On The Edge of Forward Bound

In The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, the main character is largely considered disreputable for her strange habit of going to the edge of the sea wall and staring into the distance, wondering, maybe hoping, that her past (love) might reappear on the horizon. Great change often makes me feel like I am walking the length of the seawall in my mind. That I just finished teaching Macbeth whose ghosts are notoriously haunting, or that I am preparing to teach a course on Romanticism may of course be exacerbating this feeling.

David Caspar Friedrich, Der Mönch an der Meer

I have moved in the last week, which meant that besides packing 45 wine boxes of books and rediscovering 4 I had hidden unpacked in my closet, I also sorted through the last few years of my life including postcards from museum trips I have attended, books, catalogs that I am still meaning to read, and the same things that I hide every time I move because I am still not sure whether to discard such family mementos.

The nice thing about the Romantics is that they truly understood the power of the emotional realm and both in literature and art presented the fullness of its passion. Perhaps now, it easily falls into kitsch, but after the rationality of the Enlightenment, in the context of all the revolutions at the end of the 18th century and continuing turmoil at the beginning of the 19th, the personal catastrophe of consciousness was a worthy topic.

Girodet, Ghosts of French Heroes (1801)

Without any of the same drama of that historical period, moving, change of any kind–even the best kind of change which offers the career one hoped to create, the love one hoped to find, the satisfaction of dreams and all that marvelous stuff–makes me feel like ghosts are running up and down the dusty, sepia corridors of my mind, opening and shutting doors, while I stand still at the edge of the seawall staring out into the distance.

The advantage of kitschy Romantic art is that it puts the personal melodrama into humorous perspective. I'm not really a fainting desolate mad woman, nor drifting from my body towards the heavens above. Despite the holidays, you are probably not going to lose your mind from holiday cheer, murder the masses who have forgotten your birthday/anniversary/triumph, or drown in end of year of business accounting, or dissolve under the weight of delivering packages across the world in one night, or even just your stuff to another country. If you feel like you might, perhaps a little Romantic art, even the best stuff, might make you smile:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Victoria and Albert Museum of Art, London, England
If you are in London, by all means do go to the Romanticism show at the Tate. I saw it last year and it is wonderful.

Without completely spoiling the ending of Fowles wonderful novel, she does of course create a wonderfully independent life for herself, despite the trauma she permitted herself. In fact and fiction, there is a place for acknowledging the acting out of certain kinds of melodrama, on the condition that it is in due course surpassed with far better theater, acting left behind for the directing and stage-managing of the present performance.

Time, Thought, Laughter

So an entire month and a bit more has passed since I last wrote. Though I watched the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, I can not claim to have been involved. As I watch the movement slowly die (200 arrested in LA today), I am sad because something is passing that I fear we will not have again. All is not well, but neither can we seem to change the course on which we find ourselves. In my shared office, on the blackboard, another teacher wrote "What is this basket and where am I headed?" Oddly, none of us have erased it. S/he wrote it last year, so the feeling remains but has become acceptable, subdued–I don't know.

Nor do I have any other exciting type news to share regarding why I have not written anything. It is merely the timeless: I have been working a lot. I can say that I have been working a great deal on art, or rather how art is written about. Long reading lists have been created that will occupy the next six months of my life, and which I look forward to sharing here.

I might have mentioned these past few weeks that I have taught Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, A.S. Byatt's "Art Work" from The Matisse Stories, and Ray Bradbury's "The Smile". My students struggle to think for themselves, not because they can't but because they are afraid of looking "retarded", direct quote from class. I spend much time trying to invigorate them, to convince them that all knowledge is risk. Very few start off knowing that everything they say is clever, or that every drawing is brilliant. The point isn't even knowing that. The point is simply to produce.

I will catch up in the weeks to come on the notes and thoughts of the past while, but in the meantime I have to share with you one of the funniest blogs that I have ever come across:
http://uglyrenaissancebabies.tumblr.com
If you need a laugh, enjoy!

Even More Modern than Today

Yves Bonnefoy's introduction to Gaeton Picon's book The Birth of Modern Painting suggests that among the significant accomplishments of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe was to remove the authoritarian voice of meaning from painting.

The painting is thus the response, without anxiety, or even reflection, of the painter's sensibility to a mere bit of color in the light....followed his taste for first glances–perceptions untainted by prior knowledge–after which he worked, in the diverse moment's of the work's genesis, solely with immediate, unreasoning, but obligatorily total adherence to the suggestions of a an obscure, inner necessity....The result was a sudden silencing of the voice that until then, whether clear or confused, never stopped asserting through the intermediary of things the authority of an order of the world, of an a priori truth, of an orthodoxy of thought. 

Manet  painted what he imagined, whether it made sense or not. He did not try to place his nude woman at the picnic in a context that could in any way be interpreted allegorically. It is clearly not a historical painting. The work is a pure painting, as Bonnefoy calls it, an act of the imagination.

Seeing, in other words, the interest in perception that is nothing but itself, seems to replace vision, as Mallarmé was later to believe.

He explains that this leaves the painter with the brave task of meeting and trespassing onto the unconscious. Finding their own inner source of intoxication, painters must live and produce without support or refuge, painting the visual impact of their hermetic dismissal. He goes on to make a statement that I think might have equally significant value today if recommended carefully.

This is not only an intoxicating discovery, a clear direction, the positivity of Being regained after centuries of interpretation and theory always falling short of the presence of the world; it is also an unceasing incitement to venture into the unknown, and therefore, something that can be admired and appreciated, but just as easily feared.

French painting had been ruled by the Academy, and Felibien had established a hierarchy of painting that placed historical painting, and allegorical painting, at the top. Though the imagination was called upon, it was done within the constraints of a general knowledge base and accepted interpretive skills determined and reinforced by the Academy. David's perfect portrait of Lavoisier and his wife, shows his chemistry tools to evoke his experiments oxygen, gunpowder and the chemical composition of water. Symbols are intentionally placed; poses are struck to suggest meaning. Manet suddenly rejects all this to permit a strong, enveloping but also anti-idea image. The challenge is to appreciate it without trying to explain it.

And here is where I come today. Without necessarily backtracking to require today's artists to mimic some past form or style, would it not be possible to reconsider this "intoxicating discovery" of stepping away from thought? Though much conceptual art has offered something, has it not also produced an expectation that suddenly appears quite traditional, that is the requirement to think about the art-experience? I can hardly claim to knowing what such art might be today, or how it might be identified, but perhaps we might discover it in the effort of trying to look at art rather than think, read plaques, learn biography. We might begin seeing more.

Nautical Notes: Mari, Navi e Naufragi

A week has passed but I am still thinking of the delightful show I saw at Centotto Gallery last Friday. Like many others, I am often wary of art shows in super-hip, most up-and-coming art communities, particularly when the invitation uses self-consciously heightened language, with additional remarks in a foreign tongue. This usually suggests that I am to arrive as a connoisseur with a depth of understanding,  a facility with a type of terminology that in truth I do not have, nor believe is necessary for every viewer. Such shows then tend to make me feel uncomfortable, when I do go to them, as if I were not good enough for the work on view.

This is not the case with Centotto Gallery's current show Nautical Notes: Mari, Navi e Naufragi. The show is a pleasure to see. The curator Paul D'Agostino invited artists with good work and placed them in the small space to draw the viewer into each work, so that each work can be admired, while also enjoyed together. The works vary in style but are placed in relationship to each other so as to complement and enhance themselves and each other. There are traditional seascapes, photographs, whimsical sculptures, a massive drawing, but it does not feel like a forced attempt to mix media but rather an honest representation of a response to a topic by modern artists. The show makes no theoretical claims but rather permits each artist to present a piece in loose affiliation with the nautical theme.

Though the art works well together, any of them could be owned and enjoyed in one's home on its own. Sometimes group shows require the rest in order for the works to make sense, provide the pleasure they suggest. Perhaps due to the simplicity of the theme, each work in Nautical Notes can rise to achieve its own presence, anchored through their foundation but allowed to float on their own merit. I found these works to be a true pleasure and hope to return and see them again.

Some shows are worth the voyage there. Whether the L train is running or not, find your way to Centotto Gallery at 250 Moore St #108 (off the Morgan Ave L stop) and let the works by Harry Gold, Adam Thompson, Josh Willis, Alice Lynn McMichael, Tim Kent, Zane Wilson, Rebecca Litt, Joel Dugan, Chris Wyrick, Rachel Day, Warren Holt and Paul Bergeron sail you on your own imaginative journey.

Pinned

I do not often like museum captions because I find them either senseless or unnecessarily full of sense. Either I am told information that is obscure and uninteresting that does not help me engage with the picture, or I am told something completely obvious. Occasionally, however, the combination is reached to perfection. The following caption is reproduced from the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Richard Hamilton, Pin-Up 1961

One of the founders of Pop art in Britain, Hamilton took his theme for this work directly from popular culture, using pictures from Playboy and other men’s magazines as his sources. While the work references these ubiquitous photographs of sex symbols, it is also a modern treatment of a conventional subject of painting—the odalisque, or reclining nude. Hamilton approaches this tradition through a variety of pictorial modes: the hair is a stylized cartoon, the breasts appear both in drawing and in three-dimensional relief, and the bra is a photograph applied as a collage. "Mixing idioms," Hamilton has said, "is virtually a doctrine in Pin-up."




In my mind it perfectly balances an explanation of the artist, his period, interest and approach. I learn a little about how the picture is constructed (cartoon, photograph), I am also left with enough curiosity to wish to seek out more information; what does he mean by mixing idioms is a virtual doctrine in Pin-Up? Does he mean for pin-ups as a form in general or just this picture? Why would one picture have a doctrine? Is it only particular to this picture or to his others as well? These are questions with answers that I can only learn by continuing to find out about him...either through looking at more examples of his work, or reading about him and his work, or, ideally, both! How wonderful to have a museum provide a picture and text that would engage me. Well done MoMA, and since Hamilton died last month kudos for managing to bring another person into relationship (for whatever length, since sometimes more information dispels the initial allure, like a second or third date) with his work!

Morisot, Manet and Mallarme, Part 3

There are women who seem able to do it all. Whether with the benefits of financial support, psychopharmaceutical aids, or some inherent grace beneath it all, these women can do what the rest of us can not. We may seek to ridicule them, present their hidden anxieties, reveal their personal crises, but in truth, we all know, that some women–in the words of possibly the greatest advertising campaign of all time–just do it.

In Mallarmé's piece on Morisot what becomes most apparent to me is his admiration for her ability to manage so many roles, of which the two most important are clearly her studio time and her social requirements. He sees her as the well-respected painter, the considered and considerate hostess of a Salon, a mother, the sister-in-law to the sometimes difficult Edouard Manet whose paintings also adorned her home, a sister to whom she remained intimate even when her sibling abandoned painting upon marrying, a considerate friend, an avid letter writer (as they all seem to have been! Though I guess we write emails), and, dare I say it, a beautiful home-maker.

Perhaps because we live in such a competitive age, or perhaps because we fear difference after the Social Revolution of the 60s and 70s, whatever the reason we seem disinclined these days to recognize, respect, or revere greatness. Whether in our civic leaders, our friends, or larger peer group, I see a disposition interested in finding the flaw. Is it not obvious that undoubtedly it is there? Is it necessary to highlight it?

I have said nothing here about the quality of Mallarmé's writing most commonly termed obscure because it has been discussed at such length in so many other places. He is notoriously difficult, known to have written his prose then gone back and deleted words so that what remained was a spare, almost terse, presentation of his object of focus. No matter how obscure he might be, however, that he admired her is clear. And he does not hesitate to state all the ways in which she was great. We could perhaps be encouraged to do the same, not necessarily of our immediate circle–who may in truth not be "great" with that in no way diminishing their wonderful and important place in each of our lives, though we likely each know at least one truly great person–but perhaps of those celebrities, politicians, and other luminaries whose lives we permit to have plastered across our screens and papers to feed some longing that we need not indulge.

Some people are great. Let's let them be.

Stepping back

Willa Cather once said though I know not where:

"Beauty is not so plentiful that we can afford to object to stepping back a dozen paces to catch it."

Today, again at the library, working again to know sufficient Italian to pass an upcoming exam, I could not stop myself from taking the time to walk through the Century of Art exhibit at the New York Public Library Schwartzman building on the top floor, the corridor leading to the Rose Reading Room. I felt vaguely guilty, dawdling among the pictures on my way to or from the Women's Room–I really ought to spend each moment translating, vocabulary building–but I could not resist looking at this, then that, liking it more or less with additional viewing time.

So I stepped back a dozen places from my academic activity to notice a work of art, and my life was made more beautiful for that pause. Why should I feel guilty and object to such time spent?

I hope you don't.

Morisot, Manet and Mallarmé, Part 2

Through her salon, through Mallarmé's untiring interest in anyone interesting, Morisot and Mallarmé became good friends. A book of their corrrespondence was eventually published. These letters indicate their mutual appreciation for fine music, their pleasure at each other's conversation.

In March of 1896, Mallarmé wrote the introduction to the catalogue of her retrospective Durand-Ruel. This first portion is often reprinted in Mallarmé's writings, including in Divagations. The rest of this will be a translation of his piece, with some comments provided in brackets, but a more considered discussion offered tomorrow. His writing is intentionally halting, slow-paced where a familiarity with the cuts of Emily Dickinson, for example, can provide a guide as to how to read him. He is always difficult but there is satisfaction in time.

The translation by Jill Anderson in Mallarmé in Prose edited by Mary Ann Caws is beautiful and clear. She does an amazing job of maintaining qualities of his style while also making it comprehensible in English. Since English does not have gendered nouns, or have verbs that agree in gender, keeping all the tangents that Mallarmé allows makes much of the sense disappear in English. It is necessary to alter his phrasing or order a little in order to permit the English reader to enjoy what he is saying. On the other hand too loose a translation could reduce the forcefulness of his language. She balances it perfectly. She begins:

Such a profusion of bringt, iridescent paintings, assembled here, precise in detail, exuberant, impulsive, patiently awaiting future acclaim...

Fortunately she is now well recognized, written about, thought about, and she remains for me a wonderful example of what is possible, as a woman and as a creative person.

Morisot, Manet and Mallarmé, Part 1

Edouard Manet, Stephane Mallarmé 1876

Mallarmé wrote a typically difficult, but lovely, introduction to the catalogue of Berthe Morisot's work in 1896. She had died the previous March, leaving her daughter Julie, to his educational guidance. He writes about her work "So many clear canvases iridescent, here, exact, impulsive, they can wait with a future smile" and goes on to discuss how little she was known though she balanced life and art, her Salon and her painting, always welcoming, admirable. His language requires a slow pace, and knows his reader would know her all too well, visiting this retrospective of her work.

After she and her sister had shown a keen interest, a passion even, for painting, their surprisingly liberal mother for that time, allowed them to continue studying painting under Corot. Through his guidance she had a painting shown in the 1864 Salon and thereby came to know Manet in 1867, sitting for his next Salon submission Balcony, her mother often accompanying her so that her reputation would not be questioned by being in an artist's studio, alone.

Edouard Manet, Balcony 1868

Le Repos 1870

Berthe Morisot 1869

Manet would produce several more paintings of her, which contributes to the gossip that they were amorous of one another, although she married his brother. She and her sister are known to have burned some of their letters to each other, which fact is used to suggest they were hiding some encounter, and both young ladies admit in letters that they kept to have found Manet attractive, if slightly crazy. Whatever romance may have been there was kept secured from the public, then and now, so we do better to appreciate the friendship between the two artists, their attention to each other's work, than to our own lascivious imaginations.

Berthe Morisot with a Fan 1872

The portrait most often reproduced is the one where she is in mourning. It is often used to represent her though she also did a self-portrait.

Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot with Bunch of Violets 1872

Berthe Morisot, Self-Portrait 1885

 She mostly preferred to have her daughter in any self-portraits. These portraits with her daughter provide the warm scenes of domesticity that women of her time were permitted to paint.

This interior landscape is one of the reasons that Morisot can seem banal, pastel in color and emotion. Her paintings show women reading, chasing butterflies, sitting in gardens or on balconies. They avoid city streets and the outside world of the flâneur, the wanderer in mind and heart and spirit. They are content within the safe enclave of the privileges accorded a bourgeois woman, who is nonetheless permitted to paint. She is undeniably an Impressionist, but as the next post will show, Mallarmé was able to appreciate her in full.

Berthe Morisot, Lady at her Toilette 1885

Quotable Quotes Unquoted

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-- Edward Langley, Artist (1928-1995)

Occasionally I receive one of those funny forwards filled with quips and quotables, many of which come from Mark Twain, and some others as well. Recently one arrived with the quote above and given my interest in art, I decided to find out who this Edward Langley was, what kind of art he produced, and how he came to be sufficiently interested in politics to have become quotable.

Apparently, "What the country needs is more unemployed politicians” was credited, in 1982, to artist Edward Langley (1928-1995), claimed one website that I found though it could not provide me additional information on the man or the occasion for the quote. It continued to say that in 2000, political activist and professor Angela Davis used it citing an unspecified “1967” speech–thus suggesting that she was not properly referencing her sources. At any rate, all seem to credit Edward Langley. But who is Edward Langley?  

He is not Edward Marion Langley born in London on March 27, 1870, who died in Los Angeles on May 11, 1949. This artist was abandoned by his parents in Australia, made his way to Canada, and travelled by canoe to the Gulf of Mexico! This information and the rest from Artists in California 1786-1940 by Edan Hughes. He became a US citizen in 1904 while working in Chicago with William Selig, developing the motion picture camera! He moved to Hollywood in 1917 where he became an art director for Thief of Bagdad, Three Musketeers, and Mark of Zorro among others. Edan Hughes says: "From 1921 until 1934 the Langley home in Los Angeles was a gathering place for artists and the film colony. When not busy with the movies, he was active in the local art scene. As a lecturer at local women's clubs, he used his paintings and special lighting effects to show the moods of the desert." Langley was painting in Japan when war erupted and was a prisoner there until 1943. He returned to California, lived in Salinas, Laguna, and La Jolla teaching painting classes until he died.

Interesting enough. Pictures are fine. But this is not our quotable man.

Well, so far as I can find, there is no Edward Langley who was an artist, living on the planet from 1928-1995. Any Edward Langley who is not an artist alive during those years does not show up either. Anything you find on this quote on the internet links it to this fictional Edward Langley who was an artist. Well the obvious next step in research is to go to an actual research location, like a library and dig deeper than Google, Google scholar, or even my university online library will permit me. But I shalln't do that because that is an excessive amount of work for a simple quote that if accurately cited should have become apparent fairly quickly.

Moral of the story? There isn't really one besides the fact that much of what you get in forwards is inaccurate, albeit fun, and deceptive–no matter how many people you forward it to there will be no, repeat no, financial windfall arriving in 3, 7 or 31 days. Enjoy what you read, but remember what Douglas Adams said, “Don't believe anything you read on the net. Except this. Well, including this, I suppose.”

At least, I think he said it.

Let's Talk Around since not About

In a discussion with Kenneth Koch, John Ashberry said: It's rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is the easier it is to talk about it.

I can certainly agree that discussing what one's own art is about might be difficult, but I think we ought to be careful not to misread this statement as suggesting that one ought not to be able to discuss one's art. This is extremely difficult, and makes many uncomfortable, but an artist ought to be able to help guide people to elements by which they can begin a relationship with the work.

Why not just let people see it and appreciate it (or not) for themselves?

Well, that certainly would be nice. Unfortunately, especially today, we live in a world where we expect to be assisted. That has, even more unfortunately, created an environment in which people do not believe we can understand art and demand someone to tell us about it. Anyone can, and there are gallerists and curators who will, but why not let the artist at least provide some introductory remarks on which to help the viewer set sail–note that I did not suggest the artist talk about the art itself, so much as talk around it, talk about interesting things to consider alongside it, talk about anything that might allow someone who is afraid of art to begin to consider it alone.

So long as we continue to propagate the myth that artists are unintelligent and unintelligible beings of another realm, we will continue to have an audience for art that believes it must learn a foreign language in order to understand what it sees. Artists are trained to produce image-based productions (whether of a lasting or momentary-performative variety) and can equally be encouraged (or even taught) to speak for themselves. John Ashberry was an eloquent art critic who attended to art with care and compassion (even if he claimed in an interview in the Paris Review never to have been interested in producing art criticism but fell into it to make money). He has, however and even, been notably inspired by art, as in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror for which he won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Thank you, Parmigianino!

Parmigianino, Self Portrait at the Mirror, c 1524

Not speaking about a work of art may even be important for the work of art to stand on its own, and develop its own life, apart from the artist. As Oscar Wilde said, a work of art "may be marred, and indeed often is so, by an excess of intellectual intention on the part of the artist. For when the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that whcih was put into its lips to say." If the artist knows the meaning of the work of art, and can state it, that meaning may limit how the work can impact. But not speaking about the intention of the work does not negate talking about art, albeit indirectly, because in fact, it is that very indirection that begins to open up for the common viewer the great realm of art, and learn to step sideways out of the dominating elements of the immediate to see something from a different, perhaps convex, point of view.

Appena Possibile

As soon as possible...
As soon as possible...

"Your pictures would have been finished a long time ago if I were not forced every day to do something to earn money," said Edgar Degas in a letter to the art collector Jean-Baptiste Faure in 1877.  But that does not even consider the number of pictures he was telling himself he would get to

As soon as possible...
As soon as possible...

There are so many demands we all face of the most basic element: rent, food, bills, relationships, letter writing...emails. How much time do we spend trying to respond to emails when we know we could be getting other things done? Flaubert, Kafka, Tolstoy, Barthes, all of them complained that they would have written more if it were not for the incessant demands of writing letters about this, that, and of course the work they aren't doing because they are writing letters and will start working again...

As soon as possible...
As soon as possible...

I am currently learning to translate Italian so that I can take an exam as soon as possible. Why? So that I can submit for other requirements as soon as possible. Why? So that I can be on the job market as soon as possible. Why? So that I can get on with my life as soon as possible.

But wait.

This is my life.

How much can actually be done as soon as possible without sacrificing quality? What would Flaubert have said to someone who told him that he needed to write Madame Bovary as soon as possible because there were deadlines and that style was worth sacrificing to the great god of As Soon As Possible? In Balzac's tale Le Chef D'Oeuvre Inconnu, the artist has spent years painting his greatest work of art, which is dismissed at a moment's glance by some visitors, to which he responds by committing suicide. A dramatic response, but one that anyone can recognize who has been deeply disheartened by a quick dismissive summarizing of hard work. What would, actually what did, Michelangelo say to his many patrons, including Popes, who wanted him to hurry? He got angry, disgruntled, and didn't give an inch. It takes time to reveal the statue from within the stone.

There are plenty of things that must be done in a hurry, but neither art nor appreciation (true criticism) can be done quickly. You can not dash through an art gallery if you hope to actually consider the art work. You will see it and that is undoubtedly a fine thing, but you can hardly expect to have appreciated it. You can not read a book in a blur and recognize its finer qualities, though you can certainly claim to have read it–by a limited definition of the word read. There are things to be done as soon as possible, but I think I might here posit that Art, and Literature and Music, are what we have to remind us of that which is not...

As soon as possible.

You get to know a painting over years of living with it and seeing it under different lights, life experiences, emotions...You get to know a text of literature from spending time reading it and revisiting it. In a world that is always happening, always ready to do the next thing, the arts might be all that we have left to remind us that this is it. We can appreciate it now, or we can keep saying

As soon as possible...
As soon as possible...

Until the day when that can't be said at all.

Pascal Thoughts

Blaise Pascal's Pensées are currently on my mind and one seemed particularly appropriate to a recent situation. Last Friday, I picked up a picture of my mother's that she had always hung in her standard height, ten foot tall, apartments here in New York City. As it was a life size portrait, it rather dominated the room. I remember it therefore as being large, looming, impossible to ignore. It was leaning against the garage door when I arrived and in comparison seemed small. Once hung in the loft studio to which it was taken it seemed even smaller next to the careful canvases of the painter whose studio it is.

French School, Portrait of Blaise Pascal, at Versailles (and also adorning my Penguin Classics edition)

Pascal is discussing the delicate point in time at which one can edit well, too close and one has no view of the matter, too far and one can not pick up the gist of it, when he says: "It is like looking at pictures which are too near or too far away. There is just one indivisible point which is the right place." (#21) Good grief can you imagine the museum jostling if that were true? But he goes on, "Others are too near, too far, too high, or too low. In painting the rules of perspective decide it, but how will it be decided when it comes to truth and morality?" Oh my, "decide it". Decide what? And do the rules of perspective truly indicate only one acceptable point at which to view a picture? What is this right place? I get papers with such reasoning from my students occasionally and would forgive them if they would reference Pascal as their stylistic ancestor, but they don't and I am not overly convinced by Pascal just on his own merit either. I am trying though.

Later (#41) he says "Two infinities, mean. When we read too fast or too slowly we understand nothing." Convenient excuse, if I ever saw one, for putting the blame on the reader who might be bewildered by his analogy between the well made heel of a shoe or the courage of a soldier and one's chosen career. (#35)

I have visions of a man wearing fancy heels, holding a rifle in a 17th century picture gallery declaiming sceptically. It certainly makes reading Pascal more fun.


**All quotes taken from the Penguin edition with translations by A.J. Krailsheimer

Wooster and Montesquieu

Bertram Wilberforce "Bertie" Wooster is a defining character of P.G. Wodehouse's career, and my cat. Now my cat came to me at a somewhat later age through a complicated channel that I will not bore you with here as it is far more amusing to bore you with it in person. I was reading a great deal of Wodehouse when he arrived in my life and his deep concern for food and the most comfortable spot in any comfortable area reminded me of Bertie's own proclivity for creature comforts. Though my Wooster is less capable of quoting MacBeth when in a spot of trouble, he hisses as if he were Lady M. In his little gray suit, and sharp white shirt and boots he is indeed a fine dandy.

Which is why a dear friend yesterday informed me that unpacking her Penguin copy of Huysman's Against the Grain (A Rebours), she was struck by the similarity between the cover image and my cat. What an honor! Upon finding the cover in a quick Google search, I discovered that the portrait is one of my own favorite artists Boldini!

Now the original work represents the Comte de Montesquieu, the aesthete of the aesthetes. He represents much of the art for art sake's movement, his appetite for life, fine things, and beauty in general making him a prominent promoter and benefactor of the aesthetic and decadent movements at the end of the 19th century. A prolific art critic, an occasional poet (a seeming requirement of the times), he was a portrait sitter extraordinaire. Besides Boldini, he sat for Whistler, de Laszlo, Paul Helleu, and though a supporter of Sargent's, peculiarly never sat for him. 

He is one of the models for Proust's character Baron de Charlus in In Search of Lost Time. Some of the moments of greatest arrogance which lead to acts of cruel spitefulness are loosely based on Montesquieu's own behavior. He was quite hurt by Proust's interpretation of him–after all he had introduced Proust to Society–but must have understood the note of truth if he was able to recognize himself.

Montesquieu was friends with Mallarmé, Sarah Berhnhardt, Paul Verlaine, as well as socialites of the period beyond count, where my Wooster is really more a stay-at-home recluse who seems happy with my company alone. The Comte de Montesquieu would no doubt be horrified that I never do my nails or personally know Anna Wintour. Though my Wooster does not get into any of the scrapes from which Jeeves rescued the fictional Wooster, I do feel that I awake to serve him breakfast and am reprimanded if supper is tardy.

As TS Eliot explained better than I can, the naming of cats is a difficult matter and to get it correct is not done. But a name that's suggestive, that allures, is the best of the options to come. So I point laughing to a foolish Etonian, and another finds him in a grander salon-ian. But these human names are false. Seeing him calm and reflective I wish we all had what Montesquieu appears to have in Boldini's portrait, what Wooster would lose without Jeeves, what a cat seems to have with ease:

His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable.
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Strange Pictures on the Street

Most of my life is spent inside a book, preparing to discuss it or write about it. But the rest is lived in Bushwick, a gentrifying neighborhood of those artists who moved into the lofts when it was still a questionable neighborhood, as well as those post-undergraduates who moved in after Roberta’s accepted credit cards and was covered by the NY Times, who debate if they are willing to dedicate their lives to a struggle that would likely deny them their underlying bourgie expectations of comfort, those places of solace that the career artists have rejected in favor of the rare pleasure they take from their photography, sculpture, theatre sets, traditional painting or street art.

I play the role of strange-but-cool to an eleven year old girl whose parents are good New York parents, keen to introduce her to art, museums, the culture of the city. The street art scene, of which I know little, but that is present both on compound walls and sold at the Factory Fresh gallery in Bushwick, requires a willing playfulness that seemed appropriate to introduce to her increasing blasé attitude towards art–a know-it-all by virtue of being a New York City kid. There is a huge wall outside the my friend's studio, which she got to visit last spring, that is always being redone. It wraps around to the other side, a continuum of 200 feet that uses its ten foot height to both good and bad effect. There are tags on other walls, on the sidewalk, hidden in corners and left prominently to view, done from the loft rooftops and also at street level. There is so much of it in this neighborhood, that many of the international visitors, prominently the Germans, staying at the Loft Hostel, can be seen in the early morning hours with their cameras, taking shots of this transient art for posterity.

There is a street I usually avoid because it leads to the recycling factory and the smell swamps and steamrolls the air into a rancid coffin for three blocks. One Saturday last summer, however, there was no smell which surprise had me wander down to enjoy a different route on the regular dog walks I take with the pitbull who is largely responsible for my knowledge of these streets. On these walks, I occasionally take snapshots with my camera phone of interesting pieces that I then show my young friend when I get together with her mother for our Diet Coke pow-wows. Though there are some brilliant and funny works that I have seen and shared, on this day it was a poster on the corner of a block that stood out, particularly because they are rarer now then they were when I was growing up in New York.

This poster did not advertise an upcoming event, or have any language on it at all. In black and white, I am surprised that I noticed it on the gray wall, but as the wall had other points of color from long forgotten tags, the organized square of printed black and white, with the top left corner peeling down drew me into the image of a street corner with three mice dressed as young gangsters from the 20th Century teens, one wearing a sharp wool suit, leaning against a lamp post, arms crossed, staring out at the street and the viewer from under his bowler, another one, well suited, resting his left arm on the lamp post to lean into the other mouse, as a third, standing away from these two, watches them in his newsboy cap and tie. Behind them, three brownstones with shops on the first floor; one of them a barber shop, the other unspecified with a rolled up striped awning. The shutters on the upstairs windows are battered, reinforcing the desperate tone of the setting. The last building is covered by a carriage being drawn by an oversized kitten, with the markings and the gray tonality that makes it seem to be an orange tabby. The cat looks straight ahead, ignores the mice, harnessed to its carriage load, focuses on each step forward.

The poster was poorly plastered onto the wall, which repeated the falling down style within the image, and provided a seemingly intentional ripple to the streets that made them look dirtier, poorly maintained, and brings me back to the street where I stand. Trash hides beneath the curb, detritus is pressed into the road from the trucks that drive through, and the general poverty of the neighborhood permits the anti-establishment life styles being cultivated until they get priced out by the next generation of SoHo, Tribecca, East Village, Williamsburg parents who disdain the established bourgeois neighborhoods in favor of establishing their own. When I show the picture to Lil Miss Blasé, she loves it and wants to come see it, disappointed that it is gone, ripped, torn, and replaced with something new that she doesn’t like as much, as disconcerted by such temporality as any art critic.

Ceiling of the NYPL

Sitting, working, studying Italian in the North room of the New York City Public Library Rose Reading room since this morning made me suddenly slouch back in my chair, lean my head against the back and stare up blankly to shake the stupor of Cellini from my mind- on that another time.

That was when I actually noticed how beautiful the ceiling is, though undoubtedly I have stared at it before. The windows on each side seem to reach the ceiling with their arches but leave room for several feet of white stone. Is it marble, I don't know but think not. I could learn more about decorative archiecture and tell you about the various patterns that line the edge of the wall and ceiling until this expanse of ornate wood panellin, decorated with gold, and deep forest green abound. There are three rectangular sections, and I am at the bottom edge of one so that looking up I see the middle section that is painted like a clear blue sky.

Today is our first day of sunshine in several days here in NYC but the ceiling is always cheerful. I would share a picture but none are allowed here, and though I could sneak one as surely many do, I like the way this room requires presence to appreciate its offerings, its books, its dulled grating of chairs on floors in the silence of computer typing, and so, also, its decoration.

On the third floor of the Schwartzman building, one does occasionally see tourists stop in to gaze. But the best way to enjoy this room is finding something to work hard on so that the books mean help when you need it, and all the sounds dissipate in the murmur of your own thoughts, and the patterned ceiling refreshed strained eyes with a different modality, and a false sky lets hope soar whether outdoors or in your soul it rains.

Too bad more places of knowledge do not provide this visual setting because it is inspirational, which is why, having shared this, I will return to my own studies...

Losing and Finding Things

I am currently going through a frenzy of cleaning and sorting, which means I am finding all sorts of things...mostly things worth handing on, others to be donated and then yet others whose only place is the trash.

Things worth keeping are filled with memories, fit well, still have a purpose, are well loved, all of the above or some combination of the above. When it comes to art I keep those works that I bought, were handed to me by family, or those that were given to me in unusual circumstances. There was the Thanksgiving I volunteered at a men's shelter and one of the men complained that there was no milk. When I returned from my short jaunt to the corner store with a gallon of milk, he was slightly perplexed and gave me an ink drawing he had done of a Native American woman he sometimes saw in his dreams. She had strength and would protect me. I had to burn the edges of the laminated cardboard to bring her presence into my life. I did and she still hides in my home, a memory of strength when I have none.

In the process of all this clearing, and remembering, a friend emailed me a drawing that he had found in his own organizing process before an extended trip. The drawing is from the summer we met. He had just decided to dedicate his life and time to art, and this drawing comes from our mutual time at an art school in Santa Fe where I was posing and he working as the Studio Assistant.

Read Lockhart, random drawing of Moi

His email was mocking in tone, laughing at work from a time that was filled with personal anxiety as he launched into a new life. Now he works full time as an artist, currently in Taos, New Mexico but thinking of moving. After all his training, he had decided to go find his own way with paint, and spent several years away from his mentors, favorite paintings, and colleagues. Now he paints with greater confidence, though he might laugh also to hear me say that, as there are plenty of days where a painting still won't go what he was prepared for it to take it in the morning.

For me, it's strange to find an image of myself from a time that has little to do with my life now, though it still inflects my life in little ways. I would have been so excited to know that I would have the life I gained, but there were many jobs, lovers, apartments, and states (both of the United States and disordered states of being) between that summer and today. I had to get rid of a lot to be here now.

The process of getting rid of detritus is also a way of finding who you are now. Some of my favorite clothes are brightly colored. I don't need lots of books I like; I'd rather donate a mystery library to a friend then hoard them on the shelf. I am more even keel now than I was in the days that this picture was drawn. I smile more. I cook even less often. But for all the things that I am not, there are all the things I am. And from all the things I get rid of, there are all the things I hold most dear. Most dearly are friendships, like the one that so unexpectedly occurred over a pose in a class we both enjoyed leaving behind.

Life in NYC

I was recently invited to post on a friend's private blog. The content is mostly about NYC, and thus is off topic for my own blog, but as it does address how some art was spared through Hurricane Irene, it is tangentially reasonable to share it with you here. Enjoy!

Guest Post from NYC

New York City is known for many things: art, food, musicals, night life, finance, even Law&Order or the occasional lack thereof. Those of us who live here try hard to enjoy as much of the city as we can and encourage friends to visit our favorite restaurants, hidden bars, shows and exhibits. We rarely discuss, however, the particular nature of family and friendship that this city breeds, as if in this city that never sleeps, we never sleep with loved ones or stay up all night worrying about them.

I would lie if I did not say that there are qualities of this city that make family life different from the one I experience when I visit my extended families in Nevada or Massachusetts. In New York City, school buses are only deployed for field trips as the city has a massive transit system which offers students a monthly card to ride public transportation to and from school for free. This means that sometime in middle school, most students start traveling to and from school without their parent. When I was growing up, I was given a beeper (remember those!) which allowed my mother to check on me whenever she wished and required that I respond within 20 minutes as any subway trips I took underground were rarely so long as to make that difficult to achieve, and if I were taking such a long trip she expected to know about it before hand. This liberty permitted me to visit friends, and the extended circle of my mother's close girlfriends who acted as aunts, on my own. I went to the Donnell library (now closed) across from MoMA on my own starting at eleven, the Met alone for the first time after school when I was twelve, tae kwan do in the village when I was twelve, guitar lessons in Brooklyn when I was fourteen, staying late at the theater where we had rehearsals when I was thirteen and coming home on the cross town bus in the wee hours of the night during tech week. My "aunties" met me for flea market shopping on the weekends, and once joined me for lunch when she walked into the restaurant where I had decided to get a bite. Both children and adults are accustomed to an unusual degree of freedom in their wandering.

On the other hand, we can be as close knit and present as can be found anywhere. When one of my aunties was dying two years ago, I was there to help her daughters sort through books, and other odds and ends. One of her daughters and I developed a closer relationship and this last week I visited her father who is now in the hospital himself. As the hurricane was headed towards us, I spent Friday night with her because her husband is out of town, she has two year old twin sons, a sweet but elderly dog, and Saturday morning needed to be at the hospital to help her father. We planned the morning so that she would return in time to let me get on the subway back to Brooklyn before noon when all public transportation was being shut down as a safety precaution. On the subway at 11:45, I watched in each station increasing levels of closure, and the other passengers and I chatted about our own preparations–one woman was looking forward to having nothing else to do but study for the patent law bar exam. In my neighborhood, the stores were full of people buying bottled water and tinned goods of course, but it was just as often seltzer and cans of tuna fish in olive oil, or dolmades, rice stuffed grape leaves. The prosciutto was gone before the ham, aged parmesan before cheddar, and the liquor stores were booming because New Yorkers are foodies even in a crisis. We laughed and chatted in line with each other, envying those who had gotten the last vine ripened tomato, lemon for their tuna, or 75% dark chocolate with orange.

I arrived home to tend to my own apartment and cat before heading to my partner's. The texts were a flurry as aunties ensured that I would not be alone, girlfriends checked to make sure we were stocking necessities, such as candles, and shared tips, like filling bath tubs with water in the case of a water shortage. My local taxi company made sure that I had a car ready to take me to Tim's where he was moving canvases to a higher level, caulking any cracks he could find, and sealing windows. We walked his dog during a break in the rain, and continued to respond to all the calls and texts of concerned loved ones in this incredible network. As the day wore on and we were secured with white wine, grilled chicken (it was in the freezer and might as well be made edible), dried figs, and pots of water seemingly everywhere we remarked at the fact that we spend our years building professional networks only to find that they too become a part of our closer circle. We asked people who are now friends about their galleries, their offices, their children, their pets, their water supplies, their gastronomic preferences and went to sleep curious about the storm but entirely secure in our sense of love.

As New Yorkers, we may be rude, disinterested, obnoxious, pushy, snobbish, elitist, superior, opinionated, suspicious, diffident and demanding. In this sometimes difficult city, we may be difficult in response. Nonetheless as anywhere, as family, we bicker and we bolster. As friends, we gossip, goad and champion. We love just as love loves the world over. You may not see our charms on your first weekend visit. You may not see them the next time either. But if you keep coming back, in due course, we'll show you not only our favorite hot spot, but our hearts as well.

Resubmitted Post-A Museum of Ideas

I just realized that my recent post did not get posted accurately. Here it is corrected.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, based on lost orginial by Pieter Breughel, circa 1560s

Musee des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden 

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

This is one of my favorite poems by Auden, written after his visit to the museum in 1938. Others have written about Icarus as well (Anne Sexton among them); William Carlos Williams even wrote about the same painting, which in the 90s was reinterpreted as a copy of a Breughel original for reasons including that he worked in tempera and this is an oil painting. But, all that detail aside, Auden manages to observe in his poem an apathy about life, as well as the painting itself and Breughel's particular talent at showing the ordinary setting in which extraordinary moments happen.

Conversion of St. Paul, Pieter Breughel, 1567

The Conversion of Saint Paul, above, also illustrates this rather well. A dominant feature of the painting is a horse's ass. Beyond that, the viewer must squint to see the man fallen from his horse. That clutz becomes the theologizing Saint Paul. But the soldiers and horsemen continue. Or, as Robert Frost said, "I can sum up in three words everything I've learned in life: it goes on."

The poem by Auden seems to me a particularly engaging angle on Breughel's picture. Words do not always speak well to their visual counterparts, in fact so very often they do not. That there is such a gap between the two is particularly noticeable now as we get increasingly blinded with images and yet can not, or are not permitted to, decipher them for ourselves, but need sociologists or museum curators to explain to us what we see. We have learned to focus on drama as the sole view worth having, when drama is itself surrounded by the mundane events that constitute a larger portion of reality at any given moment. As we succumb to the news flash, the idol, this moment in time, we easily lose sight of the significance our own quotidian actions can have in adjusting our life, our families, our world for the better. Even if we can not see the larger relevance at the time.

There is great value in acknowledging a war, the one in Afghanistan right now or the World War II that dismayed Auden, but artists need not only present the horrors in order to impact. Just as usefully can be a poem, painting or even installation that recognizes the rest of life, reminding us in so doing of what we hope to still have when the war is over, what it is we hope to enjoy when the dead are buried, and hopefully, through those pleasures to respect the losses entailed.

Summarily dismissed

Art is not as stupid as human conversation.
              -Alice Neel

The Popes

Picasso called Apollinaire The Pope, as a tease for his Tuesday gatherings. During one such Tuesday gathering in 1907, The Pope introduced Picasso and Braque to one another, and sparked art history to be forever changed. Their friendship became deeply tied; they would speak in near code to each other and had the other approve each painting in order to consider it finished. From 1907-1913, the two worked so closely that their paintings reveal similar objects, topics, interests, and of course style–what we now call cubism.

Braque, Man with a Guitar, 1911

Picasso, The Poet, 1911

One presumes that Apollinaire did not mind the nomiker, whereas André Breton was not overly fond of the jest of his detractors when they called him the Pope of Surrealism. Some saw Breton as being adamant and limiting of surrealism and imposing strictures that were unnecessarily confining, much the way that Catholicism was viewed (see L'Age D'Or for the degree to which their disdain could go to this religion).

Nicknames are quite personal, and not always well received, so what works for one may most certainly not work for another.

Close on Cubism

Picasso, The Accordianist 1911

In a documentary whose argument I found somewhat tediously described, Picasso and Braque go to the Movies, Chuck Close offers a startlingly succinct definition of cubism:

"...The extreme artificiality of cubism. It was not about space. It was not about atmosphere. It was not about the way we see things in nature. It's highly compressed, insistently flat. You are always aware that you are looking at a distribution of colored dirt on a flat surface and then emerging out of that, in a fractured and totally unrealistic way, pieces of imagery that begin to coalesce in your mind."

This quote made the rest of the documentary worth watching, as did the brief clips from the early films of Lumière, Edison and Pathe Frères. Otherwise, the tie between moving pictures and cubism was loosely bound and unconvincing, even if true. 

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Werner Herzog has produced a simple and eloquent account of the rock art and history of the Chauvet Caves. Discovered in 1994 by three independent cave seekers, the caves had been sealed by a rock fall which allowed the art to remain undamaged over the last 25,000 years. Much of the cave drawings were done in a previous period, between 30,000 and 32,000 years ago–the caves are truly a bewildering record of another time, indeed a time before history.

One of the drawing groups shows a cave bear claw marking, then an outline of a bison is presumed to have been drawn by a human six feet in height but with a stick, additional drawings then appear lower down, and five thousand years later the last animal is included in the group. We live now in a period when art movements change by the decade, we record our transactions and even our most mundane thoughts, and so we find it easier to stay focused on the history of our nation, of our Western culture, as if the beginning was a defined marker that concluded with us, now, here. But 25,000 years ago was long before Herodotus, Vico, Hegel or Einstein could begin to define time and space. Herzog and the scientists who are working in the cave during his brief visit there permitted by the French Cultural Agency offer a warm reminder of stillness, and pure appreciation. Appreciation in which knowledge seeks but does not expect answers because as one of them says there can be none.

Along with the caves, Herzog interviews the assorted anthropologists, art historians, paleontologists and others who have been granted permission to be in the sealed and guarded caves for the two weeks at the end of March when the cave is opened for such researchers. They are all deeply considerate people with smiles when they discuss their research, and a respect that is full of kindness for the wonders that they see in the caves. One of them, who had worked in a circus in his previous career as a juggler and unicyclist, spoke of the dreams of lions both real and drawn that he had the first five days he was working in the cave. They were not frightening dreams but revealed the depth of response he was having, At the end of the fifth day, he decided not to reenter in order to give himself time to...he stopped to think of the word, which Herzog offered from the other side of the camera...absorb.

The leader of the group at one point calls for silence so that they can all hear the sound of the cave and, he adds, perhaps the sound of their own hearts?

With such advice as part of the guide to the caves, the movie provides an inspiring and wonderful look at caves that will never be open to the public. After the Lescaut caves started developing mold from the spores in visitors' breath, they were closed. Any caves found hereafter will be unlikely to permit visitors in order to keep the works pristine. And the ones at Chauvet are so clear that they are particularly protected.

There is a two foot wide walkway from which none are allowed to stray that goes most of the 1700 feet through the assorted cave chambers. The walkway is cut out in places to avoid injury to the stalagtites. Herzog's crew of four does an admirable job of setting up shots along this narrow path, and lighting with the bright lanterns that they have been permitted to bring.

The possibility exists that it was a ceremonial site as there is a peculiar block with a cave bear skull placed on it as if on an altar. There are a great many cave bear bones, as well as cave lions, bisons, hyenas, and other animals; some bones got covered in calcite and resemble porcelain sculptures of a vertebrae, or even an entire skull.

At least one human has been identified from a wall of palm prints with a broken right pinkie finger. That hand reappears all throughout the cave, which means that however many painted with charcoal, or just their fingers in the soft wall, one is personally identified.

With a bewildering array of 3D options in the cinemas currently, this is the only film that has been able to use 3D in order to better represent the subject matter of the film, in this case the experience inside the caves and the drawings found inside. In this photograph, we can see animals gathering on both sides of what appears to be a crevice, with a horse seen in the furthest reaches. The crevice is noticeably deep when seen in three dimensions, clearly reduced in this image. Of additional interest on this drawing, however, is the circle slightly right of vertical center, nearly at the top of the photograph. That is a hole from which water pours if there are continuous rains for at least a week. This natural feature seems to make sense of the cluster of animals drawn, as the real ones would have gathered at a pool caused by a natural stream.

Some art documentaries are boring, or focus on the artist rather than the work, or the historical period rather than the liveliness of the arts produced. Herzog has produced a deliberate and masterful film full of the natural beauty in the Chauvet caves. If you have the opportunity to see the film in theaters, you will enjoy these works in all the shapes and sizes which they take, and perhaps even take some time to yourself...to absorb.

Get by with a little help from my...

A good friend of mine from college happened to be in town for a marriage (typical travel reason these days) and managed to find time for us to spend the afternoon together. Last year, she had tossed aside the safety and boredom of her job to pursue the drama and dedication of film. This did not simply mean explaining to loved ones why she was leaving the security of a paycheck during an economic recession but also taking out loans to get a new undergraduate degree in film, as her BA in philosophy and history of science was no basis for admission into a film school.

Since I last saw her, she has been taking classes and controlling more of her time for her pursuit.

This time her husband joined us, after he had been to visit one of the premiere music schools in the city. He had decided to leave the even greater security of bookkeeping and accounting for a profession in  classical music performance. Now they count their pennies (which he does very well admittedly) and time all the more carefully.

As they dedicate their hours to practice and learning, they find less time for the casual conversation, the doldrums of daily drink dates, and the many ways other ways that time can slip away. They require a higher caliber of conversation, more challenging suggestions to engage them away from the passions they now pursue.

And that is as it should be. When impassioned, only the best will do. There is nothing wrong with a life lived casually but it makes no sense to someone who is full of vigor for their new endeavor. Full of excitement, life has it all and that energy must be protected from those who are willing to slip a bit here and bit there, check out this, look at that, and go on to the next without a spark. True friends stand out during this time, not only because they are patient with the outbursts of enthusiasm for the new found passion but also because their own passions are revealed in response to their friend's outburst.

Passion for the arts is required because it pays little and the reward is largely personal. Without passion it can not survive–this has been said and will be said again for that simple reason. Passion can not be sustained by intercourse with apathy, and one's social life will change in the face of that shift. Friends are necessary to refuel the curiosity that cares to spend hours alone in trenchant trials of perfecting a very personal vision.

I wish any of us who care passionately about what we do to have friends who care equally, who sustain our excitement with their own, who learn and share their learning in exuberant monologues of inquiry, who enjoy and applaud the incredible risks taken to satisfy the life worth living.

Dark Times

I am feeling low, somewhat restless, a little fearful as I watch the economy sink again, And ponder the futility of my own aspirations. Well, that is what it feels like, true or not, and only the most confident (perhaps stupidly so) look at the future without some element of doubt present.

With these feelings in tow, I was startled when I came across the following passage from D.H. Lawrence's essay on Taos, New Mexico:

To me it is so important to remember that when Rome collapsed, when the great Roman Empire fell into smoking ruins, and bears roamed in the streets of Lyon and wolves howled in the deserted streets of Rome, and Europe really was in a dark ruin, then it was not in castles or manors or cottages that life remained vivid. Then those whose souls were still alive withdrew together and gradually built monasteries, and these monasteries and convents, little communities of quiet labour and courage, isolated, helpless, and yet never overcome in a world flooded with devastation, these alone kept the human spirit from disintegration, from going quite dark, in the Dark Ages.

The world may be on the brink of disaster, or it may not, but I can take comfort in knowing that in the face of Nothing Known, these small groups of men and women produced and reproduced the remaining manuscripts of the previous great age, and made small efforts at their own creative endeavors. I may be irreligious-I can not support the idea that we might turn to a hierarchical belief system that dictates your life here and in the presumed hereafter-but I can hope that as value is reevaluated yet again, we might find small groups in which to redefine what does have value. It may take time, and we may none of us be here to see the outcome, but there is beauty in those Dark Ages, simple, and simply left as a reminder to create no matter how vast the devastation seems.

The Book of Hours, Valencia c.1460, a page from St. Augustine's City of God

Omne Bonum by James le Palmer, c.1360-1375; A dentist with silver forceps and a necklace of large teeth, extracting the tooth of a seated man                                                   

Siege of the Castle of Love, unknown artist. c 1350-1370

The Unicorn in Captivity tapestry, The Cloisters, c. 1495-1505 (really should not be included given its late date)

All my examples appear to come from the late Medieval period but there are some good things produced earlier; The Green Knight is one of my favorite romances (in the traditional sense of the word). I shall seek out some other art and post it in the future.