The Lizard Seduction Test (Part 1 of 2)

At some point in everyone’s life
the lizards give them a test.

*

At some point in everyone’s life
the lizards look in your mind

and determine what you
find physically attractive and what

you find mentally stimulating.
Then the test will begin.

A lizard will appear to you
as a man or a woman

who takes your breath away.
This groovy guy or girl will spend time

with you, do things with you,
relate to you, so that you will see

clearly what’s in front of you.
You will see a fun, attractive

person out of your dreams.
But also there will be clues that all

is not as beat, freak and hippy
as it seems. Little, strange clues.

Weird clues. Bizarre clues.
Like, maybe, the guy or girl will run his

or her fingers through his or her hair
and clumps of hair will come

out, stuck in his or her fingers.
Or, maybe, the guy or girl

will stuff so much food in his or her mouth
that chewed and unchewed

bits fall back onto his or her plate.
There will be oddball clues

and there will be more than one.
In itself, each clue will be fine,

explicable. As a group,
they will not point to anything

you can see. They will not
buzz and flash like a big neon sign

next to your head. But in your heart
you will know that all is not

as it seems with the ginchy guy or girl
in front of you. Then

comes the main part of the test.
The kick-ass fun person in front

of you will make himself or herself
available for sex.

*

Sex with the person of your dreams.
Sex with this person who takes

your breath away. Sex
and these nagging doubts. Do you accept or

decline? Do you shrug off your odd doubts
or listen to your heart?

*

Smallville

Somebody

Save me

Let your warm hands
Break right through

Save me

I don’t care
How you do it

Stay

Stay

Come on

I’ve been waiting
For you

I’ve made this
Whole world shine
For you

Stay

Stay

Come on

“Smallville” theme

Shamballa

Someday
Somebody you never met
Will speak to you
In a language you never heard
And you will understand
Everything the person says

ANCIENT MYSTERY SCHOOL TEACHING

Cosmopolitan

The cashier at the grocery story melted.

She became a pool of glass on the floor.

The chemicals that had been her makeup

separated from the glass and congealed

on the mirror-like surface of the pool.

The chemicals reflected bright rainbows.

Like small, soft mountains around an ice lake

the cashier’s crumpled clothing cast shadows

around the periphery of the glass.

A woman with a shopping cart waited

to be checked out. It was the express lane.

But now the cashier was a pool of glass.

The woman with the shopping cart sighed, groaned.

Her cart contained a dozen eggs, vodka

and a Cosmopolitan magazine.

The woman with the Cosmopolitan

stepped forward and leaned across the counter.

She looked down over the conveyor belt

at the shiny pool of glass on the floor.

The glass reflected her face back at her.

The woman scowled, licked an index finger

and smoothed-out the gloss on her lower lip.

The pool of glass that had been a cashier

glittered under the store’s fluorescent lights.

The woman with the Cosmo straightened up,

sighed again, and waited to be checked out.

‘Bankrupt Centipedes From Outer Space’

Darlene smiles at Big John. “Duluth,” she says, “Love it or loathe it, you can never leave it or lose it.”

“I always wondered what that meant,” says Big John, drawing her voluptuous body close to his own whipcord body.

“It means us, among other things,” says Darlene. “It is what it is—forever.” Then she whispers, “Hold me.”

And Big John, warm and mature at last, says, of his own accord, with absolute sincerity and trust—and no prodding from Darlene—“I will. Because I know now that that is all that a woman wants.”

Entangled in one another’s arms, neither notices the millions and millions and millions of bugs that are now streaming across the Heights, devouring everything in their path.

The macrocosm of insect life at the heart of the Mayor Herridge Swamp has suddenly metastasized. Secretly egged on by the bankrupt centipedes from outer space, the bugs have taken over Duluth through a mere shift in tense, replacing those temporary interlopers, the human race.

Now Tricia sits at the late Rosemary Klein Kantor’s word-processor and with her mandibles she proceeds to tap out a Duluth totally unlike Duluth or even “Duluth.” Mandibles clacking with glee, Tricia describes the metamorphosis from present-day human Duluth to the myriapodal one, simultaneous with the other, yes, but equally immutable and autonomous.

*

Duluth! Tricia taps, love it or loath it, you can never leave it or lose it because no matter how blunt with insectivorous time your mandibles become those myriad eggs that you cannot help but lay cannot help but hatch new vermiforous and myriapodal generations, forever lively in this present tense where you—all of you—are now at large, even though, simultaneously, you are elsewhere, too, rooted in that centripetal darkness where all this was, and where all this will be, once the bright inflorescence that is, or—now for that terminal shift, Tricia; press the lever!—was present-day human Duluth has come to its predestined articulated and paginated end. Yes. Duluth! Loved. Loathed. Left. Lost.

“Duluth”
Gore Vidal

‘Shadows Are Not Known For Their Strength’

THE BATTLE

Cameron had spotted the hiding place of the Hawkline Monster when he and Greer were halfway down the stairs. He saw strange sparks of light on a bench behind some funny-looking bottles. He didn’t know what a test tube was.

“Why don’t you light those lamps over there?” he said, motioning Greer over to a bench on the far side of the laboratory.

The Hawkline Monster was amused as it watched them. The monster was deriving so much pleasure from this that it decided to wait a few minutes before changing Greer and Cameron into shadows.

This was real fun for the monster.

Meanwhile, its current and only shadow waited for the monster to move so that it could put into action a plan of its own.

Cameron had also spotted a large leaded-crystal jar on a table in the opposite direction that he had sent Greer to light some lamps.

From the description that the Hawkline women had given him, he knew that this was the source of the Hawkline Monster . . . The Chemicals. He was standing about ten feet away from the jar. And the monster was “hiding” about five feet away from the jar.

Suddenly Cameron yelled, “It’s over there! I see it!”

Greer turned toward where Cameron was yelling and pointing. He couldn’t figure out what was happening. Why Cameron was yelling. This was not like Cameron but he turned anyway to the direction.

The Hawkline Monster was curious, too. What in the hell was happening? What was over there if it was over here?

So the monster moved . . . involuntarily . . . out of curiosity.

Cameron in the interim of artificial excitement moved over to the table where a jar called The Chemicals was residing and he was standing right beside it.

When the Hawkline Monster moved to get a better view of what was happening, the shadow, after having checked all the possibilities of light, had discovered a way that it could shift itself in front of the monster, so that the monster at this crucial time would be blinded by darkness for a few seconds, did so, causing confusion to befall the monster.

This was all the shadow could do and it hoped that this would give Greer and Cameron the edge they would need to destroy the Hawkline Monster using whatever plan they had come up with, for it seemed that they must have a plan if they were to have any chance at all with the monster and they did not seem like fools.

When Cameron yelled at Greer, the shadow interpreted this as the time to move and did so. It obscured the vision of the Hawkline Monster for a few seconds knowing full well that if the monster were destroyed it would be destroyed, too, but death was better than going on living like this, being a part of this evil.

The Hawkline Monster raged against the shadow, trying to get it out of the way, so that it could see what was happening.

But the shadow struggled fiercely with the monster. The shadow had a burst of unbelievable physical fury and shadows are not known for their strength.


THE PASSING OF THE HAWKLINE MONSTER

Cameron poured the glass of whiskey into the jar of chemicals. When the whiskey hit The Chemicals they turned blue and started bubbling and sparks began flying from the jar. The sparks were like small birds of fire and flew about burning everything they touched.

“Let’s get out of here!” Cameron yelled at Greer. They both fled up the laboratory stairs to the main floor of the house.

The Hawkline Monster responded to the whiskey being poured into the jar of its energy source by just having enough time to curse its fate

      “FUCK IT!”

the monster yelled. It was a classic curse before shattering into a handful of blue diamonds that had no memory of a previous existence.

The Hawkline Monster was nothing now except diamonds. They sparkled like a vision of summer sky. The shadow of the monster had been turned into the shadow of diamonds. It also was without memory of a previous existence so now its soul was at rest and it had been turned into the shadow of beautiful things.

“The Hawkline Monster”
Richard Brautigan

‘Now Sing Of Walls! Sing!’

My vision clears. The stranger’s companions encircle us, useless swords. I could laugh if it weren’t for the pain that makes me howl. And yet I address him, whispering, whimpering, whining.

“If you win, it’s by mindless chance. Make no mistake. First you tricked me, and then I slipped. Accident.”

He answers with a twist that hurls me forward screaming. The thanes make way. I fall against a table and smash it, and wall timbers crack. And still he whispers.

Grendel, Grendel! You make the world by whispers, second by second. Are you blind to that? Whether you make it a grave or a garden of roses is not the point. Feel the wall: is it not hard? He smashes me against it, breaks open my forehead. Hard, yes! Observe the hardness, write it down in careful runes. Now sing of walls! Sing!

I howl.

Sing!

“I’m singing!”

Sing words! Sing raving hymns!

“You’re crazy. Ow!”

Sing!

“I sing of walls,” I howl. “Hooray for the hardness of walls!”

Terrible, he whispers. Terrible. He laughs and lets out fire.

“You’re crazy,” I say. “If you think I created that wall that cracked my head, you’re a fucking lunatic.”

Sing walls, he hisses.

I have no choice.

    “The wall will fall to the wind as the windy hill
    will fall, and all things thought in former times:
    Nothing made remains, nor man remembers.
    And these towns shall be called the shining towns!”

Better, he whispers. That’s better. He laughs again, and the nasty laugh admits I’m slyer than he guessed.

He’s crazy. I understand him all right, make no mistake. Understand his lunatic theory of matter and mind, the chilly intellect, the hot imagination, blocks and builder, reality as stress. Nevertheless, it was by accident that he got my arm behind me. He penetrated no mysteries. He was lucky. If I’d known he was awake, if I’d known there was blood on the floor when I gave him that kick . . .

The room goes suddenly white, as if struck by lightning. I stare down, amazed. He has torn off my arm at the shoulder!

“Grendel”
John Gardner

‘The Difficulty To Think At The End Of Day . . .’

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

“A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”
Wallace Stevens

“Oh, Let’s Go Up The Hill And Scare Ourselves...”

“Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,
As reckless as the best of them to-night,
By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.
Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.
The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough
Down dark converging paths between the pines.
Let’s not care what we do with it to-night.
Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile
The way we piled it. And let’s be the talk
Of people brought to windows by a light
Thrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.
Rouse them all, both the free and not so free
With saying what they’d like to do to us
For what they’d better wait till we have done.
Let’s all but bring to life this old volcano,
If that is what the mountain ever was—
And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will….”

“And scare you too?” the children said together.

“Why wouldn’t it scare me to have a fire
Begin in smudge with ropy smoke and know
That still, if I repent, I may recall it,
But in a moment not: a little spurt
Of burning fatness, and then nothing but
The fire itself can put it out, and that
By burning out, and before it burns out
It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,
And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,
Made the dim trees stand back in wider circle—
Done so much and I know not how much more
I mean it shall not do if I can bind it.
Well if it doesn’t with its draft bring on
A wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,
As once it did with me upon an April.
The breezes were so spent with winter blowing
They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them
Short of the perch their languid flight was toward;
And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven
As I walked once round it in possession.
But the wind out of doors—you know the saying.
There came a gust. You used to think the trees
Made wind by fanning since you never knew
It blow but that you saw the trees in motion.
Something or someone watching made that gust.
It put the flame tip-down and dabbed the grass
Of over-winter with the least tip-touch
Your tongue gives salt or sugar in your hand.
The place it reached to blackened instantly.
The black was all there was by day-light,
That and the merest curl of cigarette smoke—
And a flame slender as the hepaticas,
Blood-root, and violets so soon to be now.
But the black spread like black death on the ground,
And I think the sky darkened with a cloud
Like winter and evening coming on together.
There were enough things to be thought of then.
Where the field stretches toward the north
And setting sun to Hyla brook, I gave it
To flames without twice thinking, where it verges
Upon the road, to flames too, though in fear
They might find fuel there, in withered brake,
Grass its full length, old silver golden-rod,
And alder and grape vine entanglement,
To leap the dusty deadline. For my own
I took what front there was beside. I knelt
And thrust hands in and held my face away.
Fight such a fire by rubbing not by beating.
A board is the best weapon if you have it.
I had my coat. And oh, I knew, I knew,
And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother
And heat so close in; but the thought of all
The woods and town on fire by me, and all
The town turned out to fight for me—that held me.
I trusted the brook barrier, but feared
The road would fail; and on that side the fire
Died not without a noise of crackling wood—
Of something more than tinder-grass and weed—
That brought me to my feet to hold it back
By leaning back myself, as if the reins
Were round my neck and I was at the plough.
I won! But I’m sure no one ever spread
Another color over a tenth the space
That I spread coal-black over in the time
It took me. Neighbors coming home from town
Couldn’t believe that so much black had come there
While they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there
When they had passed an hour or so before
Going the other way and they not seen it.
They looked about for someone to have done it.
But there was no one. I was somewhere wondering
Where all my weariness had gone and why
I walked so light on air in heavy shoes
In spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling.
Why wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?”

“If it scares you, what will it do to us?”

“Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,
What would you say to war if it should come?
That’s what for reasons I should like to know—
If you can comfort me by any answer.”

“Oh, but war’s not for children—it’s for men.”

“Now we are digging almost down to China.
My dears, my dears, you thought that—we all thought it.
So your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,—
And children in the ships and in the towns?
Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new—something we had forgotten:
War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come up hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”

“The Bonfire”
Robert Frost

Victoria’s Secret

My world has become
a sepia and indigo montage

of gorgeous women in their underwear
always journaling.

I can’t tell you—well, I can, but won’t—
how much I’ve heard and read

about thongs and bikinis
and briefs and high-cuts and Rios.

And I’ve seen it all immortalized
in Gelly Roll colors

on the dark pages of memory books
that will last forever.

Businesswomen, scientists,
artists and others—all have felt

the imperative to analyze
and codify their thoughts

about front closures and back,
halters, racerbacks and two-straps.

*

Last week I drew a copy
of a sixteenth century fresco

by Pontormo of the Annunciation.
I used crayons

to copy the colors
of the Virgin Mary’s dress and veil.

Sixty-four crayons
make it possible to approximate

any hue, value and chroma.
Of course, the pigments and dyes

will fade in a few months,
but it was fun to draw and color.

And it’s fun to have the image around
while it lasts, knowing,

of course, that experts in Italy
are taking such good care

of the real fresco that it will last
another four hundred

and seventy-three years.
The Angel and the Virgin will last.


*

As I write this,
Joanne is sitting at her desk listening

to Steely Dan.
In a so-called ‘tapestry blue’ thong topped by

a matching seamless demi,
she’s transcribing conversation

onto the black, acid-free paper pages
of her journal.

I believe the pen is yellow.
I heard the conversation

when she first spoke it with Linda.
When Linda wears pantyhose

she wears her panties on top
because she likes the sensation

of the pantyhose seam
against her crotch. Joanne wears panties

under her pantyhose
because she finds the seam annoying.

The conversation lasted
almost half an hour. Joanne

has been writing
through all seven songs of the “Aja” CD.

The paper is archival.
So is the cool, Gelly Roll ink.

Four hundred and seventy-three years from now
the world will know

in considered, pretty detail
how our angels and virgins

and others felt about
their crotches and breasts, and the fabrics

that wrapped them.
Theology is man’s quest for a path to God.


---------------------------------------------------------------




Detail of the real deal,
Pontormo's Annunciation

A Life Of Illusion (Happy Thanksgiving!)

Sometimes
I can’t help the feeling that I’m
Living a life of illusion

Oh, why can’t we let it be
And see through the hole in this wall of confusion
I can’t help the feeling I’m living a life of illusion

Pow!
Right between the eyes
Oh, how nature loves her little surprises

Wow!
It all seems so logical now
It’s just one of her better disguises

And it comes with no warning
Nature loves her little surprises
Continual crisis

Hey!
Don’t you know it’s a waste of the day
Caught up in endless solutions

That have no meaning
Just another hunch
Based upon jumping conclusions

Caught up in endless solutions
Backed-up against a wall of confusion
Living a life of illusion

Translucent Compositions

Yesterday, I held up a page
torn from Glamour magazine

to a bright light. Each side
showed a full-page fashion photograph.

The bright light revealed
a translucent, composite scene. I smiled.

The fashion girl
from one side of the page seemed to be sitting

in the lap of the fashion girl
from the other side. One girl’s

leg even seemed to pass through
the other girl’s embracing arm.

Today, it occurs to me
as I sit here by that same light

that the events of yesterday
and the events of today

also reveal
a translucent composition. In my mind

I see me sitting here writing,
and standing behind myself

looking right through that sexy page
from the fashion magazine.

But before I even begin
to speculate about how

someone, somewhere
carefully arranged those photographs, so who

carefully arranged me,
my first whole real thought is, damn it all,

that I’d rather have been part
of the fashion composition.

I frown. I’m never
in the right—so to speak—conspiracy.

But, like someone, somewhere
turning a page, that thought fades because

then it occurs to me
that my—so to speak—conspiracy

and the other
reveal a translucent composition, too.

And there I am! See?
My leg fits right through that fashion girl’s arm.

Translucent compositions.
I see them clearly. You can, too.

Just hold up this poem
to the proper illumination.

The Guillotine As A Tool Of Cognition

The camera loves him. The camera loves her.
The camera loves you,

and the rest of us, too.
Inside itself the camera creates

a mechanical projection
of 3D reality

on a 2D matrix. Inside us
the camera creates, too,

a mechanical projection
of our 4D existence

on 3D reality.
Camera consciousness develops

inside us and develops us.
Camera consciousness frames us

and squarely defines us
as an arbitrary collection

of chemical reactions,
reactions bounded by limits

itemized on a spec sheet
put together by engineers

working to the encompassing specs
of a marketing team.

Camera consciousness composes us
for bitching front-page spreads

that tell stories much more powerfully
than language. (Someone

once defined language
as a tool of cognition but camera

consciousness replaces
trivial tool users and tools with

artists and art.) And, then, of course,
the strobe light—the beating heart

pumping life through camera consciousness—
flashes out, flickering,

illuminating the recursive essence
of the cosmos

itself with the quantum pulses
of life itself, one every

thirtieth of a second.
And we flash out, flickering, through

the snapshots. And with persistence
of vision, not to mention

memory, we pretend to ignore
everything we don’t see.

Camera consciousness clicks.
The shutter falls like a guillotine.

Reality as a bloody scrapbook,
a dripping clipping.

Winston Churchill Described Paintings As Cryptograms On Canvas

One of the things I hate most
about watercolor paintings

is the constant, blaring,
monotonous white. The paper white.

White under the blue wash sky.
White around the yellow and red

flowers. White girding and supporting
the carefully biased grays.

Watercolor painters go to such great lengths
to save their whites

that they’re constantly creating
the same painting: A white blotch

as portrayed from
an infinity of viewpoints. The white blotch.

This hazy rectangular glare—
tinted and shaded to taste—

must represent
some archetypal mystery or womb memory

or the externalization
of sparking, neural throbbing.

Winston Churchill described paintings
as cryptograms on canvas.

What secret message
does the white blotch send? And who from? To whom?

The Spirit of the Age?
Blood of the Race? Goddess of Beauty?

Whistler’s sensitives?
Constable’s scientists? Skinner’s pigeons?

Freud’s bouillabaisse
of plumbing metaphors and mechanisms?

Witches and worshippers?
Owners and property? Lost and found?

All black inkblots conceal, reveal
deeper meanings. This white blotch

conceals and reveals, too.
Deeper meanings. Complex. Seductive.

And I believe that is the solution
to these cryptograms.

The depth is the meaning.
The code is the encoded message.

The secret is the seduction.
Whether infinite blackness

or omnipresent white.
Compositions are created things.

These endless black and white mysteries
distract from both creator

and creation. Then confusion
becomes content and context.

Chaos reigns.
When creator and creation lose, chaos reigns.

I use only
opaque media: acrylic paints, collage.

I use black and white,
but only black mixed from red, yellow, blue.

I do not do chiaroscuro,
I do not do cartoons.

Compositions are created things.
I say what I say, not

what I might pretend to say
if I knew some secret language.

The word is what’s said.
Any truth is better than make believe.

Meanwhile, In An Abandoned Strip Mine...

Meanwhile, in an abandoned strip mine
somewhere between San Francisco and
San Diego, cockroaches from space
discuss the motion picture business.

“So, what do you think? Can we get Stone
to play the scientist in the next
‘Boa’ piece of crap? Will she do it?”

“Should Stone play a super ego role?
Reid dragged down ‘Alone In The Dark,’ and
Richards screwed ‘The World Is Not Enough.’
We’re mixing id and super ego.
Stone is old but she’s still a woman.”

“The monster flicks from the Fifties worked.
The male as ego. Monster as id.
And the woman as super ego.”

“Yes, but the phase space mapped differently.
Big bugs smashing buildings skew higher
than big snakes eating random people.
Without id differentiation
the super ego is conflicted.
With Stone as a scientist we’d need,
say, hundreds of big snakes attacking
a recognizable cityscape.”

“Can’t do it. Budget’s just two point five.”

The two cockroaches from outer space
were silent for a long moment. Then
the cockroach that liked Sharon Stone kicked
a rock and said, “I hate this business.”

“Could be worse,” the other cockroach said.
“Could be out east doing politics.”

Both cockroaches from space shivered and
made clicking sounds with their mandibles.
Then they returned to discussing how
to manipulate the Freudian
phase space of earth’s movie consumers
to continue enticing humans
to continue funding the insect
dominion over the human race
while at the same time bringing on board
Sharon Stone to their giant snake film
budgeted at two point five million
and going direct to DVD.

Butterflies From Beyond Newton’s World

This geometric image, a static reflection of an irreversible and fleeting time, brings to mind another one: Kepler’s ellipse. Thom’s elementary catastrophes, as well as Kepler’s ellipses, attempt to reduce time to space and to understand it through geometry. Whereas Kepler uses the mathematical tools inherited from the Greeks, Thom has the benefit of modern differential topology. Kepler uses Apollonius’s Treatise on Conics. Thom uses singularity theory. However, whereas Kepler’s model leads us into Newton’s world, which is closed upon itself, catastrophe theory is a glance into an open universe. In Newton’s world there is no past and no future, since everything is determined by today’s data. Time holds no surprise in store for whoever can handle the computations. In Thom’s world the future is mostly hidden, and the mathematician inspects the flow of events for forms to recognize and classify, like a butterfly catcher.

Ivar Ekeland
“Mathematics And The Unexpected”

Parameter Space And Some Supernatural World

Each object in the world (as Thom sees it) is associated with a dynamical system. The shape, or form, of this object for an observer is nothing but the catastrophe set associated with this dynamical system. The object itself lies in the parameter space, usually three-dimensional Euclidean space, but it is not clear at all where the dynamical system lies, or even if it has a physical reality. For instance, the shape of a breaking crest wave does call to mind a hyperbolic umbilic, but no one has ever been able to build a dissipative potential for the wave from hydrodynamic considerations. Thom himself is not very concerned with this problem. He seems to be content, either with a Platonic attitude of having the dynamical system happen in some supernatural world or with locating it in the neurological phenomena which carry perception to our brain.

Ivar Ekeland
“Mathematics And The Unexpected”

Catastrophe Means Change Of State, Like Water Into Ice

It is essential for catastrophe theory that a small number of external variables be chosen, say three, which will be the only ones to vary, all other parameters being kept fixed. The values given to these three external variables will then be registered as a point in three-dimensional space. If these values are changed, the corresponding point moves along, and the potential of the system gets modified in some (unknown) fashion. The system, initially at a stable equilibrium, follows the latter in its variations. It may happen that, for certain values of the parameter, this particular equilibrium vanishes. The system then jumps to another stable equilibrium; that is, we get a discontinuous response to a continuous change in the external variables. The set of parameter values where this happens is called the catastrophe set. It is a kind of boundary which stretches across three-dimensional space: if the point representing the values of the external variables crosses this boundary, the system will jump from one equilibrium to another. This change of equilibrium will be perceived by the observer as a sudden and substantial change in the properties of the system—a phase transition, for instance, like water solidifying into ice. If one lowers the temperature of water regularly, nothing much happens, until the critical temperature of 0˚ is reached, at which time ice appears. Here there is just one external variable, temperature, and one catastrophic value, 0˚ C. The parameter space is one-dimensional, and the catastrophe set consists of one point, 0, which acts as a boundary between negative temperatures (ice only) and positive ones (water only).

Ivar Ekeland
“Mathematics And The Unexpected”

Catastrophe Theory

Catastrophe theory was born in 1972, with the publication of a very learned book by René Thom entitled Structural Stability and Morphogenesis. It has also a subtitle: An Essay on the General Theory of Models. Title and subtitle together indicate that here we have a mathematical theory with unusual claims to universality.

Thom is a leading mathematician; his ideas were already known in mathematical circles and spread very quickly to scientists in general and to the public at large. Catastrophe theory became an instant success, treatises and research papers were written, articles and interviews appeared in newspapers and magazines. In fact, so much has already been written about catastrophe theory that it seems quite superfluous to add yet another chapter to this growing list.

Despite so many explanations and commentaries, I still have the feeling that the instant success of catastrophe theory is largely due to a misunderstanding of what a theory is and what catastrophe means.

Let me first say what catastrophe theory is not. It does not announce catastrophes; it cannot tell whether the world will end in nuclear war. Catastrophe theory does not enable us to make precise, quantitative predictions, the way relativity theory does, for instance. Neither can it be proved or disproved by an experiment, and so the question arises whether it is a scientific theory at all.

Actually it is—but it is much closer to biological theories like that of evolution than to physical theories like that of relativity. It fits certain facts together and provides an abstract setting to grasp them all at once. It is a way to make some sense out of the hopeless tangle of natural phenomena, like a listening device which picks some garbled message out of the overpowering background noise. It is a mathematical code to help us decipher the book of nature.

Ivar Ekeland
“Mathematics And The Unexpected”

Alison Wakes Up And Introduces Herself

“Hi! I’m Alison. I do rebellious

magazine collages. They’re rebellious

because when I cut up a magazine

I’m not only cutting up pop culture,

I’m cutting up the invisible world.

You know, the political and social

alchemy stuff. All the subliminal

embeds in the photography and text.

And I’m not just cutting up all this stuff.

Oh, do you get the cutting up business?

Anyway, I also reshape content.

For my own purpose. I’m making my own

messages. My own invisible world.

I glue down my worlds, damn it, and frame them.

That’s what real rebellion is all about.

The Pilgrims didn’t just exit England.

They built America. Or, well, you know,

they moved around some pieces, glued down stuff

for their own purpose. In both of the worlds—

the visible and the invisible.

Just because something is invisible,

just because I can’t identify it,

doesn’t mean I can’t play with it. Photos,

text columns, pop culture. Hell, cut it up!

Reshape and rearrange it. Glue it down.

Frame it. Yes! Magazine collages rule

in the monolectic New World Order!”

Alison Dreaming Of Me *

He shares his apartment with mice and bats.
Expeditions of goldfish with sharp spears
trek across carpet hunting fur spiders
living in the corners and dark places.

Beneath vine, tendril, he lives in a tent
seldom venturing out. Sometimes he lifts
a cloth flap to empty an oak bucket—
his waste water, his garbage, his latrine.

Once a day he unzips patchwork screening
and takes into his tent a wooden plate
of fruit and dried meat that the creatures leave—
offerings from the jungle apartment.

He’s a shadow in his tent. Fingers ring
against rusted strings on a wood guitar.
Damp has gently turned the guitar’s fretboard,
curved its body, colored its singing tones.

But the animals—the mice, bats, goldfish,
even the fur spiders in their dark webs—
bring their daily offerings to the sound.
It is their part in the strange, magic place.

Wild civilization, such as it is,
continues in that jungle apartment.
No change of state, just a warping of tone.
A wild man living wild in the wild life.


......................................................................


* That’s me on a rare
excursion outside
my apartment tent,
a typical look
of befuddlement
caught by the webcam.

Alison Dreaming Of Being A Rock And Roll Princess

An electric guitar high and falling,

rotating, above Chicago’s skyline.

Unlike the bone in “A Space Odyssey”

the electric guitar doesn’t edit

into a spaceship or Heywood Floyd’s pen.

The electric guitar rotates, falling,

and crashes through the roof of a building

and falls into a translucent glass hand,

a crystal hand of a crystal princess

standing in a room of jade and topaz

on a floor of sand on top of black wood.

The princess is made of glass, but she moves

and laughs and plays the electric guitar.

An electric guitar. A glass princess.

And the rock and roll she plays is so cool

when the children of her kingdom get sad

she rocks them into a world of laughter.


*

Alison Dreaming Of The Ultimate Buddy Motion Picture

Call it 25 A.D. — Tiberius
was still in Rome.

Pilate was headquartered in Caesarea
but spending most

of his time in Jerusalem.
John was in the wilderness.

Herodians were busy
trying to win the hearts and minds

of the Jews to the Roman way.
Zealots were agitating

for independence. And Pilate’s wife
began having bad dreams.

That’s when the murders started.
First, the wife of a publican.

The second night the victim
was the mistress of a high priest.

A prostitute familiar
to the centurions died third.

Three deaths over three nights.
But more. The women had connections.

The radicals. The reactionaries.
The lunatic fringe.

Pilate became involved.
His agents told him something was up,

but they couldn’t discern what.
Pilate knew and understood Rome.

The politics of empire.
More importantly, Pilate knew

and understood that his Jewish contacts
had vested interests.

They were limited, defined
by their involvements, commitments.

To find the killer, solve the mystery,
keep the peace, Pilate knew

and understood he needed
an ally from among the Jews.

Someone knowledgeable,
yet independent. Pilate’s agents

told him of a young Jew
from Nazareth, an itinerant

preacher, intimately versed in Scripture,
a teacher, as yet

with no students. Pilate turned
to this man. Pilate met with him.

The two had to find the killer,
solve the mystery, keep the peace.

This is the story
of Pilate and Jesus. Their first meeting.

Their struggle to uncover
an evil vastly greater than

anything either one of them
ever could have imagined.

Before the apostles,
the ministry, the arrest and trial,

before the confrontation
of the Roman man and the Christ,

they were just men, just two men
tracking a psychotic killer.

COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU:
.....................................................................
“Blood In The Temple — A Pilate and Jesus Mystery”

*

Alison Dreaming

Last night from outside I watched Alison
fog her ceiling. I stood by a street light
and watched Alison lean out a window
and scoop cupfuls of fog from the damp night.
Then she spooned out the fog into the air
of her apartment. The fog drifted up.
Standing on an ornamental footstool
Alison reached upward and smoothed the fog
with hush and kindness and thoughts of design.
Then she buffed it with a ragged tee shirt
until it shone like imitation pearls
from Woolworth’s. I watched her work for an hour
then I went home and to bed by myself.

Walking for the morning paper, I glanced
in Alison’s window. She was sleeping
on a couch, still wearing her overalls.
Overhead, her ceiling glowed, shimmering
like rice paper through frosted glass. Sleeping,
Alison dreamed. Her dreams drifted upward
glowing, shimmering, too, by her ceiling
like jade statues from a magical past
or like barrettes in a young girl’s long hair.

*

Jill, At Halloween Time #5

The wide plastic bowl
of warmed-up milk starts steaming
immediately

and just as quickly
goose-bumps form on Jill’s arms when
she pushes open

the back door. “Here girl!”
Jill says. “Snack time!” The llama
hums and purrs and trills

and rubs against Jill.
“That’s return-on-investment,”
Jill whispers. “Good girl.”

The End

Jill, At Halloween Time #4

Jill checks a mirror
and straightens out her new bra.
She starts walking back

to the kitchen but
hears a noise in the front room.
She stops, frowns, looks in.

On her computer
a tech chart is flashing and
the speaker’s beeping.

‘Some stock’s changed,’ Jill thinks,
starting in. She stops. ‘The milk,’
Jill thinks. ‘Stocks or milk?’

*

Jill, At Halloween Time #3

Standing by the bed,
Jill looks at her broken bra.
A small plastic ring

that attached the left
cup to the left shoulder strap
had cracked and vanished.

‘Looked cheap in the store,’
Jill thinks, ‘and it really was.
How often do things

in real life end up
being actually what
they appear to be?’

*

Jill, At Halloween Time #2

Jill turns the gas low.
She walks to the front bedroom
to get a new bra.

Walking, she reaches
both hands around behind her
to unclip her bra.

Topless, she thinks, ‘Oops,
in all the thriller movies
when a woman leaves

something on the stove
and goes out of the kitchen,
that’s when she’s attacked . . .’

*

Jill, At Halloween Time #1

Her stocks are tanking,
the llama’s constipated
and her bra strap broke.

Jill wants to cry but
she just can’t. Something about
Halloween season

gives her energy.
In the kitchen she warms milk
for the llama. Leaves—

brown, yellow, orange—
blow past the kitchen window.
Jill sighs, stirs the milk.

*

Ansel Adams And Alfred Stieglitz, #2

I believe that the artist and his art are only a part of the total human experience; the viewer in the world at large is the essential other part. I feel that a true work of art is like nothing else in the world. It is not essential to know how the artist thinks or how he believes he relates to his profession or his society. What he creates is his message. For me a work of art does not cry for comprehension, only for reaction at the level of art itself.

Stieglitz taught me what became my first commandment: “Art is the affirmation of life.”

Ansel Adams
“Ansel Adams: An Autobiography”

Ansel Adams And Alfred Stieglitz, #1

Anticipation is another prime element of creative art and essential to visualization. Some years ago I was talking with Edwin Land, a brilliant scientist and close friend. We talked about the remarkable photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, with his images of people in motion arrested at precisely the optimum expressive moment of time and place.

Land pointed out that the moment captured on film was realized through anticipation. Had Cartier-Bresson released the shutter at the “decisive moment” as revealed in his pictures, the psycho-physical lag would have resulted in capturing the moment after the ideal position in the composition.

Anticipation is one of the most perplexing capabilities of the mind: projection into future time. Impressive with a single moving object, it is overwhelming when several such objects are considered together and in relation to their environment. I believe that the mind, working at incredible speeds, is able to probe into the future as well as recall the past. Our explorations of the past support the present, and our awareness of the present will clarify the future.

... Photography is an investigation of both the outer and inner worlds. One might consider that if one is born an explorer he will never find existence dull. The first experiences with the camera involve looking at the world beyond the lens, trusting the instrument will “capture” something “seen.” The terms shoot and take are not accidental; they represent an attitude of conquest and appropriation. Only when the photographer grows into perception and creative impulse does the term make define a condition of empathy between the external and internal events. Stieglitz told me, “When I make a photograph, I make love!”

Ansel Adams
“Ansel Adams: An Autobiography”

Ansel Adams And Edwin Land

Once Din [“Din” was Edwin Land’s nickname] and I went to Dr. Harold Edgerton’s laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to observe the making of a strobe flash picture of a bullet piercing a balloon, recorded on a new Polaroid transparency material. The extremely short electronic flash was fired by microphone. We stood around, expectantly waiting for the firing, fully briefed on what was to occur and how safe it was. The revolver was securely lashed to a firm support, and there was an efficient sand trap to catch the bullet. The balloon was filled with talcum powder, inflated, and properly placed in the line of fire. The camera was focused upon it, all ready to go. At the moment of firing, one of Edgerton’s assistants struck a large segment of rail with a heavy metal mallet. The sound was terrific, and all but Edgerton and Land hit the floor. Great hilarity ensued. The photograph came out perfectly, with the bullet clearly emerging in a cloud of talcum from the still-tense surface of the balloon; at the moment of exposure the balloon had not had time to think about collapsing.

… [Edwin Land’s] philosophy and humanity are revealed in the statement he made on April 2, 1979, on the occasion of the opening of the new home of the academy [Edwin Land had been president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1951-54]:

“Each stage of human civilization is defined by our mental structures: the concepts we create and then project upon the universe. They not only redescribe the universe but also in so doing modify it, both for our own time and for subsequent generations. This process—the revision of old cortical structures and the formulation of new cortical structures whereby the universe is defined—is carried on in science and art by the most creative and talented minds in each generation. For individuals to contribute to this constantly evolving projection of mental structures upon the universe, it is necessary for them to concentrate on one area of knowledge or experience, and thus they limit themselves by excluding many other areas. This Academy’s function is to associate many specialized lines of concentration by gathering the individuals in whom they are embodied. Thus, while each person is narrowed by his own specialization, the group as a whole is enriched.

“The transfer of concepts as models from one field to another requires intimacy, informality and friendliness because the transfer usually is not a conscious process. Models for physics may come from music, for chemistry from physics, for art from cosmology. … The great historic periods of spectacular human advance, within time spans of relatively few generations, may have been periods in which society made possible the concentrated interplay of the separate contributions of creative individuals. There is no way in which we can tell whether we are entering such a period of history, but whether or not we are, the role of the Academy seems clear.”

Ansel Adams
“Ansel Adams: An Autobiography”

Ansel Adams And Cedric Wright

I am interested in why I see certain events in the world about me that others do not see, while they respond to different events. On the day that this photograph was made there were several other photographers nearby, some very good ones who were then far more technically advanced than I. The scene was before us all, but no one else responded with creative interest. Cedric Wright, close friend, violinist, and photographer from Berkeley, observed what I was doing and, half in jest, set his camera up in my location. I saw his print later; he did not have a lens of appropriate focal length and he overexposed his negative. On seeing my print he exclaimed, “Jeez! Why didn’t I see that!”

Ansel Adams
“Examples: The Making
Of 40 Photographs”

Ansel Adams And Margaret Bourke-White

One of the most successful Life photographers was Margaret Bourke-White, whom I first met in 1934. She had just moved into her studio on one of the top floors of the Chrysler Building and I recall a giant aluminum gargoyle clearly visible through the large window. Her assistant, a nervous young man, said, “Please be seated,” but there was nothing to sit on. Bourke-White entered the room briskly and cordially greeted me. She was dressed with great chic, on the edge of flamboyancy, and moved and talked with marvelous vitality. She explained that she was preparing for an assignment and could give me but a few moments—“My helper is checking my cameras right now.” At that moment a loud crash came from the adjacent room; the camera and tripod on which the young man was working had suddenly collapsed and were severely damaged. Bourke-White reacted with composure, saying to him, “Please call for another Speed Graphic right away.” Stating she would pick up the camera on the way to the airport, she gave me a warm adieu, abandoning me in her pristine office with the broken camera still lying on the floor.

Ansel Adams
“Ansel Adams: An Autobiography”

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #5: The Butterflies From Atlantis

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
I often check out books and DVDs
and use the public access computers,
if you browse through the stacks looking for books
like “Fishing The Dry Fly As A Living
Insect,” or, less fish, like “Trout Fishing In
America,” you won’t find them because
such books aren’t there to be found. They’re gone.

If you browse the internet for such books
you find them equally lost, but not gone,
just buried among eighty-three million
references to what Paris Hilton did
two nights ago, or many million more
equally fishy references that may
or may not say anything about trout.

*

I miss good books. Good. As opposed to books
demographically targeted—conceived,
designed and produced to strip-mine every
dollar from every market in the world.

*

When I checked out the book Paris Hilton
wrote with Merle Ginsberg and read in the park,
I sat with the book in my hand, my hand
resting in my lap and the book open
in front of me. An open book like that,
the spine in my hand, pages to the left
and to the right, looks like a butterfly.

Butterflies bask in the sun, wings open
left and right, warming themselves in the light.

Books lie open in front of us, pages
left and right, like butterflies letting us
study the pretty patterns on their wings.

But books aren’t like real butterflies from
the physical place we remember as
Atlantis. Books are like butterflies from
Atlantis, the magical place of myths.

Books are like butterflies from Atlantis,
the magical place of myths. They fly us
not by their wings, but the pretty patterns
on their wings, to worlds long gone, to worlds lost,
to lost worlds of artist and expression,
to lost worlds of designer and knowledge,
to lost worlds, too, of jester and routine.

Like “Confessions Of An Heiress.” Or this.

Books. They’re like butterflies from Atlantis.

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #4: Atlantis

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
once or twice a year the gas company
tears up the sidewalks looking for a leak,
there are more than fifty books that mention
Atlantis. Everything from Plato to
Clive Cussler appears somewhere in the stacks.

*

In the traditionally accepted
scientific dating of the planet
the continents as we know them today
were all scrunched together as one land mass
about two hundred million years ago.
Scientists call this land mass “Pangea.”

Pangea began the long process of
splitting in two and then more breaking up
about a hundred and fifty million
years ago. That is about the same time
butterflies first evolved as we know them.
In fact, the distribution of many
species across the current continents
supports the understanding butterflies
initially evolved and then began
species radiation on the northern
and southern components of Pangea
directly after the one land mass split.

Most theories of Atlantis say nothing
about Pangea because modern man—
that is, modern civilized man—is thought
to be about fifteen thousand years old,
with most civilizations much younger.

However, Judeo-Christian scripture
describes the Babel tower incident
as ending when God scattered humankind
“abroad, over the face of all the earth.”
Another verse describes a man, Peleg,
as living when the earth was “divided.”

I think we as a species remember
our origin on that one continent,
Pangea, and then the tribulations
of the catastrophic earth changes that
in the time of just one generation
created the continents we know now.

(Prior to the breakup, on Pangea,
the single continent, it’s easier
also to imagine a single flood
affecting all creatures and all humans.)

Of course this only can be possible
if either civilization is much
older than Western science understands
or our scientific dating is skewed.

Neither option is inconceivable.

Hindu scripture plainly speaks of ages
vastly more ancient than Western knowledge.

And there has been some contentious research
that cosmic “constants”—like the speed of light—
in fact might not be constant after all,
and dates keyed to radiation effects
might be over-estimating ages.

*

I believe someday we will recognize
Atlantis myths as dramatizations
of the tribulations humans endured
during the fracturing of Pangea.

*

But Atlantis has come to mean much more
than just a physical place—although if
it turns out to be the physical place
our butterflies came from that’s pretty cool.

Atlantis has come to mean a global
free-floating metaphor for any place
that was good but now is gone. Atlantis
is the secular Garden of Eden.

Atlantis is the good world that was lost—
lost art, lost technology, lost science,
and lost peace, lost understanding, lost love,
and lost humanity, lost communion.






(Tomorrow: Paris Hilton And The Butterflies
From Atlantis #5: The Butterflies
From Atlantis)

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
almost every rain makes the ceiling leak
and basement flood, they are clearing away
old books that aren’t checked out frequently.
The old books either are sold to raise funds—
hardbacks all are sold for fifty cents each—
or they simply are thrown away. The same
maintenance man who deals with the dead birds
in the driveway next to the library
once a week or so pushes a big bin
full of old books that nobody checks out
across the library’s west parking lot.
He empties the bin in the big dumpster
behind the senior center. This clears space
on the shelves for books more relevant to
today’s internet-savvy young patrons.

For instance, Jan Adkins’ “The Craft Of Sail”
has been tossed. Or sold to raise fifty cents.
Adkins designed, wrote and illustrated
his loving primer on sailing himself.

With “The Craft Of Sail” out of the way, books
shift over a little bit and make room
for new titles, like, “Your iPod Life,” by
Dan Frakes, which has a lot of photographs
of accessories people can purchase
for their Apple iPod, along with brief
discussions of how the accessories
perform so consumers can make smart buys.

And, for instance, “The New Tower Of Babel,”
by Dietrich Von Hildebrand, has been tossed.
Or sold to raise a couple of quarters.
Hildebrand, a theologian, wrote that
the modern world’s conceptual conflicts
and confusions stem from Promethean
presumptions on the part of mankind and
share similarities with the classic
Judeo-Christian story of fracture
caused by the Babel tower incident.

With “The New Tower Of Babel” off the shelf,
books shift over a bit, making room for
new and more relevant titles, such as,
“Godless: The Church Of Liberalism,”
by Ann Coulter, in which Coulter describes
atheism and evolution as
something like a religion supporting
Democrats as they fight Republicans.

Soon, a young person will ask someone old
what exactly the word “Atlantis” means.
The adult will laugh and tell the youngster
that “Atlantis” is a word that refers
to any kind of imaginary
existence—for instance, when writers dream
of a fantasy reality where
books could be written even if the books
had no explicit corporate sponsorship
and even if the authors did not have
explicit party affiliations.






(Tomorrow: Paris Hilton And The Butterflies
From Atlantis #4: Atlantis)

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #2: Paris Hilton

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
homeless people cool down in the summer
and warm up in the winter, if you do
a computer search of their catalogue
for “Paris Hilton” you will get two hits,
a horror DVD called “House Of Wax,”
and the book, “Confessions Of An Heiress,”
which Paris Hilton wrote with Merle Ginsberg.

If you venture into the stacks you’ll find
Paris Hilton’s book on a shelf in the
seven-nineties. In fact, you will find it
on a shelf right below another book,
“Price Guide To Plastic Collectibles,” by
Lindi McNulty. Paris Hilton’s book,
written with Merle Ginsberg, tells a person
how to live as if they were an heiress.

If you sit down at one of the public
access computers and do a Google
internet search for “Paris Hilton,” you
will get more than eighty-three million hits.
If you venture into those stacks you might
be wandering around for quite some time.

I have read “Confessions Of An Heiress.”
One afternoon when the weather was nice
I checked it out and went to the small park
next to the library. I read it while
sitting on a bench. The book is only
a hundred and seventy-nine pages,
and most of them are full of photographs.
It’s not about a guy named John Galt who
stops the motor of the world by getting
smart people to abandon dumb people.
In fact, you can find inconsistencies:
Paris says never wear the same thing twice
but in two photos—on page fifty-four
and page one forty-seven—Paris wears
the same pink shirt. However, early on—
page nine—Paris warns readers not to take
her fail-safe instructions seriously.

I have not reviewed all the internet’s
eighty-three million Paris Hilton hits.
In fact, yesterday when I checked there were
only eighty-two million. I couldn’t
even review today’s new additions.
I have looked at some of the old stories.
There’s one about Paris wrecking the hood
of her Bentley in a fender-bender.
There’s one about her and Nicole Ritchie
patching up their friendship after feuding.
And roughly eighty-three million others.

“Confessions Of An Heiress” is a book
written by Paris Hilton with help from
Merle Ginsberg. Most likely it was written
by Merle Ginsberg with occasional chats
over party drinks with Paris Hilton.

The internet is not a book. It’s not
written by anybody. It’s tempting
to say it’s written by everybody
but that’s like saying the United States
and Monaco are both in the UN—
it’s true but it conveys little content
toward an obviously much larger truth
that is Byzantine with consequences.

There’s Paris Hilton. And there is her book.
And there’s the internet. Byzantium.






(Tomorrow: Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo)

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #1: Et In Arcadia Ego

At the Oak Lawn Public Library where
many people work whose names I am not
allowed to say because it frightens them,
there’s a small park next to the library.

A one-lane driveway separates the park
from the two-story library building.

Among the many trees in the small park,
six trees grow along the narrow driveway.

The foliage of the trees spreads out next to
the library’s large, second-floor windows.

Birds in the trees mistake the reflection
of sky in the windows for the real sky
and kill themselves smashing into the glass.

People walking along the driveway to
the train station or to buy a paper
in the morning find their day starting with
colorful dead birds on black asphalt or
the sight of the maintenance man kicking
the dead birds over the low concrete curb
and into the bushes of the small park.






(Tomorrow: Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From Atlantis #2: Paris Hilton)

Seeing Things In Christina’s World

Andrew Wyeth painted “Christina’s World”
in Nineteen-Forty-Eight. One year later
it was purchased by New York’s Museum
of Contemporary Art. The great fuss,
then, over the painting resulted in
the real-life model, Christina Olson,
being called the most famous model in
the world of modern American art.

I was born ten years later. Growing up,
the only artists people around me
talked about were Peter Max and sometimes
Andy Warhol, or Frank Frazetta and
sometimes LeRoy Neiman. When I first saw
“Christina’s World” there was no preceding
fuss, there was no explanatory text.
My response was only to the image.

God, I thought, what a profoundly modern,
profoundly American, profoundly
New England restatement of the classic
Eternal Feminine. A young woman
sprawled in a bountiful field, her hips thrust
against the earth, her back turned haughtily
to the artist and viewer and her gaze
forward, at her farm, her house, at her world.

Much later I learned how profoundly wrong
I was. Looking at Christina’s thin arms,
thin legs, I was growing up in a time
when many girls thought Twiggy was groovy
and many women were developing
the look Wolfe would soon call social x-rays.

But Christina wasn’t a hippie and
she certainly wasn’t a socialite.

Christina Olson suffered polio
as a child. She lost the use of her legs.
As an adult if Christina wanted
to go outside when people were busy
she would drag herself out of the house and
into the surrounding blueberry field.

Wyeth often painted in a small room
upstairs at Christina’s house. He would watch
her drag herself out to the field, then back.
Eventually Wyeth painted her.

Growing up, a kid, I saw the painting
as bright, a celebration of Woman.

Older, an adult, I saw it a dirge,
a lament of Christina’s affliction,
and the painting’s key was the perspective,
the distance cue of the great space between
Christina and the high, far horizon.

Older still, confused in my adulthood,
I’ve wondered sometimes if my second guess
might be as profoundly wrong as my first.

*

One night a woman called at three a.m.
to tell me she was painting my portrait.
It wasn’t really my portrait, she said.
It was a self-portrait of herself but
she said after knowing me for two years
she felt so shaped by me that by painting
herself she was painting me. And, she said,
it wasn’t really a portrait of her,
it was actually a painting of
a donut. She said after knowing me
for two years she’d come to think of herself
as something like a frosted donut, and
it pissed her off that thinking of herself
as a frosted donut just made her smile
instead of making her angry. She said
she’d bought a frosted donut that evening
and now was staying up all night painting.
She said she was working through her feelings
toward me and herself and our dating by
making a frosted donut oil painting.

*

Having looked at a donut that was me,
or a woman who knew me, I’m not sure
what I see looking at “Christina’s World.”

Christina’s in a field. Does it matter
if I know it’s a field of blueberries?
Christina’s in a field. Does it matter
if I know she’s dragging herself through it?

I don’t know what I see. For all I know
I might be seeing Wyeth’s self-portrait
as he sees himself, shaped by Christina
and the house in the field of blueberries.

I don’t know what I see. That’s my third guess.

My third guess is there are things in this world
that are unknowable. Things we can’t know.

That doesn’t mean that we cannot see them.

I think looking into “Christina’s World”
I see things unknowable in this world.

There are things in this world we cannot know.

That doesn’t mean that we cannot see them.
Or that we cannot think they’re beautiful.
Or that we cannot love them. That’s my guess—
That art is about unknowable things.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .


Christina’s World at Wikipedia

A Very Elusive Thing

My struggle
is to preserve that abstract flash—
like something you caught
out of the corner of your eye,
but in the picture
you can look at it directly.
It’s a very elusive thing.

Andrew Wyeth
quoted in “The Helga Pictures”
by John Wilmerding

A White Mussel Shell On A Gravel Bank

You look at my pictures—Christina’s World, The Patriot, Miss Olson—there’s witchcraft and hidden meaning there. Halloween and all that is strangely tied into them. For me, the paintings have that eerie feeling of goblins and witches out riding on broomsticks—damp rotting leaves and moisture—smell of make-up—as a child, the smell inside of a pumpkin when a candle is lit—the feel of your face under a mask walking down a road in the moonlight. I love all that, because then I don’t exist anymore. To me it’s almost like getting inside of my hound, Rattler, and walking around the country looking at it through his eyes.

What I’m trying to say is that I start every painting with an emotion—something I’ve just got to get out. These immaculately painted things—you’d think I was a very calm mathematician. Truth is, I use tempera partly because it’s such a dull medium—those minute strokes put a brake on my real nature—messiness. My wild side that’s really me comes out in my watercolors—especially of snow, which is absolutely intoxicating to me. I’m electrified by it—the hush—unbelievable. A white mussel shell on a gravel bank in Maine is thrilling to me because it’s all the sea—the gull that brought it there, the rain, the sun that bleached it there by a stand of spruce trees.

Andrew Wyeth
quoted in “The Art Of Andrew Wyeth”

The Deliriously Beautiful World Of Unnamed Substances

Alchemy is a discredited pseudoscience. It took a long time dying, but the end was in sight early on, as the sciences began to move forward after the Renaissance. Oswald Croll, a seventeenth-century German alchemist, wrote a book with a picture of himself emerging from the alchemical vessel and striking a kingly pose. It is supposed to be an image of the Philosophical King, the very embodiment of the Stone. Croll calls his likeness “the earthly treasure and earthly God” but he is a flabby, nude, fifty-year-old man, and he looks pathetic—like an overweight suburbanite who stepped into a pot by mistake. Even then, in the golden age of alchemy, there were those who suspected that alchemy might be hollow. As modern chemistry got going, alchemy lost ground, and in the nineteenth century scientists stripped it even of the dubious prestige it had once had. In the last fifty years things have gotten even worse, because now alchemy is either mummified within Jung’s heavy psychological theories of the mind, or evaporated into New Age dreams.

In a perverse way, some alchemists reveled in the ruins of their discipline. If things looked bad, and they were expelled from court, or called quacks or “puffers,” then that meant their art must have some miraculous secret. Because it seemed empty, it must be full. Because it was despised, it must be magnificent. Countless books begin with versions of the epigram “What good are glasses to those who cannot see?”—implying that the book will not be understood by anyone unless they already believe in it. As the criticism from outside became more strident, the alchemists dug deeper into their unwavering convictions and unconscious self-deceptions. Current alchemy happens far from serious chemistry, physics, philosophy, and literature: that is the price it pays to keep its hope alive.

The weight of history is against the alchemists, but in a sense they are right, because there is truth in alchemy even if it does not reside in vague recipes or ecstatic prayers. I hope I have made it clear that alchemy is not just a fusty old activity fit for cranks, or a mystical New Age pursuit suitable for adolescents. It has its truths, and they were hard-won in encounters with unknown substances. Above all, alchemy is a record of serious, sustained attempts to understand what substances are and how they carry meaning. And for that reason it is the best voice for artists who wrestle every day with materials they do not comprehend and methods they can never entirely master. Science has closed off almost every unsystematic encounter with the world. Alchemy and painting are two of the very last remaining paths into the deliriously beautiful world of unnamed substances.

James Elkins
in “What Painting Is”

Negotiations Between Water And Stone

Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors. The first is painting, because artists’ pigments are made from fluids (these days, usually petroleum products and plant oils) mixed together with powdered stones to give color. All oil paints, watercolors, gouaches, and acrylics are made that way, and so are more solid concoctions including pastels, ink blocks, crayons, and charcoal. They differ only in the proportions of water and stone—or to put it more accurately, medium and pigment. To make oil paint, for example, it is only necessary to buy powdered rock and mix it with a medium, say linseed oil, so that it can be spread with a brush. Very little more is involved in any pigment, and the same observations apply to other visual arts. Ceramics begins with the careful mixing of tap water and clay, and the wet clay slip is itself a dense mixture of stone and water. Watery mud is the medium of ceramists, just as oily mud is the medium of painters. Mural painting uses water and stone, and tempera uses egg and stone. Even a medium like bronze casting relies on the capacity of “stone”—that is, the mixture of tin, lead, copper, zinc, and other metals—to become a river of bright orange fluid.

So painting and other visual arts are one example of negotiations between water and stone, and the other is alchemy. In alchemy, the Stone (with a capital S) is the ultimate goal, and one of the purposes of alchemy is to turn something as liquid as water into a substance as firm and unmeltable as stone. As in painting, the means are liquid and the ends are solid. And as in painting, most alchemy does not have to do with either pure water or hard stones, but with mixtures of the two. Alchemists worked with viscid stews, with tacky drying films, with brittle skins of slag: in short, they were concerned with the same range of half-fluids as painters and other artists.

That is the first point of similarity between alchemy and painting. There is a second similarity that runs even deeper, and gives me the impetus to explain painting in such a strange way. In alchemy as in painting, there are people who prefer to live antiseptically, and think about the work instead of laboring over it. In alchemy, those are the “spiritual” or “meditative” alchemists, the ones who read about alchemy and ponder its meaning but try not to go near a laboratory; and in painting they are the critics and art historians who rarely venture close enough to a studio to feel the pull of paint on their fingers. Perhaps because they are uncomfortable with paint, art historians prefer meanings that are not intimately dependent on the ways the paintings were made. Consider, for instance, the first of the color plates in this book. An historian looking at this painting might recognize Sassetta, a fourteenth-century painter from Siena. Sassetta is known to art history as a late medieval artist who slowly adjusted his work to the emerging sensibility of the Florentine Renaissance. He knew about the important new works that were being made in Florence, and there are echoes and hints of them in his paintings, though in the end he remained faithful to the conservative Sienese ways. We know a little about his life, and about his patrons and commissions; and we can guess at his friends, and the places he visited. Pictures can have many meanings of those kinds, and art history is a rich and complex field. But a painting is a painting, and not words describing the artist or the place it was made or the people who commissioned it. A painting is made of paint—of fluids and stone—and paint has its own logic, and its own meanings even before it is shaped into the head of a madonna. To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of “pushing paint,” breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing. Bleary preverbal thoughts are intermixed with the namable concepts, figures and forms that are being represented. The material memories are not usually part of what is said about a picture, and that is a fault in interpretation because every painting captures a certain resistance of paint, a prodding gesture of the brush, a speed and insistence in the face of mindless matter: and it does so as the same moment, and in the same thought, as it captures the expression of a face.

In Sassetta’s painting little brushstrokes form the face: they are delicate light touches that fall like lines of rain over the skin, coming down at a slight angle over the temples and next to the mouth. Brighter marks spread from the top of the forehead, crisscrossing the canted strokes over the temple. There are larger milky dapples just under the pink of the cheek—almost like downy hair—and curling marks that come around the neck and congregate on the collar bone. Sassetta has clasped three bright rings of sharp white (they are called Venus’s collars) around the neck. The sum of brushstrokes is the evidence of the artist’s manual devotion to his image: for Sassetta painting was the slow, pleasureful, careful and repetitious building of a face from minuscule droplets of pigment. The initial strokes were darker and more watery, and as the contours began to emerge he used whiter paint, and put more on his tiny brush, until he finally built up the forehead to a brilliant alabaster. This is tempera painting, and in its period many painters used the medium as a way of showing devotion. Sassetta’s lingering patience and fastidious attention remain fixed in the painting for everyone to see: they are a meaning of the method itself.

James Elkins
in “What Painting Is”

Mischa Barton, Mischa Barton

Now and then people say this or that owl
is really the daughter of some baker.
We know what other people are, but guess
at what other people really might be.

Mischa Barton went from Los Angeles
to London to learn about Shakespeare’s plays.

I knew a young woman who looked so much
like Mischa Barton that I wondered if
Mischa Barton was researching a role
as a hot, young beauty toiling away
in an anonymous suburban job.

Since in my deepest, secret soul I feel
life is for the most part very much like
a Danny Kaye movie—you know, people
in other people’s places, playing roles—
or like Greek mythology, I asked her.

I asked the beautiful suburban girl
who looked exactly like Mischa Barton
if she was Mischa researching a role.

I planned, of course, to hint that I’d expose
her presence in the suburb unless she
used her influence to put together
a development deal for a two-hour
made-for-TV thriller I was writing.
Mischa would play an ichthyologist
investigating sea serpent sightings
in Lake Champlain. I wanted Penn Jillette
to co-star as her grad student sidekick.

Mischa Barton dated Brandon Davis,
heir to the Marvin Davis oil fortune.
“I dipped my foot in that pool,” Mischa says.
“But in the end I’m not part of that world.”
They split up and Mischa went to London
to read, study and perform Shakespeare’s plays.

I asked this beautiful suburban girl
who looked exactly like Mischa Barton
if she was Mischa researching a role.

It turned out she wasn’t Mischa Barton.

And, of course, this suburban girl didn’t
assume I was a writer looking to
further my writing career through standard
show business quid pro quo maneuvering.
She assumed I was, well, something like a
barn owl looking to snap up a field mouse.

We know what other people are, but guess
at what other people really might be.

Which is not to say that I’m not something
like an owl looking to snap up a mouse.

Mischa Barton went to London to learn
what Shakespeare thought about country matters.

The girl that looked exactly like Mischa
got married, started her own business and
is living happily ever after.

Mischa Barton came back from studying
Shakespeare in London and is hoping for
a key role in a television show
about sexy, desperate suburban wives.

A mysterious society of
international banker-alchemists
somehow mixed up me and another guy
and now I’m on the run with a famous
retired woman tennis player who looks
very much like actress Vera-Ellen.

We know what we are, not what we might be.

Sleeping Beauty

I made my way down to the public beach and along it to the sandy point which partly enclosed the harbor. A few people, mostly women and girls, were standing at the edge of the water, facing out to sea. They looked as if they were waiting for the end of the world, or as if the end had come and they would never move again.

The surf was rising sluggishly. A black bird with a sharp beak was struggling in it. The bird had orange-red eyes, which seemed to be burning with anger, but it was so fouled with oil that at first I didn’t recognize it as a western grebe.

A woman in a white shirt and slacks waded in thigh-deep and picked it up, holding its head so that it wouldn’t peck her. I could see as she came back toward me that she was a handsome young woman with dark eyes as angry as the bird’s. Her narrow feet left beautifully shaped prints in the wet sand.

I asked her what she was going to do with the grebe.

“Take it home and clean it.”

“It probably won’t survive, I’m afraid.”

“No, but maybe I will.”

She walked away, holding the black struggling thing against her white shirt. I walked along behind in her elegant footprints. She became aware of this, and turned to face me.

“What do you want?”

“I should apologize. I didn’t mean to be discouraging.”

“Forget it,” she said. “It’s true not many live once they’ve been oiled. But I saved some in the Santa Barbara spill.”

“You must be quite a bird expert.”

“I’m getting to be one in self-defense. My family is in the oil business.”


from, “Sleeping Beauty”

by Ross Macdonald

The Mythologies Of Facts

“The very notion of truth
is a culturally given direction,
a part of the pervasive nostalgia
for an earlier certainty.
The very idea of a universal stability,
an eternal firmness of principle out there
that can be sought for through the world
as might an Arthurian knight for the Grail,
is, in the morphology of history,
a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods
in the first two millennia after
the decline of the bicameral mind.
What was then an augury for direction of action
among the ruins of an archaic mentality
is now the search for an innocence of certainty
among the mythologies of facts.”


Julian Jaynes

in “The Origin Of Consciousness
In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral”

That Fourth Dimension For Which I Am Searching

“For me the
metamorphosis of
height, breadth and depth into the
two-dimensional plane is a
magical experience which gives me an
inkling of that
fourth dimension for which I am
searching with all my
soul.”


Painter, Max Beckmann (1884-1950)
quoted in, “Perspective,” by Alison Cole

Anna Kournikova’s Face

I’ve been staring at
Anna Kournikova’s face.
I never get tired

of thinking about
Anna Kournikova’s face.
She always stares back.

It’s a picture of
Anna Kournikova’s face.
It’s not, you know, her.

Of course, I’d stare at
Anna Kournikova’s face
in real-life if she

were here with me, but
Anna Kournikova’s face
isn’t really here.

It’s a good pic of
Anna Kournikova’s face
from the BBC.

I’m so knocked-out by
Anna Kournikova’s face
I’d like to draw a

graphic novel of
Anna Kournikova’s face.
The cover would be

a big picture of
Anna Kournikova’s face.
And then every page

would be panels of
Anna Kournikova’s face.
The story would be

subtle and involve
Anna Kournikova’s face
in global intrigue.

There would be hints that
Anna Kournikova’s face
in real-life inspired

the odd goings-on
Anna Kournikova’s face
lives through in the book.

Readers would study
Anna Kournikova’s face
looking for clues, but

the mystery of
Anna Kournikova’s face
wouldn’t be revealed.

There’s real magic in
Anna Kournikova’s face
and magicians don’t

give away magic.
Anna Kournikova’s face
doesn’t give away

its magic. Seeing
Anna Kournikova’s face
is to know magic.

All faces are like
Anna Kournikova’s face,
pages to read, but

turning endlessly.
Anna Kournikova’s face—
I can’t look away.

Like everyone’s face
Anna Kournikova’s face
is the Holy Grail.