FLUTES AND TOMATOES A MEMOIR WITH POEMS

WADE STEVENSON

B L A Z E V O X [ B O O K S ] Buffalo, New York

Flutes and Tomatoes: A Memoir with Poems by Wade Stevenson Copyright 2015 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Interior Design, Cover Art and Typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 978-1-60964-221-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015940923 BlazeVOX [books] 131 Euclid Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

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FLUTES AND TOMATOES A MEMOIR WITH POEMS

13

PROLOGUE

When I returned to Paris that summer and was

alone in my atelier1 again, I found I had become

more sensitive to the touch and taste of tomatoes, to

their red reality. Even the word tomato, when

applied to what it was meant to describe, troubled

me. I began to feel that something else was

necessary, something deeper, far-reaching. What

was it? I searched in vain for a word, a succession of

words, a stream of words that would be better able

to contain the reality of the tomato. The word

tomato - t o m a t o just wasnt enough.

There had to be something else, but what?

1 Atelier: French for artists studio. At that time I lived at 23 rue Campagne-Premire in the 14th arrondissement. I had the basement studio. You had to climb down a few steps to enter. Then you looked up through large clear story windows with protective grating at the street level. All I could see were shoes going by on the sidewalk. Brigitte Bardot had once lived in the building on an upper floor. And in the studio above me, the Spanish surrealist painter, Oscar Dominguez, had committed suicide on New Years Eve, and the blood dripped down through the floor into my studio. But that was in 1945, long before my time.

14

As the days passed, I felt I had to make a verbal

reconnaissance operation into unknown territory. I

certainly had no idea at that time that the powerful

desire I felt to establish a rapport between the

tomato and myself would result in the book you

now hold.

The tomatoes, a dozen or so, were still perched on a windowsill in the kitchen, where the late August

light gave them a translucent glow. There was no

need yet to actually take a tomato and put it on the

table. There was simply a burning need to ferret out

thoughts, images, words that would correspond to

the brutal reality of the tomato.

It was strange to think that one tomato could

produce so many images, could engender so many

thoughts and whirling, neural forms. These images,

like that of a short red dress hugging a womans

curvy behind, came together with a shock and

collided in my head. I almost never stepped out of

the atelier, I was going stir-crazy mad. Night and day

the tomato, the image of the tomato, the knowledge

that it was within my reach and yet could not be

grasped, obsessed me.

15

How odd to think that only a few weeks ago the

tomato, for me, had barely existed. I had no tomato

thoughts, no tomato longings, no tomato nothing! If

I touched a tomato, if I squeezed it until its juices

ran out, it was in a careless, mindless way. The

tomato then was just another fruit to which I barely

paid attention except when I was eating one.

But now it was a question of actively presiding over the birth of a new tomato, of encouraging it to

come forward out of the deep, dark womb of silence

in which it had been hidden. My duty was crystal-

clear: I had to find a way of filling up the void of the

tomato, of surrounding that beautiful fruit? or

vegetable? with the light and shadow of words, of

illuminating the tomato and letting it breathe.

Where could I begin? To what domain or category

or reality did the tomato belong? One could say that

it was a vegetable, that it grew in such and such a

way; one could attempt and (probably) succeed in

describing it physically, listing all of the bio-data

that contributed to making the tomato a tomato, and

not an apple or a potato, for example, but was that

enough? Did that even begin to be enough?

16

Was not the tomato in its tomato essence of a

completely different order than anything that could

normally be predicated about it? As I paced up and

down between the four white walls of my Paris

studio, smoking Gitanes bleus and drinking

expresso coffee, those were the kind of thoughts

that dominated my mind. Fact: the tomato on the

windowsill was a mystery. I had to find a way to

decipher it or to admit failure.

Since time was of no importance to me, I decided I would try to write about the tomatoes2. I would try

to approach them in the same way that a Picasso or

Matisse sketched their semi-nude, reclining models.

At a minimum, writing about them would help me

to understand them, perhaps even go beyond them.

I imagined a tomato transcendence, a zen-state

where a tomato would be both a tomato and not a

tomato.

Carefully I carried the tomatoes from the

windowsill where they had been perched to the

2 Things give rise to the language; now the language arouses an independent life in the things, first dimly perceived in them only by the poet. Elizabeth Bishop

17

wooden table I had bought for nothing at the flea

market. I wondered for a moment how I would

rearrange them; I wanted them to look natural in

the late afternoon light. Yet before I put my hands

on them, touched their sleek, silky skin, I realized

with a certain shock that the tomatoes had already

changed.

It wasnt so much in appearance, though a few wrinkles had already creased their round surfaces.

What had happened was even more frightening:

somehow they had changed on the inside. Their

spiritual substance, or better said, the life force that

caused them to be what they are, had subtly and

indefinably morphed into something else. Where

had this otherness come from? Was it from me,

my vision of an altered reality? No, I didnt think so.

It was almost as if a touch of evil, like a small worm3,

had burrowed into the very heart of the tomato.

3 See the invisible worm in The Sick Rose, a poem by William Blake

18

I realized at once, of course, how stupid it was of

me to think that they would have stayed stable4. I

had learned a long time ago that there is no such

thing as permanence of form, feeling or emotion.

Everything changes, comes, goes, departs, every

atomic micro-second is forever being altered, the

new energy combined in the cosmic reshuffling. It

was true I had tried to keep things simply by

choosing a tomato. Since you have to focus on

something, in the end what difference does it make

what object you choose? William Blake said he

could see eternity in a grain of sand. Why not in the

seed of a tomato?

Also, there was nothing complicated about a tomato. It was almost as simple as a Van Gogh

potato. A pomegranate5 might have created a much

more difficult situation. But I had chosen the

humble tomato; out of an almost infinite field of 4 Indeed, everything comes and goes, and if one could take a scan or inner photograph of the body at such times, one would see vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions suddenly increasing or decreasing as if the nervous system itself were in a state of indecision. Oliver Sacks 5 See the Greek myth of Persephone. Eating the pomegranate bound her to the underworld forever.

19

possible choices, I had selected it to be my object of

study and affection.

Some time passed. For five days I thought about nothing but the tomatoes I had arranged

geometrically on my worktable. I could have

assembled them in a pyramidal structure but

instead I placed them in linking circles like those

monoliths at Stonehenge. I felt they were closer to

me in that way, more amenable to my

understanding and interpretation. I sat nearby on a

wicker chair which the guy at the flea market told

me was made by French prisoners, and meditated

on different ways of looking at, and thinking about,

a tomato. Its never easy to confront such an in-

your-face reality. I was alone in an austere space,

sharing my solitude with the fruit of the earth.

Because make no mistake those tomatoes

possessed a deep, rich, vibrant reality. The more I

looked at them, the more real they became; they

were as real to me as my own skin. Wild thoughts

came crashing through my mind. For example,

could it be that I had a kind of death wish for the

flesh of the tomato, and my flesh, to become one? I

20

meant in a symbolic way, of course, but even in that

way, could such a union ever be achieved? Could

the artist become one with the model? Could the

perceiver become one with the perceived?6 I burst

out laughing. What a crazy fool I was! To even think

that a man and a tomato could find harmony

together! Could they even find a way of sharing the

same living space?

To be sure, I didnt want to confuse the tomato, in its pure, natural, naked beauty, its thing in itself

essence, with some romantic object of my love or

affection. Thinking in that way made me feel

impure, uncomfortable, as if I had sinned. I didnt

want to take something that was pure and fine and

muddy it up with my own desires. For once in my

life I wanted to follow a noble, straight path. The

tomato, for me, had to be defined an exercise in

rigorous, almost religious, contemplation. The

feeling was to be shared with empathy in a depth of

time without limit, possibly reaching a state of quiet

ecstasy. Immersed in this way, I became free of my

6 How can you separate the dancer from the dance? William Butler Yeats, Among School Children

21

self and rose above the needs of my ugly, self-

centered ego.

The tomato could then be seen as if it were draped in an aura of golden, almost mystical light. The

tomato, the energy contained within its sphere,

became life, deliverance. Yet I was still a long way

from such knowledge.

Like a blank canvas waiting to be filled with

ciphers and scrawls, each day stretched ahead of

me. Im not going to pretend I spent every waking

minute indulging in speculative or imagistic

thoughts about the tomato. In August in Paris most

of the cafs, stores and galleries are closed, the city

becomes like a desert, populated only by tourists,

but I was alone and happy in my studio with the

tomatoes. I had reduced my needs to a strict

minimum. I wanted nothing. I felt free of material

desires. My existence was simple, spartan.

I had even succeeded in reducing my food requirements. I found I could survive eating once a

day, mostly a half a baguette, Camembert or goat

cheese, wine and fruit. Of course I didnt touch the

FLUTES AND TOMATOES

Poetry is the supreme fiction Wallace Stevens

No ideas but in things William Carlos Williams

51

TELL ME

Tell me how you lived in a troglodytic cave

Survived on bread and tomatoes plucked

From green vines in farmers fields

Tell how you took them to Paris

Arranged them like amulets on a windowsill

In a kitchen painted fire engine red

Tell me how you were too lonely to be left alone

A switchblade nearby

How, if it hadnt been for the living presence

Of the electric tomatoes

You might have drowned in the air

How the blood rose when the heart remembered

How your lover with the long hair

Seduced you with the notes of a magic flute

52

THE TOMATO AND I If the tomato is the sheath

I am the knife

Slowly I plunge

Into the soft red body

Then I am no longer the knife

I have become what I cut

Quivering, I vibrate in the heart

Of the drawn and quartered tomato

53

TOMATO FIELDS FOREVER I saw a drunken sun

Setting over tomato-red fields

Over and over again

I saw fields of tomatoes

Striped with dark crimson furrows

Ripened by how many burning suns

Overhead whirled black birds with scarlet beaks

In a time of no time

In a place of no place

Out of the belly of the night

A new wholeness was born

I knew when I finally cleaned house

I would find my place in that earth

54

TOMATOES ASLEEP Cleaving to a green vine

Spun from dreams of salt, olive oil

Bread and wine

On a table of earth the tomatoes sleep

While over their heads

The evening stars arise

Piping their flute-like songs

68

BIRTH OF THE TOMATO One day a seed

Fell from a star

Broke through the seabed

Matured in the earth

Burst into ripeness

In a round, red form

Thats how the tomato was born