works+CONVERSATIONS

Enrique Martínez Celaya

Robert Brady

Mary Rakow

Richard Berger

Erik d’Azevedo

N 9o

$8

The Veil

Reprint from works + conversations, No. 9, October 2004 including the following articles: “From the Editor” and “Self and BeyondSelf,” Richard Whittaker; “Looking for a Context for Martínez Celaya’s Work,” Mary Rakow

“UNBROKEN POETRY (HERMAN MELVILLE)” 1999 OIL, TAR, AND FABRIC ON LINEN 96” X 96”

FROM THE EDITORThe title of the painting on the cover The Veilsuggests a possible theme for issue #9. Exile wasconsidered because both Enrique Martínez Celayaand Erik d’Azevedo have experienced culturaldislocation. But “exile” and “the veil” both implyseparation; one of loss, home left behind, the other ofsomething covered over. Both provide points ofdeparture for many levels of consideration.

Martínez Celaya, born in Cuba, emigrated to Spain,then to Puerto Rico and then to the United States.In his own words, “Whether I’m in the United Statesor in a Spanish country, I’m always two people, onehappy to be there and one who’s a foreigner.”

d’Azevedo, as a child, was taken to live in Liberia.Although his family returned to the United States,the experience, he says, “changed [me] irreversiblyfrom that point on... I’ve felt ever since then that Inever quite fit into American culture.”

These facts serve as a starting point for reflectionsabout the condition of dislocation, separation andestrangement. The heading “Self & Beyond Self” whichI’ve used for the Martínez Celaya interview suggestsanother way to frame these themes. From this point ofview, the work of Martínez Celaya is rooted in theperennial question implicit in the Socratic call to knowone’s self. This is a knowledge that opens upon unimagineddepths and bears relationship to the great religioustraditions. Our estrangement from this knowledge goesbeyond the specifics of cultural dislocation. Who am I? Each of us is grounded in mystery.

As Martínez Celaya writes in Guide, a book-lengthself-interview, “I have continued considering the ideasof Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgen-stein.” Martínez Celaya’s reading in Western philosophyis considerable, and helps provide some context for hisstatement in Guide, that most current art isdisappointing because its aims are too shallow and tooself-conscious. “How,” Martínez Celaya asks, “can Ifind a way of living... where freedom and duty are notcontradictions.” The problem is not one that sciencecan solve for us. If it could, perhaps the artist wouldhave continued his career in quantum electronics.

What can ground an ethics today? Not particlephysics. What can guide my own ethical choices? ForMartínez Celaya, art is an exploration which is neverfar from such basic questions.

The veil is what stands between the false and thetrue, what deflects our attention, and if we can nolonger use capital letters for our terms, at least let the

claim be made that there is a difference between theauthentic and the inauthentic. We are placed in therealm of being, which is where the work of MartínezCelaya is located. This is not the being of Aristotle, ofeternal substance, but the realm of man’s being, theontological space of experience.

If contemporary relativism is, as Martínez Celayaputs it in Guide, “a drain through which all of thepossibilities of art eventually will vanish” - then whatcould the antidote be? As I understand MartínezCelaya, it will not lie in religious dogma, metaphysics,science or pseudo-science. What is left?

The perennial questions have been with us forthousands of years and there is a wisdom traditionwhich speaks to these questions. It tells us that theontological realm of individual life is something like anunexplored forest, one that cannot be explored byproxy. Each of us in this forest is something of an exile.Yet there are myths, fairy tales and the teachings of thegreat religious traditions which shed some light in thisdarkness. And what about art? Didn’t it once aspire tofind its way to the edge of clearings in this realm?

In our issue, we have two additional articles onMartínez Celaya and his work. Mary Rakow’s meditationis a revelation about the level which writing on art canreach. As Patrice Wagner told me, “I gave Enrique hisfirst one-man exhibit,” and she has contributed a littlerecollection of her own.

Richard Berger’s meditation, “To All Artists Knownand Unknown,” can be seen as an example of the veilof how little we know of each other; of lives lived inisolation. Sometimes that veil is pulled back a little toprofound effect. My own account of meeting artistPrentiss Cole is a happier story, of a veil passedthrough, that of my own automatic reactions. KathleenCramer’s “Gold Diggers of 2004” is what? Well, it’sabout finding gold. Where to find it? Deep. Or maybesometimes it’s hidden in plain view. Anyway, while thedigging is going on, Cramer reminds us that it’simportant to remember to have a good lunch.

The three portfolios speak for themselves. The nightphotography of Walter Kennedy and the photogravuresof Unai San Martin are both powerfully evocative of thepoetic face of the world always so much in eclipsebeneath our day-to-day concerns. The birds and angelsof Robert Brady give a small peek into the work of thismajor Bay Area artist whose extensive body of work isoften described as opening upon the archetypal. And, ofcourse, we have the next episode in Rue Harrison’sadventures of Indigo Animal. Welcome to issue #9 - RW

It was four or five years ago when I first heard of theartist Enrique Martínez Celaya, John Evans, poet-bookdealer [Diesel Books], mentioned him as someone Iwould find worth looking up. He’d moved to LosAngeles, John told me. Over two years were to passbefore we met. I had learned that Martínez Celaya wasteaching at Pomona College and, one afternoon, visitingmy mother in Claremont, I thought I’d try to catch him oncampus. It happened he was in class and, by the time I’dlocated the building and room, his class was just ending;the timing was perfect.

It turned out, to my surprise, that Martínez Celayawas familiar with works + conversations. We talked forperhaps thirty minutes. Remembered most clearly washis quiet directness and a quality of dignity and depth. I’dyet to see his work and knew little about him otherwise.We agreed our conversation should continue.

Not long after I returned to the Bay Area, I receivedtwo books in the mail, an impressive hardback inGerman and English published by the ContemporaryMuseum in Honolulu, Enrique Martínez Celaya 1992to 2000, and a small paperback entitled Guide, theartist’s fictitious account of a drive up the coast toSanta Cruz with a trusted friend, a framework in whichMartínez Celaya articulates his thinking and thequestions which form the background of his work.

This little book made a singular impression on me.I couldn’t remember encountering anything elsewritten on art which spoke so directly to my ownexperience and interests. I could hardly contain myexcitement and emailed my enthusiastic response. Theconversation which had begun, continued.

Martínez Celaya’s credentials are unusual. On thevery brink of taking his doctorate in quantumelectronics at the University of California at Berkeley,he switched directions and turned toward a career asan artist.

As a boy of eleven, Martínez Celaya had apprenticed to an academic painter in Puerto Rico. From his highschool years, art and science developed side by side.Science promised to set the world in order. Art provided aplace to wrestle with all that resisted order.

In Guide, he writes, “as a student, I was never interestedin finding a style. I was looking for art that revealedsomething about the structure and meaning of things.”The impulse of a scientist.

What do you want?” asks his friend in Guide. “Toclarify, to find a path,” Martínez Celaya responds. “Toyou or to the world?” One might say this is thedistinction that divides art and science. Martínez Celaya

wants both. “To make an artwork requires measurablethings like discipline, ideas and some skill but alsorequires other things that come from the inside as wellas from mid-air,” he says.

Most of us would claim to find things out forourselves. It is not enough to be the recipient of theopinions and claims of others, especially in relation toone’s own life, but how many follow that principle?Required is personal verification. As Martínez Celayaputs it in Guide, “Biographical facts are neither aguarantee nor a requirement for authenticity...Whatever I have to offer can’t be recollected in the word,‘Cuban’ or even ‘Hispanic’ or even ‘Westerner’.” headds further, “to find oneself in a collective set of traitsis a delusion.” Moreover, “some things are not signs tobe decoded by a specific culture. Take the heart-wrenching image of a mother with a dead child in aKollwitz drawing. This suffering will always be true. Ifart is centered in these types of fundamentalexperiences, then it will always have meaning. If it isabout fashion or culture, then it’s unlikely that it willsurvive... But basic human emotions and desires, andthings like trees, animals, landscapes, the sun, themoon, and so on, will still matter and will still definehuman experience.”

Carl Jung writes that we are, each of us, embeddedin nature. The statement seems self-evident, but to whatextent is it possible to feel this truth today? The meat Ieat has lost its connection with actual animals, forinstance. And what is someone plugged into an I-Podembedded in? Baudrillard describes us as being sodisconnected as to be in orbit, embedded in dreams,fantasies, spectacles. As Heidegger says, being is alwaysfalling away from us.

An investigation into this hidden realm is an essentialpossibility of artmaking. It is one way of thinking aboutthe work of Martínez Celaya. “To clarify, to find apath.” Ultimately this is fundamental for ethics. WithMartínez Celaya, the connection is explicit. What canserve as a guide for actions in my life? This search forclarification is not abstract. One might say, the real isthat which must be inhabited.

The place of the artist today is in a confused state.In the past much lip service has been paid to the ideaof the artist as the hero or visionary, a discreditednotion in the postmodern view. The more up-to-dateversion is business-like, artist as expert, a culturalworker, certified technician [MFA], someone who canuse tropes, texts, who can “appropriate” and so on.

Martínez Celaya also has his MFA, but would not,

I’m sure, ask to be thought of as such an expert. He callsus to re-examine issues which have been summarilybanished in certain circles, deeper human questionswhich even fifty years ago were taken seriously. Hiswork constitutes a challenge to many fashionableassumptions of the artworld’s postmodern intellectualatmosphere. The work belongs to a new direction, onewhich is appearing in the wake of the shortcomings ofcertain postmodern ideas now becoming apparent.

Last year one day in May, as I threaded my way up LaBrea Avenue toward the artist’s studio, such thoughtspreoccupied me. I found the address next to aninconspicuous door opening to an ascending stairway.His large studio occupies the top floor of a two-storybuilding. Enrique showed me around, showed me anumber of books he’s published under his colophon“Whale and Star” and described some publishing ideas.By the time we sat down to talk to the machine, I knewthere’d be a lot of material we wouldn’t get to. I posedthe following as a place to begin...

Richard Whittaker: I can’t help feeling you’vecome an amazingly long way having left science notthat long ago, but I don’t really know your history. Iknow you were living in Spain as a child.

Enrique Martínez Celaya: Yes, my family emigratedfrom Cuba to Madrid in 1972, and then to Puerto Rico afew years later. Spain, back then, was not an easy place forforeigners, but the difficulties and the lack of distractionshelped strengthen my relationship to drawing, so when wemoved to Puerto Rico I became an apprentice for a painterand took courses at the academy there.

RW: What academy was that?

EMC: La Liga del Arte de San Juan. Most artistsfrom the island, at one point or another, have beenassociated with it.

RW: So when you were apprenticing to a painter,how old were you?

“To discover one’s self

is also to discover

one’s connection to the

world. As one

recognizes these

connections, a prison

sometimes becomes

apparent; the prison of

what we’ve established

or imagined ourselves

to be.”

EMC: I was around ten or eleven.

RW: Would you talk a little about your apprenticeship?

EMC: At first I did many still-life drawings, pastel portraits and copies of Leonardo’s paintings—not verywell. As I got older that interest in academic drawing continued, but it took the form of narrativepaintings—allegories of what was happening around me. I still have a few of those paintings, and I reallylike some of them.

By my mid-teens expressing my feelings didn’t seem good enough anymore, so I devoted more time tophysics, which was appealing, partly because it gave me access to an emotionally simpler world. Physicsheld the promise of an orderly life.

The summer I turned sixteen, I worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and built a laser in my sparetime. But I continued to paint and read and was fortunate that at my high school everyone was encouragedto explore all disciplines.

RW: What was this school you’re describing now?

EMC: It was a school founded in the nineteen-twenties by the University of Puerto Rico as an extensionof the College of Pedagogy. By the time I was there, it had evolved into one of the best schools on the island.

RW: What a great stroke of luck!

EMC: Yes. It was. My life would not be the same had it not been for that school, especially its bully and its principal. Back when I enrolled, it was a custom for the upperclassmen to grab new students by the arms and legs, like pigs, and humiliate them by forcing their butts onto a pipe located

“Being ethical away from the world is easier than

when we are involved ourselves. I think some people

see the path of abstraction as pure, uncompromised,

but it ’s a purity of avoidance instead of disti l lation

o f what ’s essent ia l . And that goes fo r a r t too,

a r t i s ts who ins i s t on remov ing the i r work f rom

h u m a n s t r u g g l e s t a k e a n e a s i e r p a t h ,

a n e a s i e r p a t h t h a t s e e m s p a r t i c u l a r l y

wasteful when we know that many live themselves

i n t u r m o i l a n d c o n f u s i o n .”

LEFT: “REMINDER” 2001 [DETAIL] C PRINT 30” X 30”

“The summer I turned sixteen,

I worked for the U.S.

Department of Energy and

built a laser in my spare time.

But I cont inued to pa int

and read. . .”

in the middle of the courtyard. I got the treatmentthree times, so I modified a kitchen knife to stab thering leader, a bully named Chelo, next time he tried tobother me.

Luckily I laid the knife on the desk of my highschool principal before I could use it. And thatexchange, which could have gone many ways, starteda relationship that lasted the whole time I was there.

RW: With these gifts, sometimes one feels the wishto give something back.

EMC: Yes, when I started teaching, one of mymotivations was to give back some of what I hadbenefited from; to put myself out there, to be honestand to be interested.

RW: You’re teaching art at Ponoma College rightnow, although you’ve tendered your resignation,something I’d like to ask you about later; but a basicquestion arises; you must have thought about this:what is of value—potential value—in the pursuit of artand art making? I don’t see our culture as particularlysupportive of the fine arts, and yet you are teachingthat; and that is what you yourself are deeply involvedin. A big question.

EMC: Many people want to change the world in a bigway, but that’s difficult to do in art, or in teaching.Broad political work is better done in the streets. Inthe classroom, or with an artwork, the transformationsare one at a time. And if in ten years you touch twentystudents, that’s great. Maybe some of them will pushforward and make something out of it.

RW: Driving out, I was thinking about this thing wecall “art.” We say “art” and have an idea, vague, butan idea of what that means. Art is something, right?But the concept of it we have today is not old,historically. What? Four or five hundred years old?

EMC: About that, maybe less.

RW: So we read that whatever we now look at andcall “art” was totally integrated with some societal,institutional form in the past. Then, at some point, thephrase appears, “art for art’s sake” which, in a way,defines this separation; that stands alone. Can artreally have some kind of meaning without anintegration in some other structure?

EMC: I think this separation you are referring tobegan with the Enlightenment. When Kant proposedthat art must be disinterested, he erected a barrier thatwe should now tear down. Only art for life’s sakemakes sense to me. And by that I mean art asethics—a guide clarifying one’s choices and life.

RW: You’ve made a connection there betweenethics and the process of clarifying for yourself, yourown life. I’ve never heard it put that way before.Ethics and coming to a clearer understanding ofoneself. Can you say anything more about thatconnection?

EMC: I don’t see any useful distinction betweenunderstanding of oneself and understanding of one’sduty. I think that much of what we are shows up inhow we view what’s right and wrong and howconsistently we live by that view.

RW: “What is the Good?” In a way, that’s thefoundational question, as I hear you. And it’s not anabstract question, right? It cannot be an abstractquestion. When the question becomes abstract, whenpeople speak of “the good” and there’s no connectionwith a real person, it becomes dangerous, it seems to me.

EMC: Being ethical away from the world is easierthan when we are involved ourselves. I think somepeople see the path of abstraction as pure,uncompromised, but it’s a purity of avoidance insteadof distillation of what’s essential. And that goes for arttoo; artists who insist on removing their work fromhuman struggles take an easier path, an easier path thatseems particularly wasteful when we know that manylive themselves in turmoil and confusion.

“FRANKNESS (WORK OF MERCY)” 2000 ACRYLIC ON SILVER GELATIN PRINT 60” X 30”

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA

RW: Intuitively, it seems to me that among artists there’ssome form of the wish—if not always consciously —tofind what truly comes from one’s self. The need to find myown thought, my own step, my own perception. It’s aprofoundly difficult thing to do, really to come to “myown step.” But when one has that experience does thatnot, in itself, give meaning to one’s life?

EMC: To find one’s self in a gesture or in an artwork,even if vaguely, becomes a hint of our possibilities,which invigorates life with the sense of purpose. Ofcourse, these discoveries don’t happen everyday, butstruggling against one’s limitations is often good enoughto give meaning to one’s life.

RW: There’s always our egoism—I don’t mean thatpejoratively, it’s just a fact; but intuitively, oneknows that’s not the whole story of “who I am.” Soisn’t it confusing to say, “What the artist candiscover is him or herself?” Maybe that’s not soclear. Would you agree?

EMC: Much confusion comes with the “am” in “who Iam.” There’s much in oneself that has little to do withindividuality, per se, but which instead is part of a muchlarger continuum. To discover one’s self is also todiscover one’s connection to the world. As onerecognizes these connections, a prison sometimesbecomes apparent; the prison of what we’ve establishedor imagined ourselves to be. For instance, wouldn’t it benice if something were to come out of my mouth that Ido not expect? Of course. But it’s unlikely.

RW: Oh, yes. Now the students at Pomona College area pretty high-level group, and I don’t know if they’rerepresentative of this, but I get the impression thatamong young people today, and in the culture at large—do you find that “deep questions” are thought to beunacceptable? They’re cornball, or something. Do youknow what I’m getting at?

EMC: Yes, big questions can be exposing andungraceful and many students stay away from riskslike that, and if a student is not willing or capable oftaking risks, there’s not much one can do as a teacher.Nothing that matters can be solved with “put morepaint on the canvas” or “let’s talk semiotics.” But it’snot just them. I think we are evolving into a societyafraid to pose certain questions because we’re tooembarrassed about the implications.

RW: I was reading a post on an email list wherediscussions often got pretty interesting. In a philosophicalexchange, one fellow wrote, “Courageously—grin, grin,face burning with shame—I’ll admit that I’m interested inmeaning.” It’s a curious thing, this cultural milieu whereone would feel this sort of apology is necessary.

EMC: The average person still says, “I’m interested inmeaning.” It’s only among the intellectual elite that theneed for meaning has become a sign of weakness. Ithink many contemporary intellectuals consider“claims of meaning” to be in inverse proportion tomental refinement.

RW: Sometimes it seems there’s almost an attitude ofpride among the most rigorous reductionists. “I’m strongenough and smart enough to take it.”

EMC: In my experience, many of these people areenamored with science’s authority and want to makethemselves into scientists of the arts and humanities,which leads to nothing but fancy terminology,detachment and those attitudes you mentioned. Ofcourse, there are works, or thoughts, that are too softbecause they have no emotional tautness or intelligence.But there are also works and attitudes that are “hard” ina very facile, predictable way. The look of objectivity—the arcane language, the pseudo-science journals, thehard expression in the eyes—only points to what scienceis not.

RW: Yes. Clearly, one sees this. That’s well put.

“To find one’s self in a gesture

or in an artwork, even if

vaguely, becomes a hint of our

possibilities, which invigorates

life with the sense of purpose.

Of course, these discoveries

don’t happen everyday...”

EMC: I remember the first time I saw works +conversations. I was curious, but not very hopeful. As Ibegan reading I was surprised by your courage,surprised that somebody intelligent was willing to takerisks. I think you’re going exactly where people need togo if they want to change things. But doing that requiresa certain willingness to not wear the badge of the“cutting-edge” intellectual.

RW: That makes me think a little about the avantgarde. In the artworld, being identified as avant-gardeallows the artist to feel located in the place of highestrespect. Now I know that for quite a while the wholeconcept of an avant garde has come under question. Butthere’s still this tendency to aim for shock value, an oldavant garde strategy. Look at Damien Hirst, forinstance, just to take one example, and maybe over-simplifying it a bit. This has long since become aconvention of the academy. I think what you’re sayinghas some relationship to this.

EMC: The idea of the avant garde has become a fancifulconvention of the ruling class it once disrupted. Now, thebourgeois collectors, institutions and galleries are outthere looking for the new, the different and the shocking.

Hirst is not challenging the bourgeoisie or its values,but rather catering to its expectations of hyper-fluff,amusing theatrics and restaurants, without everannoying them where it hurts. I think the reactionarywork of Thomas Kinkade poses more of a threat to theart elite than the work of Damien Hirst.

RW: That’s amusing, but it’s a very good point. I’vesaid before that what would be radical and shockingnowadays would be something that’s quiet, and thatdoesn’t call attention to itself, something that requiresyour time and attention. That’d be shocking. Do youknow what I’m saying?

EMC: Yes, I think you’re right. Anything thatdemands serious and sustained engagement isrevolutionary today. We are in the age ofentertainment. I don’t think the last century will beremembered as the age of computing or nuclear power,but the age when entertainment finally took over ourconsciousness. Now, most other fields—art, politics,war—are defined through, and in relationship to, theirentertainment appeal.

Not even Orwell could have imagined that in ourtime, control and uniformity would be accomplished

without the built-in cameras and microphones, but withfamily programming and by cultivating interest in allsuperficial things. And unlike 1984, it’s hard to see a wayto rebel, because dissent is now part of the rules.

RW: Dissent - I wonder if there are other words whichwould also be worth thinking about? That’s a wordthat points you in a certain direction just like the wordsubversive does. But to become more present, to findsomething more real. The system doesn’t care, oneway or the other, I’d say. Language is problematic.

EMC: I understand what you’re saying. It’suncomfortable to speak this way, but it’s a battle againstloneliness, against the dissolution of the idea—problematic as it is—of quality.

But I do agree with you that language gets us introuble. Every time I give a talk there’s someone in thecrowd who says, “Yes, I know exactly what you’resaying.” And as they continue to speak, I realize that theymisunderstand me.

RW: Well, yes. I have to say I struggle with this myselfin pretty much the exact way you describe it; thisproblem with language. In so many areas the availablewords are essentially dead. One searches foralternatives, mostly without much success. “The middleground” for instance; it’s not as dead as a lot of phrases,but still, it’s burdened with dismissive associations...

EMC: ...and it’s always heard as some sort ofcompromise between the two sides.

“I don’t think the last century

will be remembered as the

age of computing or nuclear

power, but the age when

entertainment finally took

over our consciousness.”

“SECOND WAR” 1998 OIL AND ROSE PETALS ON PAPER 38.5” X 26.5”

RW: Exactly. And you know, there should be some pretty good associations with “the middle.” Thecenter. Balance. If you’re off-center, eccentric, which in the art world, I suppose is thought to be avirtue, it means you’ll fly off in some direction. A high level of energy combined with a lack ofbalance isn’t so good.

EMC: “The middle” is difficult. It usually rubs against the edge of language, which leads toconfusion and misunderstandings.

“MAN AND DOG (LONELINESS)” 2000 ACRYLIC ON PAPER 18” X 18”

RW: It comes to me that there is a word that bears adeep relationship with some of the things we’re talkingabout. Being. Now that’s a term we don’t hear used toomuch. One thinks of Heidegger here. It occurs to me thatwhen one is connecting ethics with the pursuit of art, asyou described earlier, as a search for clarity, clarity ofone’s self first, would you not also be willing to say thatit’s also a search for being, for one’s own being?

EMC: Yes, I think you’re right; many of Heidegger’s ideas arehelpful in thinking about the connections between self and world.

RW: Yes. Anyone who loves so much of Heidegger’sthinking, as I do, is dismayed by the Nazi connections,and yet I cannot reject the quality of his thought—somuch of it. Do you ever feel hamstrung about that?

EMC: Not really. Our lives, unlike fairy tales, havecontradictions that resist resolution, and to insist thatthese shouldn’t exist is to invite falseness. Heidegger’smistakes and weaknesses don’t cancel his contributions,even if some people try to argue that his Nazism wasalready brewing in his philosophy. I hope that the valueof my own work is not measured by my human frailties.

Even more challenging than Heidegger, in thisregard, is Wittgenstein. He wasn’t a Nazi, but he wasboth saintly and cruel. And I don’t think that thesimilarities between them are just lives withcontradictions; their philosophies have a great deal ofconnection, even if not always apparent.

RW: Well, Wittgenstein pretty much reduced what wecan say to language games, right? No deep questionsneed apply, I guess. But with Wittgenstein, there’s thiscategory of “that of which we can not speak.” And healso said, “that which can not be said, sometimes can beshown.” That is pretty interesting, don’t you think?

EMC: Yes. And life, like art, is one way to show.Wittgenstein wrote about logic, mathematics, language,color, but the concerns that seemed most important tohim—ethics, belief, spirit—he lived. And as a moralman facing the contradictions that I spoke about, hestruggled with himself and judged his actions bystandards that he often failed.

Maybe this goes back to the beginning of ourconversation. To talk about ethics, to talk about what isgood or bad is interesting, but somewhat useless andacademic. To live life with integrity is the thing.

And the purpose of art is to support and clarify that endeavor.

RW: That certainly does remind me that you’vetendered your resignation—of a tenured position,too—at one of the best colleges on the West Coast. Iwonder if you want to say anything about that?

EMC: It was a hard thing to do. I thought about it forthree years before I did it. My approach ultimatelyfailed and that is, partly, why I quit. I couldn’t teachin the environment of the institution as it existed andbe happy about it.

To give up a tenured position in the fickleness ofthe art world is a huge decision and, possibly, a stupidone. But I felt I was moving in the wrong direction bystaying there.

RW: This is not the first time you’ve made a bigchange like that. You were on the verge of taking yourdoctorate in physics and you made a big turn there,didn’t you?

EMC: Yes, and that decision was especiallydifficult, because I knew I was going to hurt myparents. Despite my fellowships, they had mademany sacrifices to put me through school anddreamed of me being a great scientist. When I toldthem “I want to be an artist,” I couldn’t offer anyassurances of success. I definitely felt foolish,careless, leaving the promises of my research atBerkeley. But I still did it.

RW: Maybe it’s the only way. It brings me back toyour concern with ethics; a life in which oneembodies what one represents. Wouldn’t you say thatwe face these questions, and that we don’t know theanswers? It’s necessary to take a step sometimes inorder to find out.

EMC: Yes. And also it’s an added motivation whenthe one direction has shown it has no answers. I mightnot know where the answer is, but I know where itisn’t. To realize that there’s no answer in something isan important breakthrough. Then, it’s just a matter ofcoming to terms with the personal sacrifices one hasto make. There’s nothing unclear in that. There maybe pain. But that’s different.

Martínez Celaya is represented by Griffin Contemporary

in Los Angeles and by the Berggruen Gallery in

San Francisco.

works

LOOKINGFOR ACONTEXTFORMARTÍNEZCELAYA’SWORK

by MARYRAKOW

I SEE THE HEADof St. Catherine of Alexandriaand think of that young woman in the 4th century,educated and wealthy, who was tied to a wheel,tortured and beheaded because she protested thepersecution of Christians by Maxentius. I see TheKing’s Shelter. I look down on these works made byEnrique Martínez Celaya and think—whole body,whole person, historical and transhistorical. Herenow: integrity, uprightness, valor.

I read what people say about Martínez Celaya’swork, about the arm, the heads, as dismembermentand I feel stupid and alone.

It is summer and I have flown to Philadelphia for theCezanne retrospective. I don’t know exactly why I’vecome. I have never looked at art made after theRenaissance, never at modern art, never at contemporaryart, but I am here just the same. In the long line of visitorsI enter the gallery. I see the first painting hanging on theright. It is small, no larger than a sheet of notebook paperturned on its side. It is seven apples. That is all. I lose mybreath. I am completely startled.

I stare at it for an hour, the crowd shuffling at my back.Anchored in sense, I look at it and look at it, each corner

each inch. I feel lifted out of myself. Transported into agreater, into an other order. I feel something like joy.

I finally turn away and exit in haste. I realize how,in all parts of my life, my consciousness is opaque,tunneled. Outside it is dark. I sit on the museumsteps. I begin to slip out of the experience. I amtrying to understand it, searching for words. I realizethis is what the mystics talk about. This is ecstasy.

By the time the cab comes, even though I avoidsmall talk, hoping to hold onto the feeling like a flamein a lantern, not wanting the cab driver to intrude, notwanting to see him, not everything, my ecstaticexperience dwindles. I pledge to not keep wasting mylife as if my fingertips were bandaged, my earsplugged, my eyes seeing things under a gray drape. Ido not sleep. I return to the museum in the morningthinking, I will be alive. Because, after all, aren’t Ialive in any case? Isn’t this constant opacity illusion?

This time I move through the galleries with thecrowd. Entrance to the show is timed in fifteen minuteintervals. I turn my eyes away from the apples but I amthinking only of them. I pass the mountains inProvence, Mont Sainte Victoire, the blue vase, Madame

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA “CONSTELLATION (WOODROOMS)”2002 COLOR SPITBITE, AQUATINT W/ DRYPOINT 46” X 36.5”

ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA “COMING HOME” 2000 TAR, FEATHERS, METAL, WOOD AND MIRROR 96” X 96” X 160”

“The boy stands softly and alert, exactly at that boundarybetween awareness and decision ... exactly at thatseam where what is knowntouches what is not-known...”

stand before one canvas then the second, back andforth and back and forth. The sun sets. Here nudity andproximity tremble at the edge of some possibility, atthe edge, perhaps of comfort, again.

I make up excuses so I can exit the gallery andreturn. I tell the guards, “I’m a psychiatrist from LosAngeles. I have a patient in crisis. I must make a call.I’ll be back.” I leave and sit in the cafeteria. I tell myself;these canvases are about memory. No. Not just that.These canvases enact the process of remembering inme. I return to the Large Bathers. For three days I goin and out. I stay only with them.

I cannot not wonder the source. Perhaps Cézanne sawsomething as a child, adults in such a configuration, tohave glimpsed this, say, on an outing with his nurse, orperhaps in a dream. A moment when all that one can feeloneself to be as a human is, in an instant, felt as ordered,at peace, so that the course of one’s life subsequent to that moment is experienced as loss, as a dividing of consciousness, a dividing of the self into intellect,

Cézanne, but I am looking at my shoes. Then I turn acorner. On the walls of a new large room, on the purewhite, hang the two Large Bathers canvases. I cannotbelieve my eyes. I know I can return to the apples butI don’t. I can return, perhaps, even to ecstasy. But hereis something different, something just as compelling.

The Bathers stand above me, larger, higher, so that incomparison I shrink to the size of a child, my perspectivethat of a young and very alert child. The woman with longbrown hair lunges in from the left, another reclines—I

The boy, caught up in his own awareness of thispossibility of self-reflection, of self-knowledge, might besaying, If I raise my head to you, I will see myself as Itruly am. And I will have no end.

The boy stands softly and alert, exactly at thatboundary between awareness and decision. He holdshimself, or we could say he lets himself be held, exactlyat that seam where what is known touches what is not-known, where what is seen touches what is not yet seen,that moment where, should he look up, time would fallaway. And he knows this. He stands in an annunciatorymoment. He stands knowing ecstasy is near.

I come to see the boy and the elk on rainy days, onsunny days. I read some photocopied articles on thecounter in the gallery where, during the opening, winewas served. I read about Enrique Martínez Celaya beingborn in Cuba, raised in Spain. I read a lot about “exile”and “displacement” but I don’t feel any of these things.I decide I do not care what other people see in hiswork. I sit with the boy and the elk. I think the boy issaying, I am here, aware of my own breath, aware ofthe hunger of my own consciousness, of myrestlessness. I am at this seam where transcendencebecomes possible. I am not lost. I am not in exile. I amnot alone. Here, now, in this awareness, I am home.

Today I am in Marfa, Texas. I feed the horse in the fieldacross the street. I ride my bike along the farm roadand some days see the gentle antelope, their tawnyhides. I am here for a writing residency and my newnovel is going horribly. I throw four years of work away.I read my way through Augustine’s City of God. I thinkabout Enrique’s work. I try to find words for why Irespond so deeply to it. I cannot do it. I am not an artperson. I have nothing smart to say.

Discouraged, I walk to Maiya’s restaurant. I eat thearugula and walnut salad. I scribble notes on the whitepaper tablecloth. This feels like a beginning. I putEnrique on a line that runs between Cézanne’s applesand his bathers:

The first time I see the work of Enrique Martínez Celayait is the exhibit “Coming Home” that inaugurates theopening of Griffin Contemporary in Venice, California.

I go at the insistence of a friend. This is my firstlook at contemporary art. This is my first art opening.The place is thronged, limousines on the curb. I learnthat it is impossible to look at art at an opening. Iwedge myself between the crowds and the walls tryingto see. A man compliments me on my shoes then driftsaway. I am relieved because, between the bodies, Ihave glimpsed the boy and the elk. I go home movedand frustrated. I go back the next day. I go back theday after that and the day after that. I go to the galleryevery day until the show closes. It is 4 o’clock on thelast day. I am told that all of the work has been sold toa collector in Berlin. I will never see the boy and the elkagain. I sit in my car and cry.

I think of Buber. The boy knows himself to be in thepresence of something larger than himself, this animalthat is not just larger in bulk, but larger in meaning, theboy standing with both feet squarely on the ground, hisposture soft but attentive, listening. As if what thebeast offers is a chance at transcendence and the boyrealizes this to some extent and it stills him, and hedoes not turn away and run. He lowers his head, whileall of his body inclines toward this intuited possibility.

I think of da Vinci’s Annunciation in Florence whereAngel Gabriel brings, as if attached to the very feathers ofhis wings, an entirely new order. The boy knows this too.It is an elk and not an angel. And the good news is there,inchoate, in the mirror that is not only stuck between theelk’s antlers, but placed there, aimed at the boy, as ifplaced there not by the artist but by the beast himself.

feeling, bodily sense, the stubborn will. This is notecstasy. This is attempted retrieval of a deep-seatedthing obsessively pursued even to the last years ofone’s life; the choice to throw oneself up againstsomething larger than oneself, that image, thatmemory, against which one’s life can be measured in itsentirety. The struggle to find it. Rules are broken. Fromthe canvas left unpainted, a flagrant white.

In a notebook of Enrique Martinez Celaya’s, on a pagelisting two columns of opposites, what is given as theopposite of “Beauty” —ugliness? No, not ugliness, but“Terror.” To save oneself by making a painting, a claypot, a photograph, a poem, a symphony. To makebecause one looks too often into the abyss, shuddering.Behind the resting object, what? If it is beautiful, what?terror. One of course thinks also of Celan. What madespeech almost impossible for him? Terror that resultsfrom the actual. Terror that is a response to humancruelty lived through. Human cruelty which arises inthe same place where speech resides—betweenpersons. Both in the same arena. This is the problem.What links Martínez Celaya to Celan, to Cézanne? Wecould say terror that lies behind the act of making.

Where does terror begin? Of course, I do not know.But certain of Martínez Celaya’s works presentthemselves as possible answers, particularly thesethree: The Garden of Forgetfulness, The Secrets, andA Boy In His Room.

Terrifying, also, the possibility that both speech andgesture will not work, as in: Pena (Sorrow), and TheEmpty Garden. Again, Celan:

To stand in the shadowof a scar in the air.

Stand-for-no-one-and-nothing....

Let us imagine Cézanne, come back to life. The LargeBathers are resident in the world in their permanentstate of incompleteness, of un-resolve, embodyingboth the movement of memory and the grating on theskin. We imagine Cézanne looking at all of MartínezCelaya’s work. Wouldn’t he stop in front of Acceptanceof Longing? So fleshy, the surrendered animal, soscored and tense the pedestal on which he lies. Thistension, this grid. Wouldn’t Cézanne say, “Yes, Enrique,it is precisely this.”

Celan’s most important verb, it seems to me, is“stehen,” to stand. To stand upright against what hadhappened and continued to happen, the Europeandisaster that took both of his parents. On MartínezCelaya’s canvas, Sebastían, the young son’s name iswritten slowly, carefully, on top of what? on top of treesthat stand against the black ground. Is this terror? Thatwhat is carried inside might hurt the child I have justmade? This vortex? In the three Large Bathers what is delineated? The vision of a choice—as if Cézannewere saying, If this tentative harmony was oncepossible between adults I glimpsed at the river’s edge,

why isn’t it possible for me? Why is touch difficult? Whydo I scream at my wife if she accidentally brushes mysleeve? The opposite of beauty is not, for MartínezCelaya, for Celan, for Cézanne, ugliness, but terror, tostand against which, one makes. One makes something of beauty. One makes what is truthful.

How do I touch this child and not wound him? notwound her? How do we touch at all? Cézanne’squestion. We bleed into each other and across. Ourwounds. Our histories. Mark (two figures). And, inspite of this, can’t we say that love is possible?

Who is the boy who stands before the elk? My boy (self).

Martínez Celaya’s work asks the question, again,again, again, Who am I? How did I get here, here? I amon this line between terror and ecstasy. How do Istand (stehen, Celan)? And what is the field inwhich I find myself now, newly, again? This fieldthat, now, is with others? Where is the answer?River (Todo el campo es nuestro). How do I find it?Fir (the path). Who will take me there? TheShepherd. And why does he have no wings?

Who will come to solve this mystery of relatedness,of being with my daughter? my son? And where will Ifind this one? Is he draped above, in the branches ofthe tree? El que ellega (the one who arrives)?

I leave Maiya’s restaurant carrying the white papertablecloth covered with words.

At home I watch two things simultaneously on t.v.:a Lannan Foundation videotape of Jorie Grahamreading her poems followed by her conversationMichael Silverblatt recorded in Santa Fe in 1999, and anight-long homage to Elvis in the movies. I flip backand forth between Graham and “Jailhouse Rock.”

Graham speaks of the border between the audibleand the inaudible, the visible and invisible, a topicwhich interests her keenly. She believes there arecertain kinds of “entry points” into the invisible whichare found on the “threshold of sense” where thematerial world is diminished. Her poem “Phase AfterHistory” which she has just read, begins with two birdscaught in a house, their wing sounds barely audible.

“Things that are on the threshold of sense give youan entry point into the invisible, the inaudible...” shetells Michael Silverblatt. “They are always like angelicpresentations. They tell you by their annunciatoryquality and by their diminishment of the materialworld...that there might be another world beyond.They tell you there is another world behind it.”

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I stop flipping to Elvis.“You have to rehearse your instrument of description

on the visible world,” she says, “the manifest, on theflesh via sense, to train your instrument on this in orderto approach the act of description, which is possible, oftwo orders of the invisible—the invisible orders that areexternal to us (spiritual) and the invisible order that isinternal to us (psychological).”

Graham cites Gerard Manley Hopkins as her guidein saying that she feels these dimensions are all ofone piece, one fabric: the carnate, the manifest, thespiritual, the psychological. I am thinking of the boystanding before the elk, the visible world in whichboth invisible orders are approached, spiritual andpsychological. This entry-point reached via sense,paint, tar, feathers, glass.

“If we rehearse our own capacity for transcriptionof the visible,” she says, “we can arrive at placesthat open to the spiritual realm.” I think she is right.On a new blank sheet I draw a triangle:

But not all artists are like Martínez Celaya, not all poets likeGraham. This is what concerns me as I go to bed. What isthe worst version of that other level of experience, thatawful level that does not satisfy? It goes something likethis: I prepare to go to an opening. I have gone to manyof them since that first one at Griffin Contemporary. I dressin black, I wear great heels. But most important to mypreparation, I change my thinking. I bring my intellect,my restlessness to consider and to feel the whole of things,to a quiet place. I do not want to suffer disappointment soI adopt a complacency. I pretend I am not profoundlyyearning. I remind myself I must not say, I hunger to see God. I remind myself not to think of ecstasy.

I enter the gallery. I have narrowed down all of myother concerns: my aging body, my husband, mydaughter and two sons, the inevitability of mydeath. I have left these things outside the gallery in

an effort to be moved. I am as aware of this act oftossing out, this reduction, as I am of the art in front ofme. I will end in some hour of some day. My hour ofdeath will be shared by every other existing thing(microbe, satellite, leaf, newspaper, parliament,fountain pen, glacier, rat). It will be an hour in thehistory of each of these things but, for me, it will be thehour of my coming to an end. I look at what hangs onthe wall. How have I lived? Will anything follow?

I stand longer before it. I am trying to be satisfied.Again, I funnel my consciousness down from its naturalrestlessness to an even narrower tip. I aim this at thework, inches from it, so that it is the tip of a knifeentering a wound. I say to myself or to my companions,“This is very thought provoking. I realize only now thatI haven’t really seen this thing before. Or the energythat occurs here.” I leave the gallery holding onto a littlelesson in the act of seeing. By the time I am in my carthe work has already become something very small,something didactic, and, (dare I say this?) little more. Itis something I can put in the pocket of my coat. It issomething I will forget about after three days.

What has not occurred in me with such work? Whathas not been set in motion?

The problem, in this degraded experience, isn’t theabsence of religious subject matter to which I was forso long accustomed. Nor is it the absence of figure. Noris it abstraction or leanness or unfamiliarity. In fact theproblem is not with the subject matter at all. It is withthe thinking and feeling that lie behind what I see. Idon’t feel the art is driven by big enough questions. Idon’t feel it is driven by deep feeling. The problem isthat behind the work I don’t feel the artist and I sufferthe same things.

Even if the artist and I do suffer similarly, desiresimilarly, wonder similarly, the problem is that I willnever know this because the art that I am looking atdoesn’t involve these things. It is as if the artist hasagreed to what seems to be a commonplace now, thatart cannot and should not address itself to what willremain, always, unsolvable. That art shouldn’t leanitself into this. As a consequence, art, in this degradedexperience, bears the unfortunate distinction of beingable to fulfill its ambition because that ambition is keptso small. This is the opposite of Cézanne in the LargeBathers. This is the opposite of modesty, the oppositeof valor, the opposite of a willingness to fail.

I consider Jorie Graham’s comment that a goodpoem presents me with the opportunity to havecomplex, simultaneous, and even (cont. page 61)

Rakow/Searching for a Context... cont. from p. 18

contradictory feelings and thoughts. This is one of thethings that makes poetry intensely pleasurable, that itmatches the complexity of my own interior. It is evenmore pleasurable when it exceeds that complexity.

A good poem is also hospitable to paradox. Froma noble family a young woman of exceptionallearning takes a public moral position for which sheis tortured on a spiked wheel and put to death. Sheis canonized. She is made the patron saint of youngwomen, scholars, attorneys and wheelwrights.

I come out of the gallery into traffic, a phone callfrom my daughter, a woman on the sidewalkrearranging flattened boxes on her shopping cart.She grips the cardboard tower with her white glovedhand. What is her history? What is her name?

On my night table is Augustine’s The City of God. I don’tknow exactly why I brought it to Marfa but I find myselfagreeing with those who say Augustine is the greatestintellect in the Western tradition, the greatest thinker.

Three years after Rome collapsed, after Alaricand the Goths sacked the city in A.D. 410, thisBishop of Hippo began his great work as a defenseagainst the charge that Christians were responsiblefor the fall of Rome. From this apologetic openinghe spreads his immense net.

I try to imagine standing, as Augustine did, in theashes of Rome and still to be able to see so far in alldirections. His treatise extends from the beginning ofthe world (which he calculated to have occurred lessthan 3,000 years prior) to its prophetic end. He reviewsphilosophical opinions regarding the Supreme Good,discusses the philosopher Varro’s delineation of 288different sects of philosophy, argues against the Stoics,the Cynics, the Old Academy, the New Academy. Hislove of Plato and Virgil is undisguised and everywhereevident. His knowledge of Scripture is inexhaustible.He is encyclopedic.

The question is: Why can I go from The City ofGod to Martínez Celaya’s work and not feel ajarring? His work isn’t, to my sense of it, explicitlyreligious, Augustinian, Christian, Platonic orCatholic. But if I free the word soul from its religiousand ecclesial connotations, if soul can mean thatforce that wrestles most profoundly and desiringlyfor meaning, that resists reduction of the self, thenI can say in Martínez Celaya’s work the soulbecomes more than a rumored thing.

Augustine’s journey to his final conversion toChristianity as an adult is well documented in his morefamous work The Confessions. As in The City of God,we see here a person who demands of himself and ofhis world that all of his appetites be considered,accounted for, satisfied, honored, in the search formeaning—including his concupiscence. To aim atnothing less. I consider, then, Landscape (Breadth).

Augustine’s knowledge is encyclopedic but he isnot writing an encyclopedia. He is giving the widestand most complex view he can of the world itself, ofwhat it means to be here, to be alive andquestioning and curious and demanding. Peoplewho write about Martínez Celaya often mention,admiringly, that his output includes poetry,photography, painting, invention. But, so what?These could be the footprints of a dilettante. But theyaren’t. The issue is the level of the questions that residebehind the work, the level of inquiry one can feel here.The choice is an Augustinian choice, a Cézanne choice,a Graham choice, a Celan choice. To place oneself overagainst the largest questions and therefore inevitablyfail. Light and Figure (almonds). Again, Celan:

In the almond—what dwells in the almond?Nothing.

What is the line between Martínez Celaya and Augustine?What besides a voraciousness of appetite and the refusalto reduce human experience? What else?

I think of Thing and Deception. The huge rabbitis not childish. It is serious. Veiled but seen through thered it is not a metaphor for death (crucifixion) andresurrection (Easter bunny) because it is not ametaphor at all. It works like a good poem. And whatopens up? Not just an idea (death/resurrection). Notjust a thing seen with the eyes and then transferred toan already existing idea. What shocks is the figure itself.This is unquestioned, making impossible all lessermeanings, all metaphoric loops. The paradox whichgives that pleasure Graham describes is that Being itselfis the subject and this high-mindedness would seem tocontradict the ordinariness of the object but it doesn’t.We hold both at the same time. We see and think andfeel both at the same time. That is the pleasure. And,then, too, what lies under the white?

Augustine asks whether or not the bodies of the damnedwill be consumed by the eternal fire in which they willsuffer. This is how his mind works: in the same breath heconsiders the arguments of the Platonists and he considers

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the salamander, which was then thought to, amazingly,live in fire without being consumed. He feels both arenecessary to get at the question. It becomes a questionof the body. The salamander is material, corporeal,visceral and his argument moves, as Graham describesa good poem, from the material to an entry point intothe non-material (the psychological, the spiritual). Thesalamander is like the rabbit in Thing and Deception.The rabbit is not presented because it is cute. It is notpresented because it is sentimental. And, mostimportant I think, it is not presented ironically. We candraw a line between Martínez Celaya and Augustinebecause the ironic posture, so easy, so acceptable, isrefused. Irony masks sorrow. Irony marks the giving upof a dream of a unified field of meaning. It masksdespair. What connects Martínez Celaya and Augustineis irony’s opposite. Hope. What kind of thinking?Couldn’t these words of Augustine’s also be Enrique’s:“That nature has some cause, science some method, lifesome end and aim” (Book XI, 25)? What is it that thehuman person looks out on? What is visceral andintelligible and has no end? Man and Sky.

But this is also the problem. Knowing all for which onehungers, voracious, unending, partial, temporarilystayed—to then produce another like oneself, anotherhuman being, this sets in motion the precise intersectionof all that one fears with all that one hopes to be true.The Future. To bring into the vast unsettledness ofoneself, The Transpierced (Morning), to stand here, inthe world where meaning is believed possible, to bringinto this tangible, visceral seam of knowing and not-knowing, a person of one’s own making, a child, thissurely this is a radical step, Gabriela (First).

But the child takes nine months to appear. Whois The Visitor? As Mary might drop her prayerbook tothe floor at the sight of the Angel Gabriel comethrough the walls to her room, unexpected, troubling,what does this visitor bring? News of a new order, ofa new way to be one’s self.

How does one build a structure to house the possibilityof such good news? Seated Figure. Who arrives, in thedripping boat, to aid? The Helper (Abruptness). Whatvoice is it that comes to me, The Wanderer? What voicecomes through my walls? Gabriela’s Laughter.

I step out of bed into the Marfa night. It is the season formeteor showers. The sky is covered with stars in amanner impossible for me to detect in Los Angeles. I wishthey were pinholes in a velvet vault, but they are not. They

are real. The landscape here, in daylight and in night,makes it obvious that I am living in something larger thanmyself. And it is overpowering. I come back inside.

What can stand up to this complexity? The boywith his lowered head, his stillness before the elk,before the mirror the elk holds. St. Catherine withher wheel. To be alive requires these. Humility.Modesty. Attentiveness. Valor.

In another Lannan interview conducted by HelenVendler, the Nobel prizewinning poet Csezlaw Miloszsays, “Of course,” because he is thinking of what hispoems are not, “Of course,” his thick black browslifting, “Of course I would like all of my poems to beabout ecstasy.”

Black tar, feather, plaster, glass, rabbit, veil, darkenedarm. Where does it say these cannot be entry points?Where does it say a painting can’t be aboutsomething? Where does it say I must not hunger?Where does it say ecstasy is no longer allowed?

In the kitchen I find blank paper and a pen. I drawanother figure:

Near the close of his conversation with JorieGraham, Michael Silverblatt mentions that literarycritics often say “of course Jorie Graham knows thatin this secular age the belief in God is only“notional,” after which they proceed to speak of herpoems as if they are “hypothetical enactments of anot-held belief.” Graham responds by saying thatshe has never been able to understand, though shecan admire, people who are absolutely certain of asecular rendering of reality. “We don’t know enoughto know,” she says, smiling. Pointing to the booksof her poetry that lie on the table between them

“EL QUE LLEGA (THE ONE WHO ARRIVES)” 2003OIL AND TAR ON CANVAS 77” X 60”

she confesses that she writes poems in order toconstantly inquire into the nature of reality, that if shehad answered, the poems would not be necessary.

The second time I see Martínez Celaya ‘s work I havedriven south on the 405 freeway for about an hourto see the retrospective that originatd at TheContemporary Museum, Hawaii, and is now at theOrange County Museum of Art.

It is evening. The rooms are filled with people. Avideo is playing which I think is of Enrique talkingabout his work, his process of making art, but I do notslow down for it because on a far wall I see what I willcome to know as Unbroken Poetry (Herman Melville).I walk toward it as quickly as I can without drawingattention to myself. The hummingbird holds his placeon the wall above me, larger than life, larger than me.I feel a terrible shock, a startling recognition. But ofwhat? Recognition of what? The hummingbird hoverson pink that is almost gaudy. I wipe my eyes on mysweater sleeve. I remind myself: I am a grouchyunbeliever. I do not go to church. I don’t read theBible anymore. I don’t believe in religion. I don’tremember Melville. So why am I shaking?

OnceI heard him,he was washing the world,unseen, nightlong,real.

I leave the painting and come back. Leave and comeback. What am I seeing here? Tar. Elk. Feather. Arm.Child. Rabbit. Snow. Pines. Bird. Lace. Wing. Hadspeech been possible to me then I would have said,There are entry points. I am in one now.

1. Paul Celan, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan,translated by John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton,2001) “Stehen, im Schatten,” p.23.2. Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, translated byMichael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1995)“Mandoria,” p.193.3. Ibid., “Einmal,” p.279.

Mary Rakow is the author of The Memory Room(Counterpoint Press, 2002), named one of the 10 BestBooks in the West, Los Angeles Times, and finalist inFiction by PEN/West. She lives in Southern California.

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