American Supra: Book Four

Christmas In America, Return to Georgia,

Teaching, Projects, Grants, Lectures, People,

Events and “Joe and Friends”, an April Exhibition

Blest hour! it was a luxury- to be.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834,

from Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement

To love one maiden only, cleave to her,

And worship her by years of golden deeds.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to be free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me;

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Emma Lazarus, 1849-1887

In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a dsliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotions, into confusion or dullness.

William Butler Years, 1865-1939, from Essays and Introductions, 1961

Tbilisi 5

It is the day before Christmas. We have our present already, coming home to spend time with our children and friends. It will be easier going back to Georgia.

On the night before Christmas, we have spaghetti, beer and wine. I try to give a Georgian toast but it just does not work.

On early morning Christmas day, I sit here in the living room with the lighted tree and all the wrapped presents until others get up to begin the ritual of opening gifts. This season I am more interested in giving than receiving. We will see how that plays out. Christmas is a time where Samantha becomes a child again with the excitement of the season (and now she is a 31 year-old mother). She will pass this joy to Erin I am sure, just as we passed it on to her. Yule time is a magical season, much more than the presents under the tree. It is the songs of Christmas, the atmosphere of counting our blessings and everyone on the street saying, “Merry Christmas.” Coming home is the best present we could give ourselves. As one friend told me long ago, “After the money is spent, you forget its amount.” The wonder of the work in the new exhibit on December 19^th begins to fade. “What’s next?” is my mindset. I am beginning to think of the spring exhibition, my final showing in Georgia. How do I top what I did in December? I don’t but maybe Joe and Friends will be a new experience as rich as the last (as all my Georgian artist friends come together to say goodbye). It should have wide public appeal and show the variety and skill of what is happening in Georgia.  That will make three major projects for the spring: finalizing the placement of the American Art Archive Collection, creating the first playground in the inner city in Tbilisi, and the “Joe and Friends” exhibition. That is plenty to keep me occupied until we fly to Beijing in May and then home to Texas.

We get a rare treat on Christmas afternoon, an encore performance of the Concert for New York City. It is five and a half hours of pure pleasure and tears. I do not like all the music but no one can deny the wonder of the whole experience of America coming together to mourn those who died and celebrate freedom. It is hard to find the words to say how I feel. There is pride in America, certainly, and there is wonderment in how quickly America rebounds from the terrorist attack. I think that bin Laden thought that the structure of the nation would crumble when the two towers did, but he is wrong. We are only soft on the surface. The Rumanian columnist’s article on America, sent to me from the Rumanian Embassy in Tbilisi, sums up my feelings in his “Ode to America”. He calls the five and a half hour concert “a celebration of freedom and heroes”.

Since that concert, I have been thinking about America’s position in world affairs, particularly in light of international terrorism. I know that bin Laden understood that he was attacking a symbol of America’s wealth and power, but what he might not have see is that America is a system which does not depend on the leadership from the top but the courage of all citizens when freedom is attacked. It is the system which will survive, even when individuals die. It does not make any difference in our policy if Gore had beaten Bush for the Presidency. The job shapes the man through our history as it does today. You can see that in the faces of those who have been chosen to lead. They age and gray in the decision-making position. In Georgia, if the head man changes, the system changes. I also question bin Laden’s decision to attack the World Trade Center because the optimum word there is “world”. It is interesting to see that all attacks since then have been on American Airlines or the US Postal system. Certainly, there is an attempt to separate America from the world by the terrorists, but the logic of killing sixty different nationalities in the Trade Center tragedy escapes me. America is no longer protected by isolation. That is now clear but in turn it is now a partner in a world without borders. Green is the color of international business and bravery is the color of freedom.

Now, it is the last day of a year of turmoil for the world and adventure for us, mostly good but some not. It is a year that set us on a course that we needed as a break from what we had been doing. It has not been an easy year, but nothing worthwhile is easy. My creative work is at a quality height that I have wanted for some time and my work has been shown internationally. Returning to Tbilisi, Georgia, to finish up the teaching and all the other projects will not be hard. In fact, it will be much easier than if we stayed there over the holidays.

Every morning I wake to the lithograph of Matisse’s drawing of a woman’s face, the essence of beauty and simplicity. The line work captures all the elements that traditional Renaissance classical drawing conveys. It does what I saw in the classic beauty of the faces of women in Georgia. This morning I try to draw it from memory, a memory device for me to etch it in my mind. It is the same device that I used in Kutaisi to learn the names and faces of the artists with which I shared a month. I see the little upturn of the line at the edge of the mouth, the long pure line of the nose (ending in the small hook that directs attention back to the mouth), and the almond-shaped eyes that stare out at the world with child-like innocence. The line of the hair pushes in upon the oval of the face. It is so perfect and complete, just the right combination, just the correct proportions, and just the ultimate degree of confidence in the line. I did three sketches and only came close on one to what Matisse had so easily done without seeming effort. I marvel at his genius. Picasso, another artist I admire, used innovation in his drawings to astound his viewer whereas Matisse uses subtle line and unerring craft. He is the master of the line. It is a wonder that a man could capture the plastic unity of a woman’s face, hold it all together and share that beauty in a few perfectly chosen lines. I remember the men standing around in Tbilisi and the peace and openness here.

Being with my daughter’s family for this special time of year, I think that all of us have come to the same conclusion: family is important and our differences are not (although we honor those differences).

To end our stay in America, we fly to Pittsburgh on Friday and on Saturday, Anne and I celebrated our 45th anniversary, high above the city and its lights on Mount Washington. Below is the meeting of the three rivers, Phillip Johnson’s glass masterpiece of the PPG Center and memories of earlier times when all of us were young. Lou, my brother in law, and I ate at the Oyster House on Market Street, across from the market where my grandfather sold fish. It is a place where my father took me many times. They still make the largest, most delicious fish sandwich in the world. The waitress is still a “smart aleck” but now quite old (ancient, in fact). Memories of good times flood my mind. Why is it as we age the good times prevail in our digital memory unit, the brain?

The anniversary dinner is paid for by Anne’s sister and her husband, Lou. It is expensive, over $150.00 for the four of us, but I wonder if Georgian prices are coloring my vision. This is the beginning of a journey back to Georgia. I now places in the mind’s file case our American visions and compare them to Georgia.             

On the way back, I find that travel is not as much fun as it once was. Security is high everywhere now. I am searched three times, twice by taking off my shoes. There is a tension in the air. People are afraid that they will make a mistake and they make mistakes. One couple on the plane got very upset when an Indian couple changed seats, with the permission of the stewardess, and he had to sit beside them. Another man who saw the interchange gave up his seat so that they could sit together but the first man was still uptight.

While relaxing on the airplane, I ask myself, “What had been accomplished on this stay in America?” Rest is the first answer, while relaxing the inner life as well as the body. We viewed three exceptional movies. I cataloged, cropped and enhanced all my photographs from Georgia and created several slide shows for the computer. I played with my new visual computer toy, which I will turn into paintings on arriving back in Tbilisi. Mostly I go back to Georgia refreshed, knowing what must be accomplished and ready to do the work.

On the nine hour flight from Detroit to Amsterdam, I find that time is a subjective dimension. An image flashes up on the television and movie screen, stating “Ten minutes to the movie.” Having nothing else to do and nowhere to go, I try to count the seconds in my head for a minute. I come to the conclusion that air time is longer than actual time. I mention this astute observation to Anne, who has a science background, and she hands me her watch without a word. I time the minute again. Of course, it is exactly one minute by the watch. Now with the 600 miles to Amsterdam, I know that my psychological time is different than real time and I think, “We do crazy things to pass the time.”

Early morning has become a routine for me, waking with the sun and the sounds of 1.6 million heartbeats of Tbilisi. Being back in the city is easier and harder than before. I have none of the adventurer’s illusions. I will just add to the knowledge base of a few key players and students which might make change happen in the long run. Tbilisi is an overpopulated city with an unemployed male workforce that is dynamic ready to explode. As I drive the streets with Raphael and Anne, I see it in the park and at the bazaar. In the few months that I have left here, I will built the playground, establish the American art resource library, teach my classes in museum management, American art and architecture, and 20^th century art criticism, help the non-governmental agencies and the art gallery owners to work in a free enterprise world, and create a body of work to exhibit in “Joe and Friends” in April.

As we stroll along Rustevili Avenue, every ten feet there is a beggar. Going under the street to get to the other side, there are mothers with rag doll children in one arm and a hand out with the other, out of work musicians play for their hat of coins, and small shop keepers try to make a meager living. Anne always puts something in an extended hand. I mention all this because the contrast is so great when you take your seats in the Opera House. It is always filled. The tickets cost from 5 lari ($2.50) to 20 lari ($10.00 for an expensive production) but it makes no difference in the cost. It is always filled to the fifth tier of seats. Mothers and fathers bring their children. I am still astonished by this. This image of support will stay with me when I go back to America. Here are a people who love art so much that they want their children to love and enjoy it too. Tonight it is Carmen with, again, a full symphony orchestra. In all the seats, everyone is dressed with style. No beggars here.

I watch one man a few seats away keeping time by clasping and unclasping his giant hands. He is a gargantuan hulk of a man with layer upon layer of flab and a shape that surrounds his seat like a snowman. Carmen is arrested and led off in chains as the first act ends. My giant of a man hangs his head in despair and rings his hands together. Sitting in front of him is one of the most beautiful women that I have seen with clean lines, olive skin and keen appreciation of her looks and carriage. She holds herself apart. The man she is with does not fit her therefore I question whether she is a woman for hire, a bangle on the man’s sleeve for the night. Sometimes I wish that I could read minds but here I can read small gestures, lines and actions. It is most interesting, a play within the opera.

No electricity last night and none briefly this morning. Across the street, in the Adjara Hotel, the lights are always on and they never pay any bills since they are refugees the government puts there. Anne had enough time to complete one load of clothes before the electricity went off again. She feels fortunate since the other day it stopped in the middle of drying and she had to wait eight hours before she could finish and unload the washer.

Of course, there is no electricity today so we go to the Embassy (who always has heat, light and electricity). We went for several reasons but one main one was to retrieve our bill for our cell phone so that we could pay it. A normal request. We wanted to pay our bill. It could not be found. “Well, call the company,” I say, “find out what I owe.” Simple, right? Simple, no! “They can’t tell you,” I am told. “Why?” “I don’t know why. Give me a day or two and we will bill you again by sending a fax to the Embassy.” Did I mention the answer that I got the other day when calling the Sheridan Hotel to find out what time Rotary holds its meeting? I was told in the most serious voice, “They meet every Wednesday night at 6:00 o’clock if they come!” Well, to finish the story, after we paid for our cell phone, we got the lost bill.

We go to dinner, 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon, at Raphael’s house for soup and bread. We told him to make it simple. Have you ever had a ten course soup and bread, with extras of course? Across the table sat Raphael’s brother, Volari. His face says volumes about the harshness of life in Georgia. The innocence of Nino, Raphael’s niece, is in contrast to the weathered face. Her youth is fleeting so I wish to catch it before it becomes the morning mist and is gone. The lovely Julia, Raphael’s wife, voices her opinion about the problems with electricity. “Some days, I don’t want to live here anymore,” she said. “Everything is too hard. The lights are out, no heat for days in the winter, Michael cannot study or go to school when it is this cold inside, and the corruption keeps it all going. Some say it is the Mafia of Georgia that sells the kerosene. Electricity is cheap; kerosene is expensive.”

Volari adds, “This has been a mild winter and yet the electricity is off when the businesses are opened.” Raphael’s only comment was “Crazy people.”

When we were in Waco at Christmas time, Anne picked up a copy of Senior News. Don’t know why she did that since we are so young but she did. On the back of the section for which she picked it up was a letter from a 75 year-old man. He writes: “We are, considering the alternative, reasonably content with the burdens of functional obsolescence, such as the immediate transfer of desserts to bodily blubber, the nearly as immediate metamorphosis of most foods from solid to the gaseous state, the graying and decaying above the neck, and the widespread deterioration below it.”  I still chuckle at this old man’s words. I am so young, a mere sixty-nine, yet I empathize with his words.

February: Letter from Tbilisi:

One of the reasons that I wanted to come to Georgia was to see wonderful examples of Byzantine and Georgian architecture of the 11^th and 12^th century.  In front of an ex-hotel which the Russians built, in the center of Tbilisi, now filled with poverty-stricken IDPs (Independent Displaced Persons, who are different than refugees who come across borders), stands the grand statue of the Bagraid king David II Aghmashenchechi (1089-1125). Each time we pass, my driver Raphael points out how he, although only 16, defeated the Seijuk Turks at the Battle of Dadgori in 1121, ushering in Georgia’s golden age of architecture. This period was short-lived for the Mongols came sweeping through the South Caucasus in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. What followed are the Ottoman Empire and the Persian invasions, interspersed with brief period of freedom, and then the iron grip of the Russians from the 18^th century to 1991. All that one can call Russian utilitarian structures is “concrete ugly” and the worst form of architecture for humans to live within. The hotel behind the statue of King David is a good example of bad architecture and Georgians shake their heads because the Russians left many examples of that.

On the hill, grandly overlooking the city of Kutaisi, stands Bagrati Cathedral, a church built in 1003 A.D., destroyed many times and rebuilt. There is a long winding, cobblestone road to the church which is walked by the citizens on holy days. We walked it when the yearly procession of the Madonna’s icon, the city’s official relic, is taken to the church. Standing in the services, the sky as the only roof, you feel like you are in grand open air Gothic cathedral, although the rounded arches tell you this is pure Romanesque architecture. In this structure, you can see the improvement in opening the walls with arches when contrasted to the Kharagauli church built in the 8^th century where the structure is more closed in although the cupping out of space has begun.  Frank Lloyd Wright calls architecture “a womb with a view”. The close space and semi-domes cupping out cave-like areas of the Romanesque style do give a feeling of sheltering comfort. Anyone thinking about it knows that “mother” is the first home, the cave follows shortly, and then constructed structures to keep out the elements and retain warmth and coolness.

In Eastern Georgia (Bagridi Cathedral was in Western Georgia), Georgian homes from earliest times had roofs which tapered into a central hole which let light in and smoke out. This design, the darbuzi, may have been the origin of the central-domed churches so typical of Georgia. In “old town Tbilisi” these churches still exist is wonderful condition.

Therefore it was with great interest that I went to see Victor Djorbenadze’s “Wedding Chapel”, on the left high-bank of the Kura River in Tbilisi. Rolf Gross makes the statement, “Victor Djorbenadze was one of the remarkable architects of the end of the 20^th century…the Wedding Cathedral shows him to be one of the great architects of Europe, with a sophisticated architectural brut, which orients itself on Le Corbusier and Frank Gehry.” That is high praise indeed. Le Corbusier was the main architect of the International style which made the glass buildings of New York, Dallas and Houston possible and Frank Gehry is the originator of the revolutionary Guggenheim Museum in Balboa, Spain.

It is a miracle that this work of art was built at all. Djorbenadze was a homosexual in a culture where that is unofficially condemned. Fortunately, he was backed by Edward Shevardnadze, present President of Georgia but then chairman of the Communist Party (a act of courage on Shevardnadze’s part because Djorbenadze was not a member of the Party). The castle-like outside, sheathed in limestone facing, is spectacular but the inside is purely Georgian with rounded curves (similar to Georgian letters and the Georgian love of “mother”). When asked about the floor plan, Djorbenadze confessed that the female reproductive system was his basic form.

Djorbenadze’s cathedral has been somewhat ignored today because of the Georgian justifiable dislike of anything “Russian in design” but this building, although built under Russian rule, is pristine Georgian. Looking up into cross-wise overlapping wooden beams that form a “false dome”, one is reminded of those early cone-like structures of Georgian farm homes (which can be seen at the Tbilisi Open Air Museum and in Miskheta). Victor Djorbenadze died forgotten and disparaged in 1999. The neglected Wedding Cathedral is slowly crumbling. As Rolf Gross writes, “There is nothing like it in the former Soviet Union”.  But as a wedding cathedral, it may have seen its time. There are too many unpleasant memories of the Communists repression of Georgian Christianity. Georgians are returning to their traditional churches for services and marriage (as it should be) but it is time to rehabilitate the man and find a new use for this original and remarkable work of art.*

Internet source for images: http://vdjorbenadze.tripod.com/WC02.htm/WC03.htm

* Typical in Georgia, instead of the government finding a use for this national treasure, they sold it in 2002 without a public bidding system to a Georgian millionaire who made all his fortune in Russia. He is now living there and has made it his home. The Georgian people are kept out by steel gates and machine-gun armed guards. The more that this society changes; the more it stays the same. This is the way it was done in Communist times.

March: Letter from Tbilisi, Georgia:

This is one story in a nation of stories.

Just up from one of the two McDonald’s restaurants (with a happy Ronald McDonald in full color sitting outside with his hand raised to greet the many patrons) is an old cobblestone street with houses behind large steel doors and an atmosphere of stepping into the mid-19^th century. My co-teacher, Ketevan Kintsurasvili, who shares a class in Modern Art and Criticism with this American Fulbright Scholar and allows me to call her Katie, had asked Anne and I to join her when she went to visit the studio of the Georgian artist, David Kakabadze. His widow Etery Andronikashvili keeps the spirit of his art alive in this house. Etery also teaches at the Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Arts

The studio was on the second floor. Etery met us with a kiss and said, “We begin to see here.” And see we did. A portrait of her husband done in Moscow in the early 1910s met our eyes as we stepped into the room. It was of a proud, straight-shoulder young man with a small moustache looking assuredly out at the world. Next, we saw his early paintings of Georgia and his love of the mountains was clear. In fact, his love of Georgia showed through the paint which was, to my first surprise, ahead of its time. He bathed the mountains in color and spirit.

Now came the second surprise. I had journeyed to Tbilisi, Georgia to learn about the art and its people. All the research that I did before coming told me that the art was about 100 years behind the times, black and white with a little color thrown in and no modern art concepts. When Kakabadze went to Paris in 1921, he was a leader in the Cubist movement, exhibiting alongside Picasso, Braque and Leger. Long before Kandinsky finally came to Paris in 1930s, Kakabadze was doing biological cubism with images that came alive under an artist’s microscopic eye. Kakabadze had been trained as a biologist as well as a painter. His work was not of cubism but went beyond cubism in its concepts.. The excitement that his work created, being so far in front of what was happening in the early 20^th century, made me want to see his studio in the next room. If a man can create all this from 1921 through 1927, what miracles of art could he create for Georgia when he returned in 1928? His revolutionary historian friend who lived several houses away tried to get word to Kakabadze that he should stay in Paris. “The Soviet Regime is oppressive and does not allow any new ideas to flourish in Georgia” was the message. But the young artist could not believe how bad the situation was in his beloved country so he returned.

The first thing that the Soviets did was outlaw any painting of Cubism by Kakabadze or any other modern ideas about art. Only Socialist Realism was allowed. If a young painter wished to feed his wife and children, he painted the party line. It was impossible for him. Cubism kept coming into his compositions. He had secured a teaching job at the Academy where I now teach. He was popular and loved by his students for his understanding and ideas. Yet, he was forced to teach only Socialist Realism and in 1948 he was dismissed because he was not a zealot of Socialist Realism. He was banned from any profession to make a living. He lived from the kindness of strangers and friends. This lasted for four years until his heart gave out and he died in 1952. Oh, I forgot to tell this part of the story. All his students got failing marks because they had associated with or taken a course from David Kakabadze.

No American can imagine what this hero of Georgia went through for his country. He had to silence his ideas about art (which were beyond their time and at the edge of what was happening in modern art), give up his teaching and finally give up his life just because he returned to the country he loved so deeply. The Communists would not allow him to leave the country. He was threatened with death if he spread “modern ideas” to the young. He was blacklisted so he could not make any living from his talents. In Paris in the 1920s, the American Katherine Drier and her friend Marcel Duchamp purchased many works by Kakabadze. They are some of the treasures of the Yale University Art Collection, taking their rightful place side by side with Picasso, Braque and Leger. And now in Georgia, David Kakabadze is known as a great artist, a patriot and a tragic victim of Communism. I learned that the cobblestone street where his studio, his widow and Ronald McDonald live is called Kakabadze Street.

When I journeyed to Rustavi to lecture at Highschool 23 and Rustavi State University, I was impressed that the principal of the highschool had rallied the community together and gotten the walls in the school painted. I was going to turn in a grant which had a component for painting to be donated therefore I asked her to write me a letter, telling how she got the walls painted. What I received was more than I asked for but it was so honest about life in Georgia that I included it in my journal.

Tbilisi 6

Anne and I go to the Georgian National Museum, open from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., which specializes in archeological finds before the time of Christ. We have attempted this tour four other times but each time the electricity is off. The government has stopped paying the bills for lights and heat although this is a national museum. This time we are determined to view some aspects of the collection but there is still no electricity for the upper floors. Only the gold collection has lights; no heat but lights. We pay for our ticket and a woman who speaks English consents to guide us through the gold and silver treasures. She has worked there for 35 years. The tour takes over two hours and we leave only then because the museum is closing for the day. I now know more than I ever wish to know about the art of goldsmithing in Georgia but she is determined to be thorough and we are determined that if she can take the freezing chamber we will follow her. It is much colder there down in the subbasement than outside (again, because of the architecture and the practice of building four to five foot thick walls to hold the night’s coolness which works if you have some way to warm the air a little). As our legs get a little numb from the cold, we journey on until a guard kicks us out. The outside air is refreshing, feeling positively warm in contrast.

It is time to return to an idea that started at the Black Sea in September. I am fascinated still by Georgian letters and words, not as a linguist but as an artist viewing pure, sensual form. Here are the ones that started me on this journey:

                    Today, Raphael takes me to the Embassy for a computer briefing. Getting there early, I am asked by the man setting up the computer, “Why are you here?” “I am a Fulbright Scholar who uses the computers when mine is down and I need to read my emails.” “You have no government clearance.” I am sure that was a statement, not a question. “All you do is get into Hotmail?” That was a question, I knew, from the look on the man’s face. “Yes, I read Hotmail.” “Then you don’t have to be here.” “OK,” I said smiling, “I will leave. Someone said that I was required to come to this before I could use the computers again.” At this moment, a second man who had said nothing, pulls the first man aside and begins whispering as I gather up my sketchbook and pens. He returns before I am ready to leave. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed,” he says in a government tone which means ‘you better’, “officially, you do not have to but I would appreciate it.” I sit down again, “OK.” You get used to this in Georgia but as the King says in The King and I, “It is a puzzlement.”

At the beginning of the briefing, the gentlemen who asked me to stay begins speaking in “government-speak” with a lot of IPOs, ISSOs, CLOs, etc. laced with words I understand but not here out of context. I do not understand a word he says for the first five minutes but the others in the audience nod their heads so I know that the briefing is going well. Oh, I get the gist of the message, “Don’t mess with my computers or I will slap your hand. Here are my rules.”

The more that we become dependent on technology to do our thinking the more we think like computers. He tells us that computers can be scanned from a mile away if you leave them on (if you have the right equipment, and the enemy always has the right equipment). With me, the United States Government is secure in its information. I know no passwords. I know nothing. I am dependent on others to even get me into my webpage on Hotmail. Most of what is discussed is for the hired help. I am the outsider although they include me in briefings where I get bits and pieces which never go together. But I did not waste my time. I make sketches of the audience. I get a lot of information from him about how not to get information. My drawings are all about gathering information. From a critical point of view and as a teacher of over 40 years, I analyze his “non-style” of presentation. The best that I can say is that it is boring.

Yesterday, we went to the bazaar to try to find acrylic paint (since all my paints were not allowed on the airplane at Christmas because they were on a list of “flammables”, which acrylic is not, oil paint is). After examining each booth in the paint section, we found none. We went to Expo Georgia and the German/Georgian paint company. I found yellow and white in acrylic (liquid form but I will make do). Ah ha, they do have the paint in Georgia. I had been told that there was none here. It is German-made so it should be good. I have not painted for over a month. My wrist needed a rest and I did not wish to injure it further. I will wear a wrist guard if it acts up again. I will tell Georgian artists that they can find “acrylics in Tbilisi”.

As we pass the machine gun guard at the Mayor’s Office, we enter a large hall with murals of Georgia’s past in tapestry form on one wall and scattered groups of people waiting for an audience with some bureaucrat. The Mayor’s office is also crowded with those waiting to see him. They turn and question our presence as the Minister of Foreign Affairs shakes our hands. I am “the American” and his translator. We are ushered into the Mayor’s grand office with a layout of Tbilisi behind his desk. I give him the citation and the present from the Mayor and City Manager of Waco. He gives me a view of Old Tbilisi to take back to them. We discuss the idea of a playground in the inner city. He queries if we are here to ask for money. When we tell him that we have that, we want his consent and blessing. With a grand wave of his hand, he says, “You find the place, you build the playground.” We leave and the Minister of Foreign Affairs tells us to call him if we run into any difficulties.

The images of children’s writing on walls in our neighborhood is put into the computer, enhanced, cropped and made ready as visual data to use in the paintings. I have no idea what they say but that is the beauty of the process. In this case, further knowledge would color the vision of seeing this writing as pure form. I do not wish to read it. I wish to use it as visual enhancement for the surface of the new paintings for the spring exhibition. I will never see my own language in the same way. I know too much about it to see it as if for the first time. I wish that I had thought of this before the December exhibition. On some paintings, it would have helped. There is immediacy in the writing that is refreshing.

Sitting at a long table, the Rector, Vice Rector and three members of the Art History Department sitting on one side, Sharon Hudson Dean, Director of the Cultural Affairs Division of the American Embassy of Georgia, Magda Madradze, the Embassy interpretor and Assistant Cultural Affairs person and me arranged on the other side, I get a totally different reception than I have in the three months that I have taught at the Academy. In fact, I got the royal treatment with all telling Sharon what a wonderful person I am and how much I have done for the Academy. This is in marked contrast to the assistance that I have gotten to make my job of teaching easier. I believe that it all changed when I helped at the large meeting for the Rumanian Ambassador and our lecture on Brancusi. After that, I am an asset, not just a Fulbright Scholar from America.

The Rector was sure to tell Sharon about the history of the Academy, dating back eighty

years which will be celebrated in May. It has 1100 students, mostly from Central

Georgia, but actually all over Georgia. Later, I get to see locked areas of the Academy

which had been closed to me before this, such as the collection (which they now want me

to catalog). I tell them that I will use my students, train them, and begin the process but

the job is something which will take several years (and I am leaving, for sure, in May). It

is a nightmare of a collection. They have just left it sit for 10-12 years or longer with no

covering to keep out the dust and no temperature and humidity control. There is dust,

dust, and more dust over everything. I did get a promise that all students would use the

American Art Archive Collection if I attempted this impossible job. I do trust

the people I teach with in the Art History Department. They want to have this dream

come true. Next Tuesday, we decide on a room for the American Collection. Next Friday,

I start on the Academy’s cataloging nightmare.

I spend two days interviewing candidates for the Junior Faculty Development Program to send Georgian faculty to America. It is administered by the American Council. Over the two days, a Georgian professor and myself thought that we had six top candidates, out of twenty-one, for four positions. The final decision will be made in Washington. One excellent faculty member who teaches film and acting told a story about finishing her movie which was praised finally at the Cannes Film Festival, Moscow Festival, St. Petersburg International Festival and the Kiev World Festival. She told a story about making 15 to 16 films a year in Soviet times, with the backing of the Communist government (not everything was bad then). Now in the last ten years, only six films have been created and she did two of them. The Georgian government has put no money into a film industry which was world class for years before the war for independence. We asked her, since she was applying to study arts management in America, how she got her film finished that won so many honors. She said, “I went to all the sources that I could find but for two years I had no luck. Finally, I found a man to back my film.” Naively, I asked, “And he was a patron of the arts? In the States, we call that ‘an angel’.” “No,” she said with straight-forward honesty and a serious look, “I sold my flesh.” I glance at my co-examiner and she did not make any reaction to this statement. Obviously, she has heard stories like this before.

After that, I would have given her any scholarship to improve herself and her exceptional art. There must be stories like this all over Georgia. My partner just shook her head, “Yes,” and went on to the next question as if the young woman, age 50, had said, “I received a grant which took two years to successfully obtain!” This woman is a survivor where survival is king and queen and pawn and everything. Americans cannot understand the dignity with which this lovely, strong, courageous woman said, “I sold my flesh.” How many artists would give up something that precious to pursue excellence in their art? She saved her inner soul and her inner dignity as an artist and a person but she sacrificed something too. Selling your flesh is not something which should be looked upon as degrading but a statement of strength in this case to move into the future with her head high. Was I impressed? More than words can ever say; more than anyone will know. She said those words as if they are normal and matter of fact but each word is filled with resolve and purpose. It says, “I will anything for my art. My inner being is more important than my body. I will do what needs to be done and will move on.” Her film won an award at the Cannes Film Festival but for me her greatest reward is her resolve to create something personal, yet a film that transcends the individual to a universal statement.

Now it is early Saturday morning and the sun bites through the mists of a coming storm across the hills which roll down to the ugly apartment buildings. The statuesque churches and Mtkvari River look cold in their stillness. The wind rips through any garments and if one takes off gloves your hands instantly freeze (it seems). It is a Tbilisi cold, the kind that cuts to the bone. There are three min-buses filled with children and Embassy personnel driving toward the mountains for a short ski vacation.

As we drive over uneven roads, the hills topped with snow act as a frieze to the valley. The names tick by: Gori, Alkabori, Ksani, Batumi, Sukami, like minutes and miles. Ahead are the storms which are foreshadowed by the blurring of the mountain tops as we drive toward Borjami (the place of the mineral waters and the beginning of the “high hills” which I call mountains). Nothing is a “mountain” unless it is part of the Caucasus. As we drive into the foothills, the ground is covered with virgin white six feet of snow. It gives a visual meaning to the naked trees, dark houses, silhouetted poles, brown weeds and a glimmer of grass that seems to litter the landscape. Only the road is somewhat clear but only for a time in this sea of white. The snow drapes itself around the landscape like a royal robe.

Now the wet road is no more, just part of the whiteness and more snow is falling hard. We are only halfway to the mountain resort. If it keeps up at this pace, we will be forced to turn back. Inside the van, it is warm and the scene of beauty keeps our attention off an important question, “If it gets worse, will we make it?” I am not the driver who knows his job so I shelve that thought and concentrate on the white scene which takes on its own glory. On the side of the road a man stands waiting. For what, it is not clear. In the streets of Tbilisi many men wait and know not what for, except a job anywhere, doing anything.

Horse-drawn carts move slowly along the same white opening between the fences and the trees. Merchants are still open on the roadside, bundled against the blizzard that has now evolved. We follow another mini-bus, pass stalled cars and buses, but our movement is slow now. Suddenly, the three buses stop at a rest station. Men and women run to the bathrooms. The tile floor is slippery from the blowing snow and the stalls are covered with layers of the new whiteness. The sun is attempting to come out. It is clearing. We will go on. The ice on the windshield is beginning to melt.

It is clear now. You can see the tops of the “high hills”. The roads are still all white but the view of our surroundings is crested by a muffler of soft mist. We drive through sentinels of trees in stark contrast to the gray “hills” beyond. The snow still falls and there is no indication that it will stop but we know that we will make the resort. Below in the rushing stream, a sole fisherman stands thigh-deep in the freezing brown waters. On the other side of the road, it drops off to a white field. Now we are in the valley of the “high hills” with icicle-dripping rocks on one side and the stream on the other. The road has become a war zone of pot holes and small craters. Our driver is a master of navigating this course. This is the same road that we drove when we went to Kutaisi in August but it looks different in its albino coat.

We climb and climb the high hills until three cars block the road. Our drivers get out and help to move the stranded cars. The snow at our sides is now four feet deep and mostly untouched by human feet. Now, we step into the warmth of the resort, the falling white snow, the shadows on the rolling mountains and the silhouettes of houses, trees and people are a black, white and gray painting by Whistler outside the windows. It is one of his winter nocturnes. Snow purifies the land. It gives it a cloak of ermine. As soon as we arrived, we eat a simple meal. Tonight, it will be the same at the Bakuraini Ski Resort.

When morning comes, pink mixed with a beginning blue emerges over the Eastern rim of the Bakuraini Mountains. There is a stillness here that the city will never know. The pace is natural and normal. The beginning day is quiet and reserved like an elderly gentleman rising with the sun. It is snowing gently now after our walk to the village. The room is painted stark white. We were instructed when we prepared for the trip to bring sunglasses but I did not know that it was for the indoor glare. The gentleness of the snow is now heavy. The distant mountains are lost in flurries and white fills the picture frame of the window. Our indoor world is soothing and warm.

I

Today, we are leaving. It is blue skies and dripping icicles, which at noon the proprietor knocked down with a broom handle. We walk again over the white road, being passed by cars, a man on horseback and horse-driven sleighs. Every few minutes a snowmobile bounces up or down the road. Taxis without chains and buses with them pass. Downstairs, when the proprietor counted out the money from the Embassy representative, he is unsure whether to give a receipt that American Embassy needs for their records, a paper trail. The man wants no paper trail for the Georgian government to follow. This is true all over Georgia, a suspicion of anything that could be used against them. Small corruption like this man is showing is a survival technique. It is not up to Americans to judge as we do not live here all the time.

April:

Letter from Tbilisi:

It has taken me a while but I have come to the conclusion that there are two centers of life in Tbilisi. There is Rustavili Avenue, the six-lane Broadway of this city of 1.6 million people. In terms of many cities in the world, that does not seem like a lot of individuals living in the same place but this is a country with a population of 3.5 million. Rustavili Avenue is the tourist center and young people’s gathering place. All the theaters and most of the upscale restaurants border its sides. Its main architectural symbols are the multiple rounded arches and the refuge hotel behind the statue of King David on the turn-around circle for traffic. The arches were the Soviet way to signify the center of commerce. Now the arches houses a restaurant called Montmarte. The “refuge” hotel is a continual eye sore for Tbilisi, with the plywood partitions enclosing the balconies and laundry always hanging from the metal fences and windows. “Refuge” is not the correct term, although it is used by visitors and citizens alike to describe the place. Technically speaking, a refuge is someone who comes from outside the country and is given asylum. These are “displaced persons” from northern Georgia where the battle still wages on who owns that region. The Georgian government claims Abkhazia as part of Georgia, Abkhazia wants it as their own country, and Russia says that it is still part of their empire. Most of the terrorists who plague Tbilisi and Russia come from this remote mountain region. Also this is the region where the Russian have been bombing in recent months in their “war on terrorism”. Russia says that this northern Georgian region is the haven for Chechen terrorists. On November 27-28, two Russian military jets SU-25’s and four assaulting helicopters MI-24 broke into Georgian air space, pounded the mountain slopes of Pankisi gorge. Rustavili Avenue is dangerous after dark we are told. The American Embassy of Georgia put out an alert about a threat to all Americans in Tbilisi of kidnapping in October and another alert after a German diplomat was murdered in December.  During the day, this area is alive with citizens, paying bills at the telephone building, walking the streets to look in shop windows, buying things from street stays and of course getting a Big Mac from MacDonald’s main restaurant.

But after you get to know Tbilisi better, you find that the heartbeat of business, commerce and shopping is not in this city center but the other one across the river, Tbilisi’s largest bazaar. The bazaar is roughly three to four square miles of open-air stands that sell “everything” from food to the kitchen sink. I mean literally kitchen sinks, bathrooms, plumbing supplies, hardware, tape, paint, wire, lumber, plywood, food and anything else  Russians, Turks, English, Dutch, Georgian, Greeks, Germans, etc. wish to sell. My driver, and in Tbilisi you must have a driver for protection as well as transportation, Raphael, takes me to the bazaar for whatever is needed in our daily lives. We break a connector on our commode. Go to the bazaar. Need material to put up an exhibition of art. Go to the bazaar. Need clothes. Need daily things. Need food. Go to the bazaar. Surrounding the bazaar, starting early in the morning, are men looking for work with their signs and tools lined up beside the road. The bazaar itself is a labyrinth of shops. In fact, sometimes two or three shops are in the same space and only when you pay do you understand that it is run by more than one owner. The walkways are dirt. There is no protection from the weather. To find what you need, you must take the time to stop and look at each place, each object for sale, while walking the winding, narrow passageways. Actually this bazaar is three bazaars, one for food, one for small objects and one for construction materials and large items. There are no signs telling you what is where so you must allow time to shop. It opens at about ten in the morning and closes when the sun goes down. It stays open in all kinds of weather in every season of the year. If you come when it opens, you can watch merchants shoveling potatoes from the back of large, enclosed trucks into canvas bags and then marvel at shoppers who somehow tie on top, on the side, and cram produce bags inside overloaded cars. They come from Tbilisi or nearby villages. Whole families come and whole families sell the wares. It is life at its elemental base with some luxuries for those with the money to buy. Merchants know a foreigner by how we shop. We are infrequent shopper. Three or four times a week, the average citizen buys at the bazaar. Almost all the time, it is less expensive than shopping along Rustavili Avenue. Also, there is little danger because it never stays open at night with its limited electricity and no bathrooms. But if you listen carefully as you meander through its maze, you can hear a heart beating. It is the people’s commercial organ of Tbilisi.

One thing about living constantly with warnings about kidnapping, bombings and other dangers, you begin to think in these terms. As an artist, my problem and talent has always been that I could imagine all kinds of things and see the images with crystal clear vision. When the image is a nightmare, that makes it more difficult to dismissed (particularly when the event is something triggered by CNN News on the laptop).

One Drop of Blood

Waking early in the morning, which is the pattern for my sleep schedule in Tbilisi, I lie a moment, thinking about the strange dream that still slips in and out of my consciousness. I was the bureau chief for a national newspaper, newly positioned, and I sent out a correspondent to get a story. It gets a little cloudy in terms of the detail from here on when I try to place myself in the correspondent’s body. What is clear is the next scene. I am sitting under a large, gnarled old tree in the courtyard of a small town in the Middle East and a drop of blood appears on my hand. As I look up, I see the body of the correspondent in the limps of the tree. Somehow the person who killed him placed the body there for us to find. Only one drop of blood came from the body but it was enough. I sent off another human being to get a story and he became the story. Even the murderer knew that. He sent back the body to tell the world that this is what happens to Americans who come to this part of the world for stories. They become the story.

On waking I returned to CNN on my laptop. In Tbilisi, Georgia, we have no television or radio. In the last eight days, the electricity has been off each day more than it has been on so television or radio is not a sure source of information. And even if we did have electricity, all the news is in Georgian therefore no television, no radio, just internet. Shortly after the abduction of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter, who was kidnapped in Pakistan, the US Department of State sent out one of its periodic warnings to alert all Americans about the danger of kidnapping. In three months in Georgia, it is the third warning, with one briefing to go with the printed word. The message is clear, “Do all that you can to not become a kidnap victim?”

You wonder at time if those announcements are really for us or are our government’s way to say, “We told them to be careful.” In the normal course of events, you make contacts with individuals in the country where you are staying. Daniel Pearl came to the Middle East to fill out a story on the terrorist Richard Reid. He had to make contacts. That is how one gets a story. He contacted a man named Bashir, who it was found out later to be Sheikh Omar, a terrorist leader in Pakistan. The contacts were simple: emails passed back and forth. One from Bashir read, “I am sorry to have not replied to you earlier. I was preoccupied with looking after my wife who has been ill. Please pray for her health.”

Pearl consented to meet Bashir outside a restaurant and he was kidnapped on January 23. I noticed that the Olympics are the lead story now on CNN and Pearl is secondary news. Yet he is still a story in the making. What will propel Pearl into front page news again is that one drop of blood.

Even the kidnappers know, like my killer in my dream, that the real story is America’s concept of the value in a single life. We do hold some truths as self evident. One of them is that American life and American freedom is precise. Pearl was not kidnapped as a person but as a valued pawn to play on some global chessboard.. Yet once he was kidnapped, other Americans value Daniel Pearl as an individual. If Pearl had gotten his story about Richard Reid’s connection to al-Queda and bin Laden, he would have had his reporter’s byline at the top or bottom of a story. Now it is clear that he is the story.

We value one drop of American blood. We value human life in a way that is strange to many in this part of the world. As I teach American art to Georgians, it is critical to teach American values and American democracy. The work of art is only the story when the artist is less famous than his painting or sculpture or performance. I teach about Texas artists who become the story when they are seen in the larger picture of American values.

To live abroad, you are constantly reminded by other Americans and by the Department of State, “You can become the story.” But how is anyone know if the person following you is a terrorist who is targeting you for kidnapping or a friendly person just interested in improving his English? Americans cannot conduct daily life abroad in fear and there has to be some degree of trust. You wish to keep your humanity alive no matter where you are. Especially after you learn that a contact has a wife who is ill, has children that he loves, and wishes to call you, “Friend”. But trust is difficult and takes time when there is the threat always of one drop of blood. The problem is, when looking for a story, time is not a luxury that a reporter has. The bureau chief wants it while the story is hot.

On way to dismiss nightmares is to stay in bed awake, snuggling in the warmth when the cold is all around. Also at times, logic is not the best companion for a Fulbright Scholar.

Becoming 70 or What’s The Difference Between A Duck?

I woke up considering the fact that I was growing old. I do not consider it much of the time but tonight I did. Normally, I wake up about three o’clock and Anne turns on the light to read. We don’t stay awake long but it happens as you grow in years. Tonight I said, “I am going to stay in this warm bed until May and then get up to go dancing with you for my 70^th birthday.” She kind of turned my way, rolling her eyes to the heavens when I get into one of these moods, and said, “You have too much to do on your Fulbright before May.” “No,” I said, “I am going to stay in bed for weeks on end, just snuggling against your warm presence. Your skin is so wonderful and fresh.” “Have you seen the age spots on my hands?” she asked. “No,” I answered, “you are always YOU to me.” “That’s not logical,” she replied as she turned a page in her new book. “Logic does not interest me right now,” I smiled, rolling on my side. “It is a myth that someone else created, probably someone in their teens. I feel like asking questions about the universe tonight like ‘What’s the difference between a duck?”

Laying there in the warmth, I dismissed the notion that I would ever have to get up again and began to consider the uselessness of logic to mature citizens of the world like myself. Logic was invented for the young. If x happens then it follows that y will happen. If I make an appointment, I must keep it at the time and place that it was made. That is not the thinking or actions in the South Pacific. They get up when the sun rises or not, and go to sleep when the moon shines or not. It is the style of life that we have found in Georgia. As one Georgian said to me, why should I pay taxes or tell the government what I make, it is corrupt and will put the money in their own pocket? I tried to consider this logically but was frustrated by the fact that the same individual complained about not having electricity because the government could not afford it in winter. That is when he mentioned the line about telling the government about his income.

It is may be logical that to make a living you have to get up and work. But tonight, in the warmth of this bed, with the heavy Georgian covers holding off the chill of the outside cold, it is enough to think about staying here for weeks on end. It is not logical but it is the moment and it is enjoyed.

I live in an illogical world, which sometimes borders on insanity. War has been the prime movement of the 20^th century and the way this century is starting, it is the way that the next 100 years will precede. During the First World War (and aren’t all wars events that impact the whole world), a group of artists, poets, writers and thinkers got together in Zurich and started the Dadaist Movement of art, which was based on illogic and was a protest against the craziness that they saw happening in Europe. They would have been happy with my question, “What’s the difference between a duck?”  Their answer may have been, “One of its two of its feet is webbed.” I know that the answer makes no sense. It is not logical but life is not logical much of the time.

I was born to die. I was born to live. Both of those statements are true. It is not logical.

Love is not logical. I have had 45 years of a honeymoon which has never been logical but is filled with love. Should I run and get a divorce because love is not logical? The woman that I married so many years ago, that I still enjoy in the warmth of our bed, is forever “her”, not young, not old. Art is not logical as a profession. Much of the time you work and the only rewards are the satisfaction of finding and exploring something new (many times yourself).  If I were logical, art is not the first pursuit of  life. It is my life though. It is not only a pursuit but a passion.

When people tell me that I “must”, “should”, “consider”, “be”, “act” something, I want to call out in the loudest voice possible. It is a voice not held back by age or infirmity, even when those things are present. I call out, “Sancho, bring me my sword, my spear and my shield, I just dreamed the impossible dream. I will stay in bed until I get up and then ride the winds of adventure. Age be damned. Logic be damned.”

Another bad wind that keeps us awake, another nightmare about security is all that the morning brings. Most days are routine and that makes them safe. Some mornings, it is important to write out the dream, to objectify it, so that a normal day can proceed.

Drown, Swim or Fly

The wind crashes, seeming to lift the tin from the surrounding garage roofs, rattling old skeletons of memories that were hidden deep in the subconscious, and furiously blowing away the last opportunity for sleep. Our second floor apartment in the heart of Tbilisi, Georgia is at the center of some demonic wind tunnel, coming in rushes of sound, attacking the three foot thick walls as if they were paper. In all this cacophony of sound, nightmares about security rush in on the winds of the mind. I dreamed of a scene as if from an Oriental Godfather movie with dark figures in long coats (seen too many Matrix movies) invading the apartment as if they though our two steel doors were only tissue paper protection. I know now as I awake that it was a nightmare but my artist’s imaging made it crystal sharp and vivid. Writing is my way to put the demons into the shadows. As long as we are here and terrorism roams the world, it will not totally disappear but it also will not hold me back from completing the job that I cam to do as a Fulbright Scholar to Georgia. Anne is my lifeline to normality in a society that is far from my normal. Tonight, again for the hundredth time, there is no electricity so I write in the ghostly light of a battery-driven half light.

I know now that I have made a difference in this society and recently got a letter from Alan Maskin, an architect friend in Seattle, who told me that Temur Jorjadze, a Georgian architecd, had followed up upon my contacts and visited the daylight laboratory at OlsonSundberg Architects. Now, he may just bring back modern techniques to light this medieval world of Georgia that is struggling to come into the 20^th century (and hopefully the 21^st century). I met with Ketevan Kintsurashvili, my co-teacher at the Academy, and discussed the Georgian part of the American Art Archive Collection.

What made this nightmare so real is the knowledge that it is all possible (even though I know that it is very improbable). In my dream, I awoke to several black figures in the apartment and on my work table where I create the colors of joy is a severed Oriental head with eyes wide open, which turns as I walk around it. I can still see it now awake. That is the curse of a visual photographic memory that can pull any vision, real or imaginary, up from some deep place to explore its possibilities in the light. You cannot control the images that blow in like this wind from the subconscious. As long as we are in Georgia, we will never feel completely safe (in fact, that is the tale of any traveler after the September 11^th terrorist attack in New York) therefore images that are conjured from the deepest imagination will appear. I have not had this kind of vivid nightmare since I was a child and now I push seventy from the lower figures. I know where it comes from as a mature individual and why it appears but that is little consolation and it does not make the image disappear. Maybe I am feeling the pressure of time- so little, so much to accomplice.

The wind has not stopped as I write in this strange, clouded light. It blows the demons of the imagination to the surface, rattles the basic fabric of reality and reminds us that man and man’s mind is a leaf in a whirlwind of crashing sound and invisible power. Then again, it just might be a Harry Potter night of youthful imagination. They call it “second childhood”, I believe, and the scary parts of the night wind will blow away with the gentle March winds which come on Friday. It makes me chuckle at myself to see how this gift of the imagination can twist a nightmare into a child’s fairy story and, of course, visa versa.

As I write, my companion, like every night about this time, 5:00 a.m., is Coke and cookies. Maybe I am back into childhood- so blow wind, the morning sun is coming and your time is short. I sympathize with your fury! My heart’s mind reaches out to your measured existence. So blow, blow and “do not go gentle into that good night”.

The other day at breakfast Anne said to me over bread, cheese, yogurt and fruit with, of course, our bottled water, “You are eating dates, raisins, tomatoes and cucumbers which you have not eaten in our forty-five years of marriage. What is the difference in Georgia?” After a moment’s reflection, I told her what could be advice for any Fulbright Scholar who finds himself a stranger in a strange place, “In the land of the sea, you drown, swim or fly.” Tonight, I thought that I might be drowning but this journal kept me afloat, along with the warmth of Anne’s body beside me.

It is the small intimate things that hold off the rushing wind and the vivid nightmares. It is these things which seem so fragile that endure.

What brings you through some days when the language gets to you, or the traffic, or the lack of schedules, or no electricity, no gas, no water, and no message from anywhere telling you why, is the small things. No Fulbright Scholar can exist without the small wonders that make up some days.

It’s the Small Things  that Shape Us

Tbilisi, Georgia: We went out tonight to our favorite Georgian pizza place. We had three beers, a small bowl of garlic bread, Capri pizza for me, and pasta with spinach for Anne, all for $15 USD. As I ate the pizza, enjoying the olives and the artichokes, I thought about how the small things in life shape our existence. It is not September 11^th, or the putting together the American Art Collection here as part of my Fulbright grant, or building the first playground in Tbilisi with the help of B. Rapoport, or teaching my classes at the Academy, or the work with the Non-Governmental Organization’s and the art dealers, or the chance to paint and show in national exhibitions, or attending ballets, operas and shows. It is all of that plus olives and artichokes. I think that I have come to the point where I am a rock where water is slowly (and in the case of 9/11 quickly) dripping to shape my existence. We cannot change the shape that we take in a general sense although we can open new currents of water and the pace of the dripping. I cannot believe that my shape is predetermined so I fight against the dripping of the day-to-day and try to shape my own existence but I know that in one sense my struggle is futile. Maybe that is why I keep the day-to-day journal. It records the dripping and the shaping. And in the recording, the observations, I step outside the action and shape the inner life. As the king says in The King and I, “It is a puzzlement.”

While eating an olive and noticing the contrast to the artichoke, while sitting last night at the opera Carmen and noticing the contrast of a gargantuan man engulfing the seat beside Anne and a beauty with an aging man where she seemed to be elegantly playing her host for this evening, while tediously cataloging books for the American Art Archive Collection all day before we went out for dinner, with having no electricity  while writing in my journal, the water drips and I am shaped. It is the recording, the noticing, the self-shaping which helps to push the drips one way or another. Or is all this an illusion? Am I a butterfly dreaming that I am asleep, or asleep dreaming that I am a butterfly (as the Chinese query)? If the dripping of daily events stops, will I awake? It is a puzzlement.

All this is our life in Georgia. It is not the big things that shape our days but the dripping of daily events that create the fabric of our lives. Tonight and every night when our driver Raphael picks us up in his car, he asks, “How are things, Mr. Joe?” I say, “Fine”, and record that he never asks Anne the same question. Georgian male life is not water that will shape me obviously. Anne is one true source of the water that shapes my living. I shoot her a knowing backward glance. Always in Georgia, men sit in the front and women behind. We spend small moments during the day joking about it.

Today there is no electricity. Last night there was none. In between we take showers and wash clothes, and then leave to shop at the grocery store that is below our apartment. They know us now. We talk of no electricity and winter cold. We pick up water, coke, Georgian bread, yogurt, six nut cakes, toilet paper (we are looked at strangely because I buy three roles everyday since I use them to clean my paint brushes), one Snicker bar, two soups, and Russian breath mints. We are normally together and the young girl says, “Hello”, in English, and we reply in Georgian. It is a ritual of daily life that we and they expect. On days when I just run down to get something, the girl asks: “Where is your wife?” The two of us are joined in her mind and therefore in ours too. The lady behind the cake counter always tries to sell me some new sweet. It is a game we play where I refuse most of the time with a wave of my hand, a knowing smile and a head shake as both of us do not speak the other’s language. Each time I come she still asks and on rare days I say, “Yes” (“Ki” in Georgian). It keeps the ritual alive and the drips of living continue.

Just as the outside of our being is shaped by daily sun, wind, stress and laughter, the inner self is shaped by the dripping of large and small ideas, emotions and sensory experiences. The mind does not separate size when ideas or feelings are concerned. It is not time that ages our being but the dripping of events, some real, some not, like olives and artichokes in a sea of pizza.

An artist is lucky as a Fulbright Scholar, he has learned how to forget. I wrote this article in celebration of that gift, the importance of forgetting.

The Important Of Forgetting

Being far away from your home country, in a land where the language is strange even in the world of languages since Georgian is one of the fourteen world languages but is only used in Georgia, you think and read a lot. Recently on reading again a 1976 publication by Edward T. Hall, called Beyond Culture, I was reminded of the artist’s, the creator’s need to forget. Children learn it as they play. You purposely forget so that you can see the world with fresh eyes. Hall’s says, “The failure to understand the significance of play in maturing human beings has had incalculable consequences, because play is not only crucial to learning but (unlike other drives) is its own reward.”

To an artist, forgetting is critical to any pursuit. I have the kind of mind that can remember brushstrokes as I walk through a museum exhibition. It gets in the way when I pick up a brush for a new painting. Therefore the first hour or so of painting is to forget all those other painter’s solutions in my mind’s eye. This allows me, or any creative person, to come to material with fresh eyes. The poet, dancer, writer, musician, inventor or learner can find individual and new solutions to “stuff” that others have only seen through established patterns or forms. The Russian scientist Luria in the mid 20^th century established the importance of forgetting in his book The Mind of a Mnemonist, the life story of a man who could not forget anything and remember everything that was placed before him. On first sight this would seem a blessing but on closer look, the man was a mental cripple. If you gave this man a problem to solve, as a visualizer he could solve it. But he could not understand poetry and abstract ideas. “Infinity” and “nothing” were beyond his mental grasp.

I remember in school when the teachers would reward the students who could memorize the best. I could not. It took me years to find ways to keep things in my mind. I was always seeing the world with fresh eyes and drawing/painting it with those visions. I finally learned that if I put a context to the data that I could remember it and by taking away the context forget it as easily. This has practical implications. At one point in my life I  build houses from the ground up. I did five over the years, from the architectural plan to the last nail or the trawl of concrete. After the first house, I found that I had to forget all the bad things that happened, all the aching muscles and long hours, all the feelings of disappointment when something did not come out as I planned before I could start a new project. Since I am a visualizer who remembered pictures of things placed in front of me, I had to learn to forget them so they did not get in the way when I wanted to have a new vision.

I found that it helps to know how the brain works and that there are ways to help you forget. Japanese Zen monks repeat a phrase until the words are lost and only the sound resonated in the soul of the priest. As Hall says, “The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid, he has little basis for validating his own self.”  At points in my life I travel to find my other self, to forget the Western man that could only see with Western eyes. In the West, we place logic and irrationality at two opposing poles. Recent mind studies find that they are positioned in the same place in the brain. Irrationality is a way to start the process toward logic and visa versa. In the front of the brain are the faculties for perception, body movement, performance of planned action, memorizing, and problem solving. If you dance, it helps with problem solving or your performance of a planned action. You can memorize better if you clear the mind of old “stuff” that clutters up the corners. Forgetting is essential to creativity. It is too bad that the warring factions in the Middle East never learned that lesson. In the long run for a human to enjoy the freshness of spring, a new rain, another sun-filled day, your child’s small hand is yours, love and sex, forgetting is as important as remembering.

The one historical fact about America is our ability to forget. We sell everything “new and improved”. What has made America great is its ability to forget (see the new) and remember (experience history) at the same time. John Robinson, the great football coach of USC, once told his team, “Today we play our cross-town rivals UCLA for the national championship. It is the most important game in your life, in your football career. Nothing can change that at this moment but there is one thing I want you to remember when you run out on that field, “There are two billion Chinese who just don’t give a damn.” He helped them forget and remember simultaneously.

Tbilisi 7

Raphael showed me, after six months here, where to get fresh-baked bread near our apartment and I learn the magical phrase, “Gwali puri, “ for “fresh round bread”. Now at least, I know that. What everyone knows here is elemental if you live here. If you don’t, it is difficult and places you in a constant state of uncertainty.

Today I go see Irina Koshoridze, Curator of Oriental Art, at the National Museum and talk of their work, concerns and worries/needs about security for the collection. She mentions that they were sending four Kandinsky’s to an exhibition of his work in Japan. The insurance value is $400,000. They also own a Jules Olitzsky “field painting” which was given for them to sell but since it was taken into their collection, although it has nothing to do with their collection or purpose, there has been a discussion for years albout whether they can sell it or not. There is resistance to any sale of art works, even when the work is given to sell. While all this is going on, the curators are paid 40 lari a month ($20 USD), the guides 17 lari ($8.50 a month) while the guards, who are paid by the government directly, make 50 lari. It is the way of this society. It is the tragedy of this society. Full professors with PhDs made 15 to 20 lari a month at major national state universities..

Last night I receive an email from Keti that the department head got a quote for the room for the American Art Archive Collection. I cannot believe the figure, $10,000, in a society where thousands of skilled craftsmen stand on the side of the road waiting, hoping, for a little work. I am angry that they thought, “Let’s take the American.” I know the Academy craftsmen are good but that figure is ridiculous. I try to email back but Georgia On Line cuts my message off five times. Finally, at 2:00 a.m., I sent something, typing it on a disc, saving it and then copying it for transmission. It is a frustrating society for anyone who wants to do a quality job. I can see where initiative is the first victim of greed and corruption and simple inadequacy.

Anne and I go to Telavi on Friday in an Embassy van with a delegation from the American Embassy of Georgia. We accompany Terry to her new home for three months and I give a lecture at Telavi State University. The city is at the entrance to the Caucasus Mountains (only 80 kilometers from Pankisi Gorge where the Russians, American and Georgians are concerned with Chechnya rebels and al Queda terrorists) but the beauty of the scene is breathtaking, a vista of snowcapped peaks stretching as far as the eye can see in 360 degrees. I give my lecture on “Creativity and Information in the 21^st Century” to over 120 students, faculty and interested citizens. One high school teacher brings several of her best students. As I come into the room, they all stand up. It is a huge success, I am told, and many ask if I will come back. I sign autographs when I am finished talking. Afterwards, we go to lunch with the Rector acting as tamada, settle Terry into her new home, and drive back the 150 kilometers to Tbilisi.

I came to the American Embassy of Georgia and noticed a copy of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board Annual Report 2000 and on the cover is my painting, Stripescape #78. As one Fulbright alumnus says, “You will get more coverage from that than being in the Fulbright Gallery on the website.” Yes, I am proud that my work made the cover. It is a joyous surprise.

Anne, Raphael and I go to the art bazaar down by the river’s edge two straight days, examining the “art by the yard” multitude of works, looking for something that my daughter and her husband in Dallas might like. Her taste is not mine or even close. I love modern and appreciate traditional painting; she tolerates some modern but loves traditional works of art. I use my art history mind to sort out the best with my artist’s eye for paint quality and drawing skill. I choose those which are well painted, photograph them and send the image to Texas for them to consider. She does trust my eye. I do know painting and I look for superior drawing. Here, at the art bazaar, I do not see much that stimulates my mind or sets my emotions on fire, and those are the two criteria by which I select for myself. But again, this is a choice for others. I want them to make a selection before the weather gets better and all tourists come to pick the bones of the artists.

The room at the National State University where I am teaching on Tuesdays is arranged in the Georgian/Soviet manner. There are chairs behind a long table for speakers, row upon row of seats for students, and on the side another row of chairs for visiting professors and guests. The idea is to create a physical and psychological wall between the professor and the student. I discussed this arrangement this morning, pointing out that this has not been how artists have arranged space since the late Renaissance with Caravaggio’s paintings or Elizabethan times with Shakespeare’s Globe Theater or his plays. The artist sets out to break the imaginary “picture plane” between the viewer (audience) and the action. I do all that I can this morning to do this. I have student’s invade the professor’s space to hold up cards. I wear a funny hat from Disneyland to make them laugh and shorten the distance between student and teacher. I show them the “cow project” of Zurich, Chicago, New York and Waco which is an artistic as well as a financial/tourist event. Lastly, I discuss the sculpture of Nancy Graves, using a video by Penn and Teller. The class runs from 10:15 to 11:25. In one way, I fail to break down a wall which has been built by Russia and Georgia for years since no student interrupted me with a question as we make this journey, and in another way I succeed. After the class, many students destroy the imaginary “picture plane” to ask me for my autograph. Even as someone who wants to tear down barriers, I am still not used to giving autographs for being a good teacher.

Ketevan Kintsurashvili, my co-professor at the Academy in the art criticism course, to give me Devi’s (her architect husband) estimates on the room for the American Collection. It was $3,500, a mere $6,500 less than the Academy craftsman’s estimate. Obviously, they will not get the work. Devi’s plan is in Georgian but I can see that it is thorough and complete. The bottom line is within budget. In the afternoon, I meet with Besarion Darjania, whose business card says “Master of Cameo Carving” (a young craftsman who is trying to organize an artist’s center and make a model of the free enterprise system in Georgia). He takes me to his proposed center, a hole of concrete at the bottom of a stack of apartments, and to his workshop, crammed with other craftsmen making superb cameos, jewelry and woodwork. A member of Parliament comes by, Ketevan Tamaradze, who wants to create a large photography exhibition of Robert Capa photos (200-300) of Georgia with the writings of John Steinbeck. The two Americans traveled all through the Caucasus region with Capa taking over 4000 photographs. Lastly, I worked with Maka Dvalishvili, Director of the Georgian Arts and Cultural Center, who is a whirlwind of projects on which she needs my help. I just proofread her narrative to the Brooklyn Museum to send her museum reproductions and we are jointly working on a grant to create a newsletter, hard and website, for information to organizations, artists and an interested public. Now, she is beginning to plan a large exhibition to send to the United States but someone from America must request it in writing. She says that she trusts me to do it for her. I probably will since we do trust each other. That is the coin of working together in Georgia. In truth, it is the criteria for working together anywhere in the world. The last appointment of the day is to be at the American Embassy  for a grant on arts management in the performing arts.

Sharon Hudson Dean, the director of the Cultural Affairs Division, asked my opinion on a proposal to bring three performing arts professionals to Georgia for a four-day workshop in arts management. She explains the idea and the cost, $10,000. My first reaction was again, “This is ridiculous.” I see no way that anyone can do any good in Georgia in four days. It has taken me four months to build trust with only a few of the arts managers and other professionals. All you can do in four days is come, drink cocktails at the Sheridan Metichi Hotel, eat good Georgian food, visit a few locations (the walk-through where nothing is seen of how the organization really functions), and give a lecture with some practical suggestions and leave. I see no worth in the project. It has not been thought out for a lasting change. I will meet with the woman who is planning it but I have great misgivings on its worth.

I am asked to extend my stay in Georgia and complete some of the projects which I have jointly started with Georgians. It is flattering but it is not in the best interest of Anne, or me, or the people I work with. At some point in any venture, it is time to leave. Georgians must solve Georgian problems, using ideas that come from anywhere and techniques which I might have helped them with in the course of my stay. On email, it makes no difference if I am here or anywhere else. Distance does not exist on email or a conference call. At one time in history, distance was a determinate to communications. Now, no! I am sure that Maka, Keti and Irina will continue to communicate with me and I will continue to help them from an American base. In what this society needs, it is more important that they have people they trust in America than working beside them here.

IN GEORGIA, THE PROBLEM IS SOMEWHAT KNOWLEDGE BUT MORE IT IS A MATTER OF TRUST.

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