The Killing Floor

Time Capsule: The Art Of Bradford Fuller + Message From NYC

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

 

The Art of Bradford Fuller


Photographs by Bradford Fuller on exhibit at Edge of Maine Gallery in Brownfield are of quality one would expect to see in New York City, at once stunning & absorbing, works of art each one. Untitled, but set out, hung, & ruled by geography. One wall points in black & white toward landscapes of Baja & San Miguel de Allende; compass turns in another direction = cathedral façade & beautiful portraits of native women in Delores Hildalgo; until eventually one gets a long-distance vista of San Cristobal de las Casas. Color explodes, as only Mexico can at the largest gallery wall holding eight striking shots of storefronts & the local comings & goings of the people of Tapachula. All these photographs make one wish to “Go!” Or, perhaps to have been with him thirty-two years ago? What a road trip!!

In 1979 Fuller bartered for a Sinar 4X5 view camera, which “composes images on gridded ground glass that shows the world upside-down & reversed.” I don’t know the technical details involved so much in his own explanation that, “Light is reflected through the German Schneider lens where you use a magnifying 8x loupe to get a sharp focus,” but do know that the effect the machine produces in this artist’s hands is one of such depth & complexity (warp & weave the texture of canvas & paint!), that one can begin to understand the primitive fear of camera stealing Souls. Evidence here Fuller’s uncanny eye caught the culture there first-hand, & perfectly in his three-month trek. Souls? If only to set them free, again, right before our eyes thirty-two years later.

Fuller set out from Gloucester, Massachusetts with Peter Ruchman, former assistant to both Arnold Newman & Richard Avedon. “Starting out, we planned to pay homage to Tina Modotti.” The painter/photographer/designer (he has designed covers to four of my books) mapped the trip from Long Island, driving straight to New Orleans, & Brownsville, Texas, where car breaks down, busses to Mexico City, then San Miguel de Allende. Couldn’t help thinking of Kerouac’s On the Road, where only yesterday, too, I learned that Neal Cassady died in San Miguel, at 41, after leaving a party, disappearing in the dark, & found the next day unconscious by the railroad tracks. Fuller’s trip didn’t end there, however.

After meeting the woman who would be his future wife (Rebecca Jenkins) & at some point splitting up with Ruchman, he treks (either by foot, carrying a tent, or by small plane or ferry) to Veracruz, Tapachula, as well as the capital of Chiapas, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, then on to San Cristobal de Las Casas, where he’ll find & photograph, “Zinacantan Indians in traditional garb with Converse sneakers; Chamulas & Lacadons in their long woolen robes smoking hand-rolled cigars. Giants among men. They have been on the run since Cortez & now displaced from the jungle by ranchers.”

There is more to the story, including overnight ferry from Puerto Vallarta to Cabo at Baja, etc. however, all one needs to do is visit the gallery, (now through June) where the images synthesize a magical, heroic Mexican culture years ago, ancient, eternal, alive in the Art of Bradford Fuller.

Message from New York City

Back in January, knowing my new publisher, Geoff Gronlund, headed to New York City for a few days, I attempted to set up a lunch meeting for him with America’s greatest publisher, Barney Rosset, hoping Barney could share a few secrets concerning alternatives to mainstream publishing, (he always said he’d only publish those the others wouldn’t!) along with anecdotes from experiences with the writing of DH Lawrence & Henry Miller, or close relationships with Samuel Beckett, Joan Mitchell, etc., the list is long. I knew Geoff’s meeting Barney would mean as much to him as it did to me. However, a few days later Barney’s wife, Astrid, wrote to Geoff saying that they would have to postpone meeting because early that Monday morning Barney had to go to Columbia Medical for consultation about a heart procedure, & they needed to prepare for that meeting. Well, sad to say, the rest is literary history, what with Barney having passed away a short time later.

Geoff & I were invited to attend the memorial service held on Wednesday evening at the Great Hall at Cooper Union on East 7th Street. Astrid introduced a number of people, including Fred Jordan, Mia Yun, David Amram, + immediate family. Clips were shown from the film: Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press. Geoff & I drove down from Maine, having less than twenty-four hours in New York City. Earlier, Astrid asked if she could use an excerpt from my poem “Ode to New York City,” or whether I wanted to write something new for the special tribute issue of Evergreen Review. I told her that since the poem was already “out there,” I’d prefer to write something new, which I’ll link here.

The morning after the memorial celebration, & discussions about whether we could stay just another day before driving home to Maine, New York City seemed to send a mysterious message, when crossing Broadway at 72nd, a butterfly landed on the upper reaches of my pant leg, & clung there (I could feel spurs in three pairs of legs tug through denim!!), drawing a crowd of astonished (& older) women, among whom one from Brazil chanted, “It’s a gift from God! You will hear good news! Everything is from God!" Into native Portuguese: É um presente de Deus!! Você ouvirá notícia boa. Tudo é de Deus!! The gorgeous butterfly held on, opening & closing beautiful wings, escorting me halfway across Amsterdam Ave., where it finally let go & flew over my shoulder. Packed up the van, headed home, toting gifts.

FURTHER STUDY:

Bradford Fuller
Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press
Beutelspacher’s Butterflies of Ancient Mexico

Time Capsule: The Golden Days, Revisited

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


The Room
[Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, Polish-French, 1908-2001), 1947-8
Oil on canvas, 190.3 x 160.4 cm, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC]

The Golden Days, Revisited

What, as if the word Love wore down, tattered, uprooted from innocent origins as Eros? That's what I'm wondering as I sift through boxes of old papers looking for a paragraph written close to twenty years ago, when on many a lunch hour I traipsed across The Mall to the Hirshhorn Museum, to stand enthralled in front of both The Golden Days & The Room by Balthus hanging side-by-side. In the tenth box in the attic (of desire, as Williams calls it) inside another box containing 500 sheets of typewritten pieces, finally recover lone copy of paragraph titled, then, “The Golden Days.” It's not half bad, but I can see why I didn't let it out of my hands, other than to include it in a letter to a friend & mentor: The half-darkness equaling grey, March clouds, that Spring pours in & dissolves. The katabatic wind administering stones breath. Spring the dance, seed impulse. Sprout up, rain light! For us, no longer abundance, but to carry the finest hunger.

Those first four sentences don't amount to much. By the end of the piece, I draw comparisons between the archaic Mycenaean Kore sculpted in the 7th Century BC, “Lady of Auxerre,” now at the Louvre, & the visage of the young woman portrayed in the Hirshhorn's version of The Room.[Actually, two paintings exist with the same title, starkly different in content & effect.] Both women's hair plaited; smiles “archaic,” or secret, knowing. Today I returned to see what Guy Davenport had to say about Balthus: quotes Archilochus & Sappho, then waxes quite modern: In time, we will see Balthus as kin to Joyce on the one hand (our biological mandate civilized by a poetry of desire and its constraints), and Proust on the other (the tragedy of time illuminated by the beauty and wonder of being alive). To me the blonde in The Room back then was tantamount to tantalize. Wish I could run this version by him.

 

FURTHER STUDY:

Guy Davenoprt (1927-2005)

Time Capsule: The København Kitties

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


The Cat of the Mediterranean
[Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, Polish-French, 1908-2001), 1949
Oil on canvas, Private collection]

The København Kitties

It’s not that a writer ever abandons difficulties, nor that one wants to, knowing the brutal beauties lie there, in wait. However, in finally pulling oneself away from such monumental figures as Olson & Still for the past few months, one’s pleased to breathe a somewhat lighter air. Look around in appreciation of just that lightness. Possibly fostering another journey without stepping out the door: in correspondence with someone in London, both of us complaining about rain, when offhandedly I mention mussels for breakfast. He says the best he had were at the Chelsea Square Diner, of all places, while I respond, “Best we ever had were at La Mediterranée, Paris, avec Champagne, + more Champagne for dessert.” Now, of course, what drew us to that particular restaurant in the center of the Odeon long ago, if 1991 is, was that Balthus liked to think of himself as the “King of the Cats,” & after a delectable lunch there, painted the Cat of the Mediterranean. Quickly, from a discussion of gastronomic tastes to tastes in art, whereupon his tastes, my Londoner*, cannot abide the prepubescent erotic teasing Balthus offers up, while for me that feminine mystique springs forth as natural.

It’s funny, some go so far as to call Balthus a pornographer, & just days before this conversation a postcard fell out of a book I was reading. No kidding: just went to retrieve it from the night table, where it’s been propped up next to the white cat & Our Lady of Lourdes: Rembrandt’s, Femme au Bain, dite Bethsabée. This great nude at the Louvre, this sole image alone defends against all possible indictments of Balthus. Tell my friend in London that my longtime mentor Guy Davenport loved his work enough to write an entire book on the artist, calling up Collette, Kafka, Meyer Schapiro, Goya, & even Gertrude Stein & Claude Lévi Strauss to make a case for validity. Found Guy’s book next to separate volumes by Sabine Rewald & Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, both titled simply Balthus; Jane Harrison’s Themis; Bette Talvaccia’s Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture; Aldis Browne Fine Arts, NYC, 1981, Edvard Munch: Paradox of Woman; catalogue of exhibit, New South Wales, 1997, titled simply Body; Susan Minot’s Lust; Dany Laferrière’s Eroshima; (I once reviewed) Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights; Collette’s Collected Stories; Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory; Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty; Psychoanalysis of Sexual Life by Dr. Vitali Negri, 1949, dedicated to his wife; The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Kraus; & The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality; etc. All located on the wall just above my wife’s home computer.

Now, even before relocating Guy’s A Balthus Notebook on this shelf way too long ignored, I reminisced to my friend about the scholar I met at the National Gallery of Art, a professor at both Johns Hopkins & the Universitá di Bologna, the oldest, continually operating university in the world (in existence for more than a thousand years). Anna Ottani Cavina told me she knew Balthus during his 16 years in Rome, pronouncing his name sweetly: “Balllttoooz…” Her parting gift to me over lunch on the 7th floor Gallery restaurant was a copy of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. One of her books is Geometries of Silence: Three Approaches to Neoclassical Art. So I think of my 14-year-old student, Wyatt Marks, playing with our cat in my first apartment, cat jumping at yanked-up fold in her skirt, unashamed. Here, this is what struck me hardest, however: rummaging through yet another book on the shelf I listed, Edward Snow’s A Study of Vermeer: what falls into my clutches, but an air mail envelope from Copenhagen, DK with letter inside from friend & poet, Robert Hellman, dated June 17, 1974. In it, he responds to a series of poems I wrote & sent him titled “from Travel Poems for Robert Hellman,” based on our Time together in Cape Ann, Boston, Cambridge, etc.:

“How lovely all the distractions in your poems, that day in Cambridge, from which you take away nothing to make something else, but leave it all there, still growing out of our deaths. How nice that you should remember Gusta Goodman’s daughter and my bald baby head squeezing out of the whale’s cunt.” & earlier, “Copenhagen has a charm, good vibes, even in the long dark winter, and now with the rising sun at 2:30 a.m. and setting around 9:45 p.m. and parks full of flowers, children, puppies, topless girls – oh how Durgin Park they are the København kitties, but turn and smile at the old man who feels so warm and just slightly itchy but not so it hurts.” Ten years later, according the NYT obituary, he passes away on a boat from Germany to Denmark. Wish there had been more correspondence. I wasn’t much of a letter writer back then, & let the relationship falter. Said more than once Hellman taught me a lot without my even knowing it. His letter ends asking about our cat, Justine, saying the cat we gave him, “Justine’s daughter, disappeared out of Rockport, where she’d been living with the Costellos, leaving her kitten who now has kittens.”

*Two nights after writing this, I reflected on another subject in this conversation, when asking David Anfam whether, while in Basel last month, he’d visited the painting shook Dostoevsky to the core to the extent that he gazed at Holbein’s, The Dead Christ, two days running? No, he’d seen it many times, & opted to take the tram to Fondation Beyeler to see the Bonnard exhibit, calling up an anecdote of Balthus arguing with Marguerite Duras at Villa Medici in Rome over the worth of the newly constructed Pompidou Center coupled (in my insomniac darkness) with walking out on a ramp of that museum’s architecture to watch sunset over Paris, whereupon, family in tow, we could not reenter the building until traipsing down another flight, or more, where a guard opened the locked door to the room where Bonnard’s last painting, The Almond Tree in Blossom, 1947, danced before our relieved, astonished eyes.


Thérèse rêvant (Thérèse Dreaming)
[Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, Polish-French, 1908-2001), 1938
Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art]

FURTHER STUDY:

Chelsea Square Restaurant
Prof. Anna Cavina
Robert Hellman
Durgin Park

Time Capsule: Constant Movement Within The Moment + A Free Man

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

  

Constant Movement Within the Moment

The train howled off across the plain in the direction
of our desires. –Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Another Sunday, when the travel section of the Times, enclosed within front-
page perturbable headlines, business week’s antics, & latest styles based on lipstick & heels, not an accompanying text, lands on the front porch with a thump before sunrise. In no position to go to Minorca this week, although I headed there once, choosing Belgrade at the last moment; nor Lyon, although I remained in rainy Paris, while my wife & kids visited brother/uncle in a one-day TGV turnaround; nor Lima, although friend David brought something back quite pure from there carved inside a candle. They make it tough traveling these days: economy, TSA, etc. So, I stay, & go. Constant movement within the moment. Here I am five hours from temptations & frustrations offered in said pages, sun fully up, & on the train scampering down the aisle before my brother could crawl out of mother’s arms, destination Philly. Step out on the platform in Marseille. Enter Guadalajara after twenty-four hours overnight in Time to witness teeming crowds try to get a glimpse of President Echeverria giving a stump speech. At one point crossing the Austrian border into Yugoslavia from Salzburg to Rijeka, Tito’s troops make a show of guns & jackboots demanding “Passports, Passports!!” (Which I can’t even afford to renew. Don’t ask me to read, again, quite yet in Scotland, Andrew!!) Paris to Cahors, & a single glass of the black wine of France at the outdoor table for 3 francs. Glad most travel is behind me by train to Kilkenny, Dublin, Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh, Stuttgart, Munich... Scraggly & long-haired heading into Bloomington, where most hours for three months are spent in stacks of the university library. Yesterday she decided to cancel our Sunday subscription to the Times, forcing me out at the train station in Nice for a fourth time, which hasn’t happened, yet, & where Kyung-won, violinist at l’Opéra de Nice, & Richard, director of Pierron Primitive Arts, will greet me with open arms, kisses on both cheeks, firm handshakes, & a silent nod for our belief in the future.

 

A Free Man

Patriot’s Day, whatever that is, although I shoot right now to Mary Ruotolo &
other neighborhood women, on occasion, wearing hats & uniforms of the
Daughters of the American Revolution, so maybe that’s it. A few more people
out here during my walk, because of the holiday. Tanker Genmar Argus flying
Marshall Islands flag docked across the way, while opposite, builders add a third
story to a house on Munjoy Hill, calling up the fact that when the ferry docked at
Peaks Island yesterday I was so ecstatic to step off the boat I left the “en” off of
“enjoyable,” settling for the truncation even after I spoke. Such unusual warmth
for mid-April a pregnant woman heads my way with big round naked belly
cradling feotus in the sun. Today, I too am simply appreciating each step, each
sun’s ray. A free man. Stones sea sky wind light vegetation: own none, & each
one, in appreciation. Upon return to the car the three sleeping hobos I saw in the
grass just past the last chain-link of Portland Vessel Services are now being
rousted by Portland cops. One guy, whose face & visage reveal he’s still in some
groggy netherworld standing in handcuffs while one officer goes through his
knapsack so meager I wonder what could be found to convict him, unless
sleeping on grass in broad daylight now in America is a public offense.

It’s night & day for any poet worth his/her salt, so after reaping daylight images,
some of which travel back in Time well over fifty years underground in memory,
night brings on texts as various as Kerouac & Kristeva, the latter on the screen
via a link from Mark Woods, “An Essay in Abjection,” in which she examines
attempts by writers to give voice to the abject: The abject would thus be the
‘object’ of primal repression. I get that. Then adds, One does not know it, one
does not desire it, one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.
In her critical assessment of some of my great ones, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce,
she concludes that, Death thus keeps house in our contemporary universe. By
purifying (us from) literature, it establishes our secular religion. That’s just one
example of what I’ll take into bed tonight. Kerouac finally makes it to Denver.
Locates Neal Cassady, & heads over to Allen Ginsberg’s basement apartment
where the poet reads him his “Denver Doldrums,” & I dream:

Something lands upon the carpeted basement floor: nut, or root bole, with
dangerous object sticking out of its round case, a beak, or tooth, or thorn, when
suddenly this dangerous part of the object begins to grow, grow into a shoot, then
longer stems, & as careful as I am in handling what is now more or less a thorn
bush, I get stuck, & the venom, or ambrosia, (or juice I see as source) enters my
veins, to the extent that I can feel the beginnings of the ecstasy of writing, &
WANT more, so lift up what is now a bouquet of thorns (wounds) & bite into the
lowest hanging root to chew & swallow IT.

FURTHER STUDY:

Opéra de Nice
Pierron Primitive Arts
Genmar Argus 

Time Capsule: The Pleasures of the Scroll Version

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

 

The Pleasures of the Scroll Version

Back, now, from my journey, not necessarily just the foray into Denver,
where one museum holds the bulk of the Clyfford Still estate, & the other
exhibits a contemporary visual artist’s take on Kerouac’s On the Road,
appropriating whole swatches of text to suit camp tastes. No, not that, but
finally finishing up all this difficult reading on Olson & Still trying to piece
together similarities in their work, which ultimately, of course, reveal
similarities in their individualities. & yesterday feeling relieved to write the
last piece after months of tough sledding, reminding me of the poet’s
longtime fascination with Aubrey Beardsley’s deathbed comment, “Beauty is
difficult, Yeats,” synthesized in his letters into, “Time is difficult, Beardsley.”
Yes, to both difficulties. So that, now, in this immediacy, as I turn away from
every catalogue written on Still, (scattered open around three rooms here) &
every published poem, lecture, & letter by Olson, (piled high), I can turn
toward the mere pleasure of reading, flashing to my younger days under the
friendly tutelage of Robert Hellman (who taught languages at Black
Mountain & accompanied Olson on his lone visit to William Carlos Williams
in Rutherford & hung out with Creeley in Aix, etc.,) his asking if I ever read
for pleasure, & my answer up until that Time, because I had so much
catching up to do was, “No.”

So I have no trouble going to the original scroll version of Kerouac’s great
novel, a copy of which sent up to me out of the blue from down in Boynton
Beach via botanist, Dr. Edward Coher & his wife Cynthia, over four years
ago*, making this no poem at all, but more report from deep hermetic
trenches, where one can hear from no one for days at a Time other than one’s
own subject. I love finding this in one of the accompanying essays, quoting
JK’s Road Log, “‘It appears I must have been learning in the past 8 months
of work on… poetry. My prose is different, richer in texture…’ if On the
Road is to be ‘a novel like poetry, or rather, a narrative poem, an epos in
mosaic.’” The pleasures of the scroll version, which I postponed getting to
until late last night, are practically instantaneous in that the first sentence
introduces Kerouac’s father’s death, echoing the narrator in Camus’ opening
sentence of The Stranger, “Maman died today.” & just as quickly one
doesn’t have to read silly fictional names such as “Carlo Marx” (publishers at
Viking, including Malcolm Cowley scared witless they might get sued for
libel [the opposite of Barney Rosset’s courageous stance!]), where one can
now read “Allen Ginsberg” & not “Remi Boncoeur” writing from San
Francisco he can get him work on a steamer, the real “Henri Cru” + instead of
simply heading out there with a few bucks in his pocket, he’s “off for the
Pacific Ocean like a veritable Ishmael with fifty bucks…” calling down the
spirit of Herman Melville, rather than kowtowing to the publishing industry’s
powers-that-would-be.

*Evidence that it was sent four years ago is an article cut out & dated 3/11/08 from the Portland Press Herald: “Scientists studying jazz find riffs akin to dreaming” Researchers, Limb & Braun, at Johns Hopkins “hired a company to make a special plastic keyboard that would fit inside the cramped MRI … Then put six professional jazz pianists inside to measure brain activity.” They found that, “Getting creative uses the same brain circuitry measured during dreaming. First, inhibition switched off. Then self-expression switched on. A small area called the medial cortex fired up… earlier research on how language forms linked that region to autobiographical storytelling.”

 

 

FURTHER STUDY:

On the Road: The Original Scroll
Aubrey Beardsley

Time Capsule: The 1940 Census

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


Convent of Sisters of Ste. Chretienne, Salem, MA 

The 1940 Census

Surely, inevitable, heads-up given by fellow traveler out of similar
circumstances (although radically different destinations), David Ferriero,
his staff at the National Archives posting the 1940 Census will spur
storytelling from every corner. First of all, one needs an enumeration #,
which can be located on maps used at the time found here: http://
1940census.archives.gov. I looked up # 5-344 for Winthrop Street in Salem,
MA, where I found my grandfather, Michael J. Ruane, his wife, Rosanna,
four daughters ranging in ages, 17, 16, 15, 14, & a son, James, 12, although
the census taker at the time must have assumed it was yet another daughter,
jotting down, “Jane.” Now, I knew this info would not only intrigue my aunt,
who’ll turn ninety next month, regarding her own household, but the
neighborhood. Sure enough, her imagination traipsed around surrounding
streets of Orne Square, Broad, & Mount Vernon. Her daughter wrote that it
“gave her great joy, clapping her hands together with each discovery of the
old neighbors!” Then my aunt wrote back in the blink of an eye with her
incredible typing skills still in tact, after I mistook the Doyles for the Coyles:

The Doyles lived next door to me; Billy, Janet (Jeanette's best friend) and the middle boy, who became a Judge in California (Paul). Marguerite worked for Mrs. Doyle cleaning house when she was about 12 years old.  Mrs. Doyle was quite a woman--  took Don Curtis and me to the Empire one night because she knew he liked me a lot and after took us for ice cream in Marblehead at the ice cream parlor on Pleasant Street which is now a branch of the Marblehead Savings Bank. She also made handmade ties that were very famous. Margie worked on the ties, she would cut out the lining for them. As you know Margie became an expert seamstress like Nana who could sew without patterns -- the most difficult Vogue patterns as well. –Aunt Irene

Also wrote to my good friend & fellow writer in Gloucester, Peter Anastas,
who wrote back:

I forgot that my father’s real name is Panos. My real name is Panayiotis, meaning “Panos the younger.” Both get translated into Peter, which diminishes them. So much for Ellis Island. My mother, my daughter and I once went there and looked our family up. We found my father’s date of entry, along with that of his father and my mother’s mother and father. All of the last names had been changed. My name is actually Anastasiades. But who could deal with that? My mother's is Poulopoulos. It ended up as “Polisson.”

I have Greek on the brain because I am reading In the Neighborhood of Zero, a memoir by the Greek American Melville and Olson scholar William Spanos about his experiences in WWII. Growing up Greek in a small NH town he felt just as alienated as I did growing up in Gloucester.

I could certainly identify with Peter, what with my old man telling me they
lopped off our “FITZ” at Ellis Island, & a name I’ve written more than once
missed. Speaking of which, when trying to track my father’s side of the
family, I reported this to Peter:

My father was totally closed-mouthed about his old man, & I never even saw a photo of him. Couldn’t find hide nor hair of that side of the family, which I guess devolved quickly after my grandfather, George Gibbons, died at an early age. Although, I did, when punching in the enumeration # 5-365 for where they once lived, find who I believe was his brother, Joe Gibbons, living with Annie Putney, also named on the census as brother to her, designated head of household, she was.

At George’s wife’s funeral, my Nanzu, Eileen Gibbons, my father’s younger brother, Bern, said, sitting next to me in the living room in Peabody afterwards, alluding to my grandfather, “Someday I'll tell you the whole story,” whereupon my father shot a look across the room at him, one I was familiar enough to recognize as threatening. Bern died before telling me the whole story.

I recognize Joe Gibbons on the census by his job title, “Route Salesman, coffee/tea,” which was my grandfather’s business, selling coffee & tea, originally via horse & wagon, the former of which my father failed to tie up right one night, & the animal fell into the cesspool, for which the old man got a severe licking. 

One story went that my grandfather got clocked on the street by a kid from Harvard, story insinuating that that was partly responsible for the brain tumor killed him. Bet my uncle told me that story early on, & vaguely recall the old man denying that fight had anything to do with his death in his forties. Joe Gibbons is listed as 42 in 1940. My old man joined the Navy in ‘41-45, & again, I can’t find his whereabouts in 1940.

I’m sure, again, thanks to the efforts of David Ferriero & his diligent staff at
the National Archives, many more true stories will get shared from California
to the New York island; from the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
from Salem, Beverly, Brockton, East Boston, Harlem, Bronx, Denver, LA,
Watts, Compton...

FURTHER STUDY:

Blog of the Archivist of the United States
J. Michael Ruane Judicial Center

Time Capsule: Mountains Offer A Sense Of Peace

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


  

Mountains Offer a Sense of Peace

Wherever I am, or will be, it’ll read New England Time within me. Now, I can’t
help that iambic & rhyme within the prose, but at least I didn’t do it on purpose.
Just like this 11:22 in a 9:22 Time Zone. Woke to snow-capped Rockies out the
window surrounding us with adversarial beauty, thinking of early settlers
migration crawling westward. Now, their descendants & interlopers simply crawl
all over each other over highways via SUVs & Mercedes. Far cry from the guy I
had dinner with last night, whose great-great-great-grandmother the family
believes came from the Taos Pueblo, & who as early as age six collected Anasazi
pottery, referring to later versions as simply black on white. He & I are into
tactics, more than plans, & may very well make a foray three hours from here,
next Time I’m here, in order to explore regions of the Arkansas River (which
begins here in the Rockies near Leadville) he knows like the back of his hand.
Told him I needed a guide sometimes for what I really want to see. (Remnants of
a blind poet?) It’s past rush hour now outside Denver, barely a lull in the traffic.
But in the distance the mountains offer a sense of Peace. Continental Divide,
indeed.

FURTHER STUDY:

Anasazi
Arkansas River

Time Capsule: An Immense World + Took My Time

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

The Swimming Hole
[Thomas Eakins (American, 1844-1916), 1884-85
Oil on canvas, 70 × 92 cm.; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas]

An Immense World

Blank page ready, just in case, in notebook bought for Denver at Delorme’s
Map Room up in Freeport with massive mechanical globe would make even
the most naïve keep from saying “small world,” a phrase forces a look
askance every time I hear it. It’s an immense world. Even multiple times out
there in one day won’t get one closer to taking it all in, but do my best. Even
before heading out there’s personal news in from London, England &
Ontario, Pretoria, South Africa, Aalborg, Denmark, Chicago, Illinois,
Raymond, Maine. In my first foray Time & Temperature Building reads 85
degrees, incredible for the second day of spring at this latitude. Call to let her
share warmth offered in words in the more enclosed, darker, colder office
space back home. She isn’t jealous of my freedom. Knows I wouldn’t call
just to rub it in. Reluctant, though, to share this weather report with crew at
Harbor Fish, but Jeff, Stephanie, & John are pleased to know what they can
look forward to. Don’t expect much, honing in on the tanker on the second
trip out, what with having previously written Overseas Shirley is “not
something to write home about,” but within minutes I look up to see two
young bare-chested bare-footed strapping city youths in nothing but cut-off
jeans diving off the stone pier between Portland Yacht Services & Fish Point.
Real jubilation, & daring. Instantly Eakins’ The Swimming Hole comes to
mind: photographs, sketches, & final masterpiece in Fort Worth. On my
return from the trek down to East End Beach one of the kids (now more
recognizably young man) climbs the embankment, & I ask if he knows the
artist Thomas Eakins, who painted a famous scene of swimmers just like this.
Could tell he was a bit suspicious of my motives, asking also if he were Irish
or French, but admits his French Canadian side with pride, & reassured
enough to give his own name, David Lapre, & buddy, Doug. Third time out
today catch sight of the massive ridgeline holds the whole of the West End of
Portland up, running the length of Valley Street. Tall, bare, white birches
waving goodbye to the glacier receding thousands of years ago.

Took My Time

Remember seeing the signature of William Blake at the bottom of a sales
receipt for groceries selling for $5,000 at an antiquarian book fair, & tempted
to take out a loan. 3/19/2012: the MESAIEED’s in port. Call her at 11:11,
when Time & Temperature Building reads that, & 71 degrees in lights atop.
Bypass path, because it’s hidden just before the stand of white birches, not
wanting to reveal its whereabouts to that group of people coming up ahead.
Continue on to third lightpole straddling East End Beach. Cliffside mimics
white horse above it in clouds. Now, I’m down here nestled at land’s end,
turn my back to sun & sea & face the stone I’ll draw two pages on in this
notebook. Has to be unique & special for me to attempt to capture it in lines
made of anything other than words, but there you have it, a pretty fair
rendition made of three lines, two dots. Bring Gary Snyder down here; he
knows what I’m talking about, & Hsieh Ling-yün. Gary says, One granite
ridge / A tree, would be enough / or even a rock, a small creek… Yes, he
knows. Hsieh Ling-yün: There, among rocks churning with whitewater, the
Way opens. Suddenly waves crash behind me from some boat went by
unnoticed. Time reaches back centuries, millennia for that matter, inching
slowly forward toward the future, my cell phone reading just past noon. The
mockingbird is acting out the role of troubadour. Waves new-found calm.
This notebook contains jottings from the Clyfford Still Museum opening.
There’s a birdman etched before me could be found in his canvases dancing.
The sea just turned black under a cloud. Wind almost noisy. Mockingbird
moved on. As must I.

FURTHER STUDY:

Thomas Eakins
Delorme Map Store
Overseas Shirley
MESAIEED

Time Capsule: Renew Sources

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


  

Renew Sources

Where that weather comes from is surely a matter of concern for many now,
& many more in the future, but to be out there in what is still winter a week
before spring, out there where spectral silhouettes of two foxes from a night
long ago fly by in broad daylight adjacent ancient boulders, where we aren’t
estranged of the word “ale” in our American vulgate talking Kerouac on what
would have been his ninetieth, over bowls of chili Geoff’s girl left for us
before taking off for her own roots in central Pennsylvania, well, that weather
& all the things it enhanced, pulverizing experience into memory, carries
over today as I want to report sun taking its own good time to infiltrate this
morning. Franklin stove in four-season porch substitutes its own light, a
different intimacy. Not all that anxious to get out there, again. Catch damned
black cat can’t seem to learn not to piss under the porch zinging another rock
just by its hightailing ear so it booms off stockade fence attempting to
behaviorally modify dumbest of the feline species ever seen. I like cats.
Granted, not the life of Picasso, nor do I care, Maya doesn’t look all that
happy in the photo at the beach in Antibes. No, we have our own lives to lead
& need find ways to value them as I most often do through all six senses. No,
but one can identify with, say, childhood reminiscences of a writer like
Walter Benjamin around the turn of the century before last, waking to
lamplight carried by nursemaid before her shadow, (how both aunts appeared
in the dream last night under similar circumstances, kissing them both quickly
so they couldn’t smell yesterday’s ale on my breath?) at exactly half-past six
in Berlin, & then with taste of baked apple still on his tongue trudges off to
school, where the cold hardwood of his seat & desk makes him wish he could
have slept his full. However, knows he won’t until much later in life, & then
only because hopes for finding a proper livelihood are in vain. I know only
too well about that, but still don’t sleep in. Renew sources over phone via
Heather at Maine College of Art, who knows exactly what I want before I
speak, & grants another exemption. Cardinal fills sky with color. Squirrel,
chickadee herald natural order of the day ahead.

FURTHER STUDY:

Franklin stove
Antibes

Time Capsule: Letters Poured In

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


The full moon during the moon's conjunction with Mars,
March 7, 2012, in Long Beach, CA. Photo by Maxim Senin.

Letters Poured In

Semblance of order, basic disarray below: a balance. Water in mind today,
more than wine. Yesterday, trekked the path between cliff ledge & sea. Stone
held attention the whole way, until returning to the car, saying, “Where’s the
moon?” Nowhere to be seen. Nothing above ferry terminal, nothing over
tanker Opal Express flying Marshall Islands flag with star emblazoned over
the equator. Nothing directly overhead. As if the pull of tide turned me
completely around, exactly 180 degrees, moon, hours from full, rose north
out of the Atlantic, dripping wet & chill pink. Last night dreamt we were
moving. Suddenly letters poured in from friends, both close & distant,
containing photos & well wishes for the journey. I’m writing this today,
water more in mind than wine, waiting for a real letter the equal of dream
letters.

FURTHER STUDY:

Full moon not only spectacle to observe in night sky
The Worm Moon
Opal Express