Letter to Jan Part 1

Dear Jan                 5 July, 1992, 2 AM (Dutch time)


I’m sitting in a cabin in Bolinas, drinking red wine, feeling all alone in the world, and I’m not sure what to think about my time in the Netherlands. It wasn’t an easy trip. So much on my mind, also I’ve been unwilling to commit anything to paper, feeling a bit betrayed.

Another letter-poem has been brewing under the surface for weeks but won’t ferment, won’t get written; I’ve been thinking of it since the solstice, especially now that I’ve been to the dukedoms of North Brabant, Limburg, Brabant and to Antwerp. I thought we were all going to Stockholm together for the solstice. I was disappointed because I didn’t get to spend very much time with you. 

Vins and I rented a car and had a lovely time ferreting out the myriad dolmens of North Holland. We made a ritual altar on the top of the largest dolmen: yew branches, pieces of flint, coins, crow feathers gathered from the village church (once also a Neolithic site of worship with its enormous megalith), libations of tobacco, wine, chocolate, and a flame . . . 

We swigged deep red Langdouc wine while a kid on a bicycle madly circled us three times counterclockwise like a demon-moth. Watching the fiery sun set a few degrees to the right, I was puzzled until it dawned on me that these dolmens were built to mark the winter solstice!

I loved traveling through Belgium: the sad coal towns juxtaposed against the town of miracles where droves of believers arrived in wheelchairs to be blessed and healed, the huge beginhof, Peter Paul Ruben’s birthplace, the castletown of Louven where Vins went to university (we crashed a theologians’ Ph.D. party for wine and crackers), where they raped and drowned Marika legendarily floated upstream to unmask her murderer.

We went to Waterloo at sunset, the desolate green fields of memory unrolling before us to Napoleon’s earthen pyramid. On the way to Brussels, we leaped the fence surrounding an extraordinary castle at twilight. Sleeping swans. I picked up a pigeon snoozing on the moat gate. Though it awakened, it could not fight the instinct to sleep during the hours of darkness. The absurd rows of chickens in the branches were much safer.

Antwerp was my favorite city. On the main square, the fountain of the slain giant, the fish are doing something naughty with the mermaids. On the Lijnwaadmarkt, we had a meal in Angelot, a garden cafe, once an old annex of the gothic cathedral of Our Lady of Antwerp, our table covering the ancient well. 

I can’t help thinking about the story of your Antwerpan lady and the Spanish soldier of your ancestry. Did she come to this place as a young woman to draw water from this well, and sit in the sun dreamily wondering what the future might hold for her, only to be raped, a pawn in the spoils of war? The image of a broken pitcher in our wine carafe, spilled blood came to mind. 

I think the cathedral at Antwerp with its original red frescos is more beautiful than Louven, Den Bosch, Brussels, or Köln, though I love the juxtaposition of the Roman arch next to the church of Köln. Stories of tyrants and belief structures, the towers of men against incurably blue skies.

On my way to Bolinas, I stopped in the small village of Point Reyes, near where I grew up, and in a box outside the office door of my friend who owns Floating Island press—were some books; the very first book I put my hands on was the Granta issue your Bavarian Christmas photos were in. A strange synchronicity, Bergtesgaden, the hometown Hitler. Rods of absolution. 

Just yesterday I was missing the time we didn’t take to visit, (and to go over the San Francisco photos etc., the black hole of unfinished business—remember, I’ve got unpaid time invested in this story too; if you don’t sell the photos, I don’t sell a story). Driving to Bolinas, I listened to your Eartha Kitt tape. As she was singing “All by myself,” I realized how aptly the storyline fit my own experiences, what I’ve been feeling the past six weeks. But instead of Israelis and Palestinians warring, I’m caught between three realities, and the sad crossfire of two men—lifelong friends—who can’t seem to communicate. You may think it’s all OK, but there’s shrapnel in love’s killing fields.

6/21/1994
Part two

Celebrate Sonoma Festival

ARTS/Acting out: Inanna sidebar, The Paper, 92?

Acting Out

Women's Theatre Company's current production, The Descent of Inanna, under the direction of Pauline Pfandler, attempts a contemporary rendition of the Inanna myth, and her entry into the underworld, is about following the “the origins of the patriarchy, the rape, and the exile of the feminine,” according to consultant/actor Pam Fisher. “And this myth, which takes place in the transition period, also gives us clues as to how to transition into a balanced culture.”

The impetus for the storyline came from a series of archetypal dreams, Fisher, one of the actors in the play, had about ten years ago. In a recent interview, she stated, “I found out a year later, when I was telling a therapist about it, that it corresponded closely to the Inanna myth.” She then had more dreams replete with scenes presented on stage. Six months later, when Fisher came to Pfander with the idea to stage Inanna, Pfander said, “I don't do dreams and myths. . . I do theater.” She personally relates to the dark side, Ereshkigal. As she went through her own descent, she said Inanna "grabbed her by the tits."

"I came to this play layer by layer. As a theater artist, I found the poem an excellent tool to stage, it lends itself well to theater.” Said Pfander, “Here is the archetypal path. We're not dying along the way. When we're stripped of our powers, we're stripped of what is not necessary. It's an important story for women.”

Pfander said the development of the script has undergone many metamorphoses. “We went through a lot of changes about the script, combining original text with modern dialog,” said Fisher. After various experiments, Pfander decided to stick to the Wolkstein text. She describes the theater piece as groundbreaking work, fusing visual slides, with movement and modern opera. “The ensemble has 12 wonderful voices.” It continues to mutate and evolve, much to the consternation of the cast. Pfandler says it's a collaboration piece. Joan Marler is one of the choreographers, and SSU archeology undergraduate Karin Dunwoody is working on the ethnography on the Inanna theater production Dunwoody compares the story to the Elusian Mysteries of Greece.

The future of our planet depends on women joining together to become a wave of transformation and change. . . “We are a light-addicted culture. We shun the dark side, we're in denial of the shadow, the dark, feminine rage. Now we are faced with our shadow side—the toxicity of the earth, opression, dysfunctional families, an addicted culture. . . Pfandler said, “What is needed is a paradigm shift, we have to move away from the cartesian philosophy.”

I had 6/92 down as the date, no tear sheet.

The essential goddess (Inanna) 92?

The essential goddess
A primer for the uninitiated
By Maureen Hurley

The Goddess has a way of sneaking up on you. After the Persian Gulf War, synchronicity struck repeatedly, forcing me to ask, who is this Inanna anyhow? Multiple references—the many books, exhibits, readings, plays, symposia, and talk of Inanna was beginning to give me a catholic case of Eurocentric type A goddess envy.

I first met Inanna two years ago, at a Goddess exhibit at the California Museum of Art. I was so impressed by the textile exhibit, entitled Inanna's New Clothes, by McKenzie Birnie, wrote a review of the more interesting pieces.

On Valentine’s Day, a review copy of Diane Wolkstein's First Love Stories, from Harper-Collins arrived at my doorstep. Thinking it was someone's bad love poetry, I glanced at it, and put it in the growing mountain of things-to-be-looked-at-later corner of my house.

Harper-Collins also sent me Dr. Marija Gimbutas' new book, The Civilization of the Goddess: The Old World of Europe, as well as her extraordinarily successful The Language of the Goddess, just released in paperback. In May, Quicksilver Mine Co. in Guerneville organized a show called “In Her Image, The Goddess in Art” including the work of nearly 25 local artists. Currently, the Women's Theatre Company is staging an ambitious production, “The Descent of Inanna,” at Five Corners Theatre in Petaluma.

The very names Sumer, Ur, Nineveh, Babylon, and the Gates of Ishtar, always give me goosebumps, as do the names of rivers: the Tigris, the Euphrates—this is the very cradle, the incanabula, the fertile crescent of civilization. This was the culture that also spawned the ancient immortal goddess Inanna. (She was transformed into the more familiar Ishtar; her earthly Gilgamesh is more familiar to the men’s movement.) Recent translation of 5000 year-old cuneiform tablets has given the world a brand-new myth to ponder—a major arcana goddess in her own right—Inanna.

One of the roles of mythology (and/or religion) is to instruct, and to offer parallel or alternative viewpoints. For many, the rediscovery of the Sumerian archetypal goddess Inanna provides an alternate role model (moving away from the male-dominated models). Women in particular, are hungry for relevant images; they’re seeking a metaphor for the pursual of balanced change, and a paradigm shift in religious philosophy from the patriarchally dominated, to a more balanced egalitarian code of ethics. Here was a powerful fully-fledged goddess, not some male god’s consort.

The archetypal love story of Inanna, the first recorded Sumerian goddess (3500 B.C.), the immortal Queen of Heaven and Earth and her earthly consort, the shepherd Dumuzi—and her voluntary descent into the underworld—comes from the cuneiform clay tablets—vestiges of the vast libraries of the ancient city of Uruk in modern-day Iraq.

According to Sumerologist and translator Samuel Noah Kramer, from the 5 - 6000 cuneiform clay tablets and fragments during the past few decades, a vast compendium of literature, some 30,000 lines of poetry—20 myths, nine epic tales, more than 200 hymns, laments, and dirges, and wisdom texts, including essays, proverbs, precepts and fables—“constitutes the oldest written literature of significant quantity and variety uncovered, and in its recovery and restoration represent one of the major contributions of our century to the humanities.”

The crux of the Inanna story is about separation, loss and empowerment. In order to become whole again, Inanna descends through seven gates to the underworld, is stripped of her magical vestments (and power) one-by-one. “Naked and bowed low,” she enters Abzu to confront her dark (side, or) sister Ereshkigal, in order to gain a deeper balance power of knowledge and wisdom. “From the Great Above, she opened her ears to the Great Below. / She abandoned heaven and earth to descend into the underworld.” She is reborn as the great goddess reigning over all aspects of life and death. Unfortunately, her husband, the shepherd Dumuzi, who took over her realm while she was down under, wasn’t too keen on relinquishing his new power—and was corrupted by it. She has to do battle with him as well.

Radio programmer and scholar Joan Marler of Sebastopol recently returned from a European lecture tour on the book, Civilization of the Goddess: the World of Old Europe, by Lithuanian anthro-mythologist and UCLA professor, Dr. Marija Gimbutas,. Marler said she first discovered the Inanna myth five years ago through storyteller Diane Wolkstein's book, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth. According to Marler, interest in the Goddess is not just a local phenomenon for the new-age prone in Northern California; it's worldwide.

Marler says Inanna has “a profound meaning for women of our time. The archaeological material is valuable as mythology, not just because of its antiquity, but it's absolutely timely and relevant material for today, like a mirror. A reclaiming of ourselves. In Sumerian, both 'ear' and 'wisdom' are the same word.”

“When I was in Germany, there was a symposium on Inanna sponsored by the Christian Academy.” She describes the participants as liberal, free-thinking women theologians who see no future in Christianity—because the basic underlying text is wrong. “When the church fathers got wind of it, they came unglued, equating 'goddess' with paganism and subversive devil-worship.” When the church patriarchy tried to dissuade the women theologians from continuing, it was a stand-off: the women replied, “You may not silence us. We will resign.”

This need for a valid myth for women to live by goes more than skin-deep There’s a Chinese saying; “women hold up the other half of the sky.” Unfortunately, the emphasis has always been on the other—equality among the sexes has never been a strong point of western civilization—especially when it comes to public exhibition of the arts. Less than 10% of women visual artists and poets are represented in publications and exhibitions. Sometimes figures fall as low as 1%. 

Oakland based artist, activist, and professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Eleanor Dickinson did some revealing studies on gender discrimination in the art world since 1965. In 1990, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibited art work by nine men, and one woman. Mills College (for women) fared worse: 67 men to 3 women! “Less than 5% of the artists in the modern art section [of the museum] are women, but 85% of the nudes are female.” Over 75% of all art reviews are about men artists. Major 20th century poetry anthologies typically feature all male writers with a token female writer or two squeezed in between the sheets.

Khysie Horn, owner of Quicksilver Mine Co. affirmed “Most major museums and galleries still traditionally show men. There’s not a good professional venue for women—art by and for women—on women’s art themes. There is a tremendous need to show women’s art.” Horn said the response to the recent goddess show at Quicksilver was overwhelming. “There’s definitely a strong interest in the goddess theme. The interest among artists who wanted to exhibit goddess-inspired art was echoed by the viewers. It touched a resonant chord.” One common theme most of the artists interviewed share is that of personal grief and descent, followed by transcendence and a release of energy—attributed to the goddess.

Sebastopol artist Victoria Whitehand said her discovery of the goddess, “had to do with my own earthly mother’s death—20 years after the fact. The grieving process liberated all my feminine energy, it began flowing through my work—both the terrible and the supportive—in endless manifestations. Essentially I blocked the energy, and didn’t let it flow.”

McKenzie Birnie, whose piece, Inanna's New Clothes, which got me into this convoluted story, said “At the time, I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d been through a descent of my own at the time; a divorce, pain, suffering. I read Diane Wolkstein’s book on Inanna—it was the most powerful stuff. I gulped it down whole. It was real deep therapy and journey—I’m not a goddess person per-se, I don’t have a goddess religion, but I welcome the energy.” Journey’s North and South, Birnie’s next exhibit with Barbara Jacobson at Quicksilver opens June 6 and runs through the 20th. Jacobson’s work is deeply influenced by the goddess, very much an exploration of the feminine—something experienced after the death of her mother.

The New York based storyteller Diane Wolkstein, whose books and stories have profoundly affected so many women, said Inanna was a birthday gift. She was looking for a role model, a complete triple goddess in all her aspects—maid, woman and crone—and after extensive searching through the world’s anthologies for a moon goddess—Mari, Diana, Persephone, Lilith, Ishtar, Hecate, Seine, Brigit, Cybele, Isis. . . and found her at last by the name of Inanna. Wolkstein too suffered her own personal descent and reemerged energized by the Inanna myth.

Though celebration of the goddess may be seen as primarily a woman’s movement, some men are also inspired by the goddess. Visionary painter Paul Nicholson, and sculptor Zac Zakine claim inspiration from the goddess. Inventor, sculptor and TV cameraman Robert LaDonne said “she affects me daily. The working goddess is so alive. Men don’t allow ourselves to truly feel, we tend deny it, to be more mechanically minded. I’m OK with my male figure.” LaDonne invented a speaker system that allows deaf people to feel sound. He discovered his invention also allowed him to feel aspects of the goddess—by listening to the aorta of a pregnant woman. “It opened up a whole new world. We have to go back into the body, our own rebirthing in order to cleanse ourselves.”

Not all artists view their work as specifically Inanna, or goddess inspired, though viewers may see a connection. Whitehand identifies more with Indian mythology, and Kali. “The transformation of aspects of the goddess is the force that drives us on the spiral of evolution.”

“The influence of the goddess is not what my work’s about. I’m a little uneasy with that thought. For me, the spiritual is not gendered. My work has more to do with the spirit of woman ancestors. The female images in my work open up the pathways for transformation,” says Marsha Connell. “It’s a reminder that men didn’t always run the world. Those reminders also empower us as creative women. Where is our muse now? ”

Which brings me back to Gimbutas’s work on the European goddess. Until the 1960s, the traditional view of Western civilization was imported in its entirety from the Middle East; its history rooted in the great waves of Indo-European migration. But the goddess is not limited to just the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization.

Marler also discussed the relevance and timeliness of Dr. Gimbutas's work on European egalitarian, neolithic goddess-centered cultures in pre-patriarchal Europe—the “matristic” cultures, which existed previous to the polarized ecologically destructive and warlike patriarchal/matriarchal cultures that followed.)

In 1967, Gimbutas began excavating in southeastern Europe, where she discovered hundreds of small clay figurines—for which no one had an explanation. (In February 1990, we literally bombed the hell out of the archaeological sites of the world's first cities, Babylon, Ur, Nineveh, Tel Afar, and Uruk (the biblical Erech—modern day Warka, 150 miles south of Baghdad). In the Diane Wolkstein book Inanna, her translator, Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, “Many a text is still lying buried in the tels of southern Iraq, awaiting the lucky spade of the future excavator.” Unfortunately, many archaeological sites were destroyed during the Gulf war.

Little by little, it began to dawn on her a full-fledged alternative civilization, what she coined “Old Europe,” flourished from 7000 to 3500 B.C. The renown archaeologist and pre-historian states that the Indo-Europeans were essentially horse-riding barbarians from the Russian Steppes who destroyed the old culture, replacing the Goddess with their pantheon of plundering warrior gods—who still seem to be in control.

Radio-carbon dating, and Gimbutas's compilation, The Language of the Goddess, where she claims the parallel language and culture of the European form of Goddess—undergirds our previous notions of the rise of entire Western culture. This has turned the concept of the Indo-European progenitor of civilization entirely on its ear, causing an uproar and enormous controversy in the male-dominated anthropological circles. “This material may affect our vision of the past as well as our sense of potential for the present and future.” Marler claims the “necessity for examining the myths by which we are operating, which gives rise to our attitudes and actions, has never been greater.”



no tearsheet

Food for Though, Joan Marler, KPFA, Marija Gimbutas  Oct. 1990

Inanna, Searching for the Goddess at CMA  Aug 16, 1990

FRANK STELLA'S WAVES

FRANK STELLA'S WAVES

In the gallery of angels, Frank Stella's waves

hunger for alizarin nouns, arabesqued murexes,

the purpled royalty and somnolent gold of divided realms.

We presume we are defined by logic

but Ahab was afraid of sea worms

and other insidious notions untitled by definition.

The sea is a waterfall sliding off the edge of the world.

What we believe to be true defines the world;

what we are capable of seeing has to do with faith.

Projectiles in space have little to do

with the back side of the moon.

Even the astronauts haven't walked there

because they can't imagine its shadows.

The shadows of buffalo still roam the prairie at night.

Sometimes when the moon is right

you can see them from the corner of your eye.

Yo soy el muerte the wind says,

and the bells follow in sequential patterns:

time imagining itself in crepuscular archways

on those quasi-tranquil days without end,

without movement; who decided the days of the week?

Prime numbers hide their faces;

we age just the same, confusing love with death.

A friend says love is what you do together;

death is alone. I can't forget the blue of his eyes

or the spilled blood covered with a film of dust;

a bouquet for the earth. We are hungry, chanting

the night is a cannibal eating itself.

We let it happen: complacency slips in

and we forget the patterns by morning.

Impenetrable stones in the earth.

Russia is a noun for red as in blood,

as in death in the gallery of angels.

5/92

PANTOUM FOR DARKNESS

PANTOUM FOR DARKNESS
—for Valera Stupachenko

The white shawl of fog covered the Baltic.
He said only time will tell if I was to believe.
The first sun in days made me nostalgic,
for the Gulf of Finland, a glistening reprieve.

He thought time would tell if I was to believe.
I had no words to say, the sun was shining
on the Gulf of Finland, a glistening reprieve
from the prison of winter ice; the streets blinding.

I had no words to say, the sun was shining.
I interrupted his morning prayers to take leave
from the prison of winter ice, the streets blinding.
I gathered carnations in order to be free,

interrupting his morning prayers to take my leave.
No anullment for grief, a dead wife’s pin.
I gathered carnations in order to be free
from committing yet another mortal sin.

No anullment for grief, a dead wife’s pin
underfoot, I couldn't shake the ghosts of suicide.
Who has committed yet another mortal sin?
Resurrection tainted the purity of love, we hid

underfoot, I couldn't shake the ghosts of suicide.
One’s whole life suddenly revolved around schedules.
Resurrection tainted the purity of love, we hid
in the closets of deceit, devouring those victuals.

One’s whole life suddenly revolved around schedules.
The curious human need for mysticism abounds
in the closets of deceit, devouring those victuals.
When we hunger for nourishment, religion resounds.

The curious human need for mysticism abounds
in the darkness of the year’s longest night.
We hunger for nourishment, religion resounds
in the passionate cry of desire for the light,

in the darkness of the year’s longest night.
I have no words to say, the sun is shining
in the passionate cry of desire for the light
from the prison of winter ice, the streets blinding.

The first sun in days made me nostalgic
for the white shawl of fog that covered the Baltic.

5/29/92

SHORT PANTOUM FOR THE BABARIAN

SHORT PANTOUM FOR THE BABARIAN

Calling it love, why do we choose to suffer instead;
because we feel it anew with each passing?
Inside the skull of night, I hesitate to disturb the spider's web.€
Blue skin on the surface of the water. It's beginning.

You talk about corporate structure and high finance,
trapped in the prison of your own choosing.
Our governments consider bilateral disarmament.
We proclaim the moon's in void. I live in the country.€

And feeling used, you said we all use each other
Freudian slip. They say Freud was a cross-dresser.
Plant a tree so it may discover quadralateral symmetry.€
What does he know of the incestuous relationships of poets?€

I am sending you stones because I know nothing else.
The oracle tells us to be like trees, upright & strong€
My friend says each relationship is a stepping stone.€ L
Yes, winter is a voyage across the dark tundra sea.€

Inside the skull of night, I hesitate to disturb the spider's web.
Calling it love, why do we choose to suffer instead?

5/29/92

Journal entry, 5/15/92 housesitting woes, Ripley the neurotic dog

5/15/92 The dog barks, wanting in, how do I tell her that her owners have spoiled her rotten, and not in a good way, and the house is not hers by right? She, who will eat all the catfood the moment I turn my back, out of sheer spite. She, who bites their ears if I so much as pet them, or carry them outside. She, whose eyes darken with jealousy if they come inside, and she is not invited in. When are they supposed to eat?

She, who I reprimanded for eating the cat food again, sneaks off and eats my best pair of underwear. And the feeding ritual: dry and wet food, oil, a hard-boiled egg, finely diced, yogurt, and vitamin C, while the cats eat straight out of the can. Someone says all that fat and cholesterol. I guess it’s come to this—worrying about dog diets on human terms. I finally moved her food bowl outside because she had to be constantly told to eat, she’d restlessly pace, lick, pace, steal the cat food—sometimes never even touching her own food. She dug up the front yard and slayed a family of moles. Poor moles. I can’t leave her unattended for 10 minutes without her wreaking pure havoc, and this house is pretty dog-proofed.

She, who, no matter how many times I scold her, jumps up on me, ruining my clothes. They said don’t let her jump on you.  So much for dog obedience school. A large German shepherd, a guard dog who barks at imaginary things and is scared of the most mundane of things—a new poster on the wall, something falling from the table. She’s a neurotic chicken with a big bark.

I put her bed outside, and now she’s miffed because she’s banished from the house. So she ate her bed. The deck is flocked in chunks of white foam. When I let her back in, she sits in front of the TV while I’m watching and bathes and scratches so loud that I have to turn the volume up, and move aside to see the show. I could smell her from 10 feet away. Why does she choose to bathe in front of me as if it were a privilege? I find the smell repulsive, especially when I am trying to eat. Doggy odor and food, enough to make me puke.

After her owners left for vacation, she was depressed, hiding in the master bedroom—they expected me to sleep with her too. I tried, but I woke up, severely allergic. Anyway, I had to go in and give her therapeutic hugs and make her feel loved, and there was nobody doing that for me. Turns out she may have been acting weird because of the tremors after the big Eureka earthquake. But then, she ate my brand new underwear, never been worn. I was screaming at her, smacking her with my crotchless panties, feeling violated myself.

So she went outside with her dinner and the eating problem magically disappeared because she had only herself to distract when she was outside. She wants in at every opportunity, the house, a forbidden delight. Thing is, as soon as she is in, she wants out again, she is a Mobius strip, entering and leaving each door. I am not a doorman. I tried leaving the doors open and she just galloped through them like a merry-go-round. Oh, I am not a dog person, if I wanted to be this responsibility I would’ve had children. Remind me never to get a dog. Still, when she cooks her head, barks, and listens to me, it’s cute. But I cannot wait for Simone and her lover to come back from Europe. I’m running out of underwear.

Hermitage Group 5/14/92

By Maureen Hurley

When arts consultant Tony Wolff of Santa Rosa, went to St. Petersburg, Russia, in early 1990, “on a personal roots trip,” he met avant garde artists who called themselves “The Hermitage Group.”

Wolff found their work exciting and innovative—different than the usual avant-garde art—a convergent evolution paralleling the Western European artistic tradition.

Wolff some took slides, and upon returning home, he showed them to curators at art galleries and museums in Sonoma County. Many saw commercial potential in the Russian work. With that, the idea for an art exchange was born.

In the 1960s, an informal group of St. Petersburg artists, under the tutelage of painter/educator, Grigory Dlugach, managed to escape from the Ilimitations of official pseudo-art favored by the Soviet government, and its counterpart—underground art.

Soviet artists were forced to work within the dogmatic confines of “social realism” depicting the glory of communism and the happy prolotariat worker. Some chose to work “underground,” and from that counter-revolutionary movement, Russian avant-garde art was born.

The late Dlugach, who was affiliated with the Russian avant-garde movement of Malevich, Kandinsky, and who studied with Petrovodkin and Filimov, taught his students to look for the kamin (which literally means "stone"), the sculptural bedrock structure of Renaissance compositions.

Seeking the true roots of art, they developed a painting school, and literally found refuge in the tradition of the Masters in the Hermitage Museum: Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Delacroix, Cezanne. Hence the name: “The Hermitage Group.”

Curator and organizer for the traveling exhibit, Tony Wolff said, "As a result of their study of the Renaissance masters, the work is very painterly, not abstract, or minimalist; they're incredible crafts/draftsmen."

“When I saw the slides from ‘The Hermitage Group,’” said John Lofgren, director of the Sonoma County Museum, “I saw the work was extraordinarily exciting, and current.

In spite of all the changes going on in Russia, this work was based on Western European classical traditions—there was a basis of communication between us and them.”

Lofgren selected over 60 pieces for the SCM exhibition (May 22 – Aug. 30).

The opening reception is on May 22 at 6 P.M. According to Wolff, the April Hermitage Group debut at the J. Noblett Gallery in Sonoma was very successful. The 40 paintings and graphics on display were well received, and several pieces sold.

More of the Russian work is also on display at the Sonoma Arts Guild through May 31. Wolff hopes to secure a national tour for the collection of the Russian art after its Sonoma County debut.

The story of how Wolff brought back from St. Petersburg 120 paintings and graphics to America is typically Soviet: (Murphski's Law.)

After one and a-half years of intense negotiation with customs officials, and paying over $10,000 rubles to “buy back” their own paintings from the state, the Hermitage Group finally obtained appropriate customs declarations and documentation.

In Feb. 1992, Wolff flew to St. Petersburg to ship the paintings home in crates, but there was no lumber to be had in the city! So they industriously sewed the 120 paintings and graphics into burlap bags.

But at Customs, all was not well; agents began ripping apart the bags, saying the documentation was all wrong, but one agent just happened to be a student of the Hermitage Group, and so, with a flourish, they were sent Ithrough customs.

A lucky break—Dutch KLM airlines allowed Wolff to check the 250 lbs. of paintings as baggage for free—otherwise it would have been over $3000 to ship the art to America. “It was an insane comedy of errors,” said Wolff, “it was really a godsend the works were packed in burlap sacks, otherwise I couldn't have checked it as luggage."

How apropos—this art literally came to America like a stowaway wrapped in burlap.”

Money raised from the sale of the Russian art will help to fund a St. Petersburg/Sonoma cultural artist's exchange program.

Though Wolff has received small local grants from the Sonoma County Community Foundation and the Exchange Bank, he hasn't yet raised all the necessary funding to bring the Hermitage Group here. Wolff estimates he's sold over $6500 worth of the Russian paintings.

He's negotiating with Aeroflot to fly the ten Russian artists to Sonoma County to live and work with local artists—hopefully by the end of summer.

Ten Sonoma County artists will reciprocate the exchange by returning with the Russian artists to work at the Hermitage studios, and exhibit their own work in St. Petersburg.

The West Sonoma County Paper, May 18, 1992

Igor Tishler: A Fantasy Come True 5/1/92

Igor Tishler in his Guerneville studio.

Over and over, he goes in clumsy circles,
into the blind darkness
Vladimir Tatlin spreads his mechanical wings…

the domes and the crosses grew dim.

—from "Vladimir Tatlin" by Vladimir Salimon
(transl. Maureen Hurley & Oleg Atbashian)

By Maureen Hurley

Igor Tischler

When the elusive golden window of opportunity opened for Igor Tishler, a fantasy painter from Russia, he didn't hesitate; he grabbed his paintbrushes, canvas, and paints, clicked his heels, and said dosvedanya to the USSR. And landed, not in Kansas, but Colorado. Oz came later.

When a friend sent the artist Igor Tishler an invitation to visit him in Boulder, Colorado, little did he know, he'd end up in exhibiting his work in Guerneville, California—on the Russian River, of all places.

Tishler's first major US art exhibition opens May 9 at the new Curtis Chase Framing Arts & Gallery location on Main Street in downtown Guerneville.

The soft-spoken 37-year-old St. Petersburg artist said he'd sold two paintings at an exhibition in Germany—just enough to buy his Aeroflot ticket to America. But all was not synchronicity once he landed in Boulder, a self-proscribed anti-Russki cowtown.

Though Tishler managed to create new works while acclimatizing to America (he wasn't able to take any of his old work with him—customs officials wanted to charge full value for his paintings), and display art at two exhibitions, no one was buying. Tishler said of Boulder: “It is…how do you say it?… a very western place; not a very good audience.”

A chance visit to California last November, brought the self-taught artist Igor Tishler and a friend to Guerneville, where Tishler met Stumptown luminary, Tom Lynch. Tischler's friend later returned to Russia, but Igor stayed on with Lynch at Southside Resort.

“Here, people like my work. I sold three or four oil paintings, and maybe, ten watercolors in two months—California is so different. For me, it seems people are more interested in different cultures, not just the western style. Maybe it's because California has more different nationalities.”

Raised in Moscow, close to the Russian "White House" and embassies along the River Volga—the birthplace of Slavic culture—Tishler had a typical Soviet childhood, attending school #407. There's a rote Russian saying: Povtoreniye mat ucheniya. Repetition is the mother of knowledge.

Even with glasnost, Soviet schools place an emphasis on orderliness, right/wrong answers, with no allowances for creativity or personal expression—especially in art. Stress is on accuracy and neatness; drawing and painting realistically according to a rigid prescription (Social Realism). Though proscribed fantasy exists in Russian fairy tales and cartoons, children are discouraged from inventing their own make-believe realms.

However, Igor Tishler's active imagination wasn't extinguished. He describes an early childhood experience at the family dacha outside Moscow. “I was four or five, walking with my younger brother on the way to the forest, we saw a giant 12" fly-bee sitting on a bench, and I watched our reflections in her faceted eyes.”

The Tishler brothers ran away in fear, but the memory lingered. When they were 10 and 12, they invented a magic planet, called the Crystal Ball—with jade mountains, castles, princesses and dragons, a dose of good and evil, etc. “This was a strange mix from real life (politics, religion, dreams). Peopled with prototype heroes and villains from the '60s.”

In Igor Tishler's world, there was the Dictator Castro versus the Little People who made up songs and poetry. “They took energy from their songs; their food, magic honey from giant rainbow bees. This country was called Breadland. In the other country, people wore masks; they couldn't be individuals.” Breadland in a country of little bread….

“In 1977, when I was 24, I had a strong dream,” recounts Tishler, “A little man, Rigvanda, from the crystal planet, called to me. He said he'd take me away from earth, turn me into a giant fly-bee… But I was not ready, I was afraid.” So Tishler began to paint and write about that make-believe world.

In 1978, Tishler was drafted into the Red Army, and stationed two years near Lake Baikal in the Chitah region near the Chinese-Mongolian border, where the army put him to work as a graphic artist, cartographer, and calligrapher. In 1980, Igor married, and moved to St. Petersburg, where his wife, Natasha, was an art student, and later, a professional illustrator. (One of her commissions included rendering The Wizard of Oz.)

After the birth of his son, Sasha, Tishler explained, “I tried to write a book on my crystal world for children. This was fantasy, like Tolkien. But I didn't ever read Tolkien because in Russia, we have no translation of him. We began to draw illustrations. At first, when I read Lord of the Rings, I was shocked, all my fantasies broke [shattered]. Some episodes from my book were like from Tolkien.”

Tischler painted his first two big pieces on cardboard, “about a magic town. After that, I think, maybe, I can paint a little bit.” He experimented on/with different materials—nails, rocks, wire and mesh—“like collage.”

“My grandfather, Aleksandr Tishler (1898-1980), was famous artist.” Igor remembers visiting his grandfather's studio. The odor of linseed oil, the dark golden mystery of the ikons amid wood sculptures of dryads carved from the branches of linden trees created a special atmosphere that fired young Igor's imagination.

Tishler said, “My grandfather taught me very strange things, I could not understand at the time what he meant. After maybe two - three years, I understand some things. It was like a secret program. He told me fantasy is not like a sea or a lake; it has limits, like a pond.”

“I was not an artist: I was more industrial draftsman, musician, hippie…” Igor played guitar and drums, dabbled in zen, studied art, iconography and calligraphy; in 1987 Tischler began to paint in earnest.

“My grandfather didn't want me to study in the Cruzhok (the pot) art circle. He said 'This will destroy your talent.' When I drew, I felt no good, I was bored. I can paint real things, but I don't like to. I like hallucinations, fantasy, Surrealism. My father had many art books, Cubism, Dadaism, Dali. I knew about this art. Sometimes people think my grandfather was a Surrealist too, but it's not true. He liked combinations of styles.”

(Salvador Dali's work was banned in the USSR; he was labeled too decadent by the art police.)

Igor showed me two art books of his grandfather's work. Stunned, I recognized a famous drawing of the poet Anna Akhmatova I had admired at her salon-house in Leningrad. Apparently the well-connected Aleksandr Tishler knew many of the belle epoch luminaries: Chagall, Picasso, Modigliani, and Mayakovsky.

Igor recounted a story his grandfather had told him: “Akhmatova wrote, only two artists understood her poetry: Modigliani, and Tishler.” Weighty praise from the mother of modern Russian poetry.

Aleksandr Tishler wasn't mentioned in any of my Russian art books, but then, this blanket omission also includes artists Kasimir Malevich, Vassily Kandinsky, and Marc Chagall. An iron curtain hid the Soviet artists who didn't toe the line. We, in the West, have little concept or grasp of that kind of blanket censorship.

Aleksandr Tishler's work was delegated to some of the best museum basements the repressive, anti-Semetic Stalin-Brezhnev eras had to offer—the lower depths of the Pushkin Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and the Bahrushkin Museum of Theater in Moscow, to name a few.

When I was in the Soviet Union 1989, I also found no Chagalls or Maleviches at The Russian Museum, but in 1990, in a back foyer of the Hermitage, I rounded a dark corner and was confronted by five glowing Kandinskys! I stood in rapt attention listening to his symphony of color. Even post-Glasnost Russia, I had to aggressively hunt down the works of these otherwise famous artists of the Western world.

Cut off from European influences of Cubism and Constructivism, (Peter the Great's window on the West closed up pretty tight after the October Revolution), Supremativism was considered to be the first purely indigenous Russian art form of the 20th century (Malevich). Constructivism (Vladimir Tatlin), and Fantasy (Chagall), two other important Russian art movements followed.

Though Tishler the Elder, was of the generation after Malevich and Chagall (who emigrated to America), he incorporated many of their styles in his work. Born in the Crimea, Aleksandr Tishler studied at the Kiev Art School (I visited it in 1989), and was also a sculptor and theater stage designer. He became stage director for the Jewish state theaters in ByeloRuss, Moldova, and Ukraine.

In collaboration with the great Soviet poet Mayakovsky, Aleksandr Tishler' s experimental work in Formalism, Constructivism, and Cubism had a profound effect on the direction of modern theater, launching new concepts into the art world.

While Igor's grandfather, a member of the Artists' Union, wasn't prohibited from painting or exhibiting his work in group shows, Igor says “they were usually held in inaccessible places.” The newspapers gave him unfavorable reviews, citing his work as “bad art.”

Like the Writers' Union, the Artists' Union was a monopoly that had the power to create or destroy artists—by denying them a studio space, living stipend, art materials, and public access to exhibitions, and potential buyers. Repetition is the mother of knowledge.

If you were an accepted official artist, all manner of doors opened. Other Artist Union perks included paid vacations at artist colonies, and use of summer dachas. I was constantly asked if I was an official artist or writer. At first, I didn't know what that meant.

When Akhmatova was banned from the Union, she received no wages, accommodations, or access to publish any of her poems. She, like most of Russia's great cultural heroes, was lavishly reinstated after her death.

igor's grandfather, Aleksandr Tishler died in 1980, before Perestroika; it took his widow four years to gain permission to display a posthumous retrospective of his work. “I went to my grandfather's show and saw his paintings. I was so upset, I Icould not paint for two - three years,” recounts Igor. “I thought I was original artist, I saw only his later work, but he was working on my ideas long before I was born. Am I unconsciously repeating him?”

Igor's own work conjures up visions of Persian miniatures, Russian folkloric lacquerware, but with a New Age twist. Interesting aside to note that the Russian River was a spawning ground of psychadelic fantasy painting. Mad-hatterly LSD parties made vast inroads in people's perceptions during the late '60s and '70s.

A whole generation, appalled by the absence of spiritual values, rediscovered Art Nouveau, in their romantic quest for a new lifestyle. The Beatles, Rubber Soul. Listen to the color of your dreams —Tischler learned English at school, and from Beatle songs.

Tishler's watercolors have a similar playful quality like Dutch pop artist Peter Max's illustrations for Yellow Submarine—which, of course, Tishler's never seen. He explains, “I don't use drugs for my ideas.”

He shows me a chart of two inverted pyramids. The artist works from the superconscious to archetype, to the subconscious level, where the mind visualizes it as dreamlike symbols, and recreates the vision in a painting. He describes how ideas come to him “like a vibration, I can see them, like a hallucinatory slide.”

Some of the pieces in the show include Sad Song, a painting of a trumpeting snail facing the last battle. He describes some of the fantasy creatures as his “small, personal army.” When asked how his work is influenced by California, Tishler replies, “my colors change, I have new ideas, not exactly new, but transformed, expanding ideas. The bicycle is a new idea. I have no car. I ride a bicycle everywhere.”

Tishler shows me whimsical paintings of bicycles, rabbits, moles, and fish—where steampunk mechanical gears predominate. And the Wild West has had an influence as well: designerly paintings of katchina dolls, turtles, horses and women. Tishler's Native American Horse with cloak, animatedly carries designs of the universe and the essence of horse as proudly as the ancient Chinese burial bronzes of flying horses.

In the Babylon Temptation of Eve; Eve's headdress is a ziggurat with gold foil—reminiscent of Gustav Kilmt who was profoundly influenced by the flat surfaces of Oriental prints. Art Nouveau, Surreal, and organic forms rich with symbolism—like Klimt's Byzantine portraits with gold leaf, and intricately patterned material.

Curtis Chase framer/artist Craig Timmerman does an excellent job of showcasing each art piece, enhancing its jewel-like quality.

Some of Tishler's oils are a bit uneven, he admits it's a new medium for him. Where his work excels is in the jewel-like tempera boards, and illustraterly watercolors. Prices for his watercolors and temperas range from $30 to $80, oils from $300 to $1000.

Since 1989, Igor Tishler's work has been included in over 15 exhibitions in Moscow and Leningrad/St Petersburg, with traveling exhibitions to Finland, Germany, Israel, Japan, France, and England. His work at the Ariadna gallery, “Art Today,” was featured on Leningrad television, and his work from Germany's “Red Gallery” was aired on Moscow television.

Many of the exhibitions sponsored by Soviet joint ventures with Japan, Germany, Switzerland, etc., have given Tishler good exposure, and afforded him a living. A member of the Young Artists of Leningrad (LOSH) Artists' Union, he figures he's sold some 40 pieces ranging anywhere from $500 to $4000 rubles each (the equivalent of 6 month's Soviet wages—a few US dollars) during the past two-and-a-half years.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union, it's hard to predict what the future of these joint-ventures will be. Artists' Unions, along with the Writers' Unions are collapsing along with the old Communist party system. What will take their places is anybody's guess. Nouvelle censorship of the arts due to poverty? It will be interesting to see what will happen with the uneasy marriage of arts and free enterprise in Russia.

Art always takes us full circle. The European artists—the Impressionists, Art Nouveau painters and designers—all looked east, toward the Orient, for their inspiration. Russia is where east meets west, and St. Petersburg is the fabled window to the west. Igor came to California to where west meets east. Fertile ground. It will be interesting to watch his career develop on the edge of the Pacific Rim.

Tishler hopes to stay in America another 6 months, perhaps a year, or maybe two, if he can get his visa renewed, but he finds life in America isn't as easy as it seems. “Sometimes it's very difficult to live here. When I have no money, it's like a depression. At this poverty level, I cannot live like most Americans.”

Though Tishler misses his wife and son, he feels he can help his family more by staying here. As to what the future might bring, he looks glumly “I don't know. I have no idea. I wait for when Rigvanda comes back to me and turn me into a big fly-bee.”

Meanwhile, his small personal army of fantastical creatures is intent on rediscovering the lost land of Oz on the Russian River.

Reception for the artist Sunday, May 9, from 1 to 4 p.m.; the exhibit will be on display through May 30 at the new Guerneville Curtis Chase Framing Arts & Gallery location at 16355 Main Street (707) 869-2041.

May 1, 1992, The West Sonoma County Paper

Journal entry, 3/1/92 Malcolm X.

3/1/92 OK I will admit that I don’t know much about  Malcolm X. Paul Mariah says he was a separatist, high up in the Black Muslim movement, and when he no longer wanted separatism, they assassinated him. He was like Martin Luther King, but with more guts, more fire, says Paul. I dream about the assassination of self. I had a dream. Now it takes a somewhat macabre and humorous twist. Malcolm X blowing himself up in a public bathroom. What a colossal waste. King, too cool to intervene, or to take sides.

And I’m pissed as hell about all this multicultural crap dividing us, making us enemies. I relate to the oppressed easily. I am Irish, I know firsthand of oppression and xenophobia. Susan says we need a workshop on how to deal with the sensitive egos of men, when we women, both Black and white, are forced to tippytoe around them. All their male supremest bullshit. It’s the women who are oppressed, not the men. Why the hell are we women supposed to be so discreet, and not rock their ego boats, why don’t they learn to not offend us? Why are we supposed to be the bootlickers? I find it offensive that I’m supposed to learn the appropriate new language to deal with Roberto, a Black Latino, when he isn’t required to do the same of me, or other women. That is not equality. Nor is it a case of cultural sensitivity. It is not a neutral meeting ground.

FREEDOM COMES IN

FREEDOM COMES IN

It's the nature of dawn

to splash against the horizon

and surrender to the sky

because forgetfulness

is always beyond reach.

It's the nature of freedom

to come in like tomorrow,

late, and out of breath.

No conspiracy

of hidden microphones

in corporate bedrooms

and in poet's quarters;

a burning sensation

as if insects announced

the arrival of word-thieves.

Tuesday is asleep from too much Monday,

blueness is an illusion of scattered light.

The human eye sees 10 million colors.

Tell that to the ozone layer.

What’s the use of sight

when the sun milks

the eyes of sheep and rabbits.

No mother, the sky.

We’ve looked into the eye of God

and become mute as stones.

5/92

Salmon Fishing, Peacock Gap, San Rafael (photo) need story

Not sure when this was, I wrote  The Mother of Beauty in April, 1992, so it was around then. I was invited out to join the residents of the Forestville Home on a salmon fishing trip by a local contractor. We left from Peacock Gap in San Rafael. I did a story for The Paper, but haven't found the tear sheet, or the journal entry. They all got seasick, the entire boatlload was barfing. So did I. We went out to Potato Patch Shoals outside the Golden Gate, and the sea was unusually rough. By the time I caught that salmon, my first deep sea fish, I couldn't care less. But I had to reel it in on my own. Later that night we ate it. Divine.

POEM FOR LA Rodney King riots

POEM FOR LA

           Rodney King riots

Please open

our hearts

to the earth

‘s only hope.

My heart is heavy.

Anger robs the streets

& the skies weep

for rain.

April 30, 1992

Journal entry, 4/21/92 housesitting at Simone and Toni’s, Bluebird morning

4/21/92 I am housesitting at Simone and Toni’s, it’s a blessed escape from the clutter of my house for someone else’s clutter. I’m escaping the distraction of my creepy new neighbor. So many wonderful places to write, but the dog won’t leave me alone. How I hate to be pestered in the morning. So I tossed the cat out. The dog circles me every minute in the house. Toni probably walks her each morning.

All the outside chairs face towards the house. I don’t want to look inward, I want the horizon. First year of decent rains after several seasons of drought, the oatgrass is reaching skyward. Too bad the hot tub is broken, I could spend part of each day submerged in this beauty. Yesterday I managed to complete my CPITS end of year report, divvying out matching money etc.

Yesterday I awoke to bluebirds banging on my window, striking the glass. All that extraordinary blueness of sky and rust colored bellies. I read once that most of bird feathers are optical prisms. It’s a question of refracted light, not a pigment. Their blueness is ethereal. I cannot imagine mere pigment entering into it. No matter what I did, those two bluebirds dove at the window. I darkened the blinds. Nothing worked. I realized that the window was a mirror and the pair were defending their territory against themselves. They were their own worst enemy.

I remember seeing bluebirds when I was young making that visual comparison with time. I used to confuse them with robins, both with their red breasts. I thought they were related, Or that they were the girls. Then came Rachel Carson’s silent spring.

And since then I’ve seen bluebirds twice in my life. Once, years ago in Chico, I rode horseback in a meadow on John Crawford’s red mare, Bluebirds swooping over me. another time out near Bridgeport with Lee Perron, we were hiking and came across a little upland meadow stretched between the framework of hills. The bottom of a gully, really, like those hanging basket lakes of the Sierras. And there they were filling the air with their blue loveliness. They took my breath away as they do each time I see them, because they have been such rare birds in my life. It’s like a glimpse back into my childhood.

I’m always searching for lost memories to mine, as if my inarticulate memories, layered beneath  years of time and neglect, held some basic truths. Finding that, I find a part of myself. I have no way of knowing which thoughts are pure, the innocent observations, without form or structure, or these gleaned from the nuances of an educated mind. Certainly they are more sophisticated.

But the purity of bluebird magic, that breathlessness occurs only in hindsight, using the sophisticated tools of language, I search for a way to describe what I must’ve felt that isn’t a cliché. Bluebirds reduced to cliché, associated with happiness, fill me with inexplicable joy and I don’t know why, other than the invisible link to my past, their disappearance for years, until I forgot I ever saw bluebirds.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 30s before I saw them again. 25 years I waited for them, I looked for them, not finding them anywhere. 25 years I searched for joy, and found other birds commonly filling the air. A bluejay is cousin to the crow, not a songbird. They knife the air with their coarse call, only in flight do they embellish and scallop it.

I do not know the song of the bluebird, but in my darkest hour, a student wrote a poem, the song of the bluebird to the explosion of the bomb, darkness is fleeting, light is eternal. How could she know of such things in fifth grade? Even she doesn’t know their song, though she writes of it.

The bluebird holds some evocative mystery, though its very name seems clichéd, but if we rename the bluebird, some of the mystery would be lost, we’d have to reinvent it. How did this bluebird become linked with happiness? its song, its color, its habitat, harbinger of spring, Sentinel of joy, diving at my window.

Arise, arise, it is day, don’t squander the preciousness of it, the metaphor seems to say. But it was really just two feisty birds defending their own turf from strangers. Territorial imperative and delusion, the urge to nest, the urge to mate, to raise young is of primal concern. Delusion and joy, seeking something irrefutably lost, was it ever there. Joy is subtle if you look at it head on, it disappears, only the absence of joy heightens it when it comes. Like those bluebird feathers, the illusion of blue, of joy as seen from the corners of the eye and never head on.

This morning I came looking for the bluebirds and found only a disappointment of barn-swallows instead.

Sunday Morning, Berth 1-11, Sausalito

SUNDAY MORNING, BERTH 1-11, Sausalito

         —for Kathy Evans, it was her houseboat

Sunday morning—not the Wallace Stevens kind rising on extended wing—I awaken in a white room, the houseboat moaning and rocking on the mud flats. A lone curlew daubs the tidal palate, jacksonpollacking the air with his spatulated beakness. The last time I slept on a houseboat, I was child—the names pleased my ears, a sing-song: tiki junction tiki junction tiki junction. Last night I dreamed the water was sweet, and I stirred it with my feet. Black bees came to drink from it, burrowed beneath my skin, the darkness a refuge. I couldn’t walk, my feet bloated with hairy bees—like burrowing birds or children— seeking entrance through the small blisters where I’d walked too far, too fast. I squeezed them out: what of the stingers and the legs and wings left inside?

Last night’s love came in small o’s, too late for the rubber, and I worry about conceptual art of squeezing bees from the soles of my feet. We trundled the double bed where a divorce has severed the sex from the psyche, and cleaved emotion from the arteries and venous matters. The honeyed odor of sex is stronger in a cloistered room. Kathleen’s mother calls, wants to know why a strange man with a Russian accent answers her on a Sunday morning.

Many women poets I know live alone in white rooms. I want to write a poem in each of their rooms; the undocumented lives behind the walls of writing. With her divorce nearly final, Kathleen says she can barely look at her houseboat poems, She says, “We can't afford to but each other out, life is selling us short.” She manages to stuff the essence of a life, her four children of a one-room studio; birds have begun to build nests in the eaves. Life goes on, blindly unaware of ideas like fairness, or sea planes asleep on the mud. My lover’s cigarette seeks the kindred air of gray sky and oceanic debris, of freeways and houses on ancient sea cliffs anchored against an eon of low tides, the seas are rising. No neap about it. The sea plane, a bee with yellow stripes of mixed imagery. I'm still afraid of the bees trapped in the pockets of my undertoes and rising tide.

On the dock, a small potted pine snags the ancestral whirl of H.D.’s pines. Incandescent remnants of holidays spent alone, or with the children, in the separate enclaves of poetry, because the basic structure of family is altered. (Sacrificial, like all the rest. Did I tell you about my father?) Oleg rises to the occasion, only to deny it, but this morning I take it, thinking of modems, and “handshakes;” the peculiar electronic orgasm of computers exchanging data via the phone lines, and malapropisms. Strange songs. What would our ancestors, the primordial blue-green algae, make of this development? I shake his cock, a friendly offering across the celibate bed of concealed weapons and thighs. It seems Oleg and I are more enemies than lovers—but the rare moments we disarm ourselves before sleep, are flowered, like the egret walking elegantly across the unstable mud flats.

Thinking of all those dead bees trapped in my feet, I cried and remembered how, in the dream, we sat on the edge of our seats as the car managed to drive up the angle of declination each time. Right before the crest, the fear of falling backwards into space volleyed the darkness behind our heads. A final refuge to be savored when it seems we can't go on. Each time the car crested the hill, we turned back the way we’d come, only to start at the bottom again, in a perpetual Möibius strip-teaser of time, the snow endlessly melting towards the renewal of spring. Does it matter if I don't know the driver? Horses followed the car, their fleeting beauty arched across the sky, my sorrel mare pulsed against all that green. Will I spend the rest of my dream life purgatorially searching for that damned mare who was allergic to hobbles, ropes and barbed wire fences in the hills of Forest Knolls? She's been dead longer than my half-life, still I dream of finding her. She's not lost, she knows exactly where she is grazing those hills, achingly familiar, out of childhood.

The questions seem mundane in daylight—why write at all? Small epiphanies made even smaller under sunlight. Those rare moments etched in our memories, yearning for a time that will never come, and so, like the burdened oxen laboring through our waking moments, we glance into the déjà vu of what if, if, if. . . I gave up everything and moved here to live on the cradle of the sea, incunabula at the intersection of land and water, delta triangle of cunt from which the word “queen” stems.

Someone advises me to learn to grieve for what I’ll never have. We've opened the burden of living together among ourselves, other wives and children. Resentment draws the familiar longitudinal line in the bed at night, this is why it's easier to draw a truce in a bed not our own. The relative freedom from constraint. Tender enemies: barnacles and mussels prepare for exposure to air by drawing inward. Suspended from the anchor ropes, and from the sides of barges, they've learned to adapt to the harsh aerobic reality of air, while all we’re capable of is learning the fine art of dressing wounds.

Oleg says the word mussel is midia in Russian, muscled mice in the tree of tongues, no Babylon to be expelled from here. The word “paradise” is the walled garden of the desert. When the Slavs came to the Black Sea it was already occupied. Midia, milish, the mealy-mouthed sweetness of bees, melissa.  What media is your art? The medium is the message—crystal balls, and computer chips. The technology we use to write with: silica divines the information, Jason's golden fleece and the dead lion with honey in his bones; parthenogenesis of words from one life form to another. Stromatolites, and the first “I am” life uttered. We read about a crack smoker makin' Jason, the ultimate orgiastic quest. We evolved out of the mud for this? Flowers stranded on the mud flat (the bay pulls its silken sheet from the bed slowly, as if unveiling a masterpiece, slowly), a vermilion gash; who would throw flowers into the sea? Surely not the just married, or the newly dead. Who, in the night, had such hope, or despair, to give the sea this gift? What lions alive in the fleeced carcasses of bees springs from the loins of our days?

While we stretch metaphor to its limit, each new crenulation of word, where ideas rub shoulders, becomes clichéd the moment it's conceived. Forever divining the spirit of word in purgatorial surroundings, we are headhunters in search of our own heads, cannibalistic dreams are a natural phenomenon in the New World. Cannibal, cannabis. Prospero's daughter in love with the island of Caliban. Canvas, the hemp sails and rope-that took Columbus to the New World—E. Cannabis Unum. The quincentennial is upon us. Airearthfirewater, and the fifth, quintessence. Take the Fifth. Five hundred years of blue-eyed love among the tribes. Mi lengua, mi Llorana, La Malinche, my sister, my voice, who spoke in tongues until the blue-eyed mestizos fell from her like stars to populate the cities of the sky. We are gathering from the four corners of the earth; she is calling us home. The trough in the mind made by this houseboat in berth 1-11, a canyon, a small river seeks the blood mother, and our beginnings. Who came first? Alpha or omega? Omicrons, small o’s as we face the second coming. Umlauts and epsilons. The invention of letters on the mud flats is left to the crabs calligraphing their way to safety.

Kathleen says she writes in order to keep her sanity. The mellifluous saxophone upstairs seeks union with the human voice within the channels of the ear. Coltrane? A friend with the angel’s name gave up singing after 15 years because her voice migrated to Wagnerian dimensions, and she hated the idea; her voice, a betrayal. Now she answers corporate phones at Apple, and lets poets buy computers with her company discount so we can continue to bite off words from the spoken air of conspiracy underfoot, and divine words onto the page via the handshakes and addresses of electronic media. I just bought a scanner. We can theoretically scan anything, even our own body parts and enter them into the electronic arena where the only thing real is on off-off off-on-off on on ommmm.

This battle of the sexes continues to operate between the sheets, making no distinction between the lines of gender, telephone lines, coke lines, the shore line, midline, the line of declination, the screen phosphor line, another line fed to us from the psyche, the gods, or another man or woman wanting something other than commitment between church and state, war and peace, enemy and friend. The helical line of the electromagnetic spectrum—where anything from radio to color bands is explainable to the staircase of DNA unwinding the haploid life, is explainable—is drawing the line, is toeing in; the shortest distance, points of recognition—the bee line, the perspective line, the song lines at Walkabout.

The earth's name is Gaia. Last night I dreamed Kathleen told a man her other name was Gaia, and she was smiling, alone and ruddy-cheeked, loveliness in a white room suspended above the squalor of mud, the tide going out, something larger than love coming in. Why should she give her bounty to the dead? In this way I understood we are all imperfect transmitters and receivers—pain is not interference from deep space, it is a conduit that allows us a glimpse, the curtain drawn aside for a moment, we see in the mirrored air, a little beyond the image of what we call “self,” the first “I am” we cannot help but utter in the plasmic void of what we are, and what is to be, becoming literal in this littoral zone. 

Easter Sunday, April 19, 1992

READING FROM THE SCULPTURE GARDEN ANTHOLOGY

READING FROM THE SCULPTURE GARDEN ANTHOLOGY

Finally, she read those poems as if he were a stranger,
writing of angst as the tao of love, to another stranger—
The noun (or is it verb?) “lover” resting casually on his lips
was not for her. Who was she? She dreamed he was a double-

edged murderer, and she was the guilty first-time accomplice—
If the truth leaks out, she'll be an accessory to the crime.
Was it the tangled clothes in the dryer that betrayed them,
or the small fish in the jaded surf at Puerto Escondito?
She saw him coming down the steps holding two poems.
Naked beneath her coat, she hid in the crowded bank lobby,
he found her on the blue bench by the fountain
saying, “A burden has been lifted from your back.”
A hag sat on the wall with a basket of black-painted eggs—
he reached for the one she held with the bluejay on it,
she smashed it on the pavement, saying,
“Last time I gave you an egg, all hell broke loose.”
She dreamed her father asked for forgiveness after 20 years of silence.
He offered her rubies, she knew that rubies must be kept warm
to keep their color alive. He held a ring of ashes toward her.
To complete the goddess dance before the congress of pontiffs,
She was given three syllables to sing, no melody,
the floor pattern of a sine curve to emulate, no instruction.
The dancer said : the movement and melody are already within you.
She dreamed she was given three sacred cloths; a black, a white one,
and a red one that read: an arrow in the wall.
If they touched the ground, the power would be lost.
She was given back a transcendental belief in love,
She musn't let go of truth, or the magic will die.
In the search of the genuine, she is transparent,

filling this courtyard with her own words—
All the poems in the world can't heal the breech between them,
& there is nothing left to wound except the memory of pain,
intransient as the annoying halo of gnats
they thoughtlessly sweep from their eyes and mouths.

4/19/92
Easter Sunday

San Pedro

THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY WALKS AMONG US

THE MOTHER OF BEAUTY WALKS AMONG US
                                     —for the mongoloid

Musing over complexities of love gone wrong,
of race, of gender, how the domestic warfront
is a soiled microcosm of the larger mirror,
I avoid the mongoloid man walking down Main Street,
who unconsciously slicks back his blond hair.
In that gesture, I could see the father was probably vain,
a lady-killer, but genetics betrayed him.
The shadow of beauty abandoned guilt behind the moon.
In that gesture, it came to me, how his face
held all the elements of race—who we are.
I want to tell the anthropologists—wait!
we've had the model in front of us all along.
I want to tell the xenophobes and the racists,
his face is that of our ancestors.
Caught on the street in the morning sun, 
unadulterated love walks among us.
How easily we make invisible
something common, holy and profound.
Can we still learn to emulate his heart;
he who loves so unreservedly, 
and wears the face of us all?

4/18/92
Forestville, CA

Journal entry, 4/12/92, Green Fuse reading

4/12/92, Green Fuse reading. Yesterday, tired to the point of exhaustion, I left the Green Fuse reading at half-time, having not even read my poem. I just didn’t care anymore. Besides, there was a typo in it. I went home, nauseous from fatigue. I was in bed by 9:30 PM and I slept nearly 12 hours, and today, having slept nearly twice as long as I have on average for the past several nights, I have insomnia, watching movies into the wee hours. Tomorrow will be horrible. But channel 9 is playing movies until dawn. I called Valera Stupachenko in Leningrad, but no answer. The rule of thumb, if I can get through, he’s not at home.

Reading at the Sculpture Gardens, 4/5/92

“Just never settles in the house of a woman not ready for the sun.“– Ellen

I was one of four readers, I haven’t read here since 1986 with John Oliver Simon. They said I read well. Nice to put the faces with the names. I get lots of strokes and compliments. Ellen who goes only by her first name because she’s been married so many times, said it was nice to be able to put the name in the face together, said that I draw from many sources keeping the reader interested. 

4/5/92 

Angel’s Gate, San Pedro