Heinecken in Retrospect

1978, Heinecken:

“I am interested in what I term gestalts, picture circumstances which bring together disparate images or ideas so as to form new meanings and new configurations.”

On Heinecken’s bulletin board:

“The greatest difference between the artist or poet and the ordinary person is found, as has often been pointed out, in the range, delicacy, and freedom of the connections he is able to make between different elements of his experience.” – I.A. Richards

Dante wrote that the mouth is where love ends. It begins, he said, in the eyes.

It was his eyes. It was the way he took us in with his eyes.

Images are engagements, scarce records of moment-by-moment attention. A trace of the looking, yet something more than cigarette ash cantilevered.

“A man sets himself the task of drawing the world.

As the years pass, he fills in the blank page with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fish, houses, instruments, stars, horses, and people. Just before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.” – Jorge Luis Borges

“What is description, after all, but encoded desire?” — Mark Doty

What did Robert stare at?
What did his eyes hold in high regard?
What did they choose to arrest?

Something speaks, beckons, fascinates. It calls you; and if you are receptive, you open. His mediation, then, with ready-made things: a dialogue. His “He/She’s,” with their pictures and texts, alternations and sequences, a playful call and response. Generous, this man and his work. When we say, ‘to entertain someone’s idea,’ it’s about exchange, isn’t it? The ability to listen to another, to be truly interested in what they are thinking. This, the nature of one who teaches. This, Heinecken’s great gift. To engage, to sense the possible in and for another – then stand back, allow the alchemy to take place. This is what he enabled.

And yet. And yet. The necessary distance.

“Powers of observation heightened beyond the normal imply extraordinary disinvolvement: or rather the double process, excessive preoccupation and identification with the lives of others, and at the same time, a monstrous detachment…The tension between standing apart and being fully involved: that is what makes a writer.” – Nadine Gordimer

Laconic: use of few words. Laconia, a region of Greece with Sparta the capital. Warlike. Disciplined. Brief of speech. (Do you remember how he could be so, so’Zen-like?’)

“In our hell bent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true character…. To be ‘tough’ on a ranch has nothing to do with conquests and displays of power…It’s not toughness but ‘toughing it out’ that counts…

If a rancher or a cowboy has been thought of as a ‘man’s man’ – laconic, hard-drinking, inscrutable – there’s almost no place [as here in the West] in which the balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity, can be more natural…their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy.” -Gretel Ehrlich writing about the men of the West

Walking down the street with the cartoonist Saul Steinberg was said to have been like “having a pair of binoculars tied onto your face.”

Heinecken. You made us see more.

“Maybe we can get together when I come to New York.”

I’m 23, a little terrified.

Who is this guy? Willie Nelson?

And then he’ll see some things in me I won’t see for years.

The gift of those receptive eyes with their ability to see inside. Time slows. We smile. Neither lasso, nor intrusion. (We, the She’s, we’re the She’s, the many of us.) Then, the slow drag, the laugh, the cough, eyes crinkle. You look back: it’s a luminous moment. The shimmering between. I think he would have liked the word vectors.

A man who knew how to send, and loved, and was able to receive. He was seeing us. Do you remember?

You, yes, you who are reading this, were you gifted by his gaze? By his generosity of seeing your attempts? And seeing not only your work but also who you might be, whom you could become?

- If you were to make an expressive work as a gift back to him, what might that be?
- If what you loved most about him could be kept alive in this world, in what ways could you live this out?
- How will your relationship continue?

Here is a chant in Pali, a language found in early Southeast Asian Buddhist texts before the time of Sanskrit:

Anicca vata sankhara.
Uppada vaya dhammino.
Uppajjitva nirujjhanti.
Tesam vupasamao sukho.

All things are impermanent. It is their nature to arise and pass away. To be in harmony with this truth, brings true happiness.

We loved you, Robert.

(Note: this is an edited version of remarks spoken at Heinecken memorial, UCLA, August 2006)