A Few Words About Bernie's Bird

Everyone is talking about the small bird that landed on Bernie Sanders’ podium in Portland, Oregon. Some people are saying, “It’s a sign.” A sign that Nature is voting for Bernie Sanders. (Let's face it, of the candidates, only Bernie would try to stop GMOs, fracking, pollution, global warming and save the bees!) Others are being silly, “Put a bird on it!” lighting up the Twitter feed, literally tweeting like birds. Still others are conjuring up animated birds to explain to them that while it landed on Bernie, it was still voting for Trump. Ha, very funny.

But only a few are asking, “What kind of bird was it?” Bernie himself called it – symbolically – a dove, come to tell us “No more war!” That message is wonderful, but I hope he knows it was not a dove. Really, Bernie.

A very informed young woman on my Facebook, concerned about our collective break with rudimentary Nature, said the bird was a female house finch. I thought it was a female house sparrow. But, no matter there. The distinction is moot. The bird was small, female, common, of the house, of the ground not the air, and in my view, represented the very people who champion Bernie Sanders – the workers, the everyday men and women, those who struggle, those who commute, who cannot afford the things they need, who try and try and try and sometimes win, and often fail to make life better for themselves and their families. The small bird, that maybe had learned that crumbs may accompany a water bottle, gave Bernie’s plastic bottle a peck, but mostly sat back on the sign “A Future to Believe In” and gazed right at the man.

The audience seemed to understand a few things about birds. Enough to revel in the odd behavior of this one. Small birds are skittish. They may enter a crowded building because they like to nest in the rafters, they may even fly down occasionally, but they do not get very close to most humans. Small birds do not stick around when things get noisy. The collective uproar from the crowd did not frighten the bird. It sat back – another odd behavior, as most birds remain perched somewhat forward when around people, ready to get going – and stayed looking up at Bernie.

I like to think the bird came to remind us about Nature and what we are doing to it. That we should treasure and protect all life. And, yes, I like to think the little bird is a sign of peace. As well as a symbol of joy in the little things.

I want to read a lot into this bird. I’ve been a believer in birds coming to us as messengers. I’ve experienced such visits, from a mourning dove and from a mockingbird after the death of a friend. One of my closest friends, after the passing of her mother, had several visitations from swans, one of which very deliberately turned to face her and stayed a very long time. My daughter was followed and befriended by a jay, not our large Northeastern blue jay, but a smaller, darker variety from a different part of the country. She’s a painter, and while she painted down by the pond near our house, he came and chirped, flew away, came back with a raspberry, chirped again, danced in front of her. We realized, after seeing him do the same thing in our yard, with our raspberries, that he had gone to our yard, taken a raspberry and gone back to her at the pond to show off. She named him Buddy and he stayed by her side all that summer.

I want to tell you what Bernie was talking about before he saw the bird.

Here is what is on the video that no one has yet mentioned –

"and if he or she does their school work seriously, does well, takes school seriously…" Bird enters.

Right now, in a last gasp campaign, Michelle Obama - who tried to tell us about organic food, but was silenced by the powers that be, began to reach out to children once again by surprise visits to local Washington D.C. schools that had gardens - and by this last ditch effort to help America’s children – “Let Girls Learn!”

When I wrote Holy Days, and in fact, when I LIVED Holy Days, I knew that the only thing we have going for us is education. My character Gloria Wisher loves to learn and that love is her salvation.

Education is all we have. Self-education is what Gloria turns to, as a poor child, she teaches herself – to read, to write, to cook, to sew, to ride a bike, to plant a garden – and further, to study and keep studying.

I think Bernie was about to say what I’ve always said, but hey nobody listens to me. Bernie has the podium and it has a bird on it – the education is there if you are serious, if you pay attention, if you take school seriously.

I always like to say, “No matter what you think of your teacher, no matter how lame or stupid you think he or she is, no matter how dull the lesson, keep learning! Use them up and take all you can from them, and move on to new studies and learn, learn, learn. The resources are all around you." I studied in a broken, abusive home, in a library where the rain dripped on the books and outside where I was stalked and bullied. I was literally beaten by the neighborhood kids every time I got an A. But, I kept on getting A’s.

My mother and I used to watch the sparrows take a sand bath in the twilight sun. The dust turned to sparkling gold, and the birds were ecstatic.

“Look how happy they are!” Mama said.

I learned from sparrows how to be happy with little. In America, being content with little is not considered admirable.

Perhaps, if Bernie makes it to the White House, we will learn a new lesson. Brought to us by a very small bird.

©PatriciaGoodwin 2016

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Flowers are Vaginas

Jimson Weed

by 

Georgia O'Keeffe

What do you see when you look at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of an oversized flower? Are you looking deeply into a flower or a vagina?

For decades, art critics and art lovers have been debating the question.

The new Tate Modern July 2016 retrospective of Georgia O’Keeffe will attempt to answer that question once and for all. The Tate calls the assumptions that her famous flowers paintings are depictions of female genitalia, a “conservative male” concept.

How is this interpretation specifically male? Or conservative? I think a lot of wild women would heartily agree, “Yes! Hail the Goddess! After all, feminists in the 1970s championed O’Keeffe’s work, according to Tanya Barson, Curator of the Tate Modern show, “as a statement of female empowerment.”

I like that.

Barson also defends O’Keeffe’s own denial – since the 1920s - that her paintings were in any way sexual. According to an article about the exhibit in the Guardian: “The Freudian theory that her flower paintings were actually close studies of the female vulva were first put forward in 1919 by Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer who first promoted O’Keeffe’s work and later became her husband.”

Stieglitz knew how to promote a show.

Georgia, herself, explained why she made the flowers so gigantic: “So I said to myself, I’ll paint what I see – what the flower is to me but I’ll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it – I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers…I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.”

To quote Achim Borchardt-Hume, the Tate Modern’s Director, his hope is that the Georgia O’Keeffe retrospective will offer O’Keeffe’s work the “multiple readings” she had been denied in the past as a female artist. “O’Keeffe has been very much reduced to one particular body of work, which tends to be read in one particular way,” Borchardt-Hume said. “Many of the white male artists across the 20th century have the privilege of being read on multiple levels, while others – be they women or artists from other parts of the world – tend to be reduced to one conservative reading. It’s high time that galleries and museums challenge this.”

Like millions of people, I have been a Georgia O’Keeffe fan since I first saw her work, probably in a book, maybe as a calendar, maybe as a print on someone’s wall. It was the '60s so I’m not sure where I was or what the painting was. But, I know I must have been mesmerized.

Very few artists of any caliber can pull off the close-up of the oversized flower. In fact, I really can think of only one – O’Keeffe.

Another part of my fascination and love for Georgia O’Keeffe lies in her finding her true identity in another land far from her home. I traveled only a few miles to the rocky shores north of Boston to discover another world that seemed to be a long lost home worlds away from where I grew up. Georgia traveled thousands of miles, from her birthplace in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, passing through crowded, nervous New York City, on to stay with artist friends in New Mexico where she felt more and more comfortable, more herself, finally rejecting her old life back in New York to make her permanent home in the vast, open land of New Mexico, the terracotta desert and the cerulean blue sky. There, she found her true self in the hot, endless space.

To me, O’Keeffe’s flower paintings need to be viewed within the context of this desert. In the desert, the importance of flowers is tremendous. Moisture is precious. Life is precious. O’Keeffe may not have meant the flowers to be genitalia, the flowers simply are genitalia. Flowers are the sex organs of plants, and, in the desert, the moist folds of the flower hold life itself.

But, I do not take the sexuality of the flower as separate from other – what did the Tate call it? Other “readings” of the work. To me, the sexuality of the flowers, the life force of the flowers, cannot be separated from the rest of life.

Take her 1932 painting of the Jimson weed, for instance, which sold for $44.4 million, the highest amount for a painting by a female artist, the Guardian tells us. Really? F**k you. Such a distinction is an insult to female artists.

Back to Jimson weed, also known as angel trumpet. Or devil’s snare, hell’s bells and devil’s cucumber. Thought to have originated in Mexico, but has a Greek and Hindi etymology (see below). Highly toxic. Hallucinogenic. Beautiful to look at, emitting a powerful perfume, also called moonflower, which opens at night and is fed upon by the night moth. The ancient inhabitants of central and southern California ingested the small black seeds of datura to speak to their gods in visions. Native-Americans such as the Algonquin, Navajo, and Cherokee also used this plant in sacred ceremonies for its hallucinogenic properties. The common name "datura" has its roots in ancient India where the plant is considered particularly sacred, and is believed to be a favorite of the Hindu god Shiva Nataraia.

The genus name is derived from the plant's Hindi name धतूरा dhatūra. Stramonium is originally from Greek, strychmos  στρύχνος "nightshade" and maniakos μανιακός "mad."

In the United States, the plant is called jimson weed, or Jamestown weed; it got this name from the town of Jamestown, Virginia, where British soldiers consumed it. They spent 11 days in altered mental states:

“The James-Town Weed (which resembles the Thorny Apple of Peru, and I take to be the plant so call'd) is supposed to be one of the greatest coolers in the world. This being an early plant, was gather'd very young for a boil'd salad, by some of the soldiers sent thither to quell the rebellion of Bacon (1676); and some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy, for they turned natural fools upon it for several days: one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows [grimaces] at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces with a countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll.

In this frantic condition they were confined, lest they should, in their folly, destroy themselves — though it was observed that all their actions were full of innocence and good nature. Indeed, they were not very cleanly; for they would have wallowed in their own excrements, if they had not been prevented. A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after eleven days returned themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed.”

–      The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705[38]

Now, do you get an inkling of why the flowers needed to be so huge?

Of course, the vulva contains all of the above qualities. Moist lips of the flower of life. Perhaps poisonous, perhaps life giving.

Look deeply into the spiral of the Jimson Weed. What do you see?

Poppies

Opium, soft hypnotic dream

Sweet spring sap of maple

Plums, apples, rock, pulsating with life

Can you really separate the flower from its source or from its fruit?

Note: To their immense credit, the Tate Modern will display O’Keeffe as a “‘multifaceted artist’ and will also be exploring her relationship to photography, music and the landscape of New Mexico, where she lived and worked in the 1930s and 40s and embedded herself deeply into the sprit and traditions of the area. It will open with the charcoals that O’Keeffe first exhibited in 1915 and end on more abstract river paintings from the early 1960s. Also included in the show will be several photographs that O’Keeffe’s husband, Alfred Stieglitz, took of her over the course of their complex marriage, including portraits and nudes…” (from The Guardian article, “Flowers or vaginas? Georgia O’Keeffe Tate show to challenge sexual clichés” by Hannah Ellis-Petersen, March 1, 2016.)

Years ago, after seeing a wonderful documentary of her life in Santa Fe, I was inspired to write and published this poem, “Georgia O’Keeffe” in my book, Marblehead Moon (Plum Press, 1993) I was struck by the ancient simplicity of how Georgia lived and worked. She cleaned her own house and baked her own bread. The starkness of her home reflected the stark beauty of the desert.

Thank you, Georgia O’Keeffe for your work.

Georgia O'Keeffe

The shapes of Nature repeat themselves

line may be lip or bone

round may be breast or stone

and, so unknown to her, 

her painting of shell and bone

                and flower

unfolded into the folds

of the female flower

and art sellers were amazed 

and excited - and titillated -

but, this was not an artistic striptease

not an agressive Ms. Chicago

force fed in your faces

at the dinner table

this was not by her hand

but the hand of God

The Great God of Where the Line Goes

so, the salty shell,

the desert shell,

opened a slit

an illicit slit

and the Art World

sucked in its breath

and flapped about the galleries

like birds who smash

themselves against glass

and the owners called her up

far way, in the desert, the phone rings

a blush phone in a stark bone room

always, before she worked,

picked clean of excess

an old woman, an old artist

dressed simply, in black,

walks in slowly, on a cane

she answers

the voice is frantic! she cannot do this!

she answers again

"I did not do it."

Protestations!

Evidence!

"The evidence is there."

               

                She says:

"The mountains are colors that roll above sand.

The birds fly alive

                 and dead

                 and alive again

And the road goes beyond the view."

there are censors! cries the little voice 

caught in the blush machine

The old artist cradles the troubled receiver

in a pillow, like a screaming babe

She lifts her cane and walks out

into hot silence

She paces a circle

She is a black sculpture

tracing white sand

making an Indian drawing

lines of herself on the land

When she came there

she was alone with rattlesnakes

rattlesnakes owned the property

but, the unending opened her

and out came music on to the land

violins spiralled the adobe air

horns heralded the red sun

the snakes backed under rocks

herself a source

she took in the land

breathing in huge gulps

she planted and ate and spoke the land

she curled up and slept with the land

brushed the land on her canvas

made love to the land

with colors so ancient, they seemed bold

with flowers so precious, they became mountains

with sculpted forms

waiting now in living bodies

found then in the dust by the road

recognized, they framed her view

of the sky to the sea

and in old age

hers was the face of beauty

They say old Indians

come home from the grave

and if she does

again, the rattlesnakes will make way

for, how can God answer a whining man 

                      on the phone?

the place of creation has no horizon

the place of success hangs on a wall

Nature's shapes repeat themselves

shell, vagina, flower, bone

and the maker walks round a circle 

                       in the sand

which only the ancient may understand.

©Patricia Goodwin, 2016

Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation. Her newest poetry books are Telling Time By Apples, And Other Poems About Life On The Remnants of Olde Humphrey Farme, illustrated by the author, and Java Love: Poems of a Coffeehouse.