{"id":17315,"date":"2015-10-02T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2015-10-02T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=17315"},"modified":"2015-10-02T06:41:54","modified_gmt":"2015-10-02T10:41:54","slug":"the-dance-of-foreground-background-and-all-the-figures-between","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/the-dance-of-foreground-background-and-all-the-figures-between\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dance of Foreground, Background, and All the Figures Between"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>\"'Broadway<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: <\/em>Broadway Boogie-Woogie (oil on canvas, 1943), by Piet Mondrian. For more details, see the note<\/a> at the foot of this post.]<\/em><\/p>\n

From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

The art of living is based on rhythm — on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all<\/em> the aspects of life, good and bad, right and wrong, yours and mine, the static, defensive life, which is what most people are cursed with, is converted into a dance, “the dance of life”… The real function of the dance is — metamorphosis<\/em>. One can dance to sorrow or to joy; one can even dance abstractly… But the point is that, by the mere act of dancing, the elements which compose it are transformed; the dance is an end in itself, just like life. The acceptance of the situation, any<\/em> situation, brings about a flow, a rhythmic impulse towards self-expression. To relax is, of course, the first thing a dancer has to learn. It is also the first thing a patient has to learn when he confronts the analyst. It is the first thing any one has to learn in order to live. It is extremely difficult, because it means surrender, full surrender.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Henry Miller [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

About Angels and About Trees<\/strong><\/p>\n

Where do angels
\nfly in the firmament,<\/span>
\nand how many can dance
\non the head of a pin?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, I don’t care
\nabout that pin dance,<\/span>
\nwhat I know is that
\nthey rest, sometimes,<\/span>
\nin the tops of the trees<\/p>\n

and you can see them,
\nor almost see them,<\/span>
\nor, anyway, think: what a
\nwonderful idea.<\/span><\/p>\n

I have lost as you and
\nothers have possibly lost a<\/span>
\nbeloved one,
\nand wonder, where are they now?<\/span><\/p>\n

The trees, anyway, are
\nmiraculous, full of<\/span>
\nangels (ideas); even
\nempty they are a<\/span>
\ngood place to look, to put
\nthe heart at rest — all those<\/span>
\nleaves breathing the air, so<\/p>\n

peaceful and diligent, and certainly
\nready to be<\/span>
\nthe resting place of
\nstrange, winged creatures<\/span>
\nthat we, in this world, have loved.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Mary Oliver [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Out of the dimming sky a speck appeared, then another, and another. It was the starlings going to roost. They gathered deep in the distance, flock sifting into flock, and strayed towards me, transparent and whirling, like smoke. They seemed to unravel as they flew, lengthening in curves, like a loosened skein. I didn’t move; they flew directly over my head for half an hour. The flight extended like a fluttering banner, an unfurled oriflamme<\/span>, in either direction as far as I could see. Each individual bird bobbed and knitted up and down in the flight at apparent random, for no known reason except that that’s how starlings fly, yet all remained perfectly spaced. The flocks each tapered at either end from a rounded middle, like an eye. Over my head I heard a sound of beaten air, like a million shook rugs, a muffled whuff. Into the woods they sifted without shifting a twig, right through the crowns of trees, intricate and rushing, like wind.<\/p>\n

After half an hour, the last of the stragglers had vanished into the trees. I stood with difficulty, bashed by the unexpectedness of this beauty, and my spread lungs roared. My eyes pricked from the effort of trying to trace a feathered dot’s passage through a weft of limbs. Could tiny birds be sifting through me right now, birds winging through the gaps between my cells, touching nothing, but quickening in my tissues, fleet?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Annie Dillard [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Istigkeit<\/em> — wasn’t that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? “Is-ness.” The Being of Platonic philosophy — except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were — a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Aldous Huxley [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Double Dutch<\/strong><\/p>\n

The girls turning double-dutch
\nbob & weave like boxers pulling
\npunches, shadowing each other,
\nsparring across the slack cord
\ncasting parabolas in the air. They
\nwhip quick as an infant’s pulse
\nand the jumper, before she
\nenters the winking, nods in time
\nas if she has a notion to share,
\nwaiting her chance to speak. But she’s
\nanticipating the upbeat
\nlike a bandleader counting off
\nthe tune they are about to swing into.
\nThe jumper stair-steps into mid-air
\nas if she\u2019s jumping rope in low-gravity,
\ntraining for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment
\nlong enough to fit a second thought in,
\nshe looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish
\nas she flutter-floats into motion
\nlike a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos
\nthumbed alive. Once inside,
\nthe bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods
\nwho’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch
\nacquired Manhattan. How she dances
\npatterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing
\nits travels in scale before the hive. How
\nthe whole stunning contraption of girl and rope
\nslaps and scoops like a paddle boat.
\nHer misted skin arranges the light
\nwith each adjustment and flex. Now heather-
\nhued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum
\nof a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow
\nand knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,
\nsurfaces fracturing and reforming
\nlike a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.
\nShe makes jewelry of herself and garlands
\nthe ground with shadows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Gregory Pardlo [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/a>________________________<\/p>\n

About the image:<\/strong> Mondrian’s “typical” work featured not just colored rectangles, but the black gridlines which marked their boundaries. Broadway Boogie-Woogie<\/em> — his next-to-last painting — broke that mold in one strikingly obvious way. From the Museum of Modern Art<\/a>, in whose collection the painting is held:<\/p>\n

Mondrian replaced the black grid that had long governed his canvases with predominantly yellow lines that intersect at points marked by squares of blue and red. These atomized bands of stuttering chromatic pulses, interrupted by light gray, create paths across the canvas suggesting the city’s grid, the movement of traffic, and blinking electric lights, as well as the rhythms of jazz.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"figure-ground<\/a>The painting on the whole suggests, for me, a colored version of what’s called (in architecture and urban planning and design) a “figure-ground map” of central Manhattan. At right is an example of such a map (click to enlarge), showing the area around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC: the areas occupied by buildings are solid black, while the open spaces are white. Sometimes the two colors are reversed, depending on which sort of feature the user wants to highlight.<\/p>\n

In Broadway Boogie-Woogie<\/em>, though, it’s almost as if Mondrian wanted to connote the intensity — the vibrancy — of the various blocks and intersections, not just to separate them visually.<\/p>\n

(For a three-dimensional version of this “visual intensification,” do a Web search on Red Grooms and his installation from the 1970s-80s called Ruckus Manhattan<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

[back to top<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: Broadway Boogie-Woogie (oil on canvas, 1943), by Piet Mondrian. For more details, see the note at the foot of this post.] From whiskey river: The art of living is based on rhythm — on give and take, ebb and flow, light and dark, life and death. By acceptance of all the aspects of life, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,250,5,36,251,4159],"tags":[295,595,1904,2161,3700,4186,4187,4188],"class_list":{"0":"post-17315","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-art","9":"category-06_writing","10":"category-reading","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"category-essays","13":"tag-annie-dillard","14":"tag-mary-oliver","15":"tag-figure-and-ground","16":"tag-henry-miller","17":"tag-aldous-huxley","18":"tag-red-grooms","19":"tag-piet-mondrian","20":"tag-gregory-pardlo","21":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4vh","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17315"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17325,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17315\/revisions\/17325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}