Narrative

Detail fromA Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) 1993 Transparency in lightbox 2290 x 3770 mm .

At MoMA some amazing photographs -- huge scenes by Jeff Wall, a Canadian photographer. Instead of the typical photos bounded by an 8x11 or 11x14 or some other 19-th or 2oth-century paper size or frame, these are HUGE (like Gursky) -- landscapes, street-corner-scapes, room-scapes. Such incredible light too, some of which comes from the light boxes that hold certain photos. Also the detail that large negatives can capture is so apparent. One amazing landscape of a river scene with mountains in the background offered clarity, as if the air had been sharpened by lightning. I loved the portrait of an artist as he drew a preserved forearm from an anatomy lab.

Also the photo above -- A Sudden Gust of Wind, based on a 19th-century Japanese woodcut. The flying pieces of paper, the scarf and hats swept up in the breeze, sheen on the water -- it's great the way Wall has re-imagined Hokusai's narrative. And Wall's photo is as much an invention as Hokusai's print. He "painted" and staged the scene. The technology of the camera, the computer and its software let photographers move farther away from the aesthetic constraints of documentary. These tools work like paintbrush and palette.

So story-telling lives on, even as we debate its necessity. Narrative comes under assault -- visual and written works of art are imagined as broken, as collages of color and sound. Don't get me wrong, I love a good story. I desire beautifully made descriptions and melodies and portraits. But it's true we live in brokenness. Stuff happens. Is it chaos theory? There's no rhyme or reason it seems. Perhaps that's why we prefer the tapestry of plot over the torn or shredded cloth.

Goodbye Agnes M.

Space that is "...infinite, dimensionless, without form and void."
Agnes Martin

I said goodbye to some of her works from the 1980s hanging at Dia:Beacon, the so-called Field of Vision series, not her title. The paintings were leaving Dia to return to owners. I remember when I first found Agnes Martin -- her show at the Whitney. My kids were little and I was buried in diapers and chicken nuggets and legos. I escaped one day to view the exhibition. It was as if I had traveled across the country to New Mexico and her desert. I didn't want to leave and visited the show several times before it closed. This was an awakening time for me, like attending a revival meeting, something exploded inside. But there was also tranquility in the work, in all the neatly measured lines and colors, in the collision of well-made ocean blues and desert sandy browns. The order was compelling, compared to my chaotic life. I envied Agnes, though that's an emotion she'd disdain. I got lost in her field again today.

Breakage

Fragment. No suggestions.

Did she say who sought refuge
in unhappy love

Day by day, we're moving into night



Slight accent, and the falling
"Leave a window open"


"Which of these is life? the true life?"


It's meant to be sad and bright, lit up
like the boat of the dead

I thought 2 hands would be 2 people.

--Kate Greenstreet
"Which of these is life? the true life" Paula Modersohn-Becker, The Letters and Journals

I'm re-reading case sensitive by Kate Greenstreet, or at least I'm re-reading it by skipping around and looking again at the poems in a kind of random way to see how they stand. At the same time I'm also reading a great book called The Unfolding of Language, which looks at the "invention" of language, though the author maintains that language wasn't actually invented but keeps happening and is always in process as it continues to change -- new words are added, tenses die out, cases disappear over time. I haven't exactly found the direct connection between the books. Maybe one will teach me about the other. Lately, it occurs to me that language works like human nature in that factors like survival, convenience, necessity, beauty, hunger,desire -- impact language's process the way they impact people and our interactions. The other thing on my mind as I read Greenstreet is story-making, story-telling. I guess I have been obsessed with narrative as a writer for a long time -- primarily because I'm no good at plot. It seems to me that stuff happens in a kind of fragmented way and later we make a story out of events to help us make sense of it all, to understand why we did certain things or behaved in a particular way. And then we turn to myth, to religion, to psychology, to art even. Or we make a mythology out of our lives so that we can believe there was a reason for the choices we made. Wasn't it Stanley Kunitz who said we should make a mythology of our lives?

On Certain Days

How I Became Impossible


I was born shy, congenitally unable to do anything
profitable, to see anything in color, to love plums,
with a marked aversion to traveling around the room,
which is perfectly normal in infants.
Who wrote this? were my first words.
I did not liked to be torched.
More snow fell than was able to melt,
I became green-eyed and in due time traveled
to other countries where I formed opinions
on hard, cold, shiny objects and soft, warm
nappy things. Late in life I began to develop
a passion for persimmons and was absolutely delighted
when a postcard arrived for the recently departed.
I became recalcitrant, spending more and more time
with my rowboat. All my life I thought polar bears
and penguins grew up together playing side by side
on the ice, sharing the same vista, bits of blubber
and innocent lore. One day I read a scientific journal:
there are no penguins at one pole, no bears
on the other. These two, who were so long intimates
in my mind, began to drift apart, each on his own floe,
far out into the glacial seas. I realized I was becoming
impossible, more and more impossible,
and that one day it really would be true.

-Mary Ruefle

White Out

Mary Ruefle's book A Little White Shadow has been sitting with me, especially since the snowfall. How bright the world looks in snow. Even as it covers the imperfections of the fall, what remains stands out, which is kind of what occurs in this small book. Page after page has been whited out except for a few words, a fragment here, a micro-thought there. She has taken a book (though there's not an author's note, you discern this from the copyright info) published in 1889, as it says on the frontispiece, "for the Benefit of a Summer Home for Working Girls," and gone through each page with great intention and even narrative thrust and wiped out most of the text. A new story is made through erasure. It's not a poem, although in its spareness it has poem-like qualities. Plus, the appearance of the whiteout gives the pages a painterly quality.There's the shadow of words under the whiteout. The rough whiteout has texture. It's like looking at small rectangular prints. And the bits of remaindered words read like Zen death poems -- as in this excerpt:

the dead
borrow so little from
the past
as if they were alive

and this several pages later:

in black velvet
the last one
he wrote when quite an old man
Ren-
dered into English
this was something of its meaning:
paper
on
fire

There are characters and places but these are mentioned in passing almost, as if you already know the story, the people. Like what's under the snow. You imagine what you can't see, make up your own story for the white space, fill the white out. Or not.

Agnes Agnes
the stern sad problems of human
existence
has its pauses.

Snow day

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wallace Stevens



from Orhan Pamuk's novel, Snow

It was like copying down a poem someone was whispering in his ear, but he gave the words on the page his full attention nevertheless. Because he'd never written a poem like this, in one flash of inspiration, without stopping, there was a corner of his mind where he doubted its worth. But as line followed line, it seemed to him that the poem was perfect in every way, which made his joyful heart beat faster. And so he carried on writing, hardly pausing at all, leaving spaces only here and there for the words he had not quite heard, until he had written thirty-four lines.

The poem was made up of the many thoughts that had come to him all at once a short while earlier: the falling snow, cemetaries, the black dog running happily around the station building, an assortment of childhood memories...He called the poem "Snow."

Much later, when he thought about how he'd written this poem, he had a vision of a snowflake; this snowflake, he decided, was his life writ small; the poem that had unlocked the meaning of his life, he now saw sitting at its center.

On Appropriation

Too long away after hardly having begun, frustrated by lack of techno know-how.
But this from Mary Ruefle's book/poem of erasure A Little White Shadow, some excepts:

the
number
blue,
encircled herself

(and)


think me
lazy
always idle; but
my brain
grows weary just thinking how to make

thought,



I think about Ann Carson's rendition/translation of Sappho, If Not Winter, which makes me think about appropriation and an article I'm reading now in Harper's about plagiarism and appropriation and the broad plain in the middle. "Invention," writes author Jonathan Lethem, "does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos."

It's cold here.

On Transience

Building Happiness

Having finished de Botton's small book, The Architecture of Happiness, I want to capture some of the ideas, the words he covers in his ruminations on how to design buildings, houses, and other spaces that engender feelings of joy or at least comfort. In a bit of synchronicity re a thread that seems to have asserted itself from the start of this blog, I'll open with a quote from the end of the book: "To design means forcing ourselves to unlearn what we believe we already know, patiently to take apart the mechanisms behind our reflexes and to acknowledge the mystery and stupefying complexity of everyday gestures like switching off a light or turning on a tap."

How mindless we are about such gestures. That indeed is the gist of the book. That we must pay attention to, think about and recognize the importance of place, be it work or home. Which seems like a rather obvious notion, certainly one that's already been taken up by commercial enterprises like Pottery Barn and Bed, Bath & Beyond (so clever the name -- beyond into what?). De Botton tries to investigate the premise more deeply by summarizing architecture's history, especially its aesthetic trends. These were the parts of the book that captured me. He briefly describes movements that have celebrated beauty as occuring in ornately designed buildings filled with busy details versus more recent trends toward simplicity and spareness of line and form.

This is of course occuring in the arts in general, poetry included. The stand-off now between poetry that is filled with narrative and description versus poetry that is about the fragmentation of language fills me with questions as I work with words. I like both. Each ideal of beauty serves me in different ways.

Perhaps this is the confusion of our time and it's best to ricochet between poles, slowing for awhile at various points along the way. Perhaps the image of these being poles at opposite ends of a spectrum is not so useful -- IE abstract VS realistic. The place in between may just be the place of my time, like finding happiness in not-knowing.

On Not Knowing

FEMA Trailers
Pensacola, FLA

Anne Carson quoted in a recent interview in The Guardian, "Not knowing what one is doing is no prohibition on doing it. We all grope ahead."

Which is a bit how I approach the work of this blog project. I'm not exactly sure what to make of this and although I listed some things to do here, there's a part of me that wants this to be spontaneous or at least a tad open to the whims of a day. Here on the first day of the new year.

On that note, perhaps it's a good time to highlight some books I'm reading and podcasts I'm listening to -- a rather schizoid accumulation: The Architecture of Happiness on how we react to the spaces we inhabit, how the buildings and other structures in which we spend our time move us; What is the What, Dave Eggars' latest on the Lost Boys of the Sudan. He retells one story in that young man's voice. Very moving, another tale of children ruined by grown-ups. All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward Jones, his short story collection, really great writing in here. A soon-to-be-published poetry collection that I'll read again (poetry does indeed need to be read several times at least to take in the full force of the work). Let's see for pod casts, Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt interviewing Jorie Graham and John Yau and Italo Calvino...each one a kind of unexpected synchronisity on the work of remembering, among other topics covered. Oh yes, a several video-casts from TED, one on love by an anthropologist and the other on the brain.

Where's this going...who knows. To end on Carson again, "when I get too many words, I don't feel I'm saying anything." Which happens to me a lot these days. Strange sensation for one who loves words.