Posted by Atticus on August 5, 2004, at 15:20:43
In reply to Re: poem ... Meet Me Under the Blue Whale, 1998, posted by Jai Narayan on August 5, 2004, at 13:46:42
This was pretty tough to write, because at the time, I felt like I'd let down the umpteenth person in my life. First, Alyssa. Then Walter, by distancing myself from him when I probably should have tried harder to yank us both back up to the surface. I wrote about this truly half-assed attempt at an intervention, and how badly I felt I blew it, in part because I was thinking about it and how differently I had handled the situation than I had handled the one detailed in "Picasso at Limelight." There is such a sense of a loss of efficacy with mental illness, and I felt it keenly in this case. And of course, I'd felt I'd let down Pez, who had stuck by me through thick and thin, despite the awkwardness of the situation given her past relationship with Walter and her ongoing, very close friendship with Alyssa. Walter's fate? The storyteller in me wants to leave that for another tale.
As for the expression "Jesus Christ on a popsicle stick," it was just something all the Irish-Catholic kids in my neighborhood seemed to say when I was growing up. In my experience, no other ethnic brand of Catholicism simultaneously expresses so much devotion to the church and blasphemes with such joyous abandon. It's always struck me as just one more of those idiosyncratic dichotomies so peculiar to the Irish temperament. Your use of it too probably has a lot to do with our shared socio-cultural backgrounds. When I wrote "Na," I figured that at least you -- if no other reader -- could relate to all the religious strangeness and ritual that passes for normality in an Irish Roman Catholic household.
Summing up my paintings is a little more difficult, because if I could have verbalized those emotions, I would have written poems instead of setting up my easel and stretching a canvas, which is a hell of lot more work. Generally speaking, they're heavily influenced by abstract expressionism vaguely similar in palette and mark-making system to Willem de Kooning's pieces, but they're also imbued with a lot of symbol systems -- especially Pacific Northwest Indian and Australian Aboriginal pictographs. They have a surreal, psychedelic, mythic quality to them. All of which probably sounds like gibberish to you. But the bottom line is, when I look at a lot of them now, I can clearly see the swirling, almost chaotic presence of an unquiet mind. To get back to your question, writing forces me to organize my thoughts into a more coherent form through the use of language; the paintings capture emotions that are more inchoate, less defined, and less accessible because of this. But that's OK. I just do the oil paintings for me, anyway. There's less of an attempt to communicate with an audience than there is when I write. :) Atticus
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