‘The myth that survives is called truth’
Miguel 2014
I came to the States from Guanajuato, Mexico on a teaching assistantship in the UC graduate program. My father’s success insured that there would be no monetary problems. My mother, an American ex patriot insured that I was bi-lingual.
I was assigned to assist a lower division painting class taught by Janos Garbo. It was 1988. Garbo had been asked to teach by the faculty that had denied him tenure ten years earlier. But being fired by the University meant he could paint full time and he soon became something of a celebrity in the art world with a series of paintings based on a post apocalyptic destruction and a rebirth of all life on earth not carbon based but as a result of the accumulation of radiation garbage that somehow organized itself into sentient playful ‘beings’. Sorry about the long sentence.
The anthropomorphized heaps of glowing garbage morphed into exquisite forms that fit in nicely with Garbo’s propensity for organic form. But his so called celebrity lost momentum when his friend and Art dealer ran off to Europe with a great deal of Garbo’s earnings.
Now in need of an ‘income’ he gladly accepted the one year teaching gig. This I learned later from others. Garbo and I spoke of other matters.
Within a few weeks I was indoctrinated into the bizarre quirky thinking that made up his view of things. Not that he offered up his philosophy. I had to argue with him to pull it out. He was uncomfortable talking about his “quiet world”.
I was somehow able to gain his confidence and his affection. Half the time he is serious but the other half is a romp.
He began by stating we had to know the limits of the seeker (man) before we could report his findings. And there he turned to Lau Tzu #1 it begins:
“ Existence is beyond the power of words”
And ends:” If words be needed wonder names them both. From wonder into wonder existence opens.”
Garbo felt that man’s searching for truth while it can be enjoyed for its own sake should not be considered as culminating in an ‘objective truth’ since it ultimately relies on words to define itself. He went farther:
“Real objective truth does not exist except as tautology. Every other utterance of fact is conditional.
Science is contemporary myth. If the myth is believed long enough it will be called truth. It may last as truth for a hundred years. Or a thousand. Until it spends out itself.
Reality is the consensus of myth.
Scientists are our storytellers. They spend years examining data from more and more powerful and sensitive instruments. These data lead them to speculate and conclude. Only to be overturned by a new set of speculations defined by words.”
Intuition and dreams were more useful and therefore more relevant. Garbo identified with the Hindu triad of realities:
1. Karma… an early variation of ‘as you sow so shall you reap'
2. Maya …. ‘ The surface of life is an illusion’
3.Lila…… ‘The play of the divine untiring unending cosmic dance by a grace born of infinite vitality and variety'
Garbo saw Lila as God’s play. He kept a kind of journal where the ideas he read or thought were printed out in a neat delicate script. Some poems too: Shakespeare, Hart Crane, William Blake, who he claimed as birth mate since they shared the same birthday.
Many years passed and we have become very close. Fate has granted that we live near enough to see each other from time… to visit each other’s studios and keep up with each other’s ideas on painting. Garbo is Godfather to my first-born. Her name not coincidentally is Maya. He is always yelling at me to stop painting like a ‘Mexican’. I don’t know if he is kidding or testing cause there is that twinkle in his eye.
