#bernard cooper

[bolandoando]

A Clack of Tiny Sparks: Remembrances of a Gay Boyhood, Bernard Cooper

[houseoforange]

It was just before 5 p.m. and the supermarket was crowded with commuters on their way home. Harried shoppers yanked at the handles of nested carts, prying them apart with civilized violence. Beside the magazine rack, a woman in a neon-pink tracksuit dumped bags of loose change into the Coinstar, her money tallied up. I was about to thumb through a recent issue of the magazine for which I’d once written art reviews when I noticed that someone had returned a copy of ‘Boating’ magazine to the shelf, but had placed it upside down. On the cover was a luxury cruiser whose white fiberglass hull could have been a canopy suspended over the cabin. Higher still, a green, unbreathable body of water replaced the air. A figure on the deck waved toward the camera but, turned on his head, he appeared to be diving into the sky, about to break through its cloudless blue surface before he disappeared. I thought: a boat seen upside down is capsized. A man on a boat seen upside down is abandoning ship, not waving hello to someone on short, but waving good-bye. This visual inversion was as concise an embodiment of loss as anything I’d ever seen, an accidental elegy composed of a single image. I stood there and stared. A flood of visual possibility pressed in at me from all sides, just as it had back in my junior high school library when ‘Life’ magazine had lain open before me, the shock of Pop on its glossy pages.

— Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, pp. 236-237

[houseoforange]

I do not need to see a dried-up human tongue to know that I will have one in a hundred years. Isn’t it a form of condescension to think your audience is so literal, so inured to death that they have to be confronted with actual body parts in order to grasp the fact of mortality?

Ghoulishness is a quality that can force us to face the limits of our physical existence, or it can hammer us senseless. When used well, ghoulishness has the power to sting like alcohol on an open wound, jarring us back to life and then reminding us that we dwell in the body, with its pleasures and horrors, for only so long.

— Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, pp. 198-199

[houseoforange]

One night, after visiting the Minskys, I lay in bed and tried to become completely blank. I closed my eyes, let out a breath, and made my arms and legs go limp. The experiment scared me half to death; what if I stayed that way forever? I needn’t have worried; within seconds I was sitting bolt-upright and gulping air. Sight dazzled my opened eyes. My thoughts beat the air like a flock of startled birds.

— Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, p. 182

[houseoforange]

From the perspective of a culture that sanctions gay marriage, it may be difficult to understand how self-hatred and shame could haunt a man for so long. It’s difficult even for me to understand. All my courage and daring were reserved for my love of the avant-garde, and in most other respects, I remained cautious, compliant—is there an antonym for avant-garde? At least that’s how I perceived myself in the presence of others, since it was in the presence of others that I became most acutely aware of how I’d learned to rein myself in, a gay boy constraining his hips and wrists, damping the higher registers of his laughter, flattening his enthusiasms until he’s sure it’s safe to enthus without risking the epithet ‘faggot.’ I learned to monitor every thought before speaking it aloud, to assess shades of meaning as fast as the Univac computer. I intercepted incriminating truths before they saw the light of day.

— Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, pp. 160-161

[houseoforange]

Let’s face it, sarcastic reactions to art are often legitimate because plenty of good artists are good precisely because they risk appearing ridiculous.

— Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, p. 139

[houseoforange]

Many of us at CalArts were fond of toys. Their primary colors and basic shapes had stirred our earliest understanding that there existed objects whose sole purpose was to engage us, to make us the glad inhabitants of a world in which we could improvise laws of cause and effect. Long ago, we’d been able to simultaneously inhabit and lose track of ourselves while we played, a state we now regained, or hoped to regain, when making art.

- Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, pp. 128-129

[houseoforange]

Though part of me wanted to believe that all experience was quantifiable (how reductive a notion that seems to me now, how naked a need for the comforts of the known!), I was drawn to poems because they eluded my understanding, compelled me toward thoughts and sensations I could neither name nor ignore. Certainly my overwhelming response to poetry couldn’t be quantified; it would be like asking a man treading water to guess the number of gallons in the sea.

— Bernard Cooper, My Avant-Garde Education, pp. 85-86