Pink Book

Beginning at the beginning. Which is rock bottom. To be an artist who has not made any art for two years is very depressing. I have been very happy and absorbed. I had two perfect little bodies come out of my body. My body was huge and soft and full of milk. I held and nursed and fondled and fed and dressed and undressed and talked to and listened to my babies in an unending orgy of interdependence. Since Mira and Bran were born I have had no time to myself except sleep. But now I have been hired by Carl Andre to do this job of sitting for three hours a day in an old green space with a sign eight feet from my right eye about possibilities for art production.... So Carl is unwittingly my first patron (this work), my inspiration and my competition. My materials were paper and pen, now I have a typewriter here so that what I am doing now is part typing what I have already written and part writing now and it all has to do with the future. My economic resources are not vast, but neither are my needs. I figure I need $500 a month to support myself and half of two children which works out to $8.20 an hour if I work three hours a day five days a week which is all I want to spare right now from my children. The economic resource I have right now from this job is really time. The rest is all my subjective characteristics which will be manifest in the work which is to write whatever I am thinking publicly so that it can be simultaneously read. I am not being particularly clear, but this is the boring part where I am trying to elicit interest and support and collaboration or patronage or whatever. Already I feel a need to rewrite the beginning. This work is writing about this work.

Writing about this work is this work. I am keeping my private journal publicly. I am the Delphic oracle. I am studying to be a shopping-bag lady. I am redefining art. I want to be in a public room with a typewriter and some machinery, maybe video, that could shoot a written page of 8½ by 11" paper and project the image of it on a wall or screen, but so it is easily legible. The room is somewhat dark except for a good light on my typewriter. I am writing down whatever I am thinking as fast and completely and well as I can. People come in and watch and read. There is a xerox machine somewhere so that xeroxes of pages may be made. I want to find out what and how I think. I want the publicness of it to interact with the process of finding out. I like using machines although I am not technically proficient and comfortable with them because they and art are the two metaphors for the mind that I am always bumping up against ... It isn't terror. It isn't joy. It's some sort of physical sensation which starts from the very top of my head and ripples down to my buttocks since I'm sitting. If I were standing it would ripple to my feet and make my insteps tingle. I'm stoned. If I thought it were terror I would be terrified. If I thought it were joy I might be still and meditative and happy, but that is different from this absorbed state of working that I am in. This is where there is that possibility of inarticulableness, either stoned or orgasming or making or con templating art or mystical experiences. There is the temptation of feigning speechlessness because of fearing the inadequacy of words. It can't be the words that are at fault, but my laziness.

Outside there is a New York sirocco blowing hot restless moving air all around my legs and hair. It's exciting but disturbing since I'm wearing only a light short cotton dress and a pair of under pants. A pair of underpants is only one thing unlike a pair of mittens. I feel naked and lustful and agitated. I just thought about Gertrude Stein and Jill Johnston as heroines, but I didn't like to think it because it broke my other train of thought. I'd rather stay physical today. While digging in my purse for cigarettes (a man wouldn't have written that) I found a three-inch high light gray plastic horse, missing its flowing tail but complete with flowing darker mane and red indented nostrils and lips, that belongs to my children. Well, I bought it for them but it's questionable if children actually own things at all.... I remember Lambie, a big soft stuffed white lamb I slept with, and later used to dust with my mother's perfumed talcum powder to make him white again. Funny that I thought he was male. I wonder when I started dividing the world that way and what arbitrary rules did I make up in unknown gender cases like toy animals and why.

I did write a list of the first hundred words the babies spoke, but I haven't written them a journal of their daily activities. That's their bedtime story every night anyway so I suppose I could tape it and save it for them for eternity. “Once upon a time there was a little boy named Bran and a little girl named Mira and this morning they woke up very early and woke up their mommy and daddy and had eggs for breakfast and...." Every once in a while I get conscious of switching the order girl/boy, boy/girl, every alternate night, but often slide back to Bran/Mira several nights in a row. I even started telling it “Once upon a time there were two children, one named Mira and one named Bran... so that there wouldn't even be the boy/girl differentiation at all, but I'm afraid that they and I are already conditioned that way. Bran is masculine and Mira is feminine and they get more and more different every day. I hope that Mira won't hate me when she grows up. I hope that all the femininity that I have inevitably inculcated in her will be perceived as positive and valuable instead of the degrading powerlessness I have often been made to feel. The only way I can attempt to assure that is to make sure she grows up with good images of female power surrounding her, starting with my own self. And that means not totally answering her current demands of all my time and affection and attention so that I can go out and get myself powerful and make sure that I feel it and feel good about it. Which is difficult to do.

Which I'm not pretending to do for her sake, but knowing that it is also for her makes me stronger. It's for Bran too but not as empathetically. For a long time I was taught to see my mother, and she was being convinced to see herself, as a mean, castrating, frigid, evil bitch. I don't blame her for that, but I would blame myself if I let Mira suffer the same thing. She will have to suffer something else. Some new pattern. In my mother's family one only talks about the women, at least as far back as the civil war, because they were the interesting ones and/or they lived longer.

Anyway it is the female line that is traced. I read a diary of my mother's mother's mother's mother who was a southern belle named Emma Munnerlin, daughter of a rice plantation and slave owner, who married Charles Stocking, a yankee whose family had been long settled in the Connecticut River valley. He made a small fortune and then the civil war broke out and his brothers and cousins were all fighting for the union. He got wiped out financially and went catatonic for a while and then just psychotically morbid and depressed and afunctional. Emma's brothers and father were killed and ruined so she had to move north with two infant daughters and a crazy husband and support every body by giving french and music lessons to the local yankee daughters. She didn't complain in her diaries and they are not too exciting to read unless you already know the story and empathize a lot. She had been brought up with a personal slave companion, a girl a little older than herself, who brushed her long hair for her every morning and every night. They must have started out like twins or best friends or lovers and been trained to accept their difference in status. Her slave would have been the real child of the black woman who suckled her and the reason the woman was still full of milk for the little white baby. It is easier to imagine the rage that the black baby girl woman might have felt but probably didn't than to understand what subtle unconscious mixtures of interdependence and guilt and affection and tyranny Emma might have felt. Either way there's no record of it. Only imaginings based on experience or literature or movies. One of my best friends throughout high school was a very brilliant, angry, tricky and unfathomable black girl, one of the three or four blacks in the whole hypocritical elitist bourgeois school. I am a complex and conscious racist. I wish I weren't a racist at all, but l am a racist and a sexist and would probably be a capitalist imperialist if I had the chance. Fighting those things personally can either give or take away the strength to fight them on a political level....

When Eva Hesse died, some friends of mine were moving into her place on the Bowery, and they knew how poor I was, and they said I could have any of the materials I could salvage from the heaps on the floor. I took inks and charcoals and water color sets and oilpaints and cords and tubing and strings and bits of rubber and everything. I figured it might be magic and I needed all the money I was making (working for a real estate agent in Brooklyn) for food anyway. I can never have too many bottles of half-evaporated foul-smelling multicolored Higgins ink and little wads of used art gum erasers. I carry it all with me from studio to studio. First to the 5th floor of 323 Greenwich St, then to Mulberry St, then to the country, then to the 4th floor of 323 Greenwich St, then to 319 Greenwich St. It comes in handy. Except for the horrid little nose masks for working with plastic.

One time I used a whole lot of that material plus other stuff to make work in the woods. I was reading a lot about shamanism at the time and, while thinking, I would spend all day in the woods, one late summer into fall, making things from painted strings and painted wood and the trees that were there and the rocks and a brook and rubber slingshots and the works were visible enough to be photographed but invisible enough to be magical traps. Nobody ever saw them except the man I lived with and the man who used to own the woods and still walked his dogs there and perhaps an occasional hunter. I always wore red when I worked so I wouldn't be shot at. And big rubber boots so the copperheads and rattlesnakes wouldn't bite me. One weekend some people were coming to visit. A critic and a painter. I was very excited because I wanted them to come see my work. I worked hard on Friday afternoon in the woods (after cleaning the house and shopping and making beds etc.). They arrived for supper and it was dark. I woke early Saturday morning from excitement and anxiety and went walking to the woods to see everything once more alone before it became public and found everything I had done wantonly destroyed and stolen and dragged away and gone. This art is writing about this art.

Writing about this art is this art. I love grammar but I don't understand its relation to meaning. If thoughts are born in words, as words, then the grammar is part of their initial existence. If thoughts are born not words, then the words come next and then the grammar is invented for them that puts them in the best order. My daughter has just invented or discovered a sentence that she says all the time which is the question “What is the -doing? -being any noun she knows, mommy, truck, daddy, brother, cookie, kitty, chair, table, toy, etc. I answer the question as best I can when it refers to anything capable of action (doing) but I get confused by "what is the cookie doing?" Sometimes I just say "it is" or "it is being a cookie" or 'the cookie is sitting on the chair where Mira left it, waiting for Mira to hurry up and eat it before Poppy or Bran does" or "I don't know, Mira, what is the cookie doing?" to which she replies "UH." She has three answers to the kind of questions that I don't know the answers to myself, No, Yes, and uh. It is not grammar, anyway, which is only a structure, but the enormous number of words and then the mathematical infinity of combining any two, three, seven, twenty-four, thirty-three of them in one sentence that staggers the imagination....

I've been thinking about Suzanne Harris' work It is experientially describable as a saint approaching death. It is made of sand and stucco walls. Suzanne looks to me like a combination of Joan of Arc and Saint Sebastian by various renaissance masters. I think she is very beautiful. That may not be relevant but I wrote it anyway. The saint approaches her death. She walks slowly in the sandy desert and the horizon melts away as the sand rises symmetrically on either side of her progress. She won't look back which is the only way to see the world and people and life she is leaving behind. She looks straight ahead at a narrow dark doorway cut into the mound of sand ahead. Inside is a cool, dark but short passageway that immediately and clearly opens into a bright round limited space. In the center of the bright round space, so huge that it takes up three-fourths of the space is an implacable white cube. The saint looks up into the blue sky above. She has left everything else behind and entered into her own metaphor for her soul, hermetic and infinite. She is not afraid.

I wrote a very long list of all the women who I think are beautiful that I have been in the same room with. This is all related. I have been trained by art at the service of society to see certain things as beautiful: sunsets, flowers, stars, jewels, fruit, oceans, shells, trees, mountains, circles, colors, sunrises, and rocks and mothers with children and gold and sunlight and eyes and animals and glass and wood and shiny things; calligraphy and birds and structure and dragons and hills; stars and moon light, boats, flags, crucifixions and repetition and liquids, flight and the lives of the saints, altruism and patriotism and irony, rhythm and power and women. This list could be short if it were generalized and long if it were particularized. Very few of the women on my list are mothers, so why did I want to be a mother? I thought of two ways to be useful on this earth. One is to alleviate human suffering which would make one want to be a saint a scientist a revolutionary a doctor a politician a nurse a teacher a social worker a mass murderer a saint a mother an artist an entertainer a whore a mathematician or to add to human joy by being.

Yellow Book

It might be possible to believe that Chang Ching truly tried to revolutionize culture or the relationship between people and culture and that is why the bureaucrats who seem to be in power now are afraid of her. The New York Times says her revolu tionary operas were rigidly propagandistic but they see propa ganda as a pejorative word and what do they know anyway? It interests me that she was an actress and perhaps an adventuress and I imagine she has been made to suffer because Mao sent his loyal wife of the Long March, who bore him children given to peasants on the route and then lost, off to Moscow and then divorced her so he could marry young Chang Ching. My son is crying in his room. It is ten o'clock at night and he is supposed to be learning to go to bed without me lying beside him or singing songs or telling stories until he goes to sleep. If I do all or any of those things his father gets mad at me. If I don't he cries and his father gets mad at him and then at me because it is my fault he cries and it takes hours before everyone calms down because I get mad too. All that writing was interrupted by my going and lying down beside Bran and holding his hand and within five minutes he fell asleep. The other night both children were in the bathtub and I gave them two roses from the dozens given me at my performance to play with. I dethorned them first. I got in the bathtub with them and they were pulling the petals off the roses and we all decorated each other with rose petals. But I worry about Chang Ching. What if both she and Mao had been mythologized together, as an inseparable passionate toward each other and passionate to the revolution pair. He would seem less a father if he were also seen as a lover. Wasn't it Justinian and Theodora who ran such an ideal government and she had been a dancing girl or something. I know I used to think that all men were republicans and all women democrats. (My daughter sometimes declares that all girls have blue eyes and all boys have brown eyes, but now she has a blue-eyed doll with a penis so her faith is a bit shaken.) (She also knows her brown-eyed halfsister has a cunt which is the word used opposite penis in this house because vagina is just not one of my favorite words and cunt is despite its frequent misuse as an insult.) I was taught that men were republicans because they had to worry about money and they didn't like to give it to poor people and that women, because they didn't have to work and are naturally extravagant and generous and soft-hearted, are democrats and fuzzy-headed liberals. Also because women can afford to be idealistic and hopeful whereas men have to be cynical to survive in the jungle. There is probably no demographic truth in that, it was only my own family. I am registered and almost always vote as a democrat but my real party is the changchingist communist party, which is entirely feminist and attempts to integrate art and life in a truly revolutionary manner. This party has only just now been imagined by me and its inspiration is languishing under house arrest in Peking on the other side of this funny round world, but the...

Our loft is very odd now. You walk in and are confronted with what is either called a what-not or a marbletop, being an elaborately carved wooden object with a mirror and knobs for hanging coats and bags and a marble tabletop for throwing keys and letters and a drawer for lint brushes and miscellany, very victorian and handy. Then you turn right into a wall giving you three choices. December 2nd. You see, yesterday was short and unsatisfactory. There was a chinese piano tuner and a dinner party, the place I live in was not described, a tiny baby and very cold weather. My eyes are heavy-lidded, always have been. I don't look innocent. I have of course been told that my eyes are beautiful, but they aren't. They are hooded and abandoned and of a blue more organic than mineral. They feel tired except when I remember they are round balls mostly inside my head. They are not just what they appear. Once I saw a short accompanying a movie which was made for german children to explain the physiology and physics of the eye. I especially remember the waves of color, the red short and angry jumping and the blue long and peaceful wavy like the ocean. Then they made gray rosebushes turn all red. Would that it were that simple. I hate mysteries. I would truly like to know everything. I'd like to begin with all the most important things and then all the subsidiary facts would just fall into place in an orderly way and wouldn't be worrisome instead of just accumulating a lot of small things and reasoning out their places to build a structure I cannot imagine the shape of until I have finished building. I would like some blinding flashes like Einstein had on the trolley. I would like not to have to work so hard and be so heavy-lidded. I would also like not to think that I have to read a lot of books, that there I might find enough details for my constructions. No, I scream at myself, that is not where it is found these days, politely hiding on a quiet page, you might find it in the bathtub with your body or in socratic dialogues with your peer group or even in a cultural manifestation, but, no, never just sitting in a book.