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.
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