Vermeer

I just watched a new documentary about an exhibition of twenty-seven Vermeer paintings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is the largest collection of his works ever assembled. The film, Close To Vermeer, is available on Kanopy, which is a free streaming site from most libraries. There are a few dramatic moments over the authentication of some work attributed to him with art experts, historians, scientists and an art collector weighing in.

The amazing pieces have always fixed my gaze. How he created so much narrative in such a small canvas, how he captured the Delft light and centered women as the focal point, all come together to astonish the eyes and add to the mystery. As my friend said, he revealed rather than depicted. Milkmaid, Girl with A Pearl Earring, Lacemaker, Woman playing the Flute, Love Letter, Woman playing Guitar are just a few of his well-known canvases.

The film calls into question the skepticism of science against the subjective response of the viewer. Yes, the green pigment was not applied in exactly the same fashion in one painting as it was in several others or the subject was at variance here from his usual body of work.

For a man who just spent forty million dollars I suppose these are matters of utmost concern. For the rest of us, who cares? Perhaps there was a copier of the master or maybe he was a mentor to a small group of wannabees or it could even have been painted by one of his daughters.

The detail of both the domestic scenes and even the view of Delft across the water or the street scene is so rich it is best viewed in the close-ups which the film renders. Given the crowds to view at museums one cannot get close enough to do justice to each scene.

Here is a poem I wrote about thirty years ago when Peggy and I returned from a trip to Delft.

 

In This Light

For the maid-servant it was just another chore among chores.

Morning bread, milking and now, the pouring.

For Vermeer secreted in the hallway

it was the sun on her flaxen smock, powdered blue,

his encounter with Delft light bent from the canals

filtered by linden trees from the mullioned windows.

He would still her sudden grace, pacify the noise

of fishmongers and his seven children playing.

There was an adoration in her face

as if the milk were an offering from her breast

fixed in his piercing eyes.

 

Yesterday our Holland trip came back in your photos.

There were the usual artsy and even a few

that died into postcards but there was also

the amazing ordinary which friends might shuffle past:

the elderly woman on the train peeling an apple,

a man in a suit at a sidewalk café,

reading a book, rocking his baby,

or the arrangement of freesia, sandwich and Heineken

as we lunched in our B&B.

How you halt time and the commotion,

compose it with shadow and angle.

The way Vermeer saw bread you see texture

and lift it to new life. You are no Johannes Vermeer,

just a descendant who sees with devotion and reverence.

What Clings To The Marrow

We seem to have no control over what sticks or what sloughs off the flypaper of our memory. Why can I name almost everyone in FDR’s cabinet of eighty-three years ago but hardly anyone in Obama’s or even Biden’s, not to mention a telephone book full of athletes?

Were Mutt and Jeff the inspiration for pairing Sydney Greenstreet with Peter Lorre?  Each of these names comes with a face as do Walter Winchell, Wendell Wilkie and Whirlaway.  

What may seem endlessly fascinating to me is sure to elicit a yawn to anyone else. Yet as an aggregate they reveal my propensities, passions and follies and, by omission, my vacancies.

Perhaps there is nothing trivial about trivia. We are archeologists sifting through the rubble of our own journey. One man’s artifact is another’s trash. Shard by shard we can reconstruct our illustrious junk sculpture of a life. If nothing else this private gallery can be the stuff to get us through an MRI.

Credit radio for evoking so many visual images. We stared into speakers and conjured everything from a barroom brawl to a courtroom drama. When Edward R. Morrow reported of bombs dropping on London I took cover under the blanket. I could smell the green grass and hot dogs when the ball game was announced and even took it for granted that Edgar Bergen’s mouth never moved when he ventriloquized Charlie McCarthy. It was our own imagining that got engraved in our bones. As the ratio of our senses is altered, we generate our own compensation. The visuals of audio. 

We live in a chaos of factoids where celebrities come and go faster than breaking news breaks yet why do the old irrelevancies still cling to the marrow? If I once knew the answer to this question I have long since forgotten it.

And so we beat on, (like Fitzgerald's Gatsby) boat against the current with a cargo of etched moments, ceaselessly into the past.

 

The Nothing That Is

 .. For the listener, who listens in the snow, 

And, nothing himself, beholds 

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
                                                       Snow Man by Wallace Stevens

The athlete without the menace of tattoos or grizzled sneer is pitching for the Dodgers. He is notable for his clean cut absence; nothing but his bare arm does the talking. His performance is enough without the compensation of signage. No snakes or crossbones, no platitudes passing for wisdom, no advertisements for himself.

Makes me long for absences. The unadorned, bling and swagger gone. Lost continent of mother's arms. Blank page surrounding a haiku. Rapid minimal strokes of black ink in a Japanese brush painting urge the essence from fallen petals. An unmet friend lo these many years and then words you cannot quite find. October maple is a ruddy diva in her death bed scene singing beyond the genius of the leaves. Skeletal trees in the mind of winter. The nothing that is there and the nothing that isn’t. To see what is not there is to behold a reality without all the expectations we have laid upon it. One has to see with the coal eyes of the snowman to have the mind of winter.

The wall in the Louvre was blank with only a nail where Mona Lisa hung a week after it was stolen in 1911. That was when Kafka traveled to witness what wasn't there. He saw the painting with his eye turned inward and he beheld its absence. The Portuguese have a word, suade, meaning combined joy and sadness for what is no longer there. Since Leonardo’s painting was returned it has been defaced, over the years, with acid and knives. It puts me in the mind of tattoos.

On the other hand, eight years later, Marcel Duchamp painted a moustache and beard on her face and turned the art world upside down by freeing our mind of the dead familiar. This is what we get for loving something to death. With his slight alterations Duchamp redeemed the piece from the banality of coffee mugs back into an organic creative form. A Dadist act against high culture decontextualized it and brought Mona Lisa back to life.

Maybe I’m wrong about tattoos. They are also a strike against established ways, a crude statement about individuality, a shock to convention. Some women find them sexy, so I’m told. They declare that one’s body belongs to oneself to do with as one pleases. 

Whatever they are rattles my sensibility. I can turn away if I like and I shall. I assert my right to bare arms, (maybe that's what the 2nd amendment was all about) my preference to see the nothing that is. At the center of the Mona Lisa is an ambiguity of gender, enigmatic smile and space which allows us to enter. We come closer to her mystery and our own.  

On Bainbridge Island

 In the silence of the forest floor

teeming with busyness

I can almost hear the hum of the hush. 

Mold at work; what is felled and rotting

going to mulch, under the majesty

of sentinels, two centuries-tall, 

Douglas fir, cedar and spruce.

This ecosystem even allows my trespass.

 

I am here in the overwhelm

with my deaf daughter.

Quietude is not nothing.

Perhaps this is her world

Janice can hear the screech of crows.

She hears me sneeze

keen to the sounds outside the voice range

of which I have become deafened.

The pulse of the forest.

The industry of snails and spores at work.

She hears, too, with her eyes.

There is more than mouths opening and closing,

reminding me of what goes unnoticed,

reflection of willow tree in the moss-covered lake.

 

 

Poetry and Politics

It’s a tricky business. The language of political persuasion often consists of dead words exhausted and limp from rhetorical flourishes. Be careful what you say; you don’t know whose mouth those sentences came out of.

Yet poets do not breathe rarefied oxygen. They inhale the common air and live in the commonweal. As citizens with heightened awareness they cannot stand by as silent witnesses. Particularly now when the menace of MAGA is less about regressive election issues than it is about values, deceit, indecency, the march to moral vacuity and deviant behavior; indeed, about survival itself.

Poets to the rescue. Truth is on life-support. Get us to triage and then to the maternity ward. Not to give birth to new words but to offer existing ones a smack and breathe new life in the body politic.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet died twelve days after the CIA coup overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. Neruda was deemed so dangerous to the despotic regime of Pinochet that there is a strong suspicion he was poisoned. His poetry was meant to tutor a biting silence.

His poems on the power of love can be read as a political act in opposition to the cruelty and violence of the military regime. In the hands of a beloved poet words become swords.

But vehemence does not a poem make. The indignation must be delivered obliquely; perhaps as objective correlative, to elicit either the palm or the fist. Does the cut worm forgive the plow?

During the McCarthy days Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Carl Foreman expressed their opposing views through their art. All were allegories either in defense of an informant as in On the Waterfront or the condemnation of passivity in a conformist culture in The Crucible and High Noon.

The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen will endure far longer than the colossal stupidity of why WWI was fought.

Red lips are not so red / as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.        Wilfred Owen

If they should ask you why I died / tell them because our fathers lied.          Rudyard Kipling

          

If there is a husk, as Robert Bly suggested, which separates the external from internal concerns, it becomes the task of the poet to find an opening. Ironically the most powerful political poems issue from the depth of one’s psyche. This flow between the public and private is particularly striking right now as we shudder to imagine the possible damage to be inflicted by a pathological miscreant with a 6^th grade vocabulary. His damaged inner life is being projected onto the big screen of the entire society.

We have come now to see how fragile is the web. Our national fabric trembles. The threads are frayed in our coat of many colors. Can words serve to reweave and restore the apparel that doth proclaim us?

 

Permeable Membrane

A portmanteau is one those small suitcases doctors carried for house calls. The two sides close in the middle. Metaphorically, two meanings merge into one word. From that came the word brunch and Brexit and even this new-fangled thing called a blog (web log)….the formation of a new term from two others.

We live in an age marked by the coming together of variants. It must be tough for those sentinels at the gate (sufferin' succotash) who think in categories. Column A has merged with Column B. You can now have both the Moo Shu and the Sweet & Sour Pork. Life isn’t vanilla or chocolate anymore. I’ll have the tutti-frutti praline parfait black mountain fudge ripple. It’s both sunny and raining. The music is fusion. Corn and cars are hybrid. The census form has a place for mixed race. Tangelo, anyone?

Now I'm going to stake out a position sure to lose me some friends. Borders are constructs of cartographers, porous as a permeable membrane.

In a few years equatorial regions might become uninhabitable. Great migrations are likely to happen because of our denial and neglect regarding climate change. The numbers at our border now are a mere trickle relative to what lies ahead. Tear down that wall, Mr Gorbachev, said Ronald Reagan. The smartest words that ever came out of his mouth. I wonder who wrote them. We have no more use for partitions in geo-politics than we do in literature. 

Don’t fret when the autobiography is part fiction because most fiction is really autobiographical. Everyone has a narrative ... or two… and if certain events don’t quite fit that is easily remedied. Embellish. After all, it happened to somebody. 

Some of my blogs are plagiarized ... from myself. Scraps of my poems have been folded into paragraphs. I’m thinking of having my poet self sue my blogger self and settle out of court for a quarter of a million bucks.

There are instances when my poetry is carefully ruined prose (Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase). Who really cares, as long as the language is fresh, authentic and transformational? On the other hand great poetry is in the realm of music. Not because it rhymes or sets your toe tapping but rather because it has a lift, cannot be articulated with any other words and warrants return visits.

Homer was said to be blind and didn’t write. He told his story. It got worked over from lips to ears. And besides, there probably was a committee of  Homers. Relax, good poetry should leave us unsettled. Being an allegory makes it no less profound. Homer hit a home run when he had Odysseus run around the bases and slide home, besting the opposing suitors while Penelope unraveled with infinite patience.

Migratory birds are all undocumented. We came here uninvited, killed our hosts and never left. How will Millennials receive their Social Security in a shrinking work force? The answer may lie with our immigrant population. North Africans pay for the French pensions and Turks for Germans.

Eventually the world population will conflate into one undifferentiated race. Everyone will be beautifully mocha without losing our individuated self. Who we are is less a function of skin than it is of what shirt we may be wearing. At least our clothes are a matter of choice and make a statement. It won’t happen by next Thursday or the week after that.

It is natural to resist change. We cling to the safe and familiar within imaginary  borders. Gimme that old time religion, one day and the next day, Don't fence me in. Even as tribalism hangs on as a vestige of ancient times we have also woken up to the imperative of universalism. Centripetal and centrifugal forces create great sparks.

Remembering Ink

My friend asked for ink. The clerk at Staples shrugged. You mean ink toner? Ink Cartridges?

The Ink Age is gone. You know, that stuff fountain pens used to run out of, the blue-black substance that would leak all over our hands and shirt pockets. That is probably what kept Chinese laundries in business.

Raise your hand if you have the same mental picture I have: a squat, hexagonal glass bottle of ink. The name Waterman comes to mind…or Schaffer.  The aforementioned bottle turns out to be Waterman’s ink.  I just looked it up. They still sell it online. In my day fountain pens were part of the back-to-school package. Today they have fallen into the same category as ink eradicator, reinforcements and blotters.

Ink is one of those lost things that vanished the way invisible ink vanished. The death knell sounded in 1949 when someone invented an ink that dries instantly. Papermate pens were the next best thing. Fountain pens became another collectible along with ink bottles, that item which an enormous stationery super store can’t find room for.

Now I am back in the third or fourth grade. I’m sitting at my desk with an inkwell at the far corner. If desks could talk they would speak in fluent doodles and squiggles. We wrote with a long stylus with a nib at the end which had to be dipped. 

This was a spelling test. The word was genuine, a tough one which threw me. I spelled it with a w; then I pictured it from the window of Brenner’s Hair Salon which advertised, Genuine Permanent Waves. I needed to change my answer but alterations were not allowed. My life down the forbidden path was launched. I managed to drop a glob of ink over my wrong answer and rewrote it correctly.

Returning to the scene of my crime I ask myself why that nefarious act has stayed with me over eighty years. Bad boy that I was I’m not sorry for it. I own it, my shadow side. The god of mischief took up residence, compensation for too much obedience. I was testing the margins; early subversion against the rules like bricks upon rules. There was an element of resourcefulness if not creativity in my misdemeanor and none of it was possible with a ball point pen.

Ink that in the great ledger. I’ll take my chances that the principal and all the teachers in P.S. 99 are well into their next incarnation and I won’t be left back to repeat spelling class or worse, get an F in citizenship or work habits. At least I didn’t run with scissors.    

Channeling my inner Huck Finn depended on that property of ink to spread its wings on the page. Pass me the Rorschach test and I’ll tell them what I really see. It's all, Inka dinka do, thanks to Jimmy Durante.

Bafflement

I’ll let you in on a running argument I’ve been having. I know my opponent to be a persistent guy. He hasn’t left me alone for as long as I can remember.  He is both my worst enemy and my best friend. In fact, he is myself.

As Walt Whitman said, we contain multitudes. Sometimes they argue and I don’t agree with myself. The stream of my thoughts gets impeded. There are tributaries and reefs. Boulders get in the way. It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. Thank you, Wendell Berry.

The current book I am reading/skimming is entitled, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman. It traces the medical history of a Hmong baby with congenital epilepsy. The reader is tempest-tossed between the exasperation of the pediatric team trying to deal with a non-compliant family and the unfamiliar cultural customs of the Hmong people.

The mother and father love their child yet when directed to administer two or three medications they withhold one or double the dose on the other and instead kill a chicken to propitiate the gods. Or they press a coin into the belly of their baby and ascribe the illness to the spirit world. Finally, the doctors arrange for the baby to be taken away and raised by a foster family for a period of time.

Perhaps the medical staff was too hasty. They failed to engage the cross-cultural belief system of the family. They might have arranged for better interpreters or visiting nurses to manage the meds. Out of all this came reforms which acknowledge the practices of cultures steeped in non-western health measures.

It was for me a confrontation with the irrational. I welcome non-rational extravagances in poetry. Metaphorical flights of fancy deposit me in countries of otherness with inexplicable images and connectivity.

Yet had I been part of that medical team I, too, would have seen the family’s acts as reckless endangerment. At the same time my more open and empathic nature leans toward a recognition of a more so-called holistic approach.

Now I am going to make a huge leap. My mind jumps from the defiant Hmong parents to the unthinking followers of the charlatan with the red tie whose cohorts range from the self-serving to the blissfully ignorant. How to reach those who would sacrifice Democracy as if it were a chicken in order to serve a false idol? This is the great bafflement we face.

Going Into Labor (From 2011)

For most of us Labor Day signals the end of summer, beginning of school, another 3-day weekend or giant shopping sales. Forgotten are the struggles that gave rise to this day and labor leaders who lead the way.

As a kid I read about Eugene Debs who organized the railroads and founded the IWW (International Workers of the World). Jailed for his leadership in the Pullman Strike of 1894 and later as a conscientious objector during WWI he became an early hero of mine. While incarcerated he ran for president and got close to a million votes.

Growing up I heard about the sit-down strikes in Detroit, John L Lewis with the United Mine Workers, Harry Bridges and later, Cesar Chavez. Today union membership has dwindled to around 7% (now at 11%) from 25% 70 years ago. What would Karl Marx say about the club of millionaire ballplayers in dispute with their billionaire owners? I can’t imagine Woody Guthrie singing, Which Side Are You On, yet their cause is a freakish part of worker exploitation given their short professional life.

More to the point are the labor conditions of a century back. One of my favorite poems is Robert Pinsky’s, Shirt which memorializes the toil and the product of the ladies garment workers and the tragic fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory of 1911. The poem’s genius is in the short, staccato phrasing which echo the rhythms of the labor and his focus on the detail and pride in the work.

SHIRT

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane's Bedlamite, "shrill shirt ballooning."
Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly
Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme
Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,
Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,
To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed
By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers
to wear among the dusty clattering looms.
Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter
Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton
As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black
Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma
And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied
both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality
Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters
Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,
The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

The Arc of Pharmacy

It was an inhalation that got me.

The allure of what we called aromatics,

Those vapors escaping from apothecary jars,

crude drugs, from rhizomes and roots,

bark, leaf, resin, an excrescence

ground to fine or crystalline power. 

The mstique of one whiff,

an intoxication stored in the olfactory vault.

 

Then it was the nomenclature, 

words from the old world

traveled across ocean and the clock.

Exotica on my tongue; in beaker and flask.

Anise and fennel, valerian and squill.

Benzoin, glycyrrhiza (licorice) and orange peel tincture.

Even the repulsion of asafetida and rancid acacia.

I felt the pull.

There was poetry in potassium permanganate,

gentian violet; how they stained my hands,

colored my imagining. Argyrol painted me

with arcana.

 

I was there when they bulldozed the garden,

The drugstore became deodorized,

the glossary rendered archaic. Merthiolate

gone. Rhubarb and soda vanished.

Flowers of sulfur withered away.

Stokes expectorant, Seidlitz powder replaced.

Aloe and senna, triturated into dust.

 

In came synthetics, assayed, the essence of the plant.

Not whole thyroid but the active fraction.

Not the leaf of Digitalis but the alkaloid, tittered.

Safe and effective was demanded. Proof !

Iodine tincture couldn’t,

Spirits of camphor, cocillana cough syrup couldn’t.

Disrepute was the fate of botanicals.

My imagined paradise paved over

in one exhalation, aroma and all.

The romance of pharmacy yielded to science,

to double-blind studies, to remissions and long life.