I am not Jackson Pollock

125 Pages·2003·0.62 MB·English

by  Haskell

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CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
DREAM OF A CLEAN SLATE
ELEPHANT FEELINGS
THE JUDGMENT OF PSYCHO
THE FACES OF JOAN OF ARC
CAPUCINE
GLENN GOULD IN SIX PARTS
GOOD WORLD
CRIMES AT MIDNIGHT
NARROW ROAD
MORE AMAZING ACCLAIM FOR I AM NOT JACKSON POLLOCK
COPYRIGHT
For my father, John Haskell,
and my aunt, Harriet Haskell
DREAM OF A CLEAN SLATE
I am not Jackson Pollock. I should say I am not Jackson Pollock, the famous
artist, when he walked into the Cedar Tavern and there was a girl sitting in a
booth at the back of the bar and he wanted to go to her. So he did. I should say
he started to go to her, but he was feeling a thing he called nervousness, a
feeling in his body that he didn’t like, so he stopped at the bar for a drink, a
whiskey. After the whiskey he was still feeling the nervousness, so he had
another drink. But the feeling wasn’t going away; in fact it was becoming more
intense and distracting and when he tried to control it, by holding it in or down,
his body would rebel against him, or against itself, and all he knew to do was
have another drink, a whiskey, and a beer to go with that, and a whiskey to go
with that, and a beer to go with that …
He’s standing, leaning his elbows on the bartop, and the distance between
where he’s standing, with his empty glass, and where the girl is sitting, with her
dark hair, expands, like an expanding universe. She’s getting farther and farther
away, and part of him—his desire—goes to the girl, while the rest of him stays
at the bar, drinking and trembling. And as the distance between where he is and
where he wants to be expands, he finds he’s getting farther away, not only from
the girl, but also from himself, or that part of himself that would act on his
desires. They’re not bad desires—they’re simple desires—but they’re
frightening because they involve another person who may or may not like him.
He smells like beer and Camel cigarettes and she may or may not like his smell.
So he stays where he is, fixed in space, and reacts, not to his own trembling,
which he hates, but to the girl, who he sees as the source of his trembling. “Who
is she?” he thinks. “She’s nothing. She’s some … nothing. I’m Jackson Pollock.
I’m the greatest living painter in the world.” But this attempt to obscure or deny
the feeling he doesn’t want to feel, doesn’t work. He’s standing at the bar, with
his elbows dug deep into the barwood, watching her, not going near her, but
looking at her and waiting, wishing that she would do something, hoping that
she would get up and do something to relieve his stupid pain, although it isn’t
pain exactly, but something like it, and he doesn’t like it, and he wants her to
take it away; he wants her to stop what he’s feeling. And she isn’t doing it. She
isn’t doing anything. So he thinks, “Fuck her.”
*
Jackson Pollock dreamed of a clean slate. He tried to free himself from the past
so that he could begin at the beginning and paint what he wanted to paint—a
thing he called “the unconscious.” He said, “The source of my painting is the
unconscious,” and he wanted to paint, not just about, but with this thing. He
wanted to break through to this thing, to poke a hole in the fabric separating him
from it, and that’s what he did. That’s what he painted. Not the hole in the
fabric: his struggle was not finding a language to merely describe the hole; his
struggle was to tear at the hole and open the hole and go into the hole, and that’s
what he did. And from there he splattered his paint on the canvas.
He was attracted to the unconscious thing because he had an unconscious or
unknown or chopped-off part of himself. He didn’t want it known because he
didn’t want it taken away. Anything known, he felt, would be taken away. Every
time he painted a painting it was taken away by the shit-ass critics and collectors
who left him with nothing, except the desire to change what was happening.
Painting was a way to change, not only the world, but the way he was in the
world, and that’s why he cultivated, not desire, but something like desire,
something inside of him that would eat at him until either he or the world was
different.
He had a dream I think, and in the dream he walks out of the Cedar Tavern,
stands on the sidewalk, looks out onto the street, and the black pavement of the
street becomes the ocean. When he turns around the tavern is gone. His friends
are there, standing on the pier, drinking and laughing, and they’re looking into
the water. He looks into the water, and he can see in the water the thing that he
wants. He doesn’t know what it is because the water obscures his vision, but he
knows he wants it. There’s a rope coiled up by his foot and he takes that rope
and he ties one end around an old wood piling and the other end he ties around
his stomach, with a good solid knot. Then he jumps into the water and he dives
down. But the water is dark, and he can’t see so he has to feel, with his hands,
for the thing that he wants. But the rope is too short. So he comes up for air.
Standing again on the pier he looks around and his friends are taking off their
pants. They’re putting on swimsuits, laughing, their voices far away. Behind
them, a seagull, perched on the cab of his dad’s gray pickup, watches him with
one eye. The bird shits, jumps up, and then flies through the air. And Jackson
thinks, I am a bird, and he unties the rope from his waist, and holding the end of
it in one hand, he dives like a bird into the water. With his other hand he reaches
out to feel for the thing he wants. But he can’t feel it. He can’t feel anything.
And he hates that. He wants to feel something. He wants to feel the thing that he
saw was there. He saw. It was there. He would like to let go of the rope and
reach out …
*
He staggered into the Cedar Tavern. This was 1956 and the girl, whose name
was Ruth, was standing at the end of the bar, full-figured, dark-haired, and
looking at him. Lee, his wife, was sitting at a table. He walked to the bar, to a
point equidistant between the two women, and started drinking himself into a
state of numbed oblivion. At a certain point Ruth walked over, sat on the stool
next to him, and began asking him questions about who he was. He wasn’t
comfortable talking about himself so instead he talked about Pollock, the artist,
the greatest one, according to the magazines. He explained to her, not his
position, but the position of Jackson Pollock after he’d painted his drip paintings.
He had discovered this language that let him say what he wanted to say, that let
him get his unconscious out and down on the canvas. And that’s what he did.
That was good. And he continued doing it because it was what the language let
him do. He could get his unconscious out and down and with purity too, but
sometimes purity is not enough, sometimes you want something more, and he
was saying that Pollock wanted more and needed more and needed to be given
more, and as he told her this, gesticulating with his hands, he touched her lightly
on her arm. And he could feel her respond, and smile. So he continued. About