vocavitque Deus mihi domum ad caelum
I
In a September draped with the still stifling heats of August I slowly receded into sleep, my mind rested as was my head against the window of a rental car while, to my left, my father concentrated—his mind seemed many miles away from mine—on the highway before us, a wide and curved strip—visible from the airplanes that soared many miles up above—which lead us out of the city of Los Angeles, a city of twelve million and five hundred thousand, located in a basin between the Pacific ocean and the Santa Monica mountains which its indigenous Tongva people called Yaanga, Place of the Poison Oak, and founded, almost two-hundred and fifty years ago now, by a group of forty-four Spanish colonizers as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles, The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels. (The Spanish colonizers were first greeted by the Tongva peoples at what they called the Baya de los Fumos, the Bay of Smokes, in 1542. Two hundred years later, the Spaniards’ catholic missionaries would subject them to a long period of enslavement, pestilence, and compulsory assimilation to the catholic faith—which praises the merciful María, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven—crushing any and all rebellions and leaving the Tongva a landless and scattered people.) On that humid day, beneath gray-blue and cloud-ridden skies through which pierced a sun of gold —as an I.V. needle pierces through a veneer of pale, sickened skin to the blue vein of red blood below—I could not help but feel, as we drove unimpeded by any traffic and the A.C. vents chilled the vehicle’s interior, as my eyelids lowered themselves over the iris and its pupil, and as I listened, through headphones, to a record by Muslimgauze, a composer of electronic music from the Mancunian suburbs, known as a loner and a shut-in, who dedicated his life to an enraged advocacy for Palestinian resistance against the state of Israel, with songs named Every Grain of Palestinian Sand and 8am, Tel Aviv, Islamic Jihad—though he never stepped foot in the Middle East—and whose music, then lulling my mind into a heaving and sighing sphere of dreams as the wheels under me churned over hot asphalt, is filled with the lisps and flutters of far-off voices, speaking in Arabic, Farsi, or Darija, and harsh metallic noises appearing in sudden stabs through windswept layers of ambient drones before receding promptly into silence—the fugitive nature of such sounds and voices being held down by percussive rhythms, heavy and deep, of a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty beats per minute (twice the pace of a resting heart)—on that day, highway-borne beneath the majesty of gray-blue skies and drifting into sleep within a music that spoke of distant war and revolution, I could not help but feel that I was far above or below both the earth and its human history, that neither time future nor time past had any real existence, and that I was alone and the car was moving itself, with no need of engine or fuel, through a flat, open space which extended from the room in which I was born, painted white, to the room in which I would die, painted black, and, indeed, extended far beyond those rooms, suggesting that I would continue to die for much longer than I would be alive.—Muslimgauze’s birth name was Bryn Jones. His body expired in the January of 1999 at the age of thirty-seven, killed by a pneumonia contracted after fourteen sedated days spent in a hospital bed, wherein doctors failed to suppress the rare fungal infection poisoning Jones’ blood. Critic Ian Penman wrote, referencing the inconceivably deep sadness present in his music, that it was almost as if the terrible dispossessed ‘birthright’ of the Palestinians corresponded, secretly, to some personal scar or shadow in Jones’ own life.
In Duarte, to which we were driving, stowed away within a small and now-defunct library, kept locked and unlit by the City of Hope Hospital complex to which it now belongs (Bryn Jones, incidentally, exhausted his last days in Hope Hospital, Manchester), but was, at the time of its painting, the library of a tuberculosis sanatorium, is Physical Growth of Man, a mural surrounding the sides and top of the rather small main entrance doors and spanning out above them to either side in the shape of the letter T, painted for the sanatorium in 1936 by Reuben Kadish—who, a few years later, would be recruited by the army during the Second World War to record images of death, famine, and villages razed to the ground by Japanese bombing campaigns in British India and Burma, and would return jobless, forced to paint impressions of European surrealist painters for twenty-five cents apiece—in collaboration with his life-long friend Phillip Goldstein, whose parents escaped to Montreal—where they gave birth to the painter in 1913—from jewish pogroms in Odessa, then a part of the Russian Empire, before moving to Los Angeles in 1919, and who, later in the same year in which the mural was painted, migrated eastwards across the country, from Los Angeles to Manhattan, and changed his surname to Guston. Goldstein, or Guston, whose favourite painter was Piero della Francesca (Francesca, it is well known, painted the Polyptych of Saint Augustine, the central panel of which has been lost and the remaining four, depicting various saints, have been scattered across the world, with Saint Michael in London, Saint Augustine in Lisbon, Saint John the Evangelist in New York, and Saint Nicholas of Tolentino in Milan), who despised the art world and felt constantly oppressed and misunderstood by its media, and who, as a child of nine or ten years of age, opened the door of his family’s shed to find a corpse hung by its neck from the rafters, the evidence of his father’s suicide—this Goldstein, or Guston, who himself died of a heart attack more than four decades ago, at the age of sixty-six, is pictured here on the right, with Kadish to his left, in front of the mural which they together had painted, staring straight through the camera’s lens, towards the viewer of the photograph, with an apparent contempt for whoever might be meeting his severe, yet vacant, eyes with theirs—for decades and centuries into the future—a contempt numbed only by what seems to me an incommunicable, and thus quiet, suffering, which pushes him to a distance from the camera much further than what is measurable by foot, yard, or metre. The figures of the mural, painted in a style which unmoors the divine immovability of the Renaissance upon the disfigured, windy seas of Surrealism, depicting birth, youth, middle age, and death, as Guston put it, loom behind the two silent men, with birth—a nude woman holding up her baby within what seems to be a large seashell—standing next to Kadish, and death—a man hung upside down, with veils tied around his feet, his groin, his hands, and his face—taking its place next to Guston. These figures are so vivid, so full of life, that even in a photograph they are pregnant with emotive force; the painters themselves, however, are frozen within the frame of the image, appearing bleak—drained of life, perhaps, by their own creation—and as insensate as statues made of concrete or black marble. The contrast is so severe one can imagine that Kadish and Guston themselves have already perished and only their creation still imbues their bodies with life and light, that the effigy of death, to the side of Guston, and the effigy of birth, to the side of Kadish, are the painter’s souls which have escaped their corporeal shells and cast themselves upon the wall.