A Clear Presence

by Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Date Published: June 18, 2020

This essay was originally published online by Guernica, and in print by 1913 Press in Sloan’s debut collection, “Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit” (2017). It has been reprinted here with permission of the author. All original formatting has been preserved.


David Hockney, A Bigger Splash, 1967, acrylic on canvas. © David Hockney. Courtesy of Tate London.

When I was in Jr. High School, my mother and I heard the sound of helicopters while house sitting for friends in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. We had just come in from using the swimming pool when someone on a megaphone instructed us to come outside with our hands up. When we did, policemen were facing the house with guns pointing toward the door, neighbors were standing on their porches in alarm, and a helicopter was hovering overhead. Our dog ran outside and we squealed with terror that they shouldn’t shoot her. It turned out that we had accidentally triggered the security system’s distress signal, and it took a while for them to determine that we were not being taken hostage. But the incident was, in some ways, an elaborate confirmation of a feeling that I held already, about that house and the city in general: that even though we had permission to be there, we had somehow managed to trespass.


In a recurring dream, I am swimming in somebody else’s pool. The city is always Los Angeles, the grounds are always well maintained, there is often a flourishing garden filled with climbing vines of jasmine, bougainvillea, and bird of paradise. The house to which the pool belongs is empty. I might get out of the water to wander around, always with the sense that, while I’ve been invited, I am not supposed to be there.



Once, at a museum in London, I saw a set of portraits by the painter David Hockney. Everyone portrayed in that particular series worked as a docent in a museum, and, as I recall, the background for each was the same dark gray. Hockney sometimes uses a roller in his paintings, so that the shape and shadow that realistically depict a nose or chin floats inside a stilled space that has been divorced from the rippling pulse of passing time.


Though he created much of it in a studio just large enough to fit the giant canvases on which he painted, Hockney helped to create an “image of California as a carefree land of sunshine, affluence and leisure” by painting its wealthiest citizens and their swimming pools. But while presenting California as an idle playground for the rich, Hockney also engaged with a meditation not unlike Shamatha, devoting himself to the task of rendering water with a diligence of spirit that he himself compared with Leonardo Di Vinci’s. This meditation involved grappling with the essence of movement and time. He studied the way that sunlight manifested itself through dancing lines of light, explaining: “Water in a swimming pool is different from, say, water in the river, which is mostly a reflection because the water isn’t clear. A swimming pool has clarity. The water is transparent and drawing transparency is an interesting graphic problem.”


Rodney King was swimming on the first day he ever heard the word “nigger.” His small self popped out of the water only to be pelted by a fast-passing stone. It was the first time he realized that he wasn’t just a kid, he was a black kid. Despite the life he would live thereafter, King writes that it was “the saddest day in creation for me.” He wishes he could “find a way of forever removing that day from every black child’s life.”

As I was growing up, African-inspired names were uttered in order to elicit humor. People liked to exaggerate the “y” sound, the “e” sounds, the funky “q” pronounced with a flip of the head and a series of snaps. As one of the only people of color in my school, I hated to have my difference pointed out to me, and got famously angry any time someone pronounced my name with three syllables instead of the two that my parents had used, for no reason in particular, since I had been born. The former pronunciation was featured in a song, and my classmates were not about to let me forget it. Whenever somebody wanted to laugh, they could sing the chorus, and I would explode into what I did not realize at the time was a vaguely self-hating rage.

During a game of “ga-ga” one afternoon, I responded to the taunting by slapping the singer, a girl with whom I was both friends and bitter enemies, on the back. She responded in kind, until we were engaged in a full out brawl, to the entertainment of everyone in the auditorium. We began to giggle soon after the after-school director pulled us apart, but the incident cemented my reputation as an easily coaxed spitfire, ready to face off with anyone who dared call attention to my membership to that blackness, the one that was in the process of being both revered and bitterly mocked, depending on the viewer, through shows like Martin and In Living Color.


Recently, while walking down the sidewalk, I trailed behind an African American man who pushed a cart of his belongings near the middle of the street, his back sloped nearly parallel to the ground. I grew nervous when a car started to drive quickly up the road behind him without seeming to know he was there. The driver of this car was black. Up ahead, I heard a second car swerve quickly, and somebody beeped. As the white driver of this other car drove from the opposite direction, I could hear him shout out his open window, “Get the fuck out of Brentwood.”

Whether he was talking about the homeless man or the driver who swerved around him, I felt strangely relieved by the outburst, as if the source of my discomfort in this neighborhood was finally being spoken out loud.



In 1978, David Hockney began work on a series entitled Paper Pools, including twenty-nine color pictures created by pressing paper pulp. As Nikos Stangos writes, the project allowed him to bring “together many of the themes he most loves: the paradox of freezing in a still image what is never still, water, the swimming pool, this man-made container of nature, set in nature which it reflects, the play of light on water, the dematerialized diver’s figure under water.” Hockney recalls, “as the time had gone on and the sun wasn’t coming out as much now and the days were cloudy, the water began to look a bit different and the tones were all-over blue. It rained and when it rained the steps started with a deep blue at the top and the blue faded as the water got more opaque because of the rain, and I thought the water looked wetter, it was all wet, now it was all about wetness.”


Though they might not perceive it while under water, a swimmer in such a scene would seem to be moving through two realms at once: gliding, weightless, through the water, at the same time that they moved through those darkening clouds, their edges set aglow by the same sun that deepens the shadow of the surrounding trees. The image calls to mind the web of emotions I swam through while dreaming, again, of pools last night. This time, I did so with a former lover, whose absence still makes me nauseous. Reentering, through dream, the confines of a relationship that just ended, it is like I am moving through two elements at once, water and air, two states of being — occupying a self that has not yet had to grieve the loss.



Before he died, Rodney King took part in a reality TV show on VH1 in which celebrity guests moved in together as they went through rehab under the guidance of Dr. Drew. King had been a life-long alcoholic, and his own drunkenness on the day he led the police on a car chase contributed to his feelings of guilt, as though he wondered if perhaps he deserved to be beaten to a pulp. When Dr. Drew tells him that he is sorry for the way King was treated, King writes, “I never get tired of hearing that I didn’t deserve what those police did to me.”



In an image called Green Pool with Diving Board and Shadow, the world around Hockney’s pool has a nightmarish feel, blackness interspersed with what look to be bright, red shrubs. As though an apocalypse were flaming outside the confines of the pool.



After the police who beat him were acquitted in 1992, before the terror began to unfold around him, Rodney King and his family sat on tattered lawn furniture in the yard. A signal flair shot out through the sky over South Central. One of his cousins drove up to the house and began to unload boxes of stolen diapers, food, and liquor, charred from a fire.


At home, he watched the news in horror. A construction worker was forcibly removed from his truck and robbed. One person “smashed his forehead open with a car stereo, another rioter tried to slice his ear off.” A crowd spray-painted the man’s body and genitals black.

King mentions the “hundred or so soldiers in camouflage” who were called in to bring the destruction under control, pointing out that “one of the guards admitted that they were all ill prepared and said that street duty for riots worried them more than being called up for the Gulf War.”



At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I stand behind a class of children being taught how to see a David Hockney painting of Los Angeles. “What is a landscape?” the teacher asks. A boy raises his hand and explains, “a landscape is land that is curved.” The children point out that the trees at the bottom of the painting don’t look like real trees. An African-American boy is handed a paintbrush, and asked to imagine the strokes that would have been required to create the gaping, colorful cityscape that hangs before him.

Hockney eventually tired of painting the swimming pool. In a video review of some of his more recent work, Alastair Sooke walks through the exhibition halls at the Royal Academy of Arts, describing the conventional pastoral scenes with an air of disappointment. “Here, though,” he says, heartened, “you have something else. There’s a very, as you can see, vivid, intense palette… it has an almost religious vision intensity.” Sooke continues, “It doesn’t take very long to look at that tree stump, and to look at those chopped up logs awaiting collection and start seeing symbols of mortality. Hockney has managed to take quite an everyday humdrum scene in Yorkshire, something really with very little mystery and imbue it with power and strangeness.” The images here are convoluted, trees are blue, pink, and yellow, and the tone is one of a brightly colored nightmare.




During the peak of the manhunt for Dorner, I went on a Friday night date to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Dorner’s face, eerily cheerful, was lit up on neon billboards all over the city, and in some ways his presence acted as a kind of secondary exhibition as we wandered through the museum. The sound of a helicopter permeated the galleries of one wing, and even when I found the source of the sound in a dark room with a projected video, I couldn’t help peeking out the windows, fully anticipating to see a shootout in the museum’s atrium. I peered closely at a small, black and white photograph of what looked to be an emptied swimming pool somewhere in Southern California, in which someone had erected a paper sign that read, “HOLY.” Later that night, my date would talk about the incongruity of Dorner’s smiling face, given his crimes. “He must be in so much pain,” he would say, and start to cry.

The rampage and manhunt remind me of the day when my mother and I sat in a smoke-filled living room while I got my hair braided. A little girl with severe autism ran in circles through the house, the woman braiding my hair acting as though we weren’t actually there, despite the fact that she was touching me. The television played a movie that I did not think I was going to be able to stomach. But, to my surprise, fifteen or so minutes into the Michael Douglas film Falling Down, I found myself filled with adrenaline, even laughing at points as the actor walked through the city of Los Angeles with measured gait, full of venom, attempting to right wrongs with weapons that he picked up along the way, including a rocket launcher. Our laughter seemed to say: couldn’t we all sympathize with his ennui? Weren’t we all sick to death of the traffic and the bullshit? I understood even then, as a child, to feel pride about the fact that this film took place in Los Angeles. We are the city of rampages and riots! The home of the white Bronco!

On television, a male reporter sounds annoyed with his female colleague as he asks her for new information, saying her name, “Gigi,” over and over again. Dorner’s car was last seen in Big Bear, and journalists, SWAT teams, and police officers have swarmed the San Bernadino mountains. The news camera stands by as a group of officers searches through the trunk of a car, looking for weapons, for bodies, for Dorner. In one shot, a camera mounted on a helicopter shows the cabins from above, and the distortion in the video makes it look as though the snow-covered trees are pink.

The Los Angeles Police Department and the media covering the Dorner episode focus on one key point: Dorner was angry for being fired. But his manifesto makes it hard to cast his motivation as simple rejection. He writes that the weapons he is using for this rampage are the same ones used at Sandy Hook elementary school, and that they shouldn’t have been so easily accessible to him or to anyone else. He calls the president of the NRA “vile and inhumane” and tells the Westboro Baptist Church that they can “burn slowly in a fire, not from smoke inhalation, but from the flames and only the flames.” He thanks the woman he has dated over the course of his life for “great and sometimes not so great sex.” He thanks his friends and tells them that he loves them. He mentions that Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” is the best piece of music ever written. He voices his support for gay marriage, quotes Mia Farrow, and gives Bill Cosby some advice. He mentions a favorite quote of his brother’s, written by D.H. Lawrence: “I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever feeling sorry for itself” [sic].

I still hear reports on the radio in which the LAPD supposedly “found” Dorner’s body in a cabin. But the event, like Dorner’s motivation, was much hazier than this. In an article entitled “How Law Enforcement and Media Covered Up the Plan to Burn Christopher Dorner Alive,” Max Blumenthal writes that after Dorner engaged in a shootout resulting in the death of two officers, “the deputies decided to burn the cabin down.” A single shot was heard before the fire had burned through the interior, which “may have signaled Dorner’s suicide.” A local TV station, KCAL 9, accidentally broadcast a deputy shouting, “Burn that fucking house down.”



As a child, Rodney King used to swim or fish with his father and brother in the irrigation canals near his grandmother’s Sacramento home. “I loved the way I looked,” he remembers. “The way my body sucked up the sunshine, the way my hair dried off with a shake.” As an adult, he looked himself up on the internet, and found that his name had become a piece of slang: when someone has been beaten by the police, you might say he’s been “Rodney King’d.” He writes, “Rodney King’d? So now I’ve even become a verb, but when will I become a real person, a whole person?”



When I heard that King had died, two details in particular stuck out to me. One was that he died in a swimming pool. The other was that, earlier that day, somebody had heard him scream. As Anthony McCartney reports, neighbor Sandra Gardea “heard sobbing from his house earlier that morning.” She said, “It sounded like someone really crying, like really deep emotions… like tired or sad, you know?”


I tried to write an essay about David Hockney and Rodney King once, before King passed away. While doing research, I became obsessed by a particular painting that Hockney had created of a Beverly Hills housewife. Painted one year after the 1966 Watts riots, Hockney’s housewife gazes idly outside the range of the portrait. She is miles away from the action, likely captured at a different time of year, but I want badly to imagine that she can hear the sound of sirens. I wish that she could at least smell the smoke.



While he studied the swimming pool in the process of painting A Bigger Splash, Hockney recalls, “What amused me was the fact that the splash only lasts a very, very short time.” He explains, “A photograph can freeze it, and that’s not what it’s like. When you paint it, you can make it flow.”