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n and the sun that set that day emerges from the little squares of color this was an image once seen by an artist who sat upon that bank at least 120 years ago on that day he looked up and beheld that cloud he flicked grey and mauve and hints of green onto his canvas to hold it down as it moved away he recreated that day s sun setting that tree which had leaved out slowly over weeks in a spring just past looked just as he recreated it the boat on the lake was perhaps owned by an old man lost in his own thoughts who had set sail from a small village nearby and passed in front of the artist s vision and off again into history s oblivion it is so slow this unveiling of a world past it is time travel intimacy with the dead did he rise that morning in his garret the artist brush his beard and dress in his white shirt and black pants and gather his art supplies and think to himself today i will record in these inks made of lapis lazuli and the stains of flowers all the echoes of colors in the world i see around me i will put them onto a canvas of woven flax and linen made and sold by peasants who live nearby who sold it to me in the market last week if my work pleases it will find its way one day to a museum here hundreds of people will walk by year after year they will mark this day that i will soon record they will remember it and find beauty in it they will photograph my work and put it in books and when i am gone from memory or even fame my colors will find life again under the thumbs of old women activating electrons on devices i cannot imagine they will see again this tree i will sit under they will watch again the boat from the village pass serenely across the lake and the sun of this afternoon this one singular afternoon will take them over an hour to recreate and they will feel again the warmth of its colors in their hearts this life we look out upon is in the nature of a dream the buddhist lamas told me how many dreams are woven into this single image my own the artist s the old boatman dead a century the thoughts of the man in the carriage the prisoners of war 200 years in the ground when the image was painted who built the bridge brick by dun yellow brick the makers of digital devices ensconced in their elegant apartments in silicon valley admiring their bank accounts looking for new image resource banks we are all connected are we not the colored dots of each day of our lives fill in one by one and the world is made from them and named and remembered and its echoes go on ahead of us to lives unknown posted by ocean lady at 12 54 am 1 comment email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest saturday june 15 2019 lessons in black lessons in black november 28 1969 the corner of 42nd ave and central in los angeles was a familiar place to me a place i had made my way to weekly for three years in a long city crossing series of bus rides from ucla to the heart of what then was called the ghetto on that block stood operation bootstrap a unique self help community center and vocational school started by two former civil rights workers i had begun volunteering after the watts riots in 1965 on this night however the school was closed and i arrived driving a dilapidated chevy station wagon at the end of a caravan of communist party members that had been summoned by the black panther party i was 21 still a student at ucla still a roamer of beaches and hills and not a communist and barefoot for some reason i cannot now recall but it allows me to remember now the feeling of the warm city sidewalk under my feet as we walked toward the open door nervous young black panthers with rifles and berets manning both sides of it they gestured up to the roofs of the buildings on the opposite side of the street and with a start we took in the rifles extending all along the central avenue roofline held by men lying on their stomachs the los angeles police department was massed in force inside we were shown the entrance to an upper room where seven or eight young mothers with infants in arms had been attending a class in new baby care when the confrontation began we had been summoned to escort them home and one by one we did i dropped off the woman and child i was assigned and drove home without incident i did not then take in the real peril all of us were in a peril the black panthers were to face in earnest two weeks later i found myself in the company of communists because i had chosen that night of all nights to find out for myself what communism was direct from a comrade s mouth somehow i had located their offices in la and driven there in my old chevy from the north hollywood apartment i shared with my father for two hours an eager young man not much older than me had done his best to explain the theories and imaginings of the communist movement a cell leader working to find converts in local factories by day he was eager to tackle a college student studying history he was filled with idealism and i had been primed oddly by the far right of the republican party to want to hear him some time during the 1950 s mccarthy hearings not so long after the birth of television these men those most terrified by the threats posed by the rise of communist ideology after wwii held a series of televised giant educational events in a football arena filled with people in which they tried to explain to americans in detail their opinions of the false promises and dangers of this movement it was the first time my child s brain had ever tried to follow abstract thought and ironically all i took away from watching was that communists wanted to help poor people that sounded nice later as a fifth grader i even undertook to teach myself russian studying in secret i managed to memorize the alphabet and finally say shto eto eto karandash what is it it s a pencil before i lost interest later as a college student my curiosity was renewed when the great leap forward in china was being promoted on college campuses all over the nation as a glorious thing said to be liberating millions from feudal suffering mao s little red book was passed out for free on college political tables leading to the ucla cafeteria i read of the dramatic idealism of the fighters in red star over china and was moved by their passion to make this world fairer listening to the earnest young man however i grew more and more troubled by the future he painted but when is it finished i interrupted him when do we stop being revolutionaries and begin being free people again free to do other things like art never he blurted the revolution must constantly be renewed but what mechanisms are there to control the leadership if it becomes corrupt that could never happen all power will belong to the people all poor people are not saints i pointed out how will the communist system prevent the rise of a corrupt strong man and so we went on until we could go no more and i became and have remained ever after dismayed by this unique human experiment despite its admirable first goals to rid the world of very real injustice indeed even then my doubts were proving valid as events of the sixties and the nationwide purges under stalin and mao unfolded so i thanked him ticked communism off my list of interests and was about to leave when the call came the black panther party needs volunteers someone shouted across the room white ones he went on to explain they needed young people they thought the police would hesitate to shoot because their la headquarters were surrounded what made me turn back at the door and go with the communists that is easy to answer i considered the black panther party though i did not know them well as my neighbors in the segregated world of the sixties i know that too needs explanation so let me go back four years from that night in august of 1965 when i was seventeen years old newly graduated from santa monica high school i was living in malibu with my mother her second husband charlie farrell and my then seven year old brother chris malibu was not yet the series of gated communities of celebrities and the hyper rich that it was to become but it was rich enough charlie was a well paid engineer at hughes aircraft and we counted several actors as our neighbors the days were mild and clear the sea clean and blue the beaches were much wider than they are now and not crowded we lived squarely within the california dream what a puzzlement then one day to see smoke rising from the heart of los angeles on our far horizon what s that i remember asking there is a riot in watts i was told i frowned this was a place name i had never heard before the negroes are burning their ghetto the fires and the riots went on for six days and i had more questions what are negroes doing in la i remember asking what is a ghetto why are they burning it i had barely glimpsed people of other races in my cloistered world looking back in my high school year book i now see dark faces but they led separate lives in the early 60 s and for me their presence had never really registered put to the question i would have said that negroes or colored people as descendents of african slaves were then named all lived in the south i did not know it yet but i suffered from a learned myopia that was nearly universal among northern whites of my generation even in liberal families the world i grew up in was saturated in the attitudes of the jim crow era in school my us history textbook informed me that slavery had been a good experience for most africans providing them not only with civilization and religious instruction but free food and rent not to mention a steady job i do remember wondering if that could really be true hadn t i also heard that slaves often tried to run away but in fact i and most of my peers were almost comically out of touch with the history and realities of race in america as the civil rights era dawned i did not know people of color were routinely excluded from the hotels we stayed at even in california nor that most of the restaurants we patronized did the same as well as the companies hiring for the jobs which supported our middle class lives i was shocked to discover a couple of years later that even the purchase agreement of our malibu house stated that the property could not be sold to coloreds my mother had always declared that negroes were equal that we should never ever discriminate she did this so vocally and so predictably whenever someone colored came into view even in their presence that i always became acutely uncomfortable as if i were being told not to look at or question a person with some terrible disability i can only imagine how keenly the person she was talking about must have wanted to get out of her range and yet with my step father she signed that lease it was required by the real estate office and they really wanted the house how could it really hurt anyone she never noticed when at five i picked up and repeated the childhood rhyme circulating around me when we played hide and seek catch a nigger by his toe if he hollers let him go it was how she had learned the song it was how it had always been sung there was no malice in it but no awareness either just as we played cowboys and indians and always shot down the indians we were walking blind in a moral minefield and never noticed any of it i had heard nothing of the racism and police brutality african americans regularly suffered nor the family ordeals generated by being last hired first fired interracial marriage was a felony in most states interracial dating created apocalyptic levels of shock in every person who walked by of either race it was almost unheard of what i thought i knew about the lives of african americans came from glimpses of white actors in black face on vaudeville stages from the aw shucks jiving of the characters on tv s amos and andy or the yassuhs and yassims muttered by actors posing as self abasing slaves who opened the mansion door for their white masters in movies about the old south these were always shown as broken clowns of human beings demonstrating in every gesture what slavish means in fact these grotesque screen portrayals fit well with the propagandized history i was receiving in elementary school those who think there has been no progress in america might do well to dig up some of these old films gone with the wind saturated with racist myopia as it is looks positively enlightened by contrast movies about africa were worse and they were an endlessly popular genre for years my child s image of africa was lines of gibbering simpletons wearing clothes like diapers with boxes on their heads following behind handsome resourceful white men in neatly ironed khaki at the first sign of danger these diaper men would throw down the boxes and flee in terror gibbering in a higher register when the movie zulu was made in 1964 of the south african battle of rorke s drift in which a trained regiment of highly coordinated zulu warriors attacks a british military station it was a revelation in high school and even in college the history of africa was presented almost exclusively as the history of white colonization we have indeed come a long way however far there remains to go i and most of the rest of white america were at the beginning of that journey in 1965 but i was keen to start when watts went up in flames i asked my father if he would drive me there so i could see for myself he drove me through quickly once the streets had opened again doors locked and windows up and i remember only flashes of what seemed then a foreign country traffic moved steadily but broken windows still lined the streets i did not notice the residential areas behind the grim boulevards thousands of row houses many as neat as a pin with well kept gardens or see the sunday parade of elegant older ladies in large flowery hats on their way to church that i later became aware of so much of watts in those days was populated by a generation of law abiding country people who had escaped the old south they carried with them values of hard work and family loyalty and hope but those hopes were being dashed as they fought to make a living or realize any kind of personal dream in still racist california and they were losing their children to the violence and despair of race based gangs the slauson street gang the crips the bloods they were all started in those years several months after the start of my student life at ucla a small notice caught my attention on a library bulletin board operation bootstrap a black self help organization in south central los angeles was seeking volunteers my curiosity about the riots still strong i decided to go it was a long journey from perky westwood to watts on a city bus in those days i needed three buses to get there if memory serves the streets grew ever more functional and drab as each bus drove farther south hundreds of blocks of factories or small poor businesses empty littered vacant lots...