PERSPECTIVE ON GRAFFITI : The Explosion of Lives Suppressed : Taggers need form and freedom, not blind condemnation by those who can’t see the forces that drive them.

The death in Sun Valley last week of an 18-year-old tagger, Cesar Rene Arce, has catalyzed a powerful undercurrent of anger and loathing toward the ubiquitous kids who seem to have the run of desolate blocks of Los Angeles.

Those blocks, in turn, have become their canvas for the weird and wildly variant collection of symbols, names, acronyms, gang rosters and genuine art collectively known as graffiti. Since Roman times, people have called it garbage, and they hate the sight of it. It speaks to them of energies gone mad, swirling chaotic nightmares of midnight collisions between the psyche and the soul. Our urge to make sense and order founders in the face of it; we simply can’t. None of that mattered very much around Cesar Arce’s bier. His mother lay wrapped in one of his jackets, speechless and shocked, also desolate in the long hours of her grief, as her son’s killer taunted her on television with rash, insensitive accusations about her work as a mother. How will that translate into the black-brush calligraphy that scars the streets of Sun Valley?

As others cheered the killer on like some conquering hero, I couldn’t help but think of the group of kids I’ve tried to nurture during their hard gauntlet run through adolescence.

In 1989, I helped start the Ivar Hawks Neighborhood Watch program and the Ivar Hill Community Assn. in Hollywood. These groups have been a vehicle to help keep these kids out of gangs and, after a while, to move them beyond graffiti into art.

I wish you knew this one kid, Aaron. For a long time, the world knew him as “state.” I’ve known this boy since maybe 1991, when he was 11, and his smile was like a bolt of sunshine that rippled right through you with gladness. He and his friends were the first targets of our association’s small effort to reach out and make the kids around us part of our lives.

There’s a former college football star and budding politician who has been calling Aaron for two years, because--even when the kid loses his phone number, doesn’t call back, talks in monosyllabic barrio-ese and 90 times out of 100 can’t be reached by telephone, anyway, because he’s God-knows-where doing God-knows-what--the guy sees the same startling gift for leadership that I see, too.

Then there was Sammy, who dropped out of school and is working now; and Sammy’s brother, “Spaceman,” whose smile was a few watts brighter than State’s, even though it was crooked as hell and a stray tooth was growing from the roof of his mouth behind the regular ones. Then there was Tico, who lost a finger as a kid and at 14 still can’t add, subtract or multiply without counting on those that remain. Tico also had one of those smiles and dark, good, true eyes and black hair and incipient zits he wasn’t ashamed to treat with a beauty mask. Spin was another smile you could see in the dark, skinny and wiry like his name, wild-minded and handsome as the day is long, a fierce fighter who never gave up no matter how we overwhelmed him, and naturally the smallest of them all.

Sammy and Spaceman had a mom and dad in the house, and an older brother with a gunshot wound that required him to use a colostomy bag for a long time. Through both his example and his wound, that brother, married and a father now, helped Sammy and Spaceman stay out of the gang life that had nearly taken his own.

Tico and Spin both see their dads fairly often, so they haven’t developed the stubborn, sulking sullenness that Aaron uses now to express a pain I couldn’t endure. Aaron has graduated from State, so to speak; he took his tagging indoors onto my big ballet mirrors (the previous tenant’s gift), and his smile into some dark place inside him that needs to see the light. His mother has kept him whole.

It’s the furious energies of kids like these and the chaos of family and urban violence and nightmarish music and media that is welling up onto the canvas of your freeway wall. It’s not the energy of death, but the frightening, fantastic and fiery energy of suppressed and beaten life fighting back, striking identity into the anonymous city.

As a society, we can only re-create what we are: As Pogo knows, the enemy tagger is us. Form and freedom are what he needs--not anger, hatred and death.