Myth of Arrival

So …

… yesterday I did something rather interesting. I wrote down bad information and gave a definition to an art movement as I hoped it would be rather than what it really was. When I wrote that Art Brute or "Raw Art" ¹ sought to "seek for images and words that lay behind cognitive thinking" and had a "fascination with the 'primitive [nature] of the soul'" … those might have been my goals but I can't claim that was what Raw Art was looking for.

Rather, in a nut shell, Art Brut is a term "created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane asylum inmates." Other artists have focused on children's drawings and the works of incarcerated criminals. In other words, it is Primitivism. It might not be as racist and sexist and xenophobic as a lot of Primitivist Art tends to be, but it still endorses the privileged status of the colonizing voyeur labeling other cultures and people as "primitive," usually Indigenous peoples, and appropriating their art because it is somehow more "truthful" than what we are doing here in the West.

It's all crap. Think of the racist European concept of The Noble Savage or the craze in Post-Impressionist of 1880s Europe of painting peoples from the South Seas or Africa because they appeared to be "exotic." It is a form of fetishism. It's gimmicky and boring too, primarily because the artist almost never sees anything other than the superficial in their subjects. Not being part of the culture, they cannot say anything profound about it. You can never say anything about a person when you see them as alien, as an Other.

So Art Brut is not what I want. I want something that turns that gaze of ours back on us. I want a primitivism of my own soul. I want a crude poetry because my own psyche is crude. I do not need to go to another to find these secrets. Maybe what I want is a new Raw Art?

Is it all inside us? After all, we all have been children and don't we all have a criminal somewhere inside us? Why go to other lands to "seek for images and words that lay behind cognitive thinking"? If I am seeking the Bullgod then is the Bullgod already inside me? If I fear the Bullgod as alien am I really fearing myself? I as Alien? I as the Unknown? A New Raw Art? How droll!

1. The first translation I read called the German expression "Rough Art" but several other translations used the word "Raw Art," which has a much more gritty feel to it. [back]

Today I find a German word and write it down. Art Brut, Rough Art, which influenced Neo-Expressionists in Europe and America in the 1960s and 1970s. Neo-Expressionists grew out of a resistance to the tendency of abstraction in modern paintings. Heavily influenced by Carl Jung, their aim was to reconnect to the psyche; that is, they were seeking for images and words and lay behind cognitive thinking. Strip away knowledge and what is laying in small pools is the truth they were trying for. Thus, a response to the Sufi mystic poet Rumi's: Only those who have felt the knife can understand the wound might look like this:

here is
the knife.

those who
stare

But it is more than just a state of unknowing the artists looked for. "It's leading figures advocated a figurative art that reflected the artist's often violent feelings" (Little, 136) So Art Brut thus created by the Neo-Expressionists came about as a fascination with the "primitive [nature] of the soul." A point we must make here, however, is that unlike earlier artist movements, such as the Modernists, who turned to other cultures to find the "primitive in the Other" (usually endorsing prevalent racist assumptions as they went along) the Rough Art sought by the Neo-Expressionists was a primitive truth produced by one's own sick soul, a soul usually in a state of terrible depression, stress or madness. The works of Anselm Kiefer, George Baselitz, Sandro Chia and Julian Schnabel, while perhaps not consciously endorsing Art Brut certainly reflect these ideas.

The poem I present here tries to reflect this philosophy; the Other is the Self. It is hard to try to achieve an "I am not I but Another," or "The Self as Alien," but try is what I am doing.

Nectar of others I love
the idea we manufacture
nectar inside I love
the idea there is a wave
breaking inside us waves
that break not a wave but
brine salt on the tongue
not salt but the way the sun
breaks not the sun but
hydrogen you will ask
me one day to ignite the
edge of the city not
the city but the salt
window glass car
buildings stoops streets
objects that die raining
down like the idea of
the wave after
all of this is
swept away.

Work Cited

Little, Stephen. -isms: understanding art. New York: Universe. (2004)

For the last couple of days I've been making my own clipart. Using free images I've found I have been cutting + pasting and making this:

… and this:

… and now this:

It's not the images I worry about. You can always make new images (to be truthful I love the concept of “psychedelia” far more than I love the actual psychedelic poster and drawings of my childhood). No, it is the words I worry about. It is a curious thing to use certain words and realize they have little or no effect anymore because they have been used so often. What is the point of writing the word “Rapture” or “Genocide” or “Holocaust” in a poem to stand for something BIG when they are happening every single day and we no longer pay attention? Our egos tell us they still should hold some importance, they still should shock us to action, but we look back to periods of dim histories we never lived through and make much out of them and by doing so we ignore what is happening now. I say “we” but I really mean “I” but it sounds better as a group option. That is one of the problems with nostalgia. The other problem is nostalgia is just plain boring.

I.

Mark a red cut, from ear
to chin, in the snow and the day's
weight shrinks with the birdsong
because there is always a bird
song and a cigarette at an execution
or doorway or a cup of
hot tea isn't there genocide?

II.

Bathos is a word you don't
hear much these days but
maybe you should there will
come a time when our children
will learn it looking back at all
this all our cardboard all
our cheese (I used velveeta, it
doesn't actually rot under
distress) the slamming trees,
the cars sucked up into
the sky and the sky all dirty and
airless sucking hard all this sucks
hard and loneliness we are always
lonely you could have got out
more they'll say you could have
volunteered, had an affair, gone to
war, killed your best friend like
in the movies done anything but feel
guilty at the rapture god that's been
done so often in every way we're all
thinking you had all the time in
the world to say something profound,
one meaningful thing, just one.

You should have said it.

Fantasized about one perfect ending.
It was the endings we couldn't explain.
Like in the movies the millionaire spends
eternity with Julia Roberts even though
she spent her whole adult life as
a prostitute and our children still
have no idea who she is and
the herpes run amok among
them every single time and still
we claim we are satisfied
with this end every single time.

III.

Let it start in 1943 because no
nostalgia is complete with treacle
on our fingers and getting pistol
whipped for your memories is
all the same thing Detroit and Dresden
will always remain
just like this: the big H
of the apocalypse and
the scream of the pilot
as the wings fly apart.

It is very cold this morning. I woke up and thought, "hmmm … is that my breath hanging above the bed or ectoplasm? that's not good!" It turns out the pilot light on the furnace is out. Last week we had warm days where it was almost in the 50s and everyone was happy. This morning I have piled all the sweaters I can find on and strapped a cat to each foot for warmth and am drinking hot tea like I just can't get enough of the yummy Early Morning Thunder brand … I might not be warm but I am well caffeinated.

So, the Oni I mention here is a character from Japanese folklore. The Oni plays the role of the West's bogeyman or ogre or hobgoblin. The basic requirements for an Oni, as I understand them, are a pair of horns, oddly shaded hair and tiger skin apparel of some sort, usually a loin cloth but also presented as a two piece bikini. This brings us to a curious double-standard when it comes to Japanese popular culture (well, not just Japanese popular culture but that is what I am looking at right now). The male Oni is always big, dumb and violent whereas the female Oni, when shown at all, is little more than a sex object, playing out some adolescent boy's fantasy of his own private sexy guardian angel. Just look at Lum and Ryoko, both losesly based on the Oni-myth, as cases in point.

However, for anyone interested in seeing an excellent use of the myth should check out Kaneto Shindo's erotic masterpiece, Onibaba; a story of a mother and daughter in medieval Japan who survive by murdering soldiers passing through their swampland and the terrible fortune they finally bring upon themselves. This movie is worth more than one viewing. Finally, anyone familiar with Amy Gerstler's poem The Ogre's Turbulent Adolescence might make superficial references here but I think it is safe to say it is OK to write about the love lives of Onis without being charged with plagiarism.

This is how I won't
come for you suddenly
like a siege-engine of
love battering down your
jade gate besiegingly
and always at war
once I was the concubine
of the mountain goblin but
things changed and I lost
my ax maybe not
lost — but I am tired
of besieging washing
blood out of my long
white mane of hair.

Let's build a kingdom
palaces humor me low
walls and palms and
apricots at bloom all
round I'll even try this
worship engineers at work
building whatever it is
they do pushing forward
and all the world asleep
under lovely warbler-
gray mosques and sooty
minarets calling the faithful
to whatever it is they do
and my horns will finally
get polished and
my nails trimmed.

I think I'd like to study
science I've heard about
stars and sofas to lounge
on we can light incense
sticks and wear royal robes
there are palace hallways
to walk through and pleasure
gardens to manage with
elephants and mountain
pumas and llamas and you
can read me poetry in
our garden I've heard it's
good with elephants and
talk about stars and long
geometry and watch our
llamas in our pleasure garden
with little cups of tea.

It's not often I am helpless with
such shaming words not often
I think of this as the age of
the gazelle and rainy season
rice and not the age of conquest
stacking the villagers' skulls
in neat little piles and
letting my horns go all
scuzzy green from neglect
it's not often I've lain awake
at night ravenous and
flushed, feeling a different
fire strain in my chest,
feeling my very own heart
burst suddenly into flames,
embarrassingly, continually,
bedazzlingly.

He has painted one or two portraits which have turned out well, but he insists on working for nothing. It is a pity that he shows no desire to earn some money because he could easily do so here. But you can't change people. (Steves and Openshaw, 237)

– Theo to his mother about his brother, Vincent van Gogh.

Here in Lansing, Michigan, which is to say if you are reading this: here in the whole width and breath and gasp of the western half of the West, America and beyond, we await the next impressionism movement. Not Impressionism, that funky European style of art with bright saturation and scary faces and exhilaration to love color. No. We are waiting the next big thing, we want to be there to declare how much we love van Gogh, how much we love slasher movies or Pet Rocks or whatever it was our ancestors ignored, scorned and shunned. Make no mistake, people didn't "get" Impressionism. We do not want that to happen to us. To be seen as prosaic, pedestrian, earthbound. To let another van Gogh slip through our hands while we obsess about what is "in." What is "now." It is so now. Like mud. I am earthbound. I am pedestrian. I am prosaic. I am like mud. That is why my poetry does not sell.

If you look at a van Gogh painting, take his Self-Portrait with Gray Hat, it is hard to imagine the future as it is now from those lines. It is hard to imagine anyone taking those lines so seriously that they'd spend their lives hunting for the next impression instead of making, doing crafting their own lines. It is all about crafting our own lines. It doesn't matter what. We say so much. The trick is to do something, anything, effortlessly and yet with a hint of mystery to it. Like breathing a clay body to life. It doesn't matter what you think, you still need mud to do it. Mud and words. Words and all this mud.

To heal. Words
to heel. On a leash.
For a bone. On my
boots mud. In this
mud, boots. What
doesn't depress me
makes me weak all
I ever wanted were
boots maybe a cape
maybe gloves but
boots instead I got
an alphabet who needs
words when a drum,
when this breathing
slows, slows, slows,
up to my chin, in
a hole, in mud, in
my mud, this mud
all this blasting
snow, up to my chin,
and shadows, my feet
dangling below, up to
my chin and then what
came? no wolf. no
crow. up to my chin
in riot glow, in shadow,
up to my chin to be
woke, to be a wake,
awoken by a snore,
by rain, by rain-glow.
Who needs alphabets?
Who needs this process
of words? Who needs
to heal from this
pointless, pointless
game? Across the frozen
ground. Mud.
My mud. This mud.
All this mud.

Work Cited

Steves, Rick and Gene Openshaw. Rich Steve's Mona Winks. Emeryville, CA: Avalon Travel (2001)