[Image: unretouched photograph of an anamorphically-painted building interior, by French artist George Rousse; I found it here. As suggested at that site, be sure to see the video about Rousse’s “Durham (NC) project.” And while you’re at it, check out the similar but sometimes entire city-sized work of Swiss artist Felice Varini. I couldn’t decide which artist’s work to feature here and finally flipped a coin.]
From whiskey river:
Flaws
I had been worrying once again
about sad lives
and almost perfect art, Van Gogh,Kafka, so when that voice on the radio
sang about drinking
a toast to those who most survivethe lives they’ve led, I drank that toast
in the prayerless
sanctum of my room, I said itout loud in a hush. Then I thought
of Dr. Williams
who toward the end apologizedto his wife for doing everything
he had loved to do.
He was speaking of course to death,not to her, though death instructed him
how valuable she was.
I thought of a lamp the neighbor’s childhad broken, then pieced back together
with wires and glue.
And my friend, the good husband,kissing the scars his wife brought home
after the mastectomy.
I drank that toast again, though silently.The radio was playing something old
and bad
I once thought was good.Flaws. Suddenly the act of trying
to say how it feels
to live a life, to say it flawlessly,seemed more immense than ever. Then
I remembered
those Persian rug makers built them in,the flaws, because only Allah was perfect.
What arrogance to think
that otherwise they wouldn’t be there!I allowed myself to wonder
about the ethics
of repair, but just for a while.Sleep, too, was on my mind
and I knew
the difficulty that lay ahead:how hard I’d try when I couldn’t,
how it would come
if only I could find a wayto enter and drift without concern
for what it is.
(Stephen Dunn [source])
…and:
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
(William Stafford [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The external world of physics has thus become a world of shadows. In removing our illusions we have removed the substance, for indeed we have seen that substance is one of the greatest of our illusions… In the world of physics we watch a shadowgraph performance of the drama of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it. Then comes the alchemist Mind who transmutes the symbols. The sparsely spread nuclei of electric force become a tangible solid; their restless agitation becomes the warmth of summer; the octave of aethereal vibrations becomes a gorgeous rainbow. Nor does the alchemy stop here. In the transmuted world new significances arise which are scarcely to be traced in the world of symbols; so that it becomes a world of beauty and purpose — and, alas, suffering and evil.
(Arthur Stanley Eddington, from The Nature of the Physical World [source])
…and:
Shoulders
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])
…and:
In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem.
(Noam Chomsky [source])
…and:
To R.D., March 4th 1988
You were my mentor. Without knowing it,
I outgrew the need for a mentor.
Without knowing it, you resented that,
and attacked me. I bitterly resented
the attack, and without knowing it
freed myself to move forward
without a mentor. Love and long friendship
corroded, shrank, and vanished from sight
into some underlayer of being.
The years rose and fell, rose and fell,
and the news of your death after years of illness
was a fact without resonance for me,
I had lost you long before, and mourned you,
and put you away like a folded cloth
put away in a drawer. But today I woke
while it was dark, from a dream
that brought you live into my life:
I was in church, near the Lady Chapel
at the head of the west aisle. Hearing a step
I turned: you were about to enter
the row behind me, but our eyes met
and you smiled at me, your unfocussed eyes
focussing in that smile to renew
all the reality our foolish pride extinguished.
You moved past me then, and as you sat down
beside me, I put a welcoming hand
over yours, and your hand was warm.
I had no need
for a mentor, nor you to be one;
but I was once more
your chosen sister, and you
my chosen brother.
We heard strong harmonies rise and begin to fill
the arching stone,
sounds that had risen here through centuries.
(Denise Levertov [source])
…and:
I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.
(Groucho Marx [source])
Finally… I actually had a musical selection to accompany this post. But after Jules shared the video below with me, I just had to include it here:
Nance says
Pausing to write as I read down the page.
The Rousse Durham Project: I lived alone and worked in Durham’s state mental health program for a couple of years. Except for Duke and its gardens, it was a grubby city in 1970, and it carried a faint, sweet smell of tobacco on the air. Looking back, it was the smell of death. For Rousse to choose an abandoned tobacco warehouse for his project just charmed me totally. Now, how was that choice made, I wonder. Did he, too, flip a coin or throw a dart?
Dunne’s perfect poem: And there is the death I smelled. This is an ode to an HSP’s New Year.
The Stafford quote might be the anthem of Whiskey River.
Eddington: My eyes always cross when I attempt to envision the spaces between the particles of an object in front of me; crossing my eyes is the closest I can come to seeing the truth of the spaces…of the object. Now, I’ll always be trying to spot the beauty and the suffering slipping in.
Nye: I’ve seen this. Cross your eyes. Take a step.
Chomsky: I hear the Dixie Chicks singing, “There’s Your Trouble.” Of course.
Levertof: I immediately imagined that she was writing this to R.D. Laing, who would have been an astounding mentor. He unfocused his eyes and saw into all the spaces of psychosis. But I had mis-remembered the dates, so it couldn’t have been Laing. Except for me, it is.
Marx: Crazy sage. My parents never missed You Bet Your Life when we got a TV in ’52. I never got the jokes at four and five, which meant I had to watch with them, even more closely the next week, hoping I’d get lucky. They told me I’d get them when I got older, so I memorized a few. It’s very strange to have to keep trying jokes out every few years to see if you get them yet.
Twin Peaks: There was something so Newhart about it.
John says
At the Web site for the Durham Project, it says (speaking of a couple of the project’s sponsors, I gather):
However he arrived at the decision, it was an inspired bit of matchmaking. Imagine the complications if, say, he’d tried this in buildings not quite so rectilinear!
I do love your “whiskey river Friday” musings. :)
John says
P.S. Y’know, I also thought she might be writing to Laing. Apparently, though, it was the poet Robert Duncan. The poem is described here as an “anti-elegy” to Duncan.
Froog says
Ha! Loved the Twin Peaks spoof – it captures that anxiety we all had that the show would have to come to an end if the Laura Palmer murder was ever solved. It did go on a bit, though. Were all SNL skits so long back then, are they now? In the UK, we’ve become used to much shorter and more intense doses of comedy in sketch shows. I shouldn’t complain; it’s all good stuff – and Mike Myers as the Dancing Dwarf?! I think the ‘Diane’ segment at the start is the best bit, though.
I haven’t seen it in 20 years, but all of those references came instantly flooding back into my mind: One-Eyed Jacks, the Packard mill, the perfume counter…
I just did a musical post on
favourite basslines which I think you’ll enjoy, JES – especially my No. 1.
John says
I haven’t been a regular watcher of SNL for a long time, but my sense was that “just a little bit too long” was always a hallmark of their sketches. I once read a critique/appreciation of The Band (that is, THE Band (Robertson, Helm, et al.) — not the show’s band), which mentioned an odd common thread to much of their music: Robbie Robertson never seemed to quite get the hang of finishing the songs, but rather just let them sort of trail off. I think SNL’s writers often had that problem.
Phil Hartman’s Leland Palmer had me completely doubled over in that video.
marta says
Oh! And Thursday night I watched the first episode of Twin Peaks yet again. I saw that spoof somewhere last year…maybe you had something to do with that? Anyway, what is not to love?
I’m now so busy thinking about Agent Cooper I can’t remember what else I was going to comment on.
John says
What is it with you and Cooper, anyhow? It’s like the fascination of Gordon Cole (played by David Lynch) with Shelley (Madchen Amick). He kept getting distracted from the Bureau’s business to rhapsodize over her.
I think I’ve mentioned before that somewhere, in the course of The Missus’s and my Twin Peaks obsession, we picked up a recording called “Diane…: The Twin Peaks Recordings of Agent Cooper.” I don’t remember that many of them were taken verbatim from the show, but were just a crazy amalgam of one-offs, all read by Kyle MacLachlan of course. (I wonder if even Doctor Who has left such an odd little assortment of media spinoffs in its wake…?)
marta says
Well, here are some of the Doctor Who spinoffs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_spin-offs
And there was rumor of a Twin Peaks spinoff…
http://flavorwire.com/227138/10-potentially-awesome-tv-spin-offs-that-never-happened#2
Wonder what that would’ve been like?
Jayne says
Funny skit! Hadn’t seen it, and did not watch Twin Peaks, except for maybe a portion of one episode.
The trouble with perspective. Stand to close to a thing it’s distorted, too far dulls the translation. Look away, or take time away, returning to the matter later refreshes the first impression, and often changes it entirely. I suppose that’s not really trouble, though, is it? It will be what it will be.
“…ethics of repair.” Every once in a while I watch the Antiques Roadshow, and I’m always surprised that restoration may very well increase the worth of a certain relic. It seems counterintuitive to mess with the original (especially a painting), but perhaps the aesthetic is more important. I tend to like scratches and chinks–the marks of a thing worn and loved–in old pieces. Not so different with people.
Now I want to read more Nye.
John says
Whenever someone intelligent and pop-culture-aware says to me, “I never really watched Twin Peaks,” I want to collapse onto the nearest fainting couch, the back of one hand held against my forehead. True, it requires a bit of, umm… well, a tolerance for gruesomeness from time to time. It was just such an odd beast: a Chimera of gothic horror and comedy… So, not everyone’s cup of tea. I get that. But I don’t know anyone who watched more than two episodes who didn’t at least watch the entire first season.
(I read somewhere that Lynch really, really didn’t want to reveal — ever — who had killed Laura Palmer, but that the network forced it on him. That he had to do so during the first season was kind of like Orson Welles’s having to divulge the “Rosebud” secret halfway through Citizen Kane.)
Roadshow is highly entertaining. Also highly frustrating. The Missus and I keep wondering how come OUR families never seemed to hang onto anything signed “Tiffany,” y’know?
Froog says
Oh, come now, it wasn’t until half-way through the second season, was it?
The SNL skit was just before the start of Season 2, I believe. There’s also a bit from that show where Kyle McLachlan supposedly gets roasted by Lynch over the phone for gauchely giving away the big secret (“Shelley the waitress did it.”) during an opening Q&A with the audience.
The big reveal was very well done – the creepiest moment in a very creepy series.
Jayne says
Gruesomeness is not something I tolerate well. In general, if I don’t connect with something right away, I don’t ordinarily stick with. I know that sounds a little shortsighted, but I like to think that my intuition serves me well. Maybe I sensed much gruesomeness down the road. ;)
Did I tell you about my George Art? I’m holding onto that. Someday, when I’m about 100 years old, it might really be worth something! (So she says to her hubby of just about everything in the basement that she won’t let him put curbside.)
whaddayamean says
ok, the Groucho Marx has made my day.
John says
Haha, right — the word “meal” alone can be pure Pavlovian trigger for certain personality types. :)
Froog says
This line goes rather nicely with that one you had a few weeks back from Philip K. Dick (which I’m going to steal for one of my bons mots: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
marta says
What is it with Agent Dale Cooper and me? Hmmm.
Well, if I had to try to explain it and dug around in memory/psyche bag of tricks, he probably embedded himself in my brain at a time when I found–and pardon me for saying it–most men incredibly dull. Even other characters on TV seemed either goofy or heroic, but not especially interesting.
Maybe I didn’t watch enough TV or get out of the dorm enough. Wait. Those are contradictions, aren’t they?
Oh me. Never contradictory me.
And it wasn’t exactly Kyle MacLachlan as I never much cared for him in other roles–unfortunately. Though I did try.
Froog says
Twin Peaks happened during my first job after university: I was a live-in teacher at a private boarding school in south-west England. The older teenagers I was assigned to supervise all became big fans of the show, and for a year or so their nickname for me was Agent Cooper. I felt very flattered. But perhaps I shouldn’t have??
marta says
I don’t know about your students, but if I called someone Agent Cooper, it would’ve been a compliment.
Froog says
Well, thank you, Marta, I take some comfort from that.
With adolescent boys, though, you can never be entirely sure; there’s always an undercurrent of subversion.
Froog says
I certainly came out of it better than a couple of my colleagues, who became known as The Log Lady and Killer Bob.