DRAWING DOWN THE MOON: Art Review

I am a reluctant driver these days, in Los Angeles. I’ve had enough of rude and clueless drivers, of endless traffic snarls around road works, of mad speeds on the freeways. The drive west from where we live at the far east end of the Hollywood hills used to be a pleasant, easy, even somewhat romantic drive along Sunset Boulevard. Nowadays, it’s a nightmare. 

Enough of that. Overcoming my reluctance, I was persuaded by Ellie—who is nursing a now nearly three-year case of Covid cabin fever—to make the drive across town to the Hammer Museum in Westwood. And as things turned out, I was glad I did. Lunch, first of all, out in the central courtyard, was a pleasant experience, at least (I can’t help but play the grouch from time to time) until the bill came. But food and service were both excellent, rare enough to be worth paying for.

We had driven this far to see the Andrea Bowers show but were side-tracked, on the way, by a sign announcing a show called “Drawing Down the Moon.” Sounded interesting. Stepped inside and stopped to read the introductory wall text, where my biases were immediately alerted by the mention of witches and goddesses and so on. Not for me, I thought. But then a couple of steps further I found myself already fascinated by first images in the show, including a print depicting three nubile, naked young “witches” engaged in erotic preparations for an evening on the town.

I should say here that I had no notebook with me, and am therefore unable to provide the kind of detail that I would have done in the old days, in an “art review.” You’ll just have to go see this utterly delightful show for yourself. Curated by Allegra Pesenti, former associate director and senior curator, Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, it spans a wide range of moon-related themes with works from all parts of the world—an international feast of the human imagination inspired by the “mystery and lure” of our closest celestial body. 

You’ll find a treasure on every wall, in every corner, in every display case. For example (and to give you an idea of the spread in time and space): a tiny, stunning painting by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich...

... a charming, miniature carved rabbit from 18^th century Japan...

... a huge “moon bowl” (for its contour, its color and its texture) from Korea; an intricate assemblage by our own (aren’t we lucky?) Betye Saar and an acquatint etching by her daughter Alison (“Eclipse”—a huge Afro blocking out the sun)...

... a construction piece by Los Angeles contemporary Michael McMillen; the small, haunting etching  of a woman waiting by a window on a moonlit night by Edvard Munch; a huge painting by Jay de Feo and a display case documenting that artist’s fascination with the moon; a wonderful abstract painting by Kandinsky; and a personal favorite by an artist I had never heard of (one of many!) Zarina, an untitled woodcut collaged with pewter leaf on black paper.

So much to see and think about. A page from William Blake. An excerpt from an edition of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems with the poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (Google it!) with the uncanny lines, “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,/White as a knuckle and terribly upset.” A sonnet by Shakespeare posted on the curve of a wall, as your turn the corner. Many surprises. Much delight. 

If you’re an artist living in the Los Angeles area, you’ll want to see this show. Don’t miss it. And for today, no disrespect, Andrea Bowers will have to wait. Tomorrow, maybe.

https://hammer.ucla.edu/drawing-down-moon

 

LUNCH WITH LLOYD

         It was February when I last had lunch with my friend Lloyd. We met again yesterday at Greengrass, the same Vietnamese restaurant where we met before. I remembered—he too—that we had ordered too much food the last time we were here, spring rolls for starters and a main course each. Followed by one of Greengrass’s special treats, a banana cream pie that we shared between us.

        Too much!

        Have I mentioned this? A couple of weeks ago I made the conscious choice to eat more appropriately to my age. For several years now I have been ten to fifteen pounds heavier than is good for me. My middle-age spread had grown into a full-blown protrusion beneath the ribs, leaving me not only unsightly but uncomfortable. I have been eating—and drinking!—as I was able to do with impunity before the approach of, first, middle and now old age. My body simply does not need and cannot handle that kind of intake any more. I ate when I was hungry, and continued to eat when I was no longer hungry.

        So what I decided was simply to be more attentively guided by my hunger. No diet. Just eating more appropriately to where I am in my life right now. It seems that Lloyd had come to a similar decision, because he announced even before myself that he’d be well satisfied with nothing more than an appetizer—something I myself had decided before setting out to meet him. I ordered the restaurant’s special soft summer rolls with shrimp; he ordered the crispy rolls with beef. And the waitress brought us a bowl of those crisp white wafers that look like packing crate chips, but taste pretty good with the brown sauce that comes with them.

        All of which was a great deal less important than the conversation, which went deep from the start. Of course, when people as old as we get together there is the “organ recital”—the exchange that covers unavoidable deterioration of the body as age continues to take its toll; and from there moved rapidly to the imminence of death and thoughts of dying. We had both, in different ways, known and worked with the great Pop artist Claes Oldenburg—that word, Pop, diminishes his peculiar genius and his accomplishment—news of whose death had reached us only a couple of days before. 

        So it was with warm feelings that we shared our memories of him. Which brought us to thoughts about art, and about the fickle art world. Lloyd, too, made a significant contribution with his sculptural environments, starting back in the 1960s. I wrote about his work, admiring their inclusivity, the invitation they extended for participation not just to those who might be aware of their aesthetic value and intentions, but to anybody, young or old, who came across them. Typically, they took the form of circular structures, inheriting, so I thought, from the kiva, Stonehenge, or the simple campfire, and offering a tacit ritual space for silent communion or debate. I liked—and I mentioned this in our conversation—what I saw to be their modesty, not of intention or worth; but in their means. It’s a quality I respond to in an art work, where the artist’s ego remains invisible—unlike the work of so many artists whose ego is out front, imperious, hungry, demanding of attention. (Think, um… Picasso!)

        We talked, too, about Lloyd’s current work. Like myself, he needs to do it. Like myself, his means to bring it to the attention of an audience is circumscribed—for Lloyd, by a gallery system that has become increasingly commercialized, increasingly more to do with what it currently fashionable and saleable than with vision thoughtfully pursued over many years and skills honed to mastery; for myself, with a comparable situation in the world of publishing. We do not feel sorry for ourselves. We just get on with what we need to do. In Lloyd’s case, this is (again modest!) work with photographs, a fascination with the always surprising quality of the ordinary, the intimate interplay of light and shadow. His mind is infinitely curious, as is his eye.

        Lloyd drove me back home after lunch—Ellie had dropped me off at the restaurant—and I invited him in for a while. Our arrival coincided with Ellie’s return, to the three of us sat around the dining room table, and talked, and talked. About old friends, old loves, old art world associates. And could have gone on talking until the proverbial cows came home, but that time had passed, suspended in our conversation, and reality returned. Time to get on with other things… 

 

FEMME OSAGE

I was reading an interesting essay in yesterday's new NYT Opinion section (replacing the Sunday Review. Why?) about the recent surge of interest in the use of hallucinogens as an aid in psychotherapy. It reminded me of my own (single) experience with LSD back in the 1960s. 

I have never been much interested in drugs of any kind. Back in those days, I did smoke a bit of weed like everyone else--but laughably little when compared to those around me. I even gave that up in the early 1970s after a frightening, seemingly never-ending attack of acute paranoia, and have not taken more than a very occasional toke since then. But I remain convinced that the effects of that one "acid trip" left a lasting and radical change in my consciousness. It literally changed my mind.

It was the summer of Sergeant Pepper and the Surrealistic Pillow, remembered forever as "the summer of love." At the invitation of a poet friend in Iowa City I drove down to visit other friends of his at a farm in the lush green countryside near Hannibal, Missouri. The night we arrived I stood at the window of my bedroom and watched in awe as one of those incredible Midwest thunderstorms rolled past with immense thunderclaps, a spectacular display of lightning against dark, luminous green skies that threatened tornados. 

The following morning I found my poet friend and our host in quiet debate by the refrigerator in the kitchen. They eyed me speculatively before evidently coming to a decision--and offered me a tablet of LSD. I accepted nervously, more to avoid being left out, I think, than of eagerness to give it a try. We each swallowed down our dose with a glass of cool, clear water.

We strolled down, the three of us, to the nearby Femme Osage Creek, and separated there, each for our own solitude... and it was then that the universe literally opened up. I was sitting in the shallows of the creek, watching the crawdads go about their business on the stony ground beneath the surface. All about me, leaves and grasses shone with a multitude of gleaming greens. A red-headed woodpecker knocked incessantly at a tree-trunk. Now and then, a cardinal would swoop by, a stunning streak of scarlet against the green. Above, the intensity of the blue sky left me amazed.

I find it impossible to describe that sense--that illusion--of the universe revealing itself to me in all its glory and, particularly, in its oneness. I had the sudden and inarguable perception of the living, essential interdependence of all things--of leaves, and grass, and crawdads, of stones at the bottom of the creek, of each individual tree--and of myself. It was all one. And this perception, this illusion, if you will, was accompanied by an incredible sense of joy, of the rightness of all things. 

Fanciful or not--you decide--I know that this experience left an indelible, if indefinable impression on the deepest level of my consciousness. I'm not a religious perspn, as you know, but this is perhaps the closest I have ever been to a "religious experience"--and it stays with me. Again, it is rarely near the surface, and I would find it impossible to convey just how it manifests in my thinking or my life. I just know it's there.

I'd certainly not recommend this kind of uncontrolled experiment to anyone. Indeed, all that lightness of being and all that joy ended up, by the end of the day, in a nightmare little short of terror. That was the downside. The universe came crashing in on me. I was lost, separated from my friends, wandering between hedges in back lanes trying desperately to orient myself, to find my way back home. 

I did get back to the farmhouse as the evening fell, and was happy to be reunited with my friends. Here I am, to relive the experience and tell the tale. I hope that you too might have enjoyed the trip. And please be careful with those mind-altering drugs.

 

FEMME OSAGE

 

I was reading an interesting essay in yesterday's new NYT Opinion section (replacing the Sunday Review. Why?) about the recent surge of interest in the use of hallucinogens as an aid in psychotherapy. It reminded me of my own (single) experience with LSD back in the 1960s.

I have never been much interested in drugs of any kind. Back in those days, I did smoke a bit of weed like everyone else--but laughably little when compared to those around me. I even gave that up in the early 1970s after a frightening, seemingly never-ending attack of acute paranoia, and have not taken more than a very occasional toke since then. But I remain convinced that the effects of that one "acid trip" left a lasting and radical change in my consciousness. It literally changed my mind.

It was the summer of Sergeant Pepper and the Surrealistic Pillow, remembered forever as "the summer of love." At the invitation of a poet friend in Iowa City I drove down to visit other friends of his at a farm in the lush green countryside near Hannibal, Missouri. The night we arrived I stood at the window of my bedroom and watched in awe as one of those incredible Midwest thunderstorms rolled past with immense thunderclaps, a spectacular display of lightning against dark, luminous green skies that threatened tornados.

The following morning I found my poet friend and our host in quiet debate by the refrigerator in the kitchen. They eyed me speculatively before evidently coming to a decision--and offered me a tablet of LSD. I accepted nervously, more to avoid being left out, I think, than of eagerness to give it a try. We each swallowed down our dose with a glass of cool, clear water.

We strolled down, the three of us, to the nearby Femme Osage Creek, and separated there, each for our own solitude... and it was then that the universe literally opened up. I was sitting in the shallows of the creek, watching the crawdads go about their business on the stony ground beneath the surface. All about me, leaves and grasses shone with a multitude of gleaming greens. A red-headed woodpecker knocked incessantly at a tree-trunk. Now and then, a cardinal would swoop by, a stunning streak of scarlet against the green. Above, the intensity of the blue sky left me amazed.

I find it impossible to describe that sense--that illusion--of the universe revealing itself to me in all its glory and, particularly, in its oneness. I had the sudden and inarguable perception of the living, essential interdependence of all things--of leaves, and grass, and crawdads, of stones at the bottom of the creek, of each individual tree--and of myself. It was all one. And this perception, this illusion, if you will, was accompanied by an incredible sense of joy, of the rightness of all things.

Fanciful or not--you decide--I know that this experience left an indelible, if indefinable impression on the deepest level of my consciousness. I'm not a religious perspn, as you know, but this is perhaps the closest I have ever been to a "religious experience"--and it stays with me. Again, it is rarely near the surface, and I would find it impossible to convey just how it manifests in my thinking or my life. I just know it's there.

I'd certainly not recommend this kind of uncontrolled experiment to anyone. Indeed, all that lightness of being and all that joy ended up, by the end of the day, in a nightmare little short of terror. That was the downside. The universe came crashing in on me. I was lost, separated from my friends, wandering between hedges in back lanes trying desperately to orient myself, to find my way back home.

I did get back to the farmhouse as the evening fell, and was happy to be reunited with my friends. Here I am, to relive the experience and tell the tale. I hope that you too might have enjoyed the trip. And please be careful with those mind-altering drugs.

Book Review DIVINING CHAOS, by Aviva Rahmani

    If you have been living in the Southern California area for a while, you’ll surely remember the Big Rock. It was a media frenzy in its day. News cameras greedily recorded every hiccup in the perilous journey of this massive, 430-ton granite boulder from somewhere in the desert to its destination at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Like some captured lion, it was tied down and loaded onto the bed of a God-knows-how-many-wheeler truck and trundled inch by inch along the freeways and, finally, the city streets, to be converted from its imposing natural state into a Work of Art by Michael Heizer entitled “Levitated Mass.”

    That was in 2012, ten years ago. I remember being disturbed about it at the time. I even commented on it in a blog entry, which I re-read today. Plonked down atop a long, sloping channel of concrete and steel, it did not appear (to me at least) to levitate. It just sat there. It had lost its magic. The Big Rock was more of a monument, I thought, to an artist’s ego—and a museum’s patriarchal ambition—than an inspiring artwork. I tried in vain to see it in the tradition of great monoliths and ritual circles of ancient history, Stonehenge, those giant Olmec heads, monumental Buddhas… It remained stolidly pedestrian.

    That was an aesthetic judgment. My view these days is significantly less benign in light of everything that has happened in the intervening decade. I have been reading Aviva Rahmani’s “Divining Chaos”, where the renowned ecoartist and ecofeminist, gives thoughtful, informed, at times carefully argued scientific refinement to my own ill-formed perceptions. I find that I now feel a great depth of sadness for that poor rock, ripped unkindly from the womb of Mother Nature to serve the purposes of what the poet e.e.cummings nicely dubbed manUnkind. Rahmani helps me to see the exploitation of that boulder as an act of rape, a violation that is not excused nor excusable by any claim to the higher purposes of Art. 

    I’m thankful to “Divining Chaos” for helping to pull together a myriad of thoughts and feelings that have been worrying at my consciousness and my conscience for a good number of years. Rahmani makes it all so clear—the complex interdependence of intellect and emotion, action and reaction, neglect and responsibility in our lives and the life of literally everything in our environment. In view of the now imminent despoliation of our planet, she points to the culpability of the patriarchal heritage of entitlement, domination, ownership and exploitation, not only—but seriously, yes—of natural resources (land, oil, oceans, forests) but also of human beings less powerful than themselves. Especially, of course, women. An activist and ardent feminist, Rahmani seeks to liberate the idea of husbandry from the ownership of the female body and associated chattels to its original meaning of taking responsibility, taking care. 

    Divining is a way of getting to the source. The divining rod points us to the cache of water hidden underground. Rahmani makes much of what she calls “trigger points” as the cracks through which entry into complex problems becomes possible, even necessary. I think of epiphanies, but those are perhaps more instantaneous perceptions. Trigger points are more like Alice’s rabbit hole, inviting the in-depth exploration of new, surprising and revelatory worlds. In “Divining Chaos” she explores a metaphorical relationship between the chaos we have created—and are continuing to create, despite all evidence--in the natural world and the chaos (body, emotions) she has experienced in her life from childhood. Her narrative details her attempts to come to terms with maternal submissiveness, on the one hand, and paternal rage on the other—and having to confront both within herself. She tells us how she has survived—among other adversities!—rape and physical violence, two bouts of breast cancer and a debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome, and uses that life experience and the need to heal herself as the paradigm for the global crisis caused by human abuse: climate change, the exploitation of natural resources of all kinds and the mindless pollution of the environment with human detritus, from discarded, miles-long fishing nets to mountains of accumulated trash. 

    In all this, Rahmani is unsparing in her expression of outrage and stubborn defiance—and in her book her passionate commitment ensures they are contagious. Her empathy with all suffering beings and a suffering planet demands her reader’s matching empathy, and this is the urgent message of her book: like addicts in a twelve-step program, we must first allow ourselves to fully acknowledge suffering before arriving at the need to heal. Throughout the long history of her art projects dating from the 1960s, Rahmani is constantly refining that purpose and learning to realize it in ever more ambitious scope. The means she deploys to create her projects span an impressive breadth of human knowledge and experience, from indigenous medicine to physical, geographic and biological sciences in a process of restitution, recovery, restoration. Increasingly, she learns the essential value of cooperation—between human beings, yes, but also in the partnership between we humans and our common mother, nature.

    I will say this: in her eagerness to say it all and say it right, Rahmani risked losing this one reader’s attention from her major theme in the meticulously detailed descriptions of the intentions and process of specific projects in the latter half of “Divining Chaos.” Having learned so much already from the big picture into which she had drawn me with such profoundly emotional appeal, I found myself getting “into my head”—and finding it hard to maintain interest, there, in all the (distinctly erudite!) intellectual discussion of aesthetic theory and practice. Others will find these passages fascinating. I hasten to add that I do believe that this is an important, urgently needed handbook for any artist seeking a path to work in the context of a social, global conscience and environmental responsibility. I also believe that, artist or not—I happen to be a writer—we must all be shouldering that responsibility in a world where inaction is no longer to be tolerated or excused. The rape of Big Rocks for aesthetic purposes is no longer acceptable.

 

 

MASCULINISM

           I have been reading about the rise of feminism, particularly in the art world but also in the culture at large in the late 1960s and early 1970s. More about that when I’m finished reading. In the meantime, though, I’m reminded how much I regret the absence of a corresponding rise in masculinism.

It’s not even a word! We hear a lot these days about toxic masculinity and it’s not hard to see what that means. A glance around the world, the country, even the neighborhood is enough to remind us what misused, abusive male energy has wrought, and continues to wreak upon our benighted species. Warfare is one deeply horrifying thing. Abuse of the planet through its ruthless exploitation is an even greater imminent peril for us all.

Here “at home”, in our country, the distorted model of masculinity embodied in the grotesque machoism of our former president is embraced by millions of our men. A Supreme Court dominated by the energy of four damaged males and one female trained in submission to men continues to endanger not only the lives of women but even our children and our planet. Young men are permitted to purchase weapons of war—and use them to devastating effect. Heavily armed, too, the police kill with impunity. Money becomes malignant power in the hands of corporate executives. And so on.

            We need a masculinist movement, in which men subject the whole culture of their gender to the kind of critical self-examination that led women to question, then revolt against the status quo. We need to be not more like women, but more like men, and for that we need a new model of manhood. We see those pathetic public figureheads of manhood—Johnson, Putin, Trump--clinging desperately to the last vestiges of power. Those who support and enable them are too often in deep resentment, anger, and fear of disempowerment. They assert themselves with the exercise of violence against those they fear usurping their supremacy.

            Why have we men spurned the path that pioneering women took, this past half century, to validate themselves and their fellow women? Why no “masculinism”? We men have been watching women gain in power with envy, fear, and condemnation, even ridicule. Clearly, we have had no motivation to change our selves. Patriarchy has worked well for us. We have been sitting in the catbird seat for centuries and wish to keep things as they aways were—with us in charge. 

            All of which is not intended to denigrate my fellow men.  Quite the contrary. I love men. And there are many of us who seek to modify the old models without sacrificing what it is to be a man. Indeed, to capitalize on our peculiar strengths. I had the good fortune, many years ago, to fall in with an organization of men that works consciously to “save the world, one man at a time.”  (For those interested and not yet informed, it’s called The ManKind Project). Less active now than I was for many years, I am still grateful for the awakening I received at the hands of other awakened men. Reduced to its simplest formulation, it is the recognition that male power resides not merely, not even primarily in the genitals or physical superiority, but instead where we have been taught to least expect it (and never look for it): in the heart.

            I claim no originality for these thoughts, but am grateful to have been challenged to rethink them in the light of what I have been reading.

 

FATHERS

The past couple of weeks we have been on retreat from our city life in the little cottage in Laguna Beach we bought nearly thirty years ago. How lucky we were! Or as I prefer to say, how smart! Tucked away here in this cosy space between two gardens, front and back, that Ellie has lavished loving attention on, we are a long way from the problems of the world that we witness daily, foolishly (we should shut the damn thing off!) on our television screen. From this perspective, it can seem almost unreal.

Our stay here has been highlighted by family visits. Our daughter Sarah and grandson Luka came down to spend a couple of nights the weekend before the Fourth--they did not stay for the fireworks. It was a lovely visit. Luka still has boundless energy, enough to sap my own, but at ten years old, now, he is learning to manage it much better. He's fun to be with, funny, spirited, and too smart by half. He hones my wits. Sarah still very deeply connected with the friend she has known for five years now--a long-lasting relationship. The two seem like a good match, but have the misfortune to live on different continents. Hard at the best of times, harder still in a time of global pandemic. 

Then yesterday we had a second lovely family visit, this time from Ellie's older sister, Susie, and her niece, Yardena, who drove up from San Diego where they live. We sat down together to enjoy a delicious lunch that Ellie had prepared with much love and labor--cold poached salmon with orzo salad--and chatted genially. After lunch, we got into some deeper family matters, Ellie with Susie, I with Yardena. As she reported later, the two daughters had talked about their father, a man of great wit and charm whom they both adored, but who was also deeply flawed. Like most men of their generation, before women came along to raise the cultural consciousness, he was casually abusive of the women in his life as though by God-given masculine rights. He burdened both his daughters with secrets they should never have known, and proved himself faithless to his second wife of many years--as Ellie discovered only yesterday for the first time—up to the very day he died from an accidental fall.

Yardena and I, meanwhile, got into a different, equally emotional conversation about the effects of separation and divorce on little children. Her father, much like Ellie's, felt free to exercise those same masculine rights. In his case--as, I freely admitted, in my own--this ended up in a split between the parents that necessarily left a deep wound in the psyche of their children. She and her two brothers suffered, as did Ellie and her sister. I told her with great sadness of my own, similar experience and the mark it surely left on the lives of my two sons. 

They say it’s the inherent task of every father to inflict wounds on their children, and of every child to do the work that’s necessary to recover from them. This is the subject of my new book, “Dear Harry,” now in the final stages of production, and I guess it has been true at least since Oedipus. Thanks to Dr. Freud, we understand it better now; and thanks to Dr. Jung we know more about the healing process. But despite the efforts of these two good doctors and countless of their followers over many decades now, I can be quite sure that this generational predicament will persist so long as there’s a human species here on earth.

It was a rich discussion on both sides of the table, anyway, and I’m sure a rewarding one for all of us. Such deep connection makes for deepening relationships and more powerful family ties. All in all, it was, as Susie said as she and Yardena were about to leave, a memorable visit.

 

 

 

WHY?

Why do I do it? Why do I choose to publish things that are so personal and private in this public forum? It’s a question that has come at me from various directions in recent days—and not exclusively on Facebook. It’s a question I sometimes ask myself.

The simple answer is that it’s what I’m given to do. I love that construction, one that I came across for the first time many, many years ago in a poem by Robert Creeley. I have not been able to find it again. Perhaps it was not a poem. Perhaps I simply heard him say it once, in my teaching days, when he came to read to one of my classes, and the words stuck: What I am given to do. Call it a mission. A mission of service. You may think it fanciful, but I believe we all have a reason for our time here on Earth. A purpose. 

It's not because I feel special in some way, especially skilled or gifted, especially wise or knowledgeable or compassionate. Not at all. Quite the opposite. It’s because I’m convinced that I’m common. Ordinary. That there is something in my experience as a human being that I share with every other human being. Not everything, obviously. I am unique in many ways, not least in my physical appearance. But there is a core part of me, I believe, that is shared by other human beings. 

I don’t know what to call it. Call it heart. Call it mind. I think of it as the irreducible core of being human and it lives somewhere in the relationship between self and other, the bridge we all need to cross as best we can in our daily lives. Call it connection. It’s what I have wanted to explore in everything I’ve ever written. Even at those times in my life when I was publishing “art reviews” in national magazines, it was that connection I felt driven to explore. I refused to be a “critic” in the sense of one who can distinguish between good art and bad. The greatest compliment I could receive was something like: “You really got me. You really heard me.”

In the sense that I was writing about connection, then, my “self” was a necessary part of that connection—the other end of the bridge, the receiving end. What I do now is much the same, but—to stick with the analogy—from the giving end of the bridge. I started out as a poet, and I think that this is what poets do. They give out of themselves. They reach in first, then they reach out and touch. It’s what Robert Creeley did, “For Love.” I write in prose but in some strange way the result feels more like poetry. It’s from the heart.

Autotherapy? Am I trying to heal myself by confession? No. I’m trying to communicate some part of my way of looking at the world with words that may resonate with others and touch them in a way that feels, well… right. It’s like when I look at a painting and just say, Yes! With all my heart and mind. No questions. No doubts. Just Yes! With an unapologetic capital and an exclamation mark. So am I trying to make an example of myself, to be the model of humanity? No. I’m just on my mission as a writer, doing what I’m given to do, communicating with my fellow human beings. And in so doing trying to find out more about what it is to be a human being and, just perhaps, become a better one.

 

LEGENDS: A Book Review

Legends of the North Cascades 

By Jonathan Evison

     This is one of those books I wanted to like more than I did. Evison is at his best in his evocation of the wild mountain landscapes of the North Cascades in Washington State. The winter winds will chill your bones, you sink into the muddy surface of the meadows in the spring thaw, you hear the rush of streams, the call of birds… Such scenes transport you. All good.

    In the promising first pages of the story, the sudden accidental death of the protagonist’s deeply loved but end-of-her tether wife leaves Dave Cartwright the distraught father of Bella, his little five-year old daughter. A veteran of the Iraq war who suffers from PTSD (never named, but readily diagnosable for anyone paying attention to our recent history) he does everything he can to alienate those around him—and that includes this reader as I suspect many others.

    Angry at the world, rejecting anything that looks like sympathy or a desire to help, dismissive of social norms and the political circumstance alike, he heads off deep into the mountains to lead the life of an isolationist and survivalist. He takes his little girl with him. Bereft of her mother and deprived of the critical understanding of an adult, she adores him, obedient to his slightest whim. Smart, sassy, tough, adaptable, Bella appears at first to thrive amid the rigors of living in the cave he makes their home, while her father fails to address the deprivations he inflicts on her—school, friends, warmth, proper nutrition, home comforts and so on. She develops, instead, a rich fantasy life, and enjoys the benefits of learning from the natural environment.

    So, an interesting situation. Unfortunately, it breeds problems, the chief of which is the main character himself. Quite naturally the reader wants to sympathize with a severely traumatized vet. Dave just keeps making it harder to feel anything but dismay, and soon anger at his childish selfishness and refusal to act on what is clearly in the best interests of the daughter whom he claims to love. In the very last pages of the book, disaster strikes and he needs the intervention of a rescue team, and is forced finally to acknowledge a measure of dependency on his fellow human beings. By this time, though, it feels more like self-service than enlightenment.

    There are other problems. There is a sub-plot, pursued in a series of separate chapters, which takes us back to the earliest days of human existence, a parallel story of survival in dire circumstances in these same mountains. Exiled from her clan, a woman loses the man who is her sole protector and is forced to face every danger in raising her boy-child to manhood. In modern times, Bella’s special senses pick up their proximity despite the centuries that separate them—at one point she turns up a skull which we readers know to be that of the boy’s father—but this other theme of potential interest never culminates in any satisfying connection between the two stories. They just run parallel, and we are supposed to do the working of making that connection.I wanted, too, more compelling action in both stories, more continuing forward movement, more reason to keep the pages turning to find out what happens next.

    Another problem: these ancient people are gifted with thought processes and language that seems inappropriate to their level of development. The mother’s skills of introspection and psychological perception about her son seem wildly out of keeping with her time. The result is many jarring moments when the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is suspended. 

    Last of my nit-picks is Dave’s family. Hard to believe his supposedly sympathetic brother and his wife would be so unfeeling, even cruel, during Bella’s brief respite off the mountain, when she has the chance to return to normal life, school, friendship… pizza! They provide her shelter, but so excessively give preference to their own daughter that Bella feels excluded, rejected, and is only too happy to return with her father to the dangers of the mountain. 

    So… I wanted more from this interesting premise. I wanted, above all, to lend the story my credulity, and I could do so only intermittently. Which is not enough.