I have been for a long time writing about the painter John Wesley who was in the first generation of pop artists: a book of memory going back to my first meeting of him in the early 1970s as the husband of the writer Hannah Green (author of THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE and LITTLE SAINT; she was a student of Vladimir Nabokov at Wellesley and published "Mr. Nabokov")... for many years Jack has been unable to leave his apartment on Washington Square and is now at another residence. There have been two great exhibitions of his work: at MOMA's PS 1 in 2000 and in Venice in 2009 a massive exhibition of his work was staged by Fondazione Prada. A selection of his work is on permanent display at the Judd Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
from: WHAT I AM DOING: AND AGAIN CHANGED, JOHN WESLEY
Hannah still seems to be here.
But I can’t sound like those old relatives Hannah always talked about. I know in Los Angeles you would expect a lot of people to talk about ghosts and voices and spirits and all the rest of those things but it wasn’t the way it was—at least for me--- we were there and they were there and it was all so real, I guess you could say and then someone wasn’t there and that was hard to understand, it is always hard to understand really understand how someone isn’t there anymore, Elman isn’t here anymore, MacShane isn’t here anymore, Hannah isn’t here anymore… but I am not so sure… but I am sure I fell, I really fell not here in this room, did I fall but in the hall. I fell in that long hall I fell..
Here in this room I have fallen, it would be easy to say, it would be grand to say: here I have fallen, didn’t MacArthur say, I have returned, and he was walking in the surf in the Philippines and I wonder when did he change his trousers and shoes or boots… remember those pictures?... you’ve only seen them in documentaries, but we saw them in newsreels that was in the summer I think and I fell in August and in October.
Here in this room I have fallen, it would be easy to say, it would be grand to say: here I have fallen, didn’t MacArthur say, I have returned, and he was walking in the surf in the Philippines and I wonder when did he change his trousers and shoes or boots… remember those pictures?... you’ve only seen them in documentaries, but we saw them in newsreels that was in the summer I think and I fell in August and in October.
Not in this room, really, but in this apartment, I have fallen and I can hear them saying that in a movie, he’s fallen down, he’s down and I felt myself down when I fell in the hall.
I didn’t hit my head, I knew that was not what you were supposed to do, you are not supposed to hit your head…
Does that make sense?
People are always talking about hard heads. Remember when they talked about hard hats… I guess they all went away or something happened to them. You still see people wearing hard hats but they don’t call those guys hard hats, as far as I know.
Do you ever get the feeling you’re in a hole and some little guys are digging right under your feet and you feel yourself slipping down each day but you’re not really in a hole, you are still right here but you have this feeling in the bottoms of your feet--- you could say it but people will say you’re nuts--- the feet are saying they are going down but the rest of your body is trying to say, no, that ain’t happening and what’s gotten into you and if I was really in a hole I wouldn’t have fallen as all you can do is fall forward like in the movies when the guys went over the top or climbed out of the foxhole, always one of the guys gets it right away and is slipping back into the hole and the other guys just had to keep going though one maybe lingers for a moment and the older gruff know-it-all gives him a yank: he’s done for and then there is always a lull in the movie and someone slips back and finds his friend dead and you don’t see any gore because that only came later, the gore and all the stuff to make it seem believable but they always leave out the feelings so then they had to ladle out the gore as no one really believes this is for real with the slimy red slippery stuff and all you keep wondering if they are using cow guts and gore or if it was a black and white film they used chocolate syrup I was told by a friend who had a friend who worked in one of the studios. What a mess that must have been but they weren’t allowed to show too much of it so I guess it wasn’t that bad.
I fell. I don’t want to fall again. No one wants to fall again after they have fallen once or like me, have fallen twice.
I have fallen twice and do not want to fall again. Then, it gets too much like Good Friday. I went along with Hannah, but it was just too distant from me. Christ falls three times and there are all those women. Hannah wanted to see the Shroud of Turin, is it… but we had decided for France and that trip to Spain. MacShane liked Italy but I went where I was taken. I didn’t know what to say in Italy. Prada didn’t take me on a gondola and I knew not to buy one of those windup gondolas I saw them selling in San Marco. You wind it up and it goes up and down as if it was in choppy seas.
Jack had an eye for the windup things… he used to have go down to Chambers Street and there were all these great stores along it filled with stuff. That’s where he got the bird clock.
Hannah would take the battery out and I would put it back in. That was then, I think.
The bird clock is not in the room. I think it was once and I remember it as being one of those objects, as they say, only Jack could find, a clock that made bird sounds, a different one for every hour. I don’t know if it did 24 but I know it made 12 and then repeated itself. 12 birds, one for each hour and the hands of the clock should have been some sort of feather design but they weren’t, Hannah knew something about birds and it bothered her that some of the calls weren’t very clear and seemed more like a person imitating what a bird sounded like.
Jack liked the bird sounds even if they were made by humans as they didn’t toll your hours away and bring your death closer the way a church bell did or the bells ringing out the hours in public buildings…
Of course, the bells ringing allowed me to quote Anthony Burgess to his knowing when you heard the bells ringing in Christian places of old: the Mussulmen are coming, the Mussulmen are coming and this is why the bells are not ringing in Turkey because they know what the bells really mean, even if they say they don’t for their own purposes…
There was no reply…
But you should know the room is not sterile, isn’t that the word people sometimes are saying, it’s very sterile in here as if like so many things… how should anyone know what a sterile room is unless they are some sort of medical doctor and anyway have you ever met a doctor who gave a rat’s behind when it came right down to it about germs?
When I first got to the city they used to have these walk-in doctors and for five dollars they would listen to your symptoms, give you some sort of jar of something or other and a note to the boss… the last one like that was down on Spring Street, when they had factories all over the place…
Things change, they are always saying and they don’t have those doctors anymore.
***
Death changes things. What a cliché. Yes, people die but no, people is not the exact word: my father died, my mother died, Hannah died… and I guess it is a good thing we didn’t start with such a sentence.
Probably better to say, certain people have been forgotten, though their names remain... but damn: what do I really know about that person, what can I call up?
I was born, Wesley says.
Can there be a more obvious statement a human being can make? If I add in California the statement is surrounded by all the illusions Hollywood so obviously and capably delivers and no one wants to have it contradicted by anything that might take away from the picture a person has formed when they hear: I was born in California and if I revise my sentence to: I was born in Los Angeles, California, I have been removed from something which I can only tell you about when I tell you about of all places the Rue Charlemagne in Conques--- what a grand name for a broken cobbled lane--- and Pierre was kicking the wall not hard as he was a very old man and saying what Hannah translated as : this is here, this is here. This is real. I don’t remember the French but I am sure it sounds better in French, everything sounded better in French, I was always thinking, even when people were ordering in the bakery: it was more than just going in to get a loaf of bread when it was being said in French…
There is nothing to kick when you say, I was born in Los Angeles, California. Once I heard on the radio, as Bill sometimes had the radio on in the studio. It was just a line: Home is…I forgot. I don’t know who sang it. Home is… I forgot.
People are always talking about hard heads. Remember when they talked about hard hats… I guess they all went away or something happened to them. You still see people wearing hard hats but they don’t call those guys hard hats, as far as I know.
Do you ever get the feeling you’re in a hole and some little guys are digging right under your feet and you feel yourself slipping down each day but you’re not really in a hole, you are still right here but you have this feeling in the bottoms of your feet--- you could say it but people will say you’re nuts--- the feet are saying they are going down but the rest of your body is trying to say, no, that ain’t happening and what’s gotten into you and if I was really in a hole I wouldn’t have fallen as all you can do is fall forward like in the movies when the guys went over the top or climbed out of the foxhole, always one of the guys gets it right away and is slipping back into the hole and the other guys just had to keep going though one maybe lingers for a moment and the older gruff know-it-all gives him a yank: he’s done for and then there is always a lull in the movie and someone slips back and finds his friend dead and you don’t see any gore because that only came later, the gore and all the stuff to make it seem believable but they always leave out the feelings so then they had to ladle out the gore as no one really believes this is for real with the slimy red slippery stuff and all you keep wondering if they are using cow guts and gore or if it was a black and white film they used chocolate syrup I was told by a friend who had a friend who worked in one of the studios. What a mess that must have been but they weren’t allowed to show too much of it so I guess it wasn’t that bad.
I fell. I don’t want to fall again. No one wants to fall again after they have fallen once or like me, have fallen twice.
I have fallen twice and do not want to fall again. Then, it gets too much like Good Friday. I went along with Hannah, but it was just too distant from me. Christ falls three times and there are all those women. Hannah wanted to see the Shroud of Turin, is it… but we had decided for France and that trip to Spain. MacShane liked Italy but I went where I was taken. I didn’t know what to say in Italy. Prada didn’t take me on a gondola and I knew not to buy one of those windup gondolas I saw them selling in San Marco. You wind it up and it goes up and down as if it was in choppy seas.
Jack had an eye for the windup things… he used to have go down to Chambers Street and there were all these great stores along it filled with stuff. That’s where he got the bird clock.
Hannah would take the battery out and I would put it back in. That was then, I think.
The bird clock is not in the room. I think it was once and I remember it as being one of those objects, as they say, only Jack could find, a clock that made bird sounds, a different one for every hour. I don’t know if it did 24 but I know it made 12 and then repeated itself. 12 birds, one for each hour and the hands of the clock should have been some sort of feather design but they weren’t, Hannah knew something about birds and it bothered her that some of the calls weren’t very clear and seemed more like a person imitating what a bird sounded like.
Jack liked the bird sounds even if they were made by humans as they didn’t toll your hours away and bring your death closer the way a church bell did or the bells ringing out the hours in public buildings…
Of course, the bells ringing allowed me to quote Anthony Burgess to his knowing when you heard the bells ringing in Christian places of old: the Mussulmen are coming, the Mussulmen are coming and this is why the bells are not ringing in Turkey because they know what the bells really mean, even if they say they don’t for their own purposes…
There was no reply…
But you should know the room is not sterile, isn’t that the word people sometimes are saying, it’s very sterile in here as if like so many things… how should anyone know what a sterile room is unless they are some sort of medical doctor and anyway have you ever met a doctor who gave a rat’s behind when it came right down to it about germs?
When I first got to the city they used to have these walk-in doctors and for five dollars they would listen to your symptoms, give you some sort of jar of something or other and a note to the boss… the last one like that was down on Spring Street, when they had factories all over the place…
Things change, they are always saying and they don’t have those doctors anymore.
***
Death changes things. What a cliché. Yes, people die but no, people is not the exact word: my father died, my mother died, Hannah died… and I guess it is a good thing we didn’t start with such a sentence.
Probably better to say, certain people have been forgotten, though their names remain... but damn: what do I really know about that person, what can I call up?
I was born, Wesley says.
Can there be a more obvious statement a human being can make? If I add in California the statement is surrounded by all the illusions Hollywood so obviously and capably delivers and no one wants to have it contradicted by anything that might take away from the picture a person has formed when they hear: I was born in California and if I revise my sentence to: I was born in Los Angeles, California, I have been removed from something which I can only tell you about when I tell you about of all places the Rue Charlemagne in Conques--- what a grand name for a broken cobbled lane--- and Pierre was kicking the wall not hard as he was a very old man and saying what Hannah translated as : this is here, this is here. This is real. I don’t remember the French but I am sure it sounds better in French, everything sounded better in French, I was always thinking, even when people were ordering in the bakery: it was more than just going in to get a loaf of bread when it was being said in French…
There is nothing to kick when you say, I was born in Los Angeles, California. Once I heard on the radio, as Bill sometimes had the radio on in the studio. It was just a line: Home is…I forgot. I don’t know who sang it. Home is… I forgot.
