This is where our atol comes from... The schoolkitchen....
Preface
As most of you know I am a former disgruntled art student come art school drop out. I think I only completed 3 college level art classes in my life. Like many of you I wandered about the pearly gates of academia with a resounding hollow in my heart and hunger in my mind. Something was missing and I couldn't put my finger on it. That something was outside the vocabulary they had given us, the fishbowl of language and concepts whose narrow perimeter we swim inside and intuit the vastness of what lies beyond. That something of being a whole human being and living hip deep in the eros of touching life to life, quickening our visions and watching as they take form under many separate hands. That a canvas, a theory, theater, dance, and ideas MUST be the footprints we leave as we walk towards our wholeness and the axes we use to smash statues of gods who make us sad.
This is my art. This is what I came to Guatemala for. This is what I aspire to: conviving convibing collaborating co-existing co-evolving communing: waking up together. Elbowing people who are still sleepy and getting elbowed when I nod off. I need you and you need me. We also need paint. Prefereably finger paint.
And so comes this very long letter: a jumbled personal retrospective after 8 and a half months here. What in the hell just happened?
Chapter 1
Sometimes proof that God exists is a small curl of surprise kitten rising and falling on your chest as you breathe on the day that you think you just can't hack it. She is a recent arrival to the house one I am infinitely grateful for. No bigger than my hand but capable of receiving all the affection in the known universe without flinching or creating reasons more significant than the house mouse for running away. She doesn't run away: she scales my pant leg and sweater and perches on my shoulder. She is Milkshake the fabucat, one of many snapshots that will comrpise my time in Guatemala.
Snapshots: there is a balance to be struck between this strangely modern phenomenon of "capturing the moment" and letting it flow through your hands like water. I think that is a lot of the drive behind the art that I do for me: I must absorb something beautiful until the barrier between it and me falls away and there is only the curves and color and form of it informing me, I have to dance until I am no longer moving my body by my own will, I have to act until the spirit moves me. I look to die a little every day of my own accord. If I don't, I don't feel alive.
And so goes my snapshot collection of the week:
On the rooftop teaching an old sailor how to play "Casas de Carton" an anthem of the El Salvadorian guerrilla while dozens after dozens of streaming kites move through blue sky above like fighting fish, elegant languid defiant. Devastingly graceful and slow. Below: gangs of barefoot brown children crowd on the tin and concrete rooftops covering the hills watching their octagons of hallowed sticks and colorful rice paper dance: Ninos el color de mi tierra.....
Tomorrow I would take a kayak across a lake in search of clean water to bathe in: dock on the dock of a phenomenally wealthy white naked women (who is present in this story, covering her thin breasts with a corinth colored towel and looking on half aghast) on the edge of a pristine cove and, to her English horror lather up my body suds up my hair and go cannonballng into the choppy water the world's deepest lake. I come up gasp for air, bobbing and shaking off soap as the 7 volcanoes surrounding me wax in and out of view according to the sting in my eyes. Literally breathtaking. Shake off the water, slither into my kayak and paddle away.....
Always there is the flow of color through my being. The thousands of rainbows handwoven into cloth wrapping the hips, thighs, and breasts of millions of indigenous women who refuse to be conquered. The way that light moves across their skin whose accents roll into shadows of deep coppery purple... The way that light comes out of their eyes when they wish you together with all of the generations that live within them: Good morning.
But this is just the week.
After spending 8 months here in Guatemala I figure I am due for contemplation. What have I learned here? What did I do here? What am I leaving with? What did I leave?
Chapter 2
The mural, all 120 square meters of it is done. When I arrived the space in front of the wall was a a fairly fetid stretch of earth littered with disposable diapers, plates, and plastic whatnots. The wall was covered in mud and only painted about 50% of the way up its 12 foot height. As I began to scrub the wall and prepare it people slowly started to take mind that the space aswell needed cleaning: a friendly grandfather showed up on Sunday afternoons to pick up trash with his bare hands.
In groups of 4- 6, my supporting artists from the local high shcool, came to help paint the wall in turns of three days. They had drawn all of the designs themselves with the help of a friend from Grupo Apoyo Mutuo: a testament to the armed conflict as lived by their families, visions of their Mayan culture and hopes for the future of their people. When they came to paint, I felt as though I could reach out and touch the effects of an educational system designed to turn out obedient plantation workers: they respectfully waited to take orders and looked panicked when I refused any and all authority projected on to me:
"Ma'am, what color do you want me to paint this?"
"Maria (Juan, Jose, Irma, Marylin, Tomasa, Nixon, Diego, Manuel, Manuela, etc. etc.), what color would you like to?"
Blank stare.
"Listen, I trust that god gave you a good brain and creativity. I leave you to that. The great thing about paint is that if you don't like it you can cover it up so experiment and make sure that you are having fun while you do it."
I must have had this same conversation or variations of it about fifteen times daily. Without fail by the third day of the kids' time with me they were all smiling and enthusiastic and MOST importantly they did not look to me as the source of all answers in the universe. And so it came to pass that as the jovenes transformed themselves, transformed the wall, so too the strip of earth in front of the mural became a corridor for butterflies. The butterflies came slowly: at first just one a week. And now after two months of hard work, at least six flutter by daily. Huge drooping orange, red, and yellow ones. Logically they are attracted by the colors on the wall but I believe, deep down, they are called there by something more. The mural is more than paint: this work of art helped close the wounds of the armed conflict for many of the people who helped me organize it, it gave the opportunity for the school's director SEnora Maria, to give her testimony for the first time: she hadn't breathed a word for over 20 years. It helped kids get in touch with their innate power to touch, move and create the world that they live in. It liteally granted the space to speak truth into silence. The mural is a testament to the beauty and richness of a culture under constant attack by anti-indigenous educational policies and racism. It is full of the pride of young people who have few opportunities to have their talents realized. It is full of magic and blessed by butterflies.
Chapter 3
I continue to leaf through the photos of my mind and try and find the ones worth saving before they all dissolve in the rapidly softening focus of age:
There are places here where you can walk in the streets and there are so many women clapping corn dough between their palms to make tortillas that it sounds as though its raining. To the Mayans, corn is their connection to god. Corn is the basis of life and the clay that is used to make women, children, and men.
The richness of this tradition is always juxtaposed by poverty. Wild dogs stare me down in front of the tortilla stands and people are reduced to standards of life that are not much better. I remember sitting in the plaza next to one such man. He was covered in dirt and sour stench from head to toe and had just finished some kind of labor. People here wear straps on their foreheads that connect to heavy loads carried on their backs behind their necks and his lay cast at his feet. He was eating tortillas and chicken surrounded by wild dogs. I tried to speak with him but he must have misunderstood reached a filthy hand into a sack and pulled out a tortilla to offer me at the moment a spindle of drool fell from his mouth. I accepted:
Buddha ate the leper's fingers that fell into his begging bowl.
Large groups of brothers and sisters move like flocks of pidgeons. Sometimes clothed and clean, sometimes not. They are curious about the strange red headed foreigner yet at any moment their shyness (and wariness) will send them running away to hide, giggling nervously. Grown-ups aren't always much different, they are just better at dressing up the same reaction. And so I have spent much time, walking through the streets as an outsider. Sometimes joyfully, enjoying how easy it is to make people laugh with my funny foreignisms and sometimes with pain splitting me in two as I take root in solitude. (If I could see my heart on those days I think it would look like my childhood horticultural experiments: usually an avocado pit stuck on all sides with toothpicks, suspended over non-nutritive water, and splitting up and down the middle with growth.)
Solitude is a funny animal and one I have had great stretches of time to contemplate. Even in prison, where people get together with the express purpose of creating hell for one another, solitary confinement is one of the most inhumane and feared punishments. I have come to the conclusion that it is our desperate need to love and be loved that is at the root of all evil. If we are not trying to buy love with our elaborate "ME" project of personality, wealth, physicality, or then we run from it because we think we can't or on some hidden level, are not good enough. I think of my brother who, at his core, joined the Marines for the purpose of gaining esteem, became a combat engineer, went to Falujah (a noted spots for civilian casualties in Iraq), and came back a man not changed for the better.
Everyone has an emotional vaccuum within them. It is deeply feared psychological territory and everytime I travel I seem get thrown into it. We run to fill it with as many activities and mental movies possible at any given time. Yet after 8 months (preceded by years of travel, Buddhist, Hindu, and Contemplative study) I have found that this space is synonymous with the silence below all sound, the space from which spontaneity and creativity arise. It is why there is no ego, no abiding self. Out of this space arise our habits of mind, that become habits of speech and body. At every moment they are getting spat out of this well of solitude, trying madly to cover it over. Without those habits, only silence remains. Before I label it as loneliness, existential angst, mal de amores, or whatever else: learning to live deeply from the inside of it is the key to something very rare that forms the core of our humanity: authentic freedom.
Chapter 4
How this relates to my work as an "Artistactivista"
For large chunks of my stayhere I have been working on the interminable project of gigantic canvas books: one on the rights of the child and one on integrity written by a group of teenagers. And much of those large canvas books has been painted by children. And I have watched them half jealous wondering at what it looks and feels like to see lines of color magically coming out from under their hands for the first time. They are in touch with this silence without even knowing it. They have never been apart from it They are fully present and they are awake to the magic of creation. They fall in love with it. They are nowhere but alive and in the moment. They are exercising art's only law: freedom absolute.
In two days the book on the rights of the child will be read in front of a group of 500 little ones. I hope that when all of their little faces, upturned and expectant in front of the turning pages, pages full of messages of human dignity and intrinsic worth that at least a little slides off the giant canvas pages and lands inside the center of their minds, never to be touched or taken from them. I hope it contributes to permanently corrode their ability to take orders from anyone.
Chapter 5
We will return to the snapshot collection:
Stay tuned.......
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