A Look Back at February for Our 50th Year of Publication
February 1, 2023
The Mysterious Life of the Heart Photo: Nicole Blaisdell, Cover Design: Robert Graham
Although The Sun had already released three books of material from its pages, The Mysterious Life of the Heart, released in February 2009, was the first to be centered on a theme: romantic love.
That’s not to suggest we are some kind of authorities on the subject. Our editor, Sy Safransky, wrote in the introduction, “If you took everything I’ve learned about love and dropped it in the ocean, there would be a little splash, and there would still be room for an ocean.” Nonetheless, readers found much to enjoy in the fifty essays, stories, and poems by such authors as Cheryl Strayed, Steve Almond, Poe Ballantine, and Tess Gallagher.
Nicole Blaisdell’s cover photo of a couple dancing together, wineglass in hand, captured the intimacy of the writing inside. One reader, Lori Chamberlin, wrote us to say, “I was so enraptured by your newest anthology . . . that I read not only the bios at the end but the back cover, the spine, and the copyright information.” https://www.thesunmagazine.org/news/this-month-in-sun-history-issue-566
Completely brightened my cloudy day to find Ernie Gaines on the new Black Heritage series stamps. Absolutely right.
The guy in the picture with me is Edward “Ned” Spring. He was a very good friend of both Gus Blaisdell and me. We were at Stanford together back in the late 50s. We used to listen to a lot of Jazz together, drink wine and discuss literature. Ned use to write liner notes for 33 rpm dust jackets. He could be extremely funny…He died young. I think Gus was at his bed side when he died, Gus called to tell me he had gone to the big PAD in the sky. He left a wife and two children. Gus and I were at the memorial. It was very quiet. Betty, Ned’s wife, wanted it that way. Just a few close friends. I think that was the only time I was ever seen to cry. Ned was quite thin, and Gus always called him The Snake. He called me Prez, because I wore a hat like the one Lester Young, the great jazz musician, wore. Gus was good at giving people different names. “Hey, Prez, the snake has left us ” We had been out drinking at the No Name Bar in Sausalito only a couple of weeks before he died–Me, Gus and Ned…..Ernie> (Jan 24, 2011)
His Total Heaviness Photo by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey
Saturday, February 22, 2014
a review of GUS BLAISDELL COLLECTED by George Kalamaras
Gus Blaisdell Collected Gus Blaisdell Selected and Edited by William Peterson Coedited by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey University of New Mexico Press ($40.00) by George Kalamaras In the current land rush for the latest, hippest poetics, caught in the web of irony that so much contemporary poetry seems hell-bent to explore, much lineage that made current movements possible is ignored. This is particularly problematic when that lineage encompasses counter-movements and personalities that served as necessary ballast to keep the ship of the art of its time from sinking. Independent thinkers often suffer obscurity for the sake of their ideals. The battle plains of poetic history are littered with such figures, whilst the monocled generals, astride white steeds on the hill, wax profoundly about the philosophical consequences of their actions. Publisher, poet, critic, bookstore owner, and provocateur, Gus Blaisdell (1935-2003), born Charles Augustus Blaisdell II in San Diego, was such a figure. Details of his life read like jazz improvisation—from enrollment at Brown Military Academy at age eight, to his fascination with all things Japanese after the close of the Second World War, to studying at Stanford with Yvor Winters in 1953, to living in Aspen and Denver (where he was a freelance reviewer of books and films for the Denver Post and worked with publisher Alan Swallow), to his correspondence with anthropologist Leland C. Wyman, leading to his readings on Navajo culture, shamanism, and religion and his 1964 move (with family) to Albuquerque to study anthropology at the University of New Mexico, to joining the staff at UNM Press the following year and coediting the New Mexico Quarterly, to enrolling in the doctoral program in mathematics at UNM in 1971, to publishing his poems with Howard McCord’s Tribal Press in the 1970s, to becoming owner of the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque (where he also operated Living Batch Press, publishing Clark Coolidge, Gene Frumkin, Ronald Johnson, and Geoffrey Young, among others). He was friends with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Robert Creeley, and Evan S. Connell. He and his fourth wife, Janet Maher, were married by Beat poet-turned-Zen-priest Phillip Whalen. These events suggest a man with multiple, interrelated interests, and a brilliant, penetrating grasp of the significance of subversive art and a connection to indigenous knowledge. As his daughter Nicole Blaisdell Ivey writes in “A Chronology”: Gus’s life was like jazz. The improvisation depended greatly on the depth of the cats he was playing with and the audience of the moment. Besides being a philosopher, poet, publisher, editor, essayist, critic, and teacher, Gus Blaisdell was a collector. He collected stamps, comics, autographs, ideas, experiences, quotes, books, music, art, and friends. And he took notes on all of them. . . . He thought of life (books, art, film, friends, wives, children) as moments and serendipitously interconnected pieces on his path from here to there. (339) Some of these interconnected pieces—just some of what Blaisdell gathered—are brought together in Gus Blaisdell Collected, a generous (nearly 400-page) offering, fittingly from University of New Mexico Press. In addition to the remarkable “A Chronology” (forty pages of a fascinating gloss of a life—almost a mini-biography), Collected includes Blaisdell’s essays on a variety of topics, with section titles “On Photographs,” “On Movies,” “On Painting,” “On Reading and Writing,” “Fiction,” and “Shorts and Excerpts from Correspondence.” Blaisdell created and taught popular courses in cinema studies such as “Teen Rebels” and “Poetry and Radical Film” for almost twenty-five years at UNM, his contributions helping to establish a program and then a department in media arts. He also taught in the Department of Art and Art History. Individual essays are intriguing, a small sampling of which includes: “Space Begins Because We Look Away from Where We Are: Lewis Baltz’s Candlestick Point,” “’Obscenity in Thy Mother’s Milk’: John Gossage’s Hey Fuckface! Portfolio,” “Highlighting Hitchcock’s Vertigo with Magic Marker,” “Vatic Writing: Evan S. Connell’s Notes from a Bottle . . .,” and “Tell It Like It Is: The Experimental Traditionalists.” Selected correspondence includes letters to Nicholas Brownrigg, Marcy Goodwin, Geoffrey Young, Lee F. Gerlach, and others. Of these, the correspondence with Brownrigg is the most fascinating; it begins in 1960 when Blaisdell was living in Aspen, and reaches into 1962 and 1963 when he was living in Denver. Just as a chronicle of the time it has value, but the complexities with which Blaisdell deals are engrossing. We see a young man caught in between this and that—distancing himself from the Beats and his earlier travels to Mexico and elsewhere, yet committed to his private luminosities, at the time not yet affixed to any particular tribe except the uncertain encampment of maturing yet still longing for the spiritual and psychic liberations of youth. He writes: Your letters are far from obscure. And there is a good reason. Recall the circumstances under which our original correspondence began? Yes, Dharma Gus on the blistering Highways of America and in its cities and hotels and women. Shit, that is over. The adulation of idiocy (myself then and Jack Kerouac) is passé. We, you and I, have families and responsibilities and we have hopes that we ourselves frustrate only to incur misery. We love, as unashamedly as possible and with gritted teeth, knowing the pressure in our jaw is wrong. I am not saying there is a change in the elemental structure of our souls; I am saying there is a new form in which we exercise ourselves. (288) Later, in his correspondence with Brownrigg, he movingly critiques universities: “The university—which strengthens the ego and unintentionally fucks up the instinctual—taught us the language of the tongue so thoroughly that, when we came to learn the natural language of bodies (two, coupled) we were made to feel perverse, clandestine, and rich. How much we have to unlearn day by day . . .” (295). Despite the powerful inclusions of Blaisdell’s essays, letters, and fiction, there is a marked absence of his poetry. His greatest contributions may, indeed, end up being his essays on film and art, as well as his ability to gather a community around his publishing activities, including his noted reading series at the Living Batch Bookstore. Furthermore, selections of a writer’s life-work understandably need to draw parameters. However, Blaisdell’s ground of being—even when he corresponds, philosophizes, and critiques—is the sensibility of a poet, and the reader deserves more of a window into that part of what gets “collected” here. That aside, Gus Blaisdell Collected is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the writing, film, and art of the period—and of an iconic figure in Albuquerque, in particular—as well as for those committed to valuing the contributions of independent thinkers who have helped make today’s freedoms of a daily practice of writing and art possible.
Allan Graham, Moon 2, 1986, oil on canvas, 83 in.x 91in. Private Collection
Omoide No Tsukimi for Ronald Johnson 1935—1998
It rises to self-awareness
Horizon that is always with us
Black north’s direction
Risen from the belly nightsky
Phantom blot, inkblack Heian hair
Coiled black pythoness
On moonless nights
Monk sleeves trailed through wet grasses
It hangs eternal there, never sets or climbs
Fulgent Moon 2, lightning struck through
Lightning flash
Then back to black
What seams this darklight
But black holds back, insists
At backbehindness it sustains
Unreflecting primordial companion
All phases of the moon condense
Moon 2 takes breathing, animates itself
Without horizon other than itself, irregular oval of all moons
Even when full or crescent sickle thin slice on either end
Blindspot
At last Narcissus lies faceless
Bottom of unsounded pond
Face buried in a silken muck
Thankfully in reflection I am dark to myself
Tarbaby reflections of Moon 2
Glitters in the total void
Senses steep in unsounded dark
Where darkbather mind
And sunbather eyes intersect
The heart is black and madder
The soul is fishscale black
Thunder underneath the under
Heart and soul begin a fisted journey
To the behindblackness
At our backs we always feel
Always back there behind it all
From head to heel black chrysalis
Hangman’s hood or shiny bodybag.
–Gus Blaisdell
Moon2 is an all black painting by Allan Graham. My Japanese title means remembering moonviewing. The line beginning “Thunder . . . ”, set in italic, varies a line from a manuscript, “The Imaginary Menagerie,” by the visionary poet Ronald Johnson. [Gus’s endnote.]
“We hear people talking all the time about Renaissance men. Gus Blaisdell was a Restoration rake, a creature of coffeehouses, bookstores, flaring arguments and happy reconciliations, crazy women and crazier experimentation. This book is a wonderful survey of his enthusiasms and complaints—and a fond memorial of his gift to New Mexico, and Albuquerque particularly. Gus was the absolute, undeniable, real thing. One of the few.”
Gus Blaisdell— Living Batch Bookstore Photograph by Nicole Blaisdell Ivey
Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel stands as an apparent hiatus in Evan Connell’s formal development. But the peculiar nature of the work is only partly structural–the mosaic technique carried a step further–and the themes it develops are consistent with the rest of Connell’s canon. The main interest of the work resides in the voice or tone of the narrator and in the formal assumptions necessary to this kind of writing, a form that appears essentially new.
A fragment of Notes, more provincial, lumpy, prosy, and less interesting, appeared in 1959 in Contact 3. Connell there remarked that he frankly did not know what the writing amounted to but that it had a curious fascination for him, like doing a complicated, private dance unobserved. Three years later, very much altered and enriched, the work appeared in full in Contact and was brought out the following year in a hardbound edition by Viking.
Kenneth Lamott, speaking for the editors when Contact devoted the December 1962 issue to Notes, characterized the writing: “It eludes the usual categories of literature, falling somewhere in the dimly defined but extraordinarily fertile area where prose and verse, fiction and nonfiction, metaphysics and science meet.” Connell himself has said of the work: “I think of it as a work of close association rather than free association;” on the form, “. . . ‘cohesion’ is as close to ’structure’ as I’d care to make it.” At the end of the editors’ introduction in Contact, writing in the style of the work itself, Connell declares his intention: “It is incumbent upon me to establish some / image whereby / all men must judge / future interpretations, believing / in the value of mine. This I do tenderly, / humbly / and with a knowledge of utter obligation.” For lack of a better term, such writing might be called “vatic.”*
Works of vatic literature are as unpopular as they are infrequent in contemporary American writing. It is only a bold or foolish writer who would undertake a work that is in direct opposition to the inherent skepticism of the American temper, that empirical or pragmatic attitude that judges all prophets false until proven valid, and then, at best, as highly dubious. Yet far more important than the climate opposed to such writing are the pitfalls within the medium itself, stumbling blocks that would seem to preclude success from the beginning.
In a sense, vatic writing, like art for art’s sake, is writing for the sake of writing. Its joys are the density of prose often archaic in syntax and diction; a delight in (and attention to) rhythm and the well-turned phrase; the precise perception; the terse tautness of apothegm and aphorism; the use of myth, esoteric lore, and bizarre fact; and the viable image. Already the writer has assumed a heavy mantle and runs many risks.
Should the fatidic tone fail, vatic writing results in rhetorical flatulence. The hyperbolic or elliptical style, together with the mythic lore, may prove elusive. If an image or myth fails to properly illuminate a part of the theme, the writing degenerates into inscrutability. In its attempt to partake of the best of prose and verse, vatic writing raises the question of how far the lyric impulse can be stretched. Or, more generally, as John Wisdom once wrote on the nature of early analytic philosophy: “It is not the stuff but the style that stupefies.” For a writer of Connell’s ability the mere stupefaction of style would be a disastrous result.
Unlike the novel or sonnet, vatic literature is not a literary form as much as it is a style or posture or stance. A prophetic or oracular voice is assumed together with a style appropriate to the fullest possible expression of that voice. Thus it can also suffer from over-richness. There are a number of interesting assumptions that must be made and met: these are the properties of the terrain as illustrated in Notes.
The medium of the writing is atemporal, allowing the narrator to range at will through time; the stage is epical. Another premise is that there are necessary, causal connections between past events and future ones; that the past, if it does not completely prefigure the future, is at least exemplary or emblematic of events to come. Unlike the Humean universe of discrete, noncausal particulars, the universe assumed here is well-ordered. The task set for the narrator is to illumine the teleology of the world. The point of view is sub specie aeternitate, assuming the unity of human nature and human purpose, and the position of the narrator is that of the mystic who, as Wittgenstein wrote, views “the world as a limited whole.” The world of Notes, similar to Wittgenstein’s world in the Tractatus, “waxes and wanes as a whole,” and the narrator records this. Atrocity and brutality are the dark of the moon; love and beauty, the full moon. There is, in Notes, an element of Yeats’ philosophy based upon the phases of the moon.
A crucial problem in this kind of writing, and one tied intimately to the atemporal structure, is the use of a disembodied voice, a narrator without individual, personal identity who changes masks at will; all the masks of time are available to him–he can be all men at all times, a particular man at a particular time–a device that results in the uneasy fact that he is nobody in particular. Space and time become points of recapitulation, coordinates for heraldic moments in the history of the human spirit.
Because individual characterization does not occur in vatic writing, there is little if any distance between author and reader, the only buffer being the elegance of the prose, the odd lore, and the incisiveness of the imagery. There is no possibility of suspending disbelief or of learning through the experiences of a character, as in a novel. Consequently, we are given the author’s truths without first having been seduced into sharing his doubts. The relationship between author and reader is litanical–prayer and response, incantation and reaction. Perhaps the greatest single risk here is that all the rich embroidery of a Penelope may issue in little more that a sampler to be hung on the wall; in this case, should Connell fail totally, instead of “God Bless Our Happy Home” we would be handed “God Damn Our Rotten World.”
If Connell’s Mrs. Bridge is characterized as a mosaic form, Notes, moving even further into the fragmentary, is kaleidoscopic. Connell seems to have had something like this in mind when the voyager of Notes writes: “The barrel turns, the crystals tumble.” This kaleidoscopic form poses an interesting metaphysical position in the book.
In a kaleidoscope a pair of plane mirrors provides the viewer with an illusion of symmetry. Each time the tube is turned, the pile of glass changes position and the symmetry reappears under a different guise. In terms of this metaphor, the reader’s task is to unearth the principle of order, thereby arriving at the crucial concerns of the work. Ideally, as in the toy, the symmetry should always be present. It is the cohesive constant.
Connell has further extended this notion to provide Notes with a cosmological model of reality. The world, like the chips in the kaleidoscope, can only be seen as ordered in a particular way. Unlike the toy, however, in the real world man can never get through the illusionary order to that hypostatized world beyond, which W.V.O. Quine has called “a fancifully fanciless medium of unvarnished news.” Connell in Notes asks us to remove our conventional spectacles, to break down the barriers and masks of our vision, and to return from our lethargic atavism with new eyes. If Notes is to be successful, something like an epiphany must take place.
The voice of the Voyager-Narrator is basically that of Magus–magician, seer, alchemist, sailor, conquistador, warrior, victim, poet, church father, anchorite, heresiarch, philosopher, executioner, and scientist. The major theme of the voyage is to be found in the recurrence of alchemical imagery. The voyager’s quest is to discover within the soul of man a formula that will transform the gross spirit into something precious. The soul is bipolar, bifurcated, Gnostic and Manichean in Connell’s world, and he continually juxtaposes prayer and creativity with brutality, as in the opening sections where he quotes in Latin the Lord’s Prayer, then delineates the butchering of a saint. The beauties of nature are opposed to the atrocities of Hiroshima and the Nazi extermination camps. Animals throughout become insignias of the beasts with the spirit of man, sometimes beautiful in their symbolic expression of human longing; at others, hideous in their viciousness. During the voyage, prehistoric monsters are found still living off the shores or Madagascar and Australia and these merge with the man-made mutants of Japan and Bikini Atoll. Astronomical theories of the destruction of the solar system are paralleled with thermonuclear annihilation; the ritual of execution, particularly the ghastly ceremonialism of gas chamber and electric chair, coincides with the deus ex machina morality of Dachau and Belsen.
“Perhaps it is true, / we are like those doves that stand / between cathedral bells / until they have lost all sense of hearing,” notes the voyager, a man who has despaired of Western tradition because of the crimes perpetuated in its name–“We live in the final tepid rays of Christianity”–and who has turned to the Black Arts, Finnish magic, shamanism, and lycanthropy. “Mankind yearns for annihilation. / The earth shall revert to worms and the rolling sea / to plankton.” Reflecting on the great New World civilizations of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec, the voyager expresses his fear of a world reduced to dolmens and stelae. “One heart, one way,” he admonishes: “Pass by that which you cannot love.”
Man’s fall, like that of the Wandering Jew, is into consciousness–to suffer in anticipation, actuality, and recollection. “Natural things look upon us / and our wonders with repugnance.” The voyager asks, “What is the color of wisdom?” and announces that it must have the color of snow.
In Connell’s view, man is caught halfway between the beast and the angel, both locked in moral combat for the possession of the soul of which they are essential complements. We may take the beast to our graves, but during our lifetimes it is capable of atrocities outstripping the imagination. The plea of the voyager asks of our humanity that it be gentle and tender, that it relinquish the ways of terror and look lovingly upon the wonders of the world. The anguish of the voice is familiar in Connell’s fiction: it is Damaso, the fisherman from Chihuahua, at the height of his song; the voice of the young Augustine in the throes of doubt and longing. Magus himself, “poised between the dream and the act,” informs us that “credulity is greatest in times of calamity,” and that the millennium shall arrive when mankind has become unbelievably atrocious.
Taking a point from an entry in Wittgenstein’s Notebooks–“To pray is to think on the meaning of life.”–Connell’s Notes may best be regarded as a psalter for post-thermonuclear man, the palimpsest of hibakusha.**
Notes:
*Oracular or prophetic, from the Latin vates, meaning seer or prophet. A footnote in the original text reads: “I owe a great debt for the sharpening of my ideas on vatic writing to correspondence with Luis Harss.” [Gus’s original footnote.]
**The Japanese term hibakusha means “those who experienced the bomb” and refers to a psychological disease akin to post-traumatic stress syndrome, which occurred among the survivors at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Gus’s original text footnote credits Robert J. Lifton, “Psychological Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima,” Daedelus, Summer, 1963.) A theme woven throughout the “After Ground Zero” essay is how Cold War anxieties can be seen as a backdrop to Connell’s writing in general. However, Gus writes, “The fear of thermonuclear destruction does not obsess Connell. But what does anger him is the way in which the unimaginable power of today’s weapons has reduced man to a cipher.” Among the works discussed in “After Ground Zero,” only Notes from a Bottle . . . utilizes the stylistically experimental “vatic” approach. [Editor’s note.]
1966
Excerpt from “After Ground Zero: The Writings of Evan Connell, Jr.” in New Mexico Quarterly, Summer 1966.
blaisdell Ivey collected 