… and the New York Times (again with UD‘s help – she most recently provided the same writer, William Grimes, with information about the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor) has written a good obituary about this odd and complicated man who painted elaborate metaphysical, visionary works.
UD found him too odd for close friendship (her sister-in-law Joanna – who was also consulted by the obit writer – understood Paul with far greater depth and sympathy), but year after year, when they met at Soltan Christmas celebrations, UD would watch Paul with special interest, and with compassion. She was not interested in his impossibly convoluted and at the same time rather shallow and adolescent (he never got over the science fiction of his youth) theories of consciousness and the universe. She was interested in the man himself, his pale face and bald head and strangely serene demeanor out of place in the hectic business of gift opening in front of a fire. He stayed chilly amid that warmth, a wanderer above the mists down from altitude for a day, his pale face and labored breaths (in his later years heart failure made it hard for him to breathe) somehow conveying his inability to adapt to temperate climates.
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Or not a wanderer above the mists — a Rocket Man above the mysteries, an icon, for UD, of the terrible human desire to know everything. Aliens, Paul believed, had implanted something in his brain that made him a conduit of cosmic truths, and his artwork was the materialization of those truths. There was no irony that I could see, no humor or teasing evasion or bet hedging here. Either his flatly literal messages from beyond beguiled you with their astonishing plausibility or they made you draw back somewhat from the man and the canvases, unsettled by their Bartleby-like remoteness from the human realm.
The human realm, after all, is where – far from knowing everything – we know shit, and where the vocation of the artist, usually, is to reconcile us to knowing shit by aestheticizing both our cloud of unknowing and the suffering and beauty it generates. For UD, people like Paul represent a refusal of the human condition.
This is what you call highly fertile University Diaries territory, and ol’ UD has been firing up her keyboard fingers, with special attention to the little fucker who left the fun to go to his car and take his gun out of his glove compartment.
UD was further fired up at the thought of letting it rip in regard to Leonid Brezhnev, WVU’s Director of Fraternal Values and Leadership, and his priceless comment on the event:
[W]e’reviewing this as an opportunity for us to collaborateand prevent it from happening again.
(I may have his name wrong.)
But then she went and checked out Garrett Boehme’s social media pages, and this took the wind out of her sails or the fire out of her fingers or whatever. She had such things planned for the shooter! She was going to do a whole riff on Garrett being a direct descendant of the great mystic Jakob Böhme who influenced Coleridge and Yeats and all and from whose Wikipedia page I took the following image, which reminds me so much of the work of my late friend Paul Laffoley:
But there was long-limbed, nature-loving Garrett grinning out from his Instagram, sharing his love of flowers and white water rafting and the National Guard.
I’m serious – if we can – armamentally – train him up in the difference between Taliban militants celebrating their takeover of the Panjshir Valley, and American soldiers targeting Osama Bin Laden, Garrett will be a crucial part of the homeland defense infrastructure that allows UD to sit securely in her bedroom, gazing at flowers.
UD laughed, years ago, when her friend Paul Laffoley assured her that head transplants were just around the corner. She felt guilty for laughing, because Paul sincerely believed in things like that.
And now in his visionary way he turns out to have anticipated Sergio Canavero.
Although the procedure isn’t quite there yet. The procedure described in my title was on a monkey.
Here’s the same writer, for The Guardian, on Canavero’s latest one, using a human.
[T]his recent successful human head transplant? It was on corpses! Call me a perfectionist if you must, but I genuinely think that any surgical procedure where the patients or subjects die before it even starts is really stretching the definition of “success” to breaking point.
UD has never been a fan of his work, which has at once a sort of all over the place New Agey thing going on, and a pretty obsessive rigidity to it…
“Mr. Laffoley has yet to encounter a system of mystical thought he could not absorb into his own project.” Right. This is a nicer way of saying what I just said.
“Mr. Laffoley’s works may seem impenetrable, but they are not nonsensical. They limn a richly provocative cartography of consciousness itself and its heretofore under-realized possibilities.” Rather pretentious formulation there, and note that the critic never says what place or places in particular this map designates for consciousness to realize.
Because work like Paul’s is all over the place conceptually, its power and legitimacy rest heavily on the artist himself, as a sort of mystic sage. I’ve never been able to grant Paul that status, and his art as such is for me too catch-all to express anything in particular.
Later this month, scientists, aesthetic theorists, and artists will convene at Johns Hopkins University to talk about the biochemical bases of aesthetic experiences. UD‘s thinking of attending. If she does, she’ll cover it, of course, on this blog.
