Mysticism, Sculpture, and Puerility
Carlos Castañeda refused to visit Arrowhead Springs and San Bernardino as a whole believing it to be an entrance into hell.
I have this memory from when I was four. I am on my knees playing next to a crawling stream in a ditch adjacent to our front yard. Our house on Old Waterman Canyon Road, my first home, sits in the San Gabriel Mountains that loom over San Bernardino, California. Across the stream the terrain juts vertically and, using the zoom out tool on Google Earth, the peak shapes into a mountain in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, this range is the last expanse of real vegetation as you travel away from the Pacific Ocean into Apple Valley and the barren heart of the deserts of southwest America.
Kneeling and staring at the bare rock wall not more than ten feet close, my eyes move slowly down to the tinkling stream, then further down to my banana yellow Tonka truck half buried in dark mud six inches past my knees. Just as patiently my focus rests on a quick sketch of a dam with a reservoir containing microscopic tadpoles, and finally back up at the raw boulder. This is quite an odd concern for me at the moment, I thought. Normally I’m staring at a completely different blank rock above rather than my present boulder of infatuation, which marks the top rim of the entire wall running along the west side of the stream. I jump as my parents call my name in a sudden, only slightly embarrassing moment of self-consciousness.
When I was one and my sister was seven she ran away from home with our dog, Shane, to go to “Mickey Dee’s in the big city.” Our neighbor picked them both up less than a mile down Old Waterman Canyon Road while on a joyride with his brand-new Corvette. Shane tracked dirt all over his brand-new leather seats.
A single blank piece of paper sits in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City having been stared at by artist Tom Friedman for a cumulative 1000 hours.
Offhand, it may seem odd for such a bland object as that gritty, ochre stone is so imprinted on the mind of a four-year-old boy. However, it is not just that rock, but also the tree right above it, and the salamander at the base of that tree, and the forest, still untouched by human hands, and the Stegosaurus eyeing that salamander, and the terrible Allosaur salivating over the Stegosaurus. The sheer draw this unknown and unreachable region has on my curiosity is brooding.
In 1965 William T. Wiley rescued an object from a salvage shop in Mill Valley, California. It was a cambered step small in size and wood covered in green marbled vinyl. Wiley gave it to his graduate student, Bruce Nauman, and it soon became referred to as “the slant step.” A tool rendered devoid of its function due to its fabricated form. Nauman drew inspiration from this object creating drawings and even his own, even more useless, version of it.
This Jurassic muse is quite alarming lest I become no longer content in pondering the a priori truths that may be vegetating in my forest. Little did I know I am preparing to scale this towering barrier.
That very afternoon, I exit my front door, cross my front yard, the street, walk up then down the bank, hop the stream and extend my palm to the exposed rock. Feeling the rough texture and breaking off its sediment gives me energy. I equate my inability to climb this monstrous wall with a holy fear and respect of the dinosaurs roaming the vast, unexplored plateau above. I imagine myself a Pterosaur with wings twice spanning twice my height, crouching down, and lifting off with a downward flap easily flying up over the wall, over the forest above, and over the mountains abroad.
In basic physics and geometry a hanging chain forms what is known as a catenary. The curve is a hyperbolic cosine, which looks similar to, although it is not, a parabola. Each link hangs in perfect tension with one another to form this shape.
Drowsy and late for class, I pull on my clothes and run out the door. I run down the hallway looking through windows I finally spot my class and slip into the critique room pulling out a metal foldable chair to sit on as our teacher, Liz King, a small framed, short-haired, baggy-clothed child of the sixties keeps talking in a flailing, quixotic fashion most likely about the history of the eye and its importance and mystery since early art historical renderings. Unsure if she noticed me in her fervor, I finally attune to her next few words as she pulls out a pile of old VHS tapes, “It’s alright if you don’t understand Japanese, you’ll still be able to understand the movements and make sure you focus on the gestures of the puppets.” She drags out the word as she waves her hand over us casting a convincing spell.
My parents literally catch me the few times I find myself stuck maybe a few feet above the creek bed. They need only hold out there arms to grab me under the arm pits as I’ve scaled not one-tenth of the wall, yet in my tenacity I convince myself I’ve nearly made it. Then my older brother, with a completely unrelated impetus, attempting the same climb, smashes his ring-finger under a loose boulder and is then rushed to the hospital in order to reattach the latter half of a digit the former stump which are connected only by a sliver of skin. Aside from my remorse for my brother’s pain, this marks an unhappy and premature end to my paleontology investigations.
A seeming failure, my insistence on empirically investigating the unknown was tantamount. Mystery is a natural property of human nature, which beckons us strongly and it is not easy for us to succumb to a belief lest we see it with our own eyes.
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri is an inverted catenary. This shape allows it to support only its own weight in compression with no perpendicular stress.
My earliest memory of making something is at the San Bernardino home. It snowed. I was five. Los Angeles never gets snow. But it snowed. Two inches. Not even. Still, enough to put a paper-thin yet even blanket over everything exterior.
Much to my distaste, instead of running directly outside in my ‘jams my first step was surviving the degrading task of being dressed by my mother in winter clothes. Long underwear, turtleneck, puffy nylon overalls familiarly known as “snow pants,” Louisville Cardinals sweatshirt from my uncle last Christmas, gray zip-up parka, Velcro and puffy nylon moon boots a la Napoleon Dynamite, oversized mittens, and a yellow puff on top of a green knit hat with miniature snoopy embroidered near the edge.
After finally preparing to go outside, it’s already afternoon and I fear this new and foreign substance is already half-melted.
As construction on the Gateway Arch commenced, builders soon realized that their cranes would not reach past a particular height. The solution was what was known as a “creeper crane” which attached to each leg of the arch and pulled itself up the outside walls. In this sense, the arch itself was a platform for its own construction.
My older brother and sister are already playing on the front porch. Then we move to the driveway where we systematically wipe the snow off the entire white cube in order to reveal our oxidized, navy Ford Aerostar we start up the street to where it curves four houses down the block. Philip throws a snowball at me, and I begin crying which only turns into laughter as Ruthie then proceeds to shove snow down the back of his jacket.
Then we all start making bigger and bigger snowballs until we can no longer pick them up to throw. We just keep rolling and rolling them as they gain mass and it takes two, then three of us to push. After getting to the point where we can all three push no more. We start anew until three or four balls taller than I am sit in a row in the middle of the street. Philip has stacked only slightly smaller balls on top of the line making a pyramidal shape. Tired, we step back behind some trees for convenient surveillance only to wait for unsuspecting victims. Very soon our frustratingly quiet community stays in character and we go home.
Only later do we hear that our blockade was in fact successful, however it was necessary to deem it only a temporary installation when our blind neighbors’ almost just as blind wife inadvertently drives directly through. No more successful than Christo and Jeane-Claude’s “Iron Curtain” of oil barrels which blocked Paris’ Rue Visconti for eight hours.
When I was seven my brother made a boat by overturning a turtle shell luggage carrier for our Ford Aerostar and we floated it out on our lake. When I was twenty I made a makeshift raft and floated down the James River from Pony Pasture to Texas Beach.
What Heidegger calls the “One” comes to mind in his obsession towards realizing one’s full potential. We move in cyclical form constantly going from “pure being” to human drama and back to “pure being.” Experience is grounded in care and one’s being is not divorced from one’s intentionality.
One time I pushed my little brother, Alex, into the pool. He was six and I was twelve. He hit the side of the pool with his mouth and started bleeding from his lip. I went to my room and I cried. I cried because I loved my brother. I felt a considerable pathos in this situation. It’s not that I was a crier, although I did cry a lot. It’s not that I was pathetic, but I was. I was playing a material role as an older, bigger brother. My push was directly derived from our relationship and our familial setting. I was cognizant of this at the time because it was this young divorce of one’s expected actions versus one’s natural feelings that affected me so greatly.
In this vein I want to bring about the word “generosity.” But I am only sometimes talking about a physical generosity, and then sometimes an appreciation, even love, or pathos; and then even sometimes all of these are one and the same.
Arrowhead Springs is a strange oasis just north of San Bernardino and just south of our home in the foothills the next exit down on the Rim of the World Highway. Owned by Hollywood celebrities in of the 20’s and 30’s it later fell into the hands of an organization called Campus Crusade for Christ who my father worked for. Now it stays in pristine condition after Crusade moved their headquarters to Orlando, Florida and San Bernardino has sunk into the worst places to live in America with a crime rate just above Compton’s and suburban sprawl like spam. Nobody wants to buy it. It’s a sculpture sitting in arrest. Unused bungalows once home to Lucille Ball, Marylin Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, Esther Williams, Desi Arnaz, and a long list of stars, palm trees, tennis courts, an elegant geothermal-heated pool with golden compass inlaid on the bottom and lined with the original 1930’s cabanas, and a monumental hotel built in 1939 with the all-original, in their beautifully decadent almost-to-the-point-of-kitsch glory, pink cocktail lounge and private movie screening theatre.
I have only few memories from this although I am told of going to the nursery in the Marx Bros old bungalow, of tackling inflatable Shamu into the pool, and of Easter egg hunts around the hotel.
Although this dreamscape is my younger childhood, I have yet to scrape into any of its real mysticism. There lies an arrowhead more than a quarter of a mile long and almost 500 feet wide carved into the mountain overlooking the hot springs. A longtime debate still ensues under whether this landmark was man-made or natural. Unsure of its origin, Brigham Young saw this site in a vision before he came to the mountain and founded the town of San Bernardino before moving west to the Pacific. It is said that the arrow was Indian-built and pointing the way to the natural hot springs bubbling below. Now some believe it to be a large slab of light quartz thrust up by tectonics through the mountain, which sits very near the San Andreas fault-line. Darker vegetation like wild sage grows more easily among the loose soil thus creating a natural outline around the exposed rock accentuating it among the pale brown surrounding brush.
When I was twenty I proclaimed my desire to become a jungle-explorer after watching Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre: The Wrath of God.” When I was eleven I proclaimed my desire to become a space-explorer after seeing Bruce Willis in “Armaggedon.”
When I was twenty-one, in preparation for a trip to the Congo, I began reading “Bula Matari,” an awful biography of Henry M. Stanley, the famous Congo explorer whose legend mostly surrounds a declaration he may or may not have stated. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”
It is still universally unknown the location or means in which great white sharks mate.
My friend has a theory in which nostalgia cannot exist for events that occurred in the nineties, and especially not in the aughts. Are we not still the same teens when we go from watching reruns of Are You Afraid of the Dark? on Snick to watching it from our TV on DVD collection?
In this vein I want to bring up the word “earnest.” Sober, sincere, important. For if we do not hold up what is ours than who will?
When I was eighteen a man from Nassau, Bahamas went to Alaska. With a team he excavated an eight by eight foot cube of ice from a frozen river. With snow still resting on top, he insulated and packaged the cube then FedExed it to his preschool in Nassau. Growing up in a less privileged part of the Bahamas, almost none of the children had ever seen or felt snow, much less a two and a half ton block of ice. He then constructed a refrigerator large enough to accommodate the ice, which was powered by solar panels outside the preschool. In effect, he was able to utilize the extreme heat from the Bahamas’ sun to achieve the exact freezing conditions on the day they cut out the ice from the Alaskan river. When I was twenty-one I was able to see this ice at an off-site Pierogi gallery space in Brooklyn with both the Alaska and the Bahamas flags flown by fans at the same wind speed the ice encountered at both the river and the preschool.
When I was twenty-one I decided to grow grass in my basement. Upside-down.
The following is an excerpt from Jad Fair’s “How to Play Guitar” in the liner notes for the “Greatest Hits” album released in 1995.
You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness.
“This is a good class,” I hear Mike Drake whisper over in my direction as everyone begins examining the first sculpture of the day, an indoor, tent-covered picnic complete with pink-foam crabs and bird-seed beer. I barely raise an affirmation, exhausted at being awake at eight in the morning having attained only negligible sleep over the past three days in an attempt to finish my own sculpture for today. The day slowly moves on as we view paint covered blinds still wet and wildly strewn, an academically carved bust of newly-elected President Barack Obama in traditional African garb, two planks of wood delicately sewn together to secure them as a single monolith, a device for two hands of separate people in which one can mechanically control another’s complete movements, a bronze cast stealth jet plane hung on a helicopter-like mechanism with a hot-blown steel UFO both being video-recorded in the reflection of a highly polished satellite dish while being displayed on a low quality, eight inch television, and an antique desk adorned with coyote tails, a bearskin rug, and an open, sweater-lined drawer nestling a sparrow.
The following is an excerpt from a wikipedia entry for Carlos Castañeda.
In his books, Castaneda narrated in first person what he claimed were his experiences under the tutelage of a Yaqui shaman named don Juan Matus whom he met in 1960. Castaneda wrote that he was identified by don Juan Matus as having the energetic configuration of a "nagual", who, if the spirit chose, could become a leader of a party of seers. He also used the term "nagual" to signify that part of perception which is in the realm of the unknown yet still reachable by man, implying that, for his party of seers, don Juan was in some way a connection to that unknown. Castaneda often referred to this unknown realm as nonordinary reality, which indicated that this realm was indeed a reality, but radically different from the ordinary reality experienced by human beings who are well engaged in everyday activities as part of their social conditioning.
When I was five, I told my mother that Christ was living in my heart. When I was seven I went to my first overnight Christian camp. When I was twelve I was beaten with shoes and duct-taped naked to a flagpole with three other boys at a church youth-group overnight. We were then left outside overnight.
Edgar Cayce is a well-known preacher of the earlier twentieth century having given hundreds of sermons across America. He is most famous for his ability to go into self-induced trances and make predictions of the future or give psychic readings. One of his many topics of readings included Atlantis, a lost city of advanced technology inhabited by fleers of ancient Egypt in biblical times. He attributed his power by being able to tap into a “universal awareness,” a Jungian-like consciousness that lies above that of the physical waking consciousness and also that of the subconscious mind.
Our family used to annually rent a cabin in Yosemite National Park where we would hike up the scenic trails to Yosemite Falls.
When I was four my best friend Adam’s father was a volunteer fireman at the station at the end of the street. We ate potato salad, chips, and hot dogs at community potlucks there and I sat on the brick retaining wall next to the basketball court.
When I was young I had a recurring dream where my brother falls off the edge of the waterfall and I jump after him. Only my brother lives.
In elementary school we practiced earthquake drills and were fed Smokey the Bear instructional videos. During an earthquake drill, one is directed to kneel facedown under one’s desk covering the back of one’s head with one’s hands leaving only one’s backside vulnerable.
In Castañeda’s A Separate Reality, don Juan Matus’ friend, don Genaro, leaps over a waterfall with the aid of supernatural powers.
In 1919 on the north end of Boston near 72nd Street, a 50-foot by 90-foot in diameter tank burst open with a gunshot followed by a rolling thunder. A 20-foot high wave of viscous, amber rushed down the cobblestone and over a firehouse, a paving department and a police station, down Commercial Street, past a meatpacking plant, a haberdashery, a theatre and a small custom watch and clock shoppe. The mammoth wave approached Atlantic Avenue striking the elevated railway and lifting a train off its tracks. Then the streets were colored an even brown. One couldn’t differentiate between people and horses; rather both were disguised in a thrashing, sticky mess struggling for air. Search crews continued searching for four days often unable to identify bodies entombed in a brown, translucent glaze.
151 injuries and 21 deaths occurred from the tragic molasses spill.
In aught five our old California house burned down with the rest of our neighborhood as the fire swept over a slim seeming majority of the state of California. With the lack of vegetation the next rain produced mudslides that curved around our street, over my best friend Adam’s house, over my house, over the fire station, and it continued down the mountain, towards Arrowhead Springs, into a Girl Scout camp, over ten girls, and over a leader. The only house left standing in our neighborhood is a one-story home built in the shape of a dome that sat on the at the entrance of Old Waterman Canyon Road.
Around the same time I revisited San Bernardino, CA, as I had not been back since my early childhood, I was aware of a strange connection between my professor, an artist, and a book.
The artist is Bas Jan Ader, a Dutch minimalist-conceptualist living in L.A. died during a project titled In Search of the Miraculous where he attempted to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a small, thirteen-foot boat. After three weeks they lost radio contact. His body was never found. A Spanish fishing vessel recovered the boat, a modified Guppy 13 named “Ocean Wave.” The boat was taken to Coruña but mysteriously stolen within a week.
The book was titled, “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst” which was found in the faculty locker of Bas Jan Ader after his disappearance. It is a nonfiction piece on an interesting man. The following is his Wikipedia:
Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from the Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide.
Michael Jones McKean, my professor, purchased the “Teignmouth Electron,” Donald Crowhurst’s 40’ trimaran sailboat that has been beached on Cayman Brac, a Caribbean island, and slowly decaying for 25 years.
This memory is from when I was twelve: I stare chin-down at my hands unable to lift my head because of the heavy weight sitting on the back of my neck in Mr. Reid’s classroom, my mother in the chair with built in desk to my left and Mr. Reid across from us. His considerable mass, however, was situated behind his adult sized teacher’s desk behind mountains of books and valleys of crosswords, puzzles, and papers. The words being said I will later block from my mind and the brown sandals my mother was wearing I will remember.
It was only thirty minutes before that the incident had occurred. I had cursed in school. Not only is that the one, the first rule included in every elementary school list of rules, it is the one never expected from the smartest (arguably, a contentious title fought between the all-male oligarchy, Sam Brunjes, Chris Bull and I) kid in the fifth grade. Regardless of this, the word-vomit occurred. No one could deny it, and no one could feign it a mishap in its clarity.
It was the last meeting of chess club for the school year, because it was the absolute grand-finale championship match of the annual chess-tournament for Mr. Reid’s chess club between Chris and I, the winner getting a notch on his brain tally, and being the last notch of the year to give out, a lasting one. I was in great spirits and up from my seat, ahead in pieces (including his queen) by a large margin with a sure checkmate in sight. Six-moves. No, Four. I can already imagine the vigor in which I will yell triumphantly. I was up on Chris in overall games for the year, though.
Quickly moving, now, after a grueling forty-five minute match, an eternity for a fifth grader, I am only concentrating on my spoils.
“Check.”
This word is subtle and quiet but a surprise coming this soon. Looking at the board, my face turns to stone, with a look of mature gravity. He has threatened my King with his Rook allowing a fork for my Queen with my subsequent move. All of a sudden the tides have turned.
“God-damn this fucking game! Shit.”
These words are exclaimed with a volume that will have now replaced my wanton cries of victory. All of a sudden my fear of the room sinks in. Thirty students either lazily starting recreational matches spread out in the classroom or spectating intently on the unfolding championship match all have a heightened attention as to what sound waves passed through the air. Chris sat across from me. But worst of all Mr. Reid sat to the direct right of me.
“What was that, Peter?” Mr. Reid calmly replies still over the slump of the game reflecting the slump of his belly over the chair.
Whether I was embarrassed is neither the point nor is it even necessary to be stated. Whether that meant I was retiring from chess indefinitely was a certainty.
In 1923 Marcel Duchamp left art to play chess, I left chess for nothing in particular.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castaneda. Page last modified on 23 April 2009, at 23:23.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Crowhurst. Page last modified on 21 April 2009, at 17:57