sketches

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/white-debt.html

James Cahill’s translation of Hsieh Ho’s 6 Laws of Painting 

In the morning cold of a Colorado June nine years ago, you were the first up, already seated at the camp stove, getting the water ready and hot for oatmeal for the rest of us. I can see you in the morning a dot on the snow between tarps, a figure by a stove at the edge of the big mountain, big sky. That day we were perched on a flat of land like a stage in reverse, where the audience was great pool of shifting terrain, of rivers winding along the floor of rock and tree like a song that emptied out to mountains in the mist. Some days we slept on snow, some days we’d have to trek across steep cliffs under wind and rain. But I would come to love the smell of badger balm sunscreen and unwashed underarmour.

You were quiet, mostly because the other boys were loud. “Playful” is what I wrote in my journal at the airport, but I meant that in the sense that professional outdoorsmen are, or gymnasts - their precision and levity in spite of the circumstances something to marvel at. Sport sunglasses guarding an elfish rosy face; your ears perked, listening. You would be at the front the group of us, or at the very back, talking with that tall, brown-haired friend whose name I can’t remember. Carrying an extra water bottle in case someone else ran out. I liked everyone on that trip, including myself, but I could see you were the kindest of any of us; the best at living with almost-strangers out of a backpack in the wild; the best at caring for people and the best at being alone.

I was counting down the days until my seventeenth birthday. I liked how much of a bad-ass this made me, to be hiking three weeks straight across the remote Colorado wilderness. I liked the taste of complete self-sufficiency, the sweet exhaustion, how simple pleasures magnified. These highs owed to ruthless physical exertion, however, where in the moment the 1-2-1-2 beat of my aching legs still walking left no space for the mind to romanticize. There were also plenty of opportunities to be terrified: of the coyote howls outside the tent or that the crampon nails beneath my boots weren’t enough to prevent a thousand-foot fall. And while the starkness of the landscape often lent me a cosmic awe (4 am pee break - moonless sky - deep stars down to the horizon), other times the total lack of human civilization lent me the sense of an indifferent universe. A nightmarish emptiness. It made me glad for the couple of nights when the group of us had layed our sleeping bags in plain air when the weather was dry, talking about our lives into the cosmos until we fell asleep.

There was a day you waited behind to hike with me. I was lagging again, can’t remember why:  maybe it was a bee’s nest, maybe homesickness. It might have begun with crying, or rain. We had been camping near a small forest beside a green, below a towering, remote cliff of rock that felt singularly indifferent to my home and family. As we walked, the terrain changed quickly from forest to hills of white, as stark as the moon, distance distorted by the sheer lack of anything between us and the jagged horizon. You, me, and that red-haired guide. You talking, you listening intently, and snow melting into water melting into rock.

It must have been less than a week later when we arrived at base camp in Marble, Colorado. You were already standing there when I crossed the finish line to hoots and claps, there with your clipboard and bandanna, imitating the guides. Under a great big house was laid out a feast sandwiches and chips, amid a clearing of grass, surrounded by an aspen forest.  

I took my first shower in weeks. We set up our tarps in an enclave a short walk from the fire pit, not far from the house. A campfire was built and games were played. You set traps to catch chipmunks before disappearing into the woods with a Swiss army knife and scrap cardboard to fashion something, I couldn’t guess what.

When I saw you again, the fire had quelled to hot coals and you had drawings up and down your arms, a sharpie marker in your hand. I asked if you would give me one. And so then we were sitting by the waning fire, talking, as you stroked a mountain into my right foot. The evening grew darker as we talked about how we’d evolved, which felt so definitive back then. I said that I was braver and dirtier and less prissy this time than I had been in times before. I can’t remember what you said, but you must have been listening, the way you dragged that sharpie against my skin.

I avoided washing it in the weeks that followed. I wanted to keep this visible, bodily trace of where I had been, of what had happened there. I was proud of the dirt behind my ears, proud of my swollen knees. When I arrived at a pre-college program days later, the stuffy 16-year-old would-be lawyers who hadn’t just traversed the wilderness for three weeks straight would ask if it was a tattoo, and I would say no, although I liked the illusion that it was.  

But of course the mountain did fade, as did the swelling. The past nine years have seen its memory compress like sediment beneath the weight of everything else that has happened since, making you a mere grain in what was a thin sliver of my life, a bright flash of mica. After the trip I made a Facebook group for all of us, and there was a minimal amount of posting and messaging. But in time we would all de-friend each other, a sour modern ritual to say that there was no point of seeing each other’s prom photos if we would never see each other again in real life. A few days ago, I Googled your name on a whim. The obituary was third down the list.  

We can’t afford to be so extravagant with memories of the living, I know. But if past is all that’s left of you, I want to echo you back to you, or back out to the proverbial big wild space of river valleys and remote, towering peaks that meant more to me because you were there.

The next day was June 30. I was seventeen. The group of us had de-installed the tarp the night before so we could fall asleep in the open air, cradled on three sides by narrow trees and thick foliage. In the dark, we had talked about the constellations, freaked out about rustlings in the bushes, laughed playing truth or dare.

When I awoke at 5 am the air was crisp, the stars bright across the sunless sky. We packed our sleeping bags into their containers, the tarp and its sticks into its long bag, our belongings on our backs, our extra gear into the big house. We bid the clearing goodbye and headed down the hill.

It was morning by the time we arrived at the bus. Someone had set out a cake and the group sang happy birthday. We loaded our bags into the lower compartment. You handed me a cardboard card that you had everyone sign (“Congrats on another rotation around the sun!” wrote the red-haired guide). And then, a cardboard crown. In sharpie marker, extravagant letters spelled “Queen of the Peak” stuffed beneath the outline of a mountain ridge.

No books in the the shops are meant to be read in Obenia, only savored with the eyes and brushed through with the fingers. Pages only contain the beginnings of paragraphs, enough to just taste before moving on to yet another well-designed cover, the last forgotten. Beautiful facades with doors engraved with cherubs and lions open to empty concrete lots. Smells arise independently, without any reference to something which could be consumed. Stores are empty of produce save for in the windows, wherein cheeses, meats and pears are replaced and disposed weekly to the dogs who have been known to disfigure each other for just a bite, being that they are not fed anything else.

It is a wonder how anyone is born in Obenia because no one has sex there except with their eyes. And since the people of Obenia are constantly in motion, stopping only to sleep, arousals and orgasms will occur as they are passing each other on the street to and from the city’s various gardens, historic Piazzas and display cases filled with glass miniatures of local architecture. It is not uncommon for shrieks of pleasure to sound from practically anywhere; thus these are usually ignored. I have heard of a woman who, having climaxed by the 3-second glance of a man standing by the produce window, collapsed sobbing and then fell asleep, only to wake up confused as to where she was, and the appearance of he who provoked her.

John Gasparach

two from the sketchbook. 

1. a night in aix - always those serpentine streets, their destinations masked, the windows with a knowing gaze

“But this fundamental notion was instilled: Imagination makes form, and form is the exploration and cultivation of the limits of freedom; form is the fruition of choice as an expression of limit. The relation between the freedom to chose and the limits of choice was a relation of judgement, the basis of a morality anchored in ethics; it was, so we were taught, essential to democracy”

“[Art] was the social element, the link that might allow individual insight to be exposed to the strangeness of the other, and then, through familiarity, to bring that strangeness into the communal.”

“Artists had a job to do: to intercede and subvert, on one hand, and to maintain and augment, on the other. The former aspect would be a vigilance against received notions of the Right, the Fair, the Good, especially when used for advancement (for power), political, social, economic or aesthetic; the latter had to do with respecting and caring for lines of legacy, to keep fresh earlier artistic expressions and their historical bearings. The context of an art object gives it cultural meaning; once it has been cut away (a flower in a vase), it quickly devolves into a commodity, lending itself to consumer ambitions, institutional as well as individual.” 

But the more she encountered the painting she noticed in fact this tiny, flailing, inconspicuous Icarus was decisive in the composition, providing each averted glance, each shift in scale with its reason. The ballooning of the ship’s sails, for one. Call it the wind, but such a spherical seaward surge could be incited by nothing less than an actual kick, that diagonal shift of the legs, a burst of energy issued from a skyward palunk down to water. Additionally, how the shepherd’s aversion of his gaze, away from the tragedy (instead toward his sheep, and up to the sky) alerted us to its existence. And the man in the red blouse in the foreground, pushing his cart horse down the steps that snaked away from the ocean? The cropped version of the picture emphasized how his round black head united the ground and sky, steadying the composition’s recessions in space onto the flat plane of the canvas. But his eyes, indeed any hint of a facial expression was suppressed under that head - what of that? What was the point of all this? The answer, whatever it was, was in the tiny, hidden legs of Icarus. Without them these moments were just devices of color in fictive space, no more.