The artist used the scraps of the day to dance angels on his fingers. He wanted his son to have playmates free of history, open to unknowns, without the knowledge that cultivates fear. Here is the glost of a scarecrow, here the electrical spook. Once upon a time this was a napkin, but now it’s Mr. Death, live on a shoebox stage, fielding questions from all sides. The wine cork becomes the old man, the devil is a ringed glove, and the monk wears a luchador’s mask.
Let’s play, he told the child––animals playing comedy; tragic heroes dressed as children playing proud birds. Make the cat a bull for the land where the only constant is that everything is constantly morphing into something else.
Watch the big eared clown, ecstatic with the solemn poet and the absolute fool. Only the fragile are powerful here, arms up to highlight where their hands might be, in display of delight: Look, no hands and nothing to hold! They will dance as soon as they wrestle, these angels, and every blessing is also a wound.
***
Inspired by this article about the hand puppets that Paul Klee (among my favorite artists ever) created for his son.
On this day in 1879, Paul Klee was born. This morning’s post is adapted from Klee’s “Ways of Studying Nature,” and uses found phrases from Klee’s writing.
How can an artist not study nature when they are part of it? The method is going to vary with changing perceptions of one’s position in space, time, and the cosmos. I don’t mean to disparage the delight of novelty, but a clear view of history should save us from seeking it at the cost of an honest view of nature. For yesterday’s naturalists, the focus was on the precision of optical appearance, but the art of seeing on other planes was neglected. Today’s artist is a creature on a star among other stars, with a sense of totality of space. To witness the appearance is to meditate on what is beneath it. Anatomy becomes physiology, but there are other ways to behold, as with contact through a cosmic bond. All ways meet in the eye to synthesize an inward vision vastly different from the original image, yet without contradiction. Those blind to nature will label such depictions degenerate, but here is a new naturalness, the image of divine work in translation.
Time to move some boxes, one said.
Another claimed he was missing a passport, unable to fly.
Artist Paul Klee, who died on this day in 1940, often invoked a childlike perspective when addressing matters of life and death. I’ve long loved the angels he painted, full of flaws and worries, trapped in human-like, sometimes animalistic forms. This morning I was looking at one of his last works, “Death and Fire” and the timing of this happens to coincide with my review of a book Words at the Threshold: What We Say as We’re Nearing Death, by Lisa Smartt. I bought it years ago. Thinking of a character was my official reason, but the interests of a character are always covers for the questions we carry. I pulled it out again today, because I have a character facing death, and I am struck by the inherent playfulness of so many of the last words recorded in Smartt’s accounts, culled from documentation of many hospice patients over time. There’s a sense of play in the voices of many of the dying, even at the “most serious” moment in life. I am always drawn to those for whom seeming opposites can coexist in the same space: joy and pain; life and death; wonder and heartache.
Death and Fire by Paul Klee, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
The following are notes assembled partly from found phrases in the book and online, considering what people say as they are leaving:
Time to move some boxes, one said. Another claimed he was missing a passport, unable to fly. One claimed to be the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, then called Bullshit! and left. One asked for chocolate shavings on her tongue. Another, a cigarette. Pancakes with whipped cream.
Then come the metaphors. Listen. Get ready for the big dance! Lots of new construction over there! Magic time: watch me disappear! See the little duckies now, lining up. They are setting the table now.
The ones who saw it as a battle went hardest. Another dreamt of being surrounded by crows. It’s a murder! he said, laughing.
Some heard music, exclamations of wonder. So many people! Can you tell me where the platform is? Can you get the door for me? Where do you want me to put these boxes? Next stop, real hope! Look, they left the ladder.
Some saw butterflies, the number eight, the color green. Others said nothing, but reached with their arms, up and out, eloquent as infants in their expressions of need.
