WENDY CALLING

philip Pearlstein

 

A surprise phone call from out of the blue Saturday afternoon. I've learned to trust things that come from out of the blue as where some of the best gifts come from. It was a voice so welcome, it was like the timing was perfect, in the subconscious, first thought: could it actually be? Yes. It was. It was my friend Wendy from the Charleston years. She's been living in NYC working with the 92nd St Y in its poetry program for several years. Last photograph I saw of her, she looked like a sixty year old version of herself. We were in our late twenties, early thirties. For one of her birthdays I bought her a special bottle of scotch called Glen something or other. We tried it. It was so good, we kept on trying it and got ourselves shit-faced in a hurry. It was like getting drunk from eating candy. We had plenty of laughs. I doubt I could tolerate a taste of it now. My taste for bonded liquor completely fell away when I tasted hillbilly homemade. Now, I don't want anything else. Wendy is special in my life. There was a time of twenty or more years that we knew nothing of each other. We made contact, found out about each other's circumstances and drifted apart again. Only drifted apart in contact. If we can't be together laughing and drinking, where's the fun?  

 

philip pearlstein

 

Something popped into my head I've never told her I did. It was one of the funniest pranks I ever pulled, funny in that it entertained me the most. I learned eventually to cut out the pranks. Mine tended to blow up in my face. This one didn't. Some of Wendy's friends from the Iowa graduate school in creative writing were visiting. She had a small gathering of them with some of her friends in Charleston, aspiring writers. I was smoking Camels at the time, mid 1970s. Before the gathering, I emptied the tobacco from a half inch at the end of one of the cigarettes and packed some reefer in it for the first puff. It was very much an anti-reefer bunch of people. We were sitting in a semi-circle on the screen porch overlooking the beach at Folly Island. At a given point in the evening when everyone was relaxed with drinks and cigarettes, I fired up my loaded Camel and exhaled the first puff. Everybody jumped to attention, Who's got it? They zoomed in on me. Who me? This is a Camel. No it isn't, let me try it. Hm. It is a Camel. He handed it back to me and I gestured, What?  Everybody was confused, nobody figured it out. And I was going crazy holding my laughter from exploding. I never told Wendy later. Not that it was a secret, it just never happened. Now, Wendy, you know.

 

philip pearlstein

 

It brings to mind another successful prank from that time, successful in that it did not backfire on me. A big open party for visiting NY artist Philip Pearlstein, who painted stylized nudes. A lot of people there I didn't know. I was with four of my friends. A time came we were bored from knowing so few people there, and tired from standing around with drink in hand talking with people we didn't know. We found a place to sit for awhile, two rows of benches that faced each other with a passageway between. We sat down. A guy came and sat among us we didn't know. He didn't talk. I lit a Camel, smoking was cool then, and handed it to Jeanette, who was sitting next to me. She took a puff and passed it to Ty sitting next to her. He puffed on it and passed it to Judy. She took a puff and passed it to Lucas, who puffed it and passed it on to the guy we didn't know. He took a puff, looked at it funny, like what the hell is this? and passed it back to me. I finished smoking the cigarette. Like, what? The next prank I pulled went off like an atom bomb in my face. The end of me and pranks.

philip Pearlstein

Wendy published a book of poems, Folly River, a good collection, moved to New York not long after I moved to the mountains. It was something like we were both in a place in our lives just before a major transition. I started playing with chance and it wasn't long before changes were happening. I'd come to a place that nothing I wanted or planned for myself ever went into motion. Age thirty-three, nobody going nowhere. I saw I don't make decisions for myself well, at all, and decided to give chance a go at it, see what chance opens up. It felt a bit like stepping off the edge of a skyscraper to see what happens. I fell into who I am very quickly, and one thing after another led, step by step, to Waterfall Road, a remote part of the Blue Ridge, once the Lost Colony. Chance led me to my hillbilly blood, something, I felt at the time, like a dandelion seed flying on the wind that touches ground to take root who-knows-where. I call it where my parachute landed me. Wendy's parachute landed her in NYC. I don't know what motivated the move as it came after I'd departed for the hills. She saw me through the greatest turning-point in my life. As a witness, it must have looked to her like I'd lost my mind. I'd finally discovered that God, indeed, is, and it turned my direction 180 degrees at the flip of a switch. She trusted my intuition. I was grateful for that in her during a time I couldn't explain articulately much of what was changing inside. I dove into the mountains with chance my guide. It was so great to talk with Wendy again, and the timing was perfect. I'd just finished a new project, had cleaned my hands of red oil paint, ready to shift gears. Ring.  

philip Pearlstein himself

 

 

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THE INTIMACY OF READING

ralph stanley and the clinch mountain boys

oil on canvas by tj worthington

A facebook friend posted today his thoughts and experience on a lifetime of reading, looking at the books, in particular, that were important to him, that stay with him. Like I look at a bookshelf and my eye falls on One Man's Bible, by Gao Xingjian, a Chinese dissident living in Paris. I feel the same glow in my heart as when I gaze at the window and see a squirrel at the birdfeeder, tail curled behind its head, nibbling a seed. The spine of the book reminds me of the content, as powerful for me in the time of reading it as Henry Miller's Colossus of Marousi in the time of reading it. James Lord's biography of Italian/Swiss/French sculptor, Giacometti, was important, because I came to know him, admire his mind, his vision, how simply he lived. At the end, Giacometti died and was buried. I closed the book, sat in the chair and cried for half an hour. It was the same as hearing of the death of one of my closest friends. I see a piece by Giacometti today and feel his presence in it. The only tool he used was his pocket knife, which inspired use of minimal tools in my own art making. I use a drill, a saw, a brush, and a palette knife, wood glue. 

philippe petit

I see the title, Man On Wire, and remember Philippe Petit, who walked the wire between WTC towers. I have three newspaper articles I've kept because they said something powerful to me. One was an article from the Village Voice when Andy Warhol was shot. Another, Philippe Petit's amazing event walking the wire. The third, an article from a newspaper about Johnny Weissmuller, a famous Tarzan from the Fifties, kept alive a vegetable in an Acapulco condo on the beach, tubes and round the clock nurses. Couldn't talk from stroke after stroke after stroke, unable to die because heart was so healthy from a lifetime of rigorous exercise. All he could do was give out a Tarzan yell from time to time and run shivers through the whole condo. I think the Tarzan story told me exercise aint what it's cracked up to be. Why was Petit's event so meaningful for me? He walked a wire between two buildings that sway, up high in the wind above the city of canyons. I know that I could not even stand on the roof of a skyscraper, could not step out of the elevator or stair well door. I sure as hell could not stand at the edge and look down at the street two tenths of a mile below. I don't know all there is to know about self, not even close, but I do know that. Him crawling over the edge and just stepping onto the wire rates my total respect. I'd rather read about him than Henry Kissinger. 

johnny weissmuller

The Lance and the Shield, by Robert M Utley, a biography of Sitting Bull, hit me as deeply as the Giacometti biography. By the end, I knew Sitting Bull, the man himself, who he was. I felt something I had never before felt from a biography, that I knew this man, knew him well. His values were mine. He seemed as familiar as reading a memoir by someone I already knew well. Like Wendy Salinger's, Listen, a beautifully written memoir of living through sexual child abuse by daddy, illustrated for me why my friend Wendy was wired tight as a banjo string. Sitting Bull, I felt I knew as well as I knew Wendy. I spoke with a woman friend about it who was somewhat psychic. She told me to ask him. I said I don't know how. She said, Yes you do, just do it. Later, at home, I went into a kind of meditation, settled down, and appealed to Sitting Bull in spirit. He appeared. We were in his tipi, either side of a small fire in the center. We smoked the pipe. I was in awe, hesitant to speak. I was thinking this is about more than a silly question. Eventually, I asked him why he is so familiar to me, why I know him so well. He said, "I am your real father." We spoke a little bit more, though mostly sat in silence. I visited him a few more times, no more questions and answers, only silence. I painted a portrait of him that is on the wall maybe four feet from where I sit. My version looks more like Gregory Peck in brown face. 

The Lance and the Shield was reprinted years later with new title and some places rewritten, Sitting Bull. I read it. And found later, a book of stories from the life of Sitting Bull that were passed down through the family, by his great-grandson, Ernie LaPointe. They're among the book treasures in the house. Another treasure in the house is Ralph Stanley's memoir, Man Of Constant Sorrow, written for him by Eddie Dean, who wrote it in Stanley's own words, as if Stanley, himself, wrote it. I have to credit Dean, because it is so beautifully written. I carried the copy to a show at Fairview and asked Ralph to sign it. I couldn't speak. I knew if I spoke a word I'd break out in tears that wouldn't stop. I asked him to sign it by opening the book and putting it before him. He got it. He wrote his signature in it, and that was all I wanted. I'm not one to ask writers to sign books, but this was necessary. I painted a portrait of him and his band playing at Fairview Ruritan, drove it to Clintwood, Virginia, and gave it to the Ralph Stanley museum in appreciation for his music. Asked if I'd like to meet him, I declined. I said I'd turn to jello. They said, he's just a man. I said, I know. He's also Ralph Stanley. A biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone, opened their music to me, one of the great gifts of my life. A few days ago I started Philip Glass's memoir, Words Without Music. I can see already it's going to be one of those books that is a treasure for how deeply it speaks to me. 

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KNOW THYSELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE

sigmar polke

The verse from the Tao te ching I put here a few days ago, #33, has been floating in my mind. Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering yourself is true power. My journey of self-knowledge included about six years of psychotherapy. A time came I felt self-examination with a therapist was the next step, guided, putting aside self-pity. So it was. My main concern at the time, the enigma I could not unravel, was why was I drawn to controlling women? The answer is obvious, but I needed to find why it was obvious. This was just the starting point. Much came up and everything that rose to the surface was dealt with and allowed its place. It wasn't about learning how to be normal, but for peace of mind. Much was brought up for examination, brought into the light of awareness where it can be seen both objectively and subjectively. The purpose was to find my own truth, not a truth outside self. I took it for the path of "Know thyself," first noted by Socrates, then by Jesus the Christ affirming Socrates. I took it to heart as a part of my path. I chose for self the path of love instead of the path of knowledge. I started from no understanding at all to, by now, a heart that can cry with a donkey when she loses her baby. It has taken forty years. By now, I feel I understand love to some degree and live it to some degree. By living love, I don't mean missionarizing about something I don't understand, or getting married or raising kids, or having a relationship. I meant to find love in everyday life, practical love that can flow freely, wherever and whatever the circumstances. I feel like I know the people I know with a loving heart. I train my pets by love and love only. They love me in turn, want to please me because they love me, and perform better when it comes to "minding" than scolding or hitting inspires. I'm told I spoil my pets. So what. 

sigmar polke

People I know who raised kids without hitting them, without talking down to them, raised kids who went through PhD on scholarship all the way. People I know who hit and berated their kids brought up kids full of anger, resentment, low self-esteem, and spikes of guilt in their heads making education difficult to focus on. This online journal is a project in knowing self. It functions in self-knowledge by bringing up particulars of my individual point of view, articulates them, gives me perspective of self in the world out there and the world within. It brings up issues I carry in mind that pop to the surface from time to time and sink back down out of sight to rise again and sink again. They seldom get articulated or examined to see what they're about, what they're telling me. I follow an issue here like talking with a therapist, the one who is now my friend, one of my favorite people in my life, a valuable soul. I'm not even sure talking to a therapist is more important than talking to a friend. I suspect people who talk to friends don't need therapists. By talk to, I mean cry with, empathize with. Writing in this daily journal becomes a meditation, a focus, searching for words, phrases, sentences, bringing up ideas, thoughts, feelings, exploring them, seeing what they have to tell me. It takes about an hour to write one of these paragraphs. Sometimes a little less and sometimes a little more. It is four to five hours of sitting here searching for sentences, one at a time. I think of it at the same time a yoga,  a meditation. I will not start with an agenda and follow it through. Avoiding agendas is number one guideline for self in this journal, except when I want to write about an agenda. Missionary is not my style. I start with no idea where I aim to go, just write a sentence or two, whatever I have on my mind, then the next sentence and the next. A time comes soon when I see where it is headed, open up and flow with it, see where it goes. One thing leads to another, and another. 

sigmar polke

I feel like I have a far better understanding of self than I did five years ago when this exercise was in its first months. Driving on the round trip to town yesterday, I was questioning the meaning in the lines of the Tao te ching verse, and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever. I cannot find it to say I embrace death with my whole heart. Initially, it seems kind of morbid, kind of Goth, fingernails painted black. It's not about wanting to die or suggesting suicide. Death, in my imaginings, here has to do with living without attachments to this life, this body, emotions and mind. The self that activates this body is the self that lives on after the body falls away. If you stay in your center, the center one's innermost self, may be the higher self, or consciousness, what have you. I like to call it consciousness, though it gets confused with consciousness associated with the fore-brain  that we like to think separates us from the animals. I think of it a word with two distinctly different definitions. like tear and tear. Somebody with a PhD in psychology would more than likely tell me I've got it all wrong. No doubt I do. I'm not giving instruction in absolute truth. I'm telling it as I understand it. At this moment, here is how I understand it. Maybe a year from now I'll see it another way. Maybe if I read some books on the matter, I'd see it an entirely different way. I don't care enough to study it academically. I have enough of a sense of it to have my own names for my own understanding. I'm not spreading it as truth, just admitting my limitations. In this illusion that is not even a vapor or a hologram, but a dream in each one of our minds, each dream is radically different from any of the other dreams in this world of more than seven billion embodied souls. A majority of us dream staggering poverty. 

sigmar polke

This is where I get my joy reading accounts of how others than myself see this world we live in, how other people experience this world, multiple points of view. This is where I find the benefit of reading. I can read Wendy Salinger's LISTEN and feel as another feels in a beautifully written memoir that is a joy to read for the writing in itself. A biography, SITTING BULL, by Robert Utley, is an entirely different experience from my own. Thanks to someone who took on the research and writing what he found looking for Sitting Bull's central core, Sitting Bull the man as he lived, I can see into the mind of someone who has something to say to me. Sitting Bull, the man, opened a new dimension in my life. I found that his values are my values. He seemed like somebody I already knew, somebody I knew well, whose values I shared, or they came from association with him I don't understand. I painted a simple portrait of him that hangs on the wall to the right of where I sit. For me, it seems to have touched his spirit somehow. I doubt any Lakota who saw it would say that. Doesn't matter. It's for me, not anybody else. I painted it because I wanted him on the wall the way some people keep a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall. A reminder, memory, of the values this individual represents. I'd never have known of Sitting Bull's life if I didn't take an interest in points of view other than my own. Knowing someone like Sitting Bull through learning his story adds a very great deal to my well being as a human being. I have refused to give my mind over to corporate brain-drain. I can be aware of the world I live in, but don't have to be of it, don't have to give it my power. I don't give over my power because somebody wants it. My power is for mastering myself, according to this verse in the Tao te ching, knowing yourself is true wisdom, mastering yourself is true power. These are my conundrums the last few days.   

sigmar polke

*

A POEM BY WENDY SALINGER

COASTAL CAROLINA FAIR 
                        WITH GAY BOYS


Those who never forget how to play:

which are they?

Oh

they know

how

to look lovely.

Prescient as women, they see

the image in another's eye.


Who keep alive

in waists and lowered looks

for me the older motion of a boy

who too disdained me in his most pure moment.

The shadow of his nose lay on his cheek

cast iron in the moon. 

In his unsettled voice the wind

took place.


Who mount the constellations of machines--

                                          the electric swing,

its cupola whipped and scrolled like bridal cake--

out and out and over the tents

of Jolly Dolly and Electric Man

and Girl Alive who Has No Bones

until World's Smallest Family dwarfs to ants,

far over the Four-Winged-Duck, monstrous in flight;


each strapped in his bucket tight about the groin

and by a silver chain hanging on.


                                  ---Wendy Salinger
                                       from her book of poems
                                      Folly River, 1980

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BOB DYLAN: NEVER ENDING TOUR DIARIES THE MOVIE

bob dylan

Assuming anything with Bob Dylan is a big mistake.
---Winston Watson, drummer

Bob Dylan stays with me. His album Tempest stirred up a renewed interest in Dylan and renewed interest in poetry. Over the last several weeks I've been picking up books of Chinese poetry, TS Eliot, wanting to read the Four Quartets again, Wendy Salinger, Lu Yu, Han Shan, Tao te Ching. Recently bought a copy of Louise Gluck's collected poems, which I love as much as Dylan songs. It would sound cool to say I love her poems more than Dylan songs, but it's not so. The same. I found a video made of home-movie footage, interviews, concert footage, featuring Dylan's drummer in the early 90s, Winston Watson. It's called, Bob Dylan: Never Ending Tour Diaries. The content is Watson talking about experiences in relation to Dylan and playing drums with the band. I liked Watson's spirit. He seemed to have a spirit similar to Bobby McFerrin, a round-faced, self-sustaining attitude toward life. I liked best seeing and hearing about being a musician with Bob Dylan, what it's like on the inside. It appears to be the same on the inside as the outside. Dylan doesn't talk much with the people in the band. He doesn't give them instruction on how they're to play, unless they're way off. Watson said he is especially demanding on the guitar players, because Dylan plays guitar too.


I saw Dylan in Atlanta in the summer of 1974 or 1975 at the Omni. It was his first tour. Two shows there, both sold out. From where I sat he looked like an ant standing on its back legs. The Band was with him. I took off the shelf my Dylan album LIVE 1975. It's with the Rolling Thunder Revue. I'm not a Dylanologist, so I don't know about the sudden change, same year. It must have been 74 I saw him. He didn't have white paint on his face. I didn't know Rolling Thunder Revue was the next thing. I can see it, however, looking back on Dylan behavior. The concert tour I saw was evidently the end of a certain way of seeing/hearing his music, time to change it, wrapping up a cycle. Winston Watson told of a time Dylan's song Like A Rolling Stone was on the set list. Watson was looking forward to playing it, because he loved it. When Dylan played it, he made it entirely different from the way Watson knew it. At the concert I saw, he sang his standards in a new way, inhibiting sing-alongs. A sing-along Bob Dylan concert would be offal. It would be too much like I imagine singing in a multi-thousand seat mega-church must be. I personally prefer church singing with less than fifty. And at music shows, I prefer an audience of less than fifty. I'd far rather hear Skeeter and the Skidmarks with an audience of twenty than Dylan with an audience of twenty thousand. So that's what I do.


An artist as satisfying as Bob Dylan makes me want to know about his life, and at the same time, not know about it. I'm not interested in connecting a particular album with a divorce or a motorcycle wreck, or anything like that. They may be pertinent to an academic examination of the songs, but has no bearing for me. I prefer to like a work of art for itself, not necessarily its context, unless the context is a part of it. If a work of art inspired by a given moment or event in somebody's life cannot be understood without the explanation of biography or critical pontification, it's not art. I like it when I read, say, a poem by Louise Gluck, AVERNO, and then read a brief note telling context, it being an Italian island with a volcano known to be the place where souls enter and leave the earth. That set off a ping in my head that was enlightening. Sometimes translators of Chinese poets will preface a poem with a short note of place, time and circumstance. I can read Gluck's poem with the same thrill I get hearing Dylan sing Mr Tambourine Man. A lot of people liked to think that a drug song, because it has the word trip in it. That was in the first years of white people discovering marijuana, etc., and attributing all forms of creativity to drugs. It was a cool time for fashion, also another quantum leap in American anti-intellectualism. The equal of the Reagan Revolution in that regard.


The Sixties in retrospect as seen on tv was all about peace and wow and free-style dancing, following the Dead, tie-dye tshirts, long hair, thrift store clothes, Janis, Jimi, Led Zeppelin. It was a renascence in rock. At first, the cool people rocked. The cool ones being the drop-outs, the ones that hung out all the time throwing frisbees, scoring, speaking a new dictionary of slang to be learned, like groovy and wow. The verb to score acquired multiple meanings in that time. Hippies were prejudiced too. People without long hair didn't even figure. If you were a hippie and cut your hair you were no longer a hippie. Reading was confined to Hesse, Tolkein, Brautigan, Vonnegut. Richard Brautigan was a hip Rod McKuen as a poet. Rod McKuen on recreational drugs. Jim Morrison of the Doors published a book of poems that became holy script. In my personal estimation it more aptly rhymed with script. It was a time when knowledge lost its vigor and its appeal. Yet in rock, some of the lyrics coming on were good poetry. Dylan's songs, Mick Jagger's, Lou Reed's, Lennon and McCartney's were good poetry. In music there was Santana, the band that suddenly became known in the film of Woodstock. Their Soul Sacrifice was unforgettable. Joplin singing Big Mama Thornton. And all the time Bob Dylan is out there by himself, the one who changed rock & roll to rock, and wrote songs nobody else could come near. Heir to Woody Guthrie. He was like what Chilean poets of the time said of Pablo Neruda, always out there ahead of the other poets.


I sometimes wonder how college might have retarded Bob Dylan. I'm so glad he focused his mind to writing songs and performing them instead of joining the corporate climb. Had he majored in accounting, he'd be a good CEO by now. And probably making less than he is making as somebody with thirty-some best-selling albums behind him, all of them still paying royalties. When it comes to wealth, he has it. The wealth does not own him, except he's the CEO of his own wealth. In my adult lifetime I have seen the career of a young bad-boy American Rimbaud folksinger under Pete Seeger's umbrella, who left the folk scene at the end of that cycle, start up a new sound called Rock and transferred his stardom from Greenwich Village to the entire earth. Not many people go to the top of their career possibilities early and stay there all the way along. Harold Pinter did. Bertolt Brecht did. Can't overlook Frank Sinatra. Like Winston Watson said, everybody in the world wants to see Bob Dylan. I've thought of Dylan as America's Pablo Neruda in that light, that he stayed out ahead of his peers. Watson described being in a room with several people, Dylan among them. He said everybody is sucking up to Dylan. Bob Dylan seems to me an Elvis who went his own way and the world went with him.

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