The Best American Poetry

The Meaning of Life [by Jean-Paul Satire]

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.)

 

 

 

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)

 

 

"The Master of the Gamblers": Omnia Vincit Amor

The "Master of the Gamblers" is how art historians, curators, and auctioneers refer to the 17th-century Italian painter (Rome, maybe Naples), otherwise unnamed, who painted, in the main, gamblers playing cards and shooting dice. "Omnia Vincit Amor" ("Love  Conquers All") is unusual among his works. -- DL

Rudy Burckhardt's Photos at Tibor de Nagy (part two) [by Vincent Katz]

How Rudy Burckhardt photographed on the move is something of mystery. He did it, so we know it’s possible, but try to put yourself in his position. He must have moved with a dancer’s speed and precision, or, cat-like, lain in wait before pouncing on his unsuspecting prey. He regularly captures head-on in close proximity the precise moment at which or just before someone looks at him and says, “Hey!”

In addition to tableaux frozen from the city’s gyre, Burckhardt could compose images that seem snatched from a Renaissance picture-making textbook. Such a one is V-Back, from about 1985. There are two versions of this moment. In the first, Rudy has come up close behind a beautiful woman, her hair carefully styled and held back by a clip, a slender chain around her neck, a purse hanging from her left shoulder, her sweater turned backward, so that its V reveals her upper back. We can see the spinal cleft as it travels down, widening to a darkness in between her delicately flaring shoulder blades. We see a man in a suit in front of her, waiting to cross the street. We catch a glimpse of the traffic as it rushes past.

In the second photo of this moment, Burckhardt has quickly and adroitly turned his camera from a vertical to a horizontal format. He takes advantage of a moment of urban serendipity. A large white delivery truck is passing. In Burckhardt’s horizontal frame, we now see, in addition to the man in the suit on the left, a man in a long-sleeved striped shirt on the right. These two men frame this remarkable woman, each one turned slightly toward her, without actually looking at her, in two different gestures, diffidence and deference. And in that split-second, the woman has suddenly become aware of something behind her, some heat of energy, some thinking, something stretching back to the galleries of European museums, kindled on the stages of New York’s ballet. She turns, looking at Burckhardt, and now at us in the photograph, her beautiful face caught in that glance, the whole picture given a timeless quality by the pure background of the white truck passing, such that, for a split-second, Burckhardt has taken the city completely away, and we are enveloped in this moment of observation, two people seeing each other for the first time.

The exhibition of these and other chance encounters of New York City residents immortalized by Burckhardt’s eye and body is punctuated by a sequence of three films shown on a wall-mounted monitor. In these three films — Default Averted  (1975), Cerveza Bud (1981), and Ostensibly (1989) — Burckhardt takes three different approaches, all showing his complex approach to cinema. Default Averted refers to the moment when New York City almost went bankrupt; Burckhardt takes a typically wry approach to the topic, choosing to show a building being demolished over time. This is a favorite motif of his in his films; he loved the way New York was built, and also knocked down, sporadically, without municipal oversight. Cerveza Bud focuses on one of New York’s great pleasures — public joy, in this case in the form of outdoor dancing, music playing, and roller skating. As usual, Burckhardt is drawn to the city’s black and Latinx populations. Ostensibly uses a poem by that title by John Ashbery, and in fact Ashbery appears in the film, in red suspenders, recording the poem. So many events and images fly by in these films, balanced by moments of calm, that I like to try to document them as they pass. I’ll end with my notes from the films.

Default Averted (1975, 20 minutes, black and white, music by Thelonious Monk and Edgar Varèse)

Architectural emblems, details, demolition, smoke and fire
Fireman grins
Boards dropped from roof
T Monk big band sound to sped up b/w city traffic
Shakespeare-like head all that remains: preserved relic in antic sweep of wreckage-remake (the New York mantra)
Earl Hines reflections in wet pavement
Walls fall, classic Burckhardtism

Cerveza Bud (1981, 30 minutes, color)

Endless bodies of color, dancing, roller skating
Public displays of love: bodies, gay couples dance Hustle to Kool & The Gang
Reclining in summer grass à la La Grand Jatte but more relaxed, more openly sexual
Open embrace of Twin Towers, part of that cityscape with street light suspended in front
Seagull soars against dirtied blue

Ostensibly (1989, 16 minutes, color, poem by John Ashbery,)

piano music by Alvin Curran)
JA reading poem
Kia Heath nude poses in front of Rudy’s De Kooning then dresses, walks in snow
Nice family hops backward up steps
Maine log-throwing competition
A woman (Rochelle Kraut?) reads same poem
Shots of pond details of trees
Man jogs shirtless on Maine road
NY intersection (23rd & Broadway?) in rain reflection
Dancers at party (Skowhegan?)
RB pushing garbage to gutter (NY) and trees to ground (Maine)
Lichen details
NY walkers, skylines, water towers, sped up clouds

Ed. Note:  for part one of Vincent Katz's piece on the new Rudy Burckhardt show, click here. 

Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 11 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side
Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: info@tibordenagy.com
The show is up from December 21, 2020 until January 23, 2021.
Gallery Hours:
Tuesday to Saturday 10-6pm

Rudy Burckhardt’s “New York Hello!” (part one) [by Vincent Katz]

Rudy Burckhardt : “New York Hello!” Photographs and Films from the 1970s and ‘80s

At Tibor de Nagy Gallery, December 11, 2020 through January 23, 2021

https://www.tibordenagy.com

https://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/rudy-burckhardt4

Through January 23, run over to Tibor de Nagy Gallery at 11 Rivington Street to see a glorious selection of the later New York City street photographs of famed downtown denizen Rudy Burckhardt. You can also see the images online, but Burckhardt’s prints, small and unassuming as they are, repay close observation in person.

I guess the only art form that survives intact online is poetry. Poetry was something Burckhardt had a lot of, and I often find myself making the Freudian slip of referring to a photo of his as a “poem.” Partially, that has to do with the wide spaciousness Burckhardt was able to include in his photographs. They have a space in them that reminds one of the space in the city poems of his friends Edwin Denby, James Schuyler, and Frank O’Hara.

When he first came to New York from his native Basel, in 1935, at the age of 21, excited though he was by the city’s gigantic scale, he was unable to photograph it, focusing instead on a prescient series of fragments — pedestrians rushing past him in midtown against slivers of storefronts and sidewalks. The effect was almost hermetic, as though Rudy was a consciousness that the urban swirl buffeted but never disturbed.

That still consciousness was something he brought to his well-known photographs of the 1940s, iconic views of Times Square and the Flatiron Building. After a few years in New York, Burckhardt had figured out a way to bring the tallest buildings and pedestrians into the same frame. He worked quickly, never wasting film, preferring to wait for the right season and light, rather than to force an unwilling moment into a picture.

Concomitant to his photographic practice, Burckhardt made over one hundred 16-millimeter films, some in collaboration with other artists, musicians and poets, others on his own as a form of diary or collage film he would assemble over time from footage shot in New York, Maine, and other locations. The collaborative films were one way Burckhardt kept up to date, choosing to invite into them succeeding generations of New York’s brightest stars, from Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles and Aaron Copland, through Larry Rivers, Jane Freilicher, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, to Red Grooms, Mimi Gross, Rackstraw Downes, Taylor Mead and Yoshiko Chuma, Douglas Dunn, Grazia Della Terza, Dana Reitz, David Shapiro, Christopher Sweet, Alice Notley, Ron Padgett, Jacob Burckhardt and Tom Burckhardt, among others.

Like his lifelong friend and collaborator, poet and critic Edwin Denby, Burckhardt made it a habit to keep up on the latest developments in poetry, music, theater, dance, and visual art. Denby and Burckhardt were inveterate culture vultures, inspiring generations of New Yorkers after them. Part of that urbane desire involved being attuned to the look of people and things, as they changed through New York’s mid-century.

Burckhardt photographed on New York’s streets from the late 1930s through the 1990s. His later work shows him experimenting, evolving, using familiar themes in different ways, with subtly different emphases. The photographs currently on view at Tibor de Nagy are striking in their immediacy, their sophisticated informality, and their ability to project certain types or looks of people. Burckhardt was remarkable in his ability to find the beauty in many kinds of people.

Three photos of couples walking are emblematic of the power of youth, of animated promenade. In one from the mid 1980s, a black couple presents ultimate contemporary style — he in t-shirt, athletic shorts, and Pumas without socks, she elegantly coiffed, in designed low-V t-shirt, carefully ironed and cuffed jeans, white sandals. They fit together in style perfectly. But to make a great photograph, he needed more than the main subject. Intimately steeped in classic European painting, he had no trouble forging balanced photographic figure-and-ground compositions on the fly. He also was immersed in modern Abstract painting, learning from it never to leave any area without interest. Here, Burckhardt catches memorable figures between and around the two mythic beauties who dominate the scene.

Ed. note: Part two of Vincent Katz's review will appear tomorrow or the day after.

Visigoths Sack Rome [by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre]

"The Sack of Rome in 410 by the Vandals" by Joseph-Noel Sylvestre (1847-1926) at the Musée Paul Valéry. It was the first time in 800 years that Rome had fallen to a foreign power: the Visigoths led by Alaric. The Roman Empire was in full decline. Note where in the painting the artist signs his name -- and the beauty of the living bodies attacking the serene but lifeless classical bust. -- DL

Traces [by Lera Auerbach]

^{Untitled - Ink on Handmade Paper by Lera Auerbach} 

 1.

When I think of my Great Aunt Rosa, I hear her laughter – deep chuckles rising from the belly of the Earth and exploding like an uncontrollable volcano. My earliest recollection of Great Aunt Rosa goes back to the time in my life when crawling seemed easier than walking, and every situation had a fantastic array of discoveries. Aunt Rosa was a gigantic mountain that captivated my mom's attention entirely. I was free to crawl around on my own to my total satisfaction. I had a small, plastic red fox. From time to time, I heard volcanic explosions of Aunt Rosa's laughter and thought that a tiny fox may not fully comprehend these sounds and feel scared. Remembering from one of the fairytales that foxes liked hiding in dark spaces (or in pretty wooden huts they would steal from the less intelligent animals), I looked around for a hiding place for my fox. I found it in Aunt Rosa's shoe, which was perfectly designed to be a home for a small plastic fox, combining the best qualities of a foxhole and fox-hut.

I must have fallen asleep somewhere next to the shoe rack. My parents carried me to the apartment of my mother's sister, Natasha, where we stayed during our Moscow visits. The little red fox spent that long night alone in Great Aunt Rosa's shoe, probably wondering if she would ever see the daylight again or if I had abandoned her forever.

2.

Nothing lasts forever. Perhaps, only the Great Nothing lasts forever until Something appears. Of course, it could not have been "forever," but perhaps it was – if Time (as we understand it) did not exist then. No space, no Time – nothing. Or, rather, everything so condensed and indivisible that it all had to fit into Nowhere. Then – Big Bang – everything explodes, divides, and we hear singing – the Word – God's name. Or His laughter. Or Her laughter. Or Great Aunt Rosa's laughter, which explodes and spills over as I wake up.

My mom, who is holding the telephone receiver away from her ear (so as not to be deafened by thunder), is also laughing. I can't help it and start laughing too, even though I have no idea why we are all laughing. And Natasha, my mom's sister, walks into the room and starts laughing too. And from the receiver booms Great Aunt Rosa's laugh, filling the room, spilling through the windows into the sky and breaking into snowflakes, dancing in the wind.

3.

My tiny red plastic fox had bitten my Great Aunt Rosa when she (Aunt Rosa) tried to put on her shoe. It did not surprise me. After the long night, the fox must have assumed that this shoe was her home. I wondered if small plastic animals have the same concept of time as we do. I decided that no, a night spent in a shoe could seem to last an eternity to an abandoned fox. So, of course, she bit Aunt Rosa's massive toe, which threatened to squish her inside the shoe. Aunt Rosa promised me she would keep the fox safe until our return. She did.

4.

When grownups talk, I prefer to hide under the table. I imagine them growing heads of animals: this man is a bear, and this woman is a sheep (just listen to how she bleats to every word the bear-man says.) This one is a wolf, and he always contradicts the bear. They have different strengths, the bear-man, and the wolf-man. The bear-man might be stronger, but the wolf-man is faster and more aggressive. It is why they argue; they challenge each other. In the corner, there is a woodpecker – he repeats the same point over and over again, proving everyone else wrong. He wins every discussion because others become too bored and lose any interest in him and his point of view.

5.

But who is Great Aunt Rosa?
I think and think but can't picture her as an animal. Maybe a bird?
I think of the stories involving birds but can't imagine Aunt Rosa flying. At least not now – maybe when she was young?
Was Great Aunt Rosa ever young?
Perhaps, she is a Dodo, that mythical bird, timeless and strange, so familiar, yet completely incomprehensible.
Aunt Rosa is flapping her wings, erasing colors, fading into a less and less traceable outline, until nothing remains except her shoes.

 

Unscalable [by Lera Auerbach]

Ivan Shishkin's Morning in a Pine Forest & Russian Chocolates

On the grand scale of things, it's not always clear what keeps the balance. 

But things are not scalable. Memories hide in the smallest details and surfaces like a shy relative of long-forgotten relations:
in the color of the window-curtains from childhood,
in the taste of sgushchyonka (sweet condensed milk of my childhood),
in the sound of unwrapping a chocolate candy – the favorite one with three brown bears-cubs and their mother-bear on the cover.

The picture of four bears was from a well-known painting by Shishkin, a famous Russian painter. 

Come to think of it; I'm not sure why Shishkin was so famous if the work he was mostly known for was this painting of four bears playing in the forest. Later it was discovered that Shishkin did not paint this painting, or rather he painted the forest but not the bears, because painting animals was not his forte, and he asked a friend to do it.

'Shishka' in Russian means a pinecone, but it also means a bump, as when you hit your head. It also can mean, in a slangy way, a big shot – a person in a position of power. 

The painter Shishkin clearly loved Russian nature with its pinecones, but he also hit his head hard with the bears' fake authorship. He did manage to remain a big shot in the annals of Russian art. 

I stopped liking these chocolates at the age of five when I discovered wriggling white worms in one. It was 'war chocolate' from the boxes of food my nanny kept in case of a new war. She had some of these boxes since WWII, some 40 years earlier. 

Time was eaten by worms, leaving only crumbs behind; crumbs dressed in the picture of the cute bears painted by a man who didn't get proper credit for painting them and whose name escapes my memory right now, unlike Shishkin. 

 

No Longer My Own [by Lera Auerbach]

No Longer My Own - Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

1. Some books matter only
   for the future-books
   hiding in them.
   
   
2. Books with strong plots
   offer safe captivity,
   allowing us to hide.
   
   
3. Books without plots
   may dangerously spiral,
   exposing us to memories of unburnt desires.
   
   
4. When you are writing a book, in reality, you are writing two books:
   one is the book you are writing; the other is the book
   about writing the book you're writing.
   
   
5. I face myself in the mirror,
   but I'm no longer my own.
   
   

WORKING SPACE, post-script: CLOSER TO HOME [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

Art calls to art; the conversation remains by design ongoing, unfinished.  I’m thinking about all pieces I didn't address. 

The very last visit I made to a museum was local--the Harvard Art Museum--to meet a friend to go upstairs to visit the conservation lab (where my better half works).  Here’s a glimpse:

Leaving the museum, not knowing it was about to close down, I looked across the inner courtyard at one of the more amazing recent acquisitions, a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall (Untitled, 2008). 

Six feet tall and five feet wide, Marshall's painting is utterly compelling, a yin and yang of dark over light. The outstretched palette reminds me of Parmigianino’s outstretched hand, here a microcosm of a working space. The angled paintbrush dips into the black circle on the palette, black like a hole, black like the black circle of the painter’s hand.

Two years ago, I visited a class of undergraduates sharing their final Museum Studies assignments:  ekphrastic poems informed by technical study of works of art.  “My palette is the milky way,/ and my canvas is a blank slate” wrote a student who had focused all semester on Marshall’s painting:

    I am a shadow of my own image
    under the light you shine on me.

“Everyone and everything we see is a self-portrait,” suggests Terrance Hayes in his poem, "Self-Portrait as the Mind of a Camera," after the work of photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris (How To Be Drawn, Penguin, 2015).  The poem continues:

    ...What if, in your previous life,

    You were born a black man's camera?  Suppose you lived
    As something filled with a light and darkness that's defined
    By what it touches.  What if you could hold everything

    You behold in a chamber inside yourself: a sense of the existential,
    A sense that color sometimes conspires against you, a sense
    There are people who would be anonymous without you?

Perhaps the best poetic analogue to the self-portrait is the sonnet, that form with just enough room for a face, an about-face, and a final reflection.  How do we fit ourselves into or fight against the framings we inherit?  What room do we have to choose? In Hayes’ stunning recent book, American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), one sonnet begins, “I lock you into an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet,” and I think about locking gazes.  The poem ends:

    I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
    Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor.  It is not enough
    To love you.  It is not enough to want you destroyed.

This reminds me of Ashbery’s final address to the artist in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The chamber in the poem where self and reflection are facing off has become the kind of chamber that holds a bullet:

    Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
    Offer it no longer as a shield or greeting,
    The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
    There is room for one bullet in the chamber:
    Our looking through the wrong end
    Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
    Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
    Among the features of the room, an invitation
    Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"
    Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
    Enough how it wasn't.

What is the end or the aim of a self-portrait?  In another Hayes sonnet, one obsessed with endings, every sentence in the poem ends with “life.”  The poems Hayes reflects on challenge us to reflect on our life sentences:

    Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo saying
    "You must change your life."  James Wright ends "Lying
    In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
    Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life."  Ruth Stone ends
    "A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
    A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
    And beginning of life.  After the opening scene where
    A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
    Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life.  A shootout
    In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
    In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
    A barn shootout endangering the farm life.  I live a life
    That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
    That makes me weep for another life.  Define life.

 

Smelling Beyond Words [by Lera Auerbach]

На птичьих правах - Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

 

There is a phrase in Russian, ‘na ptich'ikh pravakh’,  having birds' rights. 

To live ‘na ptich'ikh pravakh’ means not having proper rights to occupy space (i.e., no correct documents or inability to pay rent) but being temporarily tolerated and allowed to remain. 

What rights do birds have? 

And why birds? 

Why not say opossums' rights? 

The flattery of wings? Geography? Lack of stability? 

Can the lack of stability be something stable, constant?

If you're constantly absent, does this make you reliably absent? 

The bird can sing and leave. 

I do the same, but behind me snakes a trail of debt and obligations, a chain to keep me within its reach, stones available for throwers. Personalized gravitational pull.

* * *

In the world of confusion, only a dog knows the truth. 

But we rarely listen to dogs. We forgot how to listen.

A dog knows what would make us happy. Because it's precisely that which would make a dog happy: a walk in the woods, smelling the fresh air, that sense of well-being which only comes when you can commune with nature and feel fully present. 

A dog is not interested in words. 

Words are the mythological woods in which humans get lost instead of visiting the real woods and taking long walks with their dogs.

A dog knows the danger of words. That's why it can understand all human languages. 

It knows to smell beyond words. Because words are only shells. What's essential lies within, beyond the shell. And the shell may be misleading, a disfiguring perception of the shape it contains within. 

A cat also knows it all but doesn't have the patience to deal with human stupidity and stubbornness. A cat knows – it is futile to change us. 

Dogs are more hopeful.   

* * *

Living life in dogs' years. 

How many dogs will still adopt me? 

My childhood's big Sheila, then Toto and Daisy (all three were still alive when I left Russia for New York at the age of 17.) 

Then came school years without a dog, living on ptich'ikh pravakh here and there. For a while, I managed to keep a lizard at the Juilliard dorms, but it was difficult to shop for live worms and keep them all hidden. 

The moment when I rented my first apartment – little Sheila joined my life. I named little Sheila after big Sheila who died peacefully in my father's arms in Russia after I left for New York. Little Sheila also died in my father's arms, but in Boston, many years later. She was aging, she was ill, and I knew my father would take better care of her than I, in my birdy ways, fluttering from one city to the next.

And for the last two years of Sheila's life, there was Finek, whom Sheila hated as only an old cranky dog may hate a young puppy, who stole her human's attention and love. Finek didn't steal my love, for I still loved Sheila. Sheila was Sheila, and Finek was Finek. 

But I knew she did not forgive my betrayal with another dog. 

The moment Finek appeared, Sheila realized she was no longer the only one. 

Even today, many years later, I still feel guilty about it. Never sorry for getting Finek, but sorry for hurting Sheila in doing so. 

Dogs are supposed to be forgiving? Not so sure. 

But for my father, Sheila was still the only one. She's buried in Boston next to my aunt's house.

* * *

My life in dog-lives…

At night I protect Finek's dreams. 

He snores. His legs jerk – he is dreaming. 

His dreams often turn into nightmares, and he cries. 

I gently wake him up. He falls asleep again, breathes quietly. 

Does he ever dream about me? 

Am I the cause of his nightmares? 

 

Sheila and Finek

With Sheila in Siberia

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.

Resonating at Random [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

 

A tree is never just a tree. 

Social distancing one could measure. But how distant should one be from oneself? 

Too distant, and you risk losing yourself and becoming numb, incapable of true empathy and love. 

Too close, and you fall apart, unable to hold on to the imaginary thread
that keeps different parts of you together.

A book is like a tree: it needs a chance to grow, to take hold,
to find enough nourishment in the soil, enough water. 

In its early stages, it's too fragile, while the hurricane season is just around the corner,
and strong winds could uproot and demolish it. 

Where do all the unwritten books go? Half-written? Completed manuscripts waiting for editors? 

Forgotten manuscripts waiting for readers? Forgotten lives? 

Like a child, a book requires sacrifice. It hurts you, its birth can be bloody painful.

It can also give you the greatest joy. Ultimately, it is never yours. 

It is born through you but doesn't belong to you; you are simply its tool
and a highly imperfect one at that. 

To read a book the way one asks for forgiveness, 
as an act of searching for solace. 

But a book is just a book – a collection of words, 

resonating at random 

only when struck.