~LAURENCE LIEBERMAN~
STICK
PARAMOURS
1.
Two mantises are having sex—female above
to the left, stricken male
lower right:
long lean stick bodies, they could be scrawny
humans, so little flesh
on bones
(all but emaciated to a gleam), knobby bumps
for knees, small elbows
and shoulder
joints the humanoid giveaway. Or fierce eyes!
But twiggy mantis segments
as well . . .
This moment, they've
sprung apart—
wide space between them, amid
a prolonged
coitus. Two skeletons, man and woman sprawled
across the canvas, four limbs
contorted
in pain or ecstasy. Primal twist of their arms
and legs, as in cave drawings,
petroglyphs,
suggest frenzy of tribal dance leaps. Acute
bends may be war moves. Swings
of rage. Love
coupling and your classic battle of the sexes
blent in the spiralling fury,
bodies in flux.
Love wails and war cries may intermingle, perhaps
merge in the wavy voice lines
of graphlike
backdrop. Sound waves or nerve vibrations: who
can say what those many dim
line wriggles
transcribe? . . .
Two streams of
droplets, curving
awry, are spattered across
the foreground.
Uppermost, the long trail of semen, tiny sperm
tails aflicker, here &
there,
in the spray,
tall penis still fully erect and exposed aspurt.
A second that short gusher
thickly oozing
from his neck.
Ah, she's
beheaded him in mid
coitus, the decapitated skull
oddly grimacing,
fallen to the ground underfoot, his blood more
plenteous from severed neck-
half below
than from above-shoulder spout. His lower body
still writhes in love spasms,
oblivious
to the loss of its brain bulb. Headless-chicken
mode . . .
Her glare of
conquest
so evident
in her tilt of brow, we know her secret joy.
She conceives new life &
claws
her ex-mate's
skull off in one pure moment. A simultaneity.
* * *
Misogynist, they call me.
But I adore women, could
never hate a lady. Yet fear
of the female pervades
this portrait and many other works. For she is the true
predator.
Her aggression,
which disguises itself as tenderness, is far more lethal.
Sinister, she's the serpent
hidden beneath the wildflower—more
dangerous for being
unsuspected.
The
mantises
are us. These stick
figure insects—who mingle the passions
to love &
kill so we
cannot tell them apart—lurk
in all humans . . .
That day, Akyem
was seized, yanked by
surprise.
These creatures sprang up—as if whole in their scraggly
misshapen limbs, tubelike
extremities—from thick tactile canvas he employed. Rough
surface of that medium,
so new to his touch, drew the pair of fierce animal hybrids
from his brush. As he
daubed
paint into the coarse-grained field, it seemed to spawn
two slender twist-boned
Beings to answer the
firm swish and stroke of his tools . . .
Borne of his wrestling
with the Angel of plaited
textures, they were engendered
less from his mind or
hand's
fine rapturous sweeps than from that papyrus thick scroll-
work of crinkly paper.
* * *
What the source of these grotesque imitation
humans? Copies
of ourselves . . . The tall stick
of our body sprouts branches—necks, shoulders,
backs & hips
are extensions of arms &
legs,
a reverse of the familiar body orders. He watched
these person-
morphs seem to crawl or weave
across his paint swirls in amazement. For all
resemblance
to that mantis he's pored over
in science class texts, boon of his school days,
their posture
and bearing on his matted page
expressed a mind of human animals. And he let
this sorcery
of dual species draw from him
such hybrid creatures, spun out of our psyches
as if waiting
to be discovered by his half-
asleep brush strokes: more found than invented,
sprung whole
from the abyss of pre-racial
memory. Their closest kin in the family of seg-
mented animals
are scorpions & tarantulas,
tail
or hairy limbs poised to inflict their stings.
But the truer
brethren may be those wiry
scrawled spiderlings that survive for millenia
on cave walls,
thrusting beaks and twirled
claws over the arched wall-to ceiling murals
of petroglyphs . . .
Color, too, seems primal or
antique—both creatures and sullen backdrop
they wriggle
across draw upon the same
narrow band in the spectrum of whole colors:
all tints, hues,
of the work moving between
light brown, tan, beige and deeper yellow.
Paired bodies
are luminously red-tinged,
as in ocher, while the parts of mandibles &
curled talons
appear to be faded sienna,
darkest shades anywhere on sprawl of canvas.
The shimmering
desertscape of terrain (vague
demarcation between sky and land) is grainy
stucco yellow—
it radiates light of a low
dun sheen . . . .
II.
Long before he
takes the plunge
into a new
cycle of paintings, Akyem
gestates. He may wander the island outskirts for weeks,
months, exploring chance
nuances in nature and slowly
containing his thrills of
discovery, hints
about fine threads
that hold the
cosmos together:
those knits
& hinges that bridge
all worldly parts of things,
until he finds he's dreaming
gummy hookups, the glues
and caulks that cement his daily
bric-a-brac, piece to
piece. And he must feel
this great mucilage
of Being has
infiltrated dark
core of his
dreamlife before onsets,
before he
commences the finely cadenced rituals of paint
launchings. He works best
when this glimpsed amalgam roars
into his blood beat—true
subject and idea
always snapped up,
discovered,
found waiting for him
whole of its
own dream-skin, ripe,
rather than invented at whim, or
concocted by his direct
controlling will . . . You'd
never
guess how far into the adventure
and vision of making a paint work I already
am
by the
time I build
my stretcher of sticks &
nails
and pull the canvas across
it. Ah,
those innocent tools have a
secret life of their own, and I
must keep them pure.
Soon after he applies his first
flecks & swirls of
paint, the work surges—
barreling along,
perhaps
halfway to completion.
When the
silhouettes of our two
randy stick paramours floated
onto the burnished gold haze
of sandy waste landscape,
Mantis
seemed all-but-finished.
My dream is an engine, Akyem
muses. A train
zooming
down the art
work tracks. It's fully in
swing
before it pulls the congeries of
color
streaks & pigments into its
vortex . . . The colors that fed
this erupting vision
were stolen from the sun-baked
surfaces of ruins: that
distinct blotchy
rude color mix
of old
crumbling walls, shattered
roofs, jagged
cornices, pillars
and foundations gave him their
patina, their softly
pungent tones of stain & tarnish.
As he pored over the ruins of old
Indian stone huts, some
chattel houses among them,
they prompted in him
a lust to
capture their essence.
He'd wandered
the vacant semi-desert,
surprised to
come upon some gravelly weed-riddled
grounds of a long-abandoned
site, parts of walls still
standing,
zigzag margins showing
where breaks carved out
hulks of stone.
He cruised
these zones by first
light,
starting just before dawn,
hoping to study the very earliest
layers of glimmer settling
on those grimy pitted
surfaces revealing—at last—the
aura
of most oldened color
blocks. Arisen like spirits
from the dim shadows!
So tremblingly
alone he'd stood,
searching for
he knew not what secrets,
who craved a
message from this living spectrum of yellow
golds. He kept pondering
fallen blocks, the ravaged home
shards, ignored and
forgotten for centuries.
Had they become
invisible,
perhaps, to anyone
but himself
(how mercilessly
alone, he felt)? . .
. His art was frozen stuck in an old
groove. To free it, he'd muster
his face up close to the telltale
visage of rock, sniffing
the crosshatched exterior
of weather-gouged stone.
At
times, it returned his breath.
He'd risk
touch of his lips, even ran
his tongue tip
along seams, heedless of stinging ants or
spiders that might lurk
under sprigs of lichen or moss—
he knew himself
transported to past epochs
with old walls,
floors and warped or
buckled roofs . . .
until he
stepped off a ridge
into timelessness.
He stood outside and above his stooped
figure, and watched
millions of dribbles of water
scoring tiny
ruts and trenched in all surfaces,
and each droplet left
its
tinges. Faintest colorations.
His eye
learned to detect every shade
or hue in the
composite, and he embraced the weather-
witch's secret brew of color,
refashioning Nature's slow-
abraded mix of tints into
his own palette
blend of oils.
His mental
color code, taking fire
from aeons of
sun-baked crumblings,
infused those yellowish
shades into paint. And his passion
empowered the leggy
beasties in climax of amours,
propelling the
Lady Mantis into a feral
bloodthirsty finish.
[After the painting, Mantis, by Ras Akyem]
© by Laurence
Lieberman
