by Philip Smith
After this message the rest of the pages in the notebook are blank. Apparently, for my father, that was the end of the matter. He realized, without ever letting on, that Ruth was not just a fake but a bundle of negative, harmful energy that marshaled up dark forces whose goal was to interfere with his healing work and possibly destroy him. The dark buddies that she hung out with were somehow able to impersonate Arthur Ford and Chander Sen and get through to my father on their particular wavelength while blocking their genuine communications. Throughout the time that he spent with Ruth, he was repeatedly attacked, hindered in his healing, and exposed to false information. Yet he decided to stay with her, knowing her secret. He must have loved her in a way that I’ll never understand.
fifteen
The Mad Scientist
The phone rang. I wiped the paint off my hands onto the front of my trousers and answered it.
“What are you thinking?”
I was taken aback that my father would even ask such a question. We both knew that he didn’t need to ask, since he always knew what I was thinking, whether I liked it or not. We hadn’t spoken in over a month.
“Nothing, really.” I had been moody the last couple of days. Obviously my father picked up on this and decided to give me a call.
It was now 1980, and I had been living in New York for the past five years. After Bob the photographer tried to shoot me, I half-heartedly skipped from university to university in the Northeast. I honored my mother’s wishes and completed my degree. Now I was on my own doing the work I loved.
That week I’d just had a studio visit from Richard Marshall, one of the curators at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The visit had gone well. Richard liked the work and said that he would like to reproduce one of my drawings in the Paris Review, which I knew would please my father. Eventually Richard would select my work to be included in the prestigious Whitney Biennial. Any artist would have been thrilled by such events, but I was currently in between gallery associations, and the lack of a home for my paintings gave me a constant sense of anxiety. Museums were happy to look at my work, but galleries were not quite sure what to do with my ten-foot drawings. As the dealer Holly Solomon said to me at the end of a studio visit, “We just can’t afford to frame your work.” Interestingly, after my father died, I found Holly’s name on a small piece of paper in his files. It was a note about her mother, who lived on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, needing a psychic healing from my father. I could not figure out how Holly came to contact my father, since I never discussed him with her or vice versa.
Having once had a gun pressed to my head caused me to want to live way below the radar. As a result, I dressed inconspicuously, had an unlisted phone number, and became even more invisible than when I lived in Miami and tried to disappear from being the son of a psychic.
My studio loft on the Bowery was housed in a condemned building with no heat. The building was owned and neglected by the city. Several artists had taken over the loft as a place to live and work. The windowpanes were broken. I had glued cardboard over the windows to keep out the wind. For warmth I hung from the ceiling large sheets of plastic that I bought on Canal Street; those “walls” would trap the small amount of heat emanating from my tiny electric space heater. The transparent plastic tarps allowed me to partition out a studio and a bedroom area. A makeshift kitchen had been installed. There were no walls separating the bathroom from the rest of the space. At night I ate dinner under an electric blanket.
Without even a hint from me as to what was going on, my father started right in as if we had discussed my current situation many, many times. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about your art. Just because some gallery hasn’t said yes doesn’t mean you can’t paint. Keep painting and keep writing. Doing the work is what’s important; you will be guided. If you want, the spirits can help you with inspiration for the painting. Meditate, and I will send them to you. Your paintings will be unlike anyone else’s.”
“Thanks, but I’ll just do it on my own. Maybe I should have listened to mom and become a lawyer.”
“I really don’t think you had a choice. I knew very early on that this was your destiny. Remember when I went to the ashram with Dr. Mishra? Well, I had your chart done. I can’t even remember how old you were at the time. In fact, I had your chart done by several astrologers who were there. They all said the same thing. Your destiny is in art. It is how your soul speaks.”
In my paintings, I was attempting to map out a kind of dreamlike state of consciousness populated by a flood of pictographs not unlike the types of images one might receive during a séance. When I was a kid, my father would drag me to every psychic in town for a reading. They would take one look at me and start describing the images that were appearing before their eyes. In the trance state, most mediums get their information from flashes of mental symbolic pictures, which they interpret for the sitter. For example, a psychic might see a picture of a woman with lots of blue jewelry talking, and he would interpret that as a wealthy woman from the island of St. Bart’s coming to give you a lot of money.
Each of the pictures in my image-dense work could operate on multiple levels of meaning and interpretation not unlike a tarot card reading. In some ways, I was trying to emulate aspects of my father’s work—he could implant energy or thought-forms into objects or people. What I did was try to implant energy, multiple meanings, and codes into ordinary-looking images. Over time the images in my paintings began to reveal multiple scenarios for the viewer. As a kid, my fascination with archaeology and ancient Egypt seemed to have some impact on the formal construction of my paintings as well.
An astrologer that I saw every year on my birthday as a kind of spiritual tune-up told me that my work was an active form of meditation. He said that during the painting process I entered a metaphysical space. I don’t think he was wrong. I usually slept most of the day and painted all night until the morning. My mind was quieter in the middle of the night, and I felt better able to access the more arcane aspects of my mind as I worked until morning. On rare occasions, if I took a break in the middle of the night, I would go around the corner to visit artist Bob Rauschenberg on Lafayette Street.
In the few years that I had been in New York, my work was exhibited at Artists Space, the Drawing Center, and occasionally an uptown gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. I was extremely fortunate in being included in a seminal 1977 exhibition of new artists titled “Pictures.” The critic and art historian Douglas Crimp had uncovered a vein of artists who were all working with found media images and were producing a new kind of work that was the polar opposite of the reigning vogue of conceptualism and minimalism. This unique moment produced a new crop of artists that included Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Troy Brauntauch, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and David Salle. The “Pictures” exhibition was well attended, widely discussed, and traveled to several museums and universities around the country.
Simultaneously, I was earning a bit of money by writing for magazines such as ARTS, GQ, and Andy Warhol’s Interview. For some reason, writing came to me naturally, as it was not such a different process from the pictographic storytelling in my paintings. My published interviews included artists such as Keith Sonnier, Rauschenberg, Warhol, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Laurie Anderson, and David Byrne, as well as Run Run Shaw, the great producer of martial arts films in Hong Kong, and Morris Lapidus, the long-forgotten, audacious architect who would live to see his brilliant career reassessed by a new generation. Writing gave me an opportunity to have extraordinary conversations with people I might not otherwise have met.
Whenever I turned in an article for Interview, I would head up to Warhol’s Factory to personally deliver my double-spaced interview that had been banged out on an old portable typewriter. While I’d be talking with Bob Colacello, Interview’s editor at the time, Andy would eventually drift over and speak with me in this open-ended, cryptic way that I understood perfectly given my background of listening to disembodied spirits deliver messag
es. Almost every other Saturday, when the Factory was quiet, Warhol would call me in my studio to chat and catch up. Often I was invited to Factory lunches with food brought in from Brownies health food restaurant, as Andy’s tape recorder captured the roundtable conversation for the next issue of Interview. Years later, after editor Robert Hayes passed away, Andy would offer me his job. I couldn’t paint and edit a magazine at the same time, so, regrettably, I declined the most fun job on the planet.
During my conversation with my father, he kept trying to put a positive spin on my bad mood. “The ‘Pictures’ exhibition you were in traveled all over the country. It is a very important show and will have a great influence on art for many years into the future. You should be very pleased. It got a lot of attention. People respond to your paintings in a profound way. While they are not for everyone, there is an energy and power in your paintings. If you meditate before you begin work, you can actually put healing energy into your paintings just like Zen monks before they begin their calligraphy. I always wanted you to work with me, but I think you do your best metaphysical work through your paintings. I know you’re depressed. Do you want me to remove it? It’ll take just a second.”
“Naw, don’t bother, it’ll go away.” I was in no mood to be tinkered with. “Besides, isn’t depression good for creating? Aren’t artists supposed to be tortured and depressed?”
My father laughed. “That is a really stupid idea. I hope you will quickly let go of that thought. Art should come from a serene, wise place that is not disturbed by negative ideas. You know, I’ve told you this before, you create your own reality through your thoughts. I’ve taught you so many exercises to improve your thinking so that you are always on an elevated level. You need to be at that high vibration, and only then will you make art that will speak to people over time.”
Even though my father was 1,500 miles away, I was sure he could see me rolling my eyes in annoyance at what I thought was a pointless, patronizing lecture. I felt that he just didn’t understand the creative process even though his entire life had been one large creative endeavor.
“You need to keep your thinking on the divine level,” he continued. “Then true inspiration will come. All the hardships you are experiencing are your own creation.”
Oh, man, I didn’t need to hear this right now. Happy thoughts were not going to help me complete the painting I was working on. They certainly weren’t going to get the Whitney Museum to consider my work for its permanent collection.
“Keep your thoughts pure and elevated. You know how to filter your thoughts. If not, all this negative thinking will only create a negative reality.”
“Okay, okay, I got it.” I was irritated by his sunshiny attitude when I was involved in the stark and dangerous life-and-death struggle of making a painting.
My father believed that every aspect of our reality was first created in our thoughts before it physically manifested. We were the directors of our own movies—not chance, not the guy across the street, not our boss. If you wanted to be covered in white mink, become president of Mali, or invent a flying car, you just needed to visualize it. He had always taught me that by aligning my thoughts with the magnetic properties of the universe, they would attract good or bad events, depending on the content of my thinking. The choice was mine. At the moment, I was being a passive, negative thinker and not in control of my mind.
“You sure?” he persisted. “I could run a quick scan and psychically send you some Bach Flower Remedies to correct your current imbalance.” My father’s intentions were good. He hated to see me suffer.
In addition to being able to heal the physical body, my father was able to heal and remove mental blocks, emotional traumas, insecurity, phobias, neuroses, and obsessions almost instantaneously. He could collapse ten years of psychiatric care into about three minutes. As his healing talents evolved, he would now begin every healing with diagnosing and treating the mental state, as he believed that all disease originated in the mind—be it the superconscious, conscious, or subconscious mind. Once the mind had been healed, the body would more readily follow.
This breakthrough in his technique came when he discovered the work of Dr. Edward Bach, an English surgeon from the 1930s who felt that there had to be a more intelligent way of treating illness than cutting and sawing our precious bodies. Bach, who eventually became one of my father’s spirit guides and communicated with him on a regular basis, left his lucrative practice and followed his intuition into the fields to pick specific flowers that had mental healing properties.
When Dr. Bach held a particular flower in his hand, he would intuitively sense and then physically experience the very condition that the flower could cure. For example, certain flowers would make him feel anxious or fearful or depressed. When he experienced these mental states, he then knew that this flower could heal that emotion. Once he had discovered a specific remedy, Dr. Bach would then distill the flower’s essence and use it medically. Based on his research, he developed the Bach Flower Remedies, a therapeutic system composed of thirty-seven remedies used to correct an almost unlimited range of mental disorders and imbalances. As Bach states in his book Heal Thyself, “Disease will never be cured…by present materialistic methods for the simple reason that disease in its origin is not material…Disease is in essence the result of conflict between the Soul and Mind and will never be eradicated except by spiritual and mental effort.”
Over the years, Pop had created detailed charts of the entire range of human emotions and corresponding methods of balancing and correcting them. Not only did he believe that negative emotions were often the basis for most disease but he also needed to be able to check out if there was emotional resistance when one of his healings didn’t take. Like many of his other healing methods, these techniques had come from Arthur, who told my father, “It’s time you got busy and work on the charting of attitudes and emotions. You will need that information to determine what your patient is thinking and his attitude of acceptance regarding the healing you are giving him.” With one of these charts and a minute or two with the pendulum, Pop was able to know every detail of a person’s past, present, and future emotional makeup. By going down this chart with his pendulum, he was able to develop a detailed diagnosis of his patient’s mental condition as well as determine the correct remedy.
Part of me wanted to let my father do his mind voodoo on me so that I would be rid of this painful depression. I had no doubt that he could release the blocks and negative mental attitudes that I was experiencing. But I felt that would be cheating. It would be like some father buying his kid into college even though the kid had a D average. I wanted do it on my own and experience life free of outside psychic interference.
My father did his best to make me feel better. “Look, the important thing is making work that’s true to your soul. Don’t worry about whether anyone likes it or not or if a gallery wants to represent you. Those galleries don’t know anything. The artist always comes first. I know your work will eventually be in many museums, but that really doesn’t matter. Use your art as a kind of meditation and as a way to advance your soul. Everything else will take care of itself.”
He shifted the subject. “So, when are you coming to visit? I’m doing a lot of exciting new healings with different kinds of energy that spirit is teaching me. I’d love to share it with you. Just yesterday Arthur came in and told me, ‘Remove fifty percent of a patient’s energy, energize it, and shoot it back to him after rebuilding the vibrations to full potential. Request that the molecules, atoms, and crystals are energized to full potential before sending it back. Ask that the blood be revitalized.’ You should see the results that I’ve already gotten with this method. I had a woman here today who was so lethargic, her head kept dropping down. Before I began the healing, I did what Arthur suggested, and she perked right up. She was a new person. It made the rest of her healing that much more effective. I’d really love you to see this in action. I also want to teach you to do it; it would b
e very helpful for you.”
No doubt this would have been a handy trick for me to learn, especially when I would stay up all night working and did not leave the house for weeks on end. Interestingly, I later found out that the medical profession in Europe was doing a somewhat similar procedure known as plasmapheresis, where doctors would remove the “dirty” blood of an ill patient, filter it, and then put it back into the body. My father was rejuvenating the body in a similar fashion but on a subtle energetic level.
“I don’t know, let me see how things go. It’s awfully cold here, and I do miss Miami a lot. I don’t think I was meant to live where there is snow.”
“Or unheated buildings.”
“How’d you know?”
My father just laughed at the stupidity of my question. “I’ll leave you be. You’ll get over this—it’s just temporary—but I’m always here if you need me.”
“Thanks, Pop, I know.”
For someone who had been raised by a decorator, surrounded by the tropical color of hibiscus, bougainvillea, bird-of-paradise, and poinciana, I was making paintings that were basically black-and-white drawings. New York had drained all the color out of my work. As my art became increasingly minimalist in line and color, my father had begun to use color as another means to heal people. About ten years earlier, he had started placing small squares of colored plastic cellophane over a lightbulb in order to project colored light onto patients. He would use his pendulum to determine what color and how much exposure they required before he would bathe them in healing colored light. Eventually he gave up using actual lightbulbs and simply visualized the person surrounded by a particular colored light.