Before I Forget

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  But that wasn’t what I was on about. They were obviously lovely Catholic boys, so why wouldn’t they be sexist? Brought up like me in a Catholic boarding school? Of course they were sexist. I recognised the opening words and I was glad to hear them transposed, something done with them. The nuns at Teschemakers had chanted it up and down the dormitory, and this is where that American band got it from. ‘I lay my body down to sleep.’ Oh, how could I ever forget that. ‘I pray to God my soul to keep and if I die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take.’ I myself would have added another line if I was doing the transposing: ‘I pray to God my soul to keep and please God could you warm my feet.’ Teschemakers was as freezing as the Gulag. This gave me the mood, the theme tune for my Down in Grey Lynn Park paintings. I had found my stage set – at least for the meantime anyway.

  When Fraser and I had first married we were like intellectuals. Snobs we indeed were, all into style and existentialism. I am not into that now but one bit that has survived is the bit that I used to chant at parties at that time: Think! Choose! Leap! That bit. And there they were up on the halfpipe poised and they had better be thinking before they leaped or they could break a shoulder or twist a leg. An existentialist metaphor right there in front of me. And to music I could relate to.

  The skateboarders were a gift: they were thinking, they were choosing and they were going to have to leap. Striving for perfection, aspiring, running risks. Goya was for me the exemplary example of this in the use of paint. His paint must be read as his personal language. His compositions are a conscious tension. Things pulling against each other. And that reminds me of Fu Shan, the great Chinese calligrapher of the seventeenth century: ‘Rather than clever, gracious, deft, and proper, I prefer awkward, unpleasing, disconnected, but true to myself.’

  Graffiti is very much a part of these paintings. The way its images intrude into the landscape, speaking a new language for Grey Lynn Park. Placing the paintings in the here and now. Graffiti at its best seems to me like a form of calligraphy and hence the relevance to Fu Shan.

  Emily downloaded the lyrics from ‘Heaven is a Halfpipe’ for me. What a meaningful poem it is. However, I do not believe that my guys down in Grey Lynn Park are as politically astute as this poem suggests those guys in America are. I don’t doubt that my skaters like to party to the music, but do they get it? Somehow I don’t think so. Anyway I played it at the opening of my skateboarding exhibition, Down in Grey Lynn Park.

  I talked about those paintings on television and in fact I did a great deal of talking over that period, the ten or fifteen years or so after Fraser died. With Brian Edwards about my first memoir, Something for the Birds, raving for hours about writing, families and religion. At the Auckland Art Gallery about Colin McCahon’s and Baxter’s families, celebrating every time the republicans in Ireland won a victory. I did a number of talks for the Friends of the Gallery and so on and so on. I am afraid it is mostly now a bit of a blur. But one address I did is not a blur; I can hear my words clearly, still reverberating in my head.

  I had been asked to speak to the Friends of the Waikato Museum. This was a few years ago, I think. Was I being purposely provocative in Hamilton? I don’t think that I was. I was presenting my point of view, and as it was me they had called on to address them I don’t see how they had any grounds for offended surprise. As my latest exhibition had been about the war in Iraq, if in a rather referential way, I would have imagined it would be no surprise that my talk would involve this war. Bringing It Home was about images of the war borrowed from television and imposed on my street. Everywhere I looked those images were burned on my mind’s eye. Those images were repeated again and again on television and I saw them again and again everywhere I cast my eye. Not all of these images were from Iraq, two were from simultaneous wars in Africa. Fourteen-year-olds jumping bullets while they blasted away on their repeaters. They believed they would live forever. They were right there in the traffic on Williamson Avenue. I was bringing it home.

  Back to my night in Hamilton – here is the address that I gave. I began by saying:

  It is hard to believe that anything good came out of the horrendous bombing and invasion of Iraq. However, I do now believe something good did come out of it. I hope that my talk will explain why I believe this. What I am telling you about was illustrated graphically on television. We watched as the looters wrecked the big museum in Baghdad. This was a powerful message that was sent through these images. Those were shock tactics. The message here is museums and art galleries really matter, that should be the message to anybody involved in these institutions. They are an essential part of civilisation so therefore they must go if the end result is a cultural waste. That was clear from these images, and in fact empire builders have always known this. It was no accident that museums were targeted. Destroy a people’s memory of their past and then rewrite their history for them, this is a well-known old tactic of empire. If you want to take over the mentality of other people you must first damage their sense of themselves, of who they are. So called art objects contain precious information from the past. Information in paintings, etched into stone markings, baked into ancient pottery, scripts on anything. All a danger to the new thinking. Perhaps we needed this brutal reminder to value our museums and art galleries, to take another look again to understand just what their function is in our society. The aim of this occupying force was to lay waste the land. A cultural desert. Out of this devastation would blossom a new society based on capitalism.

  This would be the new state, the first proper capitalist state. However, as we all know, history doesn’t understand about theory and that was the theory. History takes off on its own compulsive zig-zag way. We also know what grew out of the cultural desert, not a prosperous capitalist state but chaos.

  When the looters descended on the museum at the end of the war, the army barracks where they went for help ignored their appeals. They did nothing. They said, ‘We are sorry, without a direct order from President Bush we can do nothing.’ In Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged his shoulders and he said, ‘Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and, do bad things.’ You know, like shit happens.

  Here, apocalyptic glee has taken hold, the Neo-cons were all blown away with the drama of the evolving Straussian theory. The glorious experiment. I am sure many of you here know how the Straussian mentality infected American philosophy departments. Before the beginning of the Second World War the poet Auden asked, can poetry make a difference? Now I promise that I didn’t know about Auden at the time but one of the paintings in that series was called ‘Can Painting Change Anything?’ What I was asking was, just what influence on society can painting have. After watching the looters in Iraq on television it is clear that art can and does influence events. Art, whether it means to or not, records. Tells us what was, what is. Destroying the museum was an attempt to pluck the heart out of that country. Degrade Iraq into an induced state of Alzheimer’s. Now the good thing is we are alert of all these happenings and I do believe we will stay alert, in fact we must stay alert.

  These events can only reinforce our faith in the power of art, and in the importance of the work that you people are doing here at the Waikato Museum of Art and History.

  My lecture or talk, or whatever you want to call it, was not universally poorly received. Students finishing the course in food science did a superb job with the dinner afterwards, and they and other students who attended were very enthusiastic. It was only members of the committee who were, I felt, dubious and uneasy. Perhaps they had not thought of museums as being a political force in society, that they were more a place to keep valuable objects safe.

  That the Iraq war has made an enormous impact all over the world is undeniable and in those paintings, Bringing It Home, I am recording that impact. How those images of war, received through television, lodged themselves in my mind’s eye. Walking down Williamson Avenue those images imposed themselves on my immediate landscape. What was happening in Ira
q had become part of myself, it had changed me as it was going to change the world.

  But the paintings are also a warning, a Cassandra-like prophecy of doom. It wasn’t hard to tie the Waikato Museum in with the plunder of the museum in Baghdad and how this thrust the true function of museums into the public eye.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Showing in the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA and Never Getting There

  If my grant to New York in 1980 was a spin-off from my ’70s paintings, so was my flight to LA and then Atlanta in 2007. I went to see my ’70s paintings hanging in the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.

  This whole next sequence, that flight from New Zealand to Los Angeles to Atlanta, evolved like a jerky dream. I was to spend a few days in Atlanta and then off to Mexico. I booked a night first in LA so that I could sneakily take a look at the WACK! exhibition where I had two paintings included. I was beginning to understand that to be showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art was a fairly impressive thing.

  Michael Morrisey insisted on driving me to the airport, so kind of him. (That is Michael Morrisey the actor, not Michael Morrisey the writer. Michael is a mate of mine and lives up the road with his partner, Greg Wells. Greg is a cameraman for TV 1 and also a first-class painter.) The night before I left for LA I had a gross bout of vomiting and felt indeed like death. Had I caught some gruesome bug or maybe it was food poisoning? It seemed so unfair, for I had been leading a healthy existence. I stopped vomiting about one o’clock; however, that was when the diarrhoea started. Somehow or other Michael got me on that plane to LA.

  I had for very obvious reasons been dreading this flight all night, but unaccountably I sparkled. I behaved like some star on a successful tour of promotion. I was euphoric and grandiosity took hold. A bold farce in my mind which was far from healthy. I took my sleeping pill and was in LA in a flash, all quite painlessly.

  A depressed Mexican drove me to my Japanese hotel, which was inhabited by awful pretend people. I spent the whole night with the trots – I clearly was not going to make it to the exhibition. They finally stopped as I left for the LA airport. I was dropped off at the wrong entrance and only just made it to the plane. There was a huge queue, and a panic and a muddle getting on. A truly nasty woman, a guard I think of some sort, was really rude to me. I thought she was going to stop me boarding but there was worse to come.

  The plane was the biggest I had ever seen and packed to the rafters. I had the worst seat at the very back and flat up against the cubicle where the flight attendants disappeared at regular intervals. A pretty blonde attendant, who kept her large white teeth on display, said the plane was full. Then she added, ‘You may have the worst seat on the plane but at least the seat next to you is empty. You could stretch out if you wanted to, I mean later on.’ She hurried away before I could ask, ‘How come?’ I mean, how come in a full plane this was an empty seat? Then a tall handsome guy, an all-American guy, flopped into the seat, now of course no longer empty.

  He said, ‘Hello, I am Bud Erickson. I’m a pilot with Delta Airlines. Who are you and just what do you do?’

  Before I answered that I had to ask, ‘If you are a pilot with this airline how come you are in the second worst seat on the plane?’

  ‘If I don’t pay, I get what I can get. But that doesn’t answer my question. What’s your name and what do you do?’

  I self-consciously said my name. I find saying my name embarrassing, as if I am saying something rude, or even possibly laughable. But he just waited for the next bit, what I did. So I said, ‘I am a painter, you know, paint pictures.’

  He listened carefully and I should add he carried all this off with energy and style. I could not believe my good luck having a charmer as my flying companion. He was like Van Heflin, a redhead, and then I thought of Erik the Red. Surely Erik the Red was a Viking hero. Something like that. However, I was rudely awoken from such fantasies – way down in the distance, at the top of the plane, a tall fat man clutching a microphone bellowed out my name. He bellowed my name out to the whole of the aeroplane. I was mortified. The tall man was making his progress from the top of the plane and he was surrounded by minions supporting his progress. My pilot, it would seem, had jumped ship and was replaced by a flight attendant who hovered uneasily. I appealed to her. I cried out, ‘What is going on, am I to be thrown off the plane?’ She made reassuring noises, but I was far from reassured. The way the big man bent over me was scary. He demanded my passport. Moving away with it he went into a huddle with his escort.

  During this conflab my pilot emerged from the flight attendants’ cubicle and joined them. Quite suddenly they dispersed and a little later we were informed that the plane would depart in five minutes. My pilot resumed his seat and returned my passport.

  I said, ‘Any ideas what that was about?’

  The pilot, looking very debonair and amused, said, ‘All is well, I told them you were a famous artist.’

  I laughed but said, ‘Whenever did being a famous artist ever help a suspect?’

  He explained to me that this was America and being a famous anything opened doors and got you off any hook. I thanked him. I was certainly very relieved.

  The flight attendant poked her head around the corner. She was no longer displaying her teeth. She had a new expression, a wish-to-please little smile and she told me coyly that she believed I was a famous artist. ‘Oh right,’ I answered, all rather awkward and conscious of the need to defend the pilot’s statement – or at least in some way to back it up. She then said, ‘I am very interested in painting. I like painting myself. Where do you exhibit?’ The idea seemed to be that I was a famous international artist. I panicked while those passengers near enough to hear our conversation waited for my answer. And then I had a brainwave: of course, of course. I said, ‘At the moment I am exhibiting at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA.’ I felt I had done Bud Erickson proud. However, it did strike me, even at that point, as odd that he showed no curiosity about the Museum of Contemporary Art or the exhibition. Almost as if he knew already.

  He ordered drinks; mine, sadly, had to be water. And that was another odd thing. When I hit the skies there was no vomiting, no diarrhoea – if anything, again, an almost cranky euphoria. Back on land and within half an hour, my entrance and my exit were back in disgusting action. I dared not drink for at that time I did not know when my affliction might return.

  Bud was in a let’s-get-to-know-each-other mode. After a few sorties, he said in a confiding and rather sad way, ‘Does everybody in your country hate us?’

  I said how New Zealand was made up of all sorts of different people. America was made up of all sorts of different people also. That, just as in America, it would depend entirely on who you were talking to. I said that at the moment there was a good joke doing the rounds among the sort of people I liked. I said it went something like this: ‘Don’t try arguing with Mr Bush about Iraq or he might bring democracy to your country.’ The couple in the seats in front of us laughed and Bud smiled. He indicated to a passing flight attendant that he could use another drink. There was something in this graceful and practised signal that alarmed me – it reminded me of someone and I struggled to remember just who it was. I remembered: curiously enough, that person had the same name, Bud.

  Bud was another American. Another suave operator. That Bud, however, was operating in Fiji way back in 1987. We were in Suva in 1987 when Fraser was relieving the only psychiatrist in Fiji. Bud was her partner; he enjoyed partying and so, of course, did Fraser and I.

  I don’t know how much the psychiatrist enjoyed partying but then I expect, going back to New Zealand to have an operation, she had a lot on her mind. Bud was attached to the American Embassy and his speciality was crowd control. He was happily and openly CIA but would boast that he didn’t go in for any of that gunboat diplomacy. (Incidentally I wrote a novel about Fiji in 1998. Rather than a Graham Greene scenario, discovering the truths of a tropical island through the body of a lovely young native wo
man, my protagonist makes her discoveries through a lovely young native man. Juxtaposition.)

  When chatting with my Bud in Fiji in 1987, I remarked how well read he was, and he told me in return that being a well-read person was par for the course. When Bud was holding his second drink I asked him about reading, did he find time to read as a pilot? ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘I find plenty of time to read and I do a lot of it.’ He smiled and said that when we get a kick out of doing things that we enjoy, we find the time to do them. I asked him what writers he enjoyed and he mentioned Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell; he also mentioned Ironweed by William Kennedy. What else, what others did he mention? Oh, of course, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, and then the Studs Lonigan trilogy by James T. Farrell. Yes, a pretty good line-up, one any professor of literature might approve. However, he was very keen to talk about his own state of mind and his own take on America. He wanted to explain how much he had believed in America when he was a young man, how hopeful he had always been of America’s future, of America as a leader in the new world that was to come. But I was thinking about the Fiji coup and the lies and complications that went with that event. How the CIA had manipulated it and how the results of the coup had reverberated around the Pacific.

  Meantime, his was a sparkling and energised discourse. He discussed books in a laid-back sort of style, politicised. If this guy was indeed a CIA boy, he was a superior example. His manner was far different from the bunglings of the CIA in Wellington in the ’50s, which had been my only other encounter with them.

  At a house surgeon’s party in the hospital quarters, I met the first secretary of the Russian embassy. The secretary and his wife had been asked to the party by my brother-in-law who was a registrar at the hospital. This cool dude bore no resemblance whatsoever to my imagined Russian. Especially not a Russian that was representing communist Russia. He was tall, dark and handsome, spoke flawless English and his body was graced by a Savile Row suit. His wife was blonde, slim and very pretty. She obviously bought her clothes in a more advanced country than 1950s New Zealand. When she discovered that I worked at Harry’s, she was delighted and asked that I send her an invitation to my next exhibition. She already knew Seresin, whose espresso bar was in Plischke’s building on the Quay, and who, after all, had been born in Russia.