Squiggles Splashes Blobs

The abstract fascinates me. I can’t say why. Maybe it’s because it’s abstract. The attraction is in the realm of the abstract and is therefore indefinable. Intangible. Impalpable. Incorporeal. Like a mist on a swamp. Like the song of a siren echoing in a Norwegian fjord. The abstract morphs immediately into fable. Into wizards and gyroscopes. As soon as I start thinking about the abstract, I start fetching images for it, so that it becomes apparent and manageable. Which destroys it. It becomes a representation of something entirely different. It becomes a utility rather than an entity. The abstract has the fluid ellipsis of Platonic sublimation. Images aren’t repelled by the abstract, they’re attracted to the abstract. It’s just that in the realm of the abstract, they cease to be recognized as objects in the realm of the human. Human perception is navigable when things are specific. When things are no longer specific, no longer tied to a narrative, they become abstract. Geometric. Squares, circles, rhombohedrons. Squiggles, splashes, blobs.

I like to drift to the north of myself and float above the tundra in an igloo. This is precisely how I feel about abstraction. The energy is clear and brilliant like the stars, but if it gets too warm your house melts.

When I view a work of abstract art, I’m confused as to how to take in. Because I want to take it in. I’ve been drawn to certain paintings – many paintings in fact – by forces I don’t understand. An incomprehensible magnetism draws me to a representation that is a non-representation, a representation unrepresenting itself. The reality, its essence of being, is in shape and color. That’s it. Shape. And color. Altitude spread over a mountain like chowder. The eloquence of a green arm holding a black sun. The creak of floorboards. Sensations peeled back to reveal the juice of value. Predicaments of existential trace. I let myself go to this twist of reality to find a pulse of fervor in a streak of scarlet, and linger before the canvas dissolving on its spin. Each splatter, each blot, each smudge, each splurge a palpable echo of the void between our ribs.

Reality is just an artifice, writes Mallarmé, good for anchoring the average intellect among the mirages of a fact. One must sift experience for the charms of procrastination. Facts are simply the centipedes of certitude, a swarm of anatomies creating a mirage in the shimmering advance of the text, the rapid clatter of little slender ideas, each charged with its own special brand of facticity. Something is true because it has precipitous effects on people. It makes them happen to themselves, like jalapeños or dandruff. The idea that reality is one and many and in a state of perpetual flux comes to us from Heraclitus, who, it is said, may have brought about his own death by speaking in a confused manner to the doctors treating him. He had also covered himself in cow dung. What we apprehend is, in the end, mostly random. Reality is just an artifice.

The irony at the core of abstract painting is its seeming avoidance of reality, stripping itself of any narrative, a picnic in the woods, a winter sunrise in the country, lily pads in a still pond. It gives us reality: line, shape, color, texture, mass, volume, paint.

There has never been enough said about Pollock’s draftsmanship. That amazing ability to quicken a line by thinning it, to slow it by flooding, to elaborate that simplest of elements, the line – to change, to reinvigorate, to extend, to build up an embarrassment of riches in the mass by drawing alone. Said Frank O’Hara.

You can’t look at abstract art without thinking: why am I here? How did I get talked into this? And why didn’t I wear my suspenders? This belt is useless. My pants keep falling down. My hair looks like shit today too. Like this painting. Is this truly what art looks like up close? Oh, stop being such a philistine. I was drawn here. I don’t get it. But I’m drawn to it. It’s visceral. Proprioceptive. Now there’s a word. Words have the funniest habit of popping into your mind for no reason. Like they’re some kind of elfin spermatozoa. The seeds of the impalpable. This painting isn’t a turnstile. You can’t enter it and pass through it to a subway that takes you to a specific destination. It’s all surface and fact and immediacy and sod. Take that painting by Wyeth. The one everybody understands. The woman sitting in the grass looking at a house in the distance, at the top of the slope. There’s a story there. Maybe a murder. Maybe she lost the use of her legs and she’s hoping someone in the house will come to her rescue. Maybe she’s lost. But what am I doing here? I’m looking at this painting and thinking about another painting. The abstract is insistent in a very weird way. It’s really not insisting on being looked at all. It seems fine just hanging on a wall. Even though it was created on some guy’s floor while the maniac danced around it in an exultation of paint. Color. Movement. That’s what I’m seeing. The residue of that guy’s exaltation. Which makes it insistent. That’s what I’m sensing. It’s that visceral sensation of some guy’s wild energy.

Pollock is the Nureyev of Action Painting. A Greenwich Village shaman of the 1950s. When I was a kid playing “Beautiful Dreamer” on a flute and collecting eggs from the henhouse on a North Dakota farm and feeling their warmth and that beautiful ovalness that feels so good in your hand, right down to the bone and marrow and gladness of having a hand, this supple organ for feeling and holding things. With its bouquet of fingers, and silly importance of the thumb.

The heavy impasto of Shimmering Substance says it all: It’s a universe of color a tether untethered an éclat of internal lightning. A pleonasm steeped in naked transparency. Thoughts in pursuit of a stick. Pragmatism is just a subtle crack in the argument. There are better ways to feel the resonances of the dead. Our own kindnesses invite us to open our breath to the reality of ourselves. Or the hang of things. The scrotum is a domain of great decorum. Here are some ways to think about thinking: and by that I mean the activities of the mind, which are interacting with something it doesn’t recognize, but that flashes on and off in the Kansas night. I find paint uplifting. Sensuous. Libidinous. Pleasantly gooey. I could throw adjectives at it all day and it wouldn’t bring anything into easy understanding. The effrontery of it. That sound it makes when you stir it in a big can. One need only accept the sparkle of propagation to enjoy this moment.

We hardly know our own preferences in abstract matters. There isn’t much to go on. Other than your nerves. I wish I better understood the decorum of legs. The way they move with such easy, natural rhythm could solve anybody’s argument. I do like Kline. And Kandinsky and Gerhard Richter. Prose is thought poetry is a gun in the glove box. These branches carry lovely blossoms. These branches of words, which are buds on the tongue of something magnificent, and wide open and denim. Ever open a bottle of something carbonated that overflowed and got your fingers sticky? We’re surrounded on all fronts by the impish sparkle of the arbitrary. Fruits, consequences, facts. Cesarean cookies dusted with penicillin. The science of masses, molecules and the ether. The oddness of standing naked in a stationary store looking for a stuffed monkey. Teary-eyed farewell bugs. Hot sonata ice. You don’t even know what I’m talking about. I don’t either. This always happens when I get around something abstract. The cod are visible below the waves. And the thunder reminds me of Ganesha. Whatever happened to Cameron Diaz?

Cy Twombly's marks inflate with the crackle of abstraction in the surrounding space. Rothko’s volumes are as lush as the light will allow. Is space the ultimate abstraction? Just space? Infinite quantities of space. Which isn’t a quantity. Or is it? Is space a quantity? Yes, it is, as it is a fundamental dimension that can be measured and is considered to be a vital framework for describing the physical world, similar to time and mass; meaning you can quantify the amount of space occupied by a walrus or a concertina through measurements like length, width, and height. Space isn’t empty. Space is full of particles, radiation and energy, which, according to William Blake, is eternal delight. You might also consider a trip to Thailand, or Bhutan, where penises are painted everywhere, in honor of Drukpa Kunley, a 15^th century Buddhist teacher. And if that doesn’t pan out you can always go fishing. Or visit a local face. Aren’t eyebrows wonderful?

Mathematics is fiercely abstract. That’s because numbers are elegant. It’s paradoxes bloom into beautiful theories. Einstein called math the poetry of logical ideas. But look at Einstein’s desk. Does anything look logical there? I suppose it does in some cockeyed way I’d never understand. Not without a spoon, a fork, and a pile of pancakes. A piece of chalk. And a one-way ticket to Palookaville. Socked by physics into a stupor of infinite volume. Or something like it. A truncated acute hyperbolic solid cut by a plane, like Gabriel’s Horn, which has finite space, but infinite surface area. I wonder what it sounds like. Conversations with strangers. Oysters slurped from the shell. Or maybe Miles Davis’s muted trumpet in So What. And that’s it. That attitude lurking in the abstract. I’m here. I exist. I have Being. But no bone. I exist in the mind. So what.