GET INSPIRED BY ARCHITECTURE #4 Writing as Resistance
Gajin Fujita, Queen of the Angels, 2019 (digital print by L.A. Louvre for True Colors catalogue) L.A. Louvre, Venice CA 90291.
GET INSPIRED BY ARCHITECTURE #4 Writing as Resistance
By Mary Rakow, Ph.D.
What does this painting by Gajin Fujita say about architecture? Where are the buildings?
They’re set right between large spiritual forces, both benign and malignant. And at the same time, between the large scale of these forces and the small, immediate acts of a graffiti artist. The painting makes all of this visible. Benign and malignant, large and small. Danger and safety. Vast and hand-held.
To see other works in this one-man exhibition see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4a7q3cgzd4
Our writing has to do the very same thing. We have to situate our story where Fujita locates his buildings. In this complexity. This is our job. Our work doesn’t have to make all of these surrounding forces explicit. But the reader has to feel their presence. The reader, whether it’s a flash fiction piece or a three volume series, has to feel that our story touches all of this. Holds all of this.
Why? Because life is this complex, no matter how much we narrow our focus, our gaze. The path of an ant across a table top is this complex. Our own, singular perception of that ant, that table, that pathway across the table surface, is that complex.
We can never make literary art if we go through life simplifying everything. As we have said before, we have to notice. To stop. To focus our deep attention. We don’t want to just make another novel, another short story to put into the world. As a human family we do not need more stuff. We need less. “Less but better,” to quote the famous industrial designer, Dieter Rams, “Weniger, aber bessser.” And part of being able to make art rather than stuff is to be willing to place ourselves at the center of this kind of multi-layered complexity.
Are we doing that? How are we addressing the world in which we live? Especially the difficult parts?
In San Francisco, we have many buildings in the Financial District still empty, tech companies with massive lay-offs, hundreds sleeping un-housed every single night on our sidewalks under cardboard. We have the US deeply divided politically, the church in which I worship, though ancient and global, deeply divided in this part of the world. We have climate change affecting every continent and the seas that connect them. And the air we breathe.
We have to think as writers. To remember who we are. We have to remember and exercise the power of our art, even when it might be hard to do so.
The New York Times Op-Doc titled “Away” follows two teenage artists, Ukrainian refugees living now in Budapest. They use their art both in public spaces as a form of protest, and in helping refugee children, separated from their parents who’re still in Ukraine. They look and listen to the kids as they explain their drawings. What they saw. What they can’t forget. I was surprised to see that even the very young know exactly why they’re there. The conversations are deeply moving.
We have to remember that writing is a form of resistance. It always has been. In every culture and every century. “All great art is praise,” Ruskin said. He didn’t say all art. He said all great art.
I think this is true. That great art praises and bears witness to the power of the human imagination, to our capacity for resistance, to resilience and our human capacity for compassion.
The circumstances which gave rise to my first book were unbearably difficult. I turned to writing not because I wanted to be a writer but because, having gone through grad school, I had a facility with language. If I’d known how to choreograph I would have done that. Or a composer, then music. But all I really had that could somehow hold and transform what I was experiencing was language.
At one particularly difficult moment in a journey that lasted almost a decade, I was in bed, holding the drapes slightly apart, wondering if the Sun was going to come like it did the day before. It was a real question. I wasn’t sure of anything. For the first time in my life I didn’t really know for sure that my name was Mary.
What happened, as I waited for what seemed like the Sun’s decision to come again, is that I thought of the Bubonic Plague that decimated medieval Europe, taking 1 life in 3. They did not know how it spread. It produced huge black swellings on the body. And death came in a few days.
Though I wasn’t practicing my faith in those years, for some reason I imagined a painter who wanted to paint a portrait of the Virgin and her Child. It helped me to go there. I saw the whole thing.
The Sun did return. And later that morning, once the kids were at school and my husband at work, I wrote what I’d imagined. Later I added phrases from the most famous Holocaust survivor poet, Paul Celan, (translated by the brilliant John Felstiner), a new companion to me. Here’s some of that fragment. As in the finished book, the italics are Celan’s words.
“Perhaps it was something like this:
He gets up from his bed, leaving the familiar muslin weave of his sheet. Goes to the window reluctantly, wakened by the noise of another funeral procession. Everyone wailing, holding cloths to their faces. He looks down at the priest’s weary eyes and notes the cut pattern of sunlight on the lace of his chasuble.
Next door a woman with delicate hands tips a cistern out into the street. The stench of the bile and blood rise through the air. The priest recites his delicate Psalms. Again… the mix of stench and melody.
In the alley two boys shake sticks at a rat. Laughing, one throws a stone. No one knows then that the rat carries the plague.
…He wants to paint the Blessed Virgin with Christ Child. But he can’t remember a day without wailing. Not sure he can remember what normal skin looks like. Around him, and close, so many bodies swelled and blackened, tumors the size of grapefruits, rank expulsions of pus.
It is everywhere. And it is not what he wants.
His mother sits in the kitchen below…Staring at the wall, tearing rags. At dusk he will find her slumped over and silent, rags piled around her like a nest…. He wants Mary enthroned by the moon, her cape studded with stars.
He waits for memory to bridge the gap. A woman yanks the curtain down from its rod…throws it into the street. Everywhere helplessness. Everywhere laceration.
Some cry out, “God is punishing us!” The tanner predicts the end of the world, runs through the street waving his knife. Every week a new soothsayer, a new jumble of language, beads.
Reachable, near and not lost, there remained amid the losses
this one thing:
Surrounded by bloated and black festering bodies,
…through its own answerlessness
…through the thousand darknesses
this painter somehow remembers tenderness, the beauty of skin.
We see the painter putting his pain and loss into a higher context because he wants to paint beautiful skin when all around him bodies are swollen, black and foul smelling. He wants to paint a mother and child that is not like him and his mother below. He’s alone in his little studio in his small house with his mother, now collapsed in despair, tearing rags, making her nest. We have big and small, repulsive and gorgeous. His surroundings and what he makes while standing in the midst of it.
He uses his art to resist the immediate. The horror of it. The Bubonic Plague was a pandemic that hit Western Eurasia and North Africa. The most fatal pandemic in recorded human history. It arrived on the shores of Europe in 1347 and 5 years later 75,000,000-200,000,000 people were dead.
I titled the chapter “Requiescere” meaning in Latin, “to rest” because I’d found peace.
Like this imagined painter, when circumstances require it of us, writing can be a form of resistance. Resistance to all the smells, sights, sounds that our senses are registering. Resistance to the petty. Resistance to despair.
Like painting, writing is, primarily, a solitary activity. But it is not an escape from our surroundings. It’s a choice to live in a paradox. We withdraw from the world to our small studio, precisely to bond with the world in a more intimate manner. This intimacy is ushered in by our solitude, our focus, our discipline and imagination.
We each are in possession of a unique view of the world. It’s our job to get better acquainted with this inside ourselves so that our work will come from that place. We can find our distinct perception by making small changes in our lives. Like the imagined painter who gets up out of bed and touches the corner of his canvas, and, slowly, begins.
A current client now working on a beautiful memoir said in our last session that she does not take her phone with her when she goes outside to see her garden. The phone represents, to her, in part, a sense of security that is really false. Hers is a small but very powerful decision, I think. And I’m glad she let me share it. We can do these things and should. We can decide to create new, small, habits.
We each have our lineage. Forces that have molded us. Forces we resist. Forces we embrace. I learned that Fujita (b. 1972) is a native of East L.A., was a member of LA Graffiti crews K2S (Kill 2 Succeed) and KGB (Kids G[one Bad), received degrees in art and is influenced by his father, a painter, and his mother, a conservator of Japanese antiques.
We start with our lineages. We start where we are. We begin to find ourselves. We keep at it until we make ourselves anew. From some unrepeatable amalgamation of all of these things, our distinct perception comes, and our unique voice starts to be heard.
When we access that singularity, when we write fragment after fragment, when we keep on that beam, and when we finally put all the pieces together, we will make art. We will make an object of meaning that bears witness to the complexity that is the human situation, and to the startlingly unique position we each have in that vastness. Whether we self-publish or are published traditionally, we will have written the story no one else can write. Or will ever write. That is our job. Our privilege. Our joy.
Exercises
Reflection: In the complexity of my life what is the thing I refuse to include? The thing that I am not yet ready to include? What kind of support would help me overcome this obstacle?
Writing: In response to this painting, write a 200 word flash piece set in Los Angeles, 5 pm.
In Closing
I recently re-joined SFMOMA! I love that space! If you’re visiting the Bay Area, I’m holding one-to-one sessions there, in the sculpture terrace. We can go over your work, or I can give you writing prompts to artwork in the collections and you can free write then get immediate feedback from me. My membership will cover your entry fee. For more info contact: maryrakow1@gmail.
For other editing/mentoring options, fees, writing exercises, please visit maryrakow.com. Thank you each and all, once again, for sending writers my way! It is core to my ability to build this eremitic life. And for your comments, both private and public, thank you! They are wonderful.
Good writing! See you next time,
Mary
© Mary Rakow, 2023
A freelance editor living in the Bay Area, Mary Rakow, Ph.D.
works with clients who are both local and global. She is both
rigorous and encouraging, insightful and kind.
A theologian with graduate degrees from Harvard Divinity
School and Boston College, Rakow’s debut novel, THE
MEMORY ROOM was shortlisted for the Stanford University
International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West
Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of
the West by The Los Angeles Times.
Mary writes with deep feeling and a questioning faith. Her
second novel, THIS IS WHY I CAME earned excellent
reviews in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The
Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal,
Christian Century, O Magazine, Ploughshares. It appeared
on reading lists for courses at Princeton and Yale.
Interested in the visual arts, Rakow received two Lannan
residencies and two residencies at Whale & Star, in the
studio of visual artist Enrique Martinez Celaya, where she
was commissioned to write the first book-length treatment of
the artist’s work, MARTINEZ CELAYA, WORKING
METHODS.
Mary is a beloved editor and writing coach. She enjoys
working with writers who are just starting out and those with
publications and writing accolades.
For inquiries: maryrakow.com
See also:
thisiswhybook.com
https://www.instagram.com/prayers_for_our_time/
https://www.facebook.com/Psalter
© Mary Rakow, 2023
