Category: Lately

Two weeks ago, I finally went to the New York Public Library to see the Beatific Soul Jack Kerouac exhibit and the On the Road manuscript. The typewritten scroll, though not truly composed as spontaneously as has been mythologized, is a 120-foot long physical representation of the feat of writing a novel.

The most whimsical part of the exhibit is about the Fantasy Baseball League that Kerouac created and played for most of his life. He invented rules, drew insignias, fabricated rivalries, and wrote fictional newspaper articles like Cy Locke Exults Over Hot Performances of his Cincinnati Blacks. How incredible that a man could love to write, need to be writing so much that he would invent exercises and produce a collection of work based on an alternative reality. Just to write.

The exhibit seemed appropriate, on my birthday, because I will always associate the book with my first few days in New Zealand, when I turned 21 and registered for an American Lit course and the professor assigned On the Road. By chance, I had my own copy with me. It was one of three books that I’d packed to read while I travelled and to have with me, a comfort object during my semester abroad.

In high school, I was instantly taken with Sal and Dean; their tirelessness, their verve. The book was all poetry and imagination and electric moments to me. For a few years, I traipsed my copy to the beach, to camp, to college and back. I loved the book, just the book itself. The soft pages, all striped with purple highlighter, represented the idea of that enlightened journey. Its fan of pages encompassed so much of what I sought. Holding it by the spine was like defying the laws of space and volume.

But with every reading, the book lost some of its luster. I saw joyless wandering and melancholy where I’d glossed it over before. Sal moved in circles, chasing after illusions.  The Beats seemed to smolder where they once glimmered. That’s the Kerouac that dominates in the NYPL exhibit.

His letters and illustrations are swatches of loneliness and disconnection. I wondered if he exiled himself or felt trapped away from the rest of the world. He penned an invitation, “I be at my house New Year’s Eve waiting for you, or not, as according, to whim,” and he sounds callous, not coy. Even though I expected that cloudiness, it was a heartbreaking to face it.

When I left the library, it was snowing on Fifth Avenue and there was almost no traffic. The people still left outside were watery smudges moving in straight lines up and down the street. I couldn’t see where the sky turned to snow and fell to the ground. I felt smudged.

“This thinking is stopped.”—Mexico City Blues, 6th Chorus, 1955

I remember a dream about underpainting.

It is a classical technique that requires heightened understanding of medium, of color value, of lighting; and the ability to predict the future, to see what’s not there and to know what could be.

It must have been right after I spent a couple of hours in Photoshop, rearranging layers and adjusting opacities and experimenting with blending modes and lighting effects. Those hundred thousand square pixels became imprinted in my vision but I couldn’t tear myself away. I hoped to achieve an appearance comprised of varying degrees of ishes—pinkish, roughish, sweetish. My eyes strained toward objectivity.

It’s no wonder my subjective conscious took it to sleep. In my dream, I faced the same quandries—how to intend without belying intention; how to see deeper into a flat surface; how to recall all that is underneath that top layer and understand the way it blends to create the image the eye sees at a glance.

And a few days later, in one of those moments when I’m convinced I’m either psychic or suffering a brain hemorrhage, I started reading Calvin Tomkins’ profile of American painter John Currin in The New Yorker. Tomkins writes at length about Currin’s Old Master technique and its contrast with his subject matter: skillfully rendered paintings inspired by pornography.

Currin is especially interested in underpainting and near the end of the article, which I finally finished yesterday, he demonstrates the technique for Tomkins. He adds a bruise to one of his girls’ legs. Then he sort of says, “See? So . . . that’s how it’s done,” and without an undo button on which to click, he cleans up the bruise. And then he explains that the girl’s legs will eventually be dressed in green stockings. It’s understood that Currin won’t add hosiery until the image of the bare leg is finished.

It’s obvious, once I think about it. He can’t just paint a green leg.

The profile proposes that John Currin, the man, was restored, was set right, when he fell in love with his wife, artist Rachel Feinstein. And John Currin, the painter, was revived by underpainting. The technique was a breakthrough in his work. I am endeared to the image of the artist on his honeymoon in Venice, moving from painting to painting at The Galleria dell’Accademia to look for layers of underpainting beneath the surfaces.

And I will remember him for saying, “‘I came to the conclusion that there is no misery in art. All art is about saying yes, and all art is about its own making.’” While I don’t believe that there is no misery in love, if I can learn to believe that the latter are true, that love is about saying yes, then that might be what sets me right.