FLUTES AND TOMATOES

A MEMOIR WITH POEMS

WADE STEVENSON

BLAZEVOX[BOOKS]
Buffalo, New York

Flutes and Tomatoes: A Memoir with Poems

by Wade Stevenson
Copyright 2015
Published by BlazeVOX [books]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without
the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.
Printed in the United States of America
Interior Design, Cover Art and Typesetting by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition
ISBN: 978-1-60964-221-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015940923
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FLUTES AND TOMATOES

A MEMOIR WITH POEMS

PROLOGUE

When I returned to Paris that summer and was

alone in my atelier1 again, I found I had become
more sensitive to the touch and taste of tomatoes, to
their red reality. Even the word tomato, when
applied to what it was meant to describe, troubled
me. I began to feel that something else was
necessary, something deeper, far-reaching. What
was it? I searched in vain for a word, a succession of
words, a stream of words that would be better able
to contain the reality of the tomato. The word
tomato - t o m a t o just wasnt enough.
There had to be something else, but what?

1

Atelier: French for artists studio. At that time I lived at 23 rue

Campagne-Premire in the 14th arrondissement. I had the
basement studio. You had to climb down a few steps to enter. Then
you looked up through large clear story windows with protective
grating at the street level. All I could see were shoes going by on
the sidewalk. Brigitte Bardot had once lived in the building on an
upper floor. And in the studio above me, the Spanish surrealist
painter, Oscar Dominguez, had committed suicide on New Years
Eve, and the blood dripped down through the floor into my studio.
But that was in 1945, long before my time.

13

As the days passed, I felt I had to make a verbal

reconnaissance operation into unknown territory. I
certainly had no idea at that time that the powerful
desire I felt to establish a rapport between the
tomato and myself would result in the book you
now hold.
The tomatoes, a dozen or so, were still perched on
a windowsill in the kitchen, where the late August
light gave them a translucent glow. There was no
need yet to actually take a tomato and put it on the
table. There was simply a burning need to ferret out
thoughts, images, words that would correspond to
the brutal reality of the tomato.
It was strange to think that one tomato could
produce so many images, could engender so many
thoughts and whirling, neural forms. These images,
like that of a short red dress hugging a womans
curvy behind, came together with a shock and
collided in my head. I almost never stepped out of
the atelier, I was going stir-crazy mad. Night and day
the tomato, the image of the tomato, the knowledge
that it was within my reach and yet could not be
grasped, obsessed me.
14

How odd to think that only a few weeks ago the

tomato, for me, had barely existed. I had no tomato
thoughts, no tomato longings, no tomato nothing! If
I touched a tomato, if I squeezed it until its juices
ran out, it was in a careless, mindless way. The
tomato then was just another fruit to which I barely
paid attention except when I was eating one.
But now it was a question of actively presiding
over the birth of a new tomato, of encouraging it to
come forward out of the deep, dark womb of silence
in which it had been hidden. My duty was crystalclear: I had to find a way of filling up the void of the
tomato, of surrounding that beautiful fruit? or
vegetable? with the light and shadow of words, of
illuminating the tomato and letting it breathe.
Where could I begin? To what domain or category
or reality did the tomato belong? One could say that
it was a vegetable, that it grew in such and such a
way; one could attempt and (probably) succeed in
describing it physically, listing all of the bio-data
that contributed to making the tomato a tomato, and
not an apple or a potato, for example, but was that
enough? Did that even begin to be enough?

15

Was not the tomato in its tomato essence of a

completely different order than anything that could
normally be predicated about it? As I paced up and
down between the four white walls of my Paris
studio, smoking Gitanes bleus and drinking
expresso coffee, those were the kind of thoughts
that dominated my mind. Fact: the tomato on the
windowsill was a mystery. I had to find a way to
decipher it or to admit failure.
Since time was of no importance to me, I decided I
would try to write about the tomatoes2. I would try
to approach them in the same way that a Picasso or
Matisse sketched their semi-nude, reclining models.
At a minimum, writing about them would help me
to understand them, perhaps even go beyond them.
I imagined a tomato transcendence, a zen-state
where a tomato would be both a tomato and not a
tomato.
Carefully I carried the tomatoes from the
windowsill where they had been perched to the

2

Things give rise to the language; now the language arouses an

independent life in the things, first dimly perceived in them only
by the poet. Elizabeth Bishop
16

wooden table I had bought for nothing at the flea

market. I wondered for a moment how I would
rearrange them; I wanted them to look natural in
the late afternoon light. Yet before I put my hands
on them, touched their sleek, silky skin, I realized
with a certain shock that the tomatoes had already
changed.
It wasnt so much in appearance, though a few
wrinkles had already creased their round surfaces.
What had happened was even more frightening:
somehow they had changed on the inside. Their
spiritual substance, or better said, the life force that
caused them to be what they are, had subtly and
indefinably morphed into something else. Where
had this otherness come from? Was it from me,
my vision of an altered reality? No, I didnt think so.
It was almost as if a touch of evil, like a small worm3,
had burrowed into the very heart of the tomato.

3
See the invisible worm in The Sick Rose, a poem by William
Blake

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I realized at once, of course, how stupid it was of

me to think that they would have stayed stable4. I
had learned a long time ago that there is no such
thing as permanence of form, feeling or emotion.
Everything changes, comes, goes, departs, every
atomic micro-second is forever being altered, the
new energy combined in the cosmic reshuffling. It
was true I had tried to keep things simply by
choosing a tomato. Since you have to focus on
something, in the end what difference does it make
what object you choose? William Blake said he
could see eternity in a grain of sand. Why not in the
seed of a tomato?
Also, there was nothing complicated about a
tomato. It was almost as simple as a Van Gogh
potato. A pomegranate5 might have created a much
more difficult situation. But I had chosen the
humble tomato; out of an almost infinite field of

4

Indeed, everything comes and goes, and if one could take a scan
or inner photograph of the body at such times, one would see
vascular beds opening and closing, peristalsis accelerating or
stopping, viscera squirming or tightening in spasms, secretions
suddenly increasing or decreasing as if the nervous system
itself were in a state of indecision. Oliver Sacks
5
See the Greek myth of Persephone. Eating the pomegranate
bound her to the underworld forever.
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possible choices, I had selected it to be my object of

study and affection.
Some time passed. For five days I thought about
nothing but the tomatoes I had arranged
geometrically on my worktable. I could have
assembled them in a pyramidal structure but
instead I placed them in linking circles like those
monoliths at Stonehenge. I felt they were closer to
me in that way, more amenable to my
understanding and interpretation. I sat nearby on a
wicker chair which the guy at the flea market told
me was made by French prisoners, and meditated
on different ways of looking at, and thinking about,
a tomato. Its never easy to confront such an inyour-face reality. I was alone in an austere space,
sharing my solitude with the fruit of the earth.
Because make no mistake those tomatoes
possessed a deep, rich, vibrant reality. The more I
looked at them, the more real they became; they
were as real to me as my own skin. Wild thoughts
came crashing through my mind. For example,
could it be that I had a kind of death wish for the
flesh of the tomato, and my flesh, to become one? I

19

meant in a symbolic way, of course, but even in that

way, could such a union ever be achieved? Could
the artist become one with the model? Could the
perceiver become one with the perceived?6 I burst
out laughing. What a crazy fool I was! To even think
that a man and a tomato could find harmony
together! Could they even find a way of sharing the
same living space?
To be sure, I didnt want to confuse the tomato, in
its pure, natural, naked beauty, its thing in itself
essence, with some romantic object of my love or
affection. Thinking in that way made me feel
impure, uncomfortable, as if I had sinned. I didnt
want to take something that was pure and fine and
muddy it up with my own desires. For once in my
life I wanted to follow a noble, straight path. The
tomato, for me, had to be defined an exercise in
rigorous, almost religious, contemplation. The
feeling was to be shared with empathy in a depth of
time without limit, possibly reaching a state of quiet
ecstasy. Immersed in this way, I became free of my

6

How can you separate the dancer from the dance? William
Butler Yeats, Among School Children
20

self and rose above the needs of my ugly, selfcentered ego.

The tomato could then be seen as if it were draped
in an aura of golden, almost mystical light. The
tomato, the energy contained within its sphere,
became life, deliverance. Yet I was still a long way
from such knowledge.
Like a blank canvas waiting to be filled with
ciphers and scrawls, each day stretched ahead of
me. Im not going to pretend I spent every waking
minute indulging in speculative or imagistic
thoughts about the tomato. In August in Paris most
of the cafs, stores and galleries are closed, the city
becomes like a desert, populated only by tourists,
but I was alone and happy in my studio with the
tomatoes. I had reduced my needs to a strict
minimum. I wanted nothing. I felt free of material
desires. My existence was simple, spartan.
I had even succeeded in reducing my food
requirements. I found I could survive eating once a
day, mostly a half a baguette, Camembert or goat
cheese, wine and fruit. Of course I didnt touch the

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FLUTES AND TOMATOES

Poetry is the supreme fiction

Wallace Stevens
No ideas but in things
William Carlos Williams

TELL ME

Tell me how you lived in a troglodytic cave

Survived on bread and tomatoes plucked
From green vines in farmers fields
Tell how you took them to Paris
Arranged them like amulets on a windowsill
In a kitchen painted fire engine red
Tell me how you were too lonely to be left alone
A switchblade nearby
How, if it hadnt been for the living presence
Of the electric tomatoes
You might have drowned in the air
How the blood rose when the heart remembered
How your lover with the long hair
Seduced you with the notes of a magic flute

51

THE TOMATO AND I

If the tomato is the sheath

I am the knife
Slowly I plunge
Into the soft red body
Then I am no longer the knife
I have become what I cut
Quivering, I vibrate in the heart
Of the drawn and quartered tomato

52

TOMATO FIELDS FOREVER

I saw a drunken sun

Setting over tomato-red fields
Over and over again
I saw fields of tomatoes
Striped with dark crimson furrows
Ripened by how many burning suns
Overhead whirled black birds with scarlet beaks
In a time of no time
In a place of no place
Out of the belly of the night
A new wholeness was born
I knew when I finally cleaned house
I would find my place in that earth

53

TOMATOES ASLEEP

Cleaving to a green vine

Spun from dreams of salt, olive oil
Bread and wine
On a table of earth the tomatoes sleep
While over their heads
The evening stars arise
Piping their flute-like songs

54

BIRTH OF THE TOMATO

One day a seed

Fell from a star
Broke through the seabed
Matured in the earth
Burst into ripeness
In a round, red form
Thats how the tomato was born

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