"Structures of Visual Perception." 9 feet by 3 feet, acrylic on board)

For Marilyn Monroe (Born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 Died on this day, August 5, 1962).


Roslyn (Marilyn Monroe): "Horse killers! Killers! Murderers! You're liars! All of you, liars! You're only happy when you can see something die! Why don't you kill yourself to be happy? You and your God's country! Freedom! I pity you! You're three dear, sweet, dead men!"

In "The Misfits," (Marilyn's and Clark Gable's last movies) three broken-back old cowboys hunt wild mustang horses for scratch and dog food while believing that their lust for Roslyn (MM) will save them from death. But in this scene Marilyn is outraged by their violence and barbarity and she attempts to stop the slaughter. The screenplay was written by playwright Arthur Miller, Marilyn's husband, and its based, I think, on an earlier actual experience. I am reading Miller's autobiography and he recounts that when he and Marilyn were living at Amagansett long island she encountered the surf-net fishers early one morning. The fishers drug their nets onto the beach then marketed the "money fish" but left all the writhing "trash fish" to slowly suffocate and die on the beach. Marilyn was horrified and began to get up early and follow behind these fishers and gather up all the dying fish and return them to the water. She became obsessed with stopping this daily slaughter that was ignored by everyone else and began saving the condemned fish every morning. Marilyn (like Pope Francis it seems?) rejected the economic ideology that classifies life as either 'trash' or 'marketable, but her life-saving work took a painful, physical and spiritual toll on her. A soaked-through Marilyn could often be witnessed shivering, stumbling, along the beach weeping and trying to get the dying fish back into the ocean, until one day she completely collapsed. Marilyn never fully recovered from that "break-down," and subsequent suicide attempt even though she was hospitalized for "treatment." She eventually recovered just enough to finish "The Misfits," but perhaps at the cost of her life. Other than academic/σαρκικός I have never really had much of an interest in Marilyn, but it was this story and movie that have caused me to engage her again with more seriousness, sorrow, and maybe even reverence. I agree with what Clifford Odets said: “If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.”

Marilyn's last words on screen were, "Which way is home…How do you find your way home in the dark." But I don't think that Arthur Miller's answer is true, he wrote, "To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was. She was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes." But Miller was also one of those desperate clawing men pulling at her clothes. What Marilyn needed was not more cynicism or fantasy but the kind of love that finding her broken and suffocating would return her to life-giving water.

Marilyn Found Poems:

To the Weeping Willow

'I stood beneath your limbs
and you flowered and finally clung to me
and when the wind struck with earth 
and sand--you clung to me.

Don't cry my doll
Don't cry
I hold you and rock you to sleep
Hush hush
I'm pretending now
I'm not your mother who died.

They taught my body
to squeeze grapes.
Warm wine poured out.
And once or twice,
a slick skin.

O, Time
Be Kind
Help this weary being
To forget what is sad to remember
Loose my loneliness,
Ease my mind,
While you eat my flesh.

Life
I am of both of your directions
strong as a cobweb in the
wind — I exist more with the cold glistening frost.
But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve
seen in a paintings — ah life they
have cheated you

When the hourglass
takes off its dress,
the sand loosens and spreads.
You cannot find a footing
in me. They always said
I was terrible in bed.

I have always been
deeply terrified to
really be someone’s wife
since I know from life
one cannot love another,
ever, really
We're all dying aren't we
we're not teaching each other
what we really know,
are we'


Obliged.