by Tom Robbins
I checked my load. The cargo appeared intact. Transformation, liberation, and celebration; exotica and erotica; novelty, beauty, mischief, and mirth: the goods I’d been hauling around for damn near three decades, all present and accounted for. If anything, psychedelics had cleaned them up a bit, given them a shine. This was encouraging, but having yet to find a literary voice of my own, and not wishing to imitate Hesse (or, for that matter, anybody else), I was to bide my time for nearly three more years before I trusted the muse enough to start my first novel.
In the meantime, however, like a lapsed believer returning to the fold, I commenced to reaffirm my devotion to language, that magical honeycomb of words into which human reality is forever dissolving and from which it continually reemerges, having invented itself anew. The adjective in the lotus. The jewel in the inkwell. A blue dolphin leaping from a sink of dirty dishes.
26
manhattan transfer
Whether the Protestant ethic, so called, is a self-imposed affliction, a hobble, a governor, a kind of chastity belt that limits full enjoyment of life; or, instead, is an indicator of trustworthy character, fidelity, and good moral health, well, that may be a subject for debate. In any case, I myself seem to have been tainted -- or blessed -- with that set of values at an early age and to this day have failed to completely outgrow that aspect of it that applies to conscientious work habits. Thus, though I’d landed in New York with enough savings to keep me gainfully unemployed for approximately a year (considering that my rent on East Tenth Street was $51.50 a month and I knew how to eat for a buck or two a day), my ethic demanded that I put my nose to the grindstone, although, naturally, not just any grindstone would do.
The task I set for myself to justify a Manhattan sabbatical was to write a book, specifically (having not yet found my fiction voice) a dual biography of two power-packed maverick painters, Jackson Pollock and Chaim Soutine, comparing their lives and their art. Although no critic had ever made the comparison (and still have not as far as I know), the connection struck me as obvious. Soutine (1893–1943) was a scrawny slum-dog savant from Eastern Europe, Pollock (1912–1956) a brawny cowboyish genius out of Cody, Wyoming, and the two never met; Soutine’s paintings featured representational content, Pollock’s major works were wholly abstract; yet there were striking similarities in their approach to life and art, and I maintain that Soutine, whose paintings we know Pollock saw at a New York gallery in 1936 and ’37, was the American dripmaster’s single biggest influence.
Soutine was arguably the first representational painter to completely reject Renaissance perspective in favor of an overall emphasis that, devoid of a recessed background or central focal point, made each and every square inch of the picture plane as important as any other. Emphasis was uniformly insistent from framing edge to framing edge, as it was soon to be in a Pollock, though Soutine’s dense, dark passages of pigment lurched at the viewer in a kind of visual attack, whereas Pollock’s roiling constellations swirled all about an onlooker like debris in a polychrome tornado.
Almost supernaturally connected to their primal unconscious, operating at a pitch next to madness, both men lived turbulent, Dionysian lives rife with instances of bizarre behavior; tortured by rejection, disoriented by success. But this is neither the time nor place to get into all that. Here it’s sufficient to say I spent my days in New York researching Pollock and Soutine, including numerous interviews with people who’d known them well, and while I never got around to writing that book (the Dionysus in my own unconscious began to demand my attention elsewhere), the experience was worth more than a dozen seminars at any graduate school in the land.
The eminent émigré sculptor Jacques Lipchitz had known Soutine in Paris, when he, Soutine, lived coatless and shoeless in bedbug-bitten squalor. That is, until the morning an American collector dropped by his smelly rooms and bought sixty paintings in a single franc-flinging swoop, whereupon the always idiosyncratic Soutine ran into the street, hailed a taxi, and ordered the driver to take him to the French Riviera, two hundred miles away. From that day on, Soutine never cleaned his brushes. When he’d finished for the moment with a particular color, he’d toss the brush over his shoulder and grab a new one from the basketful he’d purchased.
I interviewed Lipchitz at his large studio in Hastings-on-Hudson, high above the river, where, as he was confirming that Soutine, like Pollock, was more interested in the activity of painting (for both it was an act of concentrated frenzy) than in the finished product, I found myself becoming more interested in Lipchitz’s right leg than in his stories.
For working, Lipchitz wore loose-fitting cotton pants, one leg of which had now hitched up to reveal a surprising expanse of bare flesh. The man’s exposed appendage was penguin white, smooth as an egg, and as devoid of hair as a baseball bat. Not a filament, not a whisper of fuzz marred that pristine surface. Neither were there scars, pimples, or evidence of the bulging veins common in men of his age. It was as if he had sculpted his own leg, carving it from a single slab of purest white marble. I couldn’t help but wonder if he might have done something similar with his genitals. What an outbreak of penis envy that could have touched off at the gym!
Then, when he told me that each week Soutine, a Jew, would consult a nun at a convent on the outskirts of Paris regarding her secret remedy for the prevention of baldness, I wondered if Lipchitz had gotten hold of the good sister’s potion and was trying it out on his leg. I mean, he did keep stealing glances at the limb, as if expecting that at any moment a hidden follicle might dilate there and give birth to a perky thread.
Lipchitz was as kind and informative as he was, of course, talented, and even at the time I felt ashamed that I was allowing my imagination to run away with the poor man’s leg.
At the time of his death in a Long Island car crash, Jackson Pollock’s closest friends had been Barnett Newman and Tony Smith. In my several separate interviews with the two artists, I learned that they had a significant connection that preceded their friendship with Pollock. In his twenties, Newman had left his father’s business, intent on becoming a painter, and to that end, he enrolled in an art academy on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. His primary instructor there was Tony Smith.
At one point, Newman, recently married, invited Smith to his apartment to dine with him and his wife. Smith accepted, and they partook of a fine dinner, served on a mammoth old but elegant table. Upon their marriage, the newlywed Newmans’ families had furnished the flat for them, filling it with pieces that had been in their respective well-to-do households for decades. The various tables, chairs, chests, and stands, even the bedstead, were as thick, heavy, dark, and imposing as one of Soutine’s looming canvases.
After dinner, Newman confided to his teacher his ambition to become not merely a successful painter but a painter of consequence. He asked Smith for advice on how to further that goal. Put on the spot, Smith was silent for an uncomfortable minute or two. Then, looking around, he said, “The first thing you need to do is get rid of all this middle-class Jewish furniture.” He turned and left.
Two weeks later, Smith was surprised when Newman once again invited him to dinner. Tony didn’t tell me why he accepted. Maybe he was tired of eating out, maybe he liked Annie Newman’s home cooking. In any case, he returned to the apartment, where his astonishment instantly multiplied by a factor of ten. All of the furniture, every single stick of it, was gone. Dinner was served atop a packing crate. They ate squatting on the floor.
Smith was starting to think this guy was serious. He wasn’t just another dilettante, he meant business. So, when Newman, at the end of the evening, asked again what he could do to make a contribution to the ongoing mainstream of modernism, Smith replied, “Men know a lot about horizontals. They don’t know much at all about verticals.”
He left it at that, but it was all Barnett Newman needed. Newman went on to build a financially and critically successful career exploring the effects on the eye and the mind of strategically (but seldom
predictably) placed vertical bars, shafts, or splinters set tantalizingly close to the edges of vast fields of solid color. Far from the autocratic arrangements of traditional painting, in which the viewer’s eye is compelled to focus on one or more images of the painter’s choosing, any of Newman’s giant canvases issues an invitation -- or a challenge -- for the spectator himself to make what he would of a vertical entity in an expanse of real -- as opposed to pictorial/illusional -- space. There is no narrative, there is no seduction or pretty plea, there is only a platform from which we can “feel” elementary verticality as it asserts itself convincingly if unexpectedly against a flat ground.
It’s unfortunate that Tony Smith isn’t around and in a position to advise the human race on verticality because as we continue to procreate like adolescent fruit flies, our affection for the horizontal -- for industrial, residential, and even agricultural sprawl -- is destroying the earth and the Earth. Visionary architects contemplate structures so tall their tops would actually be in orbit, a park on one floor, hospitals, public libraries, sports arenas, and department stores on others: an entire city inside a single building. And think of vertical farms: towering hydroponic greenhouses each producing more corn, more tomatoes than a million acres currently devoid of wildlife and trees, poisoned by chemicals and greed. If we don’t go up we may go down.
That’s the value of artists, isn’t it? Even when they aren’t aware of it, they’re dreaming our dreams for us.
All things considered, I’ve learned more from talking to painters than talking to writers. Not that painters are smarter than writers, such is seldom the case, but in conversation writers are inclined to waste an inordinate amount of time either bragging or bellyaching about reviews and royalties, complaining about their publishers, or dissing other authors. Painters, being equally insecure, can likewise come across as boring and bitchy -- it’s tough being creative in a materialistic society -- but since they labor not in vineyards of verbiage but upon ice floes of visual images, they tend to function with fewer inhibitions than the wordsmiths when it comes to vocally exploring and expressing ideas. Since no one judges their speech, comparing it to their written work, they don’t feel so acutely the weight of language.
The painter Morris Graves, for example, verged on nonliterary eloquence when he told me about being awakened before dawn one morning in India by a strange, beautiful, hypnotic sound, a kind of marvelous chanting. At breakfast, he learned that in that village, as in some others in India, the men and boys have gone out each morning since prehistory to chant the sun up. “Cynics scoff,” said Graves with a smile, “but the villagers point out that in all the millennia that they’ve been chanting, the sun has never failed to rise.”
When NASA scientists invited the mystical painter to Cape Kennedy to advise them on matters about which they were becoming increasingly uneasy -- areas where astronomy, theoretical physics, and higher mathematics seemed to be inescapably crossing the line into the province of metaphysics -- Graves told them about the Indian chanters, suggesting that NASA might do well to incorporate a similarly reverential, less brutal attitude toward space exploration. Graves found many scientists receptive, even agreeing when he argued that to truly “conquer” space, men need to travel inward as well as outward, and do so with the same focus, seriousness, effort, courage, and determination they would devote to searching for life on Mars or establishing a colony on the moon.
Graves was a master at turning things inward. In what I’d intended to be a hard-nosed interview on the question of form versus formlessness in modern painting, he eventually had me on the floor of his studio tossing Chinese coins, consulting the I Ching. It wasn’t an easy sell. By that time in my life, I’d reached the conclusion that Asian spiritual texts were probably best left to spiritual Asians. The Bible is an Eastern book, pure and simple, and when one considers the many messes, psychological and material, we in the West have made in its name, one shudders to think of what harm might be unleashed from similar misinterpretations (most due to ignorance, others calculated and insidious) of The Bhagavad Gita, The Rig Veda, or The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
I knew that the I Ching was oracular, a book of divination whose system of hexagrams, refined in China over a period of three thousand years, was centered on the concept of the dynamic balance of opposites throughout the universe, and the notion that all events, personal and cultural, unfold somewhat predictably in a matrix of perpetual change. I was hospitable to that concept and curious about its practical application, but I insisted on keeping the same distance from the I Ching that I might keep from a guru’s ashram or an encampment of Gypsies. Morris Graves was, next to Allen Ginsberg, the most charismatic human being I’ve ever met, the sort of man who, if he said, “Come with me,” you’d grab your coat and go because you’d know that wherever he led you, it would be more interesting than where you’d been at the time.
Thus it was that at Graves’s urging I capitulated, posed a question (a rather general one about how to proceed on my life’s journey) and set about tossing the coins (yarrow stalks, the preferred method, being unavailable). I can’t remember the English name of the hexagram I received as my answer, but I’ve never forgotten the explanation of the hexagram, its verbal direction. It was composed in formal prose, stilted, and a little aloof, perhaps as befitting an ancient oracle, but it boiled down to this: “Be careful what goes into your mouth and what comes out of it.”
The advice was so good -- so simple, wise, and encompassing -- that I’ve never felt the need to consult the I Ching again. It was quite likely the best advice I’ve ever received. I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if I’d actually followed it.
Gray, chilling, pappy, and blah, Manhattan in March of 1965 had resembled a bowl of leftover mush, the one that, if you remember the fairy tale, caused Mama Bear to exclaim, “This porridge is too fucking cold!” Then one Sunday near the end of the month, New Yorkers awoke to a morning as sweet and fine and budding with optimism as Goldilocks’s training bra. Like some silent yet amplified public-address announcement, the sun called people into the streets, where they were so surprised by the absence of snow and snot that they actually smiled at one another. By Southern California standards, not to mention Hawaii’s, the day wasn’t really all that warm, but it was a change, a definite improvement, and the response was widely mobilizing.
That afternoon, my girlfriend Eileen and I strolled over to Washington Square in Greenwich Village. The change in weather had turned the park into some kind of walk-through jukebox. Every few feet, it seemed there was another impromptu source of live music. There were, as usual, the young aspiring folkies armed with cheap guitars or harmonicas, who stationed themselves here and there in Washington Square on any good day; but that Sunday there also were small rock groups, jazz trios, elderly classical violinists sawing away in front of actual music stands, and men from Russia or the Middle East, individually or in pairs, playing exotic tunes that neither Eileen nor I recognized on instruments we could not identify. A few of the musicians were busking, boxes at their feet into which passersby were invited to toss monetary tokens of appreciation, but most seemed to be playing for the sheer joy of it; a multicultural, nonjudgmental precursor of American Idol; and even as ominous clouds -- darker, more imposing than Papa Bear’s big brown butt -- lumbered in from the Atlantic, the dozens of mini-concerts continued, as if music alone could hold the new spring in place and keep a resurgence of winter at bay.
Then (it must have been between three and four o’clock) there came a noise -- distant at first, but rapidly drawing closer, louder, and louder yet -- a sound so potently primal that it resonated not only in the ear but in the gut, in the spine, the groin, and the heart. It was like an excerpt from an opera performed on the Fifth Day of Creation, before the existence of man and woman, when Jehovah was still up to his armpits in stardust, leaving Lucifer, his baton a twisted rod made of snakeroot and mud, to direct the chorus.
One by one at fir
st, then all at once, every singer’s song trailed off, every instrument squeaked to a halt. It had quickly become apparent that the sonar interruption was coming from above, and as if yanked by marionette strings, all heads tilted upward, lifting to see a jackknife of wild geese scratching God’s secret name in the sky.
I’d no idea the migratory path of Canadian honkers traversed New York City. It could have been an aberration, the geese diverted by a storm or an unusually voluminous release of chemical steam from a refinery near the Jersey Shore, but whatever the reason, the mighty wedge passed directly over us, northward bound, flying so low above the city it was a marvel that it didn’t crash headlong into an observation deck or a mogul’s penthouse.
For some in the square, the native-born Manhattanites, it was probably the most direct contact they’d ever had with wild nature. Even transplants from places such as Idaho or Arkansas were visibly surprised, delighted, and moved. And just before the great birds vanished in the distance, just as their primordial barking faded away, the entire population of the park -- musicians, tourists, winos, dog walkers, workers enjoying their Sunday holiday, everybody -- erupted into spontaneous applause.
