zeitquest

JAY THE ABSTRACTIONIST

2011-05-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

There is something peculiarly satisfying about the recent work of Jay Zerbe,some of which is

up at Chicago's new Park Schreck Gallery. He handles paint,first of all,with an aplomb which is never glibness,and his compositional sense is one that can consider its great historical antecedents without feeling in any way academic or derivative. The work is subtle but vibrant in color,with a certain artisanal relationship to texture remindful of mid-to-late Braque. The compositions bring up a pantheon of landscape and figure-in-landscape painters from Claude Lorrain to Cezanne to Braque,sometimes all at once. It is the tension between this " all at once" and its components that accounts for Zerbe's originality. He has developed a vocabulary that allows him to riff off a lot of history without becoming its serf.

Wondering how he managed this, I reviewed his earlier work,which is impressive but not quite on this high new level. The work from the 1970's---figurative in a deliberately faux-naif woodcut-like technique,and narrative-- recalled a somewhat homoerotic Foxe's Book of Martyrs---nifty in its way,to be sure.The pieces had an early Renaissance symmetry that was (so it felt to me)unintentionally pure. It had meant to be satirical but had ended up unresistingly beautiful. A similar ambivalent purity was to be found in the abstract work which followed. These were as strict as quilts and also had-- for all their abstraction-- a folkloric quality.He then began to make his own highly individuated rhythmic permutations of the grid.He got intricate with the interplay of depths--with being able to show the action,so to speak, at various speeds in more than one room. He learned to float an after image on the surface of one then two counter-patterns. To be able to do this lucidly is unusual.

Later,someone will delicately approach with the calipers of scholarship the exact point where Zerbe's work became as (thoughtful,sensate,delicious,complex,resolved) (italics:)as indispensable as it is.I merely wish to mark that at sometime over the last decade, he became indispensable. In a quiet way ,he became a master. How do I know? Instantly,in my case, from a thumbnail on Face Book---even at that scale, I could feel its combination of clarity with rhythmic complexity. The quasi-narrative,the quilt-ishness,the permutations on grids,the implication of landscape,or studio,or window,all co-existed in a relationship which resolved as nicely as a musical cadence.It is also abstract painting with an at-there-in-the-world quality of prescence most often found in realist work.The theosophist afflatus of Kandinsky,its other worldliness,gives way in Zerbe's work to a more mature transcendent this worldliness. Something in the way he transmits the seen,secures the seen in its way.

There are several ancillary or subtextual issues to be examined regarding Zerbe's work work which would be disingenuous not to acknowledge. The first is:if he is this good,how is it that he is not better known?Bluntly, I suspect that over the next decade,as the art world becomes increasingly de-centralized,we will find others who--like Zerbe--worked quietly at their own intrinsic concerns rather than the trends dominating the market place during a given season. The emphasis on precocity will then give way to the idea of maturity. And the perennial,ever-renewing questions of perception in relationship to painting will replace the pose of iconoclasm,

which is by now become thoroughly commercial. Perhaps by then,we will come to understand that it takes decades of steadfast research to arrive at mastery.Our idea of originality will become more rooted in the problems of art,rather than novelty and its dread

sibling, publicity. And those artists who have cultivated themselves in order to grow will

provide a different model from the one to which the art market presently dooms us,which is a brief period of success following a meteoric rise followed by decades of being ignominiously passe.However, even if these much-wished changes do not happen,an artist such as Zerbe provides a counter-example of sterling worth; I look forward to new decades of work from him.

TO THE RED QUEEN

2010-11-09T04:42:00.000-08:00

Who cares if your feelings are hurt? Your feelings are hurt by definition,given your

general disposition to take offense,to ignore the offenses you yourself provoke,and

your almost culinary approach to nursing grudges. What fool would want to keep

track of your moods and feuds,your vapors? Not me! I can't imagine a worse

boredom than caring what you care about,your thwarted eminence in the world,

whether you are intepreted correctly according to your own incoherent rules,

.your pretensions to philosophy! IF most art was as bad as the manual accompanying it,

it would be witless. You do not know how to say what you mean;this is why

"no one gets it"--as if this was the purpose they were put on earth for!There is

a real world with dire necessity and all that it requires in terms of wear and breakage.

Given this,it would be good to begin to show those in your immediate

sphere a little mercy.P

wingspan

2010-11-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

a doe has leaped into the underbrush behind me,on the levy adjourning the woods;she hides there,

motionless.

at the same time, the blue crane has spotted me across the pond, under the trees lining the levy;

just at this moment my old dog Cotton halts on a spit on sand at the edge of the pond to sight the

bird;we are each on the string of each other's stillness; no one knows who is the arrow or the bow

jorge pardo

2010-10-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

antony gormley

2010-10-10T13:27:00.000-07:00

soon jin jo

2010-10-10T13:13:00.001-07:00

2010-10-10T13:13:00.000-07:00

soon jin jo:meditation space

2010-10-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

2010-10-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

BLUE PAVILLION

During the month of April I received word that two friends,one young and one old,were stricken

with cancer. It made me wild in some way that sought expression, lacking channels elsewhere,

and so I unfurled a painting begun three years before--a draft or a promissory note on

the outdoor work I hope to do eventually. Quite irrationally I needed a large field for my large

anguish.

I worked outdoors, for the good reason that this painting is six feet high and twenty feet long.

It is made from three layers of shadecloth,or black plastic screening. The painting interruptus was

to have been black and white,but all my prayers were to the blue, and I had been writing of

of the blue,and this is why the painting may have seemed to need to become blue.

And so I hung my painting on the clothes line in the strangest state of mind.

Cobalt blue is always the blue of the journey to God for me; I

associate it with Mohammed's Journey into Heaven by Sultan Mohammed,the Safavid

Dynasty-period Persian painter,a touchstone. There is a blue closer to

cerulean the Limbourg brothers use. I struggled for sometime to make these blues emerge

from my humble shade cloth.

The winds and the rains of the variable April weather constantly interrupted this folly of mine,

which I then had to fold up and place in the garage next to the lawnmower.

And the beauty of our old "pecker-fretted"appletrees in bloom was a constant reproof,so

beautiful were they. And indeed,there are times when the beauty of the simplest or most banal

thing seems to mock me.

So large was this composition that I found I had to climb on the roof and stare down

it upon the ground--the clothes line being strung too low to

completely accomodate it--in order to see it whole. And then I had to climb down

in order to modify it. The trick en route was not to forget what I decided to do.Gradually, it began to be an articulately,deeply blue image.

I very seldom lost some sharply felt sense of my friends in the doing of this, but

I must admit that I did not know what I prayed for except that it was for them.

The talented young woman and the talent old one,both dear to me,how can I

ask that they be uniquely comforted and healed? I found myself praying

for everyone--for the whole world-- through the image and memory and the urgency of my personal concern for my friends.

To feel something very strongly is no guarantee. A prayer is no guarantee of aesthetic

merit. The only way I am allowed to discuss this in anyway is if I recognize

this first. And perhaps it is enough to say that there are times when one

prays without knowing to whom one prays or for whom one prays or with

any sure sense in the efficacy or justice of one's prayers,except that this is

part of the equipment.

BLUE MORPHO

2010-04-11T10:36:00.000-07:00

At one time I kept a specimen butterfly of the genus morpho in each of my

rooms, the better to study them. It was part of my obsession with blue,

with the comings and goings of that particular color. On the wings of the

blue morpho which I propped in its transparent case against the back-

drop of a window, I could trace the hour of the day from

dawn to noon to evening by the the angle of the daylight shining through the butterfly wing. The blue began

to fade at dawn, the wings growing more and more etched--

six eyes to each wing--the blue retreating like a shadow until

at noon only the tiniest portion of blue remained at the thorax of the butterfly

where the wings joined. This resembled the

pilot-flame of a gas-jet. And then from noon to evening,

the pattern would be incrementally erased as though through the

sifting of blue dust from the bottom of the wing on up, as

the wings were slowly replenished of their blueness.

Only at nightfall were the wings completely blue.

But perhaps it is better to say:this is a blue series in the key of

iridescence,for the morpho's blue is not one blue but

consists of many. The principal contrast is between

that blue which tilts towards green and that blue which tilts

to purple. The secondary colors duel over the primary.

I might describe at length the engraved images

of the blue morpho's underwing without doing them

justice; they would require as much pterolography--or

proper feather placement--as any

pheasant or owl. No trace of this brindled pattern can be seen at night.

Instead the

blue iridescence seems to happen on a ground of black;

now black lines unseen by day appear to be what separate the

duelling notes of blue. The secret of the iridescence, however,

lies in the fact that the scales of color happen in bands

from bottom to top/ also simultaneously

from side to side. We are scanning colors in layers

as it were from north to south and vice versa,

and simultaneously their radial counter- layers

ranging from east to west. The shimmering is due to the fact

that the human eye can not halt on one layer, but instead is in

a constant state of adjustment among many.

The Morpho butterfly family was Nabokov's favorite

of them all, and he was a lepidopterist;in a letter to his son,

Dimitri, who is to cross a part of the Orinoco river by small

'plane, he says to be alert for the migration of the blue morpho:

their wings will look like blue mirrors in flight.

WEEDING AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTISE

2010-03-23T19:22:00.000-07:00

It always seems as if I've never seen it before, that first intimation of

spring, and though I have watched for it, it always takes me by

surprise, as if inadvertant. There is always a day which mixes barrenness

with yearning, a wild cooped up feeling much like despair, and

another day which is more like hope. There is the day when to

step outside is to be born again. And the next day is to be born anew.

In the midst of this is early-spring gardening.

The lawn from the house to the pond is under old oaks; I am perpetually

cleaning up after them. Fall is a blizzard of acorns and leaves, like raking

back the sea, and now we are all twiggy from the spring storms. I rake it inch

by inch as my old Dad instructs me, the old rustic and his idiot yokel son

in absurd straw hats with brains of straw--or so I see us. This happens to be

a day of wild surmise, and while I rake, I grumble Sufi prayers,

so low does this earth seem to me, and how annoying do I find

the my Dad's instructions,f the sort made by the profoundly deaf.

This is rude, but I truly believe at moments that

it is deafness by design on my Dad's part, so the way things will be done

will be the right way to do them, which is his way. Even in his dotage,

however, it is perfectly clear to me that he is an altogether more

cheerful and reasonable human being than I am. I see this

from on high, as it were, which does not entirely improve my mood but

leavens it.Hence my role as bumpkin son--whathisname,

boyfriend of Mopsa.

The Sufi Prayers are no doubt an attempt to address God via a different

departmental mail-service and circumvent the Baptist vote.

Whether it is they or the raking which improve my mood or if--

as I believe-activity and prayer are ideal combinations--by the time I

am finished I am glad.And so it is every spring.

Every spring the hesitant unfolding of color from monochromaticism.

Every spring the budbreak shimmer, the rustling undercurrent of color.

All the while color has been changing its carpet undercover.

(2)

Throughout the winter something has been in bloom, from sasanquas to

mahonias to witch hazels to edgeworthia now to jonquils, quince,

camelia japonicae,forsythia. These early blooms

are brought into the house as if to cast out winter.The pond,

meanwhile, has been a curious claret color where it

reflects the maples abud. On the branches of the maple

themselves, the buds are disguised by threadlike leaflets

the color of thistle---which is to say no color at all--but

reflected in the pond they appear a clear wine red.

Otherwise the recent rains have polished the pond to an obsidian mirror

--which ripples!--the ideal metier for the reflection of massive cloud

cleaner than clean, Aeolian white, the Doric columns of the firmament.

3Weeding as a Spiritual Discipline:

Who I thought you might be was not as you proved; I am unamused.

Now I weed to remove you from my thoughts, thwart amour-propre,

and to stop telling you off to myself, and pull instead

this barbed weed from the bed, that chickweed or insidious

privet.

These are the evil deeds which I have thought,

the bridge I wished to push you off, the barbed thorn or bristle,

the briary patch to catch and scratch, the fire-ants' mongst melonplants,

the hidden thorn. I shake the clump of Johnson grass

and gradually you pass from concern.

The bed no longer overgrown

has benefitted from your scorn,

and I no longer mourn.

SOLITAIRES ANONYMOUS

2010-03-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

The organization of which I am the only member, whose thousand-step

program consists of many small obsessive rituals, including the making of art.

The predominant belief of this religion is in the aesthetic afterlife,

the one in which one is appreciated, or understood,or even paid.The

emblem of this organization is Eros in shabby attire, much as in

THE SYMPOSIUM. We meet often.

FROM "A BLUE STORY" BY ISAK DINESEN

2010-03-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

This comes from "The Young Man With The Carnation", which is

the first story in WINTER'S TALES(1942). It describes how a

Lady Helena is separated from her father on board a sinking ship, and how she

spends nine days lost and afloat on a raft with a young sailor,

who is sent away after their rescue. It describes how this

unsteadies her mind, which thereafter fixed on the ideal blue,

which she has seen but can not find. And she sails around

the world in search of it; she believes it will appear on blue china.

Her aunts ask her to come back home and marry but she replies,

"Nay, I have got to sail. For you must know, dear Aunts, that it

is all nonsense when learned people say the seas have a bottom on them.

On the contrary, the water, which is the noblest of all elements,

does,of course, go all through the earth, so that our planet

really floats on the ether like a soap bubble. And there, on the other

hemisphere, a ship sails, with which I have got to keep pace.

We two are like the reflection of each other, in the deep sea,

and the ship of which I speak is always exactly beneath my ship, upon

the opposite side of the globe. You have never seen a big fish swimming

underneath a boat, following it like a dark blue shade in the water.

But in that way this ship goes, like the shadow of my ship, and

I draw it to and fro wherever I go, as the moon draws the

tides, all through the bulk of the earth.....In the end my ship

will go down to the center of the globe, and at the very same hour

the other ship will sink as well--for people call it sinking,

although I can assure you that there is no up and down in the sea

--and there, in the midst of the world, we two shall meet.'

"Many years passed...and Lady Helena became old and deaf,

but still she sailed. Then it happened,

after the plunder of the summer palace of the Emporer of China,

that a merchant brought her a very old blue jar. The moment

she set eyes on it she gave a terrible shriek. "There it is" she cried.

"I have found it at last. This is the true blue. O how light it makes

one. Oh, it is as fresh as a breeze, as deep as a deep secret, as full

as I say not what. With trembling hands she held the jar

to her bosom, and sat for six hours in contemplation of it.

Then she said to her doctor and lady companion,'Now

I can die. And when I am dead you will cut out my heart and

lay it in the blue jar. For then everything will be as it was

then. All shall be blue around me, and

in the midst of the blue world my heart will be

innocent and free. ...A little later she asked them

'Is it not a sweet thing to think that, if only you have patience,

all that ever has been, will come back to you?" Shortly afterwards

the old lady died.

"I HAD THE IMAGE OF A BLUEGOLD DOME"

2010-03-14T17:25:00.000-07:00

" I had the image of a bluegold dome , those colors weaving in distinct

strands to the center of an oculus. But the painting came out blue

upon blue. Lovely, yes, but lovely in a way I have already

put behind me. It is too much of a time when I believe that
Paradise was nearby, in bliss, and now though I am not as sad

as I was, or jaded as I was once, I am puzzled...should a painting

affirm what one is unable to?

There is this blue Paradise. I did not know I was nostalgic for it

---if I am--and there it is. It may be done.

As I drove to the gym, I wished for someone else to tell me yes or no.

And thought of Francis Bacon who also wished for another painter--

working on the same problems--to verify or question the work

performed solitarily, without a yes or no. Who would this second self

be? It is impossible to imagine him or her considering what

one knows of other peoples' views. And earlier in history a common

language was shared, and to some degree a commonly shared criterion. ..

--No, that is not so; think of the sterile classicism which faulted Rembrandt

in Amsterdam c 1630. We think of earlier times as being simpler in their

demands, which was not at all how it must have felt.

Of one thing I am sure: art historians always oversimplify WHERE things come

from ,"influence" . Who would have thought that Rembrandt loved Mantegna

and faithfully copied an etching of his ? But he did, and such a thing is

in your hand thereafter. For the record, I remembered a Jean Fouquet,

and The Fall of the Rebel Angels in the missal illustrated

by the Limbourg brothers for the Duc De Berry, and the Oculus of the

Camera Della Sposi , and the Safavid Dynasty illustration of Mohammed's Descent

on the back of Buracq to the Throne of God.

My sacred blue paintings.

How well I remembered them, and to what degree,and to what ends is a

different matter, nor was this an attempt at a concious synthesis.Rather it was called out

and into being by a certain blue itself in some ambiguous zone between ultramarine cobalt

cerulean and that greeny-blue which is so different from them each

that in Russian color theory it counts (so I am told) as a different color

altogether."

(from a notebook of 1997)

LITTLE BLACK DRESS

2010-03-14T17:00:00.000-07:00

Niece,

Have you noticed how in the tabloids those celebrities

cited as "fashion victims" all sprout plumes like

characters from THE GRINCH WHO STOLE CHRISTMAS, whereas

thumbs up are always accorded that little black dress?

Different people are said to be wearing it. It is said to

be by a different designer. And it is true that its

hemline varies. But close inspection proves it to

be of the same manufacture as the automaton who wears it.

In the future the balm of forgetfulness will be put on the popcorn

and we'll watch the same movie over and over again.

PAUL VALERY:MORNING

2010-03-13T18:06:00.000-08:00

(Waking)

How gentle the light at waking, how lovely this living blue!

The word "Pure"opens my lips.

That is the name I give you.

Here, linked to the day that never yet has been, are the

perfect thoughts that will never be...

The Universal is a seed, the Universal experienced

without particulars, the Universal awaking sketchily in gold,

unblemished yet by individual affect.

I am born every where, far from this

Identity, in every sparkling light upon this hem, this fold,

the edge of this thread, that mass of lucent water. As yet

and effortlessly you are no more than a delicious effect

of light and expectation, a miracle of fire silk smoke

and slate, a complication of simple noises,

O Day!

...Why this morning should I choose myself? Why

must I shoulder again my goods and ills? Suppose

I were to abandon my name, my faiths, my habits,

and my chains, like the dreams of night, as one

who wishing to disappear and begin again,

leaves his clothes and passport at the waters edge?

(from POEMS IN THE ROUGH translated

from the French by Hilary Corke)

MARIA LUNA

2010-03-09T19:07:00.000-08:00

(1)

We found the cavern's entry

halfway up the mountain

where the cedars grow thin,

and snow lasts 'til June.

There in the ground was buried

a cornice without inscription

it felt like a tomb though Maria Luna

swore it was not.

Rather the way to the chapel

of her ancestors,

those now disappeared from this earth,

there where a cure

may be found

And so we followed her first

through a cave which stank

of bat guano,

a tall hallway to judge by its echo,

and then through tunnels

which had to be crawled

o how it felt like

the weight of the world

was soon to be upon us

crushing our breath

only she knew the way

down the rickety stairway

or could find

the key to the door

at the floor of a well

carrying the lantern,

the vocative firelight,

among the mine's striations

refracted like a prism

or mineral bride

(sleep old Niobe sleep,

rock and cradled in grief)

Beyond the moonbeamish world of artifact,

stalactite and crystal,

Maria Luna where have you lead us?

Beyond reflective pools

in limestone grottoes

under the hill,

these tall columns

are caryatids if women,

atlantides, or Atlases, if men,

all of another age,our ancients:

but should they wake the world will end.

(sleep old Niobe sleep,

rock and cradle your grief)

Still I become as a moveless stone

or a nymph barked up in a tree,

salt of old time has stained my tongue

how the heart hardens

there is no rhyme

this is what turns when the spindle's done

the waters of Lethe are white

(sleep old Niobe sleep

rock and cradle your grief)

Nothing will be remembered when I am one,

nothing, not even the smallest detail,

simplest pleasure of simplest taste

all quite forgot and never replaced,

the rose aroma or fecal smell,

all quite forgot when I am one

when I am one I won't be alone

not with all that I've forgot,

neither the title or plot

neither the teller or tale,

neither the song or the spell

neither the snow or the sun

all will make sense when nothing is known

when I am one with what I've forgot,

I will be like a stone in the sun

who does not care

how the battle has gone

neither the teller or tale,

neither the song or the spell,

neither the title or plot,

neither the snow or sun

I will be one with what I am not

nothing will be what I am not

neither the snow or the sun,

neither the song or the spell,

neither the teller or tale,

neither the title or plot,

I will be one with what I've forgot,

I'll be like the snow on the stone

and the snow on the stone in the sun

(sleep old Niobe sleep

rocked and cradled in grief)

(march 11/ 2010)

( from a fragment in an old notebook)

SPEM IN ALIUM(2)

2010-03-09T18:17:00.000-08:00

There is a Palace which is also a kaleidoscope of gold.

The pilgrim entering it enters the rose of heaven petal by petal

turning on the sacred wheel, and with each step of this roundelay

comes closer and closer to the eye of God.

To enter this eye is oblivion,

To then be restored

A component of the unity, a ray of the emanation,

swirling in the dance, the celestial machinery.

(from the margin of a notebook of 1998)

A PEOPLE OF STATUES

2010-03-08T20:05:00.000-08:00

Just as there was in Rome, in addition to the Roman People,

a people of statues, so there is in addition to this real world

another world, an almost mightier world of delusion in

which most people live.

(Goethe)

LIKE TEARS

2010-03-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

languages and languages

blowing him like the fluff

of a newborn chick

across a widening chasm

funneling like a tornado

reeling on wheels of fire

enlarging across the plains

like an arabesque of mist

electro-shocked on his eyeballs

less than a leaf, a speck,

a smidgen,

like tears

(from the margins of an old notebook)

MAGNIFICATION THEORY

2010-03-08T18:39:00.000-08:00

Whereby nothing is actually "abstract" or for that matter ideally

representational, whatever criterion might be applied to form the latter (!).

Rather everything is perceived as through a degree of magnification,

ranging from the subatomic to the telescopic. At some degree of magnification

between these both every abstract painting is actually representational

or vice versa. Calibrate this to the degree of personal optometry and

Van Eyck and Ingres can swiftly be seen to need different corrective

lenses ,as it were. Impressionist glaucoma, expressionist astigmatism

all might be accounted for on a physiological basis. All painterly perceptions would

be seen as being as typological as a set of fingerprints, or the laser-scanning

of the iris of the eye for security reasons.

TOMALES BAY

2010-03-08T18:30:00.000-08:00

As haze obscures the sunset

there a few ribbons of light left on the inlet

a last light at the end of the inlet

limning the channels of the low tide

where the arterial ways water wanders

form memories of meanders

in the tide's wake and the mirrored

basins grow opaque

as the memories of meanders

grow empty and their deltas slumber

the last silver tricklings of water

are drawn off by the low tide's last fishnet

and diffusing into mist, the weathered

plank buildings disappear into vapor,

the harbor lights, haloe'd, are covered

becoming a faint shoal of light.

(1988)

FROM A SPIRAL NOTEBOOK:FACE

2010-03-08T15:10:00.000-08:00

News Item:

Tokyo:

For couples who worry about how their unborn child will look,

or how they will look after 40 years of marriage, and electric

company says it has the answer.

Matsuhita Electric Industrial company says it has developed

a computer program that can use photographs of faces to

predict the aging process, or turn the clock back to

produce a more youthful image.

By combining the facial characteristics of the prospective

parents, it can produce a portrait of the likely offspring,

the company says.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

It can not predict a deformity, or devastating disease, or

even a minor sorrow. Yet these appear on the face.

(1992)

FROM A SPIRAL NOTEBOOK

2010-03-02T09:50:00.000-08:00

Snow. The willows have begun to bud. They are a curious green/gold/ocre

(a callow sexy color) and hairy. There on the pond is an archipelago of

snow, a funny deco swirl with empty round places in the middle of it

like Mickey Mouse ears. The shape is so like something I've been

working on in this week's drawings that I laugh aloud with recognition

when I see it. If God had written I love you in footprints in the snow or in

pigeons crossing the sky, I would not be more taken with it. I think.

I stood on the Japanese bridge and memorized it. Memorized also

the way the overlying branches made shadows at the ice's edge and

how--wonder to behold--the pattern of the melts was almost identical

to the shadows, kind of a visual pun yet again. Nature in perpetual

contrapuntal imitation of it self, inside and out, and on all levels

signalling processes and imagery on others. There is inside and

outside, of course, but thousands of gradients between--semi-imi-inside

and vice versa. At anyrate, I smiled at the ice melting on the pond

untilI got cold. Then went to the museum where I studied a

Roman Sarcophagous with Dionysus and entourage (Dionysus seated on

a panther)and the ruined busts of many great Romans, including Hadrian,

and Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, and Etruscan bronzes--

there is a jar handle made in the form of two winged boys carrying

their dead companion--and another such trio, the two youths

now wingless.

Returning home, I crossed the bridge again, but this time the snow

had sunk beneath the water, and the pattern was submerged.

(new york; feb. 1991)

A STORY OF VENICE

2010-03-02T09:33:00.000-08:00

"...My grandmother was very beautiful, and had many lovers

even when she was quite old. A short time before she died

she was in Venice with my mother, her daughter, and one day

floating up some canal in their gondola, they saw a little

palazzo of pink marble, and my mother said," I don't believe anyone

lives there, what about trying to see the inside?""

"So they rang the bell, and an old servant came and said

that no one had lived there for years, and he would show it to

them if they liked. So they went in and upstairs to a salon which had

three windows looking over the canal and which was

decorated with fifteenth century plasterwork, white on a pale

blue background. It was a perfect room. My grandmother seemed

strangely moved and stood for a long time in silence. At last she said

to my mother,"If in the third drawer of that bureau there

is a filigree box containing a small gold key on a black velvet

ribbon, the house belongs to me.""

"And my mother looked, and there it was, and it did..."

(Nancy Mitford:The Pursuit of Love)

A CHILDHOOD MEMORY OF FRANCOIS JACOB, THE GENETICIST

2010-02-28T16:19:00.000-08:00

I am seated on a train with my mother and father. We are travelling

to Dijon to spend the Christmas holidays with my grandparents.

I have a place at the seat of the window. Forsaking my book and

colored pencils, I amuse myself watching houses, gardens,

telegraph poles, cars at the level crossing; farmers and their dogs

rush towards me and instantly vanish. A strong impression

comes over me:the conviction that this whole landscape,

with its forests, fields, cows, has no continuity, no permanence;

the feeling in my abscence that it will not be there; that it was

set up as the train approached, and will be taken down once it

has passed. The setting up is done with precision, with an

unremitting fidelity, since from one year to the next I find

everything in place: the same hills, the same little stations, the same

villages hugging the bank of the river. How is it that there is

never a slip? How is it that the arrival at Laroche never changes.

even imperceptibly? That the tunnels are always the same

length? ...Where was all this stored in our abscence?

If the train went faster, would it go too fast for the

stagehands in charge of the countryside? Would it arrive

in still empty places, surprising the nothingness that

must prevail there?...

(from THE STATUE WITHIN by Francois Jacob)

BARCAROLLE

2010-02-27T17:08:00.000-08:00

There is a boat--feluca or gondola--whose rope slowly unravels at the pier.

Whether this is due to neglect or because it is fore-ordained, I can not say.

Neither can I tell you what propells it, sail, or motor,

or the current of the river. Or whether it was unmoored at all, or if the contours

of the river travel before its view. This happens every night.

It seems that the boat is also a cradle and a coffin, and as it rocks back and forth

it also travels. First it slides on the surface of the river. Then (for there is but a single

light on its prow) the darkness grows darker and the point where the river runs into the deltas

and the moment the sea begins seems vague.

My darling, I do not know whether we are still in a lagoon of

the Adriatic or drift to Asia, but I know we rise, and if I look below I see our

old home from afar, its chimneys indistinguishable from the rest of

those in town, and beyond the milky way the whirlpool in whose

coils we turn, at first slowly, but at an ever increasing rate until

our crew most hold onto the mast for dear life in such a storm as

has risen. And then I disappear, and so do you.

(1986)

THE GAME OF "STATUES"

2010-02-26T19:17:00.000-08:00

In the mild summer evenings of my childhood, we would play

a game called "Statues". At the first step of the porch, whoever

it was who was "It" would turn his or her back to the other children--

the rules of the game having been finally settled after a long parley--

and count to fifty as the others on the far end of

the sidewalk by the street would creep up, hoping to touch

their shoulder before the count was done but under the

rule that whoever was caught was"out".

The point was to guess how fast the count would last,

which was a question among the younger children at least,

and also how to be patient enough to freeze in place when 50 was reached

while making progress to the house. The fear of "It's"glance should freeze

you in your place if "It" began to turn.

Inevitably a dispute arose over who was seen moving or not and

one clown would hang balanced on a foot as if to emphasize the Gorgon-like look

of "It" when "It" turned round.

Another version of this fight about arrival at "It" would

center around whether the count was clear and counted

fair and square,or if It mumbled, which is a specialty of the part.

An allegory of Mortality and Time.

Such a game of statues I have played with your look and you with mine,

the fatal intersection which each crosses like electrical lines avoided

as through a second sense. But as the Game, the risk once won

as if chance shaved quite raised the stakes, and this time might transfix.

(1998)

GUNNAR EKELOF:AYIASMA

2010-02-25T07:04:00.000-08:00

(Ayiasma:the cult of a purifying well)

The black image

Framed in silver worn to shreds by kisses

The black image

Framed in silver worn to shreds by kisses

All round the image

The white silver worn to shreds by kisses

The very metal worn to shreds by kisses

Framed in metal

The black image worn to shreds by kisses

The darkness, o the darkness

Worn to shreds by kisses

The darkness in our eyes

Worn to shreds by kisses

All we wished for

Worn to shreds by kisses

All we never wished for

Kissed and worn to shreds by kisses

All we escaped

Worn to shreds by kisses

All we wish for

Kissed and kissed again.

(translated from the Swedish by Sjoberg and Auden)

THE GAME OF "MUSEUM"

2010-02-23T18:51:00.000-08:00

Which of these statues would you animate, given a choice,

supposing a fairy wand should also replace missing limbs, that broken nose,

and teach it a modern language which you also spoke, all contingencies

provided for, except clothes? I myself would forego Apollo and

Venus Anadromene, as I have known their contemporary counterparts

and found them to be bores, in favor of this faun. For him, I would make

a golden chain and a supple collar studded with his name--Nijinski,

I think--and walk him in the park by day, and by night commit

unspeakable acts behind closed doors, breaking antiques, throwing

plates, and be happy for a while.

(1998)

SPINDLERS

2010-02-23T16:35:00.000-08:00

FALLING COLUMN

2010-02-23T16:06:00.001-08:00

THE DEBATE BETWEEN ENNUI AND BOREDOM

2010-02-23T15:11:00.000-08:00

The debate between abstraction and representation. Personally, I don't

believe in such things. Mondrian was described by
Brancusi as "that great realist."

HALOES

2010-02-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

Here is a subject with a number of puzzles attached to it,

for one finds no haloes in Egyptian art, or Greek, or in Roman art until after Augustus.

Then haloes appear fleetingly in Mithraic cults from Persia, and encircling the

heads of maenads in the House of Mysteries in Pompeii. For the most part, though,

it is what separates Christian art from pagan.( As a word, "halo'

shares a root with heal, holy, wholesome, and hallow.)

Initially, haloes are not always round, but are sometimes the shapes of the

Byzantine mandorlas in which a Christ as Pantocrator may appear. Also

such shapes as are made by angelic wings when folded in adoration. The round halo is found more consistently

in Buddhist than in Christian arts, perhaps for reasons of stricter iconic codification.

Both in Japanese and in Indian art, the halo will seem more flower-like,more

like a lotus, than ever appears in Christian Art.

Flame-form haloes appear around the wooden protective deities of Japanese

Temples, in Tibetan Buddhist art--an example would be Mahakala--

and encircling the veiled face of Mohammed as he ascends to Heaven on the back of

Buracq in Persian miniatures of the Safavid Period.

In Christian art, the battle between east and west, between the Roman Catholic

and the Eastern Orthodox church may be seen in haloes. The incidence of

gold leaf is an indicator, not only of the tension between east and west, but between

the late Gothic and the Early Renaissance. Late Gothic uses it, as in

Duccio and Cimabue. Giotto the naturalist is impelled into the expedient

of what I call the Streetlight halo.

The Streetlight halo looks much as if Jesus or Mary or some saint stood in front

of a streetlight, which follows their head around. Some are plain, like a moth ball;

some are surrounded by a nimbus of a rainbow, or a delicately crafted

etched gold halo-ring, the halo's crystallized rays.. There is always the

hard-to-negotiate question of how far does the halo go when the head is bent

in prayer, which is one of those places where naturalism will conspire with absurdity.

Jean Colombe, who completed the TRES RICHES HEURES OF JEAN DE BERRY

depicts the saints in heaven from behind, in great assemblage. Their haloes

look like newly minted coins. Michelangelo tries to ignore the subject

Leonardo employs an array of stylistic evasive-devices, Raphael 's are a repertoire

of stylistic solutions according to the type of work. He has a Perugino-type halo, and

a back-lite halo--the escape of St. Peter in the Vatican--and

a ring of filleted gold around the Madonna halo. Titian's are atmospheric,

Caravaggio's are a sudden shaft of light. Rembrandt finds the holy light within the face.

It may shine into the surround but it is no longer almost an object but

a look.

ANTONIO PORCHIA

2010-02-20T06:08:00.000-08:00

Porchia was an Argentinian potter of Italian descent, who lived in

poverty in a suburb of Buenos Aires until his death in 1968 at the age of 84.

Roger Callois put a selection of his aphorisms into French in the 1940's.

W.S. Merwin put them into English in 1969, and this was re-issued by Copper

Canyon Press in the 2001.

"Aphorism" usually implies a flash of wit, the upshot of standing a generalization

on its head. Porchia's are not like this. His words feel turned over, felt, and shaped;

there is something turned about them which reminds me that he was a potter

---Merwin's translation conveys this--but they seem to come from a life lead

rather than the products of a personality. You pick them up and look at them like an

interesting stone found at the edge of a shore. The stone is much older than you.

Here are a few of them.

Every toy has the right to break.

He who has seen everything empty itself is close to knowing what everything

is filled with.

Not believing has a sickness which is believing a little.

I believe that a soul consists of its sufferings, for the soul that cures its own

sufferings dies.

Nothing that is complete breaths.

A ray of light erased your name, now I do not know who you are at all.

Yes, I will try to be. Because I believe that not being is arrogant.

The flower that you hold in your hand was born today and already it

is as old as you are.

They will say you are on the wrong road, if it is your own.

Chimeras come singly and leave accompanied.

If you are not going to change your route, why change your guide?

You are sad because they abandoned you, and you did not fall.

I know that I went from the brief before to the eternal afterward of

everything, but I do not know how.

You are a puppet, but in the hands of the infinite, which may be your own.

I also had a summer and burned myself in its name.

They owe you a life and a box of matches and they want to pay you

a box of matches because they don't want to owe you a box of matches.

A large heart can be filled with very little.

If I were a person who led himself, I would not take the path that

leads to death.

You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the Sun.

FIELDS OF BACH (7)

2010-02-18T15:04:00.000-08:00

Presently I am making my way through the cantatas, which I plan to

conclude towards Easter with the two surviving Passions. The last time

I did this was in a former Schule on the Lower East Side in 1980,

and it was as drafty and as cold that year as it is now. Then it was

a matter of hearing a good many of them for the first time. Now it

is to marvel at how many are familiar.

I decided to abandon my policy of ecstatic miscellaneousness, and straighten up

and be methodical, and start at the beginning instead of nipping honey at every bud.

Harnoncourt's and Leonhardt's traversal(which nearly bankrupted Telefunken)

was what I listened to then. Now I listen to the Suzuki Bach Collegeum,

whose work has won the highest praise from the Olympians of the

Penguin Guide to Classical Recordings. If they don't banish other performances

from memory, this may be because I am in a retrospective mood, but

I am happy with them, which is several rungs higher than contented.

My relationship to the music has changed perspectivally in other ways as well.

There was a time I cared about historical accuracy. Now I don't care about

historical accuracy unless I miss it.

The originalists in any case have largely won except in the case of piano versus harpsichord as a solo instrument.

Also while it is important to distinguish conductors and the differences in approach

between the various enclaves of Bach performance, I find myself caring less about this than

I do the singers. Philippe Herreweghe won me over by his choice of singers

despite his sometimes (for me) too subdued approach.So slowly,the question

has moved for me from a general view to the performances of individuals.

There is a history of great female Bach singers which doesn't coincide

with a traversal of the cantata cycle, and which includes great Wagnerians, like

Kirsten Flagstad, and great Mahler singers,like Kathleen Ferrier, and

great Mozart singers, like Elizabeth Schwartzkopf. To hear them is to

hear Bach associatively through Mozart, Mahler, even Wagner, which in

turn shows how Bach echoes through each of these great composers. The Bach

performances of each have a shining integrity which Bach seems to inspire in the great singers,

in Christa Ludwig, Elly Ameling, and more recently, the much-missed Lorraine Hunt

Lieberson. The same applies to the men, for Hans Hotter's is on par with his Wagner,

and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's with his Schubert. But there are names which I have omitted

equal to these. I heard an interview with the superb Christine Schaeffer, who said she

had to perform Bach with her Bach voice both in terms of breaths taken and

when they are taken--did I imagine it or did she say she found her breath in niches?-- and it the attack or how the note is hit.

As a visual artist I have an image of this rather than an understanding of it; for me,

because the singer of Bach becomes a herald or an angelic messenger quite often in the cantatas, this naturally has an effect on spiritual bearing

as well as physical carriage.As a painter,moreover,the singers of the Bach cantatas seem to me like the Angels found in late medieval Annunciations with scrolls unfurling besides their open, annunciatory mouths,even roses and lilies leaping from the Angel's lips, as in the case of Cimabue. As someone prone

to synasthesia, they almost appear this way to me.

RAIN VISION

2010-02-17T19:20:00.000-08:00

"Rain has a way of bringing out the contours of everything:

it throws a coloured blanket over previously invisible things;

instead of an intermittent and fragmented world, the steadily falling

rain creates a continuity of acoustic experience... Usually, when I open

my front door, there are various broken sounds spread across

nothingness. I know when I take I take the next step I will encounter the path,

and that to the right my shoe will meet the lawn...I know all

these things are there, but I know them from memory...The rain

presents the fullness of a situation all at once, not merely

remembered, not in anticipation but here and now. The rain gives

a sense of perspective and of the actual relationship of one part of the world

to the other...I feel as if the world which is veiled until I touch it,

has suddenly disclosed itself to me."

(from Hull:TOUCHING THE ROCK, an account of blindness)

ON ORIGINALITY

2010-02-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

"In saying the word "sun" we are, as it were, taking an immense journey to which we have

grown so accustomed that we almost travel in our sleep.What distinguishes poetry

from automatic speech is that it rouses us, and shakes us into wakefulness in the middle of a word.

It then turns out that the word is much longer than we thought, and we remember that to speak is to be forever on the road."

This comes from Osip Mandelstam's CONVERSATION ABOUT DANTE(1936)writing right at the edge of the Stalinist purges, a few years prior to Mandelstam's death. To write about Dante

in the Soviet Union in 1936 was to uphold what got Mandelstam ostracized to begin with, and puts him closer to house-arrest and then Siberia. His friend the poet Lev Gumiliev, shot by firing squad in the first

days of the Bolshevik revolution, died clutching a copy of Homer in his hands. This Dante essay is like

that in slow motion. Mandelstam seems to be putting every idea he wishes to impart in coded form into his last testament. In one astonishing aside,he seems to have had a poetic anticipation

into the structure of DNA--he addresses crystallography as a discipline which he would turn

to the study of Dante's patterns, if he had time. Earlier, he compares poetry

to a carpet woven out of the waters of the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Nile,

in which their waters weave in patterned braids without mixing. But it is to his comments

concerning poetic speech that I must return.

Two uses of the word "original" by two fine American poets, Marianne Moore and Robert

Frost, reverberated within reach of each other when I read them. Moore's:

IN THE DAYS OF PRISMATIC COLOR

not in the days of Adam and Eve,

but when Adam was alone,

when there was no smoke and color was fine

not with the refinement of early civilization art

but because of its originality..."

And Frost's, which is from his masterpiece, DIRECTIVE,

"Your destination and your destiny's

A brook that was the water of this house,

cool as a spring as yet so near the source

too lofty and original to rage..."

This use of the word "originality" means the near opposite of "novelty".

This rang true with me, which is a distinct sensation, like the touching of a tuning fork.

I am not sure why I believe that we hear the truth rather than see it--listening

being part of the sequence--but it is the sound of truth we speak of more often than

it is the sight. Both Moore and Frost roused me into waking in regard to the word,

original.

(There is something else concerning Mandelstam's comment to which I wish to add:

he speaks as if language is an instrument of truth, and that truth might be found

in language. This is interesting to consider in our truth-eroded, rhetoric bloated time. The idea

that a language may be the bearer of a collective truth as a poet may be the bearer

of an individual one is an original idea which novelty has largely buried beneath static.

But Mandelstam believed it was the nature of Language as well as the art of

individual speech. In a brief aside, he apostrophe's DAL's Etymological Dictionary as a giant

proto- poem of this collective truth.)

The rootword of " original" is Er, which is to set in motion, to begin.

As it was in the beginning has a very particular sense for each of us.

It consists of something familiar in the Edenic infant sense of our earliest memories

but also something of our human ancestry. All nostalgia may be based on Eden, just as all longing might be for a New Jerusalem---sacred or secular, it does not matter which: we are irreparably between.

Even so, we each have a sense of the beginning:to utter it is to

begin to picture it:who knows if this twitch goes far?

In Islam, creation begins before time, in the convocation of all souls who will

ever come to exist. All say "Yes" to Allah and enter time. I was there

with you according to this doctrine, and this hidden memory is shared

from the beginning of time.Should Jehovah ask, "where were you

when I called the world into being and the morning stars danced for

joy?"the reply might be, I was there. I know something from the beginning of

time which I have yet to put in words.

When a work of art is original, as far as I am concerned, it is because

it is touched with the beginning, and takes a reverberation from it,

and vibrates with it. It is singular but it also

has an unexpected familiarity, a way of making something I have inarticulately

known into some know-able speech. The effect of Wagner on men as different as

CS Lewis and Gerard de Nerval, Auden and Baudelaire was one of coming across

something for the first time that they had known all their life. (to be continued)

THE FIELDS OF BACH (6)(scherzando)

2010-02-16T18:06:00.000-08:00

Here is a stormy scene from Bosch, the battle of the instruments.

In this arena streaked with lightning the harpsichord and piano

duke it out in the Klavier Katzenjammer. Odds favor the champ,

Hamburg Steinway, over the contender, a replica after an

instrument by von Dulcken (1611), by 257 to 1, but you've gotta hand it to

the little cembalo, he's a contender. At stake is the soul of the

Well-Tempered Clavier, seen in the form of Flosshilde,

the German Jeanne D'arc, on a cloud above with the Holy Family( or the Royal

Family, depending on your view of iconography.) A skirmish, meanwhile,

has erupted among the Highland symphonists, who favor

bagpipes, and the Flemish sacbucketeers in a force which sweeps up the gambists and

the tympanists in one hellacious sea as Hamborg Steinway delivers yet another deadly blow

to van Dulkens plectrum. There is a splintering of parquetry as van Dulken spews

a handful of quills from his sounding board. It will be a long time before his

toccatta trots,again, it's Les Barricades Mistereuses for original instruments...

SPHINX

2010-02-15T20:37:00.000-08:00

Our travel down the Nile is calm now that we've passed the Sphinx;

how they unpetrify after the rain, or what lengths

we go to pacify them

--that emu stuffed with opiates barely got us by them,

is kept from Tourist knowledge but it stinks!

A snoring on the shore assures me we are safe but even so Hussein I must confess

We don't have any this size in Memphis whatever sense of status they confer

Our embassage would be larger now had Pharaoh

kept them tethered in their barrow,

This vogue for zoos has gone too far in terms of human flesh

The Emir's content with crocodiles; they keep the servants on their feet,

And the slow ones furnish them enough to eat.

O STUPID GIANTS

2010-02-15T20:06:00.000-08:00

O stupid giants, why are your prayers so long,

and why are they always advertisements?

INQUISITORS

2010-02-15T18:52:00.000-08:00

Then the inquisitors come, white robed inquisitors

holding the sacred text which may condemn you

to be burned as a faggot or drawn and quartered,

behind them are red robed inquisitors, the authors

of law,holding the ends of the wires wound round you.

(it is a stadium or arena from what you can hear rather than see;

the acoustics imply much)

there are the blackrobed inquisitors, so tall, carrying chains

let us be plain:there is no mercy without the admission of guilt

you must be born in death and saved by flame

your sins: in this place at this date

not as much what you have done as thought:it's in your face

I can see it in your eyes your shifty gaze admit it

don't cry we're just getting to it

just getting to baby, you're mine:

-don't gag or I'll show you what's rough

(thus the black robed inquisitors)

VOTE FOR CALIGULA

2010-02-15T16:34:00.000-08:00

Vote for Caligula, folks, if you want a state-sanctioned bloodbath.

Vote for him because you like his style--that Humvee with Rifle-turrets,

the swimming pool as an abattoir, the babes with pneumatic implants, the gladiatorial combat,

that populist wink from the top of the pyramid, the breeding farm for Aryans,

the wars to trim our young people of the unfit, the plenitude of squalor!

Vote for him because you must show your allegiance--it's a must for those of

you who want to get ahead or keep theirs, kow tow and bow to the manly modesty of the self-

deified representative and leader of the people, the autocrat of the

republic which he crushes underfoot like chicks, and his hench-people of spin, his gilded regular guy status,march for him!

Let one arena fight with another and plunder the loser:it's all virtual once you step out of the sauna anyhow and anyway

no one gets hurt who doesn't deserve it; its nothing an anesthetic can not forget,

or a fence mend in a steroid world

a fact confirmed by this synthetic human skin as vibrant as novocaine

the best light-fixtures wear

(this room is bugged; destroy this note after memorizing the following :)

WHITE DOG IN THE SNOW

2010-02-14T19:37:00.000-08:00

We're nipped in all the ways of winter, house bound, stir crazy or lethargic

depending on the wind or the snow. Sometimes at night it feels as

if death is circling around; it whistles like a scythe.My old ones are older than old.

They are stubborn, argumentative, deaf, dotty, redundant, and I love them.

The old dogs are as old as my old. Sometimes my old black Australian

shepherd can't make it up the stairs. I carry her up like grunting

luggage. She doesn't like that much.

My other dog is a white hunting dog, and sometimes he can't get up fast,

but he can run. Snow on the ground is his favorite time to hunt. Blends

in and can sneak up.

Dad usually calls him in at around ten, but sometimes he disappears.

This happened just last week. My sister found him buried in the leaf-pile

in the morning, and concluded that he intended to crawl away and die.

Even shed a few conclusive tears as she

asked me to be sure to bring him in the next night.

But he was not to be found at nine, or ten, or midnight when the first

flurries began to fall. I called with the wind bounding back at me

from the backdrop of the woods.

Suddenly I heard the deer before I saw them, and up from the leaf

pile rose my old white dog in a flurry who had lain in ambush for them ,

then all were gone.

Better to chase deer at midnight than to sit inside chewing a bone.

FIELDS OF BACH(5)

2010-02-14T17:20:00.000-08:00

I have heard the Bach Chaconne on a xylophone , a marimba, cymbalom, and celesta,

on a eighteen-string fretted lute, on a guitar, and on a banjo, I think

--though this may be hallucinated--in a version for string orchestra,

which seems besides the point, and another for brass, which was worse,and in two left hand versions only for piano by Busoni and Brahms. A chamber version of The Goldberg variations

for string orchestra confounded recognition for a few moments, so unlikely did it seem.

As for the ART OF FUGUE:piano, harpsichord, organ, wind quintet, string quartet, 'cello

quartet, in broken consort with violins and viols, and as a viol

ensemble, as in the music of Coperario or Lawes'; also string orchestra, and marimba ensemble,

in which Bach took on an unexpected Indonesian aspect.And

tonite a very beautiful version of the final, unfinished fugue by

Luciano Berio conducted by Pekka Salonen in L.A.

Busoni's piano transcriptions and Stokowski's orchestral

transcriptions are both so much richer than Bach's originals that

they seem like baby Jesus in wrapped in jeweled couturier swaddling.

Frank Martin's idea of Bach is not the Bach of Villa Lobos, the Bach of the tropics,

and Schoenberg's Bach transcriptions are a sound-world away from Stravinsky's,

as Webern's are from Kurtag's. Wooden swords and hobbyhorses attend

almost all discussions of performance practice, but for the time the harpsichords

are nearly routed, though the oboe d'amore is adopted more and more.

How much of Bach do we actually hear? Charles Rosen criticized Glenn Gould's

attempt to create maximal contrapuntal transparency--or the ability to hear

all parts at once--with the counter-proposal that the human ear does not hear

that way, but dwells on one and then another feature of the music in turn.

Rosen calls this form of hearing "terracing".

I suppose I generally "terrace", but the attempt to hear all that is going on,

which only Gould and Gustav Leonhardt among keyboard artists fulfil,

fills me with a fleeting radiance, as if the ceiling of my understanding has been lifted,

which does not happen when I inattentively "terrace".

But Bach is larger than dogma.I was raised with the

wonderful old Klemperer recording of the St. Matthew Passion , which I

rejected during the first wave of Original Instrument performance as I

could hear the parts, the inner voices, when Nicolas Harnoncourt conducted

the St. Matthew Passion with his ensemble, the Concentus Musicus. Now I can hear in the Klemperer

recording something I would have never heard in it, had I not strayed from it,

which is the healing which this music brought to its performers and to its

listeners after the Third Reich and WW2. It is

entirely wrong from what we know of baroque performance practise.

But in the history of Bach performance it stands as a shining moment of truth.

"In heaven there are many Mansions."

Our music has a history, as well as being history , from its inception to the present moment.

It is important to treat our present moment as a fulfilment

of history, not as as being apart from history as a judgment upon it from some imaginary

Cartesian perch.

Bach more than any other composer, I suspect, acts as a laboratory for musicians--

he induces or provokes experiment--

hence those arrangements of organ works for brass, of concertoes for four harpischords

being turned into concertos for five theorboes or vice versa,

not to mention a cappella jazz arrangements, synthesizers etcetera.

There was a time when I subjected all to which I listened to rigorous prior inspection. Now I

just roll with the punches.

FIELDS OF BACH (4)

2010-02-14T13:11:00.000-08:00

Let me admit from the start that I am highly superstitious,

and that for me an angelus or messenger can be incarnate in a work of art.

How this is done or for whom it is done or why it is done is very

particular, and I must not judge what acts as an angelus

for you, but only speak of what so acts for me. I, in fact,

believe that music is curative, and as such is extremely important to

good health. A quick way to induce many manias would be to eliminate music.

(I also believe that art is the crucible of the imagination, and those who

oppose it are enemies of the realm where meaning is forged.)

When I was a young man, I became severely bewildered over questions of meaning,

and it seemed to me that there was no much reason to live in a world which could

countenance Auschwitz. This disturbed me so much that I began to starve myself. There is a terrible,

low-grade perpetual depression attached to hunger; it soon makes the world dull.

There is a slow despair attached to it which I would hesitate to plumb even now.

What saved me was an old recording, a wobbly LP

on RCA's budget label, which you had to flatten out before playing,so bad was the vinyl,of

THE WELL-TEMPERED CLAVIER by the harpsichordist, Gustav Leonhardt.

Leonhardt, whose career is very distinguished, is never-the-less often taken

for the leader of a particularly ascetic Dutch Calvinist tradition of Bach , mostly

due to his angular appearance and unostentatious manner; this is a polite

way of saying that his playing is felt to be as stiff as he looks. While I

don't relish his Scarlatti, and his Couperin has been superseded , no one is

quite so fluent, or as subtle in early, early keyboard work,

in the English virginalists just after Dowland, or Sweelinck, or Froberger.

What is interesting about Leonhardt's Bach is that it sounds more like John Bull or Farnaby

or Sweelinck--music of the 1640's-- than it does a premonition of Beethoven. He puts the musical time travel clock on" before" rather than" after", so to speak.

But for me, this was less relevant than the effect which his playing of Bach had for me,

which was to restore some sense of human perspective. Come on, come into the human

fold, it said,these ultimate meanings are not yours to determine; you are part of the puzzle.

I had been reading Karl von Frisch's THE DANCING BEES--it is he who decoded

their communicative process--and in it discovered that bees will always built their nest

at 90 degrees angles to the earth's magnetic fields. Bach seemed to me to

be righting my angle, so that I too might begin to build.

But I am not alone in my sense of the healing properties of music. Its

track record in the re-routing of neurological channels after strokes is

well documented. There are also such testament's as William Styron's

concerning his depression, DARKNESS MADE VISIBLE. What cracks the human

barrier--the dread wall Styron is captive behind--is the tiniest fragment of the Brahms

Alto Rhapsody. It is in the Merchant/Ivory adaptation of Henry James' BOSTONIANS

and to see it is to marvel at how brief a flicker of hope or heart

can be clung to, as this music happens in the interval in which a door is open and closed.

FIELDS OF BACH (3)

2010-02-14T11:30:00.000-08:00

Paul Klee loved Bach, which he played on the violin. He wrote a poem

in which his cat complains about it. Music in Klee is about the arbitriness

of notation--music notation is always turning into pictograms , is always

just about to take an anarchic life on of its own--or the absurdity of social structures--

those twittering machines--or novice angels practising on some side street of heaven,

one which resembles Basle.

George Braque loved Bach, but his Bach had nothing to do with notation or novice angels,

but a great deal to do with multi-angled space, which a fugue might be said to be in sound.

Bach's music was one of the things which aided his recovery from a head-injury

suffered in WW1, and it is a synonym for him of quiet meditation. It is after

this injury that the violin replaces the mandolin as Braque's cubist refracted musical

instrument, so it is entirely possible that Braque recovered through much the

same music as Paul Klee's cat complained of.

This would be one of the three solo sonatas or partitas for the violin alone,

which are held to be the apex of the violin literature. There is a recording from

1903 of Joseph Joachim playing a part of the G minor sonata,

which is the first; it has a prescence which belies its years. Nathan Milstein,

Jascha Heifetz, Joseph Szigeti, Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Grumiaux, Henryk

Szeryng,Ida Haendel, Schlomo Mintz, Gidon Kremer, Christian Tetzlaff, Hillary Hahn, Jaap van Shroeder,

among others have recorded them. This does not keep me from regretting

not hearing a gypsy violinist which Huberman(?) took Joseph Szigeti to hear

whose incredible freedom of expression in playing Bach put both these

great violinist to shame.(This story is Arnold Steinhardt's).

My niece and nephew made a bee-line for the solo violin sonatas and

partitas above almost all other music to which I introduced them.

My niece uses the chaconne to warm up before her rugby games;

it seems to work, as she is a national champion. We vote for Grumiaux

and Szeryng after numerous comparisons.

A great deal of Dan Brown-ish nonsense was trafficed in the musical press

a few years ago with the purported discovery that certain Lutheran

chorales were quoted in the great chaconne--or variations on a bass-line--

which ends the second partita. The violinist Christoph Poppen went so far

as to record the chaconne with a choir intoning chorales directly. But

when is Bach not quoting a chorale? He is so imbued with them that it will happen sooner

or later. So Poppen and crew pointed out what is after all

a salient feature.

Numerological decodings of the music are also less illuminating than is supposed,

a way of carving "To the Glory of God" into the joinery rather than an explanation

of the over-arching scheme. Like the omniprescent chorales it is part of the plan,

not the plan. The Czech musicologist, Miroslav Venhoda, compared the Obrecht

masses to medieval computers, the polyphony based on symbolism derived from

the medieval trivium and quadrivium. The question is :if of these medieval

masses be decoded,what would we have? An annotated text of the SUMMA THEOLOGICAE?

A visual model of the cathedral? Would these parts be more or less than the actual music?

My suspicion in both the case of the numerological Obrecht at the

beginning of the polyphonic tradition, and with Bach as its end, is that

it would be less.

It is the fact of Shakespeare which generates theories about the plays being

written by the Star Chamber. It is the fact of Bach which puzzles. Our silliest

theories are due to the suspicion that here magic and science mix.

(to be continued)

THE WINTER MANTRA FROM"THE SLEEPERS"

2010-02-14T11:07:00.000-08:00

I descend my western course, my sinews are flaccid,

Perfume and youth course through me and I am their wake.

It is my face yellow and wrinkled instead of the old woman's,

I sit low in a straw bottom chair and carefully darn my grandson's

stockings.

It is I too, the sleepless widow looking out on the winter moonlight,

I see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth.

A shroud I see and I am the shroud, I wrap a body and lie

in the coffin,
it is dark here underground, it is not evil or pain here,

it is blank here, for reasons.

(It seems to me everything in the light and air ought to be happy.

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough)

Walt Whitman section 2 of THE SLEEPERS

("I know not how I came of you and I know not where I go with you,

but I know I came well and shall go well."

The Winter Mantra)

FIELDS OF BACH ((2)

2010-02-14T08:30:00.000-08:00

Among the more curious manifestations of Bach's influence is

the desire he inspires to make a counterpoint out of words.

How this is to be done is a matter of debate. Is it to be

done by cutting story against story, as D.W. Griffith did

in film? This is what Gide supposed in THE COUNTERFEITERS(1927)

with which Aldous Huxley soon concurred in his POINT COUNTERPOINT(1929).

No, say the poets lead by Pound:it is done via the inter-collision

of luminous fragments, and the cutting takes place not only with

stories but among historical epochs. It is done by layering historical

epochs over each other, in contrapuntal lines like

geological striations with dolmens sticking out says David

Jones in THE ANATHEMATA. It is done in Voices says James Joyce.

It is more than the symbolist desire to make poetry achieve the

condition of music. It is the kind of music to

which literature aspires which makes this modern,

literature which aspires to music's simultaneity of parts. The simultaneity

is what makes the great ensembles of Mozart's the Marriage of

Figaro or Verdi's Falstaff works that lift off the top of your head,

as you temporarily enter the privileged domain

of understanding six hearts and minds at once. Bach does this more

legibly, more lyrically, more often than any other composer.

This is a supposition--how could it be otherwise?--but

I feel that this need for perspectival simultaneity in narrative literature

began with 19th century urbanization. There are so many stories with

so many histories in so many faces. BLEAK HOUSE by Dickens,

which cross-cuts narratives, is one response to it. Whitman's LEAVES OF
GRASS is another. The difficulty that BLEAK HOUSE poses is

knowing what kind of story you are in; the difficulty Whitman

poses is knowing where you are in the human sea.

The attractiveness of simultaneity is knowing that you are

an individual in the context of a community. The difficulty lies

in believing this without a plenum or compass.

Contrapuntal writing organizes this in music. Narrative

writing begins to try to organize experience with something like these means.

Is Faulkner's THE WILD PALMS a narrative two part invention?

Does Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES become a kind of fugue?

Perhaps.

We look at those moments in civilization where it all came together,

which only happens in art, and we wonder how it might be done, if it might be done,

with what we know now. We know it has been done in this medium:

can it be done in that ? This is what Bach made the story- tellers wonder.

(To be continued)

PATIENCE BENEATH THE BLUE

2010-02-14T00:46:00.000-08:00

Patience and still patience,

patience beneath the blue!

Each atom of the silence

knows what it ripens to.

The happy shock will come:

A dove alighting, some

Gentlest nudge, the breeze,

A woman's touch--before

You know it the downpour
has brought you to your knees!

Let populations be

Crumbled underfoot--

Palm irresistably

Among celestial fruit!

Those hours were not in vain

So long as you retain

A lightness once they're lost

Like one who, thinking, spends

His inmost dividends

To grow at any cost.

((the two final stanzas of James Merrill's

translation of Paul Valery's Palme;

it is this poem which he refers

to in LOST IN TRANSLATION;

it was my mantra many times when

waiting for the subway,

and now I impart it to you)

FIELDS OF BACH

2010-02-13T20:23:00.000-08:00

Theodor Adorno deplored what he perceived as a Nazi

transformation of J.S. Bach into a latter-day cultural icon.

a Hans Sachs -like justification for the

supremacy of the Third Reich. How unhappily Bach was

treated in his own day would refute any broad claim to

this, as far as I can see; to read Christoph Wolff's

biography is to be immersed in the details of a

sequence of contractual disputes from start to finish.

And at the end he suffered cataract surgery at the hands of the same

quack as did Handel, and was made blind. No, Germany

did not treat him well. They were as nasty, as trite,as stinting

and as underhanded to Bach as

Amsterdam was to Rembrandt.

How might they have known him, and treated him better,

who was a prophet disguised as a scholar? The accounts

from his lifetime treat him as a virtuoso in terms

of technique,not in terms of the beauty of his music or its affekt,

whereas the contemporary complaint--which in one case lead to litigation--is that

the music is stiff, overwrought, and lacks expressivity.

This seems incredible to me in regard to the

choruses of the Matthew passion or the violin chaconne,

to seize on two examples from the far ends of his reach.

But it certainly wasn't galant,that era's sugared style, and it is important to

remember that Bach's career took place during

the heyday of Rococo, of Watteau rather than Rembrandt,

which may explain much of him which is against the grain

of his own time.

Felix Mendelsohn's conducting of the St Matthew passion with the Singakademie in 1829

is said to have sparked the Bach revival after a virtual eclipse to his reputation following

his death,but prior to that Mozart heard parts

of the Well-tempered Clavier played in the salon of Baron von Swieten,

and Bach influenced him ever after. Bach is to be found in Mozart's music in the most curious places, in the Chorale preceding the tests by fire and water in the Magic Flute,

and the monumental adagio and fugue for glass harmonica.

not to mention the c minor fantasia and fugue for piano.

Later,Schumann developed a thing about Bach

(How German is it?) and canons generally,

which leads to some rather blurry contrapuntal exercises, but it is Chopin,paradoxically,who

makes him his own; more than any other composer he understands the

lyric impulse of the Well-Tempered Clavier, which he distills in op.28 Preludes in particular.

Both seek the platonically ideal melody inherent to each different key and

the underlying configuration which will catalyze it.

(Chopin played Bach and Mozart to Delacroix and

Georges Sand- during the painting of their double portrait.

Sand and Delacroix found them old-fashioned in a way that we do not.)

Bach is not always a good influence--Tovey famously compared Brahms'

use of the Art of the Fugue theme in the first 'cello sonata to the periodic

emergence of a porpoise in a muddy aquarium--and it may be argued

that he was the ruination of Max Reger, who learned from him the technique

of carting the theme uphill via the means of the fugue. There

are admittedly a few labored fugues in Bach--not many, but enough to dread

when they occur, which happens just enough for wariness.

In his early work, this is because they are prolix, as in the

Toccata and fugue in C minor for keyboard, the later as

demonstrations of ingenuity.

He is also a great attractant for eccentric performers,

more so than any other composer,as the Goldberg variations

in the hands of Maria Yudina, Rosalyn Tureck, Wanda

Landowska, Glenn Gould, and Charles Rosen attests. The Goldbergs

manages to absorb them, and the three others by Gustav Leonhardt,

my favorite of the harpsichordists,

and two by Andras Schiff, my favorite among pianists. No

one performance encompasses it, and I approach having

heard thirty-three interpretations.Gould's first recording

made in 1955 will always be the one to which all others refer,

never-the-less, and for me personally the first

I heard and the last I will remember.

Each is interesting in the sense that someone crossing

a waterfall on a tightrope is interesting as they pass through the penumbra

of its rainbow.The wonder is that they come out the other side.

(to be continued)

2010-02-08T14:26:00.000-08:00

THE CARRIER SHELL

Deep in the coral reefs, in a dark

unlike the land's most unstarred night,

beyond quicksilver flickering shoals

of fishes where neither shark

prowls, or porpoises cavort

at the dim yet lustrous feet

of pagodas of albino white

or alizarin crimson corals

wafting in the slow

yet ever expanding diastole

of the unsurfaced sea

among anemones, barnacled debris

fluorescent polyps, bones' filigree

inconspicuous, and in disguise

the carrier shell is found

whether from Darwinian severities

or because, as ethnologist

Adolph Portmann suggests,

nature practises

concious mimesis

it performs a peculiar task

sifting through detritus from

subaquatic latitudes above

for periwinkles, wentletraps

as obscure upon

the ocean floor they drift

incessant search

chiefly unearths

fragments, shards,

these it discards

yet on a signal

occasion,it

may find, complete

a perfect shell

spinning out of its own entrails, then,

an epoxy which can resist

the sea's dilutions, it attaches

to its own carapace, at an exact

interval from the last

such find, the new found prize

the largest of these inevitably is placed

at center; in neatly graduated degrees

are arranged those of diminishing size

upon the outward rim;

nor are there mirrors to admire

this display--or even eyes

in our sense--all this is done

by touch

above these shells patiently gathered

occurs another of anomalous nature's

relationships:

upon the topmost whorl

of the migratory carrier shell

grows a form, half mineral, half-plant

rising lightly, branching out

into a white sea-flower

as if all this eerie creature thought

as through detritus it had sought

perfection, or protective camouflage

had become a kind

of crown.

(1988)

A LITTLE RIFF ON ARTIST"S STATEMENTS

2010-02-04T06:43:00.000-08:00

(for Diane, this morning's muse)

1:ON SELLING WHAT SHOULD BE UNSPOKEN

When the choreographer Trisha Brown explains her work in terms of being a bricklayer

with a sense of humor, she is pointing to the process of construction of her work

as being what it is in fact" about", the steady layering of process upon process.

This is the sort of statement I can handle from an artist. The how you go about

the what you do rather than the reasons why you do it. I am always suspicious of

larger claims, in art as well as life; ideally, an artistic statement should be subsumed in the practise.

The world and social structure, of course ,argue otherwise;

therefore, we compromise in order to communicate. How much and to what degree

can be a matter of period emphasis.Presently artists'

statements are more in the nature of sales pitches than they were during the period of,say,

Mark Rothko. From Rothko's, it is obvious that he had read THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, and

that he believed that the painter could achieve the Apollonian/

Dionysiac synthesis--- which worries:no wonder he felt the weight of the world. . Now everyone is

succinct as an elevator ride--that critical twenty-five seconds you have to sell yourselves--which worries for more pressing reasons. I don't miss the earlier incarnation of the artists' statement as student reading of Heidegger dressed-up as a manifesto, but I resent the present demand for constant self-reification.

Words for a visual artist are always a second language. It means the stresses of

the accents will always have a foreign intonation,and this will apply to meaning as well.

In a period of artistic innovation, moreover, everyone is compelled to become

an autodidact--to teach themselves how to do(ex.:) the first cubist painting, the first light

sculpture. This is both a blessing and a curse. The curse as far as language goes will often

be in the artist's inability to make a distinction between a personal meaning and

the general usage. A word then, if I may put it so, is treated as a vessel to fill up with

meaning of their own. Alas, the poor artist, compelled to turn his or her numinous

experience into a snappy sales-pitch. No wonder such a statement will confuse.

I am no different from anyone else in this regard. If called upon to explain myself, I instantly wish myself translated elsewhere. My basic relationship to art is this: any wresting with nothingness which I may do is voluntary, and consequently I must not mistake myself for a martyr or a saint. This resolve is different

from branding. And a statement must act as a synthesis of these opposite needs.Somehow.

The earliest statement of mine is probably the verbal equivalent to the black leather

and nose bones that I wore at twenty, whereas the press release written c. 1987 might compel

the interest of a student of Mallarme,

but only them. I was caught between wishing to provide an

explanation, the desire to make a manifesto, and the need

to sell. Thus I failed the first requisite:to be clear.

2:THE STATEMENT IN RELATION TO HISTORY

Historically,the artist's statement rose from a period of manifestos, in a time which hoped for Utopia,

which now we view with more qualified hopes, to put it mildly.The first great period of modernism--the period before ww1--is

also a period of manifesto making. It's important

to note that the cubist manifestoes were made by people like

Gleizes and Marcoussis rather than Braque and Picasso, and that

Marinetti, author of the Futurists manifestoes,produced little in the way of art unless a manifesto be considered so. To me there is a great deal of

unconcious aspirant fascism in many of these. Consider what it would be like to

be compelled to live in an apartment by Mondrian in which green,orange and

purple, the secondary colors, are forbidden. Or one of

Corbusier's" machines for living " if clean lines were not your thing .

A great many of the manifestoes had the tone of messianism or prophecy to them,

as if their author believed the future might be foreordained, engineered, even.

This viewpoint was scarcely halted by so unforeseen event as the first world war.

May as well make a megaphone circumspect as far as manifesto makers are

concerned. It effected writers as well as artists, and it is interesting and

instructive to see Ezra Pound try to outdo Wyndham Lewis in vituperation

on the pages of BLAST.

Reading them today, one feels a sympathy with the poet Mandelstam,

who said to his grandstanding confrere, Mayakovski, "Quiet down, Comrade;

you are not a Rumanian orchestra."

With the making of manifestoes

began the tradition of a self-interested pleading with chronology:that this idea begins here,

that this take on an idea is....original, a beginning. The merit

lies in being first. This art-historical beaux ideal underwent a lumbering sort of death, as when an

elephant falls to its knees, during the post-modernist revision begun in mid '70's,but

as a mental habit it very much persists, though we are in an epoch of

developments rather than beginnings.It requires fabricating an ideology which argues for the

merits of your practise. This in turn leads to the pretense of certainty, the fault of concluding too much.This is hardly a recipe for clarity and self-knowledge.

There is also the pre-emptive claim of the future as your own. What art

must be taught by you. And what history must learn from your work.

This was especially prevalent during the second era of

modernist manifestos--1945-1960.

Example:the merits of Caravaggio really lie in their anticipation of Frank Stella,

-- at least according to Stella in his WORKING SPACE-- just as the merits of abstraction

lie in their refusal to record and thereby treat atrocity as quotidian. Poor Caravaggio,

to hang forlornly in the Louvre for several hundred years awaiting the advent of

Stella. As for his claims of the higher ethical status of abstraction: this is no better than saying

abstract painting is on a kind of cheap date with history, with all the

tough parts left out.

(I myself started painting" realistically" again because I see the inability to record atrocity

one of abstraction's limits)(if these terms are valid to begin with, which I also doubt)

History is polyphonic, as far as I can tell , and there are histories within histories

as far as I can see. It must be possible to state one's concerns without purporting to mesmerize

the direction of history.

Beyond that, it would be irrate not to mention artists who wrote really well:

Michelangelo,Delacroix, Klee for starters, and with Blake in a zone where poetry

nearly becomes image. The poems of Arp, Van Gogh's letters, Giacometti's essay

--replete with diagrams-- on his dreams. There are titles of a few

words which are as fine as any poem: the sur-titles of Goya's LOS CAPRICHIOS. The schism they try to cross

is the one between word and image. To arrive there would be a great thing.

PHILIP GLASS AND GANDHI

2010-01-28T10:02:00.000-08:00

PHILIP GLASS AND GANDHI

1971:I left the would-be revolutionaries with whom I was associated

when one hailed the murder of Sharon Tate as a sign that times

were achangin'. Never before had I heard such a statement

of such complacency,of such self-righteous stupidity as this.

It made my neck hairs tremble and my toes get cold. I could not find words

for the sensation. But that night I had a dream in which Gandhi appeared, and said nothing,

but had tears in his eyes. And within days, I had packed up and

bid my "cell-group" goodbye.

Why did I not remember this when called upon to review Satyragaha,

Philip Glass' opera about Gandhi? O those theoretical reasons with which

one cloaks imperception, wrongheadness, envy. I intended to say

that the technique was stolen from Bali, more or less, which is untrue.

But that night I once again dreamed of Gandhi; and this time he

said, "Anyone who writes an opera about me is alright,

Phillip." Afterwards, I obtained a tape of Satyaragaha,

which sounded quite beautiful to me.

I told this story a few weeks later to the person who became one

of my closest friends, who worked in the world of foundations.

He laughed and said he was glad, in part because he had hand a

hand in commissioning it.He also told me a story about the Rome

premiere of Satyagraha:the opera house staff was going on

strike ("They're always going on strike," said Howard)

and Glass, whose opera was about to get lost in the fracas

asked why. Because the bathrooms weren't being cleaned

properly. And so he cleaned the bathrooms of the Rome Opera,

averting the strike. Someone said, "but you are the composer! Why

should you clean-up the men's room?" And Glass replied,

" Gandhi would have."

Years after, on returning to North Carolina, I felt need of

psychotherapy. I had lost a large number of people to AIDS

and I could not get out from under it. I went to one new-

age-y fellow who was far too California to me--meaning

that not getting out from under it was not a matter

of finding one's inner child, but of life and death.

I decided on the therapistl when I noticed a quotation

from Gandhi on his wall. A few months later,I told him

the story Howard Klein told me. My shrink

turned out to be Phillip Glass' first cousin.

THE FAVORITES:A READING LIST

2010-01-26T06:23:00.000-08:00

ackerly, j.r.:my father and myself

hindoo holiday

angulo, jaime de:indian tales

asturias,miguel-angel:mulata and mr. fly

arendt, hannah:eichmann in jerusalem

the origins of totalitarianism

alfau, felipe:locos, chromos

alain fournier:the wanderer

ashbery, john:three poems

attar, faralladin:the conference of the birds

auden, w.h.:collected poems

a certain world

the dyer's hand and everything else

including a shelf of criticism

auerbach, eric:mimesis

babel, isaac:the collected stories

bachelard, gaston:the poetics of space

barfield, owen:saving the appearances

history in english words

baudelaire:the painter of modern life in addition to the poems

basho:the narrow roads north et al

beckett,sam.:the trilogy et al

beerbohm, max:zuleikha dobson et al

bellow, saul:seize the day

henderson the rain king

the adventures of augie march

berlin, isaiah:the hedgehog and the fox

three essays on liberty

vico and herder

(actually:all of him)

berlioz' memoirs

bespaloff, rachel:on the illiad

bishop, elizabeth:collected poems, prose, selected letters

blake, william preferrably in his own formats:

the illuminated blake from thames and hudson

borges, jorge luis:ficciones

dream tigers

seven nights(a lovelier book of criticism would be hard to imagine)

(all of him)

boswell's johnson augmented with the other accounts

brodsky, joseph:watermark

grief and reason

broch, hermann:the death of vergil

the sleepwalkers

broch's essay on kitsch

bronk, wm.:the collected poems

buechner:lenz, woyzeck, et al

bulgakov:the master and margarita

bunting, basil:the collected poems

byron, george gordon lord:don juan

selected letters

byron, robert:the road to oxiana

cabrera-infante:three trapped tigers

cage, john:silence

canetti, elias:crowds and power

calvino, italo:cosmicomics

if on a winters night a traveller

t zero

invisible cities et al

casanova's memoirs particular the venetian episodes bk 1

carson,anne:autobiography of red

eros, the bittersweet

carpentier, alejo:the lost steps

(one of the great landscapes of all time;

and one of the few great novels about music)

carroll, lewis:the annotated alice (ed. martin gardiner)

chatwin, bruce:in patagonia

the songlines

utz et al

de chazal, malcolm:sens plastique

cheever, john:o what a paradise it seems

the collected stories

chekhov every story every play every letter

cherry-garrard, apsley:the worst journey in the world

clampitt, amy:collected poems

clark, eleanor:rome and a villa

cioran, e.m.;the temptation to exist

cocteau, jean:les enfants terribles

colette:the pure and the impure

earthly paradise(ed.phelps)

cheri (she recorded the final scene quite beautifully)

connell, evan s:manuscript found in a bottle in carmel

conroy, frank:stoptime

constant, benjamin:adolphe

comptom- burnett, ivy:more women than men

cortazar, julio:hopscotch

the winners

blow-up and other stories

clough, arthur hugh:amours de voyage

croce, arlene:as good a dance critic as Edwin Denby

davenport,guy:taitlin!

eclogues

seven greeks

the geography of the imagination et al

daumal,rene:mt analogue

denby, edwin:collected dance criticism

diderot, denis:jacques the fatalist

rameau's nephew

the nun

dick, phillip k:ubik

dickens, charles:nicolas nickleby

great expectations

bleak house my favorite three

de lillo, don:white noise

libra

dinesen, isak:seven gothic tales, winter's tales, out of africa

dostoyevsky: all of him esp:the brothers karamazov

the demons

notes from the underground

duffy, brian:the world as I found it

elkins, james p.:the object stares back

eliade, mircea:the two and the one

cosmos and history

endo:the samurai

fargue, leon-paul

firbank, ronald:five novels

focillon, henri:the year one thousand

the art of the west

flaubert, including the correspondence

von frisch:the dancing bees

frye,northrop:fearful symmetry

frobenius, leo:african genesis

frost, robert:collected poems

fowles, john: the magus

the ebony tower

fuentes, carlos:where the air is clear

aura

gass, wm:on being blue

rilke

genet, jean:our lady of the flowers

the plays and the astonishing essay on rembrandt

gerhardie, william:futility

goethe:the fairytale from conversations of german refugees

the poetry

faust two

and all the rest

gilbert, jack:best living American poet?

gunn, thom:collected poems

grahame green eric ambler john le carre

graham, a.c.:poems from the late t'ang

hannah, barry:airships

hawkes, david(trans.);the ch'u t'zu or the songs of the south

heidegger:the essay on technology

the early greek thinkers

hesse, hermann:the glass bead game

e.t.a. hoffmann

hofstader, doughlas:godel escher bach

metamagical themes

I am a Strange Loop

et al

holderlin, friedrich:poems and fragments(trans hamburger)

holmes, richard:shelley, the pursuit

herbert, zbigniew:collected poems

george herbert

herr, michael:dispatches

hoffmannstahl, hugo von:The Tower; Andreas Fragment; Colors

hollinghurst, alan:the swimming pool library

the folding star

the line of beauty

hildesheimer, wolfgang:mozart

the icelandic sagas and the elder edda

ibsen:peer gynt

issa:a year of my life

hardy, thomas:selected poems

james hogg:the memoirs of a justified sinner

(this is the great novel of Calvinist antinomianism and

a template for a lot of bad behaviour in Evangelical circles)

hopkins, gerard manley

jacob, francois:the logic of life

the statue within

henry james:the europeans

the bostonians

the ambassadors

the golden bowl

the wings of a dove

letters essays criticism about travel books et al

randall jarrell:poetry and the age

pictures from an institution

johnson, ronald:arc

johnson, samuel:lives of the poets, preface to shakespeare, rasselas, et al

jones, david:in parenthesis

the anathemata

kafka:let me put in a plug for joachim neugroschel's superb translations

kapucynski, ryzard:the last emporer

the shah of shahs

the soccer war

imperium

kawabata, yasunuri:snow country

the master of go

the house of sleeping beauties

the palm of hand stories

keats,john:poems and letters

kerenyi, karl:the greek gods and the heroes of the greeks

athene, hermes et al

kierkegaard:either/or

the concept of anxiety et al

kincaid, jamaica:at the bottom of the river, talk stories et al

kleist, heinrich von:the stories and plays

de laclos, chodelos:les liasons dangereuses

lawrence, d.h.:the stories

the poems

laxness, haldor:independant people

laye, camara:the guardian of the king

leguizamma lima:paradiso

leopardi:opera morali

lessing, doris:the golden notebook

levi, primo:if this be man

the periodic table

other people's trades

(actually all of him)

levi strauss, claude:triste tropiques

the savage mind

the raw and the cooked

lichtenberg:the aphorisms

lichtheim, georg:collected essays

lightman,alan:einstein's dreams

lopate, phillip:against joie de vivre

lowes, john livingston:the road to xanadu

(an astonishing reconstruction of Choleridges' processes

from his literary sources)

luria, ar:the mind of the mnemonist

the man with the shattered mind

machado, antonio

mac donald:the golden key

lilith and phantastes

the princess and the goblins

(the great forebearer of the INKLINGS)

mack, maynard:alexander pope

mandelstam, nadezhda:hope against hope; hope abandoned;mozart and salieri

mandelstam, ossip:the criticism in particular the essay on Dante

(trans. sidney monas)the prose(Trans. Brown)

(the egyptian stamp!)

malaparte, curzio:kaputt

mann, thomas: lotte in weimar

dr.faustus

joseph and his brothers

matthews, harry:the sinking of the odradek station, tlooth,et al

mendelsohn, edward:early auden and late auden

mc elroy, joseph:plus

the smuggler's bible

merrill, james:the collected poems

metcalf, paul:apalache

melville:moby dick

billy budd

benito cereno

michaux, henri:selected writings(trans ellmann)

a barbarian in Asia

miserable miracle

moore, marianne :collected poems

collected prose

selected letters

moorehead, alan:the white nile

the blue nile

montale:the collected poems(I lean towards Arrowsmith--)

the butterfly of dinard

satura

montague, lady mary wortley:letters

moseley, nicholas:hopeful monsters

milosz, czelaw:the captive mind

bells in winter

milton, john:paradise lost

mishima, Yukio:the sailor who fell from grace with the sea

murasaki, lady:the tale of genji

(I flitter between the translations of waley, seidenstacker, tyler)

murdoch, iris: a severed head

under the net

nabokov:invitation to a beheading

the gift

the real life of sebastian knight

lolita

pale fire

the collected stories

gogol

the pushkin commentaries et al

naipaul vs:guerrillas

the house of mr. biswas

a bend in the river

the return of evita peron etc

nerval, gerard:aurelia et al

niezchte:the corpus

orwell:george:the essays et al

o' connor, flannery:collected stories

panofsky, erwin:perspective, studies in iconology et al

parra, nicanor:antipoems

pasolini:the indian journal

peake, mervyn:the gormenghast trilogy

peacock, thomas:the novels and music criticism

poe, edgar allan

ponge, francois:things

soap

polyanyi, michael:personal knowledge

pope, alexander

porchia, antonio:voices

potocki,count:manuscript found in saragossa

pound, ezra:confucius

powell, dawn:the golden pavillion

the letters

powers, richard:the goldbug variations

prokosh, frederick:the asiatics

proust as a lifetime avocation

and contre saint-beuve plus the correspondence and the

painter and tadie biographies, shattuck, et al

pushkin:eugene onegin in sir charles johnson's translation

and with nabokov's annotation

purdy, james:malcolm

radin, paul:african folk tales

the trickster

the road of life and death

raine, kathleen:collected poems

blake and tradition

read, herbert:the green child

renault, mary:funeral games

rexroth, kenneth:his various translations from the chinese and japanese

rosen, charles:the most pertinent and detailed musical analyst I know

ross, alex:the rest is noise(our best present-day critic)

roth, phillip:the zuckerman trilogy

portnoy's complaint

(actually a large portion of his work, as I think of it, with two or three

cataclysmic missteps, but hell!)

rothenberg, jerome:technicians of the sacred(in the original edition)

riding, laura:a progress of stories

the collected poems

and, as laura(riding)jackson:the telling

rumi I read in as many available versions as I find

rushkin:the king of the golden river and sesame and lilies,

the stones of venice

the praeterita

sacks, oliver:awakenings

the man who mistook his wife for a hat

seeing voices et al

salter, james:a sport and a pasttime

salzman, mark:iron and silk

lost in place

sksprsksprsksprsksprR2

seth, vikram:the golden gate

simon schama:citizens

landscape and memory

shattuck, roger:the banquet years and many luminous essays on such subjects as

stravinsky and michel tournier

shaw, bernard:the music criticism in addition to the big plays

shei shonagon: the pillowbook

spackman, wm.:an armful of warm girl

spark, muriel:the prime of miss jean brody

memento mori et al

stead, christina:the man who loved children

letty fox

stevens, wallace:the collected poems

stevenson, robert louis:the weir of hermiston

the new arabian nights

sewell, elizabeth:the orphic voice

strindberg:An occult diary

isaac singer:satan in goray

the collected short stories

jonathan spence:the question of hu,

the memory palace of matteo ricci

god's chinese son

sutherland, donald:on, romanticism

suzuki, dt:essays on zen buddhism

zen and japanese culture

tanizaki, juniro:the makioka sisters

seven japanese tales

the tale of the lord musahi

in praise of shadows et al

thackery, william makepeace;the rose and the ring(A children's book funnier

and eviller than lemony snicket)

thomson, vergil:the music criticism

the thousand and one nights

tolstoi: childhood boyhood and youth

the cossacks

the stories and fables and plays all of Tolstoi

(I needs must admit that I love him above all others but two,

whose names I will leave you to guess)

tournier, michel:the ogre

gemini

friday et al

traherne, thomas:the centuries

trevor-roper, hugh:the last days of hitler(as he prepares to commit suicide

to Wagner, the servants play American jazz)

turgenev, including the correspondence

turner, frederick:the new world

tutuola,amos:my life in the bush of ghosts

twain,mark:life on the missippipi

letters from the earth

letter to king leopold

valery:poems in the rough

the dialogues

analecta

vallejo, cesar:poemos humanos

vidal, gore:myra and myron breckenridge

julian

robert walser

woolf, virginia:the waves is my favorite, and I have read a good part of aloud;

to the lighthouse and mrs dalloway,

and then all the novels, essays, diaries, and correspondence

wordsworth, william: the prelude

wright, austin:the morley mythology

white, edmund:caracole

forgetting elena et al

he repeats himself a great deal yet remains indispensable

wheelwright, phillip:his criticism and his translation of heraclitus

yates, frances:one of the boldest authors in Renaissance studies and its related field of hermetics and the occult; "the art of memory" is the book to begin with

yeats, with some pleading for the plays and a

rembrance of A VISION with unmitigated dread

yourcenar, marguerite:hadrian's Memoirs

Mishima

The Dark Brain of Piranesi

ON MARTIN LUTHER KING'S BIRTHDAY

2010-01-18T11:49:00.000-08:00

Today Il remember those rare moments
when justice became more beautiful than beauty. When Nelson
Mandela was freed. When Apartheid ended. The Fall of the Berlin Wall.
In each instance it was as if a discordant note had resolved, as
if we had moved into the realm of the natural--the just--
from the un-natural. And that the resolution of justice, real
justice, also relieved us of our burden of helpless complicity.
Just for a moment. Just for a moment the apprehension
of what a just world might be like. Just for
a moment the recognition that if an injustice is done you,
it done to me. Just for a moment, without fear or irony,
the hope for a transfigured world .

THE RED WHORLER

2010-01-17T09:28:00.000-08:00

A PAINTED BIRD FOR JUAN GRIS

2010-01-15T11:50:00.001-08:00

BLUE AMPHORA

2010-01-14T16:23:00.000-08:00

A small relief-painting. The two collages
which follow it--from 1998--are
called "Nightlight" and "Volleyball."

CORAL GARDENS

2010-01-12T05:33:00.000-08:00

Unless this painting appears as the most
vivid grass-green, it is not accurate; and
there are always in reproducing a
screen-painting many cherished details
which regrettably evaporate. This
particular painting features an interplay
between fishes I have scissored out
and those I have painted. The brushstroke
is like moss. The Coral Garden motif
comes from a time when I was in love with a big blonde;
we seemed to be swimming in a celestial element
and diving through heavenly grottos.

Periodically, I will do a Coral
Garden in Blonde remembrance.
Four-layered painting, the two
in-most elaborately shaped.

PALESTINE

2010-01-09T19:11:00.001-08:00

Study for a stage set;

an eleven sided painting

TWO FLYING FIGURES

2010-01-09T14:50:00.000-08:00

Halfway between
Nike of Samothrace and a
Totem;the final photo,
on a black backdrop,
gives another take
on the color scheme;
both Flying Figures
are interwoven with
colors which, alas,
do not reproduce

PIECES OF A GREY DAY

2010-01-08T14:32:00.001-08:00

A small relief painting made of
twelve cut and painted pieces,
it casts highly unusual shadows

ARCHAEOLOGY

2010-01-07T18:24:00.000-08:00

eleven small panels of aluminum screening
painted and sewn together

A STALACTITE

2010-01-06T08:01:00.000-08:00

"A stalactite points
downwards,
a stalagmite points
upwards."
--Bill Bryson;
this is made of nine
folded components, each
a different size and painted
on both faces, inside and out;
I think of it as a synthesis of a
stalactite with a bat
as both hang upsidedown. In the first
picture is a hornet's nest which I
have hanging from my rafters.

THE FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE MOON

2010-01-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

Interrupting what may be the most euridite sex scene in literature--which appears in The Dawn of Erewhon, the final story in Guy Davenport's 1974 collection, TAITLIN---is a translation of Jules LaForgues' Climat, faune, et faune
de la lune. LaForgue(1860-1887) is a wonderful poet, who has never quite gotten into English despite the advocacy of poet-critics as different as T.S. Eliot and Randall Jarrell. French friends
can not find a complete edition of his works in Paris.How could such a wonderful writer be ignored? Well, we ignored Monteverdi for three hundred and fifty years--it can be managed. The poem begins,

"I imagine in the evening cool
Your flora, fauna, and lunar weather,
Moon of the Immaculate Conception,
I, louse on a roof in Babylon.
Deep in your dim and halting nebula
I offer what I spin from my boredom
O barge floating upon nothing across
The night, along the dark's quays. desolate..."

What follows is in the realm of the taxonomic-fantastical,
enumerating mermaids licking their own tails, and
reindeers with cut-glass antlers, and polar
bears "grave as the Magi before the honey
Of divine silence..."floating hippoppotami,
luminous dugongs, lilies with hysterical smiles,
mushrooms like palaces...it is proto-surrealist,
true, but its splendor is its own,
and I have never re-read it without wondering
what it LOOKS like, Odilon Redon? Blake?
Windsor Mc Cay's LITTLE NEMO?
Joseph Cornell knew this poem,
I am sure, and half-intentionally illustrated it.
That,and Nerval's AURELIA. The part of French symbolist
literature on the cusp of the occult.

This poem has followed me ever since I read it, so much so
that I have half-intentionally illustrated it myself a
number of times. It coincides with the absurd
but persistant notion that the moon must
be sacrificially placated, which I half- believe,
somewhat on the lines of those statistics which testify to an
increase in suicides and murders during a full moon.
I try to suppress this Pierrot-Lunaire-ish, paleo-psychotic self
as much as I can but I have done a number
of versions of the Moon Poem/ Painting even so.Avatism is
stronger than rationality. Plus those dark blues
always draw me in..
There is a variant painted on a large window;
it was begun by shooting flat black krylon enamel
through lace, and then drawn upon,there have been drawings,
screen paintings, and even a collage
made of wallpaper on this theme over the years.
This is what happens when a poem resonates.

The latest of these was bought the other day by a friend
who is a country-western singer-songwriter. She does
hospice work, and described to me how she calmed a
twitchy, fearful, dying person by singing to them
a last lullaby. Such a person wanted something of mine.

The La Forgue poem ends,
"O stillness, stillness, to whom shall we give
The lunar crown? What lesson can be learned
From this quiet? Everything has kept
Faith with the same negation of being
Day after Day, saying nothing at all
or asking why...
"You will not get to the end of it sane
but with that idiotic smile of the of the marble Greeks,
For all this will not stand in a mirror
Dead. And you forget as you turn away.

We will return and press the question, Ah!
when we have understood the coral isle."

NEREID

2010-01-04T15:34:00.000-08:00

A small relief painting, made of five painted layers,

each with different imagery and a different shape. The Nereids

were the original Mermaids, the daughters of Poseidon, seen

in the current and the wave. One, Leto, lends the ship-

wrecked Odysseus her scarf lest he drown and instructs

him to return it to the sea when he arrives at shore.

I don't think mine is quite so serious.

KNOCKING ON SATAN'S DOOR

2010-01-04T05:45:00.001-08:00

THE BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR:ON DANTE

2010-01-03T10:23:00.000-08:00

(this is an excerpt from an essay by the poet Howard Nemerov called "THE
DREAM OF DANTE" and appeared c. 1980 in Prose magazine)
...it happened that I took children to a night game. But Dante's poem, for anyone
working with it closely, has the power of infecting a good many thoughts about things
which would seem quite remote from it, so that when...I saw on the electric scoreboard
a bright red Cardinal swooping up and down and across I thought:O dear, thats
the trouble, isn't it?...that Cross in the Heavens of Mars, the imperial Eagle
in the heaven of Jove, the ladder in the heaven of Saturn, all made up of
spirits who are lights (after you get past Justinian in Canto vii they no longer
have human faces)--we can actually do, or show these things. That scoreboard
could as readily flash out to us glowing crosses and ladders and eagles as it can that
cardinal or pitcher pouring golden beer...and what a vulgar production it is!
Surely poesy rules in the realm of the impossible because it is the impossible;
realization is ruin.

But a few nights after, taking the children to the Fourth of July fireworks and
seeing those wonderful sprayings and flowerings, those glowing showers of
embers slowly going out...I thought with a kind of stupid relief, Ah well, that's
more like it, the spirits on the cross and ladder come and go swiftly, like the
fireworks brilliant with heat as well as light, and with the continuousness of a musical
phrase, legato...only they don't go out.

...And, still thinking on cross and eagle and Jacob's ladder, I remembered two
quotations on this matter, though written three centuries apart.

"What a beautiful hemisphere the stars would have made if they had
been placed in rank and order;if they had all been disposed of in regular
figures...all finished and made up into one fair great composition
according to the rules of art and symmetry."
That is Bishop Burnet, as if he were introducing the eighteenth century.
But here is how the same thought occurs to George Santayana, introducing
he twentieth,
"imagine the stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their
astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in geometric
patterns, say in a Latin cross with the words In Hoc Signo Vinces in
a scroll around them. The beauty of the illumination would be perhaps
increased, and its import, practical, religious, cosmic, would surely be a little plainer,
but where would be the subliminity of the spectacle? Irretrievably lost.' ''

VEILS OF PALE SHADES

2010-01-02T16:26:00.000-08:00

Study for a stage set for Pelleas et Melisande, Tristan und Isolde, Ariane et Barbe-bleu, Peter Grimes,

and Elektra.

WAVE TOWER

2010-01-02T09:08:00.001-08:00

study using five cut out tiers, painted on both facing

and verso sides of each tier,

with imagery which interlocks with its corresponding

tiers above or below. How to make a structure out

of a Leonardo drawing of the Deluge. The two photos at the

beginning show it "Xray'd", almost, with the Flash

attachment of my camera.

A PICTOGRAPHIC TOWER

2010-01-02T06:21:00.000-08:00

A study in translating the imagery of the pictogram drawing (1))

first to two layers (2,3) and then to two structures,

(. 5,6,7,8 )the inner structure circular, the outer a modified figure eight.

Both inner structure and outer structure have corresponding imagery

painted--or in this case, inked--upon them, on both the facing

and verso sides.

RED WAVE WALKING

2010-01-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

CLOUD TOWN

2010-01-01T06:32:00.001-08:00

Another model of a space to be walked through; I think of it as Cloud-Plaza,

where a great deal of de-materialization and re-materialization takes place,

also space as an architected dance. The shapes are on their way to becoming

pictograms, but I halted them before they became too alphabetical.

From some vantages the "pathways" are self-evident, so that it

may be walked through without feeling mazed in. That is, presently supposing that you are no more than a few inches tall. From some angles

it is meant to look like a Braque from 1911.There are twenty six component pieces, so there is something alphabetical about it.

ON NEW YEAR'S DAY

2010-01-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life:
Such a Way as gives us breath:
Such a Truth as ends all strife,
Such a Life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength:
Such a Light as shows a feast:
Such a Feast as mends in length,
Such a Strength, as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart,
Such a joy as none can move:
Such a Love, as none can part:
Such a Heart, as joys in love.
( George Herbert 1593--1633 )

FIRE RIDER

2009-12-31T17:10:00.001-08:00

This is the first of a series of models and small pieces which I have done over the last

month and which I will be posting on a daily basis throughout January 2010.

Some are sketches for public arts projects, such as this "Fire Rider" which I

would like to actuate on a scale in which it might be walked through. Others

are one-offs; I did a number of them. It felt, towards winter solstice,

as if I was into the manufactory of sylphs and salamanders out of Faust Prt 2

or the Rape of the Lock, so many odd shapes hung in my kitchen . This is where

I tend to work on cold days when my main studio room gets drafty. One night

I worked late, later than I normally permit myself, and as the kettle boiled

and my old dog was underfoot and the radio was playing the Snowflake

chorus from the Nutcracker, I felt assisted by the djinn.

THE TEAR

2009-12-31T16:06:00.000-08:00

There, faraway, on a starless night
I saw a pinpoint diamond light
and lacking otherwise a place to go
travelled towards it (unless it drew
me thither)as I came closer to
this point in empty space I saw
it was no diamond,or a star
but single tear suspended there

And as I watched, it seemed to grow
much larger and I felt it draw
me within; I was inside a clear
coursing crystalline solution where
the flux of solids was laid bare

Yet racing in these floods or seas
I could discern the shapes of trees
and a much trafflicked avenue,
ships, books, and battles--also you
who first appeared ,and then withdrew

I saw all this and yet outside
another I remained and watched
in joy and sorrow, mystified
that a tear contained so much.
(1988)

POST CARD:CLIFF HOUSE 3

2009-12-10T05:32:00.000-08:00

SCHIZO-CHESS

2009-12-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

You play against yourself. The skill lies in not knowing what your opponent is thinking.

ASPHASIA IN TASMANIA

2009-12-09T19:16:00.000-08:00

ASPHASIA IN TASMANIA
By Insomnia, Gray, and Ashen
The Old Man Anchovies
Cosi fan Sposi
The Spoils of Portnoy
For Whom The Knell Tells
Four Croquettes
Flann's Last Krapp
War and Punishment
All the King's Mice
Amahl and the Mice Visitors
The Age of Mirth
The Joy of French Sex
The Manuscript Found in A Cask of Amontillado
Azure Like It
The Hedda Edda
Desire under The Streetcar
Some Call Lust Circumstance
Slouching Towards Louche Stances
The Horseman on the Hot Tin Roof
The Matchgirl of Notre Dame
The Trilogy Quartet(I'm missing a volume)
From Here to Kon Tiki
The Ballad of the Harelip Cafe
Death Comes for the Handpuppet
The Tussymussy of Hissyfit
The Carpaccio of Caravaggio
The Asparagus Patient
The Lotos Eaters' Sutra
The Denunciad
The Red Badge Comes To Yellow Sky
Tender is the Part
Ebenezer Marionette
The Cacaphonous Sarcophagous

ACHROMATIC WORLDS

2009-12-09T18:54:00.000-08:00

As a child, Glenn Gould was nauseated by the saturated colors of Disney's Fantasia.He longed for a black and white movie of sailors crossing northern seas or a darkroom to escape the teaming sea of idioretinal colors which Fantasia induced.
`To dream without sleep soon becomes a headache.
A character in Randall Jarrell's PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTE is colorblind, butnever-the-less finds(as he tells the narrator) rainy days more colorful than sunny ones.He is different from a real life case, found in Dr. Sacks, of a painter who lost all color sense in an accident. The world looks dead to him, skin tones seem cadaverous,and only in his sense of smell can he find some residual glory.
A character in Calvino--being Calvino, a being rather than a human being---plays a continuous hide and seek with his beloved in an achromatic world of light and shadows, but then the world exfoliates into the spectrum (he makes it sound like 'Toon Town), and he loses her in technicolor, foreverafter an elusive prescence never to be found.
The colorized black and white feature movie looks more drained of color, more oddlyand arbitrarily faded, than the black and white original, dyed in the imagination's richest hues.
And there is a category of painter who paints or draws in gray scales only but who is actually "colorful",while others are not, just as there are blacks which are "really" crimson and others which are "really" blues.
Is it the act of translation between black and white and color that stimulates this?Barnett Newman used to say that whenever a painter was starting a new chapter or phase of his work he fell back on black, in which everything else was implicit.
If black were to become a musical instrument, it would be a grand piano.

MIGRAINES

2009-12-07T10:19:00.000-08:00

That distinguished list of literary figures who also have suffered from them--Hildegard von Bingen, and Auden,Joan Didion,and Oliver Sacks--is no more comfort while one is suffering from them than is the also very distinguished list of those who underwent black depressions. One can compare symptoms:mine happen approximately every ten days, which is to be preferred to Joan Didion's every three or four days. Yes, there is the pre-migraine aura, which begins with lightheadedness and a certain sense of visual inflation,as if the Potempkin village or Hollywood stage- set aspect of reality is distorting, swelling in the middle and curling at the edges. For me, it is as if the visual world has grown too heavy for my eyeballs to continue to process.

The aura is a sure signal for the second phase, what I call"full-body neuralgia" except it is less a matter of nerves than the sense that my skeletal structure is at odds with the muscular structure at the borderlines of the integuments:I feel stretched and compacted. There is an argument between the mind and the body which is called the neck.I can't get the headquarters to balance properly on their pylons, stretched and compacted as I am.This is the time for retreat into a darkened room.

I tend to visualize a great deal--I have learned how to imagine a painting while driving, for example--but the migraine hallucination is different; all the spatial and coloristic aspects of normal looking, and painterly devices of visualization, and that zone between conciousness, sleep, and dream beneath the eyelids,is thoroughly out of control. If the migraine is mild I am in the sea of colors, which is much like the more abstract episodes of Disney's Fantasia, or Kandinsky in a goofy, theosophical mood. If the migraine is severe the sea becomes stormy, lightning-streaked, spaces opening upon spaces full of baroque chiaroscuro, crucifixions or shipwrecks or mass migrations;and if this is the case, I feel deeply but helplessly connected to the grief of the world.

Since I am,like every member of my devout and nutty family, prone to putting a religious spin on everything--the temperature!the teapot!--I am also skeptical of the efficacy of my saintly headaches. The literature is rife with such interpretations,though, of Heine as well as Hildegarde of Bingen finding a sense of religious communion via their physical pain. Dostoyevsky speaks of a conciliatory quality of peace preceding an epileptic seizure. We try to make use of what happens to us, and find a purpose to it. During a migraine I howl a great deal to God, but I doubt if a theology could be constructed of it,or if much might be derived from it if it could.

I watch my imagery intently, if involuntarily.A dream coalesces on the retina in one way, the waking imagination pictures something in another.During a migraine,it seems to be that the equipose which imagery rests upon has been upset.It is humbling to discover that one holds in common that which one held of oneself most private and distinct, but I recognize migrainous imagery in an number of contemporary painters, which I thought peculiarly my own.

Some of these are basic to the structure of our retinal cones. When I was little I used to rub my eyes to see the pictures contained in them. They looked like architectural floorplans which were also hexagonal snowflakes in crimson and gold. (This is probably why I needed glasses early on.)These are like migrainous imagery at one phase, before it mounts into a blizzard with geometry at its interstices.

Hildegard saw these as angelic choirs. Sacks points out a typical "fortress"structure in one of his essays on the subject--one of the staples, apparently,is a tower with crenellations--but to me St. Hildegard's images look much like W.S. Bentley's snowflake pictures, particularly the later plates, which depict "deformed" or partially melted snow-flakes.

This might be enjoyable were the cranial fissures not lite by strobes.Indeed,I feel my skull in exact detail far, far to much, the shape of the skull where the noses attaches its vividly outlined in fluorescents, the sinus passages with an exact pressure- serrated edge. All those small veins beneath the skin get topographically specific; dental work from years ago is concretely recalled. I almost said I wouldn't wish them on Hitler, but he had them, and envisioned the Third Reich.

Dietary protocols, whereby a great deal of pleasure is officially sacrificed,governed me for a while as I attempted to elude the migraine. Dark chocolate,meats using sulfates--such as pepperoni and salami--black olives, capers, coffee--also confusingly prescribed for migraines as well as being on the list of migraine-incubators--wine, cheese. A friend has become macrobiotic. I did that for a while. I seem to remember having fewer migraines but being too listless to care.

Most accounts of the migraines conclude with a resolute tone, which is how one feels when they are over. I feel grateful due to the fact that it is done. The world dread has been surmounted, until it accumulates again. The sense of being cleansed is religious to the religious and functional to the agnostic. My metaphysic tends to run like a fever, from high to low;the question is how to be steadfast.

FROM THE BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR(4)

2009-11-22T14:47:00.000-08:00

Zohar 1 15a;
In the beginning--When the will of the King
began to take effect, he engraved signs into the heavenly sphere.
Within the most hidden recess a dark flame issued from the
mystery of AIN SOF...neither white or black, neither red
or green, of no color whatever. Only after this flame began
to assume size and dimension, did it produce radiant color.
From the innermost center of the flames sprang forth a
well out of which colors issued and spread upon everything
beneath...It could not be recognized at all until a
hidden supernal point shone forth...the primal center
is the inmost light, of translucence, subtlety, and
purity beyond comprehension...Beyond this point
nothing can be known. Therefore it is called
Raishett, beginning...
(trans. Scholem)

POSTCARD:CLIFF HOUSE 2

2009-11-21T05:47:00.000-08:00

STUPID LUDWIG

2009-11-20T18:20:00.000-08:00

"If a blind man were to ask me "Have you got two hands?"
I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have
any doubt of it, then I don't know why I would trust my
eyes. For why shouldn't I trust my eyes by looking to
find out whether I see my two hands? What is to be tested
by what? (Who decides what stands fast?)
"And what does it mean to say that such and such stands
fast?" ( Wittgenstein:On Certainty)

MY MORNING FOR BOUVARD ET PECUCHET

2009-11-20T16:53:00.000-08:00

Advertisement boredom

Ad Hominem Boredom:You are who I categorize you as being,and fall into that category by the name I apply to you, individually or by demographic group,because its good for my numbers

Anthemic boredom:getting misty-eyed whilst pledging allegiance to the crowd one is standing amongst; "uplift"; "Amazing Grace" sung in sports arenas; the general view of human relationships as portrayed on television; the transcendence of barbarity or death via sentimental denial.

Antinomian boredom, or the marital indiscretions of the Elect

Anime boredom:the appalling unsurprise of discovering oneself to be a robot

Apocalypse boredom:there are those for whom a certain sense of anticlimax attends the subject

Avant-garde boredom:being shocking with the same shocking things as last year; being shocked by these things.

Boredom of the Blurb:reading them, one thinks:were this so, the dead would be raised

Boredom of Hyperbole: Whosoever opens a dry-cleaning business is a "visionary". Every business plan is a Vision. The search for capital is a Vision Quest.

Boredom of the Machine: In Science Fiction the Robots invade. In reality, we are subjected to the POS system, the computer screen, the television, and the automobile. As the late Guy Davenport put it, we have automobiles for bodies and televisions for minds. The boredom of the machine conceals the unequal struggle not to be dominated by our machinery. The degree to which this struggle is unequal can be calibrated by the number of people who worship their automobile and believe that the characters of a sitcom are their boon companions.

Buddy Movie Boredom

Capitalist boredom:who do you exclude from your gated community? and which of your possessions loves you best?

Communist boredom:the same as Evangelical boredom, with a tractor instead of an automobile as the Golden Calf

Corporate Boredom:What is good for us is good for you and here is the Anthem to prove it.

Country Music Boredom

Determinant Discourse Boredom:a disability of ad hominem boredom, corporate boredom, capitalist boredom, and communist boredom

Futurological boredom:an accurate weather forecast would encourage guarded trust

Interior Decorator Boredom:intense concentration on the subject of finials

Jane Austen or Booker Prize Boredom:you're a member of our civilized club armpatch

Prayer Breakfast Boredom

Pundit Boredom

Pornography boredom:the visual dominance of a tactile medium

Public Speech boredom:each additional moment proportionately lessens its value

Metalinguistic boredom:or the inability not to speak jargon following ndoctrination

Metanovelistic boredom: time invested to the point of indoctrination due to length of text

Minimalist boredom:folding that futon just so

memoir boredom

Nobel Laureate Boredom:what I come to say when I think, "the World will listen now."

Networking Boredom and its cyber-adjunct, Social-media networking boredom

Orgy Boredom:somehow it's always the dwarf who is the master of ceremonies

Rebellious denim boredom

Science Fiction Apparatus Boredom

Serial killer boredom

Small vegetable and free-range chicken boredom

Spectacle Boredom: car chase scenes; helicopter explosions;championship wrestling, military parades and religious processions

Spy Boredom:unhappy spies, conflicted spies, spies with amnesia but gymnastic skills

Solipsistic boredom:the belief that perception is factual because it's my/ your own

Superhero boredom:always some erotic glitch

Triumphalist Boredom:Albert Speer designs the set for the Star Wars Ballet to the Alpine Symphony at Disneyland Nurenburg

Titanic Theme Liebestod Boredom:the beauty of those vows of love beyond the grave is in how little wear they entail

Traffic Boredom

Waiting Room Boredom

Water Filter Sales Pitch Boredom;or Vacuum-cleaner feature indoctrination boredom

Wholesome boredom:or conception without lose of virginity as a means of reproduction for the general public

Unsolicited boredom :the only kind

POSTCARD:THE ANAMORPHIC SKULL

2009-11-20T15:43:00.000-08:00

from

Holbein's

THE

AMBASSADORS

in the National

Gallery in London;

I have a copy on my desk.

IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS

2009-11-20T10:14:00.000-08:00

IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS
Talking years ago with the late Jessica Mitford on her bungalow porch in Oakland, I discovered that she,too, thought the motel journey in Nabokov's Lolita took half the book. It takes seven pages. This is due to Nabokov's magicianly art, which gives narrative heft in the form of memorable details keenly observed and put. W.G.Sebald's spiralling tangents have a similiar effect. And here is Tanizaki's IN PRAISE OF SHADOWS, merely twenty five pages long. I had thought it the length of a short novel. This is thanks to its implications.
It is a study in contrast between the old ways of Japan and their rapid transformation--or destruction--because of westernization. Shiny surfaces,electrical lights and their garish relationship to the traditional Shoji screen,the glaring white porcelain western toilet, the electrical fan, all are subjects of Tanizaki's eloquent grumbling.He misses the patinas of darkness, the way shadows overlap and deepen in niches,textures polished by handling but otherwise unadorned. Japanese buildings seem like umbrellas to him, their roofs spread out beyond their walls to protect their inhabitants from rain; western buildings seemed to him like towers with caps. All around--for he is an inveterate nostalgist--he sees mindfulness sacrificed to efficiency, textures to legibility, and the resonance of shadows banished from brightly impersonal hospital-like modern dwellings.
The spell of Tanizaki' is such that on finishing his essay one wants immediately to turn off the lights.This is where it is newly relevant.I remember a snowfall of five years ago which put out our electricity for almost a week. We immediately entered an older rhythm, a candlelite rhythm, and woke at the crack of dawn. When the electricity came back on ,it was with a great deal of noise. The television was like the announcement of a perpetual catastrophe. The look of a light-flooded room at midnight seemed suddenly un-natural. The items of nostalgia for Tanizaki may be specifically Japanese but the sensation is universal. It is nostalgia for nature.
That emptiness, the abscence of technology, the prescence of shadows or darkness ,might become the ne plus ultra of luxury is something Tanizaki implies throughout.If only the rich can afford NOT to have cell phones, he is right, of course. And near-emptiness has already proven to be a commodity over the last forty years:think of the prices a Mondrian, a Rothko, an early Brice Marden or a Yves Klein monochrome, a Robert Ryman white painting--not to mention a Malevitch!--command. The larger the population,greater the premium on emptiness.
Darkness, likewise, becomes a matter of inverse de luxe in Tanizaki, finding its ultimate expression in the ever-dark alcove of a windowless room through which falls, never-the-less,the faintest tinge of light through its walls of rice paper. This brings to mind James Turrell's beautiful early installations, literally large rectangular holes in the walls, faintly lit themselves by very indirect illumination. Turrell had seemingly found the exact degree of dimness at which the human retina starts to scintillate, for this wall-space seemed both deeper than it was, and visually active, active with the apparition of something nebulous nearly but never to take form.It recalled Proust's phrase, "the kaleidoscope of darkness".
Troy Brauntuch's paintings, which are given wide currency right now, do this differently.They are representations of, say, a stack of shirts depicted as under a light so dim as to be near darkness.The eye adjusts accordingly, in stages in viewing a Brauntuch...as it does in life.What he offers us is the great luxury of being able to reach for the subject matter when almost everything else grabs at us. The problem of darkness is converted to the pleasure of re-searching it.

Shadows, too, are increasingly present in our art,after having been almost entirely banished from the hard bright art of the 'sixties.Virtuoso shadowcasters could be nominated from a number of approaches, hugely different, the celestial mechanics of an Eliasson casting shadows of a different genre from the shadows cast by the trellised structures of Christina Iglesias.Some of the best, and least known,work of Andy Warhol is his shadow-paintings;his shadows slice the field of the canvas much like the anamorphic death's head in Holbein'sAmbassadors does, and for similiar reasons. Warhol's shadow is a reminder he must die and that he still remains; it is an integral part of making something fleeting permanent----more permanent than one's own fleeting self.

Perhaps we, the public, will become connoiseurs of shadows, too, fleeing neon glare for retinal quietude. The greatest rebellion in a culture which demands more efficiency is to grow slower. The antidote to hyper-information is silence. The nuances sacrificed for impact take a life of their own. Tanizaki 's essay, meanwhile, also reminds us that our interest in the fleeting, the immaterial, the shadowy, the near-minimal,the pregnantly empty, and voidness,began not with phenomenology, or its adjunct, minimalism, but in the concious poverty of Zen Buddhism, and the generative emptiness of the Tao.

(painting by Troy Brauntuch)

A BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (3)

2009-11-11T15:50:00.000-08:00

"...I am aware of something in myself, like light
dancing before my soul, and if it could be brought
out with perfect steadiness, it would surely be
life eternal. It hides and then again it shows.
It comes like a thief, as if it would steal everything
from the soul. But since it shows itself and draws
attention, it must want to allure the soul, and
make the soul follow it, to rob the soul of itself."
(Meister Eckhardt quoting Saint Augustine)

"God is the light of the heavens and earth.
The likeness of His Light is as a niche
where a lamp burns--
the lamp in a glass and the glass, as it were,
a star of brilliance.
The lamp is kindled from a blessed Tree
an Olive neither of the east or of the west
the oil of which is almost incandescent by itself
without the touch of fire, Light upon Light.
God guides to His Light whom He will."
(Qur'an:Surah 24:35)

POSTCARD:CLIFF HOUSE

2009-11-11T07:23:00.000-08:00

THREE BLUE POEMS

2009-11-08T12:00:00.000-08:00

....the more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed,
till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element
too strong for life, and that flamy brilliance of blue
stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or
silky membrane showed the weight it held in sags.
Saul Bellow:from the Adventures
of Augie March

...and Bluebeard's Tower above the coral reefs,
the magic mousetrap closing on all points of the compass,
capping like petrified surf the furious azure of the bay,
where there is no dust and life is like a lemon-leaf,
a green piece of tough translucent parchment,
where the crimson, the copper, and the Chinese
vermillion of the poincianas
set fire to the masonry and turquoise blues refute the clock...
Marianne Moore:from
"People's Surroundings"

Turn blue on fast and it becomes purple; turn
purple on fast and it becomes black. Slow down
blue to get grey. Slow down grey to get white.
Blue is half-way between white and black; fulcrum
of light, hinge of darkness.
Malcolm de Chazal:from Sens Plastique

DREAMS OF STAIRS

2009-11-05T05:32:00.000-08:00

Should you be able to negotiate the outer walls of the tower
which have fallen haphazardly where they were pulled down and after
generations are overgrown, resembling the quarry which they
came from,
you would first traverse the outercourt, its paving stones
now split with bramble, thorns,
and then the chapel,
its ecclestiascal character preserved somehow,
though the famous stained glass windows
were shattered by catapaults
and such stones as the invaders --their victory complete--
could throw.
Finally you would come to the Keep,
its spiral stairs ruined, too,
difficult to climb in the dark,
and should you ascend
find the abscence of illumination seemingly final,
though thickening with each step,
compelling you to touch each step,
orienting yourself via the wall.
The stone is cold and cracked,
sometimes damp,
sometimes covered with moss or rough herbs
which you imagine--though it is impossible to perceive--
as albino.
As if it is a well you descend
rather than stairs you climb.
Your problems, moreover, multiply in this ascent
due to the uneven-ness of the steps, some wide and flat
some broken off so that your feeling hand
touches empty space, a drop, before discovering
the narrow margin you might rest upon
in order to continue
a necessity now as
much like a childhood dream
quite forgotten until the event
proves it premonitional
the steps behind have begun to disappear,
quite soundlessly at first,
but proven empirically true by your attempt to back track,
a wafture of cold air
such as is felt from a gorge of unprecedented depth
touching your face,
a pebble falling then
as if to illustrate that is is an empy space
it falls to
by making no sound for
five six seven heartbeats
before it hits the floor.
You have no time to exclaim
as the ledge on which you balance
begins to evaporate
and now your climb is a matter of haste
instinctual self-preservation granting at last
dim sight of a ladder at the parapet
barely nailed together,
a rung wrenched by your hand,
yet your sole means of escape.
Climbing with more agility
than you have shown in years,
you hoist yourself up
and notice the Castle Keep some great distance below,
half-disguised by cloud,
and yourself parallel to some faint star.

THE BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (2)

2009-11-04T04:26:00.000-08:00

LEONARDO:

The air is full of infinite, straight, radiant lines crossing without ever entering
the path of one another, and they represent for each object the true form of
its cause.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS:

A course in mathematics would not be wasted on a poet, or a reader of poetry,
if he remembers no more from it than the geometrical principle of the
intersection of loci:from all angles lines converging and crossing establish
points. He might carry it further and say that in his imagination apprehension
perforates at places, through to understanding--as white is at the intersection of
blue and green and yellow and red. It is this white light that is the background
of all good work-- (from Williams' essay on Marianne Moore)

GUY DAVENPORT

It is...electrochemical energy in brain cells derived from photosynthetic sugar
in vegetables whereby we can see a star at all, and the fire of the star which
we call the sun thus arranged that it could be seen and thought of by the
nourishing brain. Is that system closed? Did the sun grow the tree that
made the paper that you are holding, and in the ink on it, so that it can read
this book with your eyes?

(from Davenport's essay on the poet Ronald Johnson)

AGNES MARTIN:

PAUL KLEE:WHITE IN WHITE

2009-11-03T15:26:00.000-08:00

DREAM
I find
my house empty
Gone
All the wine

The river
diverted
Stolen
my naked joy

Eradicated
the epitaph
White
in white.
(trans. Anselm Hollo)

JOE MANGRUM

2009-11-03T10:22:00.000-08:00

Watching the Tibetan monks meticulously construct a mandala made of powder of malachite, granulated lapis lazuli,topaz ,and other rare gems and minerals was an education.The technique involved spooning these powdered gemstones into a horn-shaped receptacle with a narrow spout from which these ingredients fell grain by grain. This naturally was done to the recitation of sutras.

The mandala they were constructing from particles of sand was the Kalachakra mandala. To briefly synopsize its iconography would require starting from the center with Kalachakra, multi-armed,and his consort deity, Vishvamata, the eight female deities surrounding them, copulating deities in the second enclosure--the males with three heads and six arms-- and so forth down through the fifth and outermost level.An inventory of the subsidiary deities gyrating in their own wheel of enlightenment or their own mandorla would take a page.

I went to view the monks--who were performing this ritual at the Museum of Natural History in 1988--a number of times,which was possible as it took two months to construct.On one such visit I spied someone among the novice monks who I had last seen a decade before shooting up with one of Warhol's lesser superstars. But I was not present when the mandala was taken to a pier, and there with ritual prayers dispersed into the river.

A Process such as this as this may seem remote from the concerns of a contemporary artist but appears to be at the root of Joe Mangrum's work. He has been making mandalas with his own toys and with his own methods since the mid-nineties. The word "toys" is accurate, as these include plastic soldiers and jungle animals. He has also used bullets,and compact disks.Also, in his more perishable altars, the petals of flowers such as Jane Magnolias, Birds of Paradise, or Heliconias from New Zealand.Stupa-like forms uphold these objects as well as sea-shells,twigs,twine, crepe banners, prayer flags, etcetera. Symmetry anchors this profusion. Somewhat.

His basic formats are not really western but the grids from which the Hindu forms are extrapolated. This is one of the few times that they have been used successfully by a western artist that I know.(The other instances,paradoxically,are in ' minimalists' generations and continents apart, in Malevitch, Ad Reinhart,Sol Lewitt, and by remotest retinal suggestion Agnes Martin.)

There are altars for ecological causes, against war, and for world peace. I don't regard their idealism as stupid, but as a dire need.

Lately, Mangrum has been making sand-paintings throughout Manhattan,twenty-two at last count.The colors are idioretinal, as in a Huichole yarn painting, or a Van Gogh, the forms wheelswithin wheels rather than mandalas.They share the quality of construction via reiterated prayer with his earlier work. He takes the altar-making process to the street.It's a blessing.

SCISSORING:MARK FOX AND CHRIS NATROP

2009-11-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

Somewhere between the flat and the crooked is the scissored,somewhere between drawing and sculpture,a step that more or less skips painting. The material is paper, cardboard, mylar aspiring to the condition of lace, string,twine,or rope which can be straight , or curved,or knotted and tangled. Scissored imagery often uses the symmetry of the fold- and- cut process and then slices it, crumples it or tears it into a thousand pieces and reassembles it in a flurry. The space that such artifacts occupy is not painting space or sculptural spaceor enigmatic conceptual altar space. It feels like gesture space--the big abstract expression-ist swatch of a loaded brush of paint across canvas, but in this case across the whole room and in this case in a stroke which proves to be made of meticulously wrought fragments.

Two virtuosi of this process are Mark Fox, who shows at Larisa Goldston, and Chris Natrop,based in L.A. They are more like each other than they are like anyone else, but no more like each other than were Pollock and De Kooning. Fox tends to work towards a tornado-like centrifugal motion.Natrop tends to make constructions which may be leisurely walked through, a jungle of opaque and semi-transparent pieces and their complicated shadows. If speed were an attribute, one might say that Fox slings his imagery faster, Natrop more slowly--but of course this is absurd. It is simply that installation art is evolving its own time-sense,its own musicality, and this is something for which there is as yet more gesture, more pointing-towards, than legitimate vocabulary.

Fox's largest statement to date is DUST, which though not completely characteristic of his technique(s),is certainly a testament to his skill. Over a period of two years he made a painstaking reconstruction of every object that he owned as a paper cut-out facsimile which he then hung as if spiralling away in a tornado. Each of these cut-outs was painted toxic green from below in memory of the green underside of a tornado he saw as a child.It combines pedantic detail with wild centrifigal motion.It is the epitome of re-assembly through fragmentation.

It feels like a piece by James Surls done almost thirty years ago, which was a tree-sized sculpture made of an actual tree depicting a tree under possession suspended as if swirling with each of its branches transformed into a wielded axe. No formal relationship, in truth , save for this sense of churning centrifugal motion, and the sense that both conjure the storm.

Other of Fox's work is in the vein of urban ghost-making, floating paper constructions hyper-filigreed and drawn upon with the delicacy of etching. He will sometimes festoon these over sawhorses, which seems to be his muse- among- objects as the apple was Cezanne's. He also makes creatures threatening and/or forlorn.His earliest work was as a puppeteer--he won a Jim Hinson award for his work in theater. I envy those who have seen it.

Natrop's big pieces have the quality of painterliness in their use of swatches and washes of color,the quality of sculpture in its orchestration of shadows. Why it feels like a rainy day Vuillard or Bonnard eludes me, but it does.Natrop's smaller work--even those pieces 96 inches high--has an exquisiteness which is neither twee or precious due to the formal demands he makes on himself, which are far more varied than the mere turning out of prettiness on a lathe.The components add up.They seem to broach some near- moment when a shadow transforms into a silhouette or illustration. Almost and never quite yet.

Installation art has entered a period where it discorporates and re-integrates space in ways previously unknown. It is as if baroque alterpieces had volunteered to de-construct themselves as a ballet, as if the decor of Ravel's opera L'enfant en la Sortilege, with its lamenting wallpaper, cantankerous arm-chair, and coloratura fire were normal home furnishings.Some new relationship between sculpture and architecture is being worked out. Some of the best of this makes scissors and paper rock.

(Illustrations one and two are by Mark Fox, the second from Dust, which was installed

at Rice University in Texas; three and four

are by Chris Natrop; five is a reiteration

of Fox . Videos of the work of both

can be seen on the web.)

A BOOK ON LIGHT AND COLOR (1)

2009-11-01T05:25:00.000-08:00

A BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR (1)(foreword)These are my gleanings on the subject of light and color from a period where I had no studio, and consequently was unable to paint. It was a difficult period and I divertedmyself by compiling an anthology of the texts on light and color which I liked the best. It soon became evident that our perception of light pervades our use of language to a degree which makes the idea of compiling a comprehensive work on the subject ridiculous. I am seldom deterred from the ridiculous, however, especially when such a project allowed me to vision and envision.
Several authors have assayed something similiar. By far the best, in my opinion, are Alexander Theroux's The Primary Colors, and its companion volume, The Secondary Colors. Both immerse the reader as if they are being dipped in red blue yellow et al. To read each was to become this or that color for a time--a novel experience, almost out of L.Frank Baum. I was delighted,I admit, to find that we cited different texts. Richard Feynmann's QED, on the physics of light, is a masterwork of plain-ness making intricacy clear.I discussed this project with only two or three people, primarily the poet Ronald Johnson,now dead, whose poems are a hidden glory of literature--particularly his long sequence ARK,which I feel is a psalm of the future. It is to his memory that I dedicate these notes,scattered as they are.

ORIGINS
"In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth,And the earth was without form and voidand the darkness was upon the face of the deepand the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the watersAnd God said, Let there be light; and there was light.And God saw the light, that it was good;and God divided the light from the darkness,And God called the light Day and the darkness He called NightAnd the evening and the morning were the first day." (Genesis 1-5 in the King James Version)
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the word was God,The same was in the beginning with God All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.In Him was life and the life was the light of men, And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehendeth it not. (The Gospel of St. John 1-5 in the King James version)
AKNATON'S HYMN TO THE SUN
Creator of germ in woman,maker of seed in man,giving life to the son in the body of his mothersoothing him that he may not weep,nurse even in the wombgiver of breath to animate everyone that he maketh! ...How manifold are thy works!They are hidden from before us O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.Thou did create the earth according to thy heart. (14 century BC)
FROM THE CHANDOGYA UPANISHAD
There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth,beyond us all, beyond the heavens,beyond the highest, the very highest heavens;this is the light that shines in our heart.All the universe is in truth Brahman. He is thebeginning and end in life of all. As such,in silence, give unto Him adoration.There is a spirit that is mind and life, lightand truth and vast space. He unfolds the whole universeand in silence is loving all.This is the spirit that is in my heart, smallerthan a grain of mustard seed, greater than the earth,greater than the heavens, greater than all those worlds.He contains all works and desires,all perfumes and tastes.This is the spirit in my heart. This is Brahman.To Him I shall come when I go beyond this life.And to Him will come he who has faith and doubts not. (800 BC)

ALMOST WITHOUT WORDS

2009-11-01T04:47:00.000-08:00

The first two images are of the work of Richard Greaves, the anarchitect, who
has built a community of salvaged-material structures in the wilds of Canada;
the photos were taken by Mario del Curto, and shown at Andrew Edlin gallery.
The third is one of Adam Cvijanovic's gigantic paintings, formerly shown @
the now defunct Bellwether gallery. Images four and five are by the admirable
Ben Grasso, who is based in Brooklyn. Six and Seven are also by Richard Greaves.
(Parenthetically, I would like to observe that both Cvijanovic's and Grasso's
paintings were done well before the housing-foreclosure crisis, and consequently there
is a case for regarding them as prescient, if not prophetic.)

F.SCOTT DOES RIMBAUD

2009-11-01T04:27:00.000-08:00

From the French of Arthur Rimbaud
VOYELLES
A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue, vowels,
Someday I'll tell you where your genesis lies;
A--black velvet swarms of flies
Buzzing abpve the stench of voided bowels,
A gulf of shadow; E--where the iceberg rushes,
White mists, tents, kings, shady strips;
I --purple spilt blood, laughter of sweet lips,
In anger--or the penitence of lushes;
U--cycle of time, rhythm of the seas,
Peace of the paws of animals and wrinkles
on scholars ' brows, strident tinkles;
O --the supreme trumpet note, peace
Of the spheres, of the angels. O equals
X-ray of her eyes; it equals sex
(translated by F.Scott Fitzgerald)

DEAN BYINGTON

2009-11-01T04:01:00.000-08:00

The images of heavenly choirs received by the Abbess Hildegarde von Bingen are much the same images reported by sufferers of migraines according to Oliver Sacks.

When Leonardo wrote of being able to see fantastical shapes in the stains on a wall which had been much-spat upon, he was pointing to a basic facultyof the mind, says Valery:its tendacy to scrawl monsters on the margins of pages.It is as if we have an image-making device, the opposite of a screen-saver, which begins to doodle whenever a lecture gets dull. This faculty is related to but not synonymous with an eidetic mechanism, the talent of finding forms and faces, even illustrations, among patterns--such as those made by foliage--or shapes, such as those of clouds.

According to the art dealer Ron Feldman, Leonardo habitually concealed anamorphic imagery or visual puns throughout his paintings.This sounds right, but is hard to honestly confirm once one's own eidetic impulses have been triggered. Once we have started decoding hidden faces we will find hidden faces whether or not they are to befound. The great Safavid dynasty master of the miniature, Sultan Muhammed, hid them in the rock-work throughout his masterpiece, The Court of Gayumars, but though I have tried to locate each of them there remains a question between what I am actually seeing and what I think I see and am projecting myself, which baffles my account.

Wallpaper and other patterning metiers such as Indonesian batik or Ikat weaving do this in a different way, via the shifting in a pattern between foregroundand background. To be able to do this rhythmically is possible with geometry alone.To do this with fluidity requires the arabesque.

What Dean Byington does with wizardry is move among these levels. His paintings are collages of frottages disguised as wallpaper. This involves copying copies, blurring,enlarging,re-engraving, disguising, sewing up seams. Patterning camouflages illustration,and vice-versa.The one becomes the other's ground.

Enlarging a detail as large as I could on my computer screen simply captivated me with his ingenuity:it looked like an engraving by Hercules Seghers shading off into what might be an illustration for La Fontaine's fables by Gustave Dore which filigreed into lace-like or leaf-like reticulations. What fascinated was how seamlessly they mesh.

Quite without data or empirical proof, they seem to me to be work at the threshhold where images become stories, where the idioretinal aftermages on the retina of the sleeper coalesce into a dream. In this case, one does not have to be asleep to see.