Organized Sound

SECTION I: The Process

When my poem on Darwin was selected to be set to music, I began to think about music, words, and visual art mixed as one piece of work. I began to read This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Vevitin, 2006. The first Bricolage (Organized Sound above) was my first “think” piece about mixing ideas from music, words, and visual art while I worked. I worked deliberately with a Bricolage mixology in my garage studio. I then decided to move outside and work more freely and openly.

I began work in my backyard on a platform (see below). A 5-foot by 5-foot soaking “tub” is nested in the notched corner nearest the viewer. I later added a canopy to protect my work from the shower of leaves and twigs occurring day and night. The project was videotaped for future use.

My Backyard Platform

I soaked industrial 4-foot by 4-foot sheets of triple layer corrugated cardboard in the water “tub” overnight. When the sheets were fully saturated, I took them apart, layer by layer in various combinations. Some sheets separated into single layers and some into double layers. I then began to mount this raw, dripping multilayered material on unsoaked cardboard sheets. The dry sheets were primed with latex house paint and were stiff and impervious to the wet cardboard. This wet-on-dry combination created three-dimensional pieces in high and low relief.

Month One

The first piece (The Teacher and the Fortune-teller) that flew off the end of this process was purely exploratory and persistently Darwinian. How would the soaked cardboard behave? Would it be friendly or resistant or merely inert, lifeless, and limp? I reached into the water bath and grabbed the top sheet.

When I lifted the sheet out of the soaking tub, brownish water poured out of it in small Niagaras. The water was slick and slimy with dissolving glue. I sidled the sheet out of the bath and flung it in a whirling motion on my work table.  It was sopping wet, and I began to peel it apart immediately, using the flow of water to lift and strip pieces of layers apart. I pushed and pulled this wet material, letting the cardboard bunch up in serpentine and visceral movements. I left the composition the way it happened to gather. Going against common sense, I proceeded to paint the composition with more latex and added enamel spray paint while everything was still soaking wet. At this stage it looked like this:

The Teacher and the Fortune-teller

But I still had two more sheets soaking and grabbed the next one and did the same thing, except this time I worked with a double-layered sheet. I had to push hard on the stiffer cardboard and folded the double-thick sheet into whatever shape it slid into when I pushed and pulled on its watery surface. I painted wet on wet on this one by first using a drip method from a brush. Later, when dry, I added straight lines and called it Asian Maestro.

Asian Maestro (end)

Next,  following the Darwinian core concept of ceaseless variation, I decided to use only the internal sheet, the corrugated sheet that separates the two outside layers. The lines of corrugation were reminiscent of the lines in the musical staff. Composed of middle layer pieces folded, torn, cut, and mounted on a new sheet, a musical form began to appear in the jostling of partial forms. A composition of lines, planes, and bent edges, I call this one Cello Soloist.

Cello Soloist

Month Two

Since working wet on wet moves very quickly in a blind sort of way (another Darwinian core concept), the third piece was already arriving by the time I began work on the next piece. I was listening to Santana’s Black Magic Woman on headphones while working on the next piece. I soaked the cardboard three times, each time twisting it and turning it and then letting it dry while I bounced around to the song’s rhythms. I slathered and I sprayed paint and varnish. Marty, the Bricolage framemaker looking at the developing piece, said to me: “She has to be sensuous.”

Yes, yes, of course.  Black, black, black witchy woman hidden by her very witchiness...

Black Magic Woman is layered, very deep and thick. With layers attached to layers, its one of the heaviest pieces so far.

Black Magic Woman

The next piece would be lighter, less complicated, not for any particular reason other than slinging wet, slithery cardboard sheets takes, necessarily, only a second at most. The process moves so quickly that I didn’t have time to construct. I had time only to compose as it happened.

Orange Places

Month Three

The next piece was already at hand since I was working across six pieces in various stages—moving back and forth between pieces—as they dripped and sloshed on work tables or on the floor of my outside working platform. I had taken two single-layer top sheets that were so wet that they could be wrinkled into narrow topographies. I attached one to the other using their own wetness and then, after they stopped dripping, mounted them on a solid piece with split fasteners, making this piece heavier than Black Magic Woman. I remember thinking, “What in the world…?” I didn’t know if the female figure that emerged was making love to the oboe or whether the whole thing was spinning away. Later I called it Angel of Echoes.

 


Angel of Echoes

I moved on to the next table where a new sheet slathered with latex house paint was teeming with discolorations and wet-on-wet spray enamels. It was a sopping corrugated sheet. I threw it on the floor over a 4-inch PVC pipe and let it dry until it was stiff, but still flexible, and then flexed it and mounted it on a new sheet. I call it Sheet Music for Oboe.

Sheet Music for Oboe

Month Four

Four hours after I started, an unusual piece emerged. It was unusual in that I had mistakenly mixed oil paint with latex house paint when I didn’t read the can’s label. When I attempted to work the paint, wet on wet with water, the thing skidded out of my control. Oil and water don’t mix, but they really slather. When it dried it looked like this:

Uhmmm

Marty, the framemaker, says it looks like a person in a wheelchair. I see Easter Island. In the meantime, it began to rain. I covered everything on the tables and on the platform with plastic sheeting and ducked into the house. Once inside, I began to work on a piece I had started sometime ago. I laced it with foil tape and drew black lines to begin a musical motif.

Guitar Player

I had reached the end of this session. I would do it again tomorrow.

Month Five

The day continued with rain that had started during the night. A smaller piece was soaked by the rain before I could move into the basement to work. I folded the wet cardboard, painted it in blues, and mounted it on a wood panel to dry. It became what I call Jimmy Reed’s Delta Blues Guitar.

Jimmy Reed's Delta Blues Guitar

CONCLUSION

By this time, I had accumulated over 28 pieces in various stages of completion. They began to proliferate into these variations produced by the Darwinian process I use:

			Shown at Darwin Concert
Shown at Darwin Concert	Shown at Darwin Concert
Black Magic Woman, phase 3, in my living room

SECTION II: Description of the Darwin Music and Poetry Project

As an extension of the Dialogues with Darwin Poetry Project announced in June 2009 by the American Philosophical Society (APS) (www.amphilsoc.org) in collaboration with the Network for New Music (www.networkfornewmusic.org), this documentation of the visual art project will be part of a video titled Bricolage 5.0: A Darwinian Model of Folk Creativity (under fiscal sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts).

The APS Darwin Poetry Project began with a “Call For Poets.” Poets were required to view the Darwin Exhibit at the APS Museum and submit one poem with a maximum of 18 lines in length. Young composers were invited by the Network for New Music to individually select poems from the pool of submissions and transform them into musical compositions constrained only by the instruments of the classical ensemble. Poets and composers worked in collaboration. Five compositions were selected by a composers’ panel for performance on February 9 and 11, 2010, at Ben Franklin Hall, Philadelphia, PA. My poem, The Monogamous Man selected by two composers, Daniel Shapiro (Curtis Institute of Music) and David Davenport (Temple University), was performed at each concert.

In the meantime, I was granted Fiscal Sponsorship by the New York Foundation for the Arts (www.NYFA.org) for a one-hour documentary video examining the basis of Darwinian creativity applied to the relationship between visual art, music, and poetry. At least six demonstration paintings (some with accompanying audio) and a series of smaller pieces (10 to 15) illustrating how ordinary materials (cardboard, broken glass, discards) are used in folk creativity to capture the abstractness of music and poetry is due in October 2010. The poem follows:

THE MONOGAMOUS MAN

(called “a tribute to Darwin as thinker, seer, and glowing discoverer”
in the Philadelphia Inquirer Music Review.)

Bright as the earth, the sky reflected on his face
A brow of clouds over eyes from the center of the world
The gaze, profound, liquid,
          The measure of Time through layers of motion
          A rising light in the space of the mind
Solitary beast laboring in the soft luster of the Universe
In the illumination of Life

A movement begins slowly in the maternal earth
          Calling out the zygote moving in the frothy wave
The Man’s hand
          Following the branching light, gentle ever,
          His travels of sight reflected in a drop of blood
His monogamous soul infinitely varied, beautiful in arabesques of hidden time

The Mind in oversight,
A witness to miracle
          Witness to life, its bloom of creativity, efflorescence and explosion
          The reap of color, a wreath of movement
How wonderful he was.

(June 15, 2009)

© April 2010 (revised November 2010) - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

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"THE ACTOR AND THE FORTUNE-TELLER"

48” x 48”, 10/9/2009

“Hey, want to meet a crazy old man?” The psychology intern from the University of Texas seemed to be mocking me.

“Sure, what else am I doing?”

I was off-shift from my job as a night watchman at a residential campus for disturbed adolescents where the intern worked. I was sitting around sweating in the middle of a hot day in Austin, Texas.

Taking off on a lark too see a crazy old man was how I came to meet Clarence (his actual name) and how he became my teacher and how I learned fortune-telling from him by using the Tarot cards.

In my early 20s, I was bumming around in the Southwest searching for odd jobs and trying to figure out why I liked being a bum when, standing on a hot sidewalk against a backdrop of squalid thickets, I was introduced to the “crazy old man.”

 “Come this way,” he said with a glancing glare. He had invited me to join him. He turned and walked into and then was completely enveloped by the trees, brush, and lush foliage under condemnation, I would learn, by the city. I followed him through the bizarre ecology into an internal clearance about the size of a campsite. It was his living space. I sat down on a rickety stool and became his student. What else was I doing?

After a tumultuous and fruitless thespian career that included European theater tours, Clarence spent years making a living by hawking fortune-telling in carnival sideshows. Now sick and retired from life everywhere, he lived disheveled and defiant on his dangerously overgrown property in the middle of the city of Austin. City officials had tried to wrest the half-block property from him for years by declaring his property an eyesore, but Clarence was a hellfire protester and the battle wore on.

Dressed in soiled, ragged, and skimpy clothing, his health broken, lying back on a squalid wicker love seat, unshaven and unkempt, his eyes gleaming and radiating, he had the look of suffering and transcendence in its most ordinary, disreputable form. His uneasy, grapefruit-sized testicle unconstrained by underwear and burgeoning out from under his ragged cut-offs seemed a testimony to his dying while the world passed by cursing his inner city jungle.

Clarence often laughed at himself in a cosmic sense about the losses of life, but his sad life lessons had riven him and deposited him here, lonely and aged, with huge spiders for company hanging out in their webs like overseers, visited by bird calls and flickers of wings in the walls of dense foliage, with lawyers checking their watches and waiting at the edge of his overgrown eyesore. Young people laughed at him and professionals, mostly lawyers, fought with him. I found him an ailing, elderly thespian disrobing his veined knobby body while dragging an enormously swollen testicle, mumbling his secrets and lessons to ready his mortal and final exit from life’s stage.

I felt at home listening to him, just like I felt comfortable when listening to winitos, the rasquaches who live among ruined things, talking in their late-night circles around a fire of broken boards and other scrap wood.  I leaned forward to “see” him nakedly. I had learned to look at people this way—anthropologically—as a child. I grew up looking at primitives who lived nakedly without illusions, not even the fig leaf of steady work, except that my primitives were the winos and transients of Guadalupe, California. We were part of the human labor force working the agricultural fields of the Santa Maria Valley.

I was Clarence’s audience of one, just as I was when I listened with amusement and incredulity to the winos telling their stories of betrayals and happenstance and watched them trading laughable insults that held no barbs for people without illusions or pretensions. I had learned from them what the human spirit looks like when all the body’s pretensions and vanities have been stripped away. I learned how to listen to the discards of the worldly world. I did this by washing expectations from my thoughts. And in this way, I was comfortable listening to Clarence. The real differences between Clarence in his squalid life and me living on the road were the many years he had already lived and the many miles I had not yet traveled. I was as rasquache as he was.

Clarence particularly liked mocking Shakespearean demagoguery by streaking his words with full biblical realism. As if he had forgotten he had already said it many times, he would blurt out now and again in a scowl, “Do you want to read a good sex book? Read the Bible!” puffing out his chest.  After telling me his on-the-road stories of life and learning he would challenge me dramatically “Get free of Culture.” This was a kind of Zen sudden enlightenment, defying me to snap out of and break with conventional thinking in a blink.

Clarence absentmindedly blurted out a variation on this basic theme at least once every day I visited him. He would declare over his shoulder “Want to read a dirty book? Read the bible!” while going about his business, which often was talking to the overgrown trees and the many plants and insects around him. He would challenge me to think differently while he communed in his environment, speaking to plants, their blossoms, their insect inhabitants in caressing and familiar tones—a recognition language of deep ecology in the heart of Austin business culture. I too began to speak openly and personally to plants.

“Consciousness is what we make of it,” Clarence would insist with a gnarled finger upheld as he lay back like a broken Roman citizen on his unraveling wicker love seat.  In a voice that sounded European and far-off to me, he would suddenly switch from whatever crazy thing he was doing to begin talking grandly if circuitously about ideas and Philosophy, particularly about Emmanuel Kant’s ideas. He glared at me, more a trickster than an old man, perhaps both crazy, and when he talked about Kant’s Categorical Imperative and its rule of no exceptions, he looked at me sharply to see if I was being serious and paying attention. Actually, he was talking about ideation and the formation of thought, about the intuitive manifold, but of course I didn’t know that. The enduring rasquache in me flipped the idea of Kant’s Categorical Imperative over and understood it as “there are no mistakes.”  He was trying to teach me about the glories of pure ideation, of thought as abstract as music.  I was hearing Clarence, but I was thinking, “Almost everything from almost nothing in an entropic universe.” While Clarence reached upward with his words, I searched inward for my destiny. Why else why would I be here sitting in Austin, Texas, listening to a ruined white man with brushy eyebrows and a Mad Hatter look?

First his stories became lessons, then increasingly tutorials, and then maps for understanding mental terrain I had never seen or even knew existed. His theatrically dramatic stories and his assertions swirled around me like reverberating rings of bright air in his small inner-city enclosure. All this acting, teaching and learning with no apparent reason other than two rasquaches, an old one and a young one, were speaking for the moment in a wide spot in the road.

Clarence introduced me to intellectual theater by populating his decrepit thespian stagecraft with large ideas. At times he reminded me of my father looking upwards and spouting phony Longfellow verse in our Mexican environment. Clarence’s bristling eyes showed his defiance towards words parading as reality and his disdain towards the language traps of the mind. He exposed me to etymology like you might show a flower to a child. I had never looked at words in this way. He enjoyed dissection of word illusions and liked to split words open to reveal their true anatomies. His favorite example was “pornography,” which he said referred to early “whore’s writing about sex and eros.” The counterintuitive concept of “whore’s writing” buried like a corpse in the word “pornography” was instantly familiar to me. In Guadalupe, it was written on our flesh.

He talked elliptically about Symbolism, Platonic pure forms, Universal Mind, Divination, as if he were a juggler spinning plates on poles. I saw him as an actor in the fortune-telling stories he spun along carnival routes as he mixed ideas with carnie events and theater craft, creating a flow of people deliciously duped time and again. Mostly he would lose himself in stories about reading the Tarots during his long years as a Carney. I recognized his migrant ways through the eyes of my youthful ones. Every now and then he seemed happy, but then his eyes would always grow moist. “It’s the customers’ fate,” he told me, “that they are happy to think for a moment free of their tales foretold.”

Clarence talked about many things, including repeating stories about folk psychology and the Tarot cards, but he was reluctant to share how to actually read fortunes using the Tarots. Still, he couldn’t resist talking about the Tarot cards, which were his segue to talking about the dreamlike act of fortune-telling. The mystic knowledge that the Tarots carried, he said, was a tool—a coherent approach for developing concentration, a concentration that was key to opening the divination system residing in the spontaneous momenta at the core of every configuration—but these tools, he also said, were misused and abused by almost everyone who tried to use the Tarots’ power of divination. “Divination is a seductive power,” he said pointing to his sadness as living proof of that. “Its whore’s writing when you use divination for your own gain.” The Tarot, he went on, are an ancient tool for developing the natural, uncomplicated mind, for learning how to compress the mind’s capacity to make economic coin from the laws of motion. I, of course, was thinking “Carney shell games.” Existentially, he waxed on, the Tarots could teach one to gain from God’s sleight of hand by standing at the center of your world as it naturally comes into being. He loved these transcendent ideas and waved his arms as if his audience of one, me, had vanished.

Clarence now began to loosen up and go further afield. He draped his philosophical postures in Egyptian legends, in various divinations and, in particular, in Incantation 625 from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and its narrative of magical movement between planes of existence, among the living and the dead.  He loved to talk from these transformational shades while enraptured by the advantage of the carnie’s demagogic ability to raise people’s expectations. Clarence said that when the spirit of Hermes, the Egyptian Master of The Emerald Tablet, was evoked and heaven and earth changed places, people became entranced and hypnotized. His Carnie stories of duping people’s sense of reality spoke of skill in many realms, but most of all, it spoke of the arts of insincerity. As for Hermes, I already knew from Indian ways the overlapping unity of Death and Life—one as the other in the very water we drank.

After several weeks of visits, I walked into his small clearance one afternoon to find he had changed. His “crazy old man” facade was lying at his gnarled feet. He had dropped it like an actor’s mask and robe. He was already sitting in his tattered wicker chair and leaned forward and began to lecture in a very sober tone as if talking deeply to himself. As I sat down on a stool he began, “Divination is a dark enterprise. It attempts to unmask infinite regress, to lift the mystic curtain of its appearances. We are warned against the practice of divination by our sacred traditions, yet our noble benefactors were fierce practitioners of these dark ways. Priests intone that the alchemy of divinatory consciousness is not for everyone. Read the bible!”

The Tarot’s shady reputation in the hands of gypsies, grafters, gypsters, and immoral thespians, those such as himself, made him hesitate as if watchful for my corruption under his arched eyebrow and glittering eye. Slowly relenting, he began to show me his deck, card by card, of the Pamela Coleman Smith Tarots, his carnie tool-of-the-trade for getting something for nothing but thoughts and images. He loved the Tarot card of the Magician with one foot on land and one foot on water, transcendent connectivity, that of “as above, so below.” This concept of universal order made Clarence fond of the Egyptian Master Hermes Trismegistus. Clarence offered me Hermes’ cosmological insight, “That which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above. Thus are accomplished the miracles of the One.”

Magic.

In spite of his misgivings, Clarence taught me to divine from the moving surfaces of the world by using the Tarots in a certain way, and then like the Egyptian Joseph how to read prophetically from the shimmering surface of liquidity. I guessed that Clarence taught me to read the Tarots because I was a good student, but then it might have been because in his fading light, he couldn’t resist yet one more carnie act.

His reading chart, rudely but colorfully hand-drawn on the top of a low table about the size of a tray table, was always sitting by us. “This is a system of symbols for developing powers of concentration,” Clarence began to instruct me and then lifted his voice, “to learn to look laterally, to peer deeply through Time, to scan the Heavens with inspiration, and to see in imprimatura the cry of events!” He loved the booming voice of the prophet (“Jesters do oft prove prophets!”), with one hand on his heart and the other with raised finger. I felt hypnotized by his swirl of bright stories with their many dark centers. Duping people’s sense of reality was a common theme in his Carnie stories as he spoke of skill in many theatrical realms, but most of all, it spoke again and again of the arts of insincerity. It never occurred to me that perhaps I was learning the wrong lessons.

I’m hunched over the top of a small crude reading stool on which seven randomly sorted piles of Tarot cards from a Pamela Coleman Smith deck are laying facedown on a chart of seven astrological symbols. The symbols are hand-painted horizontally in different colors across a piece of cloth. The symbol of The Sun is at the center, the fulcrum of seven Houses, three to the left and three to the right of it like two wings. To the right are the houses of Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn. To the left are the appositional houses of Venus, Mercury, and The Moon. Each symbol exerts its own universal influences, each sending out its own symbolic messengers like heralds and visionaries. These seven planetary influences formed a prismatic net for divination with which to catch the fish of transmutative symbolism, so to speak. A field of meaning forms like a magnetic field over the seven houses lined up in that way, he said. The trick was to visually, not conceptually, yet influenced by our perceptions and thoughts, to see the Sun card’s influence moving in waveforms in the symbolic environment composed by concentrating on the Seven Houses as a dynamic field of meaning. Clarence talked about these influences as if they were actual forces in the real world. To transform these planetary connections into a story, a narrative in a new form, into the sound of consciousness, was the act of knowing, he said.

“What do you see? Tell me what you see?”

While I peered into the Tarot cards in search of divination, he would turn to me sternly and ask in a raspy voice that cracked old and crabby, “What do you see?” In an effort to see something I had not seen before, I began to look at combinations among the seven cards from different angles, as inverse, converse, reverse, that is, I looked for the improbable and the unusual in any way I could. What did it matter? I sat in the nuttiness of his rasquache environment, turning visual symbols, their colors, their shapes, their placement, over and over until the face-up cards became multidimensional knottings in my eyes. Had I known about Escher at the time, I surely would have see his “glides” in building these Mobius-like designs among the Seven Houses. I was searching by intuition for the inner release of sudden efflorescence in the illumination of the field by seeing new images. It was perceptual magic on a tabletop. This effect transferred visually to the world around me as layers of arabesque patterns suddenly tying the world together in new ways.

It was only late summer in Texas, but I was already thinking of winter as I slowly began to grasp what Clarence wanted me to see in the faces of the Tarot cards. “What do you see?” he kept asking absentmindedly over and over as he wandered about in his space, hitching up his testicle.  Finally I began to simply do it, to look and name what I saw and not what I thought I saw. Clarence insisted on this nakedness.

The complexity of stirring light and darkness into Yin-Yang patterns is what made gaining the required skills in the navigation of untruth and insincerity necessary through practice, hence the Tarots. “Tell me what you see,” became a key to navigating uncertainty without capsizing mentally. I hung on to the idea that what I could see were like flotation devices. When I came across Durant’s “Change is the only universal constant” and Confucius’ “flow, flow, everything is flow” I was busily and ignorantly learning the easy and hard ways of seeing truthfully by the light of the incidental. Yet, everything I did was becoming clumsy, difficult, ill-fitting, and uncertain. I was lost in Texas even as I looked around with new eyes. I could count on being cursed by the modern world. It was the dark side to learning from a carnie’s rasquache life.

I left Austin with my own deck of Tarot cards, a rolled-up reading chart of the seven planetary houses, and a copy of Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous, believing I had begun a journey during which unlikely teachers would appear along the way somehow, in some way, in some form, just like Clarence suddenly appeared to pontificate out of a miasma of ridicule. But I was looking with new eyes as I picked up my old ways: Reading the Tarots for fortune-telling in Oregon led to an appointment with incarceration, just like Clarence had warned me.

48” x 48”, 12/2009 - Bio-sketch in Third Person

Jose’s training in Educational Anthropology has reinforced a personal orientation to the Vernacular. He is interested in folk creativity and its innovative enhancements to contemporary culture. His initial interests in the fields of Education and Art have combined to produce three larger interests: the knowledge domains of Creativity, Consciousness, and Culture. He says that Creativity invites iconoclastic work, Consciousness synthesizes the purpose of that work, and Culture gives the work its context of meaning. He uses these domains in a theoretical formula for creating visual art.

An agricultural fieldworker, a factory worker, then corporate staff, a non-profit executive director, a Ph.D., a college professor late in life, Jose has held tightly to the reality of, as he says, “the ethnic claw” of our backgrounds. With a university degree in studio art, he has insisted that painting is not about art, not about craft, but about the fundamentals of scratching in the dirt for divination. He has refused to polish his methods, to pre-select his materials, or to systematize his artistic process. Most of all, he has refused to seek what he calls the la petite mort of perfection. He taught in humanistic graduate education for 20 years in this raw state of mind. In 2007, he left academia and began a “fifth career” as an artist-writer at the age of 69. ■

© January 2010 - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

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"HOW DOES BRICOLAGE IMPROVISATION WORK?"

Judi’s Secret Garden

I begin a commissioned piece with simple information. I ask what are your favorite colors, what kind of work do you do, and what kind of work would you do if you had freedom to choose. I then form a cohesive sense of what a person likes, a kind of “understanding,” and then the creative process begins from there. I used this process to create “Judi’s Secret Garden,” a piece commissioned by a married couple who are both Certified Public Accountants.  Judi’s mother, whose nice work hangs in their house, is a painter in the traditional landscape and still-life style.

As I tried to get a cohesive sense of this couple, I mused, “A daughter of an artist-mother reaches for and becomes a numbers person, then marries a numbers person…uhmmm…” I continued musing, “and she now wants something different, different from the logic of everything I see around them.” I could feel myself entering their psychic field, touching their sensitivities and “wanting” art that brings a touch of fantasy combined with a bit of creative light.

I didn’t mention to Judi or her husband that I had spent years as a bookkeeper, then more years as a manufacturing production planner, and then, after learning Inferential Statistics, more years as a Social Science researcher. I have a feel for the art of numbers that is personal and yet abstract. I feel I understand.

I began with a canvas (of the right size for the intended wall) painted in two sections, one blue and one rose, to symbolize the two areas of Art and Numeracy. The green mass in the center was the “something different.” I had no idea what would follow, but I would begin with this (hidden behind the first canvas is an alternative piece, the piece not chosen; its development will not be detailed here).

The bricks are counted again. Sand is mixed into their paint for added surface roughage. The background takes on a red for a sky and a mauve for the earth on which the wall rests.

3’W x 4’H unframed (Final)

The piece is almost ready. I count the bricks and the butterflies again. The moon has faded into a vernal sleep. A few more, purely minor touches of contrast plus a black frame made to resemble a garden gate by Marty Weiss (Integrated Frames) will be added, and it will be ready to show to Judi and her husband. ■

© September 2009 - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

    
Before                                      After

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"STUDY WHATEVER YOU WANT"

For all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams
It is still a beautiful world
Desiderata

I am standing on a cement factory floor next to the plant superintendent in a multi-plant operation in Torrance, California.  We’re in hardhats. I’m wearing steel-toed boots, and he’s wearing regular street shoes. He’s in white shirt and tie, and I’m in work clothes. We are watching the final assembly of solar collectors after a long manufacturing process that begins with the melting of aluminum ingots and the extrusion of 150-foot lengths of double-finned tubing, stretched, heat-treated, and rolled. This is Reynolds Aluminum.

I’m the production foreman in charge of the day shift, which is quickly coming to its end. I look at my watch and turn to the plant superintendent with my report, “If we keep this rate up for another 15 minutes, we will hit 100-percent production efficiency and set a production record, Mr. Landis.” 

The superintendent is known for no-nonsense talk. In the clattering din, he smiles under his hardhat and, loud enough to be overheard by the hardworking crew busy at the final assembly station, responds to my report: “Well,” he harrumphs, “you know the goal is not 100 percent, it's 110 percent!”

I notice the closest workers perk up their ears, cringe, and flush.

Good enough was never good enough for management and this was more proof to the members of the United Steel Workers Union. Arriving in Los Angeles as an unskilled agricultural fieldworker, the first job I found was as a factory janitor, cleaning bathrooms, dumping trash, and sweeping KleanSweep across oil-spotted cement floors with a push broom. I worked my way up from helper to machine operator, then to a production line inventory clerk responsible for counting and recording machine outputs. In this process, I held onto the view that all of us were busy coworkers, just like in the fields, trying to turn out a worthy product. The workers were my friends. They were me. Now Superintendent Landis had again turned workers into underdog adversaries in the Labor Union versus Management wars. Old man Albert, the gnarled Shop Steward missing two fingers from each hand had befriended me. Now he sneered and shook his head. The others followed suit. Production would never work this well again, and we would not set production records after this. A month later, Superintendent Landis summoned me to his office overlooking the main plant operations to inform me that I was being moved to a new position after the replacement foreman got two week of training.

Promoted from frontline supervision to a staff position in the multi-plant production department, I was about to become an insider, a member of a team in white shirts and ties that saw itself as superior to workers wearing hardhats, asbestos gloves, and steel-toed boots. Management wanted me to hammer people into manufacturing templates like pegs. Instead, I wanted to work directly with people by developing human systems that achieved outstanding production goals with dignity for everyone. Could I continue to work my way up in a system I disagreed with? Could I work with a team that pained me when they sneered at the workers behind their backs? Other than a black foreman, all the other 12 foremen were white. I was the only Latino foreman in this 24-hour, multi-plant continuous operation. I was an Affirmative Action hire. All this created an inner confusion as I thought about what to do with my promotion. Was it a good thing or not? This internal debate about how to treat people to get things done made me seriously think that maybe going back to school for the first time after 10 years of factory jobs was a good idea.

My original fieldworker ways of doing things meant working hard and trying anything, though ad hoc and risky to keep the work going. My ways were haphazard, but life on the manufacturing floor taught me that my native experimental and risky ways were also highly adaptive. They were particularly useful and creative in the whirligig manufacturing environments where making things work now was always the top priority. When a brick manufacturer in Phoenix returned aluminum rails for his brick ovens because the holes were mispunched, I used them to build equipment storage racks and kept the production lines clear. I don’t remember what Sociology book I got the idea from, but I drew up sociograms so I could put my production crews together with an eye to cooperation and friendliness among personality types. The idea is simple. If people like being around each other, they will work more coherently because they will help each other. Then I walked around, supervising the production process and talking to workers about creativity and how to make work easier for everyone. However, with every production gain came management exploitation wanting more, particularly when they saw climbing numbers. Why not keep them climbing, right through the roof if we can? With production gains, more management types began to show up on the manufacturing floor. Their “we win-you lose” way of command always eroded our production gains and flushed down the drain all the confidence that came with full teamwork. I saw my work distorted by management wrestling with the Steel Workers Union, one of the toughest labor unions ever. That was about the time that Superintendent Landis was standing next to me as we watched the assembly area shift come to a close.

Other line supervisors who would have loved to get off the production floor and off night shifts envied me. At the same time that they congratulated me on my promotion, my internal debate raged on. I wanted to know how to be creative in a positive environment, in win-win combinations of knowing and doing that produced enthusiasm and raised production above our 15 thousand pounds of finished product every shift. I wanted a process with a success profile that dressed everyone’s participation with dignity. I knew we could do more with less.

Two weeks after I walked out of Mr. Landis’ office with my promotion, I gave my termination notice, and two weeks after that, I left the shuddering manufacturing world for good. I told my Union coworkers I was leaving to get a higher education, to which they responded, “Yea, you don’t belong here.” I had tried to be fair and now they were trying to be fair, which on the factory floor meant being honest.

As I walked out, I felt released, a free if unemployed family man. When I left the multi-plant grounds, I took everything I had gained with me—all my hands-on lessons, my production ideas and real human labor accomplishments, all my sweat equity. I left nothing behind of myself. In making life changes, one has to be committed.

I left the industrial sector and immediately enrolled in a Master’s program in Education, making good on my declared reason for leaving the manufacturing corporation. I chose a concentration in Counseling and Guidance so I could help others succeed in a hands-on way. I walked through the San Luis Obispo’s Cal Poly campus carefully, studiously, maybe even gingerly. I quickly realized on entering the academic environment that I needed something other than manufacturing verve. I needed a more disciplined way, something clear and systemic. I wanted to wear the design of the Master’s program like a suit of rational action, like a new suit for the new me. I was a full-time student now.

Right off the top of the program, class lectures introduced me to Learning Theory and different models of the brain. Thorndike’s cat pawing at its environment made sense to my wariness, to my coyote survival sensibilities, but I felt badly for the cat. I looked out through the cat’s eyes at its instrumental choices, at its limited options, and I saw a worker pawing at the levers of a machine for eight hours a day. It seems we pay the price for some learning with a little bit of cruelty. The cat’s choices, however, led me to thinking about how I was going to paw my own environment and its limited options and levers.

The associative model of brain activity caught my attention. It was next in the parade of psychological theories woven into our curriculum. I imagined starbursts of neural electricity merging into image fields like fireworks bursting out in faces, forms, symbols, and stories as they faded away into the light of new ones. This model appealed to me because I knew I tended to think in images and in flashes. I didn’t know I was an example of what Psychology disparaged as a “field-dependent” thinker. Not being burdened with this biased perspective, I searched freely for the educational rules of brain fashions, for the theories of these fabrics, so I could wear the new suit I was earnestly hand-stitching together like a tailor using the needle of education and the thread of learning. When I raised my head from my studies, I looked around at the soft bodies of students milling in and out of classrooms with the hungry eyes of a manufacturing carnivore.

I soon learned in class that we tend to remember what we hear more than what we see, touch, smell, or taste. All brain models agree that auditory systems have a high sensitivity to memory and that they produce higher retention rates of information than other perceptual systems. I plucked this data from brain theories, bought a “hot” tape recorder (I could afford $5, but not $75), and began to tape text excerpts, class notes, study group concepts, and terminology definitions. Trying to remember new material long enough to pass our exams, I played with verbal auditory loops by rerecording the same information in three different ways. I practiced behavioral redundancies like leaning my head in certain ways as a kind of filigree for creating vivid memory runes. I was trying to use my magical thinking to my advantage. I listened to my tapes over and over while driving the 14 miles up Highway 101 to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and then back home to Grover City by the beach and to the prolix murmur of the repetitious sea.

When I found out that repetitive behavior engraved learning in memory, I engaged in a systematic analysis of repetition as a learning form. I wanted to maximize the retention of new information as easily as I could by whatever means. Attempting this concentration of learning effects was important to me since my time for learning was limited by working stoop-labor on weekends. The repetition rule was that after 6 repetitions, information retention rates surged upward over 50 percent and with the next 4 repetitions, retention increased to over 90 percent. Repetition, it seemed to me, was a kind of swallowing behavior that made the material my own by somatizing it. I applied various brain model principles, concepts, and methods to my own learning and repeated everything 7 to 10 times by listening to my taped lecture notes and definitions of concepts and terms and listening to them under different conditions, driving to class, or meditating, or while waiting for class to start or writing them down again on 3" by 5" cards and flipping through them automatically, as long as I got in 7 to 10 repetitions before I had to use the information. Through repetition, I could evoke images and concepts in neural linkages so that one thought, one idea, one piece of datum, led to another and another in pathways through the brain as if I were drawing freely on endless reams of paper housed in my mind. The information became visual when it began to form connections. I was thinking in metaphoric dynamics but didn’t know this yet, perhaps because metaphoric thinking is mostly addressed in literary models in English departments.

When one doesn’t recognize existing boundaries, one can walk unimpeded right through them provided one walks knowingly and doesn't bump into things. The old “bull in a china shop” breakage is a constant danger when crossing boundaries and from this danger comes the feeling of being coyote, that is, twice aware. I was looking for tricks of the trade by looking at the backsides and undersides of boundaries. I studied the institution’s psychology of consciousness model and found that its norms understandably formed a white male psychology, but, clearly, it was a psychology in which my magical thinking didn’t belong. Psychology was rational, and, by its definitions, I was not.

Without boundaries and still in unrecognizable terrain, the creativity of my rasquache ways (working with broken or ruined things) became useful again, this time inside what for me was a twilight institution. Outside of my class assignments in Psychometrics, I was reading Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols as my way of using my non-systematic self-education to analyze the institution charged with giving me my systematic education. I read Castaneda on campus and felt myself running behind educational scenes as if a coyote through desert evenings.

“After five years, you realize you think like a kid and talk like a kid.” Three middle-aged female Master's students in my classes—a handsome, sarcastic blond; a stern brunette with a librarian’s posture; and a fretful myope who wanted to make everyone happy—are talking about the Master’s program before class begins. They are on sabbatical from their elementary- and secondary-school teaching jobs and using their sabbaticals primarily to get some relief by being away. The teachers all agreed that “teaching burn out” was an occupational hazard and that a Master’s degree program served as the justification to get away and regain their “sanity” by “being with adults as an adult.” The social part of the program was the critical part for them, and they wanted to make the academic part as easy as they could. The three teachers decided to form a study group of four to share the program’s work and invited me. I would add cross-cultural views and the flavor of experience outside the “profession” to the all-female group of teachers. I found them all attractive, interesting, and full of smiles.

These teachers taking a sabbatical to earn a Master’s degree in Education taught me the practice of using acronyms for remembering conceptual entities. I saw how they were adept at condensing and packaging information and thought this came from teaching children. Our group meetings also helped me realize that auditory memory was critical to social learning. When I read an essay question on my Psychology exam, I could hear Ann’s voice talking to us about Freudian Theory and sarcastically connecting it to ideas about its relevance.

The one-year Master’s program required students to take a final test, a forced choice and essay-comprehensive exam. I began the three-hour exam by using acronyms to remember information clusters and then switched to auditory memory to visualize them as the audio tape played in my head, picking up letters in proper sequence from acronyms and writing them out. Familiar visual roads unwound, going from images in their context to the language of unfolding concepts in symbolic and linguistic space. I simply walked the roads already marked with auditory signposts pointing this way and that way. I had stumbled on a mnemotechnic for short-term memory, the same condensation and concentration methods of placing vivid images in practical locations used in Mystery Theater and the ars memoria of Political Rhetoric.

I finished the exam in 20 minutes. I saw the other students with their heads down, writing furiously or seriously pondering, while I decided whether it was too soon to leave. I was reticent. Then I got up, dropped my test papers on the instructor’s desk, and walked out while others looked up from their tests with surprise when I opened the classroom door.

I realized I could blink and see information in different ways. I was learning to use conceptual tools and improvisational processes to make the organization of content visible. This was key. How information is organized gives it its meaning. When I left the exam room feeling like a freed man once again, I knew my graduation was assured with a big “A.” I was feeling full and freshly minted, keen as a laughing coyote. Auditory memory had played like a movie theme on a smooth highway, unrolling like the highway between the Grover City beachfront and the campus spreading at the foot of the Cuesta Grade, backdropped by the antediluvian San Luis Obispo hills.

On the drive home from the campus, I began to look ahead as the ocean and shore came into view just outside Pismo Beach. Bright as the day was with the lightness of a real achievement, I felt the nagging cloud occluding my economic future. My total lack of counseling background dogged my employment possibilities and limited what I could think to do in finding a job. Supervising factory workers in how to think about their machines and instructing them in how to learn new ideas didn’t count. My degree began to feel like simply a fig leaf for unemployment.  Like a naked Emperor, I strode deluded into the marketplace.

Arriving home from the last day of my program on that sunny afternoon, the house was quiet, neat and empty, peaceful and open. Everyone was out shopping. It seemed just what I needed, a bit of time to meditate on the finish of the day. I would be home alone for several hours. I swung the front door open and raised all the windows, sitting down in a lounger to feel the ocean breeze and listen to the birds chirping in the plum tree outside the front door. Window curtains swayed in the breeze as if waving a symphony of pacific winds on and on. Dozing off, I was jarred awake by a mail carrier unexpectedly jamming an envelope into the porch mailbox. It was from the University of California at Santa Barbara, Graduate Division. The thick letter in the bulging envelope marked “Special Delivery” and “Confidential” offered me a five-year UC Doctoral Minority Fellowship. It said, “Study whatever you want. The University of California supports and encourages you.”

I was shocked and astounded, electrified. Had my hair been orange, it would have been on fire. I had not applied for the fellowship nor even knew of its existence. The idea of a doctoral education was neither on my economic radar, nor on my list of doable things. Because my financial condition was crippled and because my ramshackle education was not reliable, I had never considered further education a possibility. It had never really crossed my mind. Sitting back in the lounger with the pages of the award letter lying in my lap, I gazed distantly out the front door screen and wept without moving, eyes glowing like diamonds in the soft ambiance. The slanting light falling across the room was transcendent. I gave blessings up to the universe just because the award came out of the unknowable. I was to begin a doctoral program in my 40s with 3 children and a 3rd-rate education, still working in the fields with hoe and shovel on weekends for pocket money. Aside from the magical feeling, its tinkling sound sparkling like pixels that winked for unknown reasons, the harsh reality was that my family could live better as a student family with a fellowship than I could provide as an inexperienced and older counselor. Economics and magic, the numeric encounter and chance, conspired to lead me once again into unexpected environments strange to my imagination. From manufacturing metal objects to doctoral studying in one year seemed like an unbelievable leap. Could I do it?

“Study whatever you want,” the letter said. It opened up many free choices of opportunity so different from what were my usual limited choices of necessity. This was an ironic distinction because it turns out that necessity gives choice its durability. Choosing the Arts, however, would not support my ability to care for my family. I had to be practical with this windfall opportunity. I wanted and needed a profession, what I thought was sure to be greater freedom from choices of necessity. ■

© July 2009 - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

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"AESOP'S FABLES"

The Small Finger of Defiance

In the national quarrel concerning immigration, the shameful backdrop to the political debate, is the actual life of farm laborers. Bob Herbert wrote in today's New York Times Op-Ed section (6/9/2009) that farm workers are deeply underpaid and "gruesomely exploited," working unconsciousably long hours seven days a week without rest, with "little time even to sleep each day...in a brutal" routine. He quotes business and government authorities who defend their practices by saying, "This notion that they need to rest is completely futile. They don't like to rest. They want to work seven days." 

I know that attitude so well. Our exploitative father used to say angrily to us, "A real man doesn't need education. He just needs balls!" in Spanish of course, before sending us out to work in the fields.

The following scene takes place in the small farm laborers' town of Guadalupe, California, during the 1950s. It offers a tiny glimpse of the farm laborers' life. My brother, Tony, and I talk about those days, remembering that abuse rolls downhill from the abusers to the abused at the very bottom.    
    

Firewalker

BOOK MAGIC

My brother doesn't remember the box of books and the Aesop's Fables we salvaged from the attic of the Monte Carlo Café and Hotel, our Guadalupe in-town labor camp. The attic's lone crate of books was like an ancient garden planted with the seeds of creativity and imagination from another culture, from other worlds too strange to be useful or too foreign to share meaningfully with others. This set of books would be shoved here and there and eventually lost in the non-literate, non-linear world of the Monte Carlo backrooms.

I try to jiggle my brother's memory and remind him about the Aesop fable that takes place in a King's castle. The fable begins with a broom leaning against the kitchen wall and three young girl servants in aprons bustling about and busily leaving the kitchen, carrying full platters and returning with empty ones. The broom leans against the wall by the kitchen door as the girls go in and out from the dining hall. They are serving the King and Queen and their guests in the royal dining hall. In all the busyness, the broom slips and falls to the floor and across the door sill. The first girl servant leaving the kitchen simply skips over the broom as she passes through the doorway and continues blithely on her way to serve the King and Queen. The second girl servant comes to the doorway, kicks the broom aside and also continues on her way. The third girl servant stops, picks up the broom and sets it leaning against the wall again, and then continues on her way. Of course, Aesop's lesson is that beauty is as beauty does.

From reading Aesop, I started to see how we skipped over things and shoved them out of the way, and while this made us look ridiculous, I also realized there were many ways to do things for different reasons. The first and second girl, for example, may have had their hands full. I started to think spiritually about things and events and began to look for the redeeming qualities of our men and women engaged in brute labors.

Aesop's Fables were always of high interest to me because I had been forced by stuttering in Spanish to eagerly try to learn English in school. I say I was "forced" because I was dragged by older boys to stutter in front of men and women as the butt of their jokes.  I would be "forced" to say things such as "I want an enchilada" in Spanish since we were originally monolingual Spanish. I remember mostly my innocence when I tried to truly communicate as a person with my revered adults.  At first I stood in front of them like a little academic in love with his audience, but I stuttered so badly that when I said "I want an enchilada," it would come out in Spanish as, "Quiero chile enquearado," which meant I wanted my penis naked. The men and women usually taking a break from camp work would roar with laughter. When I understood I was being made fun of, I further lost my innocence. The adults were now a circus and I was their freak. I began to clam up and refuse to talk in front of groups. My young uncles, in turn, with Tio Chepe in the lead, began to pull my pants down to make me talk. This was a true torment, and I began to hide from adults and spoke less and less except in school with a few other kids my age where I was slowly becoming a beginning reader of English. I was drifting away from Spanish.

At first I didn't notice a strange speaking effect when I started first grade, but I soon found I could speak English without stuttering. Naturally I began to seek English out everywhere, including the rare comic book or the less rare pornographic "Tijuana bible," when we could get one, although I always found Popeye using his nose as a penis on Olive Oil totally ridiculous and unbelievable.  After all, I already knew what sex was, as you will see from my story in the next Monthly Posting.

For us who spoke Spanish at home and at work, success at school was diffidently regarded and little noticed by others since it didn't bring you any rewards in the fields. But I didn't stutter in English and that was important to me. Soon I became more proficient in English than those around me, except for my father (The Old Man) and Uncle Joe (Tio Jose). When Dylan Thomas wrote that he was taunted about his young flair for words by his peers jeering, "Listen to him, he sounds like he swallowed a dictionary," I knew the same had happened to me, except I was also ridiculed for trying to be white by speaking English. A turning point in my love affair with English came when I used the word "indestructible." The bigger boys were trying to blow a tin cup apart with cherry bombs, but the cup resisted. Amazed at the toughness of the cup, they lit a double firecracker under the overturned cup and it shot up 30 feet or so and sailed back down. I rushed with the other boys to see what damage had been done to the cup. Seeing only a tiny rip in its rim, I still said gleefully in English, "There's your indestructible cup." They pushed me aside with their snarling taunts, "Hey man, pinche vendido!" Basically they called me a white asshole. And that was the end of that for the next five years. I began to withdraw from speaking the educated English that I had developed from reading fables and practicing at school, and instead, I indulged in rash language, you know, "fuck you!" and "Chinga tu madre!" like the older boys. Rash and savage, I played the part and became that man. Yet when I looked around at my world in that way, I saw a world that clearly threatened me.

The common brutality and cruelty of our life further made me a weakling. I turned away from the slaughter of animals and away from being a slayer even as I knew it was necessary to know how to slit a bleating animal's throat as it turned its eyes on you, how to disembowel the carcass or kill beautiful chickens by twisting 20 or 30 of their heads off swiftly when their time came to be just meat.

My brother, now 74 and partially paralyzed on his left side from a stroke, explained to me how cruelty and brutality were part of our lives. Describing how our father killed the useless piglets, the inevitable runts of farm life, my brother said, "You know, I loved these animals and it hurt me when The Old Man (our father) would pick up the runt of the litter and kill it by hitting it in the head with a hammer right in front of me. He'd smash the little pig in the head and throw it in the trash, just like that, like it was nothing. It really hurt me, but that was the kind of guy he was.  

And do you remember when we killed all those wild dogs on the Nipomo mesa? I was mad at the dogs because they were sneaking in at night or early in the morning and eating the smallest pigs. It just made me really angry. I couldn't protect them from The Old Man, but I could protect them from the dogs."

I remembered and said, "Well, yeah, our father showed us how to be brutal and kill things. So, in our turn, we killed wild dogs, blasting away at them like they were nothing.  I remember when we shot them, how they gushed bright red blood, trying to howl."

Once again, it was necessary to disconnect thinking from the senses, to think through my eyes while moving my hands, but I decided again that it was better to be a prince than a hunter, better to forgive than to execute judgments. But to make this change, I needed to have balls, or justice, whichever came first. ■

© June 2009 - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

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"A DEFINITION OF BRICOLAGE"

Meeting at the Oasis

BACKGROUND

Responding to a request from a university magazine, Richard and I set to writing a one-page definition of Bricolage. Right from the start, Richard and I hit it off intellectually because we could play together. While I am an "aesthetic Bricoleur" and make visual art, he is an "intellectual Bricoleur" and makes distinctions as if they were the artwork of fine drawing. Working together as if he were playing an electric guitar, and I was shaking out rhythms on snare drums. We played, but we didn't take this lightly. We both believe that the power to make distinctions is the power to create the meaning of realities. In that way, we are Bricoleurs alike: waste not, want not.

Richard is a fine example of the "intellectual Bricoleur." Rather than build straightforwardly toward an objective, he composes his views from all available options. He explores every word and follows their implications in all directions and levels. He works more with probabilities and interactions than with detailed information as he organizes his views. When analyzing any idea or situation, this compositional process gives him multi-level views with which to work.  Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind calls this multi-layered way of thinking "mythopoeic." 

The definition that follows is necessarily brief since it was written for a one-page magazine assignment, but it is still among the best of Bricolage definitions available out there. The shortcoming of most definitions is that they don't make the shift to the dynamism of the mythopoeic mind. The reason for this lack of shift, I believe, is that "thinking like a Bricoleur" remains for them a purely cognitive engagement, once again separating thinking processes from a more encompassing aesthetic consciousness.

We included what we considered to be two generally missing but critical elements serving the purposes of an operational definition. The key concepts here are "the unsubordinated intellect" and "direct dynamism between awareness, understanding and action."

Hat

DEFINITION

Bricolage: The word sounds vaguely familiar. It resembles "collage"—the craft of pasting together various materials not normally associated with one another. Etymologically, it derives from "bricole"—that which breaks via an indirect or unexpected action. What can a word that connotes both pasting together and breaking apart mean?

In France, a Bricoleur was a person comparable to an itinerant "fix-it-man" or a migrant worker wandering the countryside looking for work, whether fixing a gate, repairing a well, or creating new tools. Bricoleurs became known for the inventiveness and cleverness of their solutions to odd jobs.

When anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied the word Bricolage to the intellectual style of la pensee sauvage (often translated as The Savage Mind, but more appropriately interpreted as an "unsubordinated intellect"), he described ways of knowing as sophisticated as—by not subsumed by—science, engineering, or linear logic. He revealed a powerful and elaborate way of knowing that did not subordinate one piece of datum to another. Images, ideas, objects, signs, and symbols each, he found, have undifferentiated power to la pensee sauvage; all are available as the raw materials and tools for working, creating, thinking, and doing. This process of taking whatever is at hand, regardless of its previous use, and make novel, useful, and powerful connections among them he called, "Bricolage."

Bricolage is both a verb and a noun in the French language. As a noun, a Bricolage is the actual construction that resolves something problematic. A Bricolage is the product of engaging in Bricolage improvisation. Used as a creative process, a Bricolage can be a repaired fence, a work of art, a flexible information system, an open-ended search technology, a literary circle or a group process. For some it is a skill that can be learned; for others it evolves from everyday experience.

As a verb, bricolage refers to the flow of improvisational folk activity. "To Bricolage" means to be resourceful in making do with whatever is at hand. It also refers to making complete constructions from incomplete resources, to fashion a solution to a problem from odds and ends. Thirdly, "to Bricolage" means to discover new, consistently novel solutions.

For the informed Bricoleur, Bricolage is a powerful tool for refining perception, developing intuition, and providing direct dynamism among awareness, understanding and action. ■

© Jose Cedillos and Richard Westheimer, The Union Institute Network,
Vol. 17, No. 1, March 2001, edited April 2009

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"HANDS"

Rock Flower

My face at knee level, swinging each arm freely in different rhythms, my right hand chopping with a short-handled hoe, my left hand working loosely and unattended to, swaying hunched over down the row by crossing my legs sideways, I work in a trance for as long as the row continues… Stooped over, our bodies bent in pain, we didn't know this produced the strange quietness of a mind in motion floating just above our lowered heads.

So close were our lowered heads, we felt we had our hearts pressed to the ground and that we could hear the earth speaking to us, its landless children. We moved crabwise, as the plantlings we pinched and plucked with a trailing almost insensate left-hand, let go of the earth in whispers. Marveling at the mystery of the trailing left hand, plucking with precision yet without guidance, I moved chopping down the rows, simultaneously noticing out of the corner of my eye, the plantlings thus stripped away. Each planting slipping from the earth, reminded us thousands of times over that the unnecessary are cast aside, and although each plantling honored the earth for its life, they now lay expiring prematurely at its breast.

When the mind broke up into a stream of simple motions, each of us also was slipping away into earth, water, air, the sun, leaving only the flame of the working body passing beyond pain and the harness of its thoughts.

How did the body do what it did? How did the left hand, swinging outside my awareness, do what it did so well?  How did the camp women, led by my mother, clustered around wood-burning, cast-iron stoves in the middle of the labor camp yard, hand-rolling flour tortillas for crews of fieldworkers –how did they reach across the flames and flick tortillas over at a magical pace without burning their hands?

What was the mystery of the hands? Why didn't anybody really know? I needed to know.
Also using just our hands we scavenged in the gentle surf of the Pacific Ocean. Having nothing else to eat, I learned there how to eat hand to mouth from what was easy to get. But I really learned to use loose ways of picking among discards and ruined things by trudging in local garbage dumps looking for any kind of salvage. We looked at everything in case it was of some possible value.

From the eager ages of six to twelve, I gleaned with my extended family in "dompes" dotting outskirts of towns like open sores. These dumps were often huge open pits; others were just ravines whose sides we scrambled down to search in the open and unregulated heaps of commercial, agricultural and civic waste.

Wandering into these dumps we slipped into a dream of watchfulness, slipping past shattered concrete slabs tangled with rusting equipment frames, gutted automobile carcasses, all strewn with thick piles of loose town, ranch and farm garbage. We skirted dead dogs bursting with maggots and other swollen beasts in various stages of gelatinous rotting.

Harvesting openly with a mind empty of prejudgments was called Rasquache (working with ruined things). We looked at everything as we moved through and around the crushed ecologies. It was our natural way, easier and more productive, to glean and gather and to try to make anything count for something. It was our economic form. Talk about lean and mean. A bunch of field-working mestizos living in the margins of an industrial culture, our eyes cooled by Indian winds, -How could we do otherwise?

Waiting at the edge of a dumpsite, the child begins with a trick. The first trick was to uncouple the senses from cognition, or else you couldn't search. We shifted from knowing what we didn't like to open sensing for everything, anything, in which, we were sure, the magic of discovery was bound to happen.

The shift from thinking about what to do to looking without prejudice at everything began with its own visual trick. Taking a mental stance of open-mindedness, we looked at the garbage dumps with the eyes of total acceptance. We saw a place filled with discoveries, an inverted magic mountain, and our vision transformed the undulating trash into a glimmering field of work.

This was the same trick of the body we used as field workers when we would silently stand in front of a 100 acre field of lettuce rows, take a mental picture of the scope of the acreage, stoop and begin with the first plant. A field of work was a field of promise.

We searched our rural dumps like entrepreneurs, each of us going our own way, poking and flipping and searching for and finally finding tiny underworlds salted with real treasure.

Discovery and the ways of least resistance worked together, like the sky and the stars, to create a larger movement, a movement that wove them together into the unconditional acceptance of tracking the difficult, sometimes hidden in the obvious, sometimes hidden in the disgusting and revolting, but to always keep looking, moving, trekking from slope to ledge, incessantly expecting to kick up the discovery of the rare find, spotting it in a far-off glint or finding it underfoot. For an instant, our beguiling Mayan heritage flickered in the midst of ruin, igniting pixels in the gases of our entropic universe like daytime fireflies.

So prepared, we began the second trick by stepping from hard ground to uneven trash as the mind tried to turn the body away from the smell. This next trick, always, was moving, first moving into and then becoming an unbridled path of discovery. This was easy enough, since trash dumps are trackless and directionless -only the next step matters. We learned that by being on the move, everything opens onto the magic of discovery.

My younger cousin, Marvin, was called Marvelous Marvin because from the age of 5 or 6 he rarely left the "dompes" without some swell find.  Reaching under the collapsed skull of a refrigerator he slipped out a store-packaged set of barbeque utensils; he plucked a complete set of playing cards, still wrapped in their poker parlor box, out of a caked mountainside of crushed chemical sacks. 

By the time he was 9 he never missed.  Marvin would disappear down a slope and pop up over another, waving objects against our ragged horizons, against the screaming seagulls swirling above his head. The rest of us would marvel at our empty hands and ask each other with excitement, "How does he do that?"  "Como chingaos…"

I noticed how the younger Marvin sped across the garbage pixels, how he lifted the edge of something while looking up field, sensing the air on his arm from the cavity beneath the object to power his vision, and he was off.  No regrets, no losses, no mistakes, no final judgments, up and down and over fragmented ecologies that yielded their secrets, their hidden treasures, only to the instincts of free, improvisational movement. 

Marvin was always moving, just like in our field work we were always moving,  moving down double-seeded rows, picking, plucking, cutting, moving ahead, stooping, walking, shuffling on our knees, snapping, clipping and chopping, looking side to side, talk rising and falling over one's head, the injured and the well...moving, looking, seeing, picking...

At age 17, now a high school kickout, I went one last time with Marvin behind Guadalupe just to stand and look out over a familiar dumpsite now converted to a partially regulated landfill. Dressed spotlessly in white, I watched the seagulls swirling through the landfill's stench. A lurid thought immediately rose up –the image of our feral glee scavenging among culture's trash. The vision of us gleaning and laughing in garbage resonated as my true rasquache self, even dressed as I was.

This rasquache sense of self was preparation for learning how to be in a persistent and trackless state of discovery, for learning later that streams of creativity secretly run through the improvisational motion of the hands. This was Bricolage. Acceptance, movement, mindlessness, all streams, all part of a path leading… where? ■

© March 11, 2009 - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

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"IT COMES DOWN TO THIS"

Braque's Bird

Margaret dusted her large drafting table with the outsized owl feather awarded to her for "best of the show" in a University Town-and-Gown art exhibit. Her Japanese-inspired drawings are meticulously laid out on her large engineer's drafting table taking up one end of her university studio. The drawings are like dragonflies, evanescent, fine lined, veined with excruciating detail, ready to take flight or to drone quietly for ages. We are talking privately in her sparse graduate-student studio provided for MFA students. She is Japanese-American, built slight, a slender five feet. Her hooded Asian eyes are long lashed and only rarely look directly at me, or anyone. She seems coy and a little bit aloof. Her skin has a sweet sheen the color of Saki.

We continue talking softly in her graduate studio. She is a prized MFA standout, and I am an undergraduate studio art major. She talks of her admiration for Gris and his drawings as the art of omission. She is serious and talks about what the artist leaves out as more telling, more powerful, than what the artist leaves in. Artists work with the invisible, with disappearance, with evanescence she tells me. She shows me how putting dots inside fine pencil lines adds wave energy to the tensions within obvious forms and profiles of shapes. Physics and holograms are of huge interest to me, and I study her work as a simultaneous presentation of waveforms and off/on light packets carrying dots and dashes. I lean over inches away from her drawings and linger, breathing in the fragrance of her scented hands still rising from the fragile paper.

My close-up survey of Margaret's modern Japanese transparencies, how she bent over to superimpose her heritage on fine drawing papers, how her sweep with the magical brush of the owl feather sent her immaculata into the air—all this was my first look at postmodern minimalism.

She sat on her working stool with an elbow on her drawing table. I sat in a folding metal chair, looking slightly up at her. She studied me and then slowly began to recognize me as a serious student even if a lowly undergraduate who practiced art by gathering trash and broken things. Our eyes connected. We looked like artists to each other, and we liked who we saw. Over even white teeth, her shy smile emerged a shade longer as our talking became more personal, friendlier, more honest, braver.

Slightly widening her eyes, she looked directly into mine. I thought her dark eyes went on forever.

"They don't know what they're doing," she said wryly. She had dismissed the entire bunch of MFA students and, by implication the faculty, as simply milling around, trying this and trying that without results worth the time or the name.

She sat at the drawing table, perched on the edge of her stool, her booted feet on the floor, looking like an Asian angel who had alighted for just a bit. With a frown in pursuit, her eyes turned aside again. She was confessing how she felt about the other MFA students. She felt star-crossed by this confession. This wasn't like her and she felt humbled. I, in turn, felt honored she would talk with me so openly, both privately between persons and with her gentle encouragement to "be yourself," saying this to an older undergraduate who talked about spraying paint on whatever he could find, plastic, metal, glass, cardboard, even organic matter.

An older, bearded Chicano, I was a crude agricultural fieldworker admitted to the university. I puzzled over Tapiez and concocted out-of-favor Junk Art from trash. She was like an earth angel, or an exotic bird, or a plumed serpent, or all three. A quiet loner, alluring as she was, she didn't like to have others hanging around her, yet we began to meet on campus regularly, sometimes for coffee, but mostly to talk about art and smile at how our different styles could engage in aesthetic intercourse, all very platonic. Right off, we liked being suggestive. I talked about the sexual, she talked about the erotic. I was raw, she was an aesthete. I was burly and she was serene. She was single, and I was married with two children. It was about this time that a studio art professor came up to my easel in class and putting his hands on his hips brusquely said, "I have a title for that one, 'Braque Being Raped by Kandinsky.'"

We often walked across campus, strolling from the cluster of student art studios in the evenings to the smallish Art Library to pore over arcane work, looking for its spiritual aesthetic, for its art as transcultural consciousness. She was on her path, and I was on mine, and they crossed here on the university campus. We smiled a lot and leaned our heads toward each other. I learned about the Tea Ceremony from her as she enticed me with intellectual pleasure revealing the power of her cultural aesthetic. I learned up close, head to head, the fine, feathery touch of a mind elegant in its self-regard. I took Margaret's quietly erotic touch to be very Asian. How could I not hear music? An Asian Kachina doll in high-heel boots who created delicate drawings by magically brushing them with her large owl feather—she was sweet and sexy with straight hair so black my eyes felt enchanted by it.

One evening, she took me to the Arts library yet again to look at her cultural foundations through Japanese art, this time with a sly smile so personal and private she didn't share it with me. I felt I was being taken in tow by a fairy guide made deliciously small and beautifully proportioned. Befriended by what looked, felt, sounded and smelled like a true Japanese American artist, I sat next to her at a thick table in the Art Library's locked Special Archives, thigh touching thigh, turning page after page reviewing artwork we had already seen.

Getting up and walking to a set of bookcases across from us, Margaret pulled several poster-sized books from the shelves. She knew, without saying a word, where all the best pornography was located in the archives. We began to pore over steamy, coital Imperial Japanese sexuality and warrior athleticism. The men were savage and the women transcendent, their kimonos barely pulled or pushed aside for intercourse. Leaning closer, head to head, watching outrageous male domination scenes, hearing her odd chuckle, feeling her Asian heat, smelling its honeyed scent rising like Saki wine from her hands, her arms, her private parts, I suddenly remembered Stephanie from my first studio painting class in Oregon. I had seen how Stephanie's careless love affair with our studio professor drained her work of artistic purpose, of personal integrity, of impeccability of personality, and bled her art of light, of color, of brushstroke and texture and left the pallid, the wan, the cold spirit embracing only itself. Watching Stephanie slide down a slippery slope and having a flash or two of sexual thoughts about her, I realized again and then again that clean and sober also meant monogamous in mind and spirit. I had learned the hard way many times that either one had integrity or one did not. "Clean" meant impeccability in all things big and small. "Clean" meant you were the same person whatever you were doing and whether anyone was watching. The I Ching Book of Changes counsels that a person should not dally with harmless vices and expect to remain clean. I was on a path of self-redemption.

I was also deep in tumescent thought.

I was, of course, enveloped and aroused by Margaret's aura and slim body. I already knew that an aroused sexuality will willingly, perhaps not until the last second, but all the same, sacrifice continuity of self for the desires of the moment. After all, what is a quick trip down an alleyway, so to speak? Or stolen glances at cleavage or at the smoothness of thighs or the shape of a calf? I was determined to be who I had set out to be, a person of integrity, who worked with the madness of nothingness—or else how could I continue on my path? These commitments were all I had. I cleared my mind of Margaret's sensuality and forgot the images of thighs sure to be tender when opened.

We turned page after page of increasingly pornographic scenes until translucent concubines were depicted completely disrobed with hairpins undone and black pubic hair penetrated by enormous Samurai penises. The pornography became more outrageous, the penises larger, the women more askew. I needed to be a person of integrity, but I could have licked Margaret right then and there, so steamy was this coital empire we sat in as historical witnesses.

Far off, we heard the campus carillon sonorously bong the closing hour for the library. It was nine o'clock. We closed the stack of books and put them back on the shelves. The library shuttered its evening doors as we walked away under moonlight. We strolled away, down darkened sidewalks, stopping several times under lampposts to talk softly in pools of illumination. Sensuality hissed its night shapes as we walked on closely. She never looked more mysteriously erotic. Rubbed alive by our trip through visual carnality, sex heated our talk of painting. I knew she had brought us to this point. I knew that she was waiting for me. Tasting like sadness, a warm blue stained my tongue and a sense of cool orange tingled on my teeth. I made my choice.

She was silent, pensive, flashing a smile at me, her hair flipping slightly, as I poured out my thoughts about the elemental arts, about the aesthetics of the raw, of Soutine, of Tapiez, of my desire to throw away my brushes and paint directly with sticks, to be real, even if it meant being crude and maligned instead of artistic and praised. I wanted sex to be liberating not a nest of fishhooks. I was on the side of the lowly I said to her. We stopped under a lamppost light and looked at each other for a moment, my eyes looking down into her eyes as I turned my flame down with the fingers of abstract talk.

"I believe, Margaret, that without integrity you only fall apart and then so does your work, and your art goes down the toilet. I think integrity is what let's you survive so that you can paint forever and stay on your path." I was thinking of my commitment to monogamy and wishing my erection would fade. We never know who we really are except by what we do, no matter what's in your heart, I thought. Knowing who I was as a person told me who I could be as an artist, not great perhaps, but real, true, alive even if lying in a ditch. I believed that without integrity, I would fall aside again, that I would follow Maestro Mique (Guadalupe's resident artist and drunk) straight to a ditch, yet I had allowed her to feel close and had used the lure of sexual consummation to spend time with her, to watch her slender neck turn when she worked while I fantasized holding her face in my hands, all to buy her time. I was trying to learn outside the classroom, away from art professors who themselves were sworn captives in a zoo by another name.

When I didn't reach out to her, when I didn't say, "follow me," her eyes suddenly flashed fire and she quickly turned back toward the Arts Library. She walked away tightly, her ass neat in her jeans, her straight black hair shimmering, her high-heeled boots clicking on the moonlit sidewalk, a sexy fury disappearing into the night in full sheen under moonlight.

I returned to my work, better able to use the Arts Library, and kept working and thinking, "There are no mistakes." In the end, my sharing of vibrational fields with Margaret came down to this haunting quote from the I Ching: "The secret of the universe is continuity in change." What caught my attention at the time was simpler, more direct. I had succeeded in clearing my mind when looking at Margaret, whether we were eye to eye or as I was watching her at her work. Off and on, I could clear my mind and begin to feel the flow of thought, what I began to call the Bricolage Stream. Every time I cleared my mind, I felt I was dipping into that stream. I began to practice clearing my mind by just walking around and being as unimportant as I could be. I began to talk less.

Margaret's well-received MFA graduation thesis show was elegant, delicate, erotic, and mysteriously quiet, just like the Saki taste of her in my mouth.

I continued to paint on anything, even plastic tubing, and graduated a year after Margaret's thesis show as undistinguished as she was distinguished. ■

© December 28, 2008 - Jose Cedillos. All rights reserved.

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"YOU'RE SUCH A DREAMER"
Myocardial Infarction, Creativity, and Thou