She moved through a city I knew already, the city of the San Francisco Beat poets and artists who were the subject of my first book, and whose annus miraculis was 1957, the year Vertigo was made, years before I was born. Hitchcock’s was a portrait of a closed world, a sort of Freudian strait of blind yearning, but the city was wide open with other possibilities at the time, the first flush of an era of hallucinogenic drugs, esoteric spiritual traditions, experimental film, a wilder, freer poetry meant to be spoken aloud, collage and assemblage art made from the very rubble of the old houses being pulled down, engagement with the mystery of everyday life and sometimes with politics—people building up communities in which it might be possible to make another culture, another art, another era. Margaretta seemed to come into the movie out of this other world, and it’s she who knows the owner of the antiquarian Argosy Bookstore who can tell the detective the history of the city. City with the Buddha Bar and the bar called Li Po in Chinatown, where the streetlights have oxidized bronze dragons curling up them, with the alleys south of Market named after nineteenth-century prostitutes and the houses sinking down because of soft ground and earthquakes, so their lintels are level with your eyebrows, with all the crests of all the hills that lift you out of the urban grid to see the ocean, the bay, and the hills across the water, with the evening fog tumbling over itself eastward past the streetlights, with in those days the jazz on Fillmore and the decrepit amusement park with its fun house and musée mécanique and hall of mirrors out at Land’s End, near the Cliff House and Seal Rocks that show up in so many old photographs, this city edged in by wildness and opened up by imagination, whose poetry moves through that movie.
Of course there had to be a plot and a new center of gravity for a story with her at the center rather than the periphery, and Vertigo gradually faded into background for this other story. She told it backward, from her position as a painter with a daughter sometime in the 1960s, back to her childhood growing up with the detective the boy next door on the San Francisco peninsula when it was the Valley of Heart’s Delight, huge orchards and small towns, not yet Silicon Valley. Slip, her prim mother telling her that a slip is something no one sees you wearing but that changes the appearance of what everyone sees, satin slips with the hedgerow landscapes of flowers and leaves in the lace next to the skin. Slip, the lingerie she drew as architecture, as the equivalent of drawbridges and gates and walls in that great age of girdles and foundations and garters and corsets, and a defloratory love scene where she was shocked not at his nakedness but her own overprinted with all the marks those straps and seams and buckles leave in soft flesh, the ghosts of garments. Slip, Judy a lingerie model as well as a salesgirl at Magnin’s and Margaretta crossing paths with her in the course of drawing that lingerie while Judy talked on about herself, Judy letting slip what kind of an affair she was having and with whom and the decision Margaretta made to stay out of it that might have been the wrong decision. Slip, small drawings, paintings, letters, telegrams, receipts, and postcards falling out of the pages of a consignment of books at Argosy Bookstore, an autobiography inserted as page markers into those books, and Margaretta tracing them for the owner to the nephew of the estate they had come from. Slip, the painter whose career had trickled away during his internment in a prison camp for Japanese-Americans in the Second World War and the paintings that included the landscape of the camps and the Sierra. The nephew became her companion in exploring the possibilities, a poet editing copy at the Chronicle while she was a painter drawing lingerie for a downtown department store, two people slipping from their original vocations into the dressing up of words and bodies. Slipping in, slipping out, slippery.
There are people for whom there is only one sun in the sky or darkness, and there are those who live in a night filled with stars, was her opening line, more or less. In a bar telling a ranger she was having an affair with, As for nature, I am in love with the elemental forces, with fire and water, with gravity and evaporation and the properties of light, and there’s as much of that in the city. It’s in the way cream curls down into ice coffee and cigarette smoke coils up and the ice cubes in this drink are melting. I remember swinging in the backyard when I was a girl and scaring Johnny who lived next door and was just enough older to think he could supervise me, jumping off at the crest of the arc and coming down with my skirt billowing like a parachute. She seemed to take pleasure in everything, to have a diffuse sensuality spread throughout the tangible world, in marked contrast to the protagonists chasing a conventional notion of satisfaction forever postponed. And so I gave her gravity, that sensation children pursue relentlessly, again and again, swinging, spinning, cracking the whip. I remember a motorcyclist telling me about the infinitely subtle ways racers use their bodies to turn at high speeds and the incredible pleasure of those acts. Gravity is about motion, weight, resistance, force, the most primary experience after all the touches on our skin, of being corporeal. And so it may be that gravity is a sweet taste of mortality and our strength to resist it, a luxuriating in the pull of the earth and the pull of muscles against it, in the momentum the two create, and in how close you can cut it, just as sex for women has the twin possibilities of procreation and annihilation.
The movie is about fear of gravity and ascent; I made both pleasures for her. She lived on the upswing as everything in Vertigo was falling. Mostly I gave her set pieces about the sensory world, and it’s those I recall. As for the grid of this city, the orchards on the peninsula had already taught me the pleasures of geometry, of the way you moved so that the diagonal lines through the plum trees disappeared and were replaced a minute later by the straight ones, and when you drove by, each avenue flashed by in a moment before the next one emerged from the crowd of trees, and I loved the way you could see the near trees swing by much faster than the far trees, as though you were on the outside edge of a circle rather than at the center, as though the center of the world was always near, but you swung on its periphery like a fly on a turning record, even though the road was straight. Perspective lessons, like in drawing class, though that’s not a rule they taught us. And of a man later, I don’t remember his face but every man who touched me made one gesture that never quite came to an end; I can feel the forearm of one across my belly as he swam up behind me in a lake, the rough kiss of another on my palm, and sometimes I think that there might be some device like the X-ray machines they use to look at your feet in the shoe stores that would make these indelible impressions visible, a series of marks, the opposite of bruises, across and around me, and I went through the world dressed in those experiences, we all do.
There’s not much more I remember of this book that seemed so complete in my head at one time, though I couldn’t bring myself to write one word down, not wanting to start unless I could finish. Plot, character, dialogue seem mostly to have vanished as anything more than broad outlines. I know she and the editor wandered the city and its bars, went to the artists’ parties, argued about vocations, and finally went into the mountains. The culminating excursion began as his desire to recover the poems he had buried in a tin at Manzanar, the bleak Second World War prison camp in the eastern Sierra for Japanese-Americans with the wonderful view of the highest peaks. By the time they arrived, though, he had recognized that his vocation wasn’t going to be buried in the past. A couple of mountaineers they had met in a Big Pine diner invited them to go up nearby Mount Whitney with them, the highest point on the continent between Mexico and Canada, and they pulled out of Manzanar to take up the invitation at the last minute.
Tiresias’s strange destiny began when he saw two snakes making love in the wilderness. He struck them and was turned into a woman as a result. Seven years later he came upon another pair of coupling snakes and struck them again to regain his manhood. Because he had been both a man and a woman, the gods asked him to settle an argument about which gender derives more pleasure from making love, and when he declared in favor of women, the annoyed Hera blinded him. As compensation, Zeus gave hi
m the power of seeing the future, and he became a famous prophet. Or, in another story, he was struck blind for seeing Athena bathing, but in apology she took the snake from her breastplate and had it clean his ears with its tongue, so that Tiresias would understand the language of prophetic birds. It’s Tiresias who tells Oedipus what crimes he has committed and is committing, who brings that cycle to its end with Oedipus’s blinding and exile, and it’s Oedipus Rex where he makes his main appearance. This prophet who sees despite his blindness, while Oedipus is only unseeing, blind or not, is much more interesting than Oedipus, whose world closes around him claustrophobically so that the stranger he kills is his father, the queen he marries is his mother. Tiresias’s story isn’t a tragedy, a knot of character untied only by death and exile, but a romance traveling through a terrain with the amplitude to include animals, gods, strangers, transformations. The word romance once meant this kind of questing journey—“usu. heroic, adventurous, or mysterious,” says my dictionary. This older meaning suggests that romances in the other sense—“(3): a love story”—too should move through place and desire. Comedy, said Aristotle, ends in marriage, but since marriage is something other than an end, romance in one sense or both is what continues on afterward or it too lapses into tragedy. Margaretta—even Midge, unmodified—is the Tiresias of Vertigo.
I sent them up Mount Whitney, but what did they see? I hadn’t been up the mountain at that point. I have since. Going the usual way, you walk up from a road high on the eastern side of the slope. The view to the east, behind you as you toil uphill, gets bigger and bigger. Around ten thousand feet you look across the wide valley between the Sierra and the first range of the White Mountains. When you’ve risen for an hour or more, you see over the range to the next one, and the desert landscape keeps getting larger and larger, until you’re looking across basin after range after basin into the distant depths of Nevada. You realize that no matter how much terrain you cover there’s far more than you ever will. Mountaineering is always spoken of as though summiting is conquest, but as you get higher, the world gets bigger, and you feel smaller in proportion to it, overwhelmed and liberated by how much space is around you, how much room to wander, how much unknown. All day you have been toiling uphill looking into the slope, on trail, switchback, in pine groves and above them, and the view behind you has gradually enlarged to the north, the south, the east. Sometimes birds, trees, the rocks underfoot draw your attention to the nearby, sometimes you are looking straight into the steepness ahead, but a turn or a pause lets you see the vastness in those three directions again, an infinite cloak of air wrapped around your back as you proceed. Finally, about thirteen thousand feet above the sea, you reach not the summit, which isn’t so dramatic a change, but the crest. Whitney is only the highest point of a long ridge. As you step up to the ridgeline, the world to the west suddenly appears before you, a colossal expanse even more wild and remote than the east, a surprise, a gift, a revelation. The world doubles in size. Something like that happens when you really see someone, and if that’s so then it has something to do with why everyone in Vertigo keeps falling. There wasn’t any falling, any tragedy, at the center of “Slip,” just moving on into this vastness.
The Blue of Distance
When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.
Klein, who was beset with the most grandiose ambitions and the most mystical tendencies, who at twenty claimed to have signed the sky as his own work of art, who was obsessed with flight, levitation, and immateriality as well as the sky and the color blue that signified it, loved the legend of the Holy Grail, another story of disappearance, since those knights on the quest for the Grail who are pure enough to enter its presence do not return. It is only the sinners, the imperfect, the incompletely transformed, who come back bearing tales. Yves Klein was born to artist parents in the South of France in 1928, though his bourgeois Aunt Rose did more to raise him than these impecunious, unsettled painters, and it was this aunt who funded so many of his ventures. When he was still a baby, she and her mother consecrated him to the care of Saint Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of lost causes, and Klein himself, who managed to reconcile being an avant-gardist and a medieval mystic, made four pilgrimages to the saint’s shrine in Italy as an adult. Or at least as a fully grown man, for he seems never to have stopped being a child in some ways, spoiled, petulant, impatient with restrictions, but also festive, generous, playful, and imaginative.
His two great influences arrived in his life the year he turned nineteen. One was the Cosmogonie, the bible of the Rosicrucian Order, by Max Heindel, which he read again and again over the next decade. For the next three or four years, Klein received weekly lessons by mail from the Rosicrucian Society in Oceanside, California. In the chaos of war and their own itinerant lives, his parents had allowed him to slip out of school at an early age, and his fascination with this one book seems to have in it something of the insularity of the underexposed who can be struck so forcefully by one source, one version. A mystical Christian sect with medieval roots, Rosicrucianism depicted the world in utopian and alchemical terms. Form and matter were, in Heindel’s view, limitations and obstacles to the freedom and the unity of pure spirit, and Klein would make an art that embodied formlessness and the immaterial. That first year of Rosicrucian study, in which he was joined by his friends Claude Pascal and Armand Fernandez (who would become well-known as the artist Arman), the young men attempted to establish an ascetic life for themselves, meditating, fasting, turning vegetarian, though they also listened to jazz, jitterbugged (one picture shows a baby-faced Klein swinging a girl above his shoulders), and occasionally violated their vows of chastity. One day they divided the world between them: in one account, Arman was to have animals, Pascal the realm of plants, and Klein claimed the sky. In imagination he had traveled to the far side of the sky, “the side with no birds, no planes, no clouds, only pure and irreducible Space,” the art critic Thomas McEvilley writes, and signed it. His ambition too was boundless.
The other great influence was judo, in which he began to train in the same year. He had a talent for it, and the way Asian martial arts imparted both mystical discipline and warriors’ powers suited him. Perhaps too something about the way judo teaches its practitioners to fly through the air and land without harm and to transport others thus enchanted him. For some years, he conceived of judo as the arena in which he would become supreme, and he dreamed of riding a horse across Asia to Japan to study the art. As it turned out, though he spent three months in Ireland learning to work with and ride horses, he took a ship—paid for by his aunt—for Japan. Funded by Aunt Rose, he spent fifteen months there, and though he had begun to make small monochrome paintings and exhibited his own work as well as that of his parents, he focused more and more on judo. He wanted to become a fourth dan black belt, a level of mastery few in Europe had then achieved, win the European championship, and dominate the French judo federation. He worked intensely, enhancing his energy with the ampheta
mines that were still legal in Japan and France, and the drug seems to have become part of who he would be for the rest of his life: restless, energetic, insomniac, prolific, unpredictable, and grandiose. Through talent, enormous effort, and a little manipulation, he succeeded in being given the title of fourth dan black belt and took a boat back to France, but there his ambitions did not bear the fruit he imagined (and this is the last sense of lost: losing a competition, as in the Giants lost the Series). And thus began his artistic career.
This career, however, he began at a sort of pinnacle. The work he made required little technical skill but a brilliant grasp of ideas and of the art world, and these he had already. The Rosicrucians taught a doctrine of color, and Klein adapted this idea of pure realms of color and color as a spiritual realm to begin his monochromes. Though he initially painted canvases orange as well as blue and eventually settled on a trinity of gold leaf, a rich pink, and intense blue, it was the blue that was to preoccupy and define him, the blue of the great majority of his painterly works. Blue the color that represents the spirit, the sky, and water, the immaterial and the remote, so that however tactile and close-up it is, it is always about distance and disembodiment. By 1957, he was using only this color, a pure ultramarine pigment mixed with a synthetic resin that would not, like most painterly mediums, dilute it’s deep, vibrant intensity.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost Page 11
