5 PRENDA DEL ALMA

Don Octavio has just told us about the mask that each face wandering the solitary labyrinth wears, and—related—how bound this world is, carefully formed, formulated. He has described for us a harsh world of defensive personalities.

Fiestas, as Don Octavio harmonizes, fiestas are the gash in form. Fiestas—offering the guise of literal masks, rendering perhaps unnecessary their figuritive counterparts—break apart the stony masks described earlier (if only for a day), rip into, smear, form, the formalization of informal life. He has some wonderfully evocative, wonderfully ACTIVE prose, so I won’t try to make his point again. 

I haven’t read the full chapter—i stopped at Death. So I feel like this write up is bound to feel incomplete until then. 

in tandem, these are the lyrics, clumsily Englished by Google. 

What will away from you, turn the soul?

Without seeing you, without hearing you talk without

Every moment you remember

Although our love is impossible

How to remove the scent of flowers?

How to take the wind harmony?

How can we deny that I love you, sweetheart?

How to delete my soul is passion?

Seeing the cruel fate condemns us

My goodness, you forget me I have fear

My heart tells me I can no longer

I can not hide my anguish

How to remove the shine to the stars?

How to prevent runs the gentle river?

How to deny mine suffering chest?

How to delete my soul is passion?

what will away from you, turn the soul?

somehow the muddiness, the obfuscation, resulting from the distortion of google Translate is strangely…eye catching (Ear catching? mind-catching?) Perhaps its the tension between obfuscation and tender, tender, deep emotion that nonetheless is signaled.

How to remove the scent of flowers? How to take the wind harmony?

tearing questions. Think about how memory works, how painful…

How to remove the scent of flowers, the harmony of the wind, the shine of the stars—how to remove the beauty of memory, the very attribute stitching the gap between imaginary and real, desire and real, hope and real.

HOW TO DELETE MY SOUL ITS PASSION.

HOW TO DELETE MY SOULD ITS PASSION…! Indeed, how??

I’m not sure how to paint, how to move, in response.

How to deal with someone else's love-load, 'authentically', without accidentally laying claim to it? His story isn't my story, and don't I forget it. 

(sidenote - note connection to Paz’s heart filled heart flow heartbreak fiestas.)

4 MASKS

Some quick notes on Paz:

MASKS ~ defense; form and formula (principles; the desire for order). "The human experience"-Female and Male experiences/roles. The Female Experience???, long suffering. (violence). (Visibility.) Permissions.

Resignation and reserve, long suffering.

Dissembling. Dissimulation.
Don No One, and his son, Nobody.

3 CASA Y RECUERDA

Something similar and related, but (1) far less successful, (2) Acrylic and gouache (weird, right? Like, why, what was the point. Well, I was trying a specific idea out, but the product didn’t really accord with the vision I’d had in mind. A lesson, then: don’t let your hand be motivated by fear or uncertainty; you’ll make all the wrong decisions), and (3) most importantly, a specific place, towards which I have great ambivalence.

The colours here contain a specific pallette I recall from Irvine, especially on rainy days, or just after the rain. The softest vibrancy of colluding/colliding pinks and oranges submerged and muted under wet blanket weather. The stupid plainness of concrete does best in this weather: Gray gains depth from being wet, things glimmer, leaves and tree trunks gain new color, underlined by the soft grayness of the weather. (Strange that such a colourless place gained so much colour from gray weather.)

The strange collusion of a few blue Grays and middling pinks…

Professor Dubovsky noted that there are suggestions of something: Houses, and a watery (too watery, that was a mistake in fact) body.

In short: this piece is full of mistakes. But the main idea is a conflict of romanticization and ambivalence towards past and place.

2 TIERRA Y CORAZON

Earth and Heart.

Professor Dubovsky has asked us to think about earth and heart in the specific context of our own lives. “…Something which expresses the meaning of these words to you--in your life, in memory, and in what you know of your family past.” 

I actually have an object to talk about, and the words “Earth and Heart” are far less personal than SOY YO (which I’m still not sure precisely how to interpret: “it’s me,” or “this is me,” or “here’s me/myself”…?) so this is (should be) more straightforward. 

Having had only a couple and a half hours to think about this assignment, due to my joining the class late, I sized down and greatly simplified a first (rather frazzled) idea, and have thrown (tried to throw) the colors of places of personal histories, and insinuate their textures, onto small blocks of wood. Two of these blocks are trying to emphasize the paintiness of paint, the fact that I’m reaching into something that doesn’t exist (anymore). I’ve never felt farther from/more uncertain of memory and family past than I currently do, so I wanted to pile on thick splotches of paint, to say, hey. i could be making this up. (but somewhere in there, sharing space with the ambivalent colors of Southern California, are ponds and backwaters and mango trees and coconut trees and the redness of the earth after the monsoon, and the smell, and the cricket-filled night. My words, much more clearly than these rather unsuccessful blocks of wood, smack thickly of Romanticization to the point of delusion. Reek of sentimentality. Many mid/later-century popular Indian rhetorics, visible for instance in film, tend to reify deify the Village; the Nationalistic; the a-colonial, uncorrupt Rural. Anti-industrial and Un-modern. (The search for authenticity in your own goddamn country). Am I guilty of nothing less, in a way? MORE paint, then—and thickly, obscurely—to alert you to the falsehoods of the mythicizing painter). Note that this is NOT metaphor, & this is NOT symbol. 

The idea, also, was evocation: the desire to evoke sensory experiences—smells, textures, colors, maybe even tastes and sounds—rather than to record or symbolize (a statement about) a personal relationship between Earth and Heart.

1 SOY YO

SOY YO

It’s hard, I think to ever say, “this is me,” and suppose that you’ve got something stable, something essential, pinned down.

“Soy yo.”

I think it’s always an anxiety that one feels, but after being away from any real home for some six months (away from both Berkeley, and away from family and friends—the jewelish rocks of my existence—and away from Irvine which, after some fourteen years, eventually yielded itself to some definition of home), there is a particular discomfort with the phrase. Moreover, I’m not sure what I want you to know about my history, I’m not sure I want to recall any personal history. 

Soy yo.

Well, the thing is, I think place (and Pomp) and circumstance have so much to do with this. I feel I’ve seen several—quite different—iterations of what, I suppose, in some sense is myself.

And, moreover, to establish, to retell, to recall the proper referent of “me” (unspilt by Descartes, unrendered nonexistent by Hume) requires digging into memory, history. But memory and I are not close friends these days; I’ve grown something of a horror for her mythologizing spell. This winter, (my feet in the snow and the snow in my hair) I achieved the death of the illusion of memory, the murder of nostalgia (so I tell myself).

Can I look really into the eyes of their ghosts, just to tell you about myself?

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SOY YO. (I feel bad now, because I haven’t really honored the prompt, I’ve kind of sidestepped the assignment.)

I could (try to) be cut and dry about it, I guess. Here I am, Berkeley senior, twenty-five. I was born here, I was moved to India when I was about three or four (an idyllic childhood, with my sisters and grandparents and my mom (she read to us and gave us paints and crafty things,  my sisters and I playing against the life-filled dull succulent greenery of South India), my dad visiting occasionally. An idyllic existence without any sense of time), saw my father for the last time at seven (he was a pastor and a musician and he bought us a fancy keyboard and brought his twelve-string guitar with him and for some six months we sang), was moved back to the States (the new, crisp, and dead suburban streets of Irvine) at ten (my mother and sisters and I all slept together on the living room floor, or crammed into her bed, for that first month), met my first American (Indian) friend, my best friend, at ten, and I don’t like writing this, so. The end. (The horror of memory? I’ve spent years and years and years with my face turned nostalgically towards the past, and I’ve only just slipped out of the spell of memory and desire, so let it rest). Once it’s out there... . One artist said that once you sort of ‘release’ an artwork to the public, it's not yours anymore. Its interpretation, its meaning, its value, lie out of your control. But it seems that's true of anything you might share—& god forbid histories and memories (and presences and futures, narratives) grow some haunting lives of their own. Searle’s speech acts include declaratives — speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration — but anything uttered risks the danger of performing a declarative, of stitching an idea into reality. 

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The fearful supposition of which you may accuse me, gentle reader, is that my conception of SOY YO is un-necessarily premised on history. (That or I'm being over sensitive, over dramatic. All of which I grant, uncomplainingly.) Can’t oneself be premised on the freestanding point the very precipice of the present itself? (But—take heed—the Futurists, those goddamn fascists, are all Dead!)