Coco Gordon
"SuperSkyWoman"
Arlene Raven:
IF YOU KNEW
Coco Gordon
SUPERSKYWOMAN -- LA CADUTA
things I know
you should know
Skywoman
Of earth
Feet on the firmament
Transfigured
Superskywoman
She falls.
In her descent,
she sees
soil spilling,
forests felled,
wetlands wracked,
coral reefs cracked.
Superskywoman knows
everything we know
and what we may not know
we know.
[But if you knew]
When Mel Ramos first paints a comic book character in 1962, he chooses Superman.
Superman, Main Man of America's popular culture, is also a popular figure in its Pop Art.
Fists taut and red flag waving, our hero bursts out of the faux metal picture plane
ready for combat. Ramos' Man of Steel might be a strange visitor from another planet, but
he is more man than any earth mortal. What's more, he is an industrial strength fighter
with no real blood and guts. Impregnable and deathless.
Later Ramos paints Wonder Woman as one of the boys.
Much later, in 1989, Mike Bidlo copies Andy Warhol's much earlier (1960) Superman.
"Good!," I read in a balloon,
"A mighty puff of my super-breath extinguishes the forest fire!"
Flying and falling,
Skywoman observes these genealogies of mechanical men.
And she knows that a puff of machine breath--however mighty--will not efface the fires now
burning everywhere.
Nor the floods, raging anywhere.
[Now you know]
In her longer view,
Superskywoman sees manmachine multiplied. Bounty diminishes drastically in favor of
homogeneous social systems. Decisive, s/he inserts himself into watershed communities
everywhere.
This, as you know, represents a climacteric change in human consciousness.
We see that humans are a small part of a fifteen-billion year sequence of metamorphoses.
Now we know that we earth mortals are still a developing part of earth community.
In a region where self is now
foreground and background.
Because we know, we have to start somewhere.
A place where time is ceaseless and unbroken;
creation and demise spinning,
"circleswimming" in the same vast revolution.
In Skywoman's creation story,
Gordon's "To Be So Forget,"
(inspired by Paula Gunn Allen's
Grandmothers of the Light)
the power-driven motor
wakes to her larger biogenic soul.
Gordon turns a 1991 photograph of
herself in Banff upside down.
Sees herself.
She is daughter
severed from her first family tree,
yet branching from a longer, sturdier root.
Skywoman's descendant begins her
descent,
searching the British Columbian mountains for her history with trees,
in Hawaiian waters for the wild ground
and finally the turtle and the genesis.
A serpent lives in this ledger.
A volume
that is a book
but also a line
above or below
the musical staff
to extend its range.
Thus for this purpose
the snake slithers,
snakes around
never dying of old age
but by shedding a skin
and so also being born. |