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PONTORMO'S RAINBOW

This could never happen today, so you’ll have to believe me when I tell you that I made it all the way into sixth grade before a bunch of people whom I did not know, who weren’t my family and weren’t the government, tried to deprive me of something I really wanted—for my own good. Up until that time, my parents had routinely deprived me of things I wanted, but they always deprived me for their own good, not mine (“No, you can’t go out. I’m too tired to worry about what you’re doing while you’re out there.”), and this tactic was annoying enough. For years, I attributed it to my folks’ bohemian narcissism. Now I suspect they were shrewder than I thought, because, finally, since my parents were always more concerned with my thoughtfulness than with my goodness, I grew up well assured that I could decide what was good for me—and maybe get it—if I could get away with it.

So I was shocked by my first encounter with communitarian righteousness—all the more shocked because, at that point in the life of our family, things were really looking up. We had just escaped air-conditioned custody in this lily-white, cookie-cutter suburb of North Dallas and moved to Santa Monica, to a house right under the Palisades, between the Pacific Coast Highway and the beach. The house was the quintessence of coolness. There was a big deck on the second floor where we could sit and gaze off across the Pacific toward China. There was a white brick wall around the house, low in front and high in back, covered with bougainvillea. There were hydrangea bushes and hardy hibiscus in the front yard, honeysuckles along the side wall where a small yard ran, a mimosa tree in the front and a wisteria in the back—and, because of the wall and the breeze off the ocean, we could crank the windows open and let the house fill up with colored light, cool air, and the smell of flowers.

Died and gone to heaven. That’s the only way to describe it. After creepy, prissy Dallas, the escalation of sensory and social information was so overwhelming that I would lie in bed at night, in the sweet darkness, listening to the trucks rumbling on the PCH and the murmur of the surf on the sand, and literally giggle! There was just so much, and it was all so cool! I had black friends at school, like my dad’s jazz buddies. I got to be the only gentile in this kooky B’nai B’rith Boy Scout troop down in Venice (Reformed). Whenever I wanted, I could just walk out the glass front door with my dog, Darwin the Beagle, and slog through the sand down to the ocean. Or we could turn left and stroll down to the Santa Monica Pier where there was a dark pool hall with surfer criminals in residence. Or we could wander past the pier to Muscle Beach where multitudes of semi-naked women loved to pet Herr Darwin.

About once a month, on Sunday afternoon, we would pile in the car and tool down to Hermosa or Redondo to listen to jazz music, and every Saturday morning my brother and sister and I would climb the concrete stairs up the Palisades (or scramble up, commando style, through the ice plant), and make our way over to the Criterion for the Kiddie Cartoon Carnival. There we would sit for three hours, happy as clams, communing with Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, the Road Runner, and Tom and Jerry, just fucking blown away; and this, it turned out, is what the three ladies wanted to talk to us about. They showed up at Santa Monica Elementary about four months after we got there and set up shop in the lunch room. There was a crackly announcement on the speaker in home room that said if we wanted to talk to them, we would be excused from class to do it. So, naturellement, everybody did.

When my time came, I was marched down the hall to the lunch room and ushered to a seat across from this lady wearing a blue suit and pearls, just like June Cleaver. She had a three-ring binder and a bunch of papers on the table in front of her, and, since the table was kid-sized, she looked really big, looming behind it like a Charlie Ray lady. When I was seated, she looked up with a big smile, called me Davey, and asked me if I liked animated cartoons. I knew then I had made a terrible mistake. But what could I do? I said yes, I liked cartoons, a lot—and that my name was Dave. She smiled again, not meaning it this time, and persevered. And what about Donald Duck? she asked. Did I like Donald Duck? Yes, I liked Donald Duck, I told her, although I withheld my opinion that the Duck was the only Disney character who had any soul, any edge, that he was sort of the Dizzy Gillespie of Disney characters. This was not the sort of insight one shared with June Cleaver.

Well then, she said, what did I think about Donald’s relationship with his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie? Did it bother me that he screamed at them all the time? Did this frighten me? Did it, perhaps, remind me of . . . my mom or dad!? She looked at me solemnly, expectantly. I wanted to tell her that, first, Donald Duck was a cartoon. Second, he was an animal, a duck, and, finally, he was only about this tall. But I couldn’t. I could tell from the penetration of her gaze that she wasn’t really interested in ducks, and I felt my face getting hot. My inquisitor smiled faintly, triumphantly, taking this blush as a tell-tale sign of guilt, which it wasn’t. I felt like a downed American pilot in the clutches of the Gestapo, determined to protect the secrets of his freedom.

Clearly, this lady wanted to know stuff about my parents, and since, in all my peregrinations through five states and thirteen grammar schools, I had never met any other adults who were even remotely like my mom and dad, I was dedicated to concealing their eccentricity. Because it had its perks. I had seen enough of my friends’ home lives to know this. According to their parents, my parents let me run wild. I got to do things that my friends never could, because my parents were weird. But they were not like Donald Duck! My dad was cool and poetic—like me, I thought (wrongly!). And my mom was not cool at all. She was serious, high-strung, and fiercely ironic, like Joan Crawford, always bustling around: painting bad paintings in the back bedroom and reading books while she cooked dinner (setting the occasional paperback aflame)—always starting up little businesses, and telling me stuff about Maynard Keynes or Karl Marx when she gave me my allowance. (Keynes and Marx, I should note, marked the poles between which my mom’s sensibility flickered on a daily, nay hourly, basis, for reasons that were not always apparent. This made things exciting, since you never quite knew if you were dealing with the sky-walking entrepreneur or the hard-eyed revolutionary. My dad was more reliable in the realm of fiscal theory. He thought money was something you turned into music, and that music, ideally, was something you turned into money. It rarely worked out that way, but, in this at least, we were of one mind.)

Anyway, that was my folks. Donald and Daisy they weren’t, but neither were they Ward and June, so I was scared and covetous of my perks as an outlaw child. I didn’t know quite how to respond, and then, amazingly, I did. I told the truth. Donald Duck, I said, was not like my mom or dad. He was like my dog, Darwin the Beagle, excitable but lovable. Like, whenever people would walk by in front of our house, Darwin would just explode, squawking and baying and bouncing along behind the brick wall until they went past; and since the beach sidewalk in front of our house was a well-traveled thoroughfare, Darwin was one busy beagle. But when you yelled at him to stop, he just stopped and walked over to you, tilting his head and giving you that look so you had to give him a big hug.

The giant lady just looked at me, but not the way Darwin did. She didn’t move. She sat there like a statue and didn’t blink. She didn’t write anything down. She just looked, and now I was pissed, because I had given her a great answer. I knew this because, after thirteen grammar schools, I knew how to deliver a professional, precocious answer—how to build those extended point-by-point analogies that boosted your score on the tests they gave you when you came to a new school. But June Cleaver wasn’t buying. She turned over a piece of paper and asked me about the Road Runner cartoons. Did I like them? Yes, I did. Did I identify with the Road Runner or the Coyote? Again, I wanted to tell her that I didn’t identify with cartoons. They were just cartoons. But, in truth, I sympathized with the coyote, so I said, “Wile E. Coyote.”

Wrong! Clearly, wrong again, from the look on her face, but I was committed and I wanted to win, so I pressed on. I identified with the coyote, I said (like a pitiful slut), because he was always sending off in the mail for stuff from ACME that didn’t work, like when I sent off for that Lone Ranger Badge and Secret De-coder, and when it came, it was just this dumb piece of cardboard. Again, I considered this a very suave, precocious kid answer. But again, nothing. She didn’t write anything down, and I couldn’t believe it. I was flunking a quiz on cartoons! So I withdrew into sullen hostility. This was my standard response to intransigent adults. My little brother, on the other hand, being a little brother, invariably turned silky sycophant, so I have no doubt that a few hours later he was sitting there smiling away at June Cleaver, saying yes, our home was pretty much a Satanic cauldron.

I folded my arms and stuck out my lower lip. June turned the page and asked me if I liked Tom and Jerry. A testy nod from little Davey. And was I ever, perhaps, frightened by the violence? she asked emphatically. A moment of thought and then, with an edge of icy sarcasm that would have impressed even my mom, I said: “Oh yeah, I’m always terrified.” And she wrote this down! Thus, I discovered virtue’s invulnerability to contextual irony. And I couldn’t take it back! For years, I would replay this scene in my head, wishing that I had said something more sophisticated, like Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I am shocked, shocked!” Something like that, but I didn’t, damn it. I had never felt quite so betrayed by the adult world—until six months later when the “results” of this “study” hit the news nationwide.

Even Dave Garroway talked about it on The Today Show, and he was shocked, shocked. Children were being terrorized by cartoons! We trembled at Donald Duck in the role of an abusive parent. We read the Road Runner as an allegory of fear. And, worst of all, we were terrified and incited to violence by the aggressive carnage we witnessed in The Adventures of Tom and Jerry. And maybe so. Maybe some kids actually said this stuff, but speaking for the student body at Santa Monica Elementary I can assure you that we were mostly terrified and incited to violence by those enormous, looming ladies. They were real, not cartoons, and we knew the answers they wanted. But like good, brave little Americans, we were loathe to provide them, since they did not coincide with our considered opinions as citizens of this republic.

So, we did our best, you know. We told the truth and were betrayed—for our own good—and I am being perfectly candid when I tell you that this experience of betrayal was more traumatic and desolating to me than any representation I have ever encountered. All of the luxurious freedom and privacy I had felt in California dissolved in that moment. Because those ladies, in their presumption that we couldn’t distinguish representations from reality, treated us like representations, to be rendered transparent and read like children’s books. What’s more, we kids knew whereof we spoke. We held symposia on “issues of representation” at recess, and it turned out that everyone knew that if you ran over a cat with a lawn mower, the cat would be one bloody mess and probably die. Thus, when the much-beleaguered cartoon, Tom, was run over by a lawn mower and got only a shaved path up his back, we laughed.

It was funny because it wasn’t real! Which is simply to say that the intimidated, abused, and betrayed children at Santa Monica Elementary, at the dawn of the nineteen fifties, without benefit of Lacan or Lukács, managed to stumble upon an axiom of representation that continues to elude graduate students in Cultural Studies; to wit, that there is a vast and usually dialectical difference between that which we wish to see and that which we wish to see represented—that the responses elicited by representations are absolutely contingent upon their status as representations—and upon our knowledge of the difference between actuality and representation.

What we did not grasp was just exactly why the blazing spectacle of lawn-mowered cats, exploding puppies, talking ducks, and plummeting coyotes was so important to us. Today, it’s clear to me that I grew up in a generation of children whose first experience of adult responsibility involved the care of animals—dogs, cats, horses, parakeets—all of whom, we soon learned, were breathlessly vulnerable, if we didn’t take care. Even if we did take care, we learned, those creatures, whom we loved, might, in a moment, decline into inarticulate suffering and die—be gone forever. And we could do nothing about it. So the spectacle of ebullient, articulate, indestructible animals—of Donald Duck venting his grievances and Tom surviving the lawn mower—provided us a way of simultaneously acknowledging and alleviating this anxiety, since all of our laughter was premised on our new and terrible knowledge that the creatures given into our care dwelt in the perpetual shadow of silent suffering and extinction.

So, what we wanted to see represented were chatty, impervious animals. What we wanted to see, however, was that wall of vibrant, moving color, so we could experience the momentary redemption of its ahistorical, extra-linguistic, sensual embrace—that instantaneous, ravishing intimation of paradise that confirmed our lives in the moment. Which brings me, by a rather circuitous route, to the true occasion for this essay: a moment, a few days ago, when I looked around my living room and realized that, for once, the rotating exhibition of art I maintain there was perfectly harmonious. Even the painting sitting on the floor, leaning against the bookcase, worked. The whole room hummed with this elegant blend of pale, tertiary complements and rich, bluey reds. I even recognized the palette. Flipping open a large book on my coffee table, I found it displayed on page after page in the paintings of Pontormo.

I found this perfectly amazing. Since I never consciously “arrange” things, the accidental harmony spoke of some preconscious, developing logic in my eye, and I loved the idea that after years of living with color I would end up with Pontormo. Not such a bad place to be, I thought, but it spoke of more than that—since I realized in that moment that I had, indeed, spent a good portion of my life creating, discovering, or seeking out just such color-saturated atmospheres—in my glowing, scented room in the house below the Palisades, in art galleries, artist’s studios, museums, casinos, and cathedrals—at the old Criterion in Santa Monica, in the Bishop’s residence at Wurzburg, and on the beach in San Diego, standing with the water around my knees, peering through the surf spray at some extravagant orange and teal sunset that flashed back in the glassy curl. Even as I considered this, another such spectacle, the Las Vegas Strip, was blazing away right outside my windows.

I already knew, of course, that the condition of being ravished by color was probably my principle disability as a writer, since color for a writer is, finally, less an attribute of language than a cure for it. But it was a disability that afflicted most of the writers I loved, so I took comfort in it—and in the thought of Flaubert in North Africa, of Djuna Barnes in the salons of Berlin, of Fitzgerald in St. Tropez, DeQuincey in his opium dreams, Stendhal in Florence, Ruskin and Henry James in Venice, and even Thomas Jefferson, my old companion in self-indulgence, who was physically discombobulated by the gardens at Versailles. In my own life, I could pinpoint the moment I came into this knowledge. When I was very young, my grandparents had a little flower shop in south Fort Worth, the centerpiece of which was a large walk-in refrigerator for storing fresh flowers. The refrigerator had glass windows and doors. The first time I stepped into it, closed the door behind me, and stood there amidst all that color, coolness, and scent, with the light streaming in, I was like Dorothy transported to Oz. I knew why I hated Texas, and this was something important to know.

So, I liked hanging around the flower shop and riding in the delivery truck with my grampa as he made the rounds of hospitals and funeral homes. I liked the way sick people always smiled at the flowers, and I even liked setting up the sprays of flowers around the coffins with dead people in them—which is probably why I felt like I had died and gone to heaven when we moved to California. Because there, at the flower shop, as in those Saturday-morning cartoons, color always occurred in league with and in opposition to suffering, negation, and death. As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue—and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.

The branch upon which the blossom hangs may be long or short, rough or smooth, strong or weak according to our expectations, but the redness of the blossom is irrevocable, and the word “red” tells us next to nothing about it. There are thousands of colors in the world and only a few hundred words to describe them, and these include similitudes like teal and peach and turquoise. So, the names we put on colors are hardly more than proper names, like Smith or Rodriguez, denoting vast, swarming, diverse families of living experience. Thus, when color signifies anything, it always signifies, as well, a respite from language and history—a position from which we may contemplate absence and death in the paradise of the moment—as we kids in Santa Monica contemplated the death of puppies in the embrace of cartoon rainbows.

Moreover, when art abandons color, as it did in the nineteen seventies, it can only recede into the domain of abjection—into the protocols of language, history, and representation. The consequence of this (which I suffered at the hands of June Cleaver) is that all discussion of art under such régimes begins at a position of linguistic regress that renders invisible the complex dialogue between what we want to see and what we want to see represented. In a more civilized world, the question I would have been asked as a child was not: “Do you like animated cartoons?” but “Do you prefer animated cartoons in color or in black-and-white?” I know what my answer would have been, but if I had been asked, I would have had a running start. I would have begun wondering, right then, why I liked cartoons in color and would have known, long before now, why I did. Instead, I moped around feeling betrayed by unction, punishing myself for not coming up with something as cool as Claude Rains in response to it. I am still shocked, shocked.