The betrayal of infancy is ubiquitous, and its forms are many. The survivors, the resilient ones, the ones who have known love, may manage to resurge with something of an integrated identity, and a gift for revelation as wondrous as it is stupefying, unsettling, even terrifying. The artifacts of such a creative imagination are like those dreams that fascinate and frighten us, and which we attend to because we know the dark knowledge they promise will enlighten and so, perhaps, sustain or even liberate us. As all else, dreams have a dual nature. Says the painter Linda Okazaki (and she is recalling her own difficult childhood), “If the night sky spoke to my loneliness, Orion always made me feel safe.”
Linda Okazaki’s mother was murdered when she was six; her mother’s dog, an African Basenji, was put down in the days that followed, and Linda’s hair — which her mother had brushed and braided each morning — was cut. Her father, although loving (“He taught me how to cross a room”), was a severe alcoholic, and Linda was placed with relatives. In her words, she felt “orphaned, old, an outsider marked with otherness and impoverished.” “I had,” she says it simply, “lost my childhood.” Yet her mind was as active as ever. She was “still in this place they call the world” (Linda quoting Rilke). Her Deep Zoo — the place of potent memories — was somehow intact and fertile. Among the powers it contained were an elephant tethered at a service station, a caged gorilla at a grocery truck stop (their predicament emblematic of her own), and loving memories of her mother braiding her hair, putting up wallpaper (“abundance!”), and sewing sequins to a tutu. That wallpaper, those sequins will show up later in paintings that are often richly, even riotously patterned. “Art,” Okazaki says today, “is sorcery.” Meaning art can transcend and transform anything, and her painting is a way to reach and to redeem the farthest self.
And there is the Basenji. Okazaki says that the Basenji is a link to her mother and to the unconscious. “If the loss of the mother is the loss of power” (Okazaki), the Basenji is emblematic of protection and identified with the Egyptian god Anubis. Anubis — who is portrayed as a man with the head of a jackal and whose statue, like Kaspar’s little toy dog, was often adorned with red ribbon — is the one who facilitates the voyage to the netherworld. In a number of Okazaki’s most powerful and haunting (and haunted!) paintings, the Basenji, a trickster and a shape-shifter, appears as a protective spirit and accompanies the painter on a series of water crossings.
Here the familiar sundecks of the Washington State Ferries are transformed into anterooms of the underworld, liminal spaces between death and life (or, perhaps, death in life, or death leaning forward into life). In Last Run, the painter stands at the railing overlooking a turbulent sea, accompanied by her talismanic Basenji. Clouds roil overhead; one is in the form of a chimeric Gorgon whose lolling tongue suggests acute anxiety. Yet the Gorgon’s size, position in the sky, and arched tail imply protection. “Evil protects,” Okazaki says, or in other words, dark knowledge protects.
In one of many mutating identities, the Basenji appears in Old Friends as a dog, spotted black and white like dice, among chairs that have acquired, like tomb furniture, a stature and magnificence. Outside the sea rises like lighting. “Water,” the artist explains, “is the vessel of emotion.” As is the Basenji: if death can slam into the ordinary, killing the mother as she sleeps, the Basenji — like Okazaki’s ubiquitous water vessels (and waters of all kinds) — evokes the wellspring of the creative imagination.
As does the memory of the mother. In Old Affection, we see a child, designated by Fate, and her mother sharing a kiss. The child’s heavy braid demands our attention. It seems animate, a cocoon in the instant before it splits open. It has been treated like the braided grasses from which a large scarab — an amulet of rebirth — might be suspended. This painting, in which a kiss exemplifies the breath of life, recalls a ritual in which a heart or a sprig would be placed before the lips of the one who had died as a charm of reanimation. The sprig exemplifies Osiris, who stands beside Anubis and assures eternal return. In Egyptian Woman with Bird, the painter lies in bed beside a bird-headed lover, holding a sprig to her lips.
In Basenji in Egypt, the Basenji, fused to Anubis, holds the serpent of evil, Apopis, between his paws. He has not killed Apopis, but he has immobilized him.
Okazaki’s masterpiece, The Land of Sunburned Souls, shows a world burned to the bone and studded with stone tombs. The monstrous Gorgon reappears as a statue of stone, petrified with horror and the emblem of the painter’s own powerful aversion and attraction to strong feelings, images, and archetypes. Its neck is encircled by the snake, whose realm in this instance is the realm of the worm:
They lie down alike in the dust and
the worm covers them. (Job)
Antipathy and sympathy, attraction and repulsion — these dualities assure fascination.
The worm Apopis is responsible for death in life — the death of the soul; one walks upon the worm (a gnostical idea) only to be, in the end, covered by worms. According to Job, man is himself a worm — an assertion the painter found especially troubling as a girl. An assertion she questions here in this haunting evocation of children lost to drought; children, who are the world’s light after all, reduced to errant ghosts, betrayed and forgotten. This painting is a mixto and a monster, the horror and the beauty of life revealed at a glance. Just as it shows betrayal’s most terrible aspect, it evokes a palpable sense of unseen forces: evil not as an absence, but a power.
But Okazaki is always a painter of unseen forces and the Egyptian Portal is only one of a multitude of ways in which to enter into the beautiful, unsettling, erotic, and necessary work of one of the Pacific Northwest’s most exemplary painters. Look at this work closely; its readings are as multiple as they are mutable. And always they are marvelous.
Silling
Sade completed “that most impure tale”—and the words are his—The 120 Days of Sodom, in the Bastille, where he was confined for infractions that, if they were outrageous, were not murderous and — unlike similar cases involving civilians in wartime — were between consenting adults. Sade was an outspoken atheist, a libertine, and a sodomist at a moment in history when sodomy was punishable by a public breaking of the offending body on the wheel. The 120 Days was a purposeful declaration of war against those who would never cease to persecute its author for his singularity. Like a suicide bombing, it is a cry of rage and a rending of the veil; it is an act of defiance and morbidity, the willful embrace of the role of the bogeyman — whose arbitrary and inescapable destiny is acute humiliation and a horrendous death.