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I had overstayed my welcome at St. Peter's Parochial High School.
Its one virtue was its
location in an ancient
house, with many
irrational crawl spaces.
The smells of oiled wood
and chalk dust were of
more interest to me than
my courses. Both teachers
and classmates struck me
as proof positive that the
race did not evolve. Faith
had pinned the intellects
of some. Others had been
locked in the cabinet of
science. Of one thing I
was sure: that the
servants of Earth's
cybernetic reich had been
planning to remove my
neocortex. Better
embalmers than they had
tried! It was difficult to
get each scrap without
damaging the nose.
My supernatural weapons
were in storage. A wind
preceded the philosopher's
stone, whose energy had
been hidden behind the two
hands of a clock. My
teachers were concerned
about my psychological
health. I did not dare to
obey them; no, because
whatever the consequences,
a voice more frightening
than any of theirs had
also issued ultimatums. I
observed myself from a
corner of the Van Allen
Radiation Belts. The voice
spoke, and I did my best
to perform the actions
that it specified. There
were times when I
succeeded. There were
others when this
performance was only in my
head.
"Drop your pencil on the
floor," the voice said,
"whenever you see the
headmaster coming. He is a
recruiter for Opus Dei, an
evil sect, and he will
almost certainly criticize
your hair. Insist that he
lead by example, as did
Christ. Leave no evidence
behind should you choose
to hang him from a cross."
Or, "Demand to know: If
Mary had sex with the Holy
Ghost, who is usually
pictured as a dove, then
why was Jesus born without
a beak?" Had I not tried
to behave? It was only by
accident that I had broken
such a large percentage of
St. Peter's rules. I left,
with a strong push to the
back from a secret board
of judges, at the end of
my sophomore year.
A revolt against causality
had been launched. Ghosts
pointing to the collapse
of the third dimension
congregated. No act of
will could restore my
freedom of association
with the Double, who was
then present only in the
form of an abstract
shadow, as a threat made
in a language that I did
not understand. This was a
language that only the
dead spoke, the stellar
dead, not the makeshift
versions. I was alive, in
a manner of speaking, a
bit more here, a bit less
there, though not in the
sense that the Ancients
would have understood the
concept, not in the sense
that I would later come to
use the word myself.
I did not yet know enough,
of course, to call this
abstract shape "my
Double," any more than I
could pierce the psyche of
a naked Siddha in a
cremation ground, any more
than I could grasp the
instructions in the
Egyptian Book of the Dead,
however much they had been
left specifically for me.
I knew this Double only
through his impact on my
sanity, as a promise that
I would get what I
deserved. On the back of
my head: cold breath. He
was the sum of things
unknown and abilities
untapped. If this figure
was close, his motives
were obscure. I was not
yet free to associate with
him, only to go where his
finger pointed. That
freedom would come at the
end of a long war. It
would be necessary for a
designated enemy to
prepare the way for my
breakthrough. The dream
that we called waking
consciousness was a joke,
whose punchline had not
yet arrived.
Victor Brauner, Oubli de la Mort, 1952
Current humans were just variations on the prototype of the object.
They were person-shaped bundles of stimulus and response. They
were designed to perform a set variety of functions. They were objects
that could move, upon which corporations could hang the latest styles
of clothing. Such humans were less real than the powers that
consumed them, who were themselves only real in their own minds, by
virtue of the shadows that lent to them their strength. Fate would
orient the phallus of the wounded god. My socially- constructed self
was a necessary evil. It was, as I would later come to understand, the
contraction of an eight-armed sphere, the plaything projected by an
earlier but still present state of omnipotence. Was I conscious? Not at
all. Did my body not look much or anything like a sphere? These were
no more than temporary setbacks, glitches in Enoch's gematria,
permutations in the occupational status of the One.
Instructions had been broadcast from a star, from the depths of the
night sky: "Get out!" It was time for a change. Milkweed pods,
sprouting from the junk of abandoned lots, broke open. My sail
swelled. Bright with hope, I said goodbye to working-class South
Worcester, a neighborhood of factories and railroad tracks. At the age
of 15, I transferred to Doherty Memorial High. It was at the time a
brand-new school, in the low, expansive style of architecture common
during the 1970s. The complex of buildings was enormous, resembling
more than a bit a shopping mall. The corridors were brightly lit and
long, going off in all directions. Vast crowds migrated when the bell
rang.
From my perch at the corner of the Van Allen Radiation Belts, which
some might describe as the doorway of my homeroom, I observed the
drifting of the ghost-like students through the complex. In their
hunger, they migrated without knowing where they went. They saw
without knowing what they saw. They heard without knowing what
they heard. They felt without knowing what they felt. They consumed
without knowing who or what they ate. By doing no more than
shuffling from one foot to the other, they went in search of a symbol
that existed before birth. They went in search of the key to industrial
-strength sacrifice. They went in search of the loved bodies that they
left on a crumbling shore. They went in search of the magnet of
Mohenjo Daro. They went, without knowing more than the room
number towards which they were turning. Such was the arcane path of
their migration.
It is not that I believed that I was other than a ghost. I was, if anything,
even more of a disembodied remnant than my classmates. Unlike
them, however, I could feel the breath of the emptiness that was
waiting to engulf us, the emptiness that several ages ago had eaten our
souls for lunch, even as we continued to be driven by our habits.
The school was by far the best in Worcester. It was located in an
affluent part of the city, with some of the most challenging courses and
the most demanding teachers. Even the students, children of lawyers,
professors, and factory owners, were more articulate than the teachers
I was used to. Until my junior year at Doherty, I am not sure that I had
ever encountered a good teacher, not one, at least, that made me sit up
and take notice. In sophomore English class at Saint Peter's, we had
studied Joyce Kilmer's "Trees." In Mrs. Goldman's junior English class
at Doherty, we analyzed T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland." I preferred the
later poem. It was at Doherty that I began to recover from my
childhood. I had known that my world was small, but I had not realized
just how small it was.
It was there that I met the gruff but not especially lovable Mr. Sleeper,
my Cultural and Intellectual History of Europe teacher, who
confronted me with the large holes in my knowledge, who introduced
me to Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, which had
the effect of a depth-charge. It was there that I met Sue Castigliano, a
teacher who intervened at a crucial turning-point in my development,
who was present in a way that no previous teacher had been present. It
was there also that I met Mr. Trippi, my senior-year art teacher, the
enforcer of technique and the enemy of vision, who was demanding in
a way of which I was not prepared to take advantage. To learn to create
art, he believed, was no different from learning the elements of
Euclidean geometry. There were principles, to memorize, and
procedures, to perform. Like many would-be geniuses, I believed that
such doglike obedience was for others.
Mr. Trippi was short, aggressive in his occupation of space, very plainly
spoken, with wide, intense eyes. He had many of the traits that I
associated with the first-generation descendants of immigrants from
Europe, in his case Italy, of whom there were many in Worcester at the
time. This was back when the American Dream—whatever the
limitations of the concept—was something more than a myth, when a
whole extended family could go from poor to affluent in a matter of
two decades, so long as they believed, so long as they defined their
goals in the image of this dream. To judge by his body language, you
would think that Mr. Trippi had missed his calling as a bricklayer, until
you noticed the flash of intelligence in the eyes or picked up on the
scholarly references when he spoke.
Max Ernst, Revolution by Night, 1923
Mr. Trippi was proud to be an American, at a time when I was against
the war in Vietnam. He was eager to continue to ascend through the
ranks of the middle class, to display his success, to prove what he was
worth. I did not see him as a person like myself, nor did I recognize
that we acted from a similar urge to prove what we could do. I was by
turns arrogant and withdrawn, contemptuous and scared. That I might
be almost wholly uninformed about a subject was not enough to
prevent me from passing the most absolute of judgments. Mr. Trippi
was unwilling to admit that a student even had a right to an opinion.
When he talked, Mr. Trippi would stand about a foot in front of you,
and stare, unblinking, into your eyes. I would always end up looking at
the floor, at the wall, at the ceiling, or out the window. He did not seem
to notice or to care that nothing of what he said was getting through.
He took my disengagement as an invitation to stare even more directly,
to be even more insistent in the proving of his points, to stand a few
inches closer.
In this period, I had great hopes for myself without knowing much of
anything, without being able to do more than gesture towards my
spiritual and creative goals. I preferred a more oblique approach to
self-discovery. Let us call this the method of "actively visualized self
-deception." By imagining a larger space than the one in which I lived,
I was, by fits and starts, able to gain some partial access to it. If this
method was, to some extent, successful, I was not in any way prepared
to prove myself to someone as militantly sure of his principles as Mr.
Trippi. I would often stay up late, listening to crickets chirp in the field
across the street from my house. The night was my idea of a good
teacher. She did not bore me. She did not make me feel more limited
than I knew myself to be, and I suspected that even her most absurd
demands would prove more useful than yet another lecture about
Raphael. Yes, I knew that he could draw. I also knew that Shakespeare
was important.
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Adolph Gottlieb, Black Enigma, 1946
In his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Pico della Mirandola had said,
We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor
endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place,
whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select,
these same you may have and possess through your own judgement
and decision…We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor
of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the
free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the
form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the
lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own
decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.
"Five centuries after his death," I thought, "how many of us have really
come to terms with Pico's words? Other thinkers have said similar
things, perhaps, but who has said them in so personal a manner, in a
tone that both accuses and invites? I can hear his voice. As Pico says, I
am a creature with no place to call my own. I will shape myself. I will
test the rungs of Jacob's Ladder. My alienation is a role; it is not a
disadvantage. Can I write a perfect college-level essay? Can I draw a
good self-portrait? No. Many students at Doherty can, but what is that
to me? I will burn with the Seraphim. I will challenge the Thrones. I
will not be content to see out of two eyes. I will somehow find the
talents that I need."
Pico also said,
For a certainty I shall speak out (though in a manner which is
neither modest in itself nor conformable to my character), I shall
speak out because those who envy me and detract me force me to
speak out. I have wanted to make clear in disputation not only that
I know a great many things, but also that I know a great many
things which others do not know.
Yes. Like Pico, I would speak. I would demand to express my mode of
vision, however half-formed it might be. I loved the matter-of-fact
nature of Pico's arrogance. Unlike Pico, I was not a prodigy. I was a
child of the working class, who, in spite of several years of far-flung
reading, had only just begun to come into his own. There were times
when I experienced my stupidity as an almost physical weight, as a
slowly constricting boa, as a virus that had begun to eat into my brain.
I had said to Sue Castigliano, "I feel that I am getting stupider by the
day." She answered, "Why should you be any different?" Against all
available evidence, however, I did feel that I knew certain things that
others did not know.
Then, at 2:00 AM one night, with no warning that anything unusual
might occur, I experienced an outpouring of creative energy, as
explosive as a pyroclastic flow. To say that this outpouring was
explosive is to only speak of its force. The quality of the outpouring—or
near total lack thereof—must be seen as a separate issue. (Nothing to
see here, Reader. You are getting very sleepy. When you wake, you will
forgive the author for his teenage grandiosity. You will forgive his
crimes against late 19th century Symbolism. You will see that he has set
aside his ego. When you come to a sentence that begins "two things,"
you will obey without remembering a word of these commands.) Two
things came from this life-altering experience. These were a 16-page
personal epic and a series of labyrinthine, hieroglyphic drawings,
unlike anything I had previously done. If these pieces were not good,
they were maybe just good enough. An energetic vortex had popped
open.
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Brian George, Ships on a Violent Ocean, 2004
The space that I had entered, or rather, that had entered me, felt
pregnant with both danger and the shadow of true vision. To what end
should I stuff facts into my head when it could, at any moment, be cut
off? I told my mother that I was ill, and I did not return to school for
several days.
I became obsessed with the idea of the "façade." Worcester's skyline
was no more than a series of cardboard cutouts. How strange it was
that they had no other side. They held back surging currents, the waves
of a black ocean. To peek behind them was to plunge into the depths. I
could not stop myself; I peeked. To believe that the city had more
substance than a stage-set was to fall victim to a form of hypnotic
propaganda.
The Institute of Oceanic Flux sent agents to recruit me. Their
instructional method: dreams, quite often long. These provocateurs
were somewhat less active during the day. In their terrifying bird
-masks, they would observe from behind my shoulder. Should they
reach out, they were anything but gentle, and their claws would feel
like vice-grips on my arm. These presences were my protectors, my
guides to the great society whose branches stretched far off into the
dark. Tangled beyond belief, and anxious to be fed, its roots were a
bloody map traced by the transmigration of lightning. I would be taken
by the hand, led layer by archeological layer down through the flames
of collapsing civilizations, the walls almost falling on my head, until, at
the last moment, a small passage leading to the next stratum would be
found. Snakes would whisk me across epileptic floods. The knowledge
found in these chaotic states was not meant to be accumulated; it was
meant to be spent, to be only partially grasped. I could barely do that
much.
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Sego Canyon petroglyphs, Utah, 6000 BC
Images led to images. The chains of association sprawled in all
directions. Was this vision or schizophrenia? Few meanings could be
solidified. As this alternate space grew, I had to give myself
instructions: "Remember, you must eat. Put cheese on crackers. Pour
milk in glass. There are your shoes. Do not stare at the floor. Do you
think that your shoelaces are going to tie themselves? Why are you
looking at your body from the corner of the room? Put your eyes back
in your head." Sadly, no supernatural presence would appear on call to
help me with a math exam, nor would the World Snake lend me the
courage to ask Claudia Mulalley for a date.
"Sheathed in an iron glove," I said, "let the hand of Fate, as in the 1914
painting by de Chirico, with a thunderous click put its finger on the
chessboard." Already, and how many times, had the stage-props of the
20th century been swallowed by the ocean, on one of whose waves I
rode? Only fools could believe that the First World War had begun in
1914. I saw my body in a trench, parts gone, decommissioned. One self,
out of hundreds. So much for my avant-garde movement, my
unpainted paintings, my unwritten books. My heart was cold. There
were no tears in my eyes.
Let the Untermenchen believe that each thing happened only once, and
only on a particular date, as if this war was somehow special because
we had forgotten all the others. It was "a" world war; by no means was
it the first. Through the mists of ancient history, I saw catastrophic die
-offs, mass exterminations. Soon my genius would transform and
systematize the dissociation of Pierre Lunaire. The moon was a vehicle.
The true sun was black. Pursued by implanted memories, we were
pawns lost on a flood plain of spent symbols, the victims of atomic
bioengineering, the playthings of omniscient beasts. We were the
horizontal shadows thrown by a vertical geometry. Our bodies were not
other than symptoms. Our brains were the materialized fallout left
from the sabotage of the Hall of Records.
Eugene Berman, The Gates of the City, Nightfall, 1937
I had discovered a poem by Cesar Vallejo that in part reads, "You
people are dead. But what a strange manner of being dead. Anyone
might say that you were not." These were my thoughts, exactly. Each
night, I continued my back-breaking work on the scaffold of a
Micronesian volcano, producing a few more pages for my journal, a
few more drawings. As the weeks drifted by, I let a large amount of
homework pile up. When I was able, finally, to yank my attention back
to school, I brought the 16-page megalomaniacal epic to show to
Mr. Sleeper, and I brought the best drawings from this series to show
to Mr. Trippi. (Bad teachers! Metaphysical pretenders! Guides who
could not read a map!) Neither of these mountebanks seemed to
understand their job, to play the role that I assigned them. Mr. Sleeper
liked three lines. Certain metaphors showed "promise." Mr. Trippi did
not seem to be amazed. As Vallejo had warned, these people were
dead, but so strange was the manner of their being dead that I had
been tempted to assume they were not.
Slowly, with an expression of deep thought, Mr. Trippi examined each
one of the several dozen pieces. He said almost nothing. Here and
there he pointed out some detail that he thought I might want to
change. He would like to see more color. Had I thought of doing these
on a larger scale? In retrospect, there was nothing he could have said
that would have been adequate, or enough. This could even be seen as
a highly sensitive response. It is unfortunate that things did not stop
there. What happened next brought a quick end to my experience in
the class. It led me to block out whatever it was that he might have had
to teach.
Returning to his bull in the China shop mode, he insisted that I stay
after school for the next few days to complete the assignments I had
not turned in. These were a color chart and a still life with some fishing
nets, driftwood, a piece of cloth, and a bottle. This was like asking that I
should do one of those paint-by-number versions of Gainsborough. Blue Boy, a masterpiece in a box. A painting to be hung above a couch.
If I was an artist already, why would I want to pretend to be one, to
learn skills whose only purpose was to please my bourgeois relatives?
Like Miro, I wished to "assassinate painting." Like Breton, I believed
that "Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all."
My teacher's words, as few and measured as they were, had unsettled
me more than I was willing to allow. I was not, in fact, a shaman. I
could not travel by choice from one place to another. No, I had to be
carried. As my model, Rimbaud, had advised in his 1871 letter to Paul
Demeny, I had done my best to derange my senses, but I seemed to
have messed up on the systematic part. I had not distilled any poison
into its quintessence. I had not come out the other side of madness. I
was not yet a voyant. My explorations led only to the knowledge of
how much I had left to do. If I did have some experience with vision, if
I did feel the beginnings of some subtle form of guidance, I was not, as
of yet, an artist or a writer. After school, I hung around for several
hours, trying to imitate the grain on a piece of driftwood. I did not
return to class for the rest of the semester. Later in the year, I was
allowed to submit an independent body of work, and I squeaked by
with a C.
Mr. Trippi came and went, like a mastodon in the moment before the
glacial crags descended. He was, of course, guilty of bad timing, a flaw
in any teacher, but also of violating the first commandment, which
reads, "Do not disrespect the Daimon. The primordial twin has no
sense of humor." Like many adolescents, I could be faulted for a
pathological inability to listen. I had not yet found a way to take from
each teacher what he or she had to offer, and always, always, I
demanded something else.
Now, at the age of 66, there are times when it seems that all
perspectives have reversed. Death is not what we call death, life is not
what we call life, nor are the two set in a simple binary opposition.
What was large shrinks to the scale of a small toy, as I study the young
"Brian" through the wide eyes of his Double. These physical events
then appear in a ghostly light. These unimportant echoes then speak to
their subtle aspects.
Shortly before graduation, Brian ran into Mr. Tsang, his art teacher
from junior year. Mr. Tsang said, "What happened with Mr. Trippi? He
was upset that you dropped out of his class. He thought you had talent,
and he was doing his best to try to toughen you up, to teach you how to
focus. You wouldn't look him in the eye. You wouldn't answer when he
asked you simple questions, and then you just stopped doing your
assignments. He couldn't guess what he'd done wrong."
During the next few years, after Brian had moved to Boston to go to art
school, he would return to visit his family once or twice a month.
There, he would sometimes see Mr. Trippi, wandering among the
statues of the 19th century heroes, wandering by the Dollar Store and
the Paris Triple-X Theater, wandering along the concrete margins of
I-90, wandering among cars in the parking lot of the Worcester Center
Shopping Mall, blown here and there, an autumn leaf.
An infinite ache would spread upwards from Brian's solar plexus to his
heart and then finally to his throat. Was this shrunken man the
monster who would stare into his eyes, whose hateful words had sent
him running out the door? Was this the fascist who had interrupted his
early training as a shaman? Was this the demiurge whose finger snap
had once broken his connection to the dream? No, he was just a retired
high school teacher. He often looked quite serious, having found out
that his wife was very sick.
Mr. Trippi was the unacknowledged catalyst, the distorted face of the
friend. Brian asked for certain lessons. Mr. Trippi offered others. He
taught more than he knew. He was the left hand of a broken god, an
irrational number, a stray quark, Phi's infinite recursion, the flawed
avatar who had all along been important to my subject's growth.
Victor Brauner, The Poet in Exile, 1946
***
At cross-purposes, wearing constellated masks, two actors perform
what they are scheduled to perform, and they may not turn to applaud
each other's skill, even as death's birdsong can be heard. They just turn
their heads aside. In the amphitheater that looks like downtown
Worcester, they do not notice how the small waves lap the lower steps.
They do not notice that these waves are getting bigger, that dolphins
are circling the pretzel stand, that their feet are very cold, or that their
shoes had started to squeak many centuries in the past. In spite of our
great freedom, it is difficult for us to be other than who or what we are.
Collapsing the wave function, by violence crafting a location for the
socially-programmed self, we pull one story from the oceanic flux of all
potential versions of that story.
We would far prefer to believe that we are conscious. We would far
prefer to believe that our talents are our own, that our names are not
detachable. We would far prefer to believe that the ignorant hear what
we say. We would far prefer to believe that our actions all make sense,
that we know where we were born, that a luminous tide was not
waiting to retrieve us, as though it were possible to have an "up"
without a "down," or a shore without a seabed. No artist should ever
feel misunderstood. No teacher should ever feel that his gift has gone
unvalued. Things should happen when we expect that they will
happen. How troubling it is that they do not.
It would be so much easier to come equipped with all we need to know
at birth. To forget, of course, is the reason we have chosen to be born.
There are crimes that a nonexistent culture once committed, wells that
we filled with blood. There are books we wrote on the wind that we
grew too drunk to decipher. There are suns we threw into the bowels of
the deep. There are gods that we dismembered, orphans we
indifferently let starve, close family members that we struck down in a
rage. There are vehicles that we miniaturized so as to tuck them in our
pockets. We have accidentally turned these pockets inside out.
In moments of sudden illumination, we can, on an almost tactile level,
feel how all the bits and pieces of our story fit together. The satisfaction
that we feel, however, may be anything but complete, for the whole of
the story can seem to have happened to someone else. The Perfect
watch from the upper benches of the atmosphere. To themselves, they
appear hunched over and attentive, with lamp-like elbows pressed on
lamp-like knees. To us, the Perfect are no more than abstract points,
just barely visible, but we can sense that they have some say in how the
drama will be judged. We would probably go blind if we looked at them
directly. It is a good thing, then, that our eyes just barely work.
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