Sheer of Light

 The sheer of light as I sit, after a day both to and from one great metropolis wondering at the bliss and pain of being happy to be here, the pepper dots of ravens oaring across the silk of color yes says I just give it some room, that's all.

The Blind See Robert Morris

 

From a distance, the Beaubourg, Le Centre Pompidou, looks charged, electrified, like a kid’s lit-up Christmas toy—swinging, jazzy—an affront—a postmodern deconstruction of visible pipes and structure plunked into old Paris. Heating and cooling systems, escalators are all on the outside of the building and painted in Tinkertoy colors, an exciting disturbance in the heart of the ancient Jewish Quarter of Paris. As a building it has the gravity-pull of a fun house and is a provocation to a medieval quarter, a part of the city left intact when, in 1880, Baron Haussmann swept the city clean of its feudal antiques destroying 60% of Paris in the process. Most of what we think of as Paris with its wide avenues and Elysian parks, the monuments to the Republic, the look-alike apartment blocks, Hausmann made—buildings like soldiers on parade, marshal and ordered with wrought iron balconies banding at the third and fifth floors. All his order can give a lift to the spirit, a bit of safe harbor to the chaos of city life, but the meandering medieval neighborhood of the Beaubourg gives a contrasting lift—the anarchy of freethinking.

With Haussmann’s sewers and transportation scheme, open space and streetlights, Paris transformed overnight into the most livable, sanitary and healthy city in Europe. It was Haussmann who gave us the Luxembourg Gardens, the Bois de Boulogne, and the promise of quiet order after the “terror” unleashed in the Revolution 100 years before, with chaos rippling through France for another sixty years. These days the Marais, the old quarter where the Pompidou was unloaded, for that’s what it feels like—a shipment of something unloaded off the back of a truck—is an attractant of its own, a chaotic charm-island in Haussmann’s dream of propriety. Trendy boutiques shoulder up next to wood paneled kosher delis—where you won’t find a buttered ham baguette and for sure, not on Saturday.

The painted pipe and cage structure doesn’t move well with the other aristocratic monuments of Paris, but I suppose that is the point. It is a people’s museum. This is no stern marble box—a columned austerity proclaiming power. With all that color and discord, it doubles up as a delight as well as a psychoactive intrusion into so much architectural history, and for the tourist it’s a simple fact, exciting the will to see something new. At the same time, it feels good to be on the inside so you don’t have to look at the damned thing, and more disturbing is that it decays too fast; the rust and chipping paint are very visible as one gets up close. Ancient masonry mellows and meets the earth as an equal, but all this techno-tension sits like anti-matter against the old stone of Paris.

On this visit to the Pompidou I am alone and in a peripatetic drift through the strata of super-modern art works watching the signifiers for what makes a work of art credible, peel away as I move from room to room. I like the Euro-slant, on the modernist cannon, the same cycle of art movement supplanting movement everywhere in the 20^th Century. The modernist juggernaut that rolled through my own art-school training—the questions posed were not aesthetic, “just make it new, and don’t just reinvent Cubism.”

I move on into a retrospective of the American Robert Morris. Morris was famous as a big-time Minimalist in the 60’s using industrial materials to fill museum spaces. A bona fide “Art Star.” Great swags of inch-thick felt slung across pristine museum walls made an authoritative manifesto of art stripped of romance. The usual signifiers of art, of craft, of harmony were gone and those pieces remained as glowering presences of anti-meaning, the colossus of domination. Big bossy things that really did hold the space and for me as an art student made me feel puny. His work brought an archetypal instinct to the front, the giant must be defeated.

He had had a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC where I went to art school. Amongst the neoclassic columns and marble floors he had placed 20 foot 16 inch raw wooden beams as though giants tossed them—seven or so of the big timbers. As the Morris exhibit came down the timbers were stored for months in the loading area of the museum. I worked back there doing odd jobs for the museum and making clay for the ceramics dept. I asked if I could use the beams for my own work. Sure, I was told, just pay Leo Castelli $24,000 and they’re yours.

In this retrospective, at the Pompidou there were those same beams in those same configurations and the felt drapery on the wall, as well as a room filled with cyclopean fiberglass jugs gauzy and airy even for the size, suspended floating in the space, filling a gallery with pure presence. It felt as if there was a Goliath lurking, a dread feeling creeping up of being dominated. Something about his work was about battling with giants, some Oedipal wrestling with a stone sky-father waving a punishing stick. Morris’ most notorious work was a poster for a 1974 show, a photograph of him shirtless in a Nazi helmet with S&M regalia—a spike collar and massive greasy chains draped around his shoulders.

Over the years Morris had changed and the magazine pictures of his work I had seen of late looked like a 180° turn toward the figurative. They looked downright romantic. The main room at the Beaubourg was showing large bronze works. They were portals and gateways in black metal, figures writhing out of the wall itself, toothy skulls and bones, apocalyptic burnt-out corpses, vivid nuclear hallucinations. They were frozen dramas, altar-like with dark phantasms, wrenching themselves free, free to face what? Many were frames for encaustic paintings—smears of red and black, flesh dragged across lonesome highways. Figures were bound with bronze rope, assassinations with sweeps of blood-crust wiping out any hope. “OK,” they challenged, “how do you be a free person with all this looming apocalypse?” Not much hope, but for the sheer willingness to make these things ripped out of the dreaded 3 AM nightmare world. That a mind of such minimalist rigor could move through a signature style and onto work that could have easily come out of the nineteenth century was evidence enough of the brightness of human spirit.

The gallery was silent but for the moans coming out of the leviathan plastic jugs. They had speakers inside or some sound device I hadn’t heard the first go-round. I was on my way to check out the sound when a cacophony broke the muffled underwater atmosphere of the museum. The guards, from the tribe of haughty scolds, were posted about with quick-to-chide finger wags lest anyone get too close to the art. Woe-betide any who would actually touch. These wardens of the State’s treasures were thrown into an upheaval. In a sudden fracas a large group filled the gallery shouting, laughing, calling across the hushed space. The group not only touched the works but were also rubbing their hands all over. The guards freaked, shouting, running around, their sanctum violated, their holy of holies so swiftly and completely invaded. Rushing in red-faced, the museum director clapped his hands three times, gave a great shout and it was quiet. He huddled with the guards, in the middle of the gallery. I listened in and heard that he had given his permission for the blind students (les Aveugles) to touch the bronzes. The guards went back to their posts vibrating with inner conflict. The touching continued, the noise rising up again in happy contact with the art. It was a great contrast for Morris’ dark portentous visions. The blind putting a thumb in the father’s scowling eye.

All By Myself

I gave up real vegetable production gardening when I came to northern coastal California in '74. I had had real vegetable gardens in the Midwest, the last, a half-acre spectacle in the countryside north of Milwaukee. I got it going, got the local farmer to disc the ground, fallow for years, and I sweetened up the soil with lots of manure. I planted it out and then departed for California. I surrendered it to the care of others in our big group house to weed and harvest but they smoked too much and left it, I heard, overgrown with festering and rotting unpicked tomatoes and broccoli, potatoes molding under the nice straw mounds. It was sad to hear that all my hard work, that potential bounty, had succumbed to ruin. I had taken courses at the University of Wisconsin AG School in soil science, soil chemistry and vegetable production. My gardens were bountiful and surprising in their productivity. I felt a bit like a pro.

In California it was all different; challenges I’d never faced. First, the clay soil; the addition of sand to loosen it up as I had done in Wisconsin created an aggregate; turned the ground to concrete. Soil in the West needs a huge amount of work to make a go, with the addition of deer proofing and the constant irrigation needed in the blazing summer and the cool foggy nights made it difficult for fruit to set, gave vegetable gardening a new set of problems. Gophers 'll kill off any remaining drop of enthusiasm. I was spoiled by the deep topsoil and moist warm nights of the Midwest.

I don’t have production gardens any more but, of course, it’s done very successfully here. We subscribe to the local vegetable box once a week and from May to October we get fresh veggies, organic heirloom varieties. We've got a few tomatoes set out every year, sometimes peppers and squash and popcorn for the dramatic big stalks, but no garden you'd rely on for food. Mostly we grow flowers with a few fruit trees. Lots of flowers the deer don't bother, four kinds of lavender, rosemary, ceanothus and bunches of daffodils the gophers hate—sometimes they even dig them up. You’ll find a bulb or two dug up and laid out on the grass every spring. This morning on my walk about sunrise I see a clump of Iris' growing in the little circle garden at the top of the drive, it’s got daffodils and lavender growing under an adolescent oak. This clump has a couple of low growing big white lettuce-y flowers, pristine and dewy with lots of buds about to take off their tight green pants and show you their goods. These you couldn't plant, they are the wild Douglas Irises. I call Judith over to look; she says, "Gosh they did that all by themselves."

Special thanks to Martin Taylor for his photograph of the white Douglas Iris taken on the Mount Tam watershed near the Phoenix Lake Reservoir. To see more of his work: http://digitaylor.com/1pages/gallery1.htm

Blonde Misty Curls

Blond misty curls, spun white gold, all around her head in the late sun. It’s sweater-weather crisp. Twilight is coming on. I am holding her familiar weight tight up on my hip, my forearm making a chair. Her hand is on my back for balance.

We are walking toward the marsh, the headwaters of the local reservoir; the cattails are dense, seeding out with those big mallet heads—brown velvet sausages, flaking out with downy fluff. The flat pulpy reeds have gone to orange-gold in the slanted light. Some of the seed stalks are crisscrossed and woven up into little loose baskets for the Redwings that nest here and go south to the southern Central Valley for the winter bug-fest there. They are the bi-color variety with a simple red on black epaulette. The males are the first to show and the last to go. Very territorial with the glossy black males singing their watery churrr all spring long. We'll be back come spring to this spot for all that opulent singing.

The way she looks out, her gray eyes—piercing, intense, she seems like some creature on the hunt. What I know about her now, you'd not be surprised to recognize back then, her instinct, solid and intact. She's looking at a bird over my shoulder, and then quick to not loose eye contact, she whips her head around mine and keeps following a raven oaring along, a winging dash against the blue.

We gather up a couple of nests, souvenirs, curiosities, sculptures really. Her mom likes nests. “What's that for,” she asks? “We're gonna bring 'em home.” “Why?” “Aren't they pretty?” “Yes”, then looking in the sky again. Her cheek polished deep rosy pink, cool against mine.

Bald Eagle

I saw a big pine tree, gone to a snag in a spreading lake, the trunk knee-deep and root-drowned. I was on one of my nature hikes into the woods in Northern Wisconsin. I am 9 in 1956 at an all boys’ summer camp, wandering off, as usual, to get free of all the sporty hoopla.

This lake was a wild sister lake to "our lake" Big Finley, tamed with a U-shaped swimming dock set with racing lanes on strings of floating bobbers. A few summer cottages squat at the far end.

This “sister lake” Little Finley was unpopulated with few suitable places for building and was growing slowly, making wetlands from forest. There were lots of spooky snags sticking up, trunks standing in water. The trees close to the shore had suffocated.

I heard a whooshing. There's an eagle with its stark white head, flapping and rising up to land with sudden softness in a nest perched in the crown of the snag. A new stick that must have been 6 feet across was being brought to the nest tangle. This big-as-a-dog eagle spooked me. I'd never seen anything close to this wildness. I quick-trot a quarter mile back to the safety of ordered camp life.

This is six years before Silent Spring was published. I learned by the late Sixties, all the Eagles had vanished from Wisconsin. The miracle bug-killer DDT had made their eggs soft-shelled, laid in a mush. The eagle I saw that day would have no chicks—the last to nest there for a long time. Every Sunday night at the summer camp, one of the custodians, a handyman, would wheel a cart, a self-driving gas motor with a big fan blowing thick clouds of blue smoke. Mosquito control for the ferocious North Country pests- quick blooming opportunists in the short season. He'd work the machine all around, weaving a pattern so nothing remained un-smoked. When he was finished a low haze would settle blanketing everything. It was DDT.

DDT was banned in 1972 and the eagles are back. As of 2004 a full recovery has been declared.

Bad Back.

It's unfortunate, that idea of a bad back. It's an idea the protracts the misery. My back is good. Its carried me, held me up for more than 60 years. Like most people's, it would hurt sometimes. It had gone into spasm several times over the years ‘til I learned to do exercises minimizing the hurt and duration. Walking barefoot in the sand really cut the recovery time. But this last time it was a totally different order of discomfort; a couple of leaky discs and a fiery sciatic nerve leaving my leg strength diminished by half and a foot gone numb.

The spine with a mainline of organized nerve at the core is an amazing device that gave rise to the codfish, the leaf-nose bat, the ruby throat hummingbird, the swan, the giraffe, and the bullfrog ga-lowming into the deep night. When a great idea like a backbone comes along in nature it makes for a real florescence of species alive now and long extinct. A single Blue whale vertebra can weigh 350 pounds and one from a deer mouse about that of a medium grain of sand. Shark’s backbones aren’t bone at all but made of cartilage so they move like the water itself. The loggerhead turtle has one and the prairie grouse and the giant western salamander, the only creature known to eat giant banana slugs, which have no backbone. We come from a family of creatures that found the notochord, a firm tissue stiffener that allows the larva of the eventually sessile Tunicate creature to swim better to find an advantageous home. Tunicates loose the notochord and become bags of soft tissue filtering seawater for a living. Next up the line of complexity, before true backbones, are the lancets, the blade-like creatures, who have a permanent notochord with the beginnings of a head. Once the backbone came into being it blossomed into fliers, swimmers, fast runners, herds as far as the eye could see, and the biggest animals the earth has ever seen. It's a very versatile body model and we have all seen the pictures of our vertebrate cousins as embryos looking so much like each other with a brainy head, big eyes, gill slits and a backbone with a tail. Pig, cow, chicken, salamander, tortoise, chimp.

It was just a muscle cramp in my hamstring at first and it hurt in my hip joint, then grenades of shooting pain that over the first couple of weeks grew and grew. It hurt when I coughed, a very bad sign I was told. I went to Dr. Chen the acupuncturist who actually stuck a pin in my sciatic nerve; the thing lit up like a lightening stroke caught on film, embedded in my mind forever. I did not go back to him, Then it got to nerve damage with loss of control, I fell down a couple of times ‘til I adapted to a cane. I got an MRI and saw pictures of my spine in black and white on the computer screen; that stack piled up looking like eroded and lichen encrusted rocks. My spine was aging. But not so bad as some, I was told. Its a months’ long self-mending process and a few shots of cortisone in the epidural zone got me going on my way back to long sweaty walks. My back is not bad, it’s just telling me two things in my first bout, round one, with decrepitude; that I am getting on in this lifetime and this pile of bones behind me holding the whole thing together is just a brilliant miracle in the story of our planet.

Duxbury Reef.

Low tide at Agate Beach, where there are very accessible tide pools on Duxbury Reef. Today is a super low tide at the end of May. I'm with my 5-year-old son and we are there counting species, making a game of finding the biggest variety. We are skipping over quickly to get to the wave boundary, thrilled with seeing that hidden underwater world revealed. Then with more focus we see a few scurrying crabs moving like nervous drumming fingers, then the hermit crabs black with worn streaks of pearl, the turban snail homes, tipping and balancing with the burden. We touch jade green anemones. They flinch as they contract like the sphincters they are. We flinch right back. Bright sea stars, purple and red, and orange bat stars catch the eye. Then the focus moves and we loose momentum, slowing, caught by the pull of the eye's gravity. We are looking with more care and turn over a few rocks finding at once a brittle star moving, its pale blue snake arms in waves around its light brown pentagon body. A nudibranch, white with orange polka dots with florescent pink gills waves hello—goodbye in the surge. We look into a still pool and see the telltale sepia bloom of an octopus inking. I search digging around under a ledge with my fingers, careless of a pinch or a sting and pull the little fellow out. It’s gone ghostly white with shock. Then it flashes to brick red. It just covers my palm. Waves of color flash over, like wind over spring grasses, pink then green ‘til it’s a mimic of my palm. It’s like a movie special effect, but its alive and doing all this to survive. We put it back watching it switching colors 'til it gets its bearings and paints itself to match the rock and seaweed and disappears invisible to the eye, but vivid and everlasting in memory.