| About my work, 1955-57 Harrison Street and The Blood Flower. |
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Paintings and Drawings from the Dirty Pink Room at
the top of the House… I most remember the feeling of aching old lust I sensed in those two rooms, an odor of dead sweat and stale sex long past. We had an extra bed and put it in the pink room for guests of which there were none. Sometimes in the hot and airless afternoons I would lie on that bed and brood about all the sex this rotting old house had seen… just like the rotting old houses I was beginning to paint pictures of in San Francisco, and just like the rotting guilt I felt in my own body. Once I visualized a—you can’t call it a story, must have been one of those “prose poems” so popular in the late 19th Century—visualized a scene and wrote and painted it. The writing and painting are below. *
From my studio notes, undated in late 1955-early 1956. I am going to bite into my finger until the blood comes. Then I will fall back satisfied.
I know that I am alive because I bleed and fuck.
It’s my big triumph over the world: that I don’t even cry.
The reason why I paint is: that in dealing thus with the themes of pity and fear which guide my life, I can experience the sense of right willing and right action which leads to perfect life.
Or else, to say more clearly the latter part of the above: these themes when treated by art become the food of perfect feeding. Perfect feeding is eating easily and unconsciously tasty food, digesting it thoroughly and without pain, and acting directly and harmoniously with the energy thus provided.
There are only two things I can do—vomit and fuck.
The continuing talking results often in stories written to be read to be reminded of ourselves. Often the rottenest work is saved that the artist may, in triumphant moments, be reminded again of his truth.
There are several shameful tales kicking around here just now, waiting to be let into my life. They are of and from the “existential environs.” Before I tell them—I guess I’ll have to—a brief description of the room would be appropriate. Someone vomited on the chair in which I sit. If it wasn’t me, it should have been. They soiled the walls also and left behind them the smell of sweat. Outside, workers are breaking holes in the street. I can’t wait any longer, the stories come…
On the table lay the severed cock. And there were spots, too, from it upon the sheets. The emptiness of the room, the silence within and without (but for a screaming somewhere, or maybe it was blood rushing through the ears) reminded us that … but we forgot. How it had come here; why it lay, in the strong dry light, upon a table bare but for it of everything, even of dust; when it had been thrown into its final place and why that place had been chosen, all had no answer.
There was nothing to do but inspect it, noticing its dryness and its hardness, the dingy fleshiness of its color and the scaliness of its skin, and how it felt dead like a dried stick from which the paint is peeling, the blackness, too, of the shadow it cast—and how its hairy parts, in their tangled profusion, bound it by their twisted, wooly shadow to the table. And also that the small amount of blood which had escaped its ripped and open end tied it with dry and cracking tentacles to the surface on which it lay. Too, that stale semen, the few drops which had escaped after it had been thrown down, had, in their way dried and hardened and broken, yellowish spots of dirt in the dry light. It hadn’t any history, but it had been there a long time.
The wall was stained and spots and lumps and clots of food and bowels still clung to it. The floor also needed to be cleaned where a great drying pool of vomit slowly hardened into a map of nowhere. Half chewed and half digested food mixed with the gummy scum which the sun leaves of the juices of a man’s belly. Runs and blobs upon the wall and floor still moved slowly with the endless pull down.
Someone had been sick there. Maybe several people; or else, if it had been only one, he had puked up most of his insides. It didn’t agree with him, whatever he ate; but then, it was all there was. Sun shone on it though, had been shining for a long time, and it was pretty well dried up and preserved. You could, if you wished, look at it quite closely.
It’s just like a Roman banquet, where you lay there on your back drinking soup while the girls worked you off; and what could you do for the last course but puke and come? But it’s now.
*
The Blood Flower, It’s Growth and Development, Care and Use. The blood flower grows best, perhaps, in drier, harsher climates. It does not need much water, and will thrive most in soil least nutritive to other plants. It is often seen in dry gutters, unused portions of city streets and in vacant lots. It is prized both for its color (a rather strong but yet dingy and darkish red) and its scent (a powerful yet stale and dried odor). More than for either of these, however, it is valued by its true connoisseurs for its flavor and feel upon the tongue and between the teeth. Its devotees consume the entire plant, beginning with the dry and bitter and woody root and going right on without let through the dust-tasting stringy stem to the red petals of the flower itself. Here they truly relish the sweetly-cloying and half poisonous taste of the fluid which lies in the flower’s veins and which gives it its name: Blood Flower.
*
And, written a little later, in pen instead of pencil… There are not many places where those crystals are. That is why we must often make them ourselves… when the need for one arises, nothing else will do; and so, if one is not already at hand, it must be made afresh.
Finally and in the end painting becomes only relics of the soul’s dark pilgrimage—and those relics might as often and as easily be left only as scars on another’s life—and too, presupposing a soul at all, one, anyhow, still alive.
OK, then, let’s admit it frankly (I’ve just been reading a doggerel “Poetry Page”), if all they are is a Soul’s Journey, then that’s all they are.
And then, several pages later, with yet another pen… Art has been for me always a spiritual experience. Even during those times when I did not know and railed and fought against failure, even in that despair it was only a spiritual experience.
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