To shewe yow the wey, in this viage,
Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage
That highte Jerusalem celestial
—Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
I finally framed the painting by Tasha Robbins—an abstracted cross-swirl of tree stumps, raising among its energy loops a curious reminiscence of human figuration—and the portraits and posters on my old familiar walls, having duly shifted places to accommodate this newcomer, are calling to each other (to me) with reawakened vigor, as if by being moved they’ve fallen under new spotlights, baring their active souls again for my renewable eyes. Chairs, end-tables, moody lamps, regularly do this dance in my house, and over again what’s seemed fixed loosens, reshapes interior meaning as complementary presence, pluralized out from each object or piece of art to bear relation in a cosmology of household deities.
Here on the cheap lightweight foldout bookcase—it pretends to be Japanese—under the orange volcanic vase spewing trails of eucalyptus nuts and corkscrew willows—is the one personal photo that owns a public space in my art-stuffed apartment. Five young men caught mid gambol in a park, a little chorus line of kicks, gropes, arm-over-shoulder wraps, and wide too-wide smiles. Yes, that’s me (if you don’t ask I’ll point it out) in the wild-prophet hair and beard, a tangle of exuberant energy far the other side of saturation. My tucked-in cotton kimono’s bared to the waist, where you can spot—look closely—the much-admired hand-beaded belt (snakeskin-waffled in maroon, mauve, and chalky blue) with its moon slice mother-of-pearl buckle. The ferocity of hair and pure glaze of sunlight reek of period. The year is 1975 (it’s forever 1975!), the men are queer (well, one is “honorary”,) and Golden Gate Park has offered its swooping cypresses and Monterey pines to border the rolling fields of that summer’s Gay Freedom Day celebration.
There is no other picture, in my house, of paradise (though there is a “vale of soulmaking”.) Whatever reconstellating takes place, its rarified image stays true. The spontaneous fraternal beatitude, renegade eros and radical hilarity of that San Francisco hover, like elements of celestial Jerusalem, at the apex of memory; no maturity, no fine mellowness, no deepened work dissolves them. Through the clear painterly air—as if all of San Francisco had northern light—epochal details sharpen. There, the city’s edge-of-the-world history joins its urgent Pacific geography to clasp my hand in a lover’s vow (I married San Francisco on a brisk craggy hilltop in 1978, in lieu of a boyfriend.) “This other-Eden, demi Paradise,” rhapsodizes John of Gaunt, similarly England-besotted, “This happy breed of men, this little world,/ This precious stone set in the silver sea.”
Extravagant phrases of praises gild memory—one no longer knows the actual from the iconic—the icon becomes the actual! Where physical distance blurs temporal distance refines. This much has not shifted: on a shelf a lucite frame encodes the past in a photo—unregenerate—as a paradise of pure loss.
But something has shifted: the resonant image, gingerly holding its chemical colors against the fading powers of sunlight, remains the same, but the very nature of paradise has changed. Even while—eyes dewy—focused back on primal beauty, the unforeseen—HIV—transfigures sight, beholder and beheld. “This sceptered isle,” Shakespeare’s Gaunt has said, “This fortress built by Nature for herself/ Against infection.” The magic island is flooded in a breakaway recursive tide; what did not hold—infected—returns to alter the image of origin. [Stein: “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”]
We stage the past in jeweled terms—to fix its daunting fluidity and give name to our nostalgia—but HIV has modified this delicate taxonomy. The paradigm shifts. A newly burnished glaze shines. A viral invasion has reconfigured the utopian body, so that what once was seen tenderly as “youth” is now revisited as the unacknowledged genius of “health”.
The circling age rings in Tasha’s painted tree trunks, I see today, are like the ovoid loops we practice to draw the human face. Her small oil of a foot among clouds rises, on my bedroom wall, above Nikki’s green collage with its palm-forward open hand. Familiar domestic talismans, these,—one sleeping, the other awake—that make of any wall a window through which I view some measure of self. Catching the last flare of sunset, they signal it across the room to a poster, in French, for Fellini’s Les Nuits de Cabiria, where Giuletta Masina, in a chicken-feather coat, flutters her fingers gamely at other seekers winging the night. In this crosswind of salutations the photo from 1975 has moved to my work table. Under gooseneck light I study its captive luminosity: its fable of youth, to be sure, and florid sunny conviviality, but more, now—shifted paradise—its depiction, its retention, of life before AIDS.
[1995]