HAN SHAN #68



     han shan by tj worthington


                      
                           #68


          Would you know a simile for life and death?

          Compare them to water and ice.

          Water binds together to become ice;
         
          Ice melts and turns back into water.

          What has died must live again,

          What has been born shall return to death.

          Water and ice do no harm to each other;

          Life and death are both of them good.


                                   ---Han Shan
                                   tr Burton Watson

    

CAN'T CONNECT WITH FRANK O'HARA

     larry rivers, I like olympia in black, 1970

Have been reading in Frank O'Hara's ART CHRONICLES 1954-1966. It is a collection of esssays from a magazine he was involved with as an associate editor, Art and Literature, where these essays originally appeared. He also worked at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote a good bit of poetry. The book was published in 1975 and I've had my copy since about that time. Seeing the spine on the bookshelf, I was thinking it would be a good time to look at it, as I hadn't paid much attention to it in awhile and he wrote about artists whose work I appreciate, the abstract expressionists. Reading in it, I realized I had read in it before. This time I was looking at an interview with Larry Rivers.

O'Hara's questions struck me as very poor interview questions, yet each one sent Rivers into a long paragraph of talking. What he drew out of Rivers I found did not satisfy my reasons for reading the article, to find some possible insight into Larry Rivers' painting. I came away disappointed, but didn't really know why. Started the essay on Robert Motherwell, recognizing I'd read it before, but that was so far away as not to matter. Read ten pages, wondered, what am I reading? He hadn't told me a thing about Motherwell's painting that opened to any insight for me. It was all information, nickel knowledge information. The information didn't even give an insight into the character of Motherwell or his painting. I quit reading it and realized this has happened before with this book over the last almost 40 years.

It takes me back to remembering why I've never been an enthusiast for Frank O'Hara's poetry. It never spoke to me. Like his prose writing, it seems like information for the sake of information. I feel like rejecting him like I have is not the way to handle O'Hara, because he is "cool" and "famous" and ran in the right circles to be totally cool. Cool people praise his writing and talk about what a great guy he was. Mighta been. I'm recalling past efforts of mine to give O'Hara a break, considering that I haven't yet given him his due, maybe if I read something now I'll get it. Maybe before, I didn't get it. Over and over I've found he leaves me uninterested in what he's writing about very quickly. I stopped reading about Motherwell when I realized after 10 pages I'd found nothing that reveals anything about what Motherwell was reaching toward. I found O'Hara has no depth in his writing. It's the same with his poetry. I used to wonder why cool people spoke and wrote so highly of him and I couldn't find any reason to read any of the poems I saw a second time.

O'Hara in these essays shows me the reason I've not been able to read him with any pleasure in the past is that he's a surface-skimmer. I've no problem with that as a legitimate style, but it's of no interest to me to read information for the sake of information. O'Hara wrote historical context very well, understood the evolution of art in the 20th Century. For me, his writing lacks life. When I finish one of his essays I feel like I haven't read anything, like I've been sitting here dozing off. His thinking, going by the questions in the Rivers interview, didn't appear to run very deep. I've never found an O'Hara poem I can say I like, and these essays, again, have only disappointed by giving no insight into a period of art I like a lot. Writing about art is not a bit easy. I'm not so wound up over Clement Greenberg's writing about abstraction, though Harold Rosenberg's writings on the abstract expressionists satisfies what I'm looking for when I want to read about art. I don't mean to make claims that one is the greatest and the other is not. Just noting my own subjective take on them.

A black bear ran by the window. It ran past the birdfeeder to the road, across the road and up the bank the other side. At first, I thought it was a black dog, but it was a little too much like loping for a dog. Running up the bank, it's fat rolling all over its body lumbering without hesitation up the steep embankment faster than a dog could, I saw clearly this was, indeed, a bear and not a dog. At the top of the bank it stopped and showed me its profile with its light brown snout. Beautiful bear. Caterpillar is looking out the screen door suspiciously. Could be she smelled it or heard the alarm in Martha's voice.. Martha barked at it briefly and made like she wanted to run after it. Satisfied to see it leave her territory of its own accord, she stopped this side of the road. She knew what it was, probably ten times her weight, big claws, big teeth, and absolutely wild.

    


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VELVET UNDERGROUND AND HEROIN

Earlier, I put on a Velvet Underground album. Their tune Heroin continues in my head, Lou Reed's and John Cale's guitars pumping a rhythm with Sterling Morrioson's bass and Moe Tucker's drums keeping the rhythm going. The shriek of guitar strings like subway wheels screeching on the tracks in curves through the tunnels under Manhattan streets. Heroin was their obligatory anthemic drug song required of every band in the Sixties. The drug anthems tended to be around lsd trips, floating over strawberry fields forever. Not the Velvets. Hard core spike in the vein, makes me feel just like Jesus' son. Hippies didn't take to the Velvets' New York scene where everybody hip wore black. California was the flowers in your hair hip style. The Velvet Underground only played outside New York a few times. They made a bus trip to Texas and then to San Francisco in hippie times playing New York sounds and lyrics. Audiences didn't take to them at all. They hated the song Heroin. Too hard core. The Velvet Underground also cranked up the metronome a bit making their rhythms a little closer to original Fifties rhythms of Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley.


Reed's and Cale's guitar solos were never Stairway To Heaven psychedelia. They wrenched the strings making unmelodic squawling sounds that turned up later in new ways by Rage Against The Machine, Papa Roach, The Clash, Garbage, Patti Smith Group. To make it brief, punk. Punk followed Velvet Underground's influence as Velvet Underground had followed Bo Diddley's and Buddy Holly's musical influence. In New York, punk pretty much came out of CBGB's where a new sound was emerging, like all at once after the New York Dolls when Patti Smith recorded Horses. Simultaneously in London punk was an art student trend. Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees was one of the first run of London punk bands in the time of the Damned, the Sex Pistols, Generation X, naming just a few, and Nina Hagen Band in Berlin. Siouxsie said punk is not a particular style of music. Punk is the freedom to do what you want to do, make the music you want to hear. In London, the press made punk into an anger expression, when it was an art student trend. There, kids wanting to get with a band went to art school. That was where you met other's looking to get a band going. Every one of the Clash met in art school. Paul Simenon, the bass player, didn't even know how to play bass. When Jones and Strummer started talking about it, Simenon was there and a friend, so come on, you can learn it, let's party. Punk was not an anger expression in New York either.


Herion ran through the New York punk scene like a plague and crossed the Atlantic to the London punk scene where junk critically wounded the punk spirit in just a few months. Richard Hell, interesting New York guitar player in the band Television with Tom Verlaine for awhile, then his own band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. He didn't last long. The black dragon got him. The one song he might be remembered for is Love Comes In Spurts. He was a guitar player and singer with promise at his very beginning, but he took a liking to the extended orgasmic feeling that's better than sex and goes on for quite awhile. Then it goes away and everything is boring, gotta get some more right away. Breaking and entering, becoming habitual at stealing cars, computers, anything, and it becomes a career. Steve Tyler of Aerosmith kissed the lips of death and wound up in the literal gutter before he could turn around. Lost his band, home, jewelry, self-esteem, the works, down the drain to the sewer. He survived and came back, as did Bob Dylan, Steve Earle and several I don't know about and never heard of.


The obvious finally popped me with a knuckle on the forehead that heroin addiction is the beginning of the spiritual path for the ones able to get with some kind of help to get over the addiction. It looks like the only path out of any kind of addiction is the spiritual path. And when one comes back on the spiritual path, they have experience of both the dark side and the light side, the whole. I think of them as brave people. They may not think they're brave when they start shooting up, but it's not long before breaking into somebody's apartment in an apartment building and carrying out the loot is what you do. That's brave. I do not have the bravery to break into anybody's apartment or house, even if the house is remote and the owners in Europe on vacation. My heart would beat so fast, my knees would be so weak a cat could scare me out of my wits. It wouldn't do for me to put myself in a situation where I have to be brave enough to face somebody being home when I wasn't expecting them. I don't have what it takes to be a junkie. I'm not brave enough to do something to get myself handcuffed behind my back and stuffed into the back seat of a police car. I have a problem being handcuffed by an authority I have no recourse against. I don't want to go there. So I obey the laws, at least within reason.


I've read different writings by junkies, known friends who have friends who are junkies. We have our share here in Alleghany on every kind of thing from crystal meth to opium, cocaine, heroin, anything of prescription drugs. I've seen it take young'uns just out of high school, set free from the leash the first time in their lives, dive head first into everything they can find. Then you need the money. A labor job just out of high school doesn't pay enough. Besides, that's work. Breaking and entering is easy and fun and you find all kindsa shit. Crossing the line into needing to steal a woman's precious jewelry, some of it her mother's, tainting her private space with the presence of a thief without compassion is something I cannot do to both myself and the person I'm stealing from. It's a feeling of having been raped when you discover somebody has been in your house and you start seeing what's missing. I don't like that feeling and I can't give the experience to somebody else. It's just not in me. It doesn't leave the world a better place. Sometimes we hurt other people without intending to and without knowing it, like when I have kicked Caterpillar walking through the house in the dark. I would never kick Caterpillar with intent to hurt her.


The people brave enough to stick a needle between their toes have something I aint got. But then it's not long before standing in the street in downtown New York traffic, holding up a lane of traffic, standing in the street talking to somebody who isn't there. That's not how I want to live my life. Whatever a heroin rush feels like I'll never know and don't want to know. It's the nature trail to hell. For the last half century the American people have made the drug trade the most lucrative in the world. It's got millions of people in prison over the last half century. The drug war is just another war used by our government to keep war going. After the 2nd WW, the Cold War. After the Cold War, the War on Drugs. Or, as Gore Vidal calls it, the War on the American People. I wouldn't think of hoping our government might do something sensible, but it seems to me free treatment programs in every city and rural county would keep prison populations down, clean up the drug problem in a short number of years. I'd be for taking somebody in no matter how many times they lapse and return. Not one minute in the labor of helping junkies is wasted, no matter what the results. Compassion the guiding light instead of punishment makes living easier all the way around. Junkies want help, need help, can't afford help in a society indifferent to them. Not indifferent. Hostile. It is a hostile attitude Americans have for junkies. Making it harder for them just makes it harder for the rest of us. Compassion costs nothing, is easy, and every expression of compassion makes the world a better place.

*     

JEAN IN THE GLOAMING

big country bluegrass, by tj worthington

At this moment is a near-perfect stillness outside. No breeze. Time of day the gloaming, after sunset when the light comes from the sky itself. Indirect lighting. It has an evenness about it, no distinct shadows. I hear what might be a katydid or tree frog, don't know which. Might be inside my head. That's where those critters sound like they're coming from. It has a certain shrillness that defies direction finding; sounds like it is coming from all directions at once. Smoke detectors are like that. I despise it when they go off. It's always in somebody else's house, because I won't have one. The shrill noise is an ice pick into my ears and I never can find them by following the sound. One day my friend Jean called, she had a shrill beeping noise in the house and she couldn't find what was making it. I went to help look. It seemed like it was coming from the bathtub area, but when I'd put my ears there, it sounded like it was coming from under the house. Under the house it sounded like it was in the house. That relentless shrill beeping sound makes me crazy. I've known water pipes to make sounds, but not like this one. It became a mystery because we could not find a source.

After awhile, I thought I'd run the bathtub water and see if that might stop the sound. A little plastic crate with grandchildren's plastic toys in it was sitting in the tub. I picked it up to have it out of the tub when I ran the water. The beeping noise went with the toy crate. I took the crate to Jean. She dumped it out. The noise was from a child's pretend cell phone with a beeper in it. Jean took the battery out and threw it in the trash. I love it that it's moments like this, hearing the night sounds of the forest, I remember moments with Jean. Many moments in the course of a day turn my mind to Jean. She was one of the people God gave to me to appreciate. In the last week or so a couple different people have posted on facebook a humorous saying such as this paraphrase: Before you jump off a bridge believing you're crazy, look around. Maybe it's the people around you that are crazy. I saw that right away after becoming acquainted with Jean. Her family, everybody around her had her believing she was crazy. What I saw as I came to know them, she was sane and they were the ones that were nuts.

Our relationship started when when she was experiencing an oppressive browbeating from her preacher daughter. We were at the table at Jr's house, the three of us sipping and talking. Jr and I drinking white liquor and Jean drinking coffee. She was telling what she was going through and I passed a note to her over the table, like in school, that said, Just say no. She said, I can't. I said, You can. It's the first word you learned, one syllable, easy to say. She did, and it worked. It worked the next time and the next time. Suddenly, she started finding her life. Of course, the ones around her that were controlling her, manipulating her, stealing from her, browbeating her, using her unmercifully, hated TJ. Grandma's differnt--it's that damn TJ. Jean stopped receiving their abuse. I let her know she didn't have to take it anymore, she had me to back her up.

They rebelled for a few weeks, getting mean and nasty. The kids don't like you any more. They don't want to see you again. Then Jean goes weeping to TJ she won't get see her babies any more. TJ says, don't worry about it. I said she's just pushing you by giving you a vacation from her, thinking you can't stand having your own life for a day---in this time she's finding how much she needs you to take care of the kids that she's taken totally for granted unto elder abuse. She'll call when she needs you. And sure enough, she called, with a whole new attitude of grudging respect. At least there was that little bit. What I was objecting to in the way the people around her treated Jean was the absence of respect, even from the grandkids. She was the hen at the bottom of the pecking order with no feathers on top of her head; the other hens kept her pecked bald. She gave me credit for her liberation from being beaten down by family around her. All I did was write on a slip of paper, Just Say No. When she took it, I said, by the authority of Nancy Reagan.

When she said she could not say no, I felt the enormity of the problem for her. She'd been trained for a lifetime that she doesn't say no to any of them, ever, for any reason. In the past, the pattern had been that when she said no, she was sent off to Dorothea Dix or one of the other mental institutions. The visits were her punishments for saying no. She came to regard them vacations, getting away from the crazy people in her life, a chance to draw a breath without being told that's not how you do it. At least, the people in the institutions were being treated for their mental illnesses. One evening at Jr's table she started a sentence, Next time they send me off.... I said, You're not going to be sent off any more. She believed me. She took it I had a knowing, when what I meant was I'll lay down in front of the bulldozer. That's a kind of knowing. They will have to get past me to get to you. Jean came into a time of her life where she was relaxed with who she was. The more she opened up to who she truly was within, the more interesting she became, and I found her already interesting. Then she was diagnosed with breast cancer past operable. Choice: die in 6 months or go through chemo treatments. She chose to die. I supported her in it. We'd already talked at length about neither of us wanting to go through a year of agony on less than a 50/50 chance of making it, and then no certainty  if you do make it. Heaven can't be that bad.

A month before her spirit rose from the body I wanted to take her to an all day bluegrass show at the Mountain Music Jamboree in Glendale Springs, a few miles down the Parkway south. She was so loopy on pain killers she was floating about a foot above the floor. It was Big Country Bluegrass, The Wildwood Valley Boys, Micheal Cleveland fiddler was with them, The Blue Ridge Travelers from MtAiry, another band I can't recall the name now. The show ended with Whitetop Mountain Band. Both Jean and I expected Whitetop to fade into nonexistence after 4 hours of staright-ahead bluegrass, but they ruled. Whitetop Mountain Band put all that went before in their dust. They tore it up. Jean's condition was delicate as a two-week old kitten. On the road there, I told her at any moment, from this moment on, you feel like you need to get back to the house, we're gone the moment you say it and I will feel no regrets. I'd seen all the bands before but the Wildwood Valley Boys. I wanted to give her the assurance that the music was not more important than the last month of her life. It's meant to enhance that last month, not be a burden. I asked her to pick the place she'd be comfortable sitting.

On the way in, we passed Jeff Michael and Ramona standing outside, Jeff smoking. I spoke with them a moment and Jean, in her psychedelic condition kept drifting on. She drifted through the doors and on to the auditorium. I said to Jeff I'd better go see where she's going; I don't want to lose her. And I really did not want to lose her. I wanted her to stay on at least through my lifetime. I figured she'd have several years after me. I cherished our time together that night. It was our last time together and it couldn't have been better. The evening of the morning her spirit left the body, driving down the mountain to Jr's, I swung around the curve below Jean's house and the full moon was sitting perfectly on the peak of the roof. Already, I had seen Jean's smiling face in brilliant white light, happy as a cat curled beside a fire, radiant, letting me know she was doing all right. It's in the gloaming that I feel Jean's peace.

*