THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTHUSIASM PART 7 by Brian Bouldrey

7 All Right, That’s Enough

When I was a kid, one of the albums in my parents’ record collection was Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.  I would sit listen to it and stare at that cover, the lovely lady Redi-Whipped into a strumpet parfait (incidentally, that was shaving cream on her, mostly, which is something to remember as an artist when you are trying to be “realistic”—artistic truth is made of something other than).  My mother must have had an egg timer set in the kitchen, because while I was allowed to look at that album, there were limits.  In she’d come and say quietly, “All right, Brian.  That’s enough.” Still, she was the first to teach me to take time to dream.

The carvings on the porches of a Gothic cathedral are more than dream, more than decoration, but an education. Most people couldn’t read back then, so the images in churches were the guides for storytelling. Most of the friezes and frescos on the cathedral fronts and in the retablos behind the priest were strictly biblical, but cathedrals were made big for some other storytelling, too. The stuff way up there, not front and center, may not be given top priority, but it is, without a doubt, part of the secret history of art, faith, and the world.

 So far as the early Fathers of the church were concerned, there is no doubt as to the purpose in authorizing wall pictures. St. Basil, in 379, said in a sermon, “Rise up now, I pray you, you famous painters of the good deeds of the army. Make glorious by your art with colors loud or by your cunning, make illustrious the crowned martyr, by me too feebly painted.”  Cunning!

And Ruskin, fifteen hundred years later, said, “Gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.”

Poor Ruskin. The socialists wouldn’t have him because he was such a religious ninny. The conservatives won’t have him because he’s such a socialist do-gooder. No wonder he longed for inclusion and unity. And any time somebody takes him out of context, he sounds self-righteous, contrived, or dead wrong. It’s hard to grab an isolated quote from Ruskin and not make him sound like a nutjob.

He brought a lot of this on himself. He would work so hard defending the indefensible: Goths, leafless trees, frosty fortitude, imperfection, pre-industrial ecology, and just when he wins you over, just when you think you might join him in his lonely crusade to do some crazy thing like glorify the dark ages or stop air pollution, he’d turn on you. He’d bite the hand that fed him. Ruskin would get the girl, and then he’d have the wedding annulled.  He was a game-board thrower.

He loved the grotesque to a certain point, and to the uncareful mind, it’s hard to see where that point was.   He found his limits exemplified in an image on the church of Santa Maria della Formosa. Over the entrance, its mocking demon face, clearly falling-down drunk and sticking its tongue out.   “Wassuupp!”  he seems to be saying.  One eye is swollen and the other is bleary.  This face marks the difference between lightness and play in art and the pursuit of endless pleasure.  The beast over the entrance of Santa Maria is nothing but mocking, nothing but mere irony—he is too cool for any school:  ”The expression of low sarcasm,” writes Ruskin, “is, I believe, the most hopeless state into which the human mind can fall.”   It has taken me years to understand why this image is “too much”, in my age of wretched excess.  But at a certain point, everybody becomes their mother  “All right,” I agree, “that’s enough.”

And that’s enough out of me, I’m sure you’ll agree.  I am honored to have yammered in my enthusiastic and grotesque way.  I will leave you with an experience and a poem by poet  Josh Weiner, a man of great enthusiasms (some day I’ll tell you all about the weird pixie sticks incident). He was asked to find a work of art in the Baltimore Museum of Art and write a poem about it.  He passed by the Velazquez and the Tiepolo and found instead a “Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish”.  “Enthusiasm for the grotesque is exactly what prompted my writing of the poem--the sculpture is pretty grotesque, in a highly charismatic fashion; it also hit me like an open signifier, which was a space I could enter and play in.”  Here is the poem he wrote.  In the words of Dick Cheney, “YOU’RE WELCOME.”  BTdubs, if you put the phrase, “, Mr. Bond” after everything Cheney says, it’s funnier.  Try it!  Okay, I’m done.  Shutting up.  Peace out.  Here’s Josh Weiner's gloriously enthusiastic grotesque poem.

 “The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish”

is not a man being swallowed by a fish
with eyes like eight point throwing stars
it's a man being swallowed by a war
a man being taken into the mouth of a woman
or being swallowed by his work

 it's a man traveling far inside a book
a man being swallowed up in smoke
he swallows the smoke, that blends around him like a thought
it's a man being swallowed by a sound
he shapes it so he lives inside a song

of a man being swallowed by his kin, his skin
a man being swallowed by the State
(Leviathan in 1948)
it's a man being swallowed by another man
literally, eaten as a pathway to god

it's a man being swallowed by a sight
he cannot reach, cannot touch, cannot trace

 it's a man who won't recognize his face
who can't fit the parts, or find the place

 it's a man in triumph over death
who laughs and beats the dust from his clothes
a man tasting dust inside the laugh

it's a man who listens to the clock
a man with nothing to exchange
a rude man, his twin he leaves behind
it's a man who wants to be a bride

a man being swallowed by his fault
with something old to show and new to hide

it's a man who tries to haul the rope
a man who stooping can’t provide
a man who can’t forget his name

it's a man who doesn’t know his worth
it's a man being swallowed by his wrath

his youth, yield, luck, the law, his fear, the fog, his fame

it's a man being swallowed by a coat
his father’s coat, he smells of the fit
a man being swallowed by his vows
it's a man softly squeezing for the vein
he never finds it, he’s minding the road

it's a man being swallowed by a room
in which he finds a man being swallowed by a fish
it's a man who thinks what’s in a man
who exits into night at closing time
the figure of a man being swallowed by a fish.

    -Joshua Weiner

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

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[Brian Bouldrey]

It was my pleasure! Let's do it again some time. Meanwhile, all my eyes are on Jericho Brown and his postings! Thanks to everybody who put up with me!

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