Reflections on Some Events in the 1960's
Joe Kagle

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In 1998, I had emergency quintuple heart by-pass surgery. It did not change my perspective on life and death, although it was a wake up call for taking better care of my body. My confrontation with death really came in 1963 when I took two years, working 10 to 14 hours a day, drawing more than 2500 studies for a book called Death Is All The Time, a book/painting of 169 finished drawings. It started with photos of the holocaust, was interrupted and expanded by the murder of Jack Kennedy. The work dealt with the death of art history, the death of “we two”-male and female, the death of innocence, the death of politics, the death of childhood and finally the death of light. I immerse myself in the past. Not to study it but to attempt to relive it, to revive it. I discovered the writings of Rumi, a 13th century Islamic mystic poet, who helped me understand the wedding between death and life. He wrote:

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

One source for getting it is my son Chris, who is mentally retarded. He helps me see the linkage of everyday life and eternity because for him tomorrow is a far shore. Again, Rumi expresses my insight on linkage when he says: I you he she we. I you he she we. In the garden of mystic lovers, I you he she we. In the garden of mystic lovers, these are not true distinctions. I you he she we.

Many times I don’t get it because of the The Skin I’m Not Livin’ In. For example, I say to my son’s roommate who is also mentally retarded: “I just learned that your brother died.” He replies: “He died two years ago. I am going to his funeral this Friday.” Translation: My brother’s death is painful. I need to put it in the past but I must go to his funeral this week. Rumi examines this when he writes:

To the frog that’s never left his pond the ocean seems like a gamble.
Look what he’s giving up: security, mastery of the world, recognition!
The ocean frog just shakes his head: “I can’t really explain what it’s
like where I live, but someday I’ll take you there.”

I took one whole summer trying to “get it” as a mentally-retarded person. I read “Flowers for Algernon” and tried to live it. I took advanced classes at MIT which were out of my mental reach. I played basketball with young kids who made me feel inferior and stupid. But I knew that I could walk away and be me. I will never get what it feels like to be black or Hispanic or female or homosexual or mentally retarded, although I have tried to live in their skin. I have tried to learn what it feels like to be someone else. I still try. Drawing, painting and writing helps. And if we do try, people will allow us into their world. What I get from my son is a special kind of love.

My friend Robert Wilson took in two boys who society called mentally retarded. He accepted their language of sounds and images then used their image and word patterns to create avant-garde works in theater that have transformed the end of the 20th century and began to shape the 21st century. Wilson took the shape formed by two fingers by Einstein, from photographs from childhood to old age, and created Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass. His plays use the New York “crazies” pointing up, exercise positions that he had created for children with disabilities, and then he forms his plays around these shapes. It is vertical thinking, not linear thought- start anywhere and add information that seems to fit- Buddha’s teaching gesture, the actions of telephone operators, the motion of the teacher at the blackboard, the photos of Einstein.

For those of us born in the inner city, winning is the America message but you miss something. It was only when my son Chris started running the 200 meters in Special Olympics that I learned what true winning means. The big race came up. I told him that I would stand at the side of the last 100 meters and yell, “Run, Chris, run. Win, Chris, win.” He was twenty yards in front of his best friend as he rounded the final turn. About ten yards from the finish line, he stopped, waited, took his friend’s hand and ran across the line with him. I knew the quote from Martha Graham long before that moment, “I am only in competition with that person I know I can become” but I had not gotten the meaning fully until then. Now I understand win-win. I understand what the Chinese for centuries have said: a painter is an amateur until his forties, an artist in his fifties and a master after sixty. There are places to get it but there are some universals that take time to sink in and transcend the immediate data gathering. With enough time, most of us get it. Chris drowns in everyday data.

Robert Frost suggested that we had a choose of “the road taken” or “not taken”. In 1955, our lives were filled with “or” decisions- conservative or liberal, academic or worldly, follow your bless or follow the money. It was only later that I learned (I got it) there is an “and” way of approaching the world. Chinese painting and thought, Robert Wilson, Robert Rauschenberg, my son Chris are heroes of a 21st century “and” world. The message can be summed up in another Rumi poem: “May the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” It does not matter which road you take because the one you choose gets you there. “Birds fly in great sky circles of freedom. How do they learn this? They fall and having fallen, they are given wings.”

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