Stumbly, but Not Half-Assed

Writing is my livelihood, I dabble in bonsai, and I recognize a strong kinship between those two things. But the whole vocation v. avocation, work v. dabble, duality doesn't quite convey the way I think about it. I'll circle back.

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I've noticed some confusion in the gradual and natural winnowing effect of experiences over the decades; to extend the image, what was apparently wheat has turned to chaff or often the other way around. For example, a long time ago I watched my friend Bill, who had been my only real male friend growing up, play the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's Zoo Story. Thinking back on the experience, three impressions return.

Remember the play? Jerry confronts Peter in Central Park and imposes an increasingly disjointed conversation on him that culminates in Jerry's telling THE STORY OF JERRY AND THE DOG!, the ongoing struggle between Jerry and his landlady's mongrel. Things get less rational, more physical; Jerry forces a fight and impales himself on a knife Peter is holding. So the first impact on me was the distress of watching your best friend from your high school days turn into a crazy guy in front of you. In public.

Then, with a little distance, I remember Zoo Story's familiar themes. The play is about all those mid-twentieth-century concerns that have faded from favor over the years: the distance between people, the triumph of materialism, the absurd arbitrariness of experience.

I can conjure these when I remember watching the play back then. But what came to mind just recently — spontaneously — was the phrase Jerry uses to describe the dog dedicated to tearing him apart. "He was sort of a stumbly dog, but he wasn't half-assed, either. It was a good, stumbly run, but I always got away."  Stumbly, but not half-assed. T-shirt, if not actual epitaph material. I guess if one of Albee's themes was about the dislocation of experience, it took.

The phrase came to me when I was thinking about a cotoneaster plant I was pruning. So to be more precise, then, my work with bonsai is stumbly, but not half-assed. I don't dabble, I commit. And it's not always easy.

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I feel the weight of a history that runs from the Tang Dynasty Chinese practice of what came to be called penjing (or pen ching) through Japanese bonsai and down the centuries to my workbench. I know about how early penjing specimens were oddly shaped trees thought to have magical powers. These were followed by re-created landscapes in trays — plantings of rocks or more complex arrangements of rocks, plants, and decorations — creations that, if not religious, were at least mysterious enough in their ability to miniaturize nature to contain their own sort of power. When the practice of tray planting (pen tsai in Chinese) emerged in Japan as bonsai, its aesthetic was simplified to correspond to Zen beliefs. A bonsai composition came to comprise a single tree, and I try to see each tree as an embodiment of the entire universe.

But I'm defeated. Often it's simple fear at the moment of pruning a branch — gone forever, the harmony destroyed. Or it's the cold reality that true bonsai take many years to become convincing; I might not live to see any project through to completion. And I'm defeated also by my own confusion. I'm not comfortable with the control element of bonsai, which seems to appropriate the Judeo-Christian idea of nature existing in service to humans. In theory, the practice honors the natural world by trying to understand it, but recreating it and controlling it using techniques such as wiring, defoliating, and trunk-chopping feels hubristic.

What I settle for is the Zen truth from that famous Buddhist aphorism: Better to travel well than to arrive. At no point are the plants under my control; they're in charge, and the best I can do is cooperate and sometimes collaborate. And I can just enjoy the process, stumbly as it is, and what the process teaches.

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Since most dictionaries, if they acknowledge “stumbly” at all, assign a prosaic definition — "given to stumbling" — I feel free to offer my own:  Stumbly adj. 1 something lacking in polish that is produced by an engaged maker;  2 a condition required to produce such a result. To be stumbly is to be enthused, unguarded, honest. It insists on mindful attention to each moment at a task. It cares little for "outcomes," avoids the cheap, the hurried, the vain. And now the topic is shifting here — from bonsai to writing to a way of living. It turns out that stumbly and "not half-assed" are the same thing; work and play can be likewise joined by a dedication to mindful living.

Paul Valery gets translated repeatedly in workshops and writer interviews as saying a poem is never finished, just abandoned. I think closer to what he really said was "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death." Same thing, just more specific: the point is that you can choose to be satisfied or you can die; you may be finished but your work isn't. And note that Valery's list doesn't  include a frantic need to publish as many works as possible that leads to dashing off a poem in one sitting and submitting it, simultaneously, to two dozen journals.

Also in Zoo Story, Albee has Jerry observe “sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.” That may be gibberish, or it may be useful — the two are sometimes so close together I have trouble telling them apart. In the context here, though — of bonsai, writing, and editing — Jerry seems to have been given a moment of clarity. At any time on the way to the zoo, you can’t be anywhere else except where you are. Might as well give each stumbly moment its due.

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I'm obviously ignoring my own counsel by writing a blog; however, I will take my own advice and not publish a photograph of my own bonsai. The one that precedes this piece was taken in the North Carolina Arboretum's bonsai exhibition garden in Asheville, North Carolina.

Return to Georgia: Benny Andrews (1930-2006), Raymond Andrews (1934-1991)

For most of the twentieth century, the South was not a happy place for the arts. One appraisal came from H. L. Mencken's "Sahara of the Bozart," an overstated, but trenchant, assessment of southern culture that he prefaced with the immortal J. Gordon Coogler's immortal couplet: "Alas, for the South! Her books have grown fewer— / She never was much given to literature." Mencken’s examples are dated, but they haven’t lost their sting. "Georgia," he asserted, "is at once the home of the cotton-mill sweater, of the Methodist parson turned Savonarola and of the lynching bee." (Savonarola — as Mencken was certain none of his southern readers would know — was a fifteenth-century friar and preacher most famous for his "bonfire of the vanities," a comprehensive book, manuscript, objet d'art, and all-around-cultural conflagration). White male academics spoke to what Mencken called “Baptist and Methodist barbarism” through discussions of cultural identity, poetry theory, and ideology. Black artists first dealt with the cotton mills and the lynching bees. Then they made their art.

When Benny Andrews was five he started picking cotton to earn money to buy winter clothes. Raymond Andrews did the same when he turned five. And in cruel symmetry, five dollars was what their father took home weekly from his WPA job. Their mother worked in the fields and bore ten kids. Both parents loved the land; they wanted to be farmers. Raymond records the inevitable result of this combination of a natural desire and his family’s privation in his memoir The Last Radio Baby. "This automatically sent us to the only type of farming available to us 'po' folk' kind. Sharecropping. Thus in 1943, on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the man who freed the slaves, we moved across the hill from Mister Jim's place to the old Barnett Farm to become sharecroppers." Few escaped sharecropping's downward financial spiral. The landowner took half the farmer's crops; with the other half, the farmer bought supplies (on credit from the landowner). The meager leftovers, if any remained, comprised the family budget. Mere survival. Benny would echo Raymond's slavery reference in his own autobiography:** "Ever present in the sharecropper's mind is that he is only whatever his labor is worth, not a hair more. He belongs to his master, and can never have a word of disagreement with him." One such point of disagreement that wasn't allowed, for example, was the understanding that males from age 11 and up would work in the fields. Benny was 13 in 1943, Raymond was 9. Only through their mother's courageous intervention were they allowed to attend school . . . and only on days when it rained.

During these years, Benny practiced his drawing in Georgia dirt, with a nail. He also copied images from magazines and newspapers on whatever was available and drew stories on pieces of "clean on one side" paper or on brown paper sacks. He and Raymond experimented with making paints from blackberry juice, fingernail polish, even chocolate candy — paints that he would apply with straw, weeds, rags tied to sticks, and finally homemade hog bristle brushes. Meanwhile, Raymond read everything he could buy with his monthly dime-to-spend, borrow, or sometimes filch; boxes under the bed he shared with his brother held his reading stash: newspapers (especially the comics and sports pages), magazines (radio, movies, and more sports), and paperback books (westerns, mysteries, detective stories). "By age nine,” he wrote later, “I had no interest in toys, only the printed word, film, and radio."

In the late 1940s, Benny and Raymond left a town and the region that had offered them a paltry foundation for their careers: training for black painters that was negligible at best and a library for black readers that was sparse and seldom open. After separate military stints, they ended up at the Chicago Art Institute and Michigan State University respectively, and it's hard to imagine two individuals more ill-prepared for their eventual fields of endeavor. Benny, at age 23, had never been in an art museum; essentially he had never seen an original work of art. Raymond, at age 24, listed among his favorite authors Luke Short, Zane Grey, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ellery Queen, Ben Traven, and Harold Robbins (whose Dream Merchants he pronounced a classic).

Yet against the odds and obstacles, they succeeded in leaving behind a true and vivid picture of southern country life, especially the years leading up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Benny Andrews never stopped painting his home places and people. As he said in a 1975 interview, "I left Georgia when I was nineteen. . . . My interpretation of things — how I saw things — and my ideas about things had already been formed." His work has been in dozens of solo and group exhibitions and is represented in major museums throughout the country including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, and the Philadelphia Academy of Art. From 1982 to 1984, he was visual arts director at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2002, he launched the Benny Andrews Foundation to assist young minority artists and institutions dedicated to African American art.

Likewise, Raymond Andrews' monumental Muskhogean County trilogy, originally published by Dial (1978-1983) and reissued by the University of Georgia Press (1987-1988), reveals life in the rural, Jim Crow south. Three other books continue his program, which he laid out in his preface to the reprint of Appalachee Red, the award-winning first book in the trilogy: "My American roots (like those of most Afro-Americans) are southern rural. This particular land and the individuals who have lived and died on it are what my books are about."

The Andrews brothers’ stories of escape from indigence and rise to success are at once inspiring and impressive. But perhaps more significant is their return, both artistically and physically, to the region that treated them so shabbily. Much of Benny's work deals with things southern; all of Raymond's does. And Benny built a studio outside Athens, Georgia, fewer than thirty miles from the old sharecropper's shack where they grew up. He and Raymond would trade off: one working in Athens while the other worked in New York. The art they made there is a testament to their character — never vindictive or angry (as well it might have been), often funny, always engaging, compassionate, and wise.

*Photograph: Appalachee Red's haint lording it over some bronze guy in Athens, Georgia. Based on a Benny Andrews illustration for his brother's book, the foam-core cutout was made by the University Press of Georgia marketing department for the launch of Appalachee Red.

**Benny Andrews' unpublished memoir "Mine, or Forty Years of Being Here" is quoted in J. Richard Gruber's American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948-1997.