Not a Still Life

S. and I went to a MusicNow concert at the Harris Theater last night. Overall, it was fantastic; Esa-Pekka Salonen was conducting, and the final piece was his own composition - "Catch and Release." Hands down the best part of the program.

The first piece, on the other hand, pretty much scared the bejeesus out of me. Titled LautLeben (loud life), it was composed by Rolf Wallin, in collaboration with Sidsel Endresen, who is apparently a well-known Norwegian vocalist. The piece is orchestrated entirely with Endresen's voice. Computer manipulations of her voice are piped into the theater, and she improvises along with them. Oh, and there's also a video - mostly geometric, patterned things coming and going on a big screen.

But oh my god, what that woman does with her voice. It's like everything I ever imagined about demonic possession. Bones ratcheting; reptilian things hatching and dragging their viscous bodies along the floor. The twitching, the sudden guffaws and wails. It was terrifying.

Gorgonize

To affect as a gorgon; hypnotize; petrify.

Gorgonize. I like it, but it should really mean "to get organized by scaring the shit out of everyone in your house." Well, that's how I'm going to use it.

"It is no longer a question of balance and yet

we dance to keep from falling."

Dionisio Martinez, Dancing at the Chelsea

The Magic of Place

The Big Bent-Covered Hillock
The Big Rock Face at Twisted Gully
The Tongue of the Black Cape
The Norseman's Channel
The Reef of the Jura Men
The Pass of the Yellow-Rattle Pool
The Glen of the Baglike Plain
The Skerry of the North-Facing Creek
The Shelter of the Miserable Women
The Temple of the Glen
Fair Malcolm's Fishing Rock
Red Archibald's Fishing Rock
Bald Kenneth's Daughter's Fishing Rock
The Fishing Rock of the Crabfish's Heel
The Well of the Speckled Thicket
The Well of the Red Trickle
Foul Puddle
Foul Harbor
The Little Terrace at the Head of the Dike
The Lifting Stone
The Pierced Stone
Fever Rock
McPhee's Standing Stone
McPhee's Black Gully
McPhee's Hiding Bed
The Foot of the Birch Wood
Extremity of the Speckled Point
Red Angus's Field
Gray Samuel's Boat Pool
The Corpse Island Eddy
The Island of the Scalasaig Women
The Periwinkle Cleft
The Little Black Waterfall
The Pool Between Two Pools
The Little Loch of the White Calf
The White-Rumped Extremity
The Lady Cave
The Danger Cave
The Ruins of the House of Boisterous Angus
The Ruins of the House of Duncan of the Gold

- John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird

Still Reaching

When my sister H. was in her second year of college, she moved from the dorms into a (not-a-sorority) house on campus. The house had a damp, dark basement with one little window up at ground level. When she came home the next summer, she stored a number of things in the basement, including a tiny seedling she'd given up on.

In September, when she returned to school, she found that the plant had sent a shoot up - and not just up, but eight feet up! That little seedling had stretched all the way up to the window, looking for light. I suppose for all those weeks of darkness, it thought it was still underground. When the shoot reached the window, it grew leaves. What a strange sight that was, the slimmest of stems, eight feet tall and unbending, topped by three, understated leaves.

My sister took the plant under her wing - rescued it, the way she used to rescue toads from the window well. The next summer, I helped her move her things back home, and I got to spend the entire six-hour drive with the plant on my lap (over my shoulder, around the bucket seats. "Don't bend it!")

I understand how she felt. It's impossible not to feel protective toward something so hopeful.

"An immense stillness everywhere

With the trees always bare,
The raindrops coming down only halfway,
Coming so close and giving up."

Charles Simic, Great Infirmities

Rater's Anxiety

I've opened an account on Goodreads.com, and I'm slowly entering books and adding my two cents about them. So here's the problem: I have rater's anxiety.

If I disliked the book, that's easy; 2 stars. If I hated it, or it was terribly terribly written, it might even get 1 (that hasn't come up yet). If I liked it, thought it was okay, 3 stars. Here's where the trouble starts: if I really really liked, maybe even loved it, it gets either 4 or 5 stars.

Of course my favorite books get 5 stars - The Master Letters, The Mercy Seat, Never in Anger, Pieces of the Frame. But then along comes Wislawa Szymborska's View with a Grain of Sand. I think it's a 5-star book, but I don't love it as much as I do my favorites. Do I give it an objective 5, or a subjective 4? This is maddening, which probably says more about me than about Goodreads or the classificatory process in general. I can't help it; when it comes to books, I really want to tell the truth.

Circumbendibus

It's like circuitous, only Seussical
and more syllable-y.

Life is a Cabaret

Saw Cabaret at the Theatre Building last night. F. was playing a waiter and a custom's official, but his big moment was the solo in Tomorrow Belongs to Me. Took R. with us as well, despite the "Mature Content" warning. Yes, there were, as R. put it, a lot of "butts and crotches" in the show, but as Fraulein Schneider says, "So vat?" It was a brilliant production - lots of Fosse-like staging, with the kit kat girls posed around the set like pieces of furniture (and with their torn stockings and bruised faces, their status as chattel was nearly complete). It was powerful, it was sad, it was a riot, and the Pineapple Song was not to be missed.

"Clay tablets wail:

--These are bad times, the Gods are mad,
children misbehave and
everybody wants to write a book."

Miroslav Holub, Nineveh

No Rhyme or Reason

Why am I annoyed by rhyme in English language poetry, and not, say, in the Urdu poetry of Faiz Ahmed Faiz? The above image is taken from Faiz's poem Shaam (Evening). I've never found an English translation that I care for, but here's the final verse and a half, transliterated (sorry, no diacritics):

Ab kabhi shaam bujhegi na andhera hoga,

Ab kabhi raat dhalegi na sawera hoga.

Aasmaan aas liye hai ke yeh jaadu tute,

Chup ki zanjir kate, waqt ka daaman chhute,
De koi sankh duhaai, koi paayal bole,
Koi but jaage, koi saanwali ghungat khole.

The sounds in this poem are exquisite. Musical, hypnotic. They give me chills.

I guess I'm not annoyed by all rhyming English language poetry. (There's Shakespeare, after all). Maybe I've just read too much bad poetry. Maybe all the good rhymes in English have been taken. (But I don't believe that, do I?)

Maybe historical distance gives me permission to enjoy rhyme. Maybe I'm predisposed to view form in contemporary poetry as phony and forced. Thing is, when rhyme creeps its way into a piece on its own - as incidental rhyme, or near-rhyme, or assonance - I find it very pleasing. Ironically, the one form I actually enjoy when employed by English-language poets is the Ghazal, made famous by the Urdu poet Ghalib (but this form uses repetition rather than rhyme...)

Hm. Curiouser and curiouser.

Melancholia=Muse?

Here's the pull quote from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

"We’re in danger of losing a major cultural force, the muse behind much art, poetry, and music. We are blithely getting rid of melancholia..."

Nothing new about this warning; we've heard it all before. Anytime it looks like people in the Western world are finding new ways to actually be happy, critics start lining up to tell us why it's a bad idea. This suspicion of happiness has a long backstory. For much of European history, happiness was a non-issue. Humans weren't the center of the universe, nor were they the appropriate focus of intellectual or artistic contemplation. We were too low on the food chain in the Great Chain of Being. It was all about the divine. Original Sinny and all, we were products of a notorious Fall that pretty much sealed our fate.

Enter the Enlightenment, and humanity takes center stage. Now we're asking questions about epistemology, moral development, social life, and our place in the "natural order." (No, God's not gone, but that's another story). Meanwhile, global exploration kicks into high gear. While Hume and Locke are philosophizing in their dens, sailors, explorers and missionaries are encountering new worlds from the South Pacific to the arctic and beyond. Travelogues written by these erstwhile ethnographers are bestsellers. People can't get enough of them. Why?

Simply this: they offered a vision of - yes - happiness. What a shock for the guilt-ridden, self-punishing Europeans to see an alternative to the daily, dirty, relentless grind of labor, of conflict and class division, of scarce resources and fierce competition, of stern gods and abject sinners. Of course, the worlds they encountered weren't perfect, egalitarian paradises; but they were different enough to suggest to the travelers that misery wasn't universal, and therefore might not be inevitable - that happiness might be attainable in this life, and not simply the next.

Well, suffice it to say that happiness gained a few champions, but misery had a whole bunch of defenders. You can read the entire history of intellectual thought from the Enlightenment to today through this lens: can we, and do we deserve to be happy? For example, Freud sees misery as a psychic inevitability; Marx sees misery as a consequence of capitalism and the alienation of labor (presumably, happiness is possible in an alternative socio-economic system).

So what does any of this have to do with melancholia as muse?

It's part of the same debate. Misery's defenders tend to present said misery as not just inevitable, but necessary. Thus, Freud sees thought - as well as artistic production, indeed, all the treasures of civilization - as the product of want. All our unfulfilled desire (unfulfillable, remember; we can't, after all, go back to the womb) gets redirected, sublimated, into creative expression. We create things - poetry, novels, the Taj Mahal - because we're miserable. Happiness's champions (Schachtel, e.g.) have dared to suggest that we create art despite our misery, or only when we are free enough from need to be able to view the world as something other than an extension of ourselves and our needs.

Oh, I could go on and on. The association of melancholia with muse just pushes my buttons. I think when miserable people write beautiful poems or make brilliant films, it's because they've transcended or bypassed the misery somehow. It's a hopeful step, isn't it, to put words or images on paper. Guess that places me on the side of happiness.

Art(sy) for Art's Sake

I just finished reading The Museum, a play by Tina Howe. This is one of those works that could appeal to people on both sides of a very fractious divide. On the one hand, those people who are suspicious of, or unimpressed by so-called "conceptual art" could read this and feel vindicated. On the other, aesthetes enamored with said conceptual art could read it and have a good laugh at the philistines who schlep through galleries saying "My 5-year old kid could draw this."

The play is entertaining enough - lots of rapid-fire banter, a huge cast of walk-on characters. But by around page 40, I began to ask myself what, exactly, I was supposed to be getting from all this. Ironically enough, cue Chloe Trapp, a curator who enters with a patron to conduct a private tour. As she enters, she explains to the patron the significance of the pieces. All the other characters on stage are transfixed, and gather around the curator to hear more. "I'm so grateful!" the patron says. "Oh, we're all so grateful!" says another.

The play works because it's not really about conceptual art; it's about the difficulties of communicating across particular lines of difference - the tragic (but also comic) way in which we often seem to talk past each other. The museum is loud, cacophonous. The exhibit is titled "The Broken Silence." Language difference and disorder is a central theme here. My favorite scene is the final one, in which the deaf-mute parents of the artist Zachary Moe stand reverently in front of their son's paintings (canvases painted entirely white). Here is what they say to each other in sign language:

MRS. MOE. Remember the drawings he used to make as a child?
MR. MOE. The sketches he did of all his toys in his nursery...
MRS. MOE. How wonderful they were, bursting with life...
MR. MOE. Noisy with life!
MRS. MOE. Remember how he'd make the walls shake when he wanted something?
MR. MOE. And how they shook! He shouted with the voices of a thousand men!

Finding your Inner Fish

Neil Shubin, a Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has written a book on our convoluted evolutionary history. It's called Your Inner Fish. Very crudely, when you are "designed" to swim in the ocean, then "modified" to thrive in streams, then treetops, then the savannah, and now cubicle farms, there are bound to be any number of glitches. Illness, chronic disease, pain; we owe it all to this history. We are like the used cars of the animal kingdom: lemons, lemons, more lemons.

You can read a great excerpt from the book here. Art above is by Allen Carroll.

The Poetry of Outlandish Guesses

I read something interesting on, um, Damn Interesting. Apparently there's a condition called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, in which gradual loss of vision (eg. from macular degeneration) prompts the brain to "fill in the blanks" - to guess, if you will, at what the eye is no longer quite seeing. This causes people to have wild, fanciful hallucinations. Faces will peer out of lampshades, gargoyles lurk in hat racks. It seems we are so hardwired to recognize faces that when we stop seeing them, the brain lowers its standards to allow for anything remotely face-like to be interpreted as "face." The result? An ever present entourage of "phantom people." I quote:

"These phantom people normally wear pleasant expressions on their faces as they loiter in eerie silence, and they make frequent eye contact with the viewer. Curiously, a great number of these imaginary characters are described as wearing hats, sometimes along with elaborate costumes."

Diego, I hardly knew you

S. drew this with white charcoal and conte on black mitientes paper. It's based on a photo by Edward Weston (we were fortunate enough to see a signed print at the Art Institute last summer). I love the lines, the crayon strokes, the tooth of the paper. They give the image an entirely different feel - one that's powerfully alive, and striving.

At the National Museum of Mexican Art, you can see a few pencil sketches by Diego Rivera. They are tossed off, it seems, with the loosest of hands; and they are wonderful.

New Year's Resolution 3

"I [will] romp with joy in the bookish dark."

Eating Poetry, Mark Strand

New Year's Resolution 2

"I [will] look for the L
In my name in places of light, lucky,
The good ending of tenderly."

The Letter L, Lucie Brock-Broido

New Year's Resolution 1

"I [will] plant my syllables in light.
Let them multiply there."

Reset, Elaine Equi

"A Hunger" for endnotes

Lucie Brock-Broido writes quite possibly the most exquisite endnotes I've ever seen. S. gave me "A Hunger" for Christmas, and I have been devouring the poems and savoring the endnotes like gin-soaked olives from the bottom of a martini glass. It's the insight you gain into the life of the poet that's so delicious. It reminds me of that section from a popular entertainment/celebrity magazine: The Stars are Just Like Us! They go grocery shopping (cue photo of George Clooney with a shopping cart)! They play with their kids (cue Reese Witherspoon on a playground)! I wish more poets did this (or did it this well).