WORKING SPACE: WAITING ROOMS [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

In January, I flew to see the Vija Celmins exhibition at the Met Breuer – the last flight, the last exhibition, as it so happened, of the year.  Here's the closest thing to a "Self-Portrait" in Celmins’ work:  a meticulous drawing/collage of a tiny envelope addressed to herself (from her mother), with separately drawn stamps: a house, waves, clouds—but also fire, explosion.

It reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "In the Waiting Room," in which the child (in Worcester, Massachusetts) is suddenly galvanized by the O of pain of her aunt's cry from the dentist's office, an O that somehow is and is not her own. 

        But I felt, you are an I,
        You are an Elizabeth,
        You are one of them.
        Why should you be one, too?

A self-address implies a dislocation.  When I flew to New York I was suffering with shingles; it flared along the nerve branch from my spine down my arm to my hand—the nerve I felt when I lifted a cup of coffee, or a pen.  I had a hunch that Celmins art would teach me something about what nerves are – strands of electrical impulses?  Were they the fibers of my being (did my being have fibers?)? Celmins’ astonishing renderings of spiderwebs, of the surfaces of waves, of cosmos after cosmos of (apparently) pulsing stars – the acuteness of her eye, yoked to the patience of that hand:  when I stood in the gallery the work absorbed me, helped me to find and lose myself.  Art sees you; poems read you.

I was not prepared, this summer, for the utter lucidity with which John Ashbery’s long poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” reflected back to me the pressure and yearning of shut-in days, even from its opening lines:   

        As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
        Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
        And swerving easily away, as though to protect
        What it advertises.  A few leaded panes, old beams,
        Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
        In a movement supporting the face, which swims
        Toward and away like the hand
        Except that it is in repose.

Yes, that’s the gesture of the COVID dream in which you reach toward someone and then at the last minute realize you mustn’t and pull your hand away.  For me, a miracle of Ashbery’s opening lines is that even as he tells you so plainly what is there, and so precisely and technically how Parmigianino went about making what we see (as Vasari wrote), he is able--as effortlessly as the light arriving--to make a place in his poem to establish a soul:

        The time of day or the density of light
        Adhering to the face keeps it
        Lively and intact in a recurring wave
        Of arrival.  The soul establishes itself.
        But how far can it swim out through the eyes
        And still return safely to its nest?  The surface
        Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
        Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
        That the soul is captive, treated humanely, kept
        In suspension, unable to advance much farther
        Than your look as it intercepts the picture.

Marianne Moore writes, in “When I Buy Pictures”--or, as she amends the act in the first lines of her poem, “what is closer to the truth, / when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor”—this is what matters most:

        it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
        it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

There’s something of this in Ashbery’s poem and Parmigianino’s portrait, in the ways we register most acutely now how much it matters to be humanly face to face.  “Do you not see,” Keats asks in a letter, “how it takes a world of pains and troubles to school an intelligence and make a soul?”

        The soul has to stay where it is,
        Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
        The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
        Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
        Posing in this place.  It must move
        As little as possible.  This is what the portrait says.
        But there is in that gaze a combination
        Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
        In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
        The secret is too plain, the pity of it smarts,
        Makes hot tears spurt:  that the soul is not a soul,
        Has no secret, is small, and it fits
        Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

I wish we could start over and take five days to keep reading Ashbery’s poem, the way it moves in and out of the painting, a studio, a day, the breeze turning the pages.  But we’re out of time.

Comments

[Fiona Manonn]

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