The Best American Poetry

How Life Magazine Vaulted Jackson Pollock's Career [by David Lehman]

You could plot out the rise of Abstract Expressionism by consulting selected issues of the popular magazines of the time, especially Life. Initially the press played its part by scoffing. In 1947 Time reproduced paintings by Pollock and Hofmann and a sculpture by David Smith as if the work were self-evidently junk. Pictures that did have Time's seal of approval appeared on the same page: John Singleton Copley's portrait of Paul Revere and, as an example of acceptable modern art, Max Beckmann's expressionist treatment of a girl in front of her mirror. But perhaps the more important happenstance was that the magazine had seen fit to broadcast nationally the claims that Clement Greenberg had made: Pollock was "the most powerful painter in America," Smith was the only other American artist who could be considered "major," and Hofmann's teaching made him "the most important figure in American art in the period since 1935."^[i]

In its issue of August 8, 1949, with America's girl Debbie Reynolds pretty and wholesome in a straw hat on the cover, Life asked if Pollock was "the greatest living painter in the United States?" The question was asked with a jeer, yet it introduced a possibility that could not be dismissed. Although the intent may have been to mock, the strategy backfired for the simple reason that notoriety was the best possible publicity. To be sure, the magazine got in its digs. Some people, we're told in the lead paragraph, find Pollock's work "as unpalatable as yesterday's macaroni." He sometimes uses a trowel instead of a brush and "deliberately mixes sand, broken glass, nails, screws or other foreign matter" into his paintings. The editors had fun with the captions: "Pollock drools enamel paint in canvas," they wrote. But the editors were in a media predicament that has since become familiar. They were trapped by the inner workings of their own logic -- "if it's worth covering, it must be important." And so, in a magnificent example of a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Pollock, at the age of 37, has burst forth as the shining new phenomenon of American art."

The pictures in Life were always a thousand times more important than the words, and Arnold Newman's spread of photographs made Pollock seem a heroic man of action who just might be the great American hope in painting. In the lead photograph Pollock is shown standing with his arms folded, scowling, a tough guy with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He wore neither suit nor tie and sported none of the accouterments that readers associated with European culture. De Kooning thought the picture made Pollock look like a gas station attendant.^[ii] What could be more American than that? Pollock was "virtually unknown in 1944." Now "he is slated for a one-man show in avant garde Paris, where he is fast becoming the most talked of and controversial U. S. painter." It was as American a story as that of Life’s cover girl that week, Deborah Reynolds. Miss Reynolds "was working as a clerk in a food store" in Fairfield County, Connecticut, two years ago. "Now, at 20, she is a professional model." The best was yet to come for her, too.

The Life spread was the turning point. In a trice Pollock emerged as the art star with the greatest cachet. Not that critical hostility disappeared. Pollock was still the renegade artist that a venomous critic would dub "Jack the Dripper" as late as 1956, the year of the painter's death.^[iii] But as of August 1949, he no longer toiled in obscurity. In America, where the border between notoriety and fame is quickly blurred, he had become the most notorious artist of his time. Three months later, when Pollock next showed his work, there was a celebratory buzz; collectors and curators came and formerly hostile critics prepared to make an about-face. Pollock, in de Kooning's oft-quoted formulation, had "broken the ice" for everybody else.^[iv]

Once the press gave vent to its bewildered fascination, there was no stopping the New York School juggernaut. The media spread the word about these sexy rugged postwar artists with unprecedented efficiency to a public looking for a new kind of artistic hero. In January 1951 Life ran Nina Leen's group photograph of the leading Abstract Expressionists, and though the caption remained derisive ("from the dribblings of Pollock to the Cyclopean phantoms of Baziotes"), the photo itself cast the painters in a heroic light as the leaders of an avant-garde rebellion.^[v] That year Pollock's abstractions were smart enough for Vogue. In the magazine's March 1951 issue, a fashion-spread of photographs by Cecil Beaton features "the dazzling and curious paintings of Jackson Pollock" as the backdrop against which the models were posed at Betty Parsons' Gallery in New York City. (Jacqueline Bouvier appears in the debutante pages of that issue.) Two years later Look (which was usually two years behind Life) showed its readers the new Hans Hofmann that a wealthy Wall Street investor had just acquired.^[vi] And just two years after that, Fortune suggested that readers with the means to buy art should consider doing so as a solid long-term investment that would simultaneously protect against inflation and reduce income tax liability. Fortune used Picasso as its blue-chip standard; de Kooning, Rothko, Pollock, Motherwell, Still, Reinhardt, and Kline were among those rated as "speculative or `growth' issues." A Rothko purchased in 1955 or 1956 for $1,250 would, Fortune said, be worth four to five times that sum by 1960, and between $25,000 and $30,000 by 1965.^[vii] Abstract art had gone pretty far pretty fast in gaining respectability. "In 1949 a bank would never have had an abstract painting on the wall," the painter Al Leslie noted. "In 1959 an abstract painting was the only painting a bank would put on the wall."^[viii] Although no one was aware of this then, the whole episode attests to the growing importance of the media in determining the actuality they are naively supposed merely to reflect. While beginning as a mouthpiece for resistance to the new art, the media served willy-nilly as a publicity machine of greater power than anyone had supposed.

[i]. Time, December 1, 1947.

[ii]. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, p. 595.

[iii]. Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock: An American Saga, p. 753.

[iv]. "Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?" Life, August 8, 1949, pp. 42-45. "Broken the Ice": Naifeh and Smith, Jackson Pollock, p. 598; William Barrett, The Truants, p. 135.

[v]. Life, January 15, 1951.

[vi]. Look, November 3, 1953, p. 72.

[vii]. Eric Hodgins and Parker Lesley, "The Great International Art Market," Fortune, December 1955, pp. 118 ff., and January 1956, pp. 122 ff. Quoted in Breslin, Mark Rothko, pp. 340-341.

[viii]. Interview with Al Leslie, June 14, 1995.

Invisibility Leaves Traces [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

    My grandmother Alichka, whose birthday I always remember as it coincides with International Women's Day in March, had a Singer sewing machine. It occupied all the wall space between the door and her bed. It had a pedal to step on for the machine to work. Just like my father's Lada car had pedals: a pedal for gas, a pedal for the brake, and even a pedal to make the car roar like a bear. 

    Alichka could mend things without the sewing machine. She had a special plastic mushroom for simple fixes. Let's say you had a hole in your trousers. Alichka would then find the thread of the color of your pants (she had a magical chest of various threads, needles, and buttons; her collection of buttons deserves a poem dedicated to them alone.) Alichka would take her plastic mushroom and place it inside your trousers right under the hole (you must not wear your trousers at that time, of course!) and stitch them in a way you would never guess that the hole was there. Unless it was in a prominently visible place, but even then, it would be noticeable only if someone paid close attention to your trousers. Which rarely happens. 

    Sometimes, there would be no hole yet, only a tear or just the traces of a future tear. Then it was not necessary to undress; you could keep your trousers on while Alichka mended the tear without her Singer machine and without her plastic mushroom – just with her hands. In such cases, out of superstition, she would cut a piece of the thread and give it to you to hold in your mouth during the entire mending procedure. It would ensure that the needle did not accidentally stitch your brain. Not sure exactly how the whole thing worked, but it must have worked just fine. Alichka often mended my clothes, and every single time I held a thread in my mouth while she worked, and I don't believe my brain was accidentally sewn. Or, if it happened, we didn't notice it. 

    When Alichka was stitching, her hands would leave traces in the air. Quick horizontal traces. Just as a conductor paints music with a baton. Conducting lesson 101: imagine you're a painter, and the baton is your brush. Invisibility leaves traces. 

Mark Tansey’s “Triumph of the New York School” [by David Lehman]

Mark Tansey is a definitively postmodernist painter. His pictures stand at two removes from nature; not art but art history (or art theory) is his subject. Tansey deals in theories and notions, presenting them with the sort of sharp irony found in the best editorial-page cartoons. His pictures are literary; they tell stories, spin out allegories, or make intellectually complicated witticisms. At the major Tansey exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1994, the most striking and I think best example of the painter's work on display allegorizes a World Historical Event in the annals of modern art. The picture, an oil painting dating from 1984, is called Triumph of the New York School. It records the moment New York supplanted Paris as the art capital of the world and home of the international avant-garde.^[i]

One of Tansey's ironies is that his picture is wholly committed to the representation of a scene and as such stands in diametrical opposition to Abstract Expressionism, the movement that vaulted New York into its position of international dominance. In sepia tones suggestive of an old photograph, with a war-ravaged landscape as backdrop, Tansey's huge canvas -- more than six feet tall and ten feet wide -- depicts one set of military men surrendering to another. The defeated group of soldiers on the left of the painting is dressed in French uniforms from World War I. The victorious men facing them wear the battle fatigues of American soldiers in World War II. At the center of the picture is a table on which the surrender is at this moment being signed by Andre Breton, the leader of the French surrealists and the presumptive spokesman of his era, wearing a combat helmet and great coat.

Breton, who was known as "the Pope of surrealism," is observed approvingly by the commander of the victorious Americans, Clement Greenberg, champion of "American-type painting" (his name for it), whose pronouncements on painterly matters were supposedly heeded, in the galleries and lofts of New York, as though they were the orders of a five-star general. Breton's forces include Pablo Picasso (in a flamboyant fur coat), Henri Matisse, Ferdinand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Juan Gris, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Rousseau, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, the champion of "the New Spirit," who brilliantly promoted the School of Paris, launched Cubism and gave Surrealism its name.^[ii] Greenberg's adjutants are such mainstays of the New York School as the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, and Arshile Gorky, the sculptor David Smith, and the critic Harold Rosenberg, who vied with Greenberg for the distinction of being the group's chief hierophant. Not only the uniforms but the placement and posture of the figures suggest a clash of periods. The French have a cavalry; the Americans, a news photographer kneeling to take his shot of the magic moment. The French are formal, the Americans at ease. Greenberg, genially slouching, keeps his hands in his pockets. So does Pollock, his prize discovery, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

In composition and scale, Triumph of the New York School evokes the grandeur of a classical surrender scene -- Velazquez's Surrender of Breda (1634-35) -- to make a point. The picture illustrates the allegorical thesis stated succinctly in its title; in effect Tansey visualizes a dead metaphor to revive it. The conceit of the artist as soldier derives from etymology -- from the military origin of the term avant-garde. If the "vanguard" of an army is its assault troops, vanguard artists are the elite officers planning raids and forays into the uncharted regions of the imagination. But Tansey's Triumph of the New York School is based on something more than impressionable conceit: the conviction that what it depicts did in fact happen, and in just this metaphorical way.

It is generally accepted that the old School of Paris, which dominated the first part of this century, was eclipsed by the New York School in the late 1940s. The success of Abstract Expressionism is seen, moreover, to have coincided with a triumph for the city of New York as a milieu, a market, an ambiance, or a headquarters for art and the arts. It could be said that the artistic movement concurrent with Hiroshima and the death camps had superseded the ones associated with the earlier "war to end all wars." The "lost generation" (Gertrude Stein's term) was history; "action painting" (Harold Rosenberg's catchy, existential-sounding term) was now. All this Tansey's picture proclaims, and more: that the avant-garde artist is a militant figure, accustomed to adversarial behavior, for whom conquest and capitulation are the only available choices, because changes in style and fashion in art occur violently, amid competition, and in the face of stalwart resistance.

Tansey's picture is faithful to a script; the advent of the New York School has long been rendered in the terms of a military campaign or athletic contest. The picture's title echoes that of Irving Sandler's standard history of Abstract Expressionism, The Triumph of American Painting (1970). The champions of the new American painting had a penchant for framing the artists' struggle in the context of a competition for global supremacy: New York versus Paris, America versus Europe. Adjectives of choice included triumphant and heroic. This lexicon of triumph now makes people anxious. Recent critics have objected on the grounds that such language smacks of either chauvinism or boosterism. It may also lead to a more profound misunderstanding -- the notion that on some theoretical plane the agents of the abstract revolution were agents of American nationalism. In fact, the avant-garde adventure was not narrowly nationalistic but was as international in outlook and character as in the diverse birth places of the artists themselves, many of whom had come to America from Europe -- from Russia (Rothko), Holland (de Kooning), Armenia (Gorky), Germany (Hans Hofmann), and elsewhere. "Most of us felt that our passionate allegiance was not to American art or in that sense to any national art," Robert Mothwerwell said, "but that there was such a thing as modern art: that it was essentially international in character, that it was the greatest painting adventure of our time, that we wished to participate in it, that we wished to plant it here, that it would blossom in its own way here as it had elsewhere, because beyond national differences there are human similarities that are more consequential."^[iii]

If the metaphor of triumph remains compelling, that is largely because it is historically accurate: New York did displace Paris as the center of modern art, Abstract Expressionism did become the first indigenous American art movement to win international dominance. But for the artists themselves, the most important triumph came at home, not abroad. In 1965 Frank O'Hara -- "our Apollinaire," as Philip Guston dubbed him -- recalled the "violent resistance" facing the American artist in the late 1930s and early 1940s. It was, O'Hara warned, all too easy to forget "that period's artistic and political isolationism (how controversial then were Gertrude Stein and Wendell Wilkie!), the mania for Impressionist masters, the conviction, when there was any interest at all, that avant-garde was not only a French word but an Ecole de Paris monopoly. But the greatest resistance of all came from other American painters -- the regionalists, the Social Realists, and the traditionalists."^[iv] The artistic triumph of New York was, in short, a victory over public rejection, scorn, and blind allegiance to tradition. The spirit of the new, vacating Paris, had arrived like a guest who had been invited for cocktails in June and stayed for the rest of the summer.

Some events in the history of art really do seem to occur with the speed and decisiveness with which, for example, the sinking of the Japanese carriers at Midway determined the naval war in the Pacific. The shift of the world's center of artistic gravity from Paris to New York would appear to be one such event. It was as momentous as it was unexpected, an incidental byproduct of the global tremors of the wartorn 1940s. It happened suddenly -- over the course of a few years commonly thought of as the "heroic" period of the New York School.

-- David Lehman (1994)

[i]. "Connections: Mark Tansey," at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston May 11 - August 7, 1994.

[ii]. Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1968), p. 296.

[iii]. "Robert Motherwell," in Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles 1954-1966 (New York: Braziller, 1975), p. 66.

[iv]. Frank O'Hara, Art Chronicles, p. 66.

Met Percent: Week Twenty-Six [by Alec Bernstein]

“Faux tographe...”

Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (detail), Leonardo da Vinci, Musée du Louvre, 1510. 
The Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View Facing Right, Leonardo da Vinci, 1510. 
Trilby Clark from Movie Stars Exhibit Cards series, 1920. 
NFT Art, Rick Carter, OMGDrops, 2021. 

The Met Museum galleries of Drawings and Prints are very near the Photography galleries. Three “Special Exhibition Galleries” (691, 692, and 693) display all three media. Categorization seems blurry, fluid or tentative.

We forget that painting on canvas was a radical change from painting on wood (see Leonardo’s chapter “how to paint on canvas”). As radical was the exhibition of drawings in museums and galleries. Photography was also inherently problematic. 

The Trilby Clark Card (of the once-renowned 1920s actor) is of course both a “photograph” and a “print” but is cataloged in the department of Drawings and Prints with Leonardo’s Head of the Virgin. Looking back on examples from the Met’s Prints online, I notice a surprising number are printed photographs. The Met Photography Department opened in 1928, but the mass-produced printed photographs remain in Drawings and Prints (founded 1916). What prompted the Met to keep printed photos in Prints? Is mass production an artistic marvel more marvelous than a single photo? Are printed photographs not photographic prints?

Oscar-winning art director Rick Carter’s NFT (Non Fungible Token, far right above) is a good example of what awaits the Met’s future Acquisitions Department. Initially the NFT was intended to protect the rights of image originators. It has gone full spec-capitalism and is presently entangled in our crypto-currency market dynamics. The data needs no physical printing of any kind.

But categorization is a minor skirmish in the larger “art / photography” battles.

Jean Renoir often quoted Edgar Degas’ comment to the photographer Nadar: “Faux peintre! faux artiste! faux. . . tographe!” (False painter! false artist! false-tographer!) (1873-74). 

In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz (1922), Marcel Duchamp wrote, "You know exactly how I feel about photography. I would like to see it make people despise painting until something else will make photography unbearable.”

In predictable over-simplifications, mainstream media regularly “exposes” pairs of “boundaries”: Weege—fine art and murder; Richard Avedon—art and fashion; Robert Mapplethorpe—art and pornography; Richard Prince—art and appropriation; Cindy Sherman—art and “post-everything”. 

George Bernard Shaw was an early experimental photographer, commenting on the field with his usual astuteness, “I would willingly exchange every single painting of Christ for one snapshot”.

Self-Portrait (detail), GB Shaw, c1907, Society of Authors, the National Trust and the London School of Economics.

 

Weltschmerz und Zeitgeist

Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., Diane Arbus, 1962. Top, print. Bottom: proof sheet.

Everyone I have ever known has seen me in this pose. I use it to this day. It seems also always to suggest a caption, a Komposita (a German compound term) . . . from Zietgeist to Weltschmerz to the recently coined German Coronaangst terms, like Maskentrottel (mask idiot) and Impfneid (envy of those who have been vaccinated).

For a while, I had a copy of the proof sheet hanging in the dining room. I called it Boygrenadeparken. Then driving to the office, an Ausländer working for a German corporation, I would mull over multisyllabic terms to prepare for the day. E.g., how to maintain das Fingerspitzengefühl (the fingertip feeling — tactfulness, intuitive flair or instinct) while having das Fernweh (distance pain — a longing for a place that isn’t where you are right now).

Somehow I find the idea of the Komposita apt for Arbus: Bittersweet? Glee-gloom? Mashed-up-solitude? And the happy-kinder on the proof? Just too long a shoot. . .

 

Happy Birthdays, Mr. Hockney

Top left: David Hockney working with his Polaroid, photograph by David Hockney Foundation, n.d.
Top right: Pearlblossom Hwy., 11 – 18th April 1986, #2, David Hockney, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 1986. 
Bottom: Hockney at the BMW Design Studio, Newbury Park, CA, photographs by BMW, 1995.

I saw Hockney lecture on his Polaroids in the 1970s. He spoke eloquently on the time his montage method gave him to stay with a work, compared to the speed of a single photograph. It reminded me of Ansel Adams: “If photography were difficult in the true sense of the term — meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching — there would be a vast improvement in total output.” (1943).

In 1995, Hockney was commissioned* to do an “art car” for BMW and assigned a BMW 850 CSi. The car, unfortunately, did not fit in his studio elevator, so he drove up to evaluate our design facilities. I was the designer assigned to support him, and I waited at the reception desk to give him a tour. He carried his dachshunds, one under each arm, and saw among the business cards one for “Frisbee, Corporate Dog.” He asked if it was true that we had a corporate dog.”Yes, he is in the accounting department.” “O.K. I don’t need to see anything else. This place will be fine.” He brought his long brush collection and spent two and a half days painting in and outside the studio.

One morning while viewing the car, we chatted over a cigarette break. He had heard on the radio that OJ Simpson received 7,000 birthday cards in jail. This was how I discovered that I share a birthday with both David Hockney and OJ Simpson. 

I remember his long brush work . . . And his words, “A line has time in it.”

*BMW gave Hockney his own 850 CSi, complete with a special custom seat raised up for his little dogs to see out of the window.

 

Marilyn @ The Met & The Money

Top left: Marilyn Monroe on the Set of "The Misfits": Leaning Out of Second Floor Window of Frame House, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960.  
Top right: Detail, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960.  
Top center: Marilyn Monroe and John Huston on the Set of "The Misfits": At the Craps Table, Eve Arnold, 1960.  
Bottom left: Andy Warhol’s cropping of: Niagara, Eugene Korman, 20th Century Fox, The University of Michigan Museums of Art and Archaeology, 1953. 
Bottom center: From Marilyn, Andy Warhol, 1967. 
Bottom center insert: Untitled (self-portrait, as Marilyn Monroe/Norma Jean), Cindy Sherman, 1982.  
Bottom right: Marilyn Monroe, Actress, New York City (Sad Marilyn), Richard Avedon, 1957.

The only Eve Arnold listed at the Met online is not shown. It is described as one of Arnold’s series of gambling table shots (above) on the set of “The Misfits”. The same holds for the Cartier-Bresson: another Met-owned image — catalogued, but not shown online.

The Eugene Korman publicity shot of Marilyn is only in the Met by way of the 51 prints of Warhol’s From Marilyn. While the Museum of Modern Art claims, “Richard Avedon was fiercely protective of Marilyn’s memory”, perhaps Cindy Sherman was not as concerned. 

These are all the listings of a search for Marilyn at the Met online. In or out of the Met’s collections, scores of photographers did “something” to or for Marilyn and her image, one of the most reproduced faces in photography. Lee Strasberg’s second wife Anna Mizrahi inherited the bulk of the Monroe estate which she sold to Authentic Brands Group for an estimated $20-30 million in 2011. The Warhol Marilyns go up and down, but in the millions. The Sherman fetched $25,000 at Christies in 2016. The Eve Arnold estate sells her Marilyn prints at £30.

“I would prefer photography to be a folk art – cheap and available to everybody, rather than elevated to mandarin proportions created through an artificial scarcity.” — Eve Arnold (https://www.evearnold.com/posters, prints shipped worldwide).

“The new art is really a business. . . We want to sell shares of our company on the Wall Street stock market. . . I’m a commercial person, I’ve got a lot of mouths to feed. I’ve gotta bring home the bacon.”— Andy Warhol, 1969.

 

Nice Horizons (pause)

Top left: Boden Sea, Utwill, Hiroshi Sugimoto, 1993. 
Top right: Coral Sea, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1983. 
Center: Untitled, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, 1960s.
Bottom: Cloud, Mexico, Edward Weston, 1926. 

“Hamm: And the horizon? Nothing on the horizon?  
Clov: (Lowering the telescope, turning towards Hamm, exasperated): What in God's name would there be on the horizon? (Pause.)” — Samuel Beckett, Endgame, 1957.

A Fountain Pen [by Lera Auerbach]

Japanese Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

I think all poets should receive a fountain pen for each birthday. A fountain pen would remind them that someone loves them. It will also reinforce the notion that they're not impostors. Because when there are so many great dead people looking over your shoulder at what you are writing, pretty soon, you start to feel like an impostor.

Being a poet is a difficult profession.

Receiving a good fountain pen once a year would remind poets that at least one reader takes their poetic occupation seriously. One reader, just as one word, could make all the difference.

It would be so easy to save a poet. One could do it with relatively small out-of-pocket expenses by hiring them an occasional housekeeper, presenting them with a nice pen, and offering them publications; this way, poets can be clean, have a writing instrument, and feel needed, which is more than enough to get through tough times. And for poets, tough times are most of the time, even with some occasional pampering.

"Girl Writing a Letter" [by Wlliam Carpenter]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

[from The Best American Poetry 1995]

A thief drives to the museum in his black van. The night
watchman says Sorry, closed, you have to come back tomorrow.
The thief sticks the point of his knife in the guard's ear.
I haven't got all evening, he says, I need some art.
Art is for pleasure, the guard says, not possession, you can't
something, and then the duct tape is going across his mouth.
Don't worry, the thief says, we're both on the same side.
He finds the Dutch Masters and goes right for a Vermeer:
"Girl Writing a Letter." The thief knows what he's doing.
He has a Ph.D. He slices the canvas on one edge from
the shelf holding the salad bowls right down to the
square of sunlight on the black and white checked floor.
The girl doesn't hear this, she's too absorbed in writing
her letter, she doesn't notice him until too late. He's
in the picture. He's already seated at the harpsichord.
He's playing the G Minor Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti,
which once made her heart beat till it passed the harpsichord
and raced ahead and waited for the music to catch up.
She's worked on this letter for three hundred and twenty years.
Now a man's here, and though he's dressed in some weird clothes,
he's playing the harpsichord for her, for her alone, there's no one
else alive in the museum. The man she was writing to is dead -
time to stop thinking about him - the artist who painted her is dead.
She should be dead herself, only she has an ear for music
and a heart that's running up the staircase of the Gardner Museum
with a man she's only known for a few minutes, but it's
true, it feels like her whole life. So when the thief
hands her the knife and says you slice the paintings out
of their frames, you roll them up, she does it; when he says
you put another strip of duct tape over the guard's mouth
so he'll stop talking about aesthetics, she tapes him, and when
the thief puts her behind the wheel and says, drive, baby,
the night is ours, it is the Girl Writing a Letter who steers
the black van on to the westbound ramp for Storrow Drive
and then to the Mass Pike, it's the Girl Writing a Letter who
drives eighty miles an hour headed west into a country
that's not even discovered yet, with a known criminal, a van
full of old masters and nowhere to go but down, but for the
Girl Writing a Letter these things don't matter, she's got a beer
in her free hand, she's on the road, she's real and she's in love.

[from The Best American Poetry 1995]

The End [by Lera Auerbach]

The Tree – Acrylic on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

 

THE END

(1)

It is hard to know how to start a book.  

Its ending is an even greater mystery. 

How do you know you’ve finished
writing the book you're writing?

After all, the end is never the end
(unless you die just as you’ve finished the last sentence.)

Some may argue that even if you (meaning the reader)
or I (meaning the author) die in the previous sentence,
even that would be no more of an end
than death (which is, in all fairness,
rarely the end of anything.) 

This is why suicides are so useless.
Because nothing really ends,
and a lot of new troubles begin.
Everything remains, even more than before
outside of your control (since you are dead
and can't do much about it.)

(2)

Why have so many poets killed themselves?

(3)

I have a young peach tree, which we planted in the backyard of our dacha in hopes that one day it would produce delicious peaches. When we planted it – the tree looked healthy and full of green leaves. Soon its leaves turned yellow and then fell. All of them. Instead of a tree, I had what looked like a naked dead branch sticking out of the ground. 

Perhaps it is not dead, I thought. Perhaps this tree is of a poetic, sensitive nature and, just like a poet, needs attention and nourishment. Instead of pulling the dead stick out of the ground, I bought fruit-tree vitamins – large spikes full of nourishment, which I pressed into the ground all around the roots. The next morning, the tree was still without any leaves, but it was covered in tiny white flowers – the tree was alive and grateful. 

If we could find every poet in the moment of despair and offer him or her some vitamins, perhaps not so many would end up killing themselves. And there is always the next suicidal poet waiting for some kindness. Even if he or she has not written a single line of poetry.

 

Out of Reach [by Lera Auerbach]

Ink on Music Paper © Lera Auerbach

 

When something is out of reach – sometimes it is just out of reach by a tiny bit, not close enough to grasp, but almost there. At other times, it is so enormously out of reach that reaching for it is altogether unthinkable. 

Jessye Norman was giving a masterclass at the Juilliard School. A student singer had difficulty reaching the highest note; it kept sounding flat and unrefined. The harder she tried, the worse it sounded. Norman stopped the student. She whispered to her, "The note is already there. All you have to do is let it sound. Just like that." And Norman sang a perfectly executed passage without any preparation.

 

Sweet Tooth [by Lera Auerbach]

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

I walked
around the house
in search
of chocolate.
(There must be
some chocolate
somewhere, right?)

No, I don’t think
it’s a sweet tooth
craving,
I just have
an excess
of dissonances
today.

Chocolate makes
dissonances
resolve.

(Or it doesn’t.)

Regardless,
somehow,
you feel
better.

(Or you don’t.)

Oh well,
At least,
you’ve tried.

 

Geography [by Lera Auerbach]

Watercolor on Paper by Lera Auerbach

I am looking at the world globe with my father.

He points and says: “This is where you are.”

“What do you mean? I am here with you,”
I respond, not understanding.

Father laughs: “You are here, but you are also there.”

“You mean there is a tiny copy of me who lives there?”

“No, I mean here is there.”

That did not make any sense, so I never learned geography.

 

Starting a Zuihitsu on (Un)deliveries [by Lera Auerbach]

Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

At times like this, I feel sorry for postal workers.
It must be very stressful to be one.
To always have to sort things out while thinking of viruses.

One can easily distinguish a postal worker who thinks of viruses from the one who doesn't.
Those who think wear gloves and masks. But most of them do not; most of them are young and careless.

At the beginning of the pandemic, an entire hotel in China that was converted into a hospital for coronavirus patients had collapsed suddenly, killing everyone inside.
How does a building suddenly collapse? 
How does a human being? 
What is the breaking point? 
What is that something, usually insignificant in itself, that makes all the difference between life and death?

I think of Sylvia Plath.
How she returned to her dirty home (her housekeeper left), overwhelmed by unhappiness, with her two small children always in need of her care.
If she had returned to a spotlessly clean and welcoming house instead of a messy one full of dirty dishes and laundry, would she still have killed herself? 

Perhaps, but maybe not then.
Maybe the breaking point would still hold a while longer.

(2)

Last year there was a postal worker who was overwhelmed by his responsibilities of daily deliveries of packages.
He just had too many parcels to deliver to too many houses and not enough time allotted to do so.
Even if he worked past his hours, he still could not manage all deliveries and be often scolded by his superiors for the delays.

At first, he kept undelivered packages in the trunk of his car in hopes of delivering them the next day, but the next day he would have a new bunch of boxes, and soon the trunk of his car was too full.
After a while, he gave up on the idea of being able to deliver everything, so he left all packages he could not deliver in a shed next to his house. 

He hoped to deliver them one day when his daily load would be lighter, but such a day never came.
After a while, the shed was full of packages, and he had to keep the new ones in the garage.
He never opened the boxes.

In his mind, he never stole them, he just kept them for better delivery times.
It was not his fault that better times were slow in coming.

Nobody appreciated any of his past accomplishments (for he did make numerous safe and timely deliveries) when police discovered his shed and his garage full of packages belonging to other people.

He tried to argue that the packages didn't belong to anyone – they were still in transit on the way to their final destination, but some of them were in transit for over a year and, after all that time, were considered missing in action like lost soldiers.

(3)

Sometimes my poor head makes me feel like the trunk of this poor man's car with too many deliveries scheduled in too short a time, and I feel like giving up.

At night, I stare into all these packages in my head.
I try to imagine what lies within each.
I look at the names of people and imagine them as characters in my book. 

Then the clock chimes and reminds me that it is too late for everything.
Too late even to try. 

(4)

A dog doesn't know if something is too late. 
Unless it's related to food. 
Because, as far as a dog is concerned, food always comes too late and never too early.

(5)

Life is mostly unbearable. And full of wonders.
Partially, it is unbearable because it is full of wonders.
Just think of all the undelivered wonders the postal worker kept in his garage.

But many wonders would not fit into any packaging and can't be delivered because they are just too great. 

Like the night when Venus and the moon were so close together, and we sat on the bench next to the ocean and felt so happy about the present moment that it also felt sad. 

Great happiness is always sad because it overflows and spills into sadness; happy sadness because it is just too vast to stay happy.

The chorus of frogs after the storm is like that.
Also Gesualdo's music and the Montserrat cathedral – you almost hate it, it's so beautiful.

A good book feels like that: overflowing without beginning or ending, even without a middle, happening all at once and about everything and nothing in particular. 

The only thing that separates a good book from nonexistence is its two covers: that's not much of protection from nothingness, not much at all.

Viennese Traffic Lights [by Lera Auerbach]

In Vienna, they have same-sex pedestrian traffic lights.

Typically, traffic lights are sexist: they display a matchstick figure of a man that turns green or red and sometimes flashes nervously, trying to speed up pedestrians so that cars can start driving.

In Vienna, they replaced the matchstick man with two matchstick figures holding hands.
No, I mean touching hands since matchstick figures have no fingers. 

In some Viennese traffic lights, instead of a matchstick man, there is a matchstick woman figure. No curves, but a triangle of a dress. Instead of a flashing man, there is a flashing triangle of a woman or, even better, two women touching hands. 

Gay traffic lights appear only in the center of the most touristy areas.

"Such a progressive city," I thought.

"No," my Viennese friend Verena objected. "They are more intolerant than most; they just hide it better." 

My apartment in Vienna remains empty throughout the pandemic, and sometimes I imagine that a part of me lives there, but then I remember about the lockdowns and quarantines and feel gratitude for spending the pandemic away from any large cities – in the Middle of Nowhere, surrounded by nature.

With the flights cancelled, cars parked, restaurants closed, and theatres and concert halls paused in a year-long fermata, the traffic lights in Vienna remain working, touching invisible fingers of the matchstick figures made of lights and reminding us that human touch may still be possible again one day and isolation will not last forever.

 

From My Diary No. 3 – February 2020

 

Inner Voices – Oil on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

(1.)

I think of the mountain from Rafael's childhood.
Once upon a time, there lived a woman.
Her name was Soledad.
Nobody lives on that mountain now.
Nobody is left who remembers Soledad,
only Stella (Rafael's mother) and Rafael.
She's also in my memory.
And if you are reading this, she's now in your memory, too.

You may forget about Soledad as soon as you finish reading this.
Or, perhaps, I may make her a bit more memorable
or bring her name again later, so if you forget her now,
you will remember when you see her name later on.

Soledad was 82 years old when she died.
The house, high in the mountains, had no electricity,
and each morning, she would milk cows and look around for snakes.

Snakes loved the sun and would come out to lie on the stones.
Some of the snakes were poisonous, but they only bite if frightened.

Nobody knows how Soledad appeared and from where she came.
She was always living with Rafael's family, although she was not related to any of them.

Soledad never married.
Every night she would make bread in the oven,
enough for the whole family.
She would drink coffee all day long,
and her hands smelled of coffee, bread, and milk.

When we moved to our house in Florida, Rafael bought a machete to protect against the snakes.
He never used it, and the machete was lost,
just as so many things tend to get lost and never found again.

(Where do all these lost things go?)

 

(2)

Before coming to the Mayo Clinic, I was preparing to perform my 'Arctica' with the Oslo Philharmonic.
In my hotel room in Rochester, I had a piano, and after long days of tests and doctor's consultations,
I would return and practice for the upcoming concert.

Very few people knew I was at the Mayo Clinic. One of them was Enric Sala.
Enric is an explorer with National Geographic and my partner in the "Arctica" project.
Enric encouraged me to put my health first and not to postpone the surgery.
I don't know if I would have the strength to cancel my performance in Oslo without Enric's support and perspective.

Fortunately, the presenters found another pianist who was able to learn the solo part in time.
The performance in Oslo went on as scheduled.
I felt like the captain who abandoned the ship, yet the ship miraculously sailed on,
while the captain was left alone on the reefs, bruised and confused.

Each day in the hospital, some part of me was in Oslo, rehearsing with the choir,
rehearsing with the orchestra, practicing alone.
Another part of me was back in the Arctic, listening to its silence (which is never silent)
and trying to grasp the enormity of its solitude.

Arctica – the fragile giant, the North of the North.

Only a small part of me, the least real one, was in the hospital,
trying to walk around my room (ten steps in each direction)
while holding onto the IV stand.

I also used the IV stand in my symphony as a musical instrument –
it is how "Arctica" starts – with the sound of drops falling from an IV stand.
Sound of time passing, ice melting, seconds and droplets melting away.

(Sound of a hospital, of a medical emergency, of life passing or life renewing itself.)

 

(3.)

Generally speaking, quarantines need to be continuous –
since at any time in any given place, there are plenty of contagious illnesses.
One quarantine should melt into another.

Quarantines shouldn't be limited to viruses.
For example, when there is a spike in fatal crashes while driving,
there should be a few days per week when driving is forbidden.
Or at least limited to certain hours.
Let's say one would be allowed to drive between 2:00 and 5:00 AM at night
when nobody drives, but not during rush hours.
It would certainly balance things and improve statistics.

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic explained to me that Cushing disease
has only a 30% success rate of treatment by operation in Germany,
while in the USA, the rate of success is 100%.

"How could it be?" I asked.

"We operate on healthy people," the researcher explained. "In Germany, they wait
until you are damaged by the illness. Healthy people have a 100% recovery rate."

Statistics are a powerful thing.

For example, if there is a spike in divorces, let's freeze all marriages for a while.
Fewer marriages result in fewer divorces.

It's not a bad idea to quarantine all children; they seem to get ill much more often.
Healthy children equal healthy nations.

And definitely forbid people from gathering.

(Let's approach life in a way to improve statistics.)

 

(4.)

Why would anyone want to gather anyway? I never understood that.
Much better to stay at home and read good books.

Or you can listen to orchestral music using noise-cancelling earphones.
Noise cancellation is vital because this is how audible viruses (for example, news) get in.
The earphones don't fully protect you from noise, so when you are not listening to symphonic music,
you should wear earplugs with noise-cancelling earphones on top of the earplugs.

If someone asks you a question, just nod in response.
Nobody expects you to listen anyway.
Nodding is similar to clicking likes under social media posts –
you just add your support to the ego-boosting activities of your friends.
Nobody expects you to actually read their posts or click on their links (unless they contain cute animals, of course.)
After all, if you start reading and clicking on all posts of all your friends, most of whom you have never met,
you will never live to be 82 like Soledad, who lived alone in the mountain and never owned a computer.

The other positive side of a continuous quarantine
is that the Apocalypse loses its edge after a while.
One can scream, "We are all doomed!" only until one loses one's voice.
After a while, it's no longer believable.

But I'm worried about my parents. They are 82 like Soledad.
They don't fully understand the weight of the impending disaster, even though they have a computer and television and other viral spreading news outlets. They still venture outside and are reckless enough to visit various doctors wherein the waiting rooms they wait for sick people to spread more germs around.

Their refusal to quarantine themselves saddens me.

I have quarantined myself from everyone long ago, for that's what a writer must do anyway.

(It comes with the territory.)

 

(5.)

Can poetry and music, serious music, still be written?
In times when people have forgotten how to listen,
how to keep silent, how to remain still?

Perhaps I am starting to sound depressive.
As my doctors have warned me, cortisol deficiency can take its toll.

Every week, I receive a questionnaire from the Mayo Clinic.
The questionnaire is always the same.
It compares my attitude and feelings before and after the surgery.

I don't think my answers have changed so far, but I do not know for sure
since I did not keep my previous answers.
Probably, researchers may find my data disappointing.
They would like to see a graph. A graph is when lines go up and down.
Flat graphs are boring. Flat graphs are unremarkable.
Like rubber ducklings in a bathtub of a polar bear hunter.

Keep it together, I say to myself.
But I am worried that I may not be able to keep it all together
and may turn into a soundwave or break into tiny particles
that no longer make any sense and can't be reconstructed.

(I wish I could go to that mountain and meet Soledad,
who never, I am sure, worried about becoming a soundwave.)

 

 

From My Diary – February 2020 No. 2 [by Lera Auerbach]

Home © Lera Auerbach, Oil on Canvas

(1)

The doctors warned me that I might get depressed after the surgery.
Before the surgery, my tumor was producing five times more cortisol than normal. 

After the surgery, it would take months before my remaining adrenal gland would start producing enough cortisol.

In between, I will feel tired and low even though I will be taking hydrocortisone pills.
Ideally, I will be able to taper them off slowly, reducing the dose every week.

"It will be a long and tiring process," the doctors assured me. 

"I felt tired and depressed before the surgery so that it will be nothing new," I tried to reassure my doctors.

"Yes, but before, you felt tired and depressed because you had too much. After, you will feel so because you don't have enough. It's very different," the doctors seemed concerned.

The doctors seemed tired. And somewhat depressed.
But they were also excited because they would get to cut my tumor off. And cutting tumors is exciting and admirable.
And then one gets to experiment with those tumors once they are cut and out.
No patient asks for a tumor back or expresses the wish to keep it for a souvenir in formaldehyde on a shelf in a library
or on a bedside table. So, the doctors get to play with other people's tumors and write papers about their findings.  

(2)

My clock lost its hands and could no longer tell time.
"It's okay," I reassured doctors. "I understand the complications."  

"You may no longer feel like yourself," the doctors continued.
"I'm not sure if I feel like myself now before the surgery," I said. 

It was true. I could not tell if I felt on top of the world, or downright miserable,
or even if it mattered at all how I felt. I no longer knew.

After the surgery, I discovered that my tumor was made of fear.
That's why it was producing so much cortisol: the fight-or-flight hormone. 

Now, while the remaining adrenal gland is still half-asleep, I seem not to feel fear.
No, I don't feel particularly brave, but rather… indifferent.  

Fears are hopes in disguise.
Have I lost hopes too?

(3)

One of the scars on my belly is bigger than the others. 

Sometimes, I dream it becomes unglued, my belly opens up,
and my insides start falling out for everyone to see. 

Last night I dreamt I was having surgery, but the surgeon kept forgetting what kind of surgery it was
and kept waking me up to ask over and over again. He was also not sure if he had my name right.
Drugged by anesthetics, I kept misspelling my name until I, too, was doubting if I was the right patient. 

(4) 

It is now two weeks and three days since my surgery, and I can no longer see the surgeon's initials
marked on my belly next to the four scars. Strangely, I miss them. 

The scars also look different. The glue has partially fallen off, and under the bond, there is some pink skin 
senza the red-and-black drama of stabbing wounds.

The remaining glue looks dirty and gray, like the residue left by Scotch tape.
My belly still looks inflated; for the surgery, they filled it with gas and fluids. 

I do not know how to answer how I'm feeling because I do not know what I am feeling and, more importantly,
how I'm supposed to be feeling. The best thing to do with feelings is to transport them. 

I know what I'm feeling if I hear it in music or read it in a poem.
But without art, without its forms, how can I name the unnamable?  

After the storm, the choir of frogs sings "Alleluia"
while Venus and the moon are getting ever closer each night this week. 

(5)

Anything can become anything can become anything. 

I love nights because nights hide; you can imagine something magical,
and there is no evidence to the contrary. 
That's why witches preferred to fly at night. Shady characters. 

But if flying on a broomstick seems childish,
why is wearing a cross with a brutally murdered Jew any better? 

Each religion pulls the symbolic blanket of righteousness on its side.
My god is the only true god; my beliefs are the most believable. 

My friend Burcin in Minnesota said, "I believe in butter. Because butter makes everything better." 
But probably even 'I believe in butter' belief could find its opposition. 

I believe in music. But does music believe in me?

I am here but also absent. 

 

 

From My Diary – February 2020 [by Lera Auerbach]

Suite del Ocells © Lera Auerbach

(1)

At first, the days were numbered.
They were numbered before the surgery and then after.

Going under is a bit like dying, but you know you will wake
and that you are not entirely alone in this.
You welcome the temporary oblivion that anesthesiology provides.

What if we knew for certain that reincarnation is real?
Would it change our fear of dying?

The days after surgery are marked by progress,
life stripped to its essentials.

The body learns how to function again, how to adapt,
and you are just grateful for any sleep you can get.

You long for things to return to normal, or at least their appearance,
even though you suspect that the new normal and the old may never be reconciled.

The news from Europe and Asia is full of numbers and statistics:
the new virus ravaging through China has made its way to Europe.

I don't turn on the TV in my hospital room.
Instead, I open the All Good Things book on my Kindle.

I enlarge each painting or drawing and drown in each image, appreciating its beauty.
The book is a personal anthology created by Stephen Ellcock –
one of the very few people I follow on social media.

(Every day Stephen posts images that speak volumes;
images that reassure me that not everything is dismal and there is beauty
hidden in the open, just waiting for someone to give it form.)

(2)

Today is the 24th of February 2020.

As I write this, I feel the longing for the present moment – this moment in time.

Last week, I was in the hospital at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
It was snowing, and February felt as cold as the Februaries of my childhood in Chelyabinsk.

I remember waking up in intensive care after the surgery.
The pain was overwhelming.
If I have to endure this pain all my life, I would rather die, I thought.

There were two men in intensive care in hospital beds like me
and some shadowy nurses. I couldn't see them clearly:
everything doubled in my eyes and made me feel nauseous.

One of the men was moaning.
The other was interrogated by doctors or nurses
who kept on asking him if he had ever had a heart attack.
They just kept on repeating the same questions,
but the man didn't seem to understand them.

Or did I dream this up?

When I woke up, nobody was next to me.
For a moment, I thought I had already died and this combination
of pain, nausea, loneliness, and moaning was hell or purgatory,
or whatever is waiting for us in the forever beyond.

I drifted in and out.

Then there was a nurse next to me.
She kept on repeating the same question over and over again,
"Can you rate the level of your pain on the scale from one to ten?"

At first, I could not understand what she was saying.
How can you measure pain? The enormity of it.
And how would such a scale look?

How would one take all this shapeless pain and put it on a scale?
Wouldn't the pain spill and fill the entire room, overflowing?
I was drowning in pain, and I was asked to measure it?
How do you rate your drowning experience?
Unbearable?
Almost unbearable?
Almost bearable?
When everything doubles in your eyes – does it mean that your pain doubles too?

I found it difficult to speak or to find my tongue.
The nurse put something soothing on my lips.

"How do you rate your pain on the scale between one and ten?" she asked again.
She didn't seem to be annoyed by my silence.

"It is ten," I managed to whisper.
Then I thought again. I was able to withstand it somehow.
It means it could have been worse.

"Maybe nine," I corrected myself.

"I'll give you more painkillers," said the nurse,
and a sickening wave of nausea took me into its current.

"All is doubled," I managed to say;
and heard before being carried into oblivion:

"She has a very low pulse…"

"Still high pain…"

"Too long…"

(Too long...)

(3)

Before the surgery, they strip me naked.
Completely naked. Underwear and all.

I put on a robe that has an opening in the back.
The robe doesn't close well.
I feel like a baby just born into the world, completely defenceless.

There are many people.
They come and introduce themselves:
surgical team, anesthesiologists, nurses.

Each person asks my name and date of birth,
what surgery I am having, and on which side.
They know it, but it's the protocol –
I'm told it's for my own safety.

After continually repeating my name and date of birth
for each new face entering the room, I start to feel strangely removed from myself
as if I'm saying the name of someone else, not my own.

Indeed, this particular combination of letters and syllables feels almost random.
I'm me, but not my name.
But if I'm not my name, then who am I?

I think about it while I lay naked,
waiting for the nurses to roll me into the surgery room.
They roll my bed through corridors so fast I get dizzy and cold.

In the operating room, I notice that I'm the only one not wearing a mask.
I remember: they will put some kind of a breathing apparatus
into my nose and throat after I fall asleep.

They will also put a catheter, make four openings in my ribs
for the instruments and the camera.
And I will not feel or remember any of it.

One of the surgical assistants lifts my robe and, with a marker,
writes something on my belly on the right side,
just around the place they will cut.

Later, I discover next to the angry-looking scars,
two large black letters, TM.
Why TM?
For some reason, I remember this abbreviation from some time ago
when I was learning transcendental meditation.
But transcendental meditation has nothing to do with it,
although perhaps it is also some sort of anesthesiology.

TM stands for Trevor McKenzie, the name of the surgeon.
The letters, written in a sharpie, remain next to the scars for weeks after the surgery.
I feel tattooed or branded, but it doesn't upset me, I find it rather amusing.

Everything is so strange – it must be happening to someone else.
Not me, but to the person whose name and date of birth
I recite mechanically to everyone who enters my hospital room.

The initials of the surgeon's name on my belly feel more like a sculptor’s signature.
Let your initials signify your responsibility, welcoming my future without the tumor.

(I shall be your greatest masterpiece, my surgeon.)

(4)

The time in intensive care with shadowy nurses and moans feels endless –
dark void, unbearable, unending.

The next time I wake up, I'm in the hospital room,
I can see the snow falling through the dark windows,
it's late evening.

Where did this day go?
We came to the hospital early in the morning.

Rafael is in the room.
My lips are so swollen I can't talk.
My lips are blocking my voice.

"All shall be well," repeats Rafael.

I feel empty and light-headed,
so I let my mind fill with this thought.

All shall be… shall… Why shell?
Does it mean all is not well now but will be well in the future?
Does it mean that this thought is a shell?
And if it is a shell, what is the real thought within its protective embrace?

But I'm too tired to open the shell.

(I drift into sleep again.)

(5)

Today is exactly two weeks since my surgery.
Two weeks felt like two months. Or two years.
But not entirely in a bad way.

My previous life feels distant, not quite real.
Yet my life now is even less real in its normalcy, in its un-remarkableness.

The bloody mess is all around, yet nowhere to be seen.
IKEA's designs are maddening.

There are 80 cases of coronavirus in New York now.

(People have stopped consuming Corona beers out of superstition.)

(6)

The scars on my belly do not have stitches or threads, only glue.
The glue is still there after two weeks.
In one of the four scars, it's starting to peel off.

"In a year or so none will be visible," Rafael assures me,
probably concerned over me being concerned over my scarred appearance.

I'm not concerned. The scars make the surgery real.
Without them, it all seems to be a dream within a dream.

Maybe some part of me is forever stuck in the purgatory of Intensive Care,
trying to measure the unmeasurable and weigh the unthinkable,
while someone in monotone keeps on asking about a failed heart?

Can someone attack your heart?
Can your heart attack someone?
Can your heart be broken?

(Even the smallest feather could tip the point.)

(7)

I was ill, I had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester,
and I had to cancel my upcoming concerts.

Finally, I returned home to pick up my life but found that in the meantime,
the world, too, had fallen ill.

Unlike me, the world is steadily getting worse and not on the mend at all.
People went mad with fear of catching a deadly virus,
and panic is spreading across the borders.

Rafael bought 25 dry army breakfasts that are supposed to last for 25 years.
Then he bought 25 dry army dinners and a massive bottle of water.

"We should probably buy more cat food," he said.

(After all, Aya, our cat, may not want dry army breakfasts for years to come.)

(8)

I wish to make the world around me understandable,
but everything around me, every object, contains something
that refuses to be defined.

I write in order to understand, not vice versa.
But understanding, if any, is fleeting and cunning –
a red fox-demon, a clock with cut-off hands of time.

(I stand empty-handed.)

 

 

 

The Meaning of Life [by Jean-Paul Satire]

Dislocated in Time [by Lera Auerbach]

Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

(1)

The problem with the future is that it is unforeseeable –
the great unknown is full of opportunities for dreadful disasters.

Their multitudes are inexhaustible.

The stars are the pores of our reality.
They shine because that’s how we see the light of another world. 

The Arctic fox dances its foxy dance, pretending to be a woman,
pretending to be a nurse. 

The seal waits underwater. It knows it is being hunted. 

The stars are not the pores; they are pills,
round white pills the woman-fox is giving me.

Pills for pain, pills for sleep, pills for blood pressure,
pills for muscle aches, pills for adrenal gland function,
pills for inflammation or rather against inflammation,
pills for/against nausea. And steroids.

And more pills for pain. Killers of pain. 

(How many universes did I swallow today?)

 

(2)

Everyone is very kind to me. So kind, it breaks my heart.

Everyone is doing their best. Or his or her best. 

I feel generous with the pronouns. I think pronouns are so yesterday. 

So are all nationalities, religions, sexes, and any other boxes of definitions, including self-definitions.

If everyone were so kind, there would be no need for any of these limiting concepts. 

I understand how beautiful it would be, how connective, how whole and wholesome,
and it breaks my heart that it is not yet universally so.

I cry from the unbearable weight of my love that I cannot express. 

My husband, concerned, asks if I’m in pain. 

“No, on the contrary,” I try to explain what I feel. “I understand what it means to be ‘we.’ 

I am the seal; I am the fish it ate; I’m the polar bear waiting for the seal to breathe; 

I’m the polar bear hunter, waiting for the polar bear to strike the seal. 

I’m the polar bear hunter’s mother, wishing to feed the polar bear 
so that the bear could feed her son one day; I am the polar bear hunter’s girlfriend,
enjoying the safety of the aroma of the Lancôme perfume.

I am the surgeon searching for the patient who has his initials drawn on her belly. 

I am the patient praying to be her surgeon’s masterpiece.”

(“You are on drugs. It’s the painkillers,” says my husband.)

 

(3)

Where do all lost things go? 

Perhaps, lost things are dislocated not in space but in time.

It is why something may disappear and then later appear right in front of your eyes –
where you have already looked for it and more than once.

Instead of moving in space, they fall into the holes in the fabric of time.

Because time is made of porous material and things may fall through. 

Sometimes things reappear, moved back by some internal tides; 

at other times, they disappear without a trace, 

and new strange things appear instead. 

It is hard to hold on to your belongings when they keep falling 
through the porous realities of time and space.

It’s quite difficult, especially lately, to hold on to myself 
with all these electrons, protons, and neutrons misbehaving as particles 
and waves the moment you try to observe what they’re doing. 

Just think of all the effort my poor self needs to put together 
in order to hold some kind of a recognizable shape of a body 
instead of just becoming a soundwave or melting into a puddle. 

(No wonder I feel exhausted all the time.) 

 

(4)

Yesterday I learned there is such a thing as repulsive gravity.

By repulsive, I don’t mean ugly or unpleasant. 

Apparently, gravity can be not only attractive, 

thus attracting things ever closer the way earth 

doesn’t let us float away and fall into space, 

but also repulsive, meaning always repelling things 

further and further away. 

In all likelihood, this universe was made by such repulsive impulse, 

resulting in the Big Bang and all its consequences. 

It is why we are still expanding, universally speaking. 

(Just think of it: all we are is a hiccup of some repulsive shudder.)

 

(5)

Time in the hospital – sleepless nights, leg compressors, IV drips, 

blood-pressure measurements, vital signs checks every hour, medications. 

You wish to sleep, but your sleep is continuously interrupted by machines, nurses, 

and your own body. You melt one drop at a time and float restlessly in the night. 

And you still need to repeat your name and date of birth 

each time you are given the meds. You swallow a bunch of stars 

and start feeling that the repulsive gravity which made the Big Bang 

is just around the corner, and the reversal could happen at any moment.

You are internally running extremely fast while not moving at all. 

(And you’re still naked under the hospital robe.)

 

 

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.) 

Met Percent: Week Twenty-Five [by Alec Bernstein]

Drauen and Preindre

Inset: Phone, for Life Magazine, Anonymous, 1965.
Center: Design for a Desk with Decorations from A Midsummer Night's Dream, G. Clark Stanton, 1851.

It would be impossible to estimate, wandering around the few Drawings and Prints galleries (690-693), how many drawings, how many prints the Met Collection has. Most works on paper are vulnerable — not on view — isolated for their own protection (sound familiar?). 

Quarantined. And yet they could overwhelm — in a good way — isolation: 177,000 online entries and 1.2 million pieces in the department. If I would go to the Met, but I won’t yet, only about one hundred prints might be on display. And if I were an average viewer, and these days I feel average, I’d look at a single drawing for 27.2 seconds (including label reading, for those who do). But between the Covid time warp and the massive online entries, I look as long as I like, whenever I like, as if I myself were inside the light protective bubble with the vulnerable drawings, prints — our human scratches — expressed and preserved. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!?department=9.

But first a few definitions. 

Draw: "Give motion to by the act of pulling" — from drauen, alternate spelling of Old English dragan "to drag, to draw, protract". “Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence”. — Henri Matisse

Print: “A mark made by impression upon a surface" — past participle of French preindre "to press, crush," from Latin premere. Joan Miro slowly planned his prints in sketches; but at the crucial moment, when he came face to face with the plate or the stone, he never referred to them. He would take a deep breath and say, "Let's go".

So many gestures, such a range of responses — I would love to have the writing desk above, covered in midsummer night’s dreams, even as I would disrupt its “love-in-idleness” style with a “desk phone”. I have needs to “Dial the world direct. Every week”. 

Direct from the collection:

Top, left to right:

• Joan Blondell, Movie Star Cards, 1930.
• From Nineteen prints, Kikugawa Eizan, 19th c. 
• Red Eagle, Prussia, from the World's Decorations for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes, Lindner, Eddy & Claus, 1890.
• John Reilly, 1st Base, Cincinnati, Old Judge Cigarettes, Goodwin & Company, 1887.
• Two nude figures wearing veils, seen from behind, "Le Pitture di Pellegrino Tibaldi e di Niccolò Abbate esistentinell' Instituto di Bologna", 1756.

Center, left to right:

• Hab.ts de l'Isle Marquises from playing cards "Jeu d'Or", Anonymous, French, 18th c.
• Two Studies of a Seated Male Nude Seen from the Back, attributed to Cherubino Alberti ,1596–1602.
• Design for a Stage Set Opera, Paris, 1830-90.
• Silhouette of Cecil Brent, A. Brent, British, 19th c.
• Broadsheet, relating to a worker's strike in Orizaba, workers holding up the Mexican flag, flanked by soldiers, Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, 1920.

Bottom, left to right:

• Drawing 16, Jacoba van Heemskerck, ca. 1916.
• Two Tables, One Blond the Other Purple Lacquer, both with Vases and Objects, Anonymous, Chinese, 19th c.
• Six Stages of Marring a Face, Thomas Rowlandson, 1792.

William Ivins, the first curator of the Drawing and Print department, expanded the fine art collection to all works on paper, “to spread the butter thin on as much bread as possible.”

 

What you can do with acids 

Left: Bolinka and Marcolfus, Daniel Hopfer, late 15th–early 16th c.  
Center: Close Helmet for the Tourney, ornament copied from a design by Daniel Hopfer, 1552, gallery 371. 
Right: Moresca Dancers Surrounding a Sausage Seller, Daniel Hopfer, late 15th–early 16th c., Minnesota Museum of Art.

Hopfer was the first artist to adapt acid-etching on armor to printmaking on paper. He produced his own stock of populist, often irreverent prints.

Bolinka and Marcolfus is an illustration from the The Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf, a literary “best-seller” from about 1410 to 1550. There were 75 Latin versions, a dozen European language translations and it is still in print. The tale chronicles Marcolfus outwitting Solomon. It is full of humor and scatological riddles, trickster style: an anti-establishment one-upmanship saga.

The helmet’s designs are referred to by armor historians as “in the Hopfer style”: gothic vine tendrils, Italianate grotesques, line etching, and his unique dark ground dot patterns. He also published influential prints of armor patterns used by many German armorists. 

The sausage seller has seven boorish men doing a Morris dance (Medieval courting ritual) around a goitered old woman who holds up a jug of beer and a spit with seven sausages. 

These images and my college dorm life in the early seventies somehow connected: R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, Sabrett hot dogs with mustard and onions, campus beer parties, helmeted riot gear, and reading Rabelais. One Saturday, my friend Tom and I toured Ellis Island under the influence of small purple drops of acid. A couple of student discontents looking for our pasts. All lined up — Medieval peasants, striking students, literary irreverence in the halls of those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. 

Tom Henehan became the head of the Young Socialist Party in NY and ran its newspaper. “Printing changes everything”, he would say, “and read your Rabelais”, like “A certain jollity of mind, pickled in the scorn of fortune.” 

Wish I had a seven sausage spit and a jug of beer. 

“Turned slightly to the . . .”

Clockwise from top left: 
Self-Portrait, from The Iconography, Anthony van Dyck, ca. 1640. 
Portrait of Frans Snyders, from The Iconography, Anthony van Dyck, ca. 1600s. 
Aman-Jean (Portrait), Georges Seurat, 1882–83. 
Self-Portrait, turned slightly to the left, Käthe Kollwitz, gallery 690, ca. 1893.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger from The Iconography, Anthony van Dyck, 1627–35, The Frick Collection.

In design school, I had 8 terms of “Viscom” (visual communication) in which techniques of the Old Masters were systematically extracted from fine art, codified and taught for a new purpose. One of my favorites was vignetting. The vignette does not completely fill the frame; it lets an image fade, drift, or dissolve into the surface medium. 

Here are a few common terms, defined with a viscom spin, for types of vignetting. 

Soft blur: the edges of the subject lose focus. 
Torn paper: An edge or a part of a “complete” image appears torn off.  
Fade away: The contrast gradually recedes. 
Spillover: the background appears as a field of illumination.  
Sketchy edge: a highly rendered subject dissolves into sketchy lines.

So I reverse course and apply the contemporary taxonomy back to its roots: these portraits use a mix of “sketchy edge” and “fade away”, except the Seurat: it combines “soft blur” and a tad of “spillover”.

“Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.”
— Wallace Stevens

Self-portrait, Study of a Hand and a Pillow (recto); Six Studies of Pillows (verso), Albrecht Dürer, 1493 ( not on view).

Who wouldn’t want a pillow like that after so much self-observation?

“I have taken notice, as of an extraordinary thing, of some great men, who in the highest enterprises and most important affairs have kept themselves in so settled and serene a calm, as not at all to break their sleep.” — Montaigne, “On Sleep”.

After 56 Met screen/pages of 80 works each, one must rest one’s head!

Silent Music [by Lera Auerbach]

Leitmotifs Photo by Lera Auerbach

 

 

At the Marlboro Music Festival, returning home at night –
my door was covered by moths. I opened the door quickly
as not to let them in, but at least twenty managed to fly in –
into the light of the dining room's lamp.

 

Today I found them dead all around the entrance,

dried angels, almost transparent in their fragile death

with the powder – angel's dust – still on their wings.

 

I think of them while listening to Chopin's mazurkas –

so fragile, so transparent, immortal in their captured beauty.

I gently lift the dead bodies of white&gray moths
from the floor – sliding them into an old glass jar.

 

There they shall rest. They look alive.

Most have their wings open, as if in flight.

My fingers are covered with the powder from the wings.

Their silence is music too.

 

When I wake up tomorrow morning

– they shall still be here, under the glass,

frozen in their death, as in a dream

hearing the music only they can hear.

Jane Freilicher, "Parts of a World" at Kasmin (Jan 21-Feb 27, 2021)