What's Left?

[Lightning Rod]

I just had a conversation with my old friend Jim Franklin. He is an artist whose paintings hang all over the world. You can see some of his paintings here:

http://yb3d.com/jimfranklin.html

Talking to him made me think of some of our adventures together. Here is an abstract account of one.



What's Left?

The first time I ever heard Charlie Parker play Ornithology my life was transformed. Play it that fast? I could barely listen to it that fast. And the way he played right across the changes like a Bird. I didn't sleep for two days. Parker said, "First learn your instrument; then learn music; then forget all of that shit and play."

This is a restatement in bop idiom of a principle of creativity that is well known. It has to do with a period of intense concentration and discipline followed by a release and abandonment of concentration.

The mathematician who spends days searching for a root to his theory, trying to solve that problem and one morning he takes a walk in his garden and he's listening to the birds and smelling the flowers and suddenly it hits him--his solution--while he seems to be not thinking about it. Has to do with letting the mind go when it has your somatic intellegence supporting it. When your fingers know what to do they can follow the mind, but the imagination can also follow the hand.

Things that you know with your right hand are different from the things you know with your left.

Susan, my ex, used to get in a strange mood and write with her left hand. When she did this she wrote in mirror writing. I would always hesitate when I found one of these letters from the other side. I would dread it before I held it to the mirror because it was usually something crazy and left-handed about me. I thought about attempting the practice just to see what I would write--who knows maybe I'd be sane on that side.

From what I've observed the left side is more subconscious and mysterious. The word sinister derives from the Latin for left. To 'go left' means to take a plunge into the realm of non-reason. The bass line, that most insinuating and domineering part of music, on the keyboard is played with the left hand. In the guitar world it's the hand that frets.

Jim Franklin was a lefty. So was Doc Pal. They were both artists, Doctor Pal was a sculptor of human flesh--one of the pioneers of the mammeoplasty operation; Jim was a painter. You couldn't go to a Mexican restaurant in Dallas in the late 70's or early 80's without seeing some of Jim's vegetables airbrushed on the walls. He was particularly fond of peppers, eggplant and tomatoes because they were smooth and shiny and disappeared at the edges.I don't know that you could call Jim a great artist but his works were decorative and just off-center enough to make for good conversation(as was the artist himself) so poeple wanted them.

Jim was a worse junky than me. But he could eat in any Mexican food joint in town. Doc Pal loved Jim's work. He had also become aware of Jim's penchant for the opiate. On this basis a system of barter was established.

The Doc kept office hours from about 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. I never figured this out nor did I ever see another patient in the office. I know that he had a pharmacy in his office and periodically his kickboxer sons would go through one of the walls with much fanfare and destruction and would burgle the pharmacy. I think this was a way the old doc had of resolving his bookkeeping with the FDA.

I can think of many times about 11:00 of an evening if nothing else came our way Jim and I would look at each other and I would begin to stretch a canvas. It usually took me longer to stretch the canvas than it took Jim to do a painting on it. He worked very fast (especially when encouraged by drug-lust) but also had his stock vocabulary of subject matter which he was very adept at rendering.

With the painting still wet we would head for the doc's office where we would always enter through the back door. Here the Doctor would examine the painting and some subtle and silent bargain would be struck and he would take the work to be installed in a room that was stacked with Jim's pieces. Then he would retire to the pharmacy and return with two syringes full of morphine and spirine(an enhancer) and give one to each of us.

We would go into his office where he liked to watch us shoot up and then enjoyed talking about subjects picaresque while perusing his before and after books. After a rosy hour or so we would be sent off with a buffet of pills. It was one of those sick relationships you could learn to love. Very left handed