his own creative impulse: “Made of porous material, I shall one day assume the form of a molecule with its potential explosions of atoms.” (1)

Truly, the most volatile art tears its way free of the most precise focal point. If I could strip away the other consciousnesses and exercises of this life and become Lispector’s molecule, I might not be able to resist the force of my own holler. I believe that might be transcendence.

Back in my own reality, there are objective truths that, though I can conceive of them as illusory, must still be managed on this plane—and I grant that science is better than art on a purely pragmatic plane where creativity equals eccentricity, and eccentricity is tolerated as comic relief. There are worldly limits to what is manageable.

But the dichotomy is driven to confrontation from both sides. My sister’s old boyfriend, a professor of Romantic Literature, liked to say that if you intend to make money from your art, you should not call yourself an artist, but rather an artisan, the distinction acting as indictment. In the shadow of that veil, the incidental dismissal of the creative life is made with the finest intent—to protect both the temple of art and the belly of the creative child.

By the lime green grassy light of a waning afternoon at the park, I get reflexively angry when my girl’s love of art, music, and language is meted with pity for me. There is an assumption at work that I have seen before—that I have much shepherding and steering and outright pushing ahead of me to keep her from doing the wrong thing—whatever that is—as if in some way, just the tendency to think abstractly is enough to lead her to capitalist ruin. Judging by my own experiences, maybe that’s true enough.

Always, I have been diluted in spirit by the tug on the one side to be the art and on the other to pay the rent, but I have no hard feelings either way. I think the point that might have eluded the practical park mother, my sister’s boyfriend, the teachers, the counselors, the bosses, my mother, is that there is no relief in de-emphasis. Recalibrating an artist as artsy does not cleanse the soul of unpredictability and impractical desire any more than turning a painting into a vow to purity pays for supper. The barrier of exclusivity between the two worlds only serves to disenfranchise. Eventually, creation finds the artist, the atom excites, even if you are hiding in a classroom or a cubicle. Though sometimes nothing is created except loss.

For now, I am trying to find a more concrete answer for my child, because I think that would be a nice present to give her one day—here, sweetheart, this is what you should do and I’m sure I’m right. But at that yesterday moment, all I could do was frown a smile at this woman and follow my chasing child up the crow hill, where we stood with the birds, looking up at the gloam, listening for the signal.

(1)      Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York, NY: New Directions Books, 1992. P. 13. Print.

For the Urge of Art

I feel like I could write a poem while painting and photographing at the same time … I want to braid hair and sew a new dress and knit some gloves … I want to record a song ~ Kamina Cox-Palmer

   Mrs. Stevens lived in a trailer apartment parked on a used car lot. The hand-lettered sign that faced the freeway frontage road coupled her offerings: “Quality Used Cars and Sure Thing Psychic Readings”.  The day I went to see her, I was nineteen and fleet footing puerile idiocy in a straight line to nothingness.

In her icon-crowded room, I sat beside a statue of St. Jude, my feet resting at the hem at the Holy Mother’s imitation ivory robes, enameled blue as the summer sky if but the room had not been so dark, so shadowed in red damask, red linen, red muslin, red wool thread crocheted into an afghan lava flow that covered couch and ottoman and table.

Mrs. Stevens, a burning filament of brown and black and twisting wisps of smoke, took my forty dollars of fives lifted week by week from the grocery money of which I was in charge, counted it three times, and then took my right hand in hers without pardon or warning. Her skin felt warm and soft as wind, but her grip would have held a ram in sacrificial throes.

She flipped my palm upwards, outwards, not without force. Studying, studying, she frowned and hummed a vaguely churchy tune as she squeezed my fingers, one by one, my thumb, the heel and valley of my hand. She turned it over, studied the veins along its back, rubbed my wrist bone, patted me in docile finish. Then she turned my hand upward again and there placed a deck of cards, which she deftly cut, dealt, read aloud, and thereby fore-delivered to me in lacey and tin-tipped accent the mostly mundane news of my life to come. Late marriage, she said. One child, she said. God’s smile above my head, but uncertain and many journeys, she said. She told me I didn’t believe her and that was truer than I would have liked it to be. 

I was allowed to ask her for a single absolute insight. I hesitated under pressure and then sputtered on without the benefit of logic or ear—will I be able to work as an artist? Should I write instead? Would I be better off with my camera? Should I concentrate on poetry or plays? Fiction? Should I paint abstractly or do portraits? Should I try to open a restaurant? Design clothes? Teach? To me, these were all one question.

“Stupid girl, you are sweet, though. Focus on something or don’t and see what happens. You will do what you what you do whether you decide what you want or not. This is an immutable truth.”

I thought she was a terrible psychic, but then I didn’t believe as devoutly in freewill then as I do now, almost thirty years into the warp. Until you are a bit older, the specter of fate comes to all your birthdays riding a unicycle and juggling knives. Later, that mechanistic clown is just a drunk houseguest that must be evicted, over and over, after weddings, funerals, and winter holidays.

Fate thus relieved of its authority, Mrs. Stevens has achieved a kind of grace in hindsight. I do what I do. I have let go of the idea that there is a separation between what I experience as word and what I see as picture. The trick of hosting the demiurge is to open without checks, to accommodate sensation and instinct without the limitations of imaginary borders between the countries spread across the mind’s map. My pen is my brush is my lens is my diary is my bread is my play is my puppet is my land of dreams is my instinct.

In this profusion of making, I have realized, I am in a crowded bloom of good people who would rather not be fenced by the names of their personal surds. And so I am opening this year my own shabby, virtual temple of used cars and sure thing readings. And writings. And paintings. And teachings. And there will be more. One is the same as another and unified by proxy, by metonym, by the origin of urge.