Notes on Reading Archives

Art Friends

In loving conversation.

Dear friend.

Caro mio.

Fellow artist.

How good it is to share this devotion.

Let me soothe your self-doubt, and you can remind me that I am not invisible.

Let us venture forth, co-conspirators in these dangerous, obsessive, sometimes gallant adventures in our separate mediums.

Here is a womb for your thoughts.

Here is a loving gaze.

Here’s company in your distaste for certain fashions of the moment.

Let us be proudly unfashionable, together!

Alas, confidence ebbs.

My love, let this encouragement flow.

A reminder: to nurture those odd traits most vulnerable to misunderstanding among strangers.

Also, here is a spicy retort! Now passionate disagreement! Tart reply!

Stand with me, friend, when the wasteland offends to the point of nausea.

By the way, why must you be great? Why not be more like yourself?

You know, sometimes you need to forget this pious improvement.

Remember to play. Eat!

You notice I am silent when you speak.

Because with you, dear, there is just so much to watch!

***

I don’t know why a query about hyperbolic surfaces led me to Joel Salzburg’s article, “The Rhythms of Friendship in the Life of Art: The Correspondence of Bernard Malamud and Rosemarie Beck,” but I was intrigued to read about the long friendship, lived mostly through letters, between the American novelist and the abstract expressionist painter (Salmagundi, Fall/Winter 1997). Several phrases above are adapted from the excerpts and commentary provided by Salzburg.

Between the Word and the World

For John Clare.

Some remember your madness, your poverty, your unusual grammar, your melancholic breaks, but you loved the land and had some of the wild pasture in your blood––and the blight.

An eager listener, a student of nature’s music, you let yourself be carried on the wizard noise of the wind. You were always inviting others to join, but your neighbors preferred to count the land in parcels. To no end.

For you, poetry was the means of hearing, and by it you learned to read the living land, a music unto itself.

You found the world through the word, learning to name its birds by the sounds of their wings in flight. Listen a minute, you reminded, and hush.

***

When I learned that today is the birthday of poet John Clare (1793-1864), I decided to spend some time with his work, as well as with an essay by Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, “Listening with John Clare,” which highlights the poet’s particular sensitivity to the sounds of the land he walked so well (from Studies in Romanticism, Fall 2009).

Visions

An artist elaborates.

The goal: to arrive at a truth endorsed by life.

For example, how war is often experienced not as explosion, but as tension, a concentration that feels like a rumbling in the ground. For example, the expressiveness of a death. For example, the fact of a vast cloth of undivided time between the living and the dead.

So many aspects of human life can only be faithfully represented through poetry, the inner power of the image, the fact of accounting for the participation of an audience, a listener, a viewer, as an essential aspect of any genuine effort to connect.

***

This post is the result of notes made while reading the opening chapter of Andrey Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, which my love gifted to me in response to my newfound adoration of this artist’s work. I expect that several future posts will be inspired by this remarkable volume of the director’s own words (translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair).

A Joyful Noise

The transformation of silence.

How to speak, that what would live may live,

even if bruised. Even if misunderstood.

Death will come anyway, with its final

silence. Why rush its hand?

If fear is here anyway, let us use it. Your

silence will not protect you. There is

love here, even in war. And company,

in the refusal to swallow a tyranny

of silence, the refusal to comply

in becoming the next casualty.

In becoming, may we live visibly

to speak, share, spread life

creative and continuing

in growth,

to find

the others.

***

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” from Sister Outsider. Italicized phrases are Lorde’s.

Nighthawks

A tribute to Edward Hopper.

To show this felt presence, the undiscussed ghost, you let a part stand for some concrete whole, which stood in for the imagined whole we had once dreamed to approach, when the choir sang, Nearer. My God.

Consider your figure at a gas station, far from history, community, from any sense of connection to any other moment in time. There is no house, no other human being, not even a passing car in the frame. No trees live here, only this undefined scrub of the beyonds, leaning away. We can hardly see what he does.

Another, flanked by the shadows of buildings in a boomtown, far from any landscape, the hoe replaced by the rake. His action like a still, somehow the stuff of a life, but what is it?

Here is a particular American bleakness: the cold light, harsh angles, a mechanized blandness, a puritan stiffness of rigid self-containment, waxed fruit shining in a bowl, at the center of an empty room, beside the stylized body in space. We are far from her, and she is far from herself.

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) Linda Nochlin’s description of the work of Edward Hopper in this article, “Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation” (Art Journal, Summer 1981). Citing an observation by Brian O’Doherty, Nochlin highlights how “the alienation that viewers feel in Hopper’s pictures is not the simple alienation of human beings from each other, but of individuals from themselves.”

Little

Worlds within worlds.

If every universe is wrapped in curves, each around an imagined center,

and attention is a magnifying glass, consider the patience required

to work in miniature, to fit an entire nature in a grain of sculpture

and how the dreamer can renew the small world simply by moving

the face.

Here, too, is all of it,

and here the entrance

and

now

here.

***

With found phrases from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, Ch. 7 “miniature,” (section V., 159-163).

Bodies in Space

Where we turned in wartime.

We became a constellation of bodies, orbiting the war.

which war? any war.

We saw one another as we saw its agents, half monsters,

half men.

and the children.

We looked for patterns, traced the blood, and still we

could not see its inside.

still, we asked

One another, what do you see?

and sometimes said nothing

And sometimes we were a chorus of bodies in orbit,

looking into ––

We were there, I saw the others looking through––

it was so much

We could not take it in

it held us to one another

Still, we turned.

***

Inspired by the art of Roberto Matta, especially Inside Outside.

First Knowing

What powers may be.

There is knowing before proof, before language––a well of strength,

and a voice. All humans are creatures first, and does the oriole argue

for song? Is the song her testament? No, the song is what she is

singing, because she is.

For us, of course, sensation is not enough. But it is a useful power,

this measure between chaos and the beginning of self. How tragic

it would be, has been, may still be––when knowing is limited to

what can be readily explained.

Beyond what simply is, what is it that matters? This is not about

what is done, but how. Not ends but means. If there are no ends

but this, imagine the meaning of a life, this fullness.

Here is a power born of chaos and from it, music moves, and through

its force, a body may learn its dance. What songs are missed when

this is muted, what unimagined means, and into what might we

pass, from this dark hour?

***

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” published in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. And birdsong.

A Pilgrimage

Going to meet the dead.

May we remember to visit our dead,

that we won’t stop knowing them.

May we remember our place,

finding theirs.

Romantics, they say, have a reality problem

but I don’t know what it is. Maybe the dead

will have some ideas.

Mortality is such a threat to continuity

––at least of culture, at least of certain

things we used to know,

they say.

***

Inspired by William Goodwin’s Essay on Sepulchres (1809).

Firefly Watch

Air, bread, poetry.

Let defense of ideology be drowned by birdsong. Let feeling, dream, heredity project forward and out, free of realism, a hallucinatory language of hiccup and fumbling spasm, following these enigmas of moving points of light until they erupt from your watch, another sun giving way to the next, the seismic pulse of these collective lights.

***

Inspired by (and with phrases from) the (translated) work of Aimé Césaire, Martinician poet, playwright, educator, and politician born on this day in June 1913. He died in 2008.