I recently found that this is an interesting thing that
relates to that book, the Chorus of Stones,
it's is a terrific book with things that are unspoken still
emerge in cultures later.
I recently found out that my mother was farmed out
to a relative who could better feed her
than my grandmother was who was very, very poor.
And that her cousin was a painter, I mean,
she painted and my mother told me envy that
and I just found that out maybe like two months ago,
which is an amazing thing.
Here's another one, this is further
in my harangue about what words do, and how painted they are,
and how much I'd like to be separate from that if I could,
clean air.
I love clean air, especially California clean air
paints of the 1930s, which I have,
I'm lucky enough to have one.
I just love it not because I'm sophisticated,
I know anything about it they remind me
of social studies, illustrations of social studies books,
and I just purely love them for that and just
so totally escapist.
I hate the social studies, but I love those pictures
in the desert-- and all those colors.
[LAUGHTER]
So this is called "Plein Air."
I'd like to explain how difficult it
is to work with words.
A painter sits down and lines of little tubes of color,
cleansed of context.
The autistic tubes in a row under narrative, a sentence
don't waggle with admonishment of squirm with shame.
There's no fear there tiny silver mouth
to a whisper, fucking mustache or fat immigrant.
You never or I always or don't.
No one has hissed cadmium yellow in a fit of rage or spat chrome
oxide green while walking out the door.
Free from these radioactive insinuations,
the painter can open up the top of her head,
release the words blackening its ceiling like trapped smoke
and go to work with the vocabulary of another planet.
Her materials are as forgiving as leaves,
which pair not whether she says detergent
instead of iconoclast.
When she opens up the case, the colors
are all there exactly as she left them,
not dangling between her and the checkout clerk.
They're pristine, untroubled, idiot savants
with an amnesiac's satin memory.
She doesn't have to autoclave each one before she picks it
up.
There could be such a box for writers
filled with words, brightly minted but spared
the smudge of circulation.
Words denied to cruel rapacious partners, jealous coworkers,
spin doctors, and ad copywriters.
Words one could pick up and squeeze
a little bit of on a palette, add
a splotch of medium and swirl to just the right
syrupy consistency.
Thus preserved these words would sweep the mind
free of muddle, the sky of pollution,
and, virginal as illustrations in social studies
books before we understood the West was actually lost,
blue creased mountains would loom, crisply visible,
their presence saying simply winter, saying late afternoon,
saying here.