Throwing off the scent of influence.

Something has been bugging me for a long time. A very long time. It has to do with Art, and about how artists talk about their influences. In fact, I can't remember when it first occurred to me, and when, or how it got stuck in my craw. It's one of those things that I can hear the authorities belittling me about; (he said paranoically..)

Without further ado:

Artists, I'll stick with painters for the moment, have a tendency to leave out certain people when they are giving credit for their influences. They will say something like, "Well, Gorky was a big influence, and of course, Cezanne, and Piero Dela Francesca, and Bill, you know, De Kooning?" But they will leave out another guy, who's influence is glaring if you just look at their work. If you challenge them, they will deny deny, and swear on a stack of Bibles if you confront them, in fact they will get very hostile, and they will make a point of going on an immediate quest to assassinate your character, sending out their acolytes to do the dirty work.

Of course writers do it too. It's a nasty habit. I suppose lots of people do it, even trades-people....but it strikes me as most offensive, most ugly, among the painters, perhaps because I've had several closeup views of this type of performance.

Next in order of importance for me in this regard are analyst-writers who write about psychoanalysis and other types of psychology who do the same type of dishonest omitting. As I'm reading one of their books I will flip often to the index to check and see who they allowed in and who they left out. Of course, I could be wrong about certain individuals, but could I be wrong every time? Well, yes. Ask one of the offenders.

Do poets do it?  Fiction writers?  Sculptors?  (You betcha!)  (I don't care about actors, there are too many of them today what with all the wave lengths available, and they've, with me at least, reached the saturation point.)

I'd be interested in knowing if anyone out there shares my irkedness and has any examples to share. Thanking you in advance, me.

Postscript; I've just finished reading D.W. Winnicott's book Psycho-analytic Explorations, and the last paragraph of the book illustrates to a degree both why D.W.W. has been thought of by some as one of the great thinkers of the 20th Century, and also what this lowly writer thinks is lacking in so many other artists and writers; this comes from an address he gave on the subject of his theory and it's relationship to other formulations of early development:

"I can't cover all that I want to. I will just say that I don't know whether you'd like to discuss any of this or would like to help me in a letter to try and make amends and join up with the various people all over the world who are doing work which either I've stolen or else I'm just ignoring. I don't promise to follow it all up because I know I'm just going to go on having an idea which belongs to where I am at the moment, and I can't help it."

Notes:

12/17/16

The Rights of Infants, Early Psychological needs and their satisfaction; by Margaret Ribble, M.D.

An M.D. and a Psychoanalyst based in Manhattan, my mother was going to her as an analysis patient at the time I was born, circa Dec. 1942.

Having just started to re-read this book starting with the last few chapters, I see similarities to the later work of Aulangier, Lacan, and Winnicott.  Were any of these thinkers aware of Dr. Ribble?  Not totally unlikely, and for me, tantalizing.

This could be under the heading, for further attention, of things the unconscious does in terms of editing, ie, deleting, contracting, expanding, and all that, which could be expanded to include purposeful ignoring......Here's a few lines from the index of my friend the late Elizabeth Fisher's great book, Woman's Creation... (She was a member and worked with the Italian Communist Party for some years.)  ...in order....   Clitoris; Cockroach; Coitus; Colson; Comanche; Conception; Concubinage....and etc.  No Communism.....  Also, under the A's, no Adorno, about whom she spoke to me often.... This is just to say that when we leave things out it can be perfectly reasonable and innocent. No one really knows.....my father always mentioned Cezanne, as an influence.. to the point where I was sure he felt he was on safe ground there.

Tall, Blond Roberta, from San Francisco, Rest in Peace.

2015?  I expected to be dead by now, or on the Moon.  But I'm here; somewhat aged, but here. And I just wanted to say, Goodbye Amagansett, I'll miss you. It's a goodby letter. I'm not talking, you know, about the Amagansett of the contemporary hype. I mean the little village where Clam Pie was a staple and people still knew people who had the blood of local Indians in them and most everyone had eaten a piece of illegal venison at some time, and most everyone, now that we're speaking of that, was related to everyone else. And a girl was expected to know how to clean out the meat from a lobster claw with her pinky nail which had to be painted pink even if her knuckles were dirty from working at some dismal grind, like cleaning out the cellar.

I'm not homesick. I have Archaic Longing. If it's not her, my old Amagansett, it's one of the dames of my existence. The ones that fish-hooked my heart. It's always there. The something that's missing. It's the God Shaped hole.

I need God.  I pray. I need God because I am not a Master of the Universe. I'm along for the ride, and the driver is drunk. Like I used to be too often. Not get-drunk-fall-down-pass-out drunk, but get high, then higher then higher then keep doing it, go for a drive, maybe down along the frozen sand from Amagansett to Montauk in a Jeep listening to the Jazz Crusaders while smoking opiated hash or down into Harlan County sipping a Coke and Moonshine while dirty dancing with Mama while her two drunken Three Hundred pound sons prepare to slit my throat high and my friend Skip begs me "Tony please, we got to Leave Here!" 

 Now someone like me drunk is driving the car or the Ship of State or the Space Ship Earth. And I have Agida. (How you spell?)  Agida because I'll be going home next month for a few days or a week and that old Hamlet won't be there, because it has disappeared like Brigadoon only Brigadoon will come back. And my Archaic Longing will have to endure another lesson in being in the Decisive Moment. The one that says, that old Now is a fantasy. This now is the only one you can ever be in. You need to chew your food. You need to breath, you need to thank God that you don't think you're God.

There is a payoff though. The longing is the kick in the ass. The longing is what made me search and search. It's what led me to little pieces of enlightenment. Like the eureka moment when a ballet dancer named Roberta, in San Francisco, in 1978, (an acquaintance, not a g.f.), told me that one has to reach out and dare to love somebody, before one can become lovable enough to get some back.

Lovely Roberta. Either she had a gift of being able to give bitter pills to the wounded and make them think it was candy, or I was just finally ready to hear the obvious, at least from Someone Supposed To Know, to paraphrase Lacan.

  

    

R.I.P. an old friend.

Symptomology? Or over-think?  When one of my oldest friends died a month ago, I guess I was shaken up. I don't show grief very easily, almost not at all, but what I do, what I did when my parents died, twenty and thirty years ago respectively, is I break out in some symptom. I catch a cold. Or my back goes out.

This time I broke out in Atopic Dermatitis; on my forearms. I suppose it's some kind of amalgam of hives, psoriasis and who-knows-what. (Playing doctor isn't one of my kicks.) At the same time, I'm beginning work on a book. I've talked about my other book, in other posts. (So you'll know it's self-published and all that and I don't have to run-on justifying.)     

A life's transition. Very dramatic. Felt like I had to tell somebody. Thank God I could talk to my wife, (common-law, State of Florida), and to my friend's Ex, who came and visited. ...and now it's a month later and I'm still putting some kind of salve on my arms, and having started the new book, I'm noticing a little mental weirdness. When my father died I went through a period of feeling haunted, especially when, a few days after he died, I was doing T.M., which I by then had been doing for six or seven years, and I felt a huge explosion in the room, and the sliding door to the back yard opened up by itself. Crap. Even remembering it sort-of freaks me out. I knew it was the old man. He loved to needle me. A poke here, a tease, there, nothing mean....and then for a couple of weeks, my life seemed sped up. In Manhattan one day while riding a bus I began to feel like I was duck-walking through an old Charlie Chaplin movie.

I'd had a similar experience back in the sixties, while on L.S.D., wandering around in a big meadow trying to be rusticated. I laid down in the grass, and closed my eyes, and saw my surroundings in black and white, and then felt that I was watching a movie reel, and the film reel broke and went, 'thwack-flicker-flicker-twang-snap'; stop. And then a pop like a muffled pistol shot, after which I was immediately down from the acid trip. I went and had a beer.  

But back to the mental block. I have difficulty feeling grief, sadness, that kind of thing. Thirty years ago, a poet named Allen Plantz recommended I read Love Story. Allen wasn't blocked or anything but his wife had died recently, and coincidentally he'd read that book, and he just knew it pulled all the right strings. (Helped him to cry.) I never read the book.  See, I didn't want to feel the feeling. Maybe it, (Fear of crying...) was, is, a phobia.

Meanwhile, back in the present, I'm starting to feel those things...just like a shrink once told me...

"One day you'll be driving along and you'll have to pull over because you'll be bawling your eyes out."  Well, no bawling yet, but I've had these experiences of feeling weepy. A little bit teary.* So there it is, the present state of my mind. Do I think anyone would want to hear about this?  Well, why not. One person somewhere who has had a similar experience with being shut-down.   

*I am aware, as you would expect me to be, that the aging human's lowered libido loosens up the mortar that structures the character armor, turning it into hot buttered grits. 

*Drawing, by me, of my above mentioned friend, Einar Handrup, 1961,  33W.67th, NYC NY.