Imagine we gather, here.
It has been a long time since we have gone home.
Let’s gather.
We will meet in the nest.
I have hidden the meal, over that hill. See, in the distance.
In the forked branch of the second tree?
We will feast on what we find. Bring what you find.
Or bring nothing. We will share.
There is a round table in the nest, and six chairs.
Around the table, we will feast inside our nest.
Come.
***
Inspired by the art of Charlie Baker, as described in this article
and by birds everywhere.
Harry Houdini confronts predecessors, past illusions, and posers of the moment.
On this day in 1926, Harry Houdini gave his final performance, at The Garrick Theatre in Detroit. To mark the occasion, I spent some time exploring what I could of several books he left behind. I was interested to learn that Houdini had suffered a period of deep disillusionment when he discovered that much of the appeal of the artist who inspired him, Robert Houdin, was artifice assembled from the work of countless unnamed others. Houdini set out to name these in The Unmasking of Robert Houdin. Later, he devoted much of his non-performance time to debunking the claims of many of the leading mentalists of his time, a process he describes in A Magician Among the Spirits. This is an imagined monologue in which the escape artist considers the toll of his lost belief, even as he remains steadfast in revealing the truth. It includes borrowed phrases from both texts.
Do you think I imagined nothing of soaring heights? My first act was the trapeze. I was nine, and my father had lost his job, and all we knew then was how to live on the edge. It should go without saying that not all edges are the same. Some you walk by necessity; others are brandished by the charmer, those swords and weapons not for protection or battle, but merely to catch the light, wow an audience, earn applause.
With some people, greater intimacy only yields greater discoveries, the rewards like that of earth itself: the closer you look, the more there is. With others, these sword-bearing magician illusionists, the effect is the opposite. The more you look, the less there is to see. Looking long enough, the familiar patterns and tired tricks reveal themselves. Finally, broken hearted, the once and future believer has no choice but to accept. The emperor wears no clothes.
I have been interested! I held seances, surprised clients. It was a lark! My ambition, my love was gratified. Moving forward, some hallowed reverence advanced with age, and I was chagrined. I became more plastic, interested to discover if it was possible to return from beyond the veil.
What lengths I have gone to, by now. How many compacts I have made with the living: when you go, will you reach me? They agreed. I have waited, watched. No one can accuse me of being unwilling to receive a sign.
To be clear, I am a sceptic, not a scoffer. My heart softens still to remember the believer I once was, the unsuspecting heart of inexperience. I sometimes wish I could return. It is not so unusual, after all, for the senses to mislead. A little sign, appealing to the waiting imagination, the endless promises and guarantees of charlatans claiming special insight, heightened vision––becomes a menace to health and sanity.
No doubt some are sincere. Even my trained mind can be deceived, how much more susceptible the ordinary observer. Magician, you are lost to me since I have seen you. I thought knowing, as with all good things, would only enhance appreciation. I could blame you for pretending to be what you are not, but now who is the fool? I was told I had no finesse for illusion, not enough sleight in my hand. I lacked the guile that came naturally to you; it was your daily bread.
I’d prefer not to look, but there are others at risk. My purpose is to warn them. After all, I was never the magician, only the escape artist. I have escaped the nailed box, the sealed coffin, the underwater milk jug, the chains, and now I fly from the illusion that you were ever anything like the promise you pretended to be. It hurts my sore wings, long cramped. I’d rather not do it, but there is an audience, after all, and their attendant faith. If my loyalty runs parallel to the seed of this faith, then my exodus is the sacrament at hand. Blame the moon for peeling back the veil; blame the intensity of my childhood will, to believe. Blame the failure of the blinders that you counted on, to hold. Blame the persistent posture of looking; I learned this as a matter of devotion early on. Try as I might, even in the early days of watching you perform, I could not unlearn it, not completely, until now.
Tracing the narrative lines of a medieval tapestry.
What is the meaning of this creature, beyond beautiful? Some said wisdom, others marriage. Some said a Christ-figure, others immortality. Whatever the case, it fell like a stag in the allegorical hunt. Consider the spirit’s pining against the vulnerability of the flesh.
In concert now: eternal yearning and earthly forces. These men with dogs in the first panel, they don’t look much up to the chase, more like bored heirs hanging out in a forest. Only the page in the distance seems alert: Look, look! Over here!
Now here’s the unicorn at the fountain, dipping his narwhal horn, the bitter water sweetened by its touch. Other animals gather. Witness the detail: the pheasant’s reflection in the pool. None of the hunters are looking. They stand around, talking.
Next: the creature surrounded, pierced on all sides with their spears, wearing the martyr’s expression. Notice the waiting reverence of the dogs while the men attack; the bloodlust. One of the hounds is pierced in the next panel, when the bleeding unicorn rises, kicking back.
A maiden appears by the wounded creature’s side while a dog licks its back. It is placid now. Someone in the background sounds a horn. Here comes the death blow, the body paraded into town on the back of a horse. Townspeople look ambivalent; the dogs appear nervous, alert.
Finally, the unicorn appears loosely chained to a tree. A low fence encircles him, the surrounding garden abundant, and what once appears to be blood now appears to be the juice of a pomegranate dripping from his side.
***
Inspired by The Unicorn Tapestries
Considering the subtle choreography of silence.
On this day in 1973, philosopher and political scientist Leo Strauss died at the age of seventy-four. Among his many works, Strauss published Persecution and the Art of Writing in 1941. In honor of the occasion, this will be the text for today’s found reflection––not quite a found poem, but a meditation constructed at least partially with phrases from a parent text.
Once there were public spaces of free public discussion, and now it may be worthwhile to consider certain compulsions: to coordinate speech with the accepted norms of a given group.
Hasn’t this always been true? Perhaps, and yet. The possibilities of voiding a name have never been more endless; it remains unclear yet if they run parallel to those for saving one.
The issue is no longer so clear cut. People vs. government? Only sometimes. People vs. the ideas they have been conditioned to believe are their own? Frequently. People vs. machine? Often, and yet: few blanket statements are effective. People vs. the blanket statement, easily codified into an algorithm? Here is something.
Who checks the rampant impulses that so many have been conditioned to believe themselves to own? Compulsion paves the way by silencing contradiction.
If freedom of thought is the ability to choose from among a variety of ideas, what happens when a choice is diminished from a vast number of possibilities to a simple either vs. or? What account can ever be made for censorship by noise?
There is no need to silence the still, small voice when it may be easily overcome––on first listen, anyway––by an onslaught of noise. What does the average listener call a statement constantly repeated without contradiction, but true?
Inspired by wild images.
Creation: a milky cloud under a full moon in July, thousands of groupers.
A mountain gorilla in the rain, eyed closed as if to know it in his breath,
droplets beading over lined face. Polar bear sisters cool in summer waters,
wonders of affection, chimpanzee leaning up to kiss a woman’s cheek,
another curled in her lap, while under a bed a spider the size of a hand
watches her newly hatched brood. Ravens in courtship sing to one another,
passing soft warbles and gifts between them: moss, twigs, stones from
beak to beak over the frozen ground. There’s a warbler in the sunflowers:
listen, she weaves a cradle for her eggs.
Inspired by an article at My Modern Met about the 2021 Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards
A found poem introduction to the definitive introduction to literary theory.
The following is assembled from phrases found in the opening six pages of The Norton’s Anthology of Theory and Criticism, a text that some readers might find a touch dense, or perhaps conducive of a sprained wrist. I took the liberty of assembling this found poem from the text, to keep on hand for moments when something lighter is in order.
What does theory demonstrate? That there is no position free of it,
not even common sense. The same is true of an author’s inner being,
institutions, historical periods, and conflict.
What is interpretation? Consider dense and enigmatic
explication, exegesis––versus intimate, casual appreciation.
In order to establish our bearings,
along the way
we discuss.
True, there are problems
with seemingly sensible methods
––ambiguities, paradoxes, the problem of no easy
answers––and theorists, and well-known heuristic devices.
The notion of mirroring necessarily contains
distorting devices: signifiers, signified;
the crisis of reference; the dizzying view.
Significantly, it re-presents and refracts
certain affinities.
The trick is to learn how to look from a distance while close to the pieces, and to account for the movement of light.
Huh.
What?
There are faces.
I don’t see any.
Look here. You can’t see them as a collective. Go one at a time.
All I see is wallpaper.
Step back. There is a face.
I’m not––
It’s in the shadows.
The face is?
The shadows make the features. It only works at a distance.
Like memory?
Exactly.
I read something about mosaics recently, just like that. By someone who was learning the art. How the trick is to learn how to look from a distance while close to the pieces, and to account for the movement of light.
There’s a little winged man in the garden sometimes.
––The art of broken parts, she said.
In the clouds, a giraffe. The lights in the sky, like a bird in flight.
There’s a green haired man in the rocks.
Madonna in a gourd, toast Jesus, the grilled cheese miracle.
There’s a rabbit on the moon. Or a man.
A man, you think?
Well, a face anyway. Like this. Step back a little more. Right here. Relax your eyes, like a cat.
I ––oh. Wow.
Yes.
It’s there.
Right there.
I almost missed it.
Keep looking.
Notes:
This piece is inspired by an article about artist Lee Wagstaff’s recent work, in which “hidden faces” emerge from canvases of repeating geometric patterns, and also by an article about the human tendency to see patterns.
Margherita Cole’s September 29th article in My Modern Met: “Hypnotic Portrait Paintings are Based on AI Generated Faces.”
Larry Sessions’s Earthsky article, “Seeing Things That Aren’t There? It’s Called Pareidolia,” (November 2020)
The reference to mosaics is inspired by Terry Tempest Williams’ Finding Beauty in a Broken World.
A “Real Talk With Dead Folks” installment featuring French painter Paul Delvaux, who would have been ninety-eight today.
Today is one of those days for Real Talk with Dead Folks, an occasional Breadcrumbs feature. I knew it this morning when I learned it was the birthday of French painter Paul Delvaux, and I spent my coffee silence with his work.
Joyeux anniversaire, Paul Delvaux. You would have been ninety-eight today.
You are known for your nude women, your long shadows, your anxious isolation.
I like your Break of Day, the topless figures gathered in what is either a palace courtyard or its ruins. At first I think they are women, then I see what appear initially to be the finned tails of mermaids.
But that is mossy bark, not scales, and those are roots, not tails. And then I look closer: the faces, the pose of their hands, their stiff necks. These are not women, exactly, but statues of flesh and trunk.
I consider the roots, how tight they look, not quite spread and not quite rooted, and so close to one another. It seems impossible for them to make it very long like that, in such arid land. Behind them, a clothed woman is running, the desert floor behind her.
Mountains congregate in the distance, under sky.
Elsewhere, Gestapo were making arrests, Stalin was enforcing his Great Purge––mere preludes to the next world war. Your skeletons were often more animated than your fleshy counterparts.
The home of your childhood was burned during the war years. What became of your beloved trains? Desire and horror met on your platforms. You studied music in the museum room, while skeletons in a glass cabinet appeared to watch.
You knew the anxious city, haunted with skeletons. You called it the climate of silent streets, with shadows of people who can’t be seen.
Mirrors, moon, candles, books: these were your favored elements. Around the nudes and the flute players, your skeletons danced. Always in your paintings, this sense of waiting: of separation, this terrifying emptiness; this ongoing cycle of arrivals and departures.
It’s the little girl in the dress I am wondering about, the one with her back to the viewer. She is watching the trains by moonlight. What else does she see?
Always in your paintings, there she is: the beautiful but inaccessible muse. You painted her anyway, unable to keep from looking.
It is for this that I bow to you. The way you saw death everywhere, and still looked for something else. The way you seemed to know your salvation to be just out of reach, while you reached anyway–– seeming to accept, by your actions, some unspoken contract. We all sign it to live here, but most are afraid to read the fine print. It’s enough sometimes, to live for the unseen, the untouched. I like to think that this is what makes your skeletons move the way they do.
More about Paul Delvaux’s work:
More Real Talk with Dead Folks
Seeking insight on working with these unwieldy pages, I turn to an artist known for making sculptures of paper.
I was wondering what to do with these blank pages, the ones that need to be written to make these other ones make sense. Developing a manuscript sometimes feels like the messy middle of a construction project, with the piles of debris everywhere, and material under tarp, and the eyesore of scaffolding all you can see, one of those that inevitably leads to someone asking, what is going on here?
It seems like they haven’t been doing much.
Maybe the funding ran out. I forget what it was supposed to be.
Then I learned about the paper artist. He makes these vivid sculptures from the pages.
How does he do it?
Begin with a single fold, he says, and curiosity. The first action causes a transfer of energy. This leads to subsequent folds. I follow to understand, he says, about how the energy moves. If I knew where it would go, he says, I wouldn’t have to do this.
Where do you find it? They ask him.
Everywhere, he says. Music, architecture, Islamic tile patterns, protein misfolding.
My favorite is this: I have this habit of misunderstanding, he says. It helps me see what is often overlooked.
Thank you to My Modern Met for publishing the article, Paper Artist Crafts Incredible Three-Dimensional Relief Sculptures Entirely by Hand, featuring the work and words of artist Matt Shlian. I especially appreciate Shlian’s descrition of his process. Phrases from the interview are featured in this post.
Celebration of wonders that are easily missed by habitual lenses, and of the transcendent potential of the the act of looking closely enough.
Reading about the father of microbiology for yesterday’s post inspired me to return to one of my favorite forms of photography, the extreme closeup, which has been a fascination of mine for some time, most likely because it so aligns with other perennial fascinations: the unseen world, the right-before-the-eyes wonders that are easily missed by habitual lenses, and a belief in the transcendent potential of the the act of looking long enough and closely enough, with a willingness to appreciate unseen wonders, bowing to them over a lens, in postures of awe and reverence––for the wonders themselves, and for the artists who knew how to look, who took the time to wait, sore necks bowed over lenses, so that others might see: not what might or can be, but what already is.
Such as?
Look!
Sweep of obsidian, the curved form of a new age creature, the decorated ponytail extending from an avian head, the fine grain of its surface, the smooth luster of the skin. Where is it looking, so made up, and what is this creature?
That is the hind leg of a beetle.
What can I make of this glowing-red canopy from Alice’s wonderland, bright orbs giggling on top of it, a party of yellow puffer fish around the birthday cake?
Anther of hibiscus.
What is this now? Jungle of Pleistocene Forest, before the age of leaves, where the burgeoning woods are a viscous pink, part fiber and part gel, growing up and across like the storms of Jupiter, cooling in a mold, catching globs of supernovae?
That is cotton fabric, pollen grains.
Now a dreamscape: cloud bands fertile with wheat fields, above the twilight river, bodies of unborn fruit floating in it, their impish sweetness like thumbnail fairies?
Cross section of agate. Think you know rocks? Look at this.
That isn’t rock, but concentric circles of prism: green, blue, pink, suspended in snowflakes, but I don’t have the words right; the colors themselves are not even colors, but light in translation.
Check out this guy. He’s looking at you.
Look at this ant, his face grizzled with three-day-old whiskers and his Whatchou doing there? look, wearing the attitude of the widened trickster on the corner, the crazy uncle calling out the trouble you’re about to get into before you’ve even thought about it. He looks like he started in early on the rum punch and he’s cornering you with what you can already tell is going to be a long story.
These close-ups are really something, but look at this. Is this a lost Rothko, or an arial view of the ruins of some ancient cousin to Babylon’s gardens? Yes, it must be the gardens; look at this rich wood, these leaves, translucent gold petals of gossamer fabric. This must have been what the seraphim wore to blow trumpets; it must be––
That is a table salt crystal, and there is the vein and scales of a butterfly wing.
But what is this wild celebration of light, like a Van Gogh vision of Mardi Gras after the absinthe kicks in, like a pointillist’s version of stained glass?
That is a brain tumor, laced with a virus.
Even this?
Even this.
Oh, this world.
It’s almost too much.
To take in.
How does anyone ever do anything but look?
And wonder.
And take the hand of the next person, hold it and say, Look, look!
There it is.
There it is.
This reflection was inspired by a feature in The Atlantic on the winners of Nikon’s 2021 Small World Photography Competition.
