PHOTOS and MEANING

I've been writing and thinking (the two are almost invariably intertwined for me -- writing focuses my random thoughts) about photos.

One of my favorite writers, John Berger, has a book of poetry called "And our faces, my heart, brief as photos."

That's pretty much the crux of it for me. We're mortal. Our faces will disappear. And even, or especially the photos that might "capture" and preserve our faces are brief.

Take this photo of my son Tom playing at EZ's Woodshed in Harlem.

http://www.bigapplejazz.com/sched.htm

What does it mean?
What does it mean to me?
Those are two very different questions.

To me, to Tom's father, it means -- it's a means to see Tom, or at least a picture of Tom. It makes me wish I had been there to watch and hear him perform with his trio in front of the painting of John Coltrane. It brings back all sorts of memories and makes my mind race to the future when I'll fly to New York to hear and see Tom in early December. It means that Tom is working and can pay his rent. And so on.

But all of these meanings are mine. I'm the one reading the photo this way. Those meanings are exactly as brief as I am. They'll be here for a few more years if I'm lucky.

By itself, the photo is some kind of historical record and could be read in terms of the shirt Tom's wearing, the way he wears his hair. A reader of the photo might conclude things about the myth of Coltrane from the train that sweeps across his body in the painting.

But personally, the photo is as brief as our faces.

That's all the more apparent in another photo I've been thinking about. It was taken in 1966 or 1967 on a landing strip near Lake Powell.




If you found this photo and had absolutely no context outside what you see, you could figure out several things.

The red-rock desert landscape makes some sense; and with enough effort you might even pinpoint this as a place overlooking Lake Powell. The clothing and hair styles might indicate the 1960's, although this is an eclectic bunch. There's a lot of information to be read from the boy on the far left: a basketball player's legs and height and Converse shoes. His shirt says "Farmington Scorpions" -- this group is from Farmington, New Mexico. The kneeling man has boots and haircut that might indicate some sort of educated outdoor profession. There's an FFA cowboy in the middle of the front row. And so on.

The brief meaning I bring to the photo is more personal and much more extensive. The basketball player is named Willard Washburn. The cowboy is Delbert Slaugh. The kneeling man is a petroleum engineer. The man in the blue shirt standing in the center has a trading post on the Navajo reservation. The man to his left owns a car dealership and will become the mayor of Farmington.

I'm standing behind the boy in the red shirt, Larry Echohawk, who will become the first Native American attorney general of any state and will only narrowly be defeated in a bid to become governor of the State of Idaho.

There's lots more to be told; but important here is that most of the meaning to be read from a photo (there's no meaning inherent in the photo -- it's just a bunch chemicals adhering to a piece of paper) is tied to memory. And memory is as brief as we are.

Finally, John Berger brings this all back to the value of diverse or interdisciplinary approaches to meaning:

There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like the terminous at the end of a line. Numerous approaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches.

Writing about Alex Caldiero

I've had the pleasure of writing about the art and poetry and performance of Alex for more than a decade now.

"Intermittent Conversations" is the beginning of an essay written for the 1994 exhibit at the Salt Lake Art Center of works by Alex and 4 other artists under the title of "The Unclosed Hand."

I just posted this essay on my professional page, along with several other publications on performance and art and poetry. With Alex, if you worry about generic purity or about how to categorize his work, you're already a day late and a dollar short. He's got a whole set of interdisciplinary genes, inherited from his Sicilian parents, mutated by his Brooklyn upbringing.



Today in our class about LANGUAGE, Alex wrote the first two letters of the word "cry" on the board and declared that the C was the mouth, the r the tongue.

Here a couple of his drawings from that Unclosed Hand show that illustrate the visual nature of Alex's sense for words:

Language Scraps and the Deseret Alphabet

Torben Bernhard has just started a blog --

languagescraps.blogspot.com --

with the intention of collecting "language scraps." It's already a visually beautiful site, and the entry on the Deseret Alphabet caught my eye.

The Deseret Alphabet was an early Mormon effort, one of many of their revolutionary ways of remaking the world they lived in, and even if it isn't used widely today, it was such a creative attempt that it continues to capture the imagination of creative people.

For instance, the Clearfield, Utah artist and 5-string banjo player Bob Moss has created a whole series of works on wood and leather and gourds and who knows what else that feature the deseret alphabet. The one I've scanned here (which has a proud spot in my house) asks what a monkey and a cookie jar have in common, and provides a transliteration sheet for any curious readers/viewers. To learn more about Bob Moss, who epitomizes the eclectic interdisciplinarity this blog keeps harping on, see this address on the web:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=47335869

You'll hear good music, see some photos of Bob Moss and his work, and learn that Bob Moss doesn't have a computer.

The Deseret Alphabet also showed up about a decade ago in Trent Harris' film "Plan 10 From Outer Space." Trent's website is worth visiting:

http://www.echocave.net/plan_10_from_outer_space.html

You'll read there that

Plan 10 From Outer Space is now available on DVD and it is loaded with extras. For instance it has the official Plan 10 From Outer Space deseret alphabet decoder! It has Karen Black singing the Kolob song!! And it has the extra special extra, extra...Day With The Director, which is a strange short film where Plan 10 From Outer Space director Trent Harris chases pesky antelope around a live bombing range. . . .


and that

Plan 10 From Outer Space begins when Lucinda Hall (Stefene Russell) discovers a century old book penned by a mad Mormon prophet. She deciphers this odd artifact and is sucked into a world where spacemen, polygamists, and angels run amuck. Lucinda desperately tries to uncover the "Secret of the Bees" before it is too late. Is she mad or is she on the brink of discovering a diabolical plot led by Nehor (Karen Black), a peeved alien from the planet Kolob? Just because it's made up doesn't mean it isn't true!

And if the Deseret Alphabet and the lovely Karen Black singing "If you could hie to Kolob" and the beehive-headed cyclops don't have your attention yet, note that Alex Caldiero appears in the movie (with his now-defunct station wagon -- I kept telling Alex he should check the oil -- oil, smoil, he said) as a mustachioed father out to reform his son who has a panty fetish.

The Semiotics of Young Werther

Ah, sweet love. Sweet depictions of love. Words of love.

In our interdisciplinary class on "Language, most dangerous of possessions," we've begun talking about Goethe's first novel (1774). Written by a 24-year-old who was spurned by Charlotte Buff and whose friend Jerusalem killed himself after being turned down by a married woman, there's a high potential for embarrassing sentimentality (captured nicely in this etching by a contemporary artist).

"Why does it need a name?" Werther asks, "Tell it as it is!" And that's the crux of the problem: things are as they are; we know them through language. Frustrated by the constrictions of the very language through which he knows things, Werther sees "nothing but an eternally devouring, eternaly cud-chewing monster" (when he's not kissing Lotte or her letters).

Semiotics and epistemology are Goethe's antidotes to romance in this novel that even Napoleon couldn't get over (or are they the poisons that make love wither?). So when Werther sits at his desk in his famous yellow trousers,
weighing the pen and the pistol against one another, reading Lessing's tragedy Emilia Galotti, writing the words to Lotte that will announce his death, he's caught in that web of words, that prison-house of language that is our shared human condition.

Although this ends tragically for Werther, Goethe found solace in his own writing, and went on to a ripe old (and very productive) age.

The Semiotics: A bed of words

Of nature, angels, and gods;
Of untranslatable music;
Of oblivion never sweeter
Than upon a bed of words.
Alex Caldiero

Oh that Procrustian bed of words, sweet even though (especially because) it requires clarity and translation. Let nature, angels, and gods sing freely and absolutely. The dark impress of human language speaks us as we savor its flavors.


Alex's poem and my Goethe Yearbook article on language in Goethe's first novel are echoes of Herder's arguments in the essay "On the Origin of Language."

For instance: "If an angel or a heavenly spirit had invented language, how could its entire structure fail to bear the imprint of the manner of thinking of that spirit, for through what could I know the picture of an angel in a painting if not through its angelic and supernatural features?"


For instance: "What proof is there of the existence of a single word which only God could invent? Is there in any language anywhere a single, pure and universal concept that was handed down to man from Heaven?"

As Herder contemplates the human origin of language he contrasts the whirling and fecund imperfections of language with the cold universality of supposed angelic speech. God's language and the cold language of French philosophy pale, for Herder, against the rich tapestry on the bed of German words.

"Die, or create language."

The Semiotics: Alex and Scott

This semester I'm teaching a course with my old friend Alex Caldiero called, after a line by Holderlin, "Language, most dangerous of possessions." The delicate song and dance that is teaching (lowest paid branch of the entertainment industry) becomes even more delicate when it's Alex and me dancing cheek to cheek. We've thought of several names for our act: Abbott and Caldiero, The 49'ers (both born in 1949), The Poet and the Madman, HUMISPHILCOMM (the departments sponsoring the class) -- but have settled on The Semiotics, neatly fracturing a noun meant to describe a scholarly discipline.

Don LaVange made a wonderful poster for the class, using a miniature painting of the Tower of Babel from a medieval manuscript.

With about 30 students able and eager to discuss 18th-century European theories of the origin of the language, a novel by Goethe in which the main character shoots himself because he can't escape the conventions of language, the language of religious mystics, the everpresent and omniscient DADA, Nazi use of language, obscenity, The Goalies Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and so on, we're having great fun thinking about semiotics of all sorts. (Great fun with suicides? Nazis?)

The high point of the class will be a November performance by Alex featuring poetry in and about, for and forswearing, within and without language. Watch for a new flier and come hear and see and possibly smell a master of the semiotic arts.

Still-born fawn

Yesterday my dog Blue and I were hiking in a gully near our house. (The photo is from last winter, his favorite season.) Blue's sharp nose led us to the remains of a fawn, still-born earlier this summer. Its tiny black hooves were still perfect, it was still curled in what I took to be a perfect fetal position, but something had gone wrong and there it lay. Still.

I felt sad about the loss of potential; but I also recognized the event as perfectly, or imperfectly, natural. We start things, we conceive ideas, we make plans, we nurture them and let them grow; and sometimes they just plain don't work out. Sometimes we just have to let them be.

Left there to decompose, the fawn's little corpse was feeding ants, flies, beatles, birds, and would have fed Blue if I hadn't been so squeamish. Our abandoned projects and incomplete ideas can do the same.

This summer I've returned to some writing I started in 1991 and for my new work have been drawing from its various blind alleys and fragments. I grew up in Farmington, New Mexico, and my ongoing question is what that red-neck, oil-boom town was like outside my limited set of experiences.

In my research, I found some information that I inserted into the beginning of my text:

March, 1950, Farmington, New Mexico

In what eventually will become our hometown, for three days running, half the citizens report seeing flying saucers. Between eleven and noon each day, hundreds of the alien craft raise hell among farmers and trading-post operators, builders and teachers, cooks and civil servants, many of them descendants of Mormon settlers.

I found a newspaper account that I also wove into my experience:

10 June 1974, Tocito Oil Field, Navaho Reservation

I kick at rabbitbrush to break the silence. The derrick has been lowered, the doghouse packed with equipment. Cactus Drilling Company is paying me time-and-a-half to stand guard for the night.

A breeze browses through the newspaper I’ve set aside.

“Violence Erupts, Policeman Injured: Coalition Stops Posse Parade”

A traditional Sheriff’s Posse Parade through downtown Farmington Saturday erupted after a peaceful beginning into an afternoon of violence which saw a Farmington policeman struck by an automobile and crowds of hundreds flee from police tear gas when members of the Coalition for Navajo Liberation attempted to stop the parade. . . . The leaders, who seemed to be supported by an estimated 40 to 50 more Indians on the sidewalk, objected to allowing a six-man contingent of horsemen to proceed. Dressed in cavalry uniforms of the late 19^th Century, the horsemen were members of the U.S. Army’s Ft. Bliss, Tex. drill team. . . . One middle aged Fruitland Indian, speaking just after the violence, said in a voice heavy with alcohol, “I care for my people. It should not happen . . . I speak for my people and the white people.”

“Juveniles Sentenced to Springer”

All three youths charged in the mutilation murders of three Navajo men in April were sentenced to terms at the New Mexico Boys School at Springer following an all-day hearing in San Juan County District Court Friday. . . . Medical and psychiatric testimony at the hearing revealed that in the opinion of the authorities, none of the three youths was insane and that they would be “amenable to treatment.”

I study a sidewinder track in the sand. A sinuous sentence with ellipses. And there’s the snake! It progresses almost by regress, eyes me as carefully as I it.

I sleep fitfully in the back of my little car, dream of vengeful natives in the grey dawn over the sand.

After remembering this, I found what's called "The Farmington Report," an important civil rights document, on the internet. It's a federal attempt to improve the way Navajos are treated by Anglos in my home town. That national context made me see the little town with new eyes.

Then I talked with my friend Don LaVange and he showed me a 1974 poem by the Beat poet Gary Snyder:

I Went into the Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick Bar

In Farmington, New Mexico.

And drank double shots of bourbon backed with beer.

My long hair was tucked up under a cap

I’d left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay by the pool tables,

A waitress asked us where are you from?

a country-and-western band began to play

“We don’t smoke Marijuana in Muskokie”

And with the next song, a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances in the fifties;

I recalled when I worked in the woods and the bars of Madras, Oregon.

That short-haired joy and roughness—America—your stupidity.

I could almost love you again.

We left—onto the freeway shoulders—under the tough old stars—

In the shadow of bluffs I came back to myself,

To the real work, to “What is to be done.”

Gary Snyder, “I Went into the Maverick Bar” from Turtle Island.


Finally, I drove through Farmington again and found an adult video store on the south side of town with a billboard towering over it:





That, of course, scared the bejesus out of me and I went back to my computer. My task now is to take lots of fragments like these and tell a story with them.

The Byrds tell a story of a dog named Blue you may enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUsb9BhJ7LU

And I hope that buck and doe have more luck next spring.