Ray Johnson, photographed by Hazel Larsen Archer.
All rights to Black Mountain College Museum
I do not own rights to this photograph
I know the view from that window in the photograph above....rather, from my standing years ago on the grounds of what was once Black Mountain College in Western North Carolina. Lived near there for some years after fleeing Holy Hill in Tennessee, a refugee from John Calvin with a hankering for mystics all kinds, even those of a nihilistic bent when it came to the delusion that accurate understanding of a rumored but intuited, despite the scientific materialist (more than) bent of the age I was thrown into, THE Absolute. I moved uneasily, but now in old age am a veritable ice-capade performer, gliding gladly between one haystack to many others on a large plain of mirror glass that is the biggest of all hints...
As above, so below.
The point is in the gliding and the falling and the getting up and going on intellectually and otherwise, sense of humor intact viz. film footage, flicker, of Charles Chaplin, a serious thinker in waking life, the clumsy character on roller skates veering in barely controlled falls a folie, like me, a barely controlled fall through and through in hopes to one day, soon cuz lesser and lesser days are staring at me, breakthrough zennily into what is between the Beguine and the veer with less complaints. When asked, I reply:
"ME? me, I'm just veering on the plank....(as in walking it)....Hey, it's a living. Gravity is free thus the pitching forward and backwards, limbs flailing, call me Teeter, or Totter. I read broadly and wider and there's a part in me that holds, as we all must do, really, honestly, the contraries which make for a volatile alchemical mix, a stew of sorts. Just keep adding the garlic, s'why I wear a garland of it around my neck, clove clusters decorating even my Double Taurus hump in old age...the better to pitch forward with....
William Blake's "Heaven" is not a place but a process, a spacious field or vortex or, better, vortices that can and do contain all the contradictions and incompatibles of everytihng that ever was and is and will be (no future in the no where not there aphasia), no one thing is more valuable or better than any other there. Good and Evil and the Blur Between, the Opposites, that endless ARRAY, are held, contained, even flourish with their own view/voice equally valid to all others though differing or different...said "Heaven" then is a rowdy place, yes? Alla that energy is contained though NOT constrained. Hmmm....CONTAINER could be the better description of any Absolute worth its Overalls. n hauls n hells to pay.
So, back to Black Mountain College, and that mountain in the not so distant view....knew it well then, and even now can trace the line of the Blue ridge top edge chalk, how it moves, a very close and predictable horizon that references and refers to the Greater Location in its singular (to the eye) trace. Many views like that to be had in those mounts and tho present and stable, they, to my eyes, were never the same....always changing, ever new. Unlike me.
No surprise that the College itself, too, was a kind of mountain, out of place but in place, of Culture, the Arts, the modern (that now appears provincial and quaint looking back to there from gaudy here), a proper place for brilliance just beginning in mentors and students in an alternative environment and ways (heuristically aka learn by experience and doing the do) of teaching/learning though I imagine that all earliest-to-humans learning was experiential and rife with necessary improvisation while figuring out emerging 'see- and equations as they revealed themselves to eye and thigh (essential!) and hand and feet in the meat and greet of savage Nature which does,indeed IS, Order, Logos and ChaOs (long O to rhyme with Logos), the opposite or both/and (complementarity thanx to Mrs. Quantum for this word).
I was in my early 20's then and knew nothing of Black Mountain College but once there in the area quickly heard of it, did my research at libraries, asked around and realized that the poets then mid-70's blowing in the wind at that time, many of them had been, were, associated with the Black Mountain College (late '30's to 50's I think, many iterations throughout), some of the poets doing well in the San Francisco area once the College was done, or they had got what they needed and headed West. Hard for me to imagine the unstoppable brilliance , say, of Robert Duncan moving about and around Lake Eden there, with Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Mary Caroline Richards, the Albers, Buckminster Fuller, many others, in an extremely rural area with many locals there (farmers, etc.) who dwelt inwardly and outwardly in extremely fixed, rigid belief systems (fundamentalism abounding) which they, as did I, come by honestly. But.....I'll just let the but hang.....
Funny, tho, how weary I am NOW, have been for a long while, of New York City, and dwell on a street in an area that some of "the best minds" of that 50's and after generation, lived, roamed the hood, read and reveled at Saint Marks Church just a 40 second stroll from my apartment door. It means something to me still but nostalgically. Never suspected I'd veer in my free fall into what feels like an encapsulation, a barrier aura, somewhat hazmet mixed with jumpsuit (oy...just saw poor old jumpsuit Elvis in mind's eye_ that is mine and not mine, a separation, that, I'm guessing, is necessary, at least for me now dotage-ing n oy. Serves perhaps to contain my own emotional stew, mixed with 7 decades of memory meeting the man, the stranger, MOI, in his '70's pondering what is being lived and needs to be lived as the, before the, CODA's over. Kaput. Fin. ALTO (tho I was a boy soprano with an angelic voice, perfect pitch - central casting).
I'll let poet John Wieners, one of the better Veer-ers of his batch, be the coda to the above indulgent veer. Ah. That's the word, the V-word....old age, and companionable indulgence BY memory, these are the/my (objective/subjective) "window frame" through which I meet and experience the present world, apart and a part of, with the I that still is me, but as Rimbaud sez, "I is" also "Other".
This text below is from the seventh section of Wieners "A poem for painters" in The Hotel Wentley Poems (1958), in that year I was all of 6 years old, finger in my nose, avoiding the red bike that insisted on throwing me over and over....first word I loved to hate - BALANCE.
Ah, now I can see why I love the more the theme of my entire life -
VEER "here then" "now then" "Quick now, here, now, always (Mister Eliot)
*
Wieners:
At last. I come to the last defense.
My poems contain no
wilde beestes, no
lady of the lake music
of the spheres, or organ chants,
yet by these lines
I betray what little given me.
One needs no defense.
Only the score of a man's
struggle to stay with
what is his own, what
lies within him to do.
Without which is nothing,
for him or those who hear him
And I come to this,
knowing the waste, leaving
the rest up to love
and its twisted faces
my hands claw out at
only to draw back from the
blood already running there.
Oh come back, whatever heart
you have left. It is my life
you save. The poem is done.
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