Ars Gratia Artis

Interstate 40

William Timberman4 Comments

For Charles Bukowski

You already have your plans
your image of the women coming to you
blond
and used to the water
you smell salt in the air
and money
when you close your eyes
and you decide to come

You pack your toothbrush
you try it on your friends
you stop for cigarettes in a gas station

And it takes you coming out again
the wind
the way the trucks pass

I think how you stand there
feeling for your wallet or your breathing
striking a light then
inhaling
as you step down off the curb

They do it the same way in the movies
first with the wind
and then

a Greyhound sign
a kid with a botched haircut
and a dufflebag maybe
two girls seen only once
laughing and turning away
outside the terminal

Inside
a drunk and his paper suitcase
get tagged and separated
one ticket apiece
someone puts his last nickel
in the pinball machine
They get it right
the producer
the director
thin as it is and sad as it is
they get it right

And we sit there
watching the places we start from
the places we wind up in
sooner or later
pass over us
and no one blinks
no one wakes up afterwards

Everyone but everyone
a moviegoer
Even the drunk great once
at following the hero and the waving grass
at stepping over the derelict
lightly
with the rest of us
Before the bottle took him
and the fog inside him rose
and left him a six-part
ticket to the coast
and forty maybe fifty cents
The westbound express
is now boarding passengers
at gate five
Places everyone

It was
just like in the movies
the way I remember it
There was hardly anything
left of him then
except for the eyes
except for the way he sat there
with the light on him
looking out
and me across the aisle the whole time
thinking

“It all comes easy to him
the storefronts and railroad crossings here
the lumber yards
car bodies
bars
it all comes easy”
But for me
this is how it is in the towns
The children run
and you pass them
At the crossroads
faces
women’s faces most of them
turning away from you
inside the glass
outside the glass
the same

I have never found it easy
I find it the way it is
the land like a flatiron there to here
the towns small
and broken at the hinges
and wind
and too much light
all of it out of our reach now anyway
no matter what my friends tell me
who rub their hands together
and the dust escapes them
who walk through looking at scenery

No
I have no respect for the land I think
I think of you
shielding your eyes when you travel
the sun at noon
standing on the broken ridgelines

“Half chalk” you think
“half fire
standing like that…”
But you go on following electric wires
letting your eyes glaze
your weight
shift a little
and when the weather changes
you watch the Indian beside you
the one with the crewcut and bow tie
fold his hands

He’s made the trip before
this Indian
or his uncle has
or his sister
Forgetting the hawk
the shadow where their horses go to water
forgetting the slap of the wind
and the broken rock standing like that
they pack overnight
and make their way here with you

Here
they all come here to California
where everything
stays close to the heart
everything works
so they think
and they come
I know the way they come to it finally
leaving the smell of sweat and alcohol behind
the uneasy breathing
They roll their magazines
and step down blinking
in their new sunglasses
they get picked up
or walk toward town against the wind
in pairs
alone
And when I look again
cypresses and redwoods cover them
girls with copper earrings
lemon groves
earthquakes
fire in the hills
money
(if they’re lucky)
money
I know
I have been here ten years now
doing what they all do when they need to eat
or stop for a smoke
or be remembered

I check the mail
put the water on for coffee
find my way downtown
I come home at night
and open up my curtains over
California palm trees
California-loving-the-water

“And when it’s like this”
I think
“I could come to it still
the way they do
the way you do
all heart and teeth”

But after ten years
the suntan oil and chlorine and success
run in me like a river
cheap thrills cheap thrills on signs
burning under the offramps
acres of carpeted hallways
doors with numbers on them
and regret
something like regret always part of it
come morning

It weighs too much with me
the traffic and the leaden air
love
the way my neighbors work at it upstairs
with the lights on and the TV going
all this time
and it never changes

There’s a swimming pool in Burbank
like they say
a yacht
a white sand beach in Venice
lettuce in the desert

And in Hollywood a man I admire
stumbles in his bedroom
Drunk
undoubtedly drunk again
and I think
“Night
and his arms around it
night
and the wind in it
making something for his middle age and mine”
while people pull up in their cars outside
and park
and walk away
while I sit up half the night
with a light on still
and curtains blowing
listening to the palms outside my window
bend and rattle
and it weighs with me

It weighs with me
exactly
the way you’d imagine

Point Lobos, 1969

William Timberman

And if you had
What you thought you had
When the trees
Turned with you
And the times
Out of all time
Came
And you could see what they said
What they all of them said
Was true

No measuring here
No defense necessary
Sing with me now
No iron intrude between us

Break your vow here
And no fire burns
The way we burn already
The living and the dead
Together
Cold fire
Even when
the lot of us
are ash

I will tell you
Did you think that I’d
Forbear to tell you
How we are?
How
Broken by the knowledge
Broken
All the pieces find
Their voices here
Speak here
Thigh-deep in lupine
Dead-white
Cypress arms and fingers
Over us
And our eyes on the gull

Die Amis haben unser Unterbewusstsein kolonisiert*

William Timberman

*The Yanks have colonized our subconscious (A quote from Wim Wenders’ film Im Lauf der Zeit)

Well, you may be old now, I told myself at sixty, but at least you haven’t started reading obituaries. Now that I’m past seventy, I know damned well that it doesn’t matter whether we read them or not. We have Twitter, we have Facebook. Unwelcome news will get to us.

When the unwelcome news of Harry Dean Stanton’s passing arrived on my iPhone a few mornings ago, just ahead of the overnight summary of White House twitter atrocities, I did what we do — I winced and scrolled up to breathless estimates of impending nuclear war. That evening, though, I poured a second beer, dimmed the lights in my living room, dug Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas out of my essential films library, and watched it again after who knows how many years.

The Sam Shepard screenplay was as laconic, as precise as ever, Ry Cooder’s guitar licks were as haunting as ever, and there, at the center, the Old Man was as magnificently himself as ever, even though he wasn’t nearly as old as I’d remembered. When he died, I said to myself, something about what it means to be an American died with him.

But what is it about these Germans? Wim Wenders, Percy Adlon — who gave them permission to put Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinsky together in the lonesome American Southwest, or Jack Palance and Marianne Sägebrecht, for that matter? What kind of muse, what kind of genius is this?

Yeah, well…. It’s a long story. If you live in Arizona, as I do, it’s impossible to miss the German cousins in our midst. Go anywhere around here in the summer months and there they are, seemingly impervious to sunstroke, peering into their guidebooks for directions to the local Sehenswürdigkeiten, more familiar with our landmarks — even the ones they haven’t seen yet — than we are ourselves. I used to wonder, now and then, if there could possibly be as many Germans in all the other deserts of the world — the Sahara, the Gobi, the Kalahari, the Atacama, the Negev — as there were in the Sonora and Mojave.

With all due respect to the insatiable German curiosity about the world we share, I doubt it. For all sorts of historical reasons — never mind the two world wars — our national mythologies harbor semi-disclosed affinities that appeal to both our populations more or less equally. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we’re constantly in and out of each others’ pockets, sometimes with a pessimism bordering on the morbid, but more often than not with the kind of cross-cultural fertility that levels empires, confuses dialects, and assists in the birth of things no single individual could ever have dreamed of.

Case in point: Wim Wenders. The French famously lead the rest of Europe in complaining about us, but Wenders, who knows us far better, gives us the benefit of a doubt that admittedly we don’t always deserve. It’s not exactly a get-out-of-jail-free card, though, this Paris, Texas of his. It’s an admonishment, if a gentle and sympathetic one, of our chimerical American dreams. Fair play to him. Having colonized the German subconscious, as Wenders himself so elegantly put it, we can hardly complain when a German artist of his stature returns the favor.

Someone should arrange to show Paris, Texas to the pig* vile creature currently posing as our president, not that it would do any good. He’s as American as I am, but he’ll never have any idea what that actually means, let alone honor it in his actions. How much better off would we be, do you think, if the qualities that Harry Dean Stanton embodied in his best performances informed the day-to-day actions of our politicians? In the meantime, all I can say is that I’ll miss that grand old man, and so will a lot of other people, Wim Wenders fans or not.

*It’s long after the fact, but I just can’t let this stand as originally written. Pigs have good reasons for being how they are. Trump doesn’t. I’m not sure he deserves all the blame for what he’s become, but at this point how he got to be what he is matters less than putting him in a place where he can’t do any more harm to anyone who hasn’t volunteered for his abuse.

Mortem Confundit Magus*

William Timberman

Businessmen say going forward instead of in the future. Our Secretary of State says that Muammar al-Qaddafi must acknowledge what the International Community requires of him. A respected liberal economist, defending the necessity of nuclear power plants, remarks that it’s unlikely that the Chernobyl accident produced more than 50,000 excess deaths world-wide. He seems to take it for granted that this simple statistic will rekindle our faith in Atoms for Peace.

Why does no one in public life sound like this any more?

It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

The wizard can bare his breast to the assassin’s dagger without blinking, and the Son of God can carry his own cross with confidence to Calvary because their mortal forms are mere teaching points. Abraham Lincoln understood this in a way that our present leaders do not. Secure in the vast powers at their disposal, they seem to have forgotten that they’re nevertheless as mortal as the rest of us, and that, in the end, their powers are only on loan to them. We can’t afford such a luxurious forgetfulness; we have to deal with the consequences of their actions every day. It wouldn’t hurt, I think, to remind them of that fact from time to time.

*The wizard confounds death — from the 1981 fantasy film, Dragonslayer — a wonderful bit of whimsy, part Sorcerer’s Apprentice, part Arthurian legend. This line is spoken by no less grand a thespian than Sir Ralph Richardson himself, in the role of an old wizard with a flair for Shakespearean declamation even in Latin.

Luxe, Calme, et Volupté

William Timberman25 Comments

This blogging stuff is hard work, especially when you’re trying to force your way uphill against what Paul Rosenberg calls our hegemonic discourse. For myself, I’d just like to recover a little of the America that an earnest young teacher once told me about in a junior high civics class, and my parents still believed in after ten years of depression and five more of world war. I hate seeing it sneered at by morons and sadists like Rush Limbaugh, or turned into a right-wing Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by shrunken souls like John Yoo and Dick Cheney.

I need to go look at some art. Not Delacroix, I think…especially not La Liberté guidant le peuple. Not today, anyway. Maybe Manet — I always liked Un bar aux Folies Bergère. I actually got to see it once, when I was in New York some twenty or so years ago. An older couple, friends-of-friends who had tickets to the VIP opening of the retrospective at the Met, found themselves with a prior commitment, and so sent me instead.

The exhibition filled a very large hall. Every painting by Manet that I’d ever seen in a book was hanging there, along with many I hadn’t known about at all. And there I was, just me and twenty or so other art lovers, walking from station to station with our eyes bugged out. It was one of those rare occasions when you understand what privileges are actually available to the privileged.

Beautiful refractions of a very mundane world, made all the more beautiful when you can see the actual brushstrokes which composed them — that’s what I thought once I was standing in front of it. And that black, that radiant black…the color that Manet claimed wasn’t one. I felt sorry for the young woman behind the bar, though — trapped, distracted, unaware that the painter is making her less beautiful, and the world more, as though to prove that the dignity of labor is overrated.

Once upon a time, I might have asked her what time she got off work. Now, I think of myself as one of her less-favored customers — old, fat, loud, and overly fond of pastis. Still male, though, unfortunately. Maybe I should consider pastis the old man’s virtue rather than his vice. That would be acceptable, I think, especially if I could sit at the back of the room and see what Manet saw.

But no, not the bar after all. When all is said and done, it does the woman an injustice, perhaps because Manet went to such lengths to disguise his reverence for her.

Matisse, I think. You know the one. Women unencumbered. Women and light. I think I might have caught a glimpse of Digby there, out of the corner of my eye, but not a sign of Ann Coulter, or Michelle Malkin. They don’t show up anywhere unless they’re paid.

Ninety-nine Cents Worth

William Timberman5 Comments

Compared to the gaseous diffusions of our political discourse these days, the offerings of our songwriters are often a marvel of directness.

If you want to know what I mean, do yourself a favor and go listen to John Mayer’s gem Gravity, from his album Continuum. I won’t quote the lyrics here — fair use and all that — but if you’re in need of a blues hymn to shelter you for a couple of minutes from the storms of bloviation whipped up by our on-all-the-time media, you can’t do any better.

Trust me.