Staying sane while working a steady-eddy phone job requires periodic full-body immersion in art, but petty-betty phone jobs don't provide the kind of money needed to buy theatre tickets or pay for expensive museum admissions. So like any starving artist in desperate need of art, I do what is necessary to throw myself onto or into the nearest art island/slagheap/ burning bush (or swamp).
I volunteer.

This week, I hustled over to SF to serve as a volunteer usher at Forum,  Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' experimental theatre venue. I wanted to see  Eiko & Koma's Fragile,  originally produced  as a gallery installation for the Walker Art Center but then recreated as a more formal performance piece together with SF's own Kronos Quartet. It was, I thought, just the thing to take my mind away from surveys and chitter-chatter, maybe push me into the light  . . . or bury me in dark. Either way,  I was ready -- I thought -- to sit quietly for four hours as the two of them lay naked barely moving, caught inside haunting bells mixed with the lapsed strings of the Kronos Quartet.

I would sit -- I thought -- as silently, as still as their unclothed bodies dusted with white rice powder and bits of leaves and feathers. I would be as naked as they, my mind my spirit as stripped as motionless, lying on mounded dirt, while the Kronos played. 

Either I was caught thinking (again) or I should stop already with all this thinking.

I didn't know that my volunteer gig would remove me from the performance space, abandon me to the narrow space of an organized past. I did not know I would  not be asked to seat the audience and then left to my own devices within in the womb of the performance space as expected. I was surprised and a bit chagrined that I was instead positioned as a "guard" of the 'archives,' asked to stand in a back corner behind the impervious black curtain separating the stage from an artificial yet "upfront" backstage where a suspended oversized rack holding costumes from past performances swayed above a floor littered with snapshots from past performances.

Nostalgia gone wild.

I was supposed to keep folks from walking away with the photos, from grabbing the costumes unceremoniously, from sneaking into the  dark unexplored space behind the stage. Control the crowd. But I was alone in that corner. I was expected to guard the past, but, of course, no one was interested in visiting the past. 

No one cared to dive headfirst into the sensuous floor to ceiling cascade of fiber, string, and paper that had been essential to the set of a previous performance. No one reached out to grab the over-sized kimonos, the faux bearskin wraps, or the silky scarlet camisole suspended above the hundreds of photos scattered about the floor. No one knelt to peer at those snapshots or picked them up to hold them closer to the light.

No one wandered into the corral of the past.  The audience was dutiful and respectful. The door opened. The door closed. They walked in, turned left, sat down, and stayed neatly folded onto the benches inside the curtained performance space.

The musicians played. The bells tolled. The two naked dusted bodies curled and uncurled, and I, guard of the past, stayed in my corner, leaning on myself,  splashed color, dim light, and violins, stretched past fragile.

I make a lousy guard -- not really my nature to guard things -- but in this case I was a ridiculous guard, a Beckettian guard, waiting for waiting, standing inside of standing, leaning on nothing.

I was extraneous.

I would like to believe that the audience was more focused on the present and thus ignored the carefully collected past, hanging  unceremoniously off to the side.

There are days when nothing makes much sense. I pick up my phone, sit down to work, dialing, speaking, dialing, and feeling most of the time like a buzzing housefly, a swooping mosquito, a chattering chipmunk. I calmly ask all those creatures to wait in the wings and let me work. Sometime close to noon, I take a brief break, put a pillow behind my aching back, close my eyes, listen to the rain.

I have always found the sound of rain soothing and satisfying, comfortably green, but today it feels shredded and inconsistently grey. More work to do. I pick up the phone, dial, speak, listen, repeat. Mid-afternoon, drained by the drabness of the work, I put on my hat and go down to the bay. Earnest-the-wonder-dog and I walk in the rain.

We’re not singing, but humming old nursery rhymes, watching sea birds swoop and sway.

No Strings, One Clarinet, a Bass Drum, and a Piccolo

It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring.
He stumped his head, went to bed, slept too long,
and all went wrong. Now he can’t get up at all.
He’s way too tall, his feet are stuck between the ribs
of his bed, his hands limp flour sacks, his skin
stretched loose like an old grey goose, his eyes
bunched tight, a barbed wire fence, slack jawed
against his nose, a balloon about to pop,
and he can’t hear a thing. When he looks,
the room’s on fire, his life a lie, and death
is make-believe, everything in-between
spun sugar or worse -- treacle made
to look like butter cream. What to do
but shrug and hum: It’s raining,
it’s pouring, the old man
is snoring.  He’s jumped
to red, forgot the dead
and anything else is
boring. Frightfully.

Art need not be corralled. It doesn't need to stand still. It can still kick up its heels, carouse in the midst of chaos. Follow ArtIsMobilUs around town, discover the extent of infinity, and -- why not -- revise your notions about the 'stability' of art.

This 8' x 24' painting is mounted on the side of a bus that happily drives around town. Oh, what a wondrous world it would be if we all were to paint our cars and trucks with such imaginative vision.

Life would be so fine.

Truly.

On those days when I just feel like walking briskly non-stop without indulging in the distractions of sea winds and ducks slip-slap-slapping their feet against waves as they attempt water take off without traction, I go to Emeryville where the sidewalks are long, very nearly always empty, and reach all the way to infinity. There's nobody talking and nobody walks along the sturdy nearly 1/2 mile-long fence separating the magical kingdom of Pixar from the rather more mundane outside world of concrete and gravel. Nobody but me, that is, me and Mr. Earnest, the wonder dog.

At this time of year, it is still possible to peer through the  black iron bars into the inner sanctum,  and I do. Those bars are too wide for my hands to grasp without stretching uncomfortably,  but I can lean against their immobility and almost taste the lush green lawns within, imagine being barefoot in all that grass, walking next to  star creatures and six-foot caterpillars. A lovely dream, a distant impossibility, close but as far from my world as  are  translucent glaciers under an arctic sun.

Soon, however,  the thorny canes bound to those massive bars  will be in full green growth, budding and stretching and concealing. The secret Kingdom of Pixar will once again disappear. New canes thick with buds will swell through the bars and burst into pink bloom. The street will be flushed with roses, the air perfumed  . . . and that blue sky,  resting now so sensibly on that sturdy triangle of black steel, will suddenly and inexplicably be propped up by a most outrageous froth of hot pink.

I can't wait.

Different types who wear a day
coat pants with stripes and cutaway

 . . . putting on the Ritz.

Garden days have arrived. I simply can’t help myself. As the moon creeps ever closer, as dark becomes more luminous, as morning comes sooner and daylight hours more numerous, I find myself wanting to tend the earth, to help my garden grow and bloom. I crave beauty.

This morning, I woke after strange dreams, thinking I needed to plant a lemon tree – and did,

almost before the day really began. I showered, had a cup of tea, but then left the house before eating. It was too early for the nursery to be open for business so Earnest and I went down to the shore and walked along the beach, amazed by that the waters had pulled even further from shore than I thought possible. Soon it was evident that the tide was as far out as it would go. Standing there, I could see that the waters were returning. I could hear the tide coming in.

The water was moving at such a speed across the sands that it made a brittle yet lacy sound, almost as if hundreds of fairy folk were running their fingers carefully and delicately over the rims of hundreds of tiny crystal glasses, some half-full of water, some with less water than that, some with more. As long as their fingers moved swiftly and lightly along the rim of the glass, a weeping music ran out to the stars. That swiftly disappearing music wrapped me. It anchored my feet to the rocky shore, and then the sun  settling onto the ripples of the incoming tide lifted me until I felt as of I were thin-stretched and buoyant, a soap bubble on the wind, a marsh-reed on a star-sea.  A very real feeling, maybe even an important feeling, but impossible to describe credibly or usefully.

I soon turned from that swiftly moving tide and drove to Encinal Nursery where I knew they had in stock a number of healthy Meyer lemon trees. Out of the sky, away from the shimmer,  and back to the earth. As I drove past lines of cars, through clogs of traffic, I thought again of tides and the hearing of tides,  tides that come in swiftly without warning, tides that we cannot describe.

I left the house this morning to escape one of those tides. Spit from dreams, then turning on the radio, I heard nothing except solemn voices remarking war, discussing death, a fierce tide that roared and wallowed like rust, diesel against dusk . . . a relentless uncomfortable tide. I turned  the radio off.

The tide of war grinding ceaselessly against the edges of my life is not a sound I enjoy, and so I go to the sea. I stop, I listen, and then, I sink my arms into the earth, dig a hole for a lemon tree.

May it grow and prosper.

Tides turn and so can we.

March has crept in like a lamb.
No lion here. No crunching bones.
No drooling jaws. No fierce storms.
Just fishtails in trees flicking sun
onto bareback winds, twisted flat
across the billows of night, warped
into acres of stars, armloads of bloom.
I don't believe the postman when he says
he saw the lion, greasy with spume,
crouched beneath the underpass
eating lemon grass and honey bees.
Then I hear that tree, a spreading oak,
its branches snapping,  rising on winds,
great limbs twisting like dandelion seeds
reinvented as bullets shot with unholy speed
into clouds wound as tight as springs.

Every morning, I wake and flip on the radio, and every morning after a very few minutes I turn it off. I find the brittle language, the constant spew about war, death and destruction exhausting. This morning, my little dog drowsed on the bed and I sat at the kitchen table, eating dry cereal topped with sliced strawberries and almond milk. The radio was on, and a man described drones buzzing the skies of Afghanistan while he and fellow prisoners closed their eyes, knowing they would not hear the missile that killed them. These drones were moving past the speed of sound. Even though I knew that soon there would be a discussion of the great and fabulous imagination of Dr. Seuss, I turned the radio off . . . went and sat on the porch to drink my tea and watch the flowering pear tree, pushing new green leaves against a still blue sky while the tiniest of finches danced from branch to branch.

I know the world is plastered shut with violence. I know that the human need for violence needs to addressed, revealed and never concealed, but I am tired of hearing narratives of violence and violent conversations about a life that could be peaceful and peaceably discussed. Change your language and change the world. Speak about beauty and live beautifully. Speak peace and live peaceably.

I thought about a brief ten minute video I watched recently of  'the artist as a young man'. . . Eskae, an artist I have known all his life – since that night he drew his first breath – on film, speaking 16 years ago about  the language of living, the language of art, while he and Crayone painted visual narratives, at the request of its owner, over the entire interior and exterior of a house in Napa before its demolition. Floors, walls, ceilings, bathroom fixtures -- everything touched by joy. The touch is gentle, the lines graceful, the images quirky ironic and potent; the transformation extreme. Politics without violence.

Give it a listen and watch as one artist creates a lively environment of gratitude and rebirth in a structure that will soon be splintered and shoveled off to the landfill, making art for life, for living, even in the face of death.

I may be prejudiced – Eskae, after all, is my son – but I find both this Bright Moments video and what this young artist has to say remarkable.  Sixteen years have passed, the house is gone, much has happened, but what he says about language and art  still  resonates today.

Years ago, I worked as an artist in that most marvelous program that Jimmy Carter's administration invented to support all of us struggling and starving artists in NYC. I taught in the New York City Prisons, the Brooklyn House of D and the Tombs, penned illustrations of silent movie stars for a movie mag in Queens, taught mural painting at FDR High Schools in Brooklyn, ran art workshops at the Bronx museum. I had a lively  and lovely time, making art while drifting about the city, but discussing that job is not the reason for this post.  Decay, and its unseemly lack, is.

In those days I had a friend, married to one of my fellow art workers, who was a remarkable draftsman, an artist extraordinaire with a strange vision of what needed to be preserved. She drew decay.  Each Monday morning, she walked down to Chinatown, bought vegetables -- perhaps an eggplant, Bok Choi, a squash or two, a head of lettuce -- and set them out as a still life on her drawing table. Then, she would sharpen her pencils and create oversize glorious drawings inch by inch, day by day, a new drawing everyday for week, recording with her pencil (and her erasure) the collapse of all that fecund vegetable flesh. The first drawing would be of plump sassy vegetables and fruits,  the second the same but showing a bit of wear. By the third drawing, the squash might be collapsing, the lettuce withering. She would keep drawing until everything had dried or melted. The drawings were meticulous, beautiful, and alive with an inexplicable magic.

She left this planet some time ago, but every time I open my refrigerator and see my now nearly four-month-old Romaine lettuce, I think of her. Even she would not have the patience required to draw this slow rate of decay. Living things that never age are boring; lacking shrink or fizzle they drift into a disconcerting sameness, alarmingly flat and subdued. My still perky aging lettuce now has a few brown spots along its ribs, and one leaf is slightly brown on top, but for lettuce cut clean from its roots sometime back in early November, it's still disturbingly fresh.

It doesn't feel magical, just unnatural.

I feel the same way about facelifts, boob jobs, tummy tucks, and cherry red lips on sun broken faces.

Out of habit, I almost ate a piece that had broken off in the bag, but I stopped my hand before it reached my mouth.  Of course, I have no intention of eating it, and, of course, I will leave it in my refrigerator. Next month, I'll snap another photograph.

I wonder if this head of lettuce will make it to June or beyond. It just might.

_

When the sea is glitter lit,
the sky pied and beauty bent, I pause,
stop to rest on a bench with a bronze plaque
installed:  For Millie full of life and valor for hers and others.

The planks ground down by salt,
rough with chiseled initials, one word
(love) neatly placed. On unfenced grass, a man
throws a Frisbee low and long and grey-blue pallor sifts
across the river of yellow bloom where mothers sit content.

Mid-afternoon, as the sun grew longer and golder, I heard voices. First two distinct voices speaking loudly in harmony, and then the many repeating, responding. Those voices were distant but approaching. By the time, I had laid aside my work, a small but active crowd was passing in front of my house. Two young women were out in front with megaphones, followed by a group of thirty or forty people, including  the Mayor, her husband, the Police Chief and other Oakland city workers, marching solidly up Peralta Street. The women yelled out What do we want? and the crowd yelled back PEACE. And the women yelled back When do we want it? And the voices lifted  NOW. 

End the violence. End the violence. End the violence now.

Join us, join us, yelled the man with the microphone. My heart was with them, but I couldn't get up and walk. I was working. I was barefoot. I would have to put away my work, close up the house, set the alarm. I had a million excuses, and even before I could scratch them all on the back of my skull, the crowd was turning the corner to head down Twelfth Street towards Mandela Parkway and away.

_
What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW.

NOW. . .Now. . . Now.

What do we want? PEACE. When do we want it? NOW. . . Now.

The mayor's husband, a doctor, a founder of an over-60 health clinic, reached across my fence and handed me a magnet  for my refrigerator. Create a Safer Cleaner Oakland. Report Problems to the Public Works Agency. I thanked him, and then stood still, listened to the gentleness of feet moving together, the pitch of voices rising. Call and Response. Call out and the world calls back.

I did not want to think about how many years ago, how many decades past, I yelled those same words, passionately, convinced that by working together, we could change the world, bring peace to our cities, peace to our land, peace to our world. Almost 50 years. I stood aside and watched them go  -- the years, the people, the voices -- wondering why I cling, somewhat stupidly, to a hope for peace, but I do. I do.

After they were gone, my neighbor to my right went back to working on his car. My neighbor across the street picked up his hammer again. The man who had stepped out from the Western Service Workers Association put away his camera and stepped back in. I went back to work, and somewhere behind some closed door someone went back to cleaning his gun.

What do we want?       PEACE.

When do we want it? NOW. Stop the Violence, stop it now. NOW. Now.  now. . . please NOW.

But how?  Federal funds are funneled off to wars. Schools are collapsing under the weight of senseless and useless bureaucracies. Our society is gasping and grasping and gagging. There's no money for schools, no money for health care, no money for housing, no money except for those who already have more than they could ever spend in a lifetime. Education, housing, healthcare  have become unaffordable for most of us. Real health care is no longer available except to those who can afford to pay for private  insurance and the hefty deductibles. The rest of us make do with aspirin and tisanes. The social safety net is so shot through with holes that if any who has the misfortune to fall into it instantly falls through its rotted netting and hurdles downward into the abyss.

We want peace, but who's going to sign the Peace Treaty and give up war when war is the money machine, the rusted gas guzzling brutal nasty engine that keeping the economy pumping. . . All money goes to war; all money comes from war. Capitalism is war on the people. Once that war was organized with well-defined rules of engagement; now, it is guerrilla war, fought down in the ghettos and out in the streets, and we, the people,  are being unwittingly transformed into soldiers, destined to die in those trenches unless we cast off the uniforms, lay down the guns, and give up on war. NOW.

Now . . . NOW . . . Now . . .

But how?

If we want peace, we have to stop consuming and start nurturing. We are not the brave soldiers of capitalism, marching off to consume and consume some more. We are mothers and fathers, artists and musicians, farmers and mechanics, dreamers and inventors, scientists and doctors, workers, children, grandchildren, lovers, humans with thin skins and giant hearts.

To find peace, refuse war. All war. All violence. Live simply. Consume less. Do no harm.