First Anniversary Commemorative Mail Art

I sent this postcard to a fellow mail-artist one year later.
It reflects on my train-trip with fondness and nostalgia.
Peace on earth.
Slainte.

The time has come, the Walrus said...

1971 (watercolor, oil crayon, ink)


Shortly before my trip to the East Coast, my Mother's house in Fall River, Massachusetts was sold. Over the years since moving to California I had retained an attic bedroom and den at her house which I used on my visits home. I still kept a lot of artwork, books, records and other materials there. This was all hastily off-loaded to a storage facility when the house went on the market. It had since languished there with a steady cost to her estate. Despite it being the case that most of it was not mine nor could I conceivably want any of it in addition to my own junk, it was soon more or less thrown in my lap. This had led to my decision to take this trip when I did, to see my family and to put things in order.

In the eight days during which I laid-off train travel in Massachusetts, I had spent a lot of time going through my old belongings and the profuse flotsam and jetsam of our family's household.
In the course of reconnoitering this slightly morbid hoard at the storage space in the old neighborhood, my brother drove us past our former address. It was only as we did so that I learned I would not be forced to look with sad estrangement at our old place--the house was gone! Our sprawling yard was subdivided and foundations for two houses were marked-out. The building whose every inch I knew was now purely a structure of memory. The beautiful wisteria, clematis and forsythia, the roses, the maples, the ivy, the old stone wall, were all just ghosts in photographs now. I thought I'd be melancholy but I was cheered. There was nothing left to long for.

In the hoary trove of my old thoughts and expressions, I found a number of artworks from my youth. Included was this old water-color of a walrus, now foxing and brittle. I made it when I was age 19 and all its elements are clearly recognizable to me today. It memorialized a dream I had dreamt of this great totemic aquatic mammal. It had somehow personified my hermetic life spent back home that summer on vacation after my first year of University study. My independent esoteric studies ranged from William Blake to Eastern religions, Rimbaud, Paul Bowles and Beat literature, H.P. Lovecraft, folk, jazz, blues, and underground rock music. The calling I was hearing was for consciousness expansion via entheogenic substances, yoga, meditation, outdoor contemplation, art studies and everything else at hand in sort of an improvised psychedelic Tantra, a new bloom on my pious Catholic roots.

In the painting, the attic itself has become the walrus. The pattern of its wooden slats is visible on his back, as are two posters that were tacked-up at the time. One poster was a silkscreen print of a Viet Cong flag. The other, of which only the bottom is depicted, was a photographic poster exhibiting the world's greatest varieties of hashish. All you see is the text from it in sort of a Martian script and the illustration identifying the types of hash by outline and numbers. I had proudly tried quite a few of them by then myself. This was after a year at a large fairly hip school with a war going on. In those days there were lots of military flights into the US that did not have to go through customs, a lot of do-it-yourself hash-smuggling took place. I had had some passing acquaintance with Rose of Lebanon, Nepalese Temple Balls and finger rolls, dark Afgani bound with sheep fat, black Pakistani Gold Seal, and some thin Moroccan wafers (though that may have been epi-phenomenal). There were others as well, quite distinctive, but whose specifics are evanescent now in the smoke of time.
I never again saw hashish to compare with those years of the early seventies. In 1974 I actually had some minor experience making hash in Oaxaca. Despite the longevity of high quality herb in the area, hashish-making had no tradition there prior to those times.
Although there are now some very interesting types produced in California for the medical cannabis dispensaries, all very good or great in their way, the ancient indigenous hashish types seen in the poster were all master products, sui generis, and truly superlative.

The painting's oneiric walrus wears the forehead marking of a devotee of Shiva, god of ganja-smokers. Floating with him in the aqueous void of the painting are various objects from the attic, almost all quotidian and yet talismanic. An empty Mateus vin rose bottle, a little plastic sixties style stash container, a tackle box, a chair and a pillow, everything displaced and free-floating. Spookier objects bob around as well, a folk-art version of the Philip Morris bell boy, a horse skull found in a swimming hole in Dartmouth, and a Viennese coffeehouse pipe still smoking despite apparently being underwater. In the distance there sinks a copy of the original New Directions paperback of Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea--look for its green abstract expressionist cover by Lustig. I remember reading it alone in a tent in remote New Hampshire and throwing it at the canvas wall, overcome by existential dysphoria.

The last thing in the painting reaches back even further in its associations. That is the small black-and-white and non-existent poster. It was an attempt to recall a design for a public safety poster I once drew on a blackboard in the first grade at St Patrick's school. The original consisted of just the right portion of this version. I intended to represent visually the good advice we were given as children to "wear white at night" in order to lessen the risk of getting run over by traffic. It took on other dream elements in this representation with more alien script and with the murderously anthropomorphic yet depersonalizing wonderment itself, the automobile. Ultimately the car is like a ventriloquist dummy, a delegate, a mouth piece.

So this oxidized sheet of cheap paper with its dream-saturated cartoon resonates back to my life as a child and as a young adult. Its vibrations still feel resonant to me now. My life continues to be like this mysterious warm-blooded creature of the forbidding cold. I am as archetypal and as atavistic as this sentient animal, as I hunt for sustenance and sensual fascination, and for mystical transcendence, in an exploded and floating world.

The California Zephyr Outside Denver

These photographs record a liberating moment when the passengers revolted and began opening the window of a door on the lower level of the train. The Amtrak staff, when they were not being officious and unfriendly, were nowhere in sight for long, long stretches. I observed that they had a lounge that they disappeared into rather than have to assist passengers in any way.
At the same time the train got behind schedule and they began cutting back on the already sparse "smokers' stops" as the brief opportunities to go outside and refresh ourselves were called.
Cigarette smokers made the first move and sprung the window which was boldly labeled "Do Not Open." It swung wide open for the conductors to use in their work and it closed quickly with a handle like the door of a cooler. There were only bathrooms near it, seats were on the upper level. I began to use it myself for my own private smokes and, as in these photos, for an occasional burst of exhilaration. There is no feeling like training at a good speed in open air in wild country. It was single-digit cold in brilliant sunshine that day. Just having the window open roused you from the perpetual drowse you fell into with so little activity and so few periods of deep sleep while riding in coach.
These happen to be the last exposures I shot on the trip. I had carried a disposable camera the whole time. But I got a little shutter-happy during the week spent in Massachusetts and neglected to buy another camera in Chicago, my last chance. In general it was quite difficult to photograph with these cameras while on a train passing through the great vistas. The flash, which couldn't be disabled, just gave you a reflection in the train window. I had stopped attempting to take any way back in Canada. But I had not anticipated the open window option, otherwise I would have been sure to have had a camera at the ready.
These two photos, then, take on a significance as a result of being the last from the long journey which was far from over at this point. Instead, it was entering perhaps into its most fantastic phase at this point: the mountains and deserts of the western United States. Ascending toward Colorado's myriad peaks and dramatic high landscapes, it was as if a "no cameras beyond this point" degree had been inveighed. In any event, photographs would have fallen short thereafter. I would have to rely on poetry to record the experience and to express my continuously expanding perception of it.