No Country for Old Men

 Whenever I am in the mood for regrets, which is seldom, because I recognize it is for the most part of fruitless mood, I regret that in 1966 I moved to Chicago rather than to New York.  I had been accepted by the New School, but somehow I decided against it.  (I sometimes wonder if that decision extended my life, because had I moved to the Village in 1966, I might have been caught up in the AIDS crisis.)  I went instead to Roosevelt University in Chicago, where I had some very good teachers, met some wonderful people, and fed myself as often as not with the little sandwiches at the Members' Tea each afternoon at the Art Institute.  

What I most regret about that decision, however, is that I missed an opportunity to have known, perhaps, Nam June Paik,  Ironically, I dabbled around the edges of some of the things he was doing in New York while I was at Roosevelt, but I never met anyone else who was at all interested in such dabblings.  What also happened while I was in Chicago was the beginning of what Zorba the Greek called 'the full catastrophe'.  Marriage, family, golden retrievers, mini vans.  It would take me more than twenty years to escape  Then no longer a young man, I nevertheless went West, to Santa Fe.  I took Super Highway 40 to Clines Corner where there is a cut-off to Santa Fe, to a world unimaginably different from Memphis or Chicago or New York.

Santa Fe and the surrounding hills and gullies are about as artsy-fartsy as one could hope for, and again I met some wonderful people. I fed myself with the mountain air and hosted my own teas ,on Sunday afternoons, or  brunches on Sunday mornings.  I even indulged in a bit of artsy-fartsyness myself,and was able to make enough money to wander around a bit.  If I had good sense, I might be writing this in a cafe in Santa Fe--if there is a cafe open in Santa Fe during the Great Fear--instead of in a tin can on the edge of nowhere.  But I have never had good sense, so I wandered back to Arkansas, to Fayettevile and the University of Arkansas.  It was an odd move.  When I lived in Memphis and told people I wanted to move to Santa Fe, their response was almost always 'Oh.  I want to move to Santa Fe.  How can you move to Santa Fe?'  I would answer, 'Go west on Interstate 40 and turn right at Clines Corner'.  When I told people in Santa Fe that i wanted to move to Fayetteville, they would almost always respond, 'Oh.  I want to move to Fayetteville.  How can you move to Fayettevillle?' I would answer, 'Go east on Insterstate 40 and turn north at Fort Smith.'  My move to Fayetteville had a few more detours than that, but I got there eventually, and I found the Purple Chair.

The Chair is Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair.  Yes, that Eero Saarinen, who also designed the TWA Terminal at what was once Idlewild, now JFK, airport in New York.  It sits in the northeast corner of the Fine Arts Library in the Ed Stone's famous Fine Arts Building at the University of Arkansas.  Yes, that Ed Stone, of the MOMA in New York.  In fact the Fine Arts Building has a courtyard that rather replicates the Paley Garden at MOMA.

So, as a no longer even middle-aged man, I could sit in that chair and feel connected to the lost opportunities of my wasted youth.  That chair is right by the stacks holding the books about Korean art, and in my old age I became at least a bit acquainted with the missing piece of the artsy-fartsy understanding of the world I had been seeking a bit in Chicago and Santa Fe.  If I had good sense, I would might be writing this essay in a coffee shop in Fayetteville--if there are any coffee shops open in Fayetteville during the Great Fear. (The coffee shops in Fayetteville are so good that when I got back here to the edge of nowhere, where coffee is a major god, there being no other gods left, people asked if I had gone to Onyx.  When I said I often had breakfast there, they wanted to touch the hem of my garment.)

But I don't have good sense, and besides, the summers in Fayetteville are hot enough to make one want to move to hell for relief, so I came back to the edge of nowhere.  Here I make do with a chair that's an Eames  kock-off. (It's actually more comfortable for long periods than the Womb, which like all wombs, is a little cramped for old men.)

And I just have a little pile of Nam June Paik books. (Although some of them are not in the UofA Fine Arts Library.)

I'm hoping to add to the pile in the future (if I live so long):

Why, you might be wondering, am I sharing too much information with the world.  I am sharing it because a friend back in Arkansas posted today on Facebook about 'having a hard time understanding how our currently frustrating and unhealthy political and cultural state has come about'.  I thought, as I always do, because we have become, as McLuhan predicted, retribalized, and it is, as Toffler described, shocking beyond our ability to adjust.  (Is it any wonder that Zombies walk among us, at least in our popular art?  And didn't McLuhan tell us that if we wanted to understand the future, we should look at art?) But there is another reason I have been revisiting my past about which regrets are fruitless.  It is because I enjoy revisiting hope. (You know, that thing that springs eternal in the human breast, because the human breast is a slow learner.  Or maybe it just has Patience and Fortitude, to borrow an image from another library of my past.)

In 1966, I was a young man full of  hope.  Hope that I could understand the world.  Hope that my generation would get it right.  (Generational hubris is a thing.)  The International Style in architecture still held out an idea that we could build in ways that transcended our tribal differences.  (Even though the nations among which that style was inter- were mostly found in northern Europe.)

And in my past, or present, no one has held up hope more clearly than Nam June Paik, whose life occupied all the great warring powers of the modern world.  His Korean  family took refuge in Japan to escape the Chinese.  He then made his way to Germany. and then to the United States.  He hoped that the tools of the modern world would allow all of us to enjoy personal sovereignty but with cooperation. Nowhere perhaps is this better shown than in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.

That is a hope which I am not yet willing to abandon.  The human breast may be a slow learner, but it is a learner.  Although the scale of modern warfare seems horrible to us, and it is, a smaller percentage of young warriors die in combat,  even in the 'world wars' of industrialized nations, than died in the combat of  the idealized tribes of the our past

As an old man I recognize, admittedly with some regret, that 'An aged man is but a paltry thing/A tattered coat upon a stick'.   And yet I hope.  I take a sort of wry solace in the reaction to Nam June Paik's first major exhibit, one which he enjoyed remembering in his old age. It was at a small private gallery in Wuppertal, much less glamorous than, say, his installation at the Guggenheim.  He exhibited works that would predict most of what he would do later, works that were quite revolutionary in 1963, but which were almost entirely unmentioned in the mainstream media.  What caught the attention of the media was that Joseph Beuys took an axe to a piano in the entrance to the exhibit, and that Paik hung an ox head over the door of the gallery.

Hanging an ox head over the door was a tradition, it seems, in feasts in Paik's homeland.  It was all many contemporary visitors to the show saw.  Now a Google search of Nam June Paik Wuppertall Oxhead brings up no photo of it at all.  

As McLuhan reminded us, we travel into the future looking into the rear view mirror.  Even Nam June Paik couldn't resist hanging an ox head over the door of what would be a very futuristic exhibit.  I hope I live long enough to see what comes when we emerge from the Great Fear.  I am certain it will be much more interesting, much more hopeful, than what is in the rear view mirror.