SIGHT UNSEEN

By Allan Graubard

Collages by Gregg Simpson

When Gregg Simpson asked me to collaborate on a new work -- his collages, my texts -- he mentioned he would send his collages to me. I thought about it for a moment and replied this way: "Don't send the collages. Just send the titles; that's enough." So he did, so I wrote these texts to his titles, and here, with his collages, is SIGHT UNSEEN.

New Terrain is Old Terrain

The Delta region whose waters pour into the Gulf has borne many multiform creatures through the centuries. Human and animal, bird and insect, fish and crustacea have each come under its spell with striking adaptations to this mercurial environment. Whether to facilitate movement on the ground, flight in the air or depth under water, there is little in regard to anatomy that has not changed to suite. A local hunter who lives most of the year in a watershed swamp has grown thin-veined webs between his toes to enhance balance on the spongy ground. A black catfish has generated a bony, horned protuberance just above its eyes to mesmerize prey with. A Jackbird has diminished in girth to elude predators by diving faster and soaring swifter while an orb-weaving spider has sprayed across its web a perfume that mimics mating scents in its diminutive world, and there are many more examples.

What this means when considered as a totality, the various differences between animate creatures completing the rapport that defines them individually, shimmers just out of reach – a mirage in whose circumlocutions fact and fancy mingle.

As a citizen of these realms, among others who have come and left their mark before me and others most certainly to do the same after me, I expect nothing less.

And, of course, there are some creatures – no doubt, from each species – who, for reasons of their own, not only replicate these kinds of mutations but do so with great success, so that they seem ever more natural, even to the point of one species infusing another with an external or internal form – sentinel reciprocations that heighten the stakes for each and every one of us attuned to it.

Is this why there are poets who mistake their metaphors for truths and scientists for whom wonder is a bridge to commensurate discoveries?  Is this why there are sparrows, in a rain pool or pond, that suddenly exchange their tufted heads for stellar combustions in the constellation Albertus Magnus, which commands during winter nights? Is this why there are dung beetles who curtsey before the great termite mounds that rise from the dryer uplands then lunge out to gather the soft fecal matter expunged from the nest, molding it into globes to lay their eggs in? Is this why an Oregon salmon transplant, having finally returned to its birth harbor, begins to think like a schizophrenic from Kronstadt circa 1921, with all the odds stacked against it and death a clean finale?

I believe the answer to each of these examples is yes although I have little time or instrumentation to prove the point.

No matter. The perceptible world, so quantum mechanics tells us, is not as we embrace it.

This incertitude has its charms.

These charms their resplendence.

One further comment: Given the distinctions within this realm, equal to or more than those gained through descriptions of them, the act of writing takes on something of their animous. Words convulse, glitter, evaporate, reanimate, corporealize, convex, deracinate. Meaning follows and, while still compelling on its own, gains something more: sonic, even musical resonance that fabulates, one vowel or consonant at a time. And language, however quotidian it was beforehand, flashes with utopian salts – the better to eat clouds by; clouds that rise from the vernal Earth.

Putrefaction Ritual

In the Merida Mountains of Venezuela, which arc in the northwest quadrant of the country just south of Lago de Maracaibo, there is a curious custom that its ancient indigenous peoples followed. It involves several rituals performed over a dead body. Seemingly, it did not matter whether that body were human, animal, bird or fish. Archeological evidence on that score is fairly complete. What we don’t know is just what happened and the sequence of each ritual. Nonetheless, putrefaction is key. 

As the dead creature putrefies, so too do the four organic offerings that surround it, each geometrically placed above, on each side and below; when vectored forming a diamond-like shape. Dog teeth, fingers, neck vertebrae, paws, sea shells, seeds woven into small circular mats and other brief constructions are used in this manner to complete the circuit. The shape of the diamond no doubt qualifies the putrefaction of the dead creature, both framing and isolating it from the surrounding area.

Musical values also enter into this custom. Archaeologists have found primitive pipes carved from animal bones near enough to the burial to counter more cautious appraisals of their purpose. Perhaps devotees played those pipes during the ritual and then left them as tribute, a final salute to the transformation of life and regeneration to death and putrefaction. 

Not long ago I was invited to a performance of one of those pipes, which time and erosion had not appreciably damaged. A classical flautist had determined its range – two octaves – and, with embouchure, its note scale. Played in a concert hall, which amplified the modest tone of the pipe, something that would not be possible in nature, unless played in a valley that supported echoes, an ancient lyrical music, simple and rich, enchanted me.

Was this music a means for the dead creature to pass into putrefaction or was it less symbolic, something done to end the ritual for those who practiced it? I suppose I will never know.

On my last trip to the Merida Mountains to continue my research, not so much in ancient customs and rituals now as their survivals in culture today, my colleague – whom I will not name – gave me a pipe dating back three millennia. She told me that I deserved the memento and would, in time, learn to play it. She was right. I play it when pondering the putrefaction ritual, and why, given its recurrence in this area, it was so important over so long a period of time. The organic diamond form around the dead body resonating with faint, deliquescent vibrato....

Cave of the Mandarins

Adroit cartographers over the centuries have learned to communicate by inserting discrete visual clues or codes into their maps. An expert in the discipline can pick them out and, from time to time, discussion about them has entered into scholarly discourse, even if the practice is more playful than serious. Scholars must laugh like the rest of us.

That they do so amidst arcane analyses for a small audience comes as just another  flourish in an otherwise routine culture that the academy prizes.

Recently, linguists from the University of Modena, Italy, have applied new translation techniques to this exclusive tradition. Coupling algorithms refined to detect subtext and structure in comparative groups of visual signs with newly conceived oneiric interpretations, they have produced a quixotic yet compelling narrative that has unearthed some disturbing values. 
 
Maps portray landscapes, natural and urban. They also portray something of the dreamlife that unconsciously goes on when awake, and which, however much cartographers guard against it, seeps into their work. This does not mean that their maps are incorrect. They aren’t, given the historical period in which they drew their maps and the information they had to draw them. It does mean, however, that cartographers knew or felt or intuited, as they drew, that the line, circle, squiggle or vector spoke to them in a language that the clues or codes they left on the map referred to.

Here, though, is what our linguist group has found.

Figured bodies of land or water, outlined and inset with geographic features – such as plains, lakes, rivers, highlands, mountains, valleys, islands and the like – provoke erotic images; a tendency quite natural to us and which, I must admit, is a predilection of my own. When viewed straight on or obliquely, images emerge. And however blurred or haphazard they might appear at first, a kind of latent visual subtext, more pronounced here, less pronounced there, they slowly clarify and then, as if part of the pulsation that keeps us alive, disappear. A slow natural flickering subsumes the map. Suggestive couplings, routine seductive poses, wide glistening ecstatic eyes, moist curving lips, full breasts, an erect penis, a tangled vagina, the bare shoulder that slopes to the top of the arm, a hand with long reaching fingers, the slope of the ankle, a turned wrist, a sweaty cheek and other anatomical signs, many of which, beyond their status as cultural clichés, suddenly compel; transforming the map into a palimpsest of desire, both compassionate and cruel. Apparently, the visual clues or codes that cartographers inset into their maps attest to this unique facility, this envisioning, by drawing our attention to different areas whose boundaries interact. And what was once a recognizable geographic shape, complete in itself, alters.

The terrestrial cartography of surficial bodies becomes a medium that allows viewers to see, as it rises and as it passes, what attracts them most in this infectious momentum. The study group has also noted an eccentric disposition that figures, not humans, but animals in rut as well as large insects whose mating choreographies are as complex as they are savage, with death and ingestion a concomitant outcome; the female its dominatrix. Whether or not the translation of other animate creatures into visible images will occur, how they accord with their roles in nature, what sex leads and what sex follows, which is prey to instinctual hunger, whether or not mimicry, masking and nurturance claim their pedigree are questions, surely among others yet defined, for further study.

One result, however, is fairly clear: The envisioning that researchers have developed leads them and us into realms, both imaginary and real, that refract individual passions while valorizing anew our capacities in mapping. At the same time, the technique is a risky one, especially when it prompts the viewer to enact what he or she has seen without the usual cautions in place, preferably in a palace built for that purpose or, if lacking, then on any stage suitable for what’s to come, luxurious or plain, large or small. 

Saved at Last

Yesterday, the Department court ordered that the body of one, Gaston Thibeaux, be exhumed from its grave, illegally dug at the bottom of the levee near the curve in the river, and reinterred in hallowed ground. Catholic by birth, and as tradition has it, an altar boy along with his brothers, Frederic and Darceney, when Gaston finally came of age and took his place in society his manias and behavior had changed – for him the better, for us the worse; but then that really depends on who you are. Pimp, thief, pirate, card shark, burglar, bigamist, impresario, embezzler or murderer, these were the stages he passed through and ever returned to.

With poor parents who eked out a living insufficient to feed and house their three sons in clean surroundings, despite their rundown neighborhoods, and schooling an eccentric affair at best, Gaston did what he could get away with whenever the chance arose and whenever he made that chance his own.

Quick to seize on new possibilities, whether of female flesh or the green that spells “dollars,” Gaston prospered or seemed to. The latter distinction he earned by his wiles, yes, but also by his talent in masking; quite simply, expressing virtues he did not in fact possess or believe in. Appearance being the arbiter of taste and success in business, Gaston’s business, however that might turn, rarely let him down.

Within or outside of the law, his projects gained the kind of prosperity that he could indulge in. With lavish parties thrown for friends, sailings into the Gulf of Mexico on his yacht, which at 46 feet was just long enough and antique enough to envy, especially by those he had yet to invite, his social standing rose, placing him squarely in harm’s way. Make no mistake, money and prestige – which he adored, however they came – did offer shelter from the storms that blew through the city, social and natural.  

From his girls he had gathered a bank roll that opened uptown doors and poker stakes, and all their cigar and gin-mixed winnings. Add in what he stole from different safe deposit boxes, whose entrance codes he filched, and there you have it. Exactly how he got the codes was not something he ever revealed. As a gentleman, though, who appreciated irony, he always replaced what he took with counterfeits so poorly rendered that their falsity was clear. No one could say that he left those boxes empty of the bonds they formerly held; however unusable they were.

From the real bonds, of course, money flowed as the city grew, soggy plains on which to build small plantations as quick collateral against potential losses. Then there were the several men and women he killed by bullet and blade, a necessary consequence to protecting his stash.

And this went on for quite a while until complaints from gilded families, patchworked though they were, hit pay dirt with the mayor, gearing up for another election. No matter that Gaston had played them all, mayor included, and did it so well that they enjoyed losing  -- a rare conclusion to a finely tuned game. But then Gaston was a pro in the art of the sham, a cheat in whose refinements his victims found their pleasure. Avarice was one thing; the fun of winning another, and yet another the despair found in losing, which Gaston also used to keep the entire affair from crashing too soon. He’d have a winning streak, lose some then win again – without fail.

When the police finally arrested Gaston, he went to jail willingly. He knew he’d come out on top however his trial went. He’d blast his way out of the courtroom if it came to it – easy enough in those days – then vanish among the islands, large and small, that stretched out from the coast for a final getaway south.

Of course, the police caught a minority on their run to Venezuela or Columbia, where extradition treaties did not exist. But the majority were rarely heard from again. The living they bought from their new country, if similar to what they fled, offered richer amusements. Led by endless supplies of sexual mates, heterosexual, homosexual, young, old, fat skinny, willing or unwilling, the latter the better to violate, the former impassioned enough and free enough with their passion to violate them – premiere inducements – vied with power hungry avatars set to consume their holdings the moment they could. The two groups kept them sharp enough to savor an ebullience they sometimes shared.

Gaston, not having the heart to follow along blindly, prizing above all his sense of self, the luxury he deserved by way of it, and gaining in excess what he needed to feed his desires, out lasted them all. 

When in his late 80s he keeled over and died one hot, humid July afternoon, the city devolved to a potent mix of sweat and bitters, Gaston had not a cent to his name.

A year earlier his gambling debts, which were themselves quite enormous, and a stock market crash, flattened his accounts. When he lost his several mansions and the acreage he had accumulated in different high-stakes crap games, that was that. Having enough in surplus to pay what he owed, and save something of the respect that others gave him, he thereafter lived on the largess of friends, who found to their delight that they could give as well as take, not having suffered too much from this or that scheme that Gaston thrived on.

As a corpse, Gaston’s escapades, once a magnet for conversation after the usual diatribes about race and patrimony, faded off quickly. Laid there in the city morgue, just another slab of meat, it was time to forget him. Nonetheless, in deference to his wit and joie du vivre, those same friends who had come to his aid when he needed it, decided to save him from the crematorium. They took his body by stealth, dug a shallow grave at the base of the levee, rolled him into it, and covered him with enough dirt to keep the vultures, dogs, and other scavengers at bay.

Then the late summer floods came and swept away the dirt above him; his right foot jutting up from the mud with just a bit of flesh hanging from the metatarsals -- a mangey blossom from a former time when Gaston called the shots.

Are we any the worse for playing along with Gaston as he wove his cunning webs, which we weave as we can – taking his amusements for our own – however wealthy or poor we are, with those we love or hate or, more simply, live with, fearing the solitude of living alone?

I think not.

Although Gaston did not in the end field a foolproof magic, in terms of morality or conduct, the grandiloquence with which he did it drew admirers and antagonists both, as much to drink from it as to magnify their own or lack thereof; his narcissism elevating theirs, his vanity a perfect excuse to try their luck at.

What could be better in this world of feints and shudders that makes us bleed, and in bleeding bleed to death?

You first.

Niagara Honeymoon

That night, unlike other nights, I woke near dawn.

I knew this and that’s all I knew: I had exhausted my luck. I lost. I was done.

Write me a letter when you get there. That’s what you told me. I didn’t. Time had morphed into wicker Esperanto on Elba. Twilit June settling on the island; all that heat and dust, the tide, those sharp rocky beaches. As if I were nowhere, the idiot neant in a face struck by coffee, a face in stark hot despair.

Was this a dream, my dream, despite my desire to forget it: Scene 3 -- the lip of the crag, waters ragging; whipped by the spray, toppling over…

I want to keep you close, superfluous, paltry...

Tintype binoculars wobble along the transept

There they are again: yellow sheep shivering under fluorescent bulbs.

Through that doorway, the slaughterhouse

.

Niagara honeymoon; that’s what the brochure said. I held it up to you, above me, your face the face of the moon.

But it was our face, not mine, that cinched to its nautical height the fictive flood, which you gave, breaking apart, your lips curling, teeth glinting, a nose like some shattered upland headstone.

Hope? 
 
No hope.

Don’t get me wrong. I just don’t like charades. And in truth, I don’t like you.

I never did.

Ritual

Suddenly, as if the light shifted into blue frondescence, I wandered back to that precious moment when I was born, emerging head-first from my mother’s cunt, slippery wet, first eyes opening, eternity my concubine years later when I found in a kiss that fateful lock, the transept where time returns to beginnings.

That was the start in whose slow violin clichés…

There were tears pinned to stars that flowed over us, night to night to night.

Take me in your arms, airless fairground, subtitle in which “I” am little more than a mirror, a mirror of wool split at the seams. 

 

Take me and forget me. You will be better off if you forget me. You might even reclaim the woman you were before I squeezed your liver and raised your breasts to Ecclesiastical heavens.

But maybe, just maybe, that’s what you want.

That, and an end note; the beginning with no end.

This fur, this shadowy furrow that flees from my feet…

Venus on the Moon

They tell me, in the song, that a woman cries out to the moon rising above a glimmering lake. And as the moon rises to its perihelion, the woman in the song opens her arms to the light that falls from the moon. But her sorrow remains. There is nothing that moonlight can do to calm the woman, and her cry extravasates.

They tell me that a woman will sing this song when her husband or lover has died or left her for someone else. The longing and hurt in the cry that compels the song is not something that singing can absolve either.

She sings of cruel truths and fickle passions, And the anger that scuttles her heart is relentless and useless.

They tell me that after she sings this song, the grieving wife, the wounded lover, understands just how much she has lost; gaining this loss that undoes her.

They call this song “Venus on the Moon,” and no one ever wants to sing it but they do. Things happen

They sing it.  

Vindication of Species

I don’t want to say anything, and this has nothing to do with poetry. I am sitting here in the nude on a hot humid summer night. The fan is whirring. The streets are quiet. I am tapping on these keys that make letters on a white screen. There is nothing more here. No hidden significance, no sur-text, no latent emotions, just this tapping. I will be doing this for the rest of my life. What more can I say? The words come. Simple quotidian words, neither rushed nor slow they come.

 

When this, our species, is at its end, I can assure you that someone will be composing words and watching them turn into vapor…

.

Now my wife is getting ready for bed. And when she lies down, nude, like me, she will be another word. Not one I have written but one she has written, for herself, for her son, for her sisters, her mother, brother, friends, and all those students that she teaches. She will be the word that they form in their mouths when they speak of her.

The same for me.

Is this vindication?

Perhaps it is. Then again perhaps it isn’t.  

The Door to Infinity

The door to infinity opens to a corridor that runs below the street; a walkway for pedestrians, some of whom are asleep, some of whom are awake. Whatever state they are in, when passing each other they provide for each other. They emit whatever distinction they carry with them – a dream perhaps when sleeping, a memory perhaps when awake -- and absorb another’s. Their passing also charges a surplus to the interchange that keeps the corridor in tact -- for them and for other pedestrians to come. 

Now the corridor is wide enough and high enough to allow pedestrians to pass each other without incident. At the same time, its construction – by whom or what agency I cannot say – places those within it at least close enough to enable the interchange. A brief shiver that traverses the shoulders, neck and head signals the moment. Point of view also plays into this, as does fantasy. Tales tell of two pedestrians -- one coming, one going – who suddenly merge, separate and continue on their way. Whether or not they do merge, and what happens to each having merged, is certainly a question to resolve. 

That the structure has existed for millennia, very much part of our history, is reason enough to celebrate. Not because “infinity” is a place a pedestrian can reach and say, definitively, this is where I am; this, my infinity, is also yours. Rather, the age of the corridor, its prestige in society, the various cultural forms that it gives birth to – in scholarship, the arts, literature, music, etc. – the reciprocal coming and going, the near tidal increase and decrease of pedestrians in the corridor over time give to us a continuity we simply can’t do without; or haven’t up to this point done without -- which is probably a more truthful way of putting it.

That all this occurs below ground is another inducement for wonder, especially because above ground, on the street, amidst the quotidian Hurley-burly, that other place, unseen yet poignantly felt, attracts, no matter how “down there” it is – as though submerged lateral movement had acquired a marvelously rich resonant charm in itself, and in which and by which we are able to live just a little more intensely.

Recently, an effort to rationalize access to the corridor by mapping its aboveground entrances has largely failed. Once identified, a doorway thereafter vanishes as if it weren’t there at all and, in fact, had never been there. I suppose these occurrences speak to factors in the infinite that elude us, derived from yet unexplained or ever inexplicable encounters.

Nowhere to be found after having been found, the door to the infinite finds us when we need it or when we least expect it. And when it appears, there is every reason to open it and begin a descent as others, having ended their walk, ascend, re-entering a world that they can now revive.

 

Dance of the Infidels

In a smoky room on Manhattan’s west side midtown, two pianists ponder the bridge to a trim new tune. It’s late afternoon and the sun angles in through a break in the curtains. One is sitting on an old leather arm chair, eyes closed, humming the introduction. The other is at the piano tuned to notes that he plays in silence, fingers poised above the keys. He does this when he’s unsure, yet listening to the urges rising within him; urges that he usually transforms so well into music.

This goes on for quite a while until his colleague snaps his fingers, stands up, steps to the piano, leans down and plays two chords. They sound awkward enough when isolated but in tandem add up to something that the tune can use; as much to offset its harmonic as to tip the rhythm forward.

The originator of the tune then jots down the notation, looks at it for a moment, whistles between his teeth, lips barely open, and plays the thing out.

That night, after the first set at the club, while in the dressing room, the pianist tells his band that he’ll do the first song solo. It’s a new thing he’s written and he wants to try it out.

 

“I’ll play it. Then you all follow, drummer, bass, sax, trumpet. We’ll do the repertoire but start up in that order: drum solo, bass and drum duet, trio, quartet. Take as long as you want. Then I’ll join in.”

They have a few drinks, smoke a cigarette, snort some coke, talk a bit with several journalists who’ve dropped by with their ladies and lay back for a few more minutes. Then its curtain call.

The pianist walks on stage, sits down on the piano bench, hands in his lap and waits for the crowd to quiet. He waits a little longer, placing his hands on the keys. Then he begins. When he gets to the bridge he realizes again how perfect it is; just what the tune needed; keeps the opening and closing sections off-balance enough to entice deeper listening. And he plays on as he wrote it: for a memory, one of several memories, that kept returning a few afternoons just as he was waking. Whether they were real or not, formed by events he experienced in sleep or by day, when he was conscious enough to know he was awake, isn’t something he can say.

He doesn’t split hairs on such things either. He accepts them for what they are and how they present, and enjoys or dislikes them, or some portion of both, then moves on. 

Be that as it may, he senses that this memory, those memories, orbit about a dreadful sun that burns up through a vortex composed of clouds, rain, dust and bits of petrified lightning whose thin blue magnetic borders crackle lowly.

Amidst the centripetal force of the vortex, which he no doubt creates, if only to stabilize the tale that this memory, these memories, tell, he sees this: He and his wife are walking along a trail beside a deep gorge. A body of water -- river, lake, or pond;  it’s too small to be a lake from so high up yet it could be – glitters far down at  the bottom of the gorge. Transfixed by the glittering light reflected off the water, they forget where they are. The trail climbs and falls, turns and rises again toward a summit as far above as the water in the gorge below. 

Sudden cool breezes appear and vanish. Time escapes them. Their thoughts dwindle to the regular sway of their walk, the faint signature of their clothes rubbing together, the shallow pulse of their breathing. It is as if they have been here for as long as they have been alive. It is as if the trail, centuries old, were a medicant medium and they its servants. It is as if the scene they give birth to, this scene from that memory, these memories, conveys them to a second life, a separate parallel vivacity that in sharing, he absorbs, and as he does, she does, along with the scene from that memory, these memories.

It all happens ever so slowly.

He knows then that he’s been playing, that he is playing the new tune he wrote with that bridge his colleague came up with, and that the entire thing is just about to end.

He ends it, sits up, folds his hands into his lap and closes his eyes.

The audience, first silent, not knowing how to respond, stunned a bit by the journey the tune has taken them on, breaks into scattered applause.

He swivels around.

“Dance of the Infidels,” he says, “a new tune.”

Then the drummer walks on with his sticks and brushes, sits at his kit, pauses and starts in…

          Gregg Simpson and Allan Graubard

           Bowen Island, BC; /  New York, NY

.About the Writer and the Artist

Allan Graubard’s poems, fiction, theater works, and literary and theater criticism are published or performed in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Chile, U.K., and the E.U., with translation into numerous languages. He has appeared as reader, guest artist, and lecturer in the U.S. (New York, Washington D.C., New Orleans and Lafayette, Louisiana, Wesleyan, Connecticut, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boulder, Colorado); Canada, (Toronto, and Montreal); U.K. (London and Oxford); Croatia (Dubrovnik and Hvar); and Bosnia Herzegovina (Sarajevo).
 
His books include: Into the Mylar Chamber: Ira Cohen, Western Terrace, A Crescent by Any Other Name, Targets, And Tell Tulip the Summer, Roma Amor, Fragments  from Nomad Days, Ascent of Sublime Love, and more. He is co-editor with Thom Burns of Invisible Heads: Surrealists in North America – An Untold Story.

Theater works include:  For Alejandra, Woman Bomb/Sade, and with Lawrence D. “Butch” Morris: Modette and Erotic Eulogy.

Born in Ottawa in 1947, Gregg Simpson grew up in the rainforest environment of the west coast. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Canada, the U.S., 
Europe and South America and is included in over 100 private and public collections internationally. His work has been included in the major exhibitions and books on
ontemporary Surrealism. 

In 2012 and 2013 a retrospective of his work from 1970-’75 toured museums in Spain and Portugal. In May, 2000 he had a solo exhibition in a castle in Italy which became the subject of a BRAVO TV television documentary, A New Arcadia, The Art of Gregg Simpson: 

www.greggsimpson.com/Videos.html

Simpson works in the tradition of abstract surrealism. His paintings combine automatism with elements of landscape and the figure. They are improvised from simple charcoal outlines and then combined with the direct application of paint onto raw canvas. The meaning of the forms he creates changes with each viewer.