American Dream Book

I roll myself upon this heart as upon a bed and resign to the dusk that is approaching. My dreams are slow in coming because my bed is surrounded by men marching. Round and around my bed they stomp so that quickstepping bare feet create an arc that moves me away from sheets and blankets to mountains, the Alleghenies where newfound strength becomes a place to be free, to take up arms to defend even manhood. The landscape is in black and white, a daguerreotype. 

But my dream deepens and flushes in color. It begins with a horse which I ride. He is a poor thing, yet noble to me and our cause so that throughout our journey, a certain kind of dignity, even glory, accrues to his spotted body, exhausted tail. He becomes a dragnet and takes us to places where only God shows His face and we cross the Jordan and the Missouri. God sweats and this sweat owns me and overpowers me. And this smell of omnipotence combines with the smell of black people. It is an odor like early evening after harvesting, of clover and rye burning to gold suspended in the air. This odor invades my nostrils, possessing me tenaciously arousing in me all the intoxications that spell the tragedy of their existence, the faraway places they will never see again and that they will die while continuing to be alive, standing up.

Do words convince or do human beings only listen to actions bloody and destructive? A man appears bony faced without beard and I know it is John Brown. He is smaller than I would imagine him to be, but I am reminded he is a legend and what we see can never match what we hear. I take hold of him and we wrestle and his sweat is mingled with the odor of harvest and he tells me that originally, he came into this world to speak the truth about slavery, but no one will listen. He sheds tears of mixed feelings born from his heart. So before me, he grows a beard, long and prodigious and becomes a leader of his people, a warrior, a special angel of death.

His brown hair lies close and even to his head. He holds a revolver high in each hand, over his head which is now encased in a straw hat. Later a white duster will cover his shadow. Slavery continues to grow, protected by a constitution, reinforced by courts, national and state laws, he persuades me through his beard, now growing awesome in its girth. Terrible acts will occur.

John Brown is now lying not in a grave, but on a cot with toes protruding from his shoes. He becomes a legend and is on trial. It is here, horizontal and in repose with his eyes closed that his life (and mine?) passes by before him.

He sees the land to cultivate, the moist dirt that cascades through his horse-drawn plough. He stops to wipe sweat and then thinks again and claims the sweat as his due, his gift for making life grow. How long has it been that he has stretched his body wide like the horizon which frames his fields. How long it has been since he reached deep down into the water hugging the marshes of his farm. Everything reminds me of omnipotence.

“I did not kill them, but I approved of it.”

He retires to secret places, dense faraway places that the earth protects and he wrestles with God who strips him from all his conceits and this world longings. He is taken into that wholeness of nature and spirit in which conflicts and contradictions are resolved. In a vision, he sees happier times, happier places.

“I believed that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right.”

So the visions continue and I become part of them since they are part of his dream. These visions evoke vertical constructions that occupy small concentrated places, especially blue in color. I gingerly traverse these special places, but find John is no longer with me and I am alone and uninvited without him. So I walk through colors of blue and red, special hues of colors well known to me, but here unreceptive and unwelcoming. I am in the visions of another and they become strange, paradoxical places without a guide. Do I continue to occupy these places that are not mine with anticipation that my own visions will evolve or do I retreat at least back to waking moments?

“I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.”

I spread my body, especially with extended fingers and I am forced out of my cot to a newer, larger place and I am bound with hands behind me. My fingers, however, are free and it is they that pierce new passages. Each digit marks a sort of rhythmic pattern and I travel up and out from my body for what will, it will appear, be my last journey in this body in this earth now. So I visit all twenty children, all landscapes dear to me, all the women I have loved even in carnality. And I am heartened by what I see and feel and can fathom. And I go to the dispossessed and smell them and touch them and become their smell and touch and I reach farther to touch as many as I can before I know I will be brought back to inhospitable places and tied again, retained so as not to be free. I savor all these moments that only this world knows, the change into spring where the green appears first as a dot, then expands, first tentatively, then like a torrent, effused, bold and fruitful. This last spring I greedily devour and its smell of wet birth and new life is enough and I let go of its stems and leaves and begin to leave and forget its fruit. I am not sad but resigned to the gallows.

“By only hanging a few moments by the neck I feel quite determined to make the utmost possible out of defeat.”

I am suspended now between life and death, between heaven and earth. Both are places and in both I am alive in different ways. I become a perfect circuit and re-live my life, hoping to change it, transform it, but I cannot. My soul is split and there are two of us, fraternal twins you might say. In one existence, the younger, clean-shaven twin partakes of a life that leads to death and destruction in the name of something noble and good. I ride into the angry night and spread splendid havoc, convinced as I am of the evils of slavery. We will kill people to save them. And that we do and I don’t look back, even in the face of a widow’s cries.

I bridge two different time periods and we talk to ourselves simultaneously. Am I doomed to carry forever this split? The first twin hopes to leave his mark on fermented nature, a dancing master of guile and lonely heroism, but ears are deaf, mouths twitter with new sounds that engage small minds fully. And when I grow my beard and become larger in the eyes of men, I see the paucity of my ways and cannot undo the deaths I am responsible for. 

“I am besides quite cheerful, having (as I trust) the peace of God, which passeth all understanding ‘to’ rule in my heart, and the testimony of a good conscience that I have no live altogether in rain.”

I am at home, I feel, though nothing is recognizable. Earth and human feelings seem far away and it is at this point that Brady is forced to cease a dream that was never his and quickly travels back to his mother’s bed.

I reach for my blue-tinted eyeglasses and, even in my half-dream, wear them to restore my reassurance about myself and the pleasures of gravity. I have studied the careers of men like Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. I was how they have enjoyed long and successful careers, I the adept manager of public image that is larger than biography. And I do know publicity, the marketing of an image. So when a beard appears on Brown’s face, it is not a mask but a hallmark of his mission. Brown is a Moses who knows how to die. I wish I could have photographed him, especially his beard.

Today I am busy constructing a special skylight to insure a dependable, controllable source of illumination for my works. It is a lovely thing when we can transform ordinary life by seeing through blue glass (sort of like rose-colored glasses). Some of my competitors I understand use blue filters over their camera, but this is not enough for me. I like the whole environment flushed in blue, creating a rippling poetic effect. My pleasure extends to my having crafted blue tinted eyeglasses, especially crafted for me so that I can carry poetry with me wherever I go.

So I am uncomfortable when I keep hearing about John Brown and his raid at Harper’s Ferry. In spite of myself, I am moved by what seems to me a large willingness of heart.

This image follows me throughout the day, reinforced by news of John’s call for an uprising of salves. I become frightened as I have always valued order (I have many southern clients). Has he not undermined the value of slavery as property?

This empathetic heart intrudes leaving me breathless and I leave the studio early and retire early. Can dreams determine the shape of our beds? My bed inherited from my mother where I am told I was conceived looks different. The late afternoon sun has transformed it, denying its practical contours, even the beddings of useful quilts, A new apparition replaces what is familiar with what feel like human flesh, golden and brown, warm and smooth to the touch, above all receptive to my contemplated nap and I succumb to the feeling of blessed arms holding and embracing me. I snore and breath with this heart that surrounds me and this beating of human organ displaces all my fears. Soon is displaces my own heart and my old rhythm, faint and irregular is stirred by new feelings.

As the studio becoming an aviary darkens, Audubon reaches for sharpened wires, a sort of armature where he impales fresh specimens of feather and flesh in attitudes suggesting the wild. Adding pins to secure the details of a fresh whippoorwill, the artist creates a frozen choreography of bird in space. He smoothes the plumage and arranges their distribution; the bird’s eye looks directly at its captor, sorrowful and pensive and uneasy. The artist measures with compass his victim’s various parts and transfers these notations to his composition, reinforcing the scientific objectives of his artistic pursuit.

He repeats this enterprise now with chimney swallows and when the secrets of their movements are captured, he stows their tiny bodies in voluminous pockets. His pencil and brush have given birth to a whole family of cripples resembling disembodied corpses on a field of battle. Here in Audobon’s left pocket are the fragmented head of a black-bellied whistling-duck, a half living ladderbacked woodpecker still assuming the pose of controlled flight; a great kiskadee is naked, stripped of all feathers with pins still anchoring his left claw. Small sounds of chirping emit from a mangled vermilion flycatcher. Audubon’s right pocket is less filled with bodies and along with two unhinged black anhinga is a small somewhat artistically wrapped sandwich of chopped olives with tomato on buttered bread, still moistened by a damp napkin. A granny smith apple completes the composition of this pocket. The tempest lulls and the moon comes floundering through the drifts.

Then it happens. All the prisoners of his armatures and pockets, alive and dying and dead suddenly free themselves from their jail and turn on their jailer, an artist whose only claim was to give shape to their form and to elevate their existence. Crows throw off their pins and gauge his neck; turkey buzzards stretch themselves sufficiently to bend their restraints and go for his eyes. Pigeons in their frantic haste to release themselves leave behind pulsating legs and torn feathers and skin. They attack with enormity this jailer who had taken what had been free and left as a work of breathing art. To this artist, it was enough to have created a monument of dislocation in the name of understanding nature but which became quickly a monument to suffering and diminution.

Quail and canaries attack the artist’s smaller parts, all his openings, penis and nipples. Cormorants and ducks split, shear and slice the sagging white flesh of his ageing frame. A golden hawk who had been impaled on a sturdy armature, returns to render havoc on the artist’s limp existence creating a grey smudge, gloomy and rotten with mildew. He cries out, but who will help him who has offended nature?

Mr. Brady’s assistant makes an exposure; we hear the click and the image is burned in a glass plate. When developed, we are surprised to see no human present but a vast number of birds thrashing in the night. But these images begin to recede and one image, a giant Carolina paroquet with enormous beak overpoweres his head and takes its place; then that image retreats to be replaced by a shy and retiring old man, distracted and unprepossessing.

Mr. Brady is consulted and all agree that Mr. Audubon’s image needs assistance, some elevation as they say in the trade. His beak is softened, his dead eyes are alivened, his loose garments bulging with maimed carcasses, are smoothed over and cosmetized. Then his glassy cheeks are tinted, his ears illuminated, his beak and wings downplayed (This would, of course, involve an extra fee.) Then Audubon, cocooned under glass and with brass mat, enshrined in a handsome frame, is himself embalmed. The enshrined portrait appeals to the ever-present American values of prosperity and patriotism with a dash of morality. Photography in Brady’s hands has moved far from literalism, into a circumference of its own. The composite, compounded and abstracted image of the illustrious artist which “acts on the mind of the subject” is the result.

Imagine if you would, the arrival, shy and retiring of an old man, distracted and unprepossessing. In shadow, however, he takes on a different dimension and appears like a giant golden hawk, rapacious and devouring. Am I the only one to see this? Mr. Brady seemed oblivious and I try to warn him, but like always, he is blinded by the fame of our sitter, John James Audubon and ignores my admonitions. I feel and smell trouble and want no part of this sitter who quickly sits on me with a heaviness that I never knew before.

So with Audubon sitting on me, not moving in the slightest, he seems like a bird of prey with me as a perch. He watches as Brady moves the camera away from strict formality, wanting as he usually does, a simple pose where Audubon’s hands won’t distract from his face nor his eyes staring directly at the lens. But the sitter will not have any of this and glues his eye directly on the lens with a vehemence that even unnerves the normal passivity of Mr. Brady’s assistants. Could any viewer of this portrait not feel threatened by the intensity of this stare?

I begin to argue with the photographer about light insisting that the whole body (with chair) is as important as the face. I also do not want the deep shadows of the studio to create the context for Audubon’s bird-like existence to come forward. But I am over-ruled and the camera directs its attention on the hawkish face, softening the ambience with blue glass that aims to poeticize the composition with shades and shutters.

Other birds begin to appear in the shadows of the room: quail, turkeys, wood grouse, loons, crows and cormorants. Flapping wings, open beaks, piercing eyes, they splatter and spray Audubon and me with their waste. Blue-gray backs and wings compete with brown, green and black spotted wing coverts, heaving brown and ochre breasts with multi-colored tails. Quickly the studio becomes dark with flapping wings eclipsing the blue skylights with dung.

You can say that I do like pretty clothes and adore shopping. I am sensitive to trends and when in New York (I like especially A.T. Stewart's Emporium) I purchase a whole array of outfits that will project the image I want.

You must understand that when I was a little girl there was a profound shift in ladies’ clothes. Our shoulders grew prodigiously, reinforced by bountiful sleeves, and this resulted in wide and generous skirts, ankle length, and embellished. I remember petticoats multiplied to give my step-grandmother, Mary Brown Humphries, that fuller look which used to her advantage, adding ornaments, ribbons, and jewelry. She always taught me through example as well as admonition that your sleeves should always be twice the size of your waist. So she and her dressmakers were happy seeking solutions such as hoops to puff out their voluminous upper arms. I frequently dressed in step-grandmother’s clothes and I fit perfectly because the style encouraged the look of a tiny girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes.  I guess it was a sort of disguise.

I was almost twenty when I discovered (we lived in Lexington, Kentucky) that what I was wearing was no longer stylish, that a new image of beauty had invaded our lives. Our wonderful puffy sleeves that I had so enjoyed, along with their piping, flounces, and ribbons, were banished and we were directed to cleaner, simpler lines: clothes that ceased to deny gravity; vertical, floor-length, and sleek. My step-mother (though less fortunate than her mother and burdened with continued pregnancies), had the vision to see that the new clothes, now more delicate in pastel tones, would cause the American woman to be held in a new and untried way. No longer would she trumpet her individuality; instead she would present a whispered self-effacement.

In the new style I felt free, newly dressed, and while I could not raise my arms beyond a right angle, I felt that I was now able to develop a graceful expression of sincerity and yearning. Like my step-mother, but not my step-grandmother, I was proud that my simple clothes reflected my true character, banishing the affectation of ornament and its hypocrisy.

True, I did use padding in my bodice and over the backs of my hips, but on the whole, I felt my clothes conformed to my natural proportions and were a positive home for my truer emotions. I dispensed with hats (many inherited from family) and chose instead a simple bonnet that framed my face and brought to my attention to my features. I was not beautiful, but what beauty I did have was a reflection of my mind, heart, and soul. Clothes provided me with a stage that would enhance their dimensions.

But those days, lovely in the contemplation of beauty revealed by truth, expired with the assassination of my husband. I swore henceforth to wear only black and began gradually to shrink inside, dying like a walnut shriveling in its shell. But since I was dressed as a reflection of my interior state, I felt comfortable in making nightly visits to Summerland, where I could visit Mr. Lincoln. Then I began to visit graveyards, not as sad stone gardens but as places to reconnect with all the departed in my life: my darling sons Eddie, Willie, Tad, and what is most unbearable, Mr. Lincoln. I leave my son, Robert, out.

At night I slept fitfully, the burden of my losses weighing heavily on me. When I would awaken my right eye would open to look about, but in my left eye the pupil sometimes would have rolled in its socket so that it seemed stuck in its casings, peering into my brain . When this happened, I knew that my sweet boys were connecting with me and I would encounter them, not collectively but individually as I preferred.

How does a mother ever know her child? They grow so fast and are always beyond reach, beyond touch and understanding. My first loss was Eddie, and he moves about with such rapidity that I have to immobilize him into sleep so I can love him. This way, I make him a kind of Endymion and I become Selene, a moon goddess. Like the moon itself I can gaze and caress him forever for he will always be there for me, always a boy asleep and accepting of my love and embrace.

Eddie is my garden that hourly changes so that in an expanse of four seasons I can experience the fullness of his nature in its climatic evolution. From his left side his tiny pink chest, soft and delicate grass, tufted and yet waving, invite picnicking and gentle contemplation. I love these summers of his and I time my approach during his naps when with his legs akimbo the smell of rosemary competes with shiny wrinkled leaves of hawthorn that seem to explode with pungent dark orange seeds and tangy sap.

As a mother I can celebrate my boy’s physical beauty, his proportions and his evolving manhood.  I am not incestuous nor pedophilic, but can marvel at what I created from my own body, and in my contemplation as a moon mother, I can bathe my boy in silver light and can understand him only as a mother can, the silences of losing him fitfully, hourly to time and inevitably to faraway places.

So I relish Eddie in autumn, his brown matted hair, thick with the smell of pear trees shedding their crowns, English ivy in retreat, green and yet growing brown.  And I am happy. He cannot see in the normal way, but I can tell he is dreaming. He looks at me and does not see me, then sees me but does not look at me, and I am happy. Winter surrounds his tiny bird-like fist and in that grasp is the embrace of all that nature can provide and I am happy and return in my own dream to my sleeping husband’s bed.

I lose Eddie and he cannot be replaced, but as the moon I shine in despair and in time replenish my belly and give form to another beautiful boy sleeping.  I am the wooer as always, steadfast and strong, and Willie replenishes my loss and fills in his quiet sleeping all that I can ever ask for. But there is more. This tiny evolving boy beautifully formed in me and sharing in Eddie’s spirit is mine in a different way. Eddie died at three, almost four, and with Willie my caress is longer, deeper in my feast of his beauty never to be forgotten. I conceived him in my great loss, and at the moment of ejaculation, I thought of my husband’s strength, gentleness, and intelligence. And I created a safe place on the moon itself as nursery since I was promised a wonderful transformation for this child. I was blessed and Willie blessed all of us in return.

I know I have deep, driving desire, which is who I am, and this desire is also my will. And my will, strong and focused, is also my deed, which is my destiny. So I gaze on this tiny well-made child and my heart is full; he stirs in his sleep to reach for me, sensing his incompletion and I am happy for two years.

When I strive to will again I imagine a beautiful girl at the moment of conception. But this time I am cruelly punished (what had I done?). Another boy appears but not beautiful with enormous head and cleft palate. Thomas becomes Tadpole, then Tad, but for me he is “ my little troublesome sunshine”. It is then I begin to see him not as Endymion enjoying the gift of immortality in forever youth and beauty by remaining forever asleep, but as Pan, Dionysus, a dancing god, mischievous in inexhaustible play. I never can see him clearly, he is always in movement, his face like breath, transitory and formless, and his hands quick, blurred colors suggesting the objects or toys he is playing with.

My eyes follow him and in time I learn to read both his baby-twisted words, later his slurred sentences. But he is my deed, created from my will, and he is all about who I am and ever wanted to be.

I have Willie for twelve years before like Eddie, he is taken from me. Death is no objective thing, no fact to be recited. I know death is grief and sadness, mourning and dislocation. The true reality is the feelings we have of loss, not the fact of death. So I choose carefully clothes that appropriately reflect my inward state. Nothing that I wear in my bereavement can shine, nothing can reflect the moon. What is fitting is a black bombazine, a gentle silk and wool mixture, lusterless and dignified. Trimmed in black crepe, a silk treated to resemble a dull matte finish. My collars, sleeves, and cuffs, even my bonnet (with long black veil) are all made of crepe. I jettison all the ribbons and jewelry I love and choose an oval broach set off by pearls and containing an eyelash of my beautiful boy.

I move in public so as to advertise my bereavements much like a performance. Is this wrong if it focuses my grief and strengthens my resolve? I visit in my dreams the House of Mourning, a dark edifice whose individual floors reinforce different levels of grief, and I move in and out of the ground floor and first floor not daring to go further upstairs. Would my mourning unravel? My heart is broken, split into apple like sections, and like the crowds who surround me I am learning the levels and dimensions of sorrow. I dare not venture upstairs to the next floors, where mourning takes violent forms (to judge from the sounds). But I would soon enough learn the geography of these upper most floors and the circumstances of my own heart. For the time being I use a white linen handkerchief with darkened borders, highlighted by artificial tears in mock pearl sewn asymmetrically.

My tears, however, are not artificial even though I know I make myself cry in order to convince myself (and others?) that my grief is anything but illusion. I know I am blessed with this gift of tears, deliciously wet and cleansing, bathing me in fluid expansion. I am rightly proud of them because they speak larger than words, not from talking mouth, but from the fullness of my woman’s body. But these tears are also signs and shape a mythology of rupture and loss. They deny gravity, flowing sideways, disappearing when they reach their destination.

I know my husband is upstairs in the House of Mourning and I try to reach his rooms, but my feet cannot mount the stairs and my hands become frozen to the banister. My hope is that I can ascend with breathing intact or move appropriately; I want to feel my grief in increments. The vestibule of the House is large and I take full advantage of its generosity. I begin to move first slowly then in small timed increments. Legs moving then arms following. My head encased with veils can then rotate to the left and right though my public bandages of mourning hold me in check. But as I increase my subtle movements, my grief that is suspended over me descends and begins to fill my body, first registering in my flesh and then invading all of my organs, invading my stomach, intestines, then bladder, and finally taking over and pummeling my heart. I let this happen; no, I invite it. Feeling my feelings fully becomes the price of admission to the upper floors of the House, and that becomes my destination, thence to return to everyday life with some sense of being free.

In sympathy night retreats and the wallpapered leaves and flowers that decorate the vestibule begin their own autumn journey of loss, first in color then with leaves dropping prodigiously. Encouraged, my movements become larger and my legs and arms are more fully engaged. I begin to encounter complex movements, or do they spring from my own body as it gains momentum? I had always been a good dancer and even Mr. Lincoln loved to lead me across the floor. But this is no dancing, no, not as I knew it.

My pace quickens, legs and arms almost detaching themselves from my body and the intoxication of falling mounts, coalesces, and then pulverizes my whole being. My sobs quicken, then quiet, then simply breathe and I escape into a window that suddenly opens to allow passage to the floor where my husband lies.

I am resolved now and my body is quick and focused, but I fathom I am crossing a great divide so I hesitate to enter that room I know he sleeps in. My pause distracts me and I find comfort in his clothes and hat, which are suspended on pegs outside the door. Long, white and black, full of sweat and pain and exhaustion, some blood, but the overriding quality to his clothes is a curious embrace of life: grass stain on elbows, the odor of wet dirt on knees; his hat crushed by continuous use, which includes its role as a source of play for children. His pockets reveal their contents and, in the process, their owner: some money, spectacles, a comb, and jacks to play with, a few envelopes with scribbled notes, a tiny pencil. I inventory them in my mind and approach the door, open it and find the room empty.

I understand that his body is gone, not to return, but that his spirit is here and not here for it has much work to do. If I see this clearly it helps only a little in relieving my sorrow and I descended the staircase, pass through the vestibule where the wallpaper is now wintry, with trees now frozen sticks. 

Tad is waiting for me, my Pan, my boy whose speech like his life is blur in time and space. But eventually he too is taken and I am alone, utterly alone.

I visit photographers, no not Mr. Brady who is interested in the surfaces of existence, but those who can access other dimensions. My senses hunger for connection, new circumferences, and Mr. Mumler of Boston provides me with new opportunities. In my visits there, I have to climb stairs to encounter my own self-image of woman-ness, fertile as the moon, giving life to males. And when I reach the top of the stairs, I encounter a familiar smell, dusty and pungent which seems to be waiting for me. It pervades my sittings with Mr. Mumler and when I leave I take with me an image of an old lady in black, strong in her past fecundity, with two gentle hands on her shoulders, loving and peaceful. There are others, but this is my favorite and I leave the studio at 170 West Springfield Street, and I leave Boston and eventually I leave even America.

But before my departure, I push Mr. Brady out of my dream and he awakens full of fear and consternation.

Mrs. Lincoln, the president’s wife, used to visit my studio frequently. Ordering me around, she would search out the best lighting to enhance her importance. She was a vigorous custodian of her public image and censored what she deemed not worthy of who she believed herself to be.

She loved clothes and seemed to subscribe to the maxim that such matters were not disguises but revelations of true character. One night, bored with sentimental novels that seemed to share this folklore, I dreamt first about Mary Lincoln in my studio, then found myself on Broadway surrounded by ladies of fashion parading up and down the boulevard. It was a sort of public theater of ostentation and self adornment so I suspect that it must have taken place in the late 1850’s or even during the war. I even fantasized that phrenologists had become fashion consultants, advising their clients on appropriate ways of revealing (or veiling) their phrenological extremes. Hats and hairstyles were opportunities to become whoever you wanted by veiling your defects.

What I saw on Broadway that day were yards of inflated material made even more magnificent with an excess of petticoats enlarged and held firm with steel hoops-ruffled and flounced, braided, pleated in gauze, brocade, organdy in dark and lavish colors. In the midst of these fashionable ladies I see Mrs. Lincoln, whose presence precludes anyone else from shining or casting shadow on her elevated existence. Her voice is sonorous as it clarity trumpets even over the boom of Lower Broadway. This voice still rings in my ears with its fathomless magic made denser in autumn. Hear her...

—California Association of Teachers of English

John Ransom Phillips sits on a hard, straight-backed wooden chair and, straight-backed himself, at his dining table he writes on a legal pad with ball-point pen. He writes all morning, one leg slightly angled, transcribing, as it were, the dreams of his ten thousand fathers. After a cup of tea and bowl of soup Phillips goes into his studio to paint.No computer. No typewriter. No tape recorder. Just a pen, paper and sunlight through the window.