from Association Copy Brian Teare for Stephen Motika Nausea, collage, these works on paper— a way to begin ill again, everything unfinished. I’m still thinking about painting. San Francisco winter returns, its thin light rinsed and acidic, etching everything’s edges. At the museum we’re looking at panels by Ellsworth Kelly. I’m bored by their bright glossy geometry, and my friend Frances says something like “Imagine choosing not to use most of the tools at your disposal.” That’s useful for me. A poem begins when I’ve forgotten how to make one. I don’t know why. One day the tools are gone. As are the rules that guide their use. Then what. Another doctor’s appointment, first— disgust to give up to get rid of the language value of anything at all or to do the work to doubt that the work needs doing I open the notebook. I feel stupid, choosing making in the waiting room: pain scale, color field, patient history, pale tile of the clinic bathroom. Then what. Take a number. Why. Go on— [End Page 107] Being ill in my thirties is like certain paintings in the sixties, Agnes Martin saying yes to the grid and no to pretty much everything else. “Horizontal lines for forty years,” she says in documentary footage, “must be some kind of record.” Her certainty and discipline, her tape and ruler, those graphite lines floating on gesso. Abstraction seems double-voiced, saying yes to what, saying no to what, is what I ask, negotiating define object define event move the “inside” of the picturebetween invisible and visible, the ineffable and the clinic, what is considered to be the “material” flower fruit phallus book & vase what principles obeyed, what principles refused, embodied by what materials and processes, the morning I vomit between parked cars and stand up, fog rolling off Twin Peaks, not a drawing not a structurenot a speech not a construction with a stained collar I go to the doctor and now here is Jasper Johns, who writes in his sketchbook, “It is what it does. What can you do with it?” [End Page 108] During the years preceding her psychotic break and his breakup with Rauschenberg, Martin lived on Coenties Slip and Johns on Pearl Street, a short distance neither crossed to the other. Her biographer Nancy Princenthal argues that “Johns was developing a language that had much in common with Martin’s.” Would either ultimately agree with that? In the early sixties certain of their canvasses might have had a passing resemblance, but Martin’s metaphysical obsessions were in part informed by visionary experience. Johns had aesthetic obsessions in part informed by the gay male coterie of Rauschenberg, Cage, and Cunningham, and in part by art history, Duchamp in particular. Abstraction for her meant a fairly limited vocabulary, whereas for him it meant a rearrangementthe air must move in as well as out of “the painted space.” Not the grid’s fixity, but a dexterous restlessness, meaning’s mutability and manipulability no sadness just disaster [End Page 109] What’s the event that bisects a biography, after which nothing is the same? What’s the shape of the moment when you lose everything except your life? Double negative, skull against canvas. Outside the doctor’s office, my love and I part ways. I take a different route home, avoiding Dolores Park, its empty wintry hill. To ask another artist afterward: how do I do this? writing or painting as a way of writing or painting or as a way of doing something else another possibility way can be used to meanthis is the way I do this this is the way he does this this is the way he does it I do it this way The event’s so big my body can’t hold it. I need to build a structure it can live in. Lead section. Bronze junk. Glove. Glass. Brush. Dark glass → mouth. It swallows everything. I follow the taste of salt, thinking until the ambulance arrives. “What’s that even mean,” I hear myself saying to the EMT. Someone pulls a curtain across it...