bad time for poetry

The Last Entry

2009-05-25T12:04:00.003-04:00

The samurai looks insignificant

beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Excerpt from After a Death by Tomas Tranströmer

Stopping the Blog

2009-05-19T13:08:00.004-04:00

A few people have asked me why I am stopping the blog. I don’t have a tidy answer. Nor do I want to pretend it is a big deal. But since even frog tastes like chicken, I will include an excerpt from Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel Prize speech as a form of reply; and as an expansion beyond the question also—to where it might want to go.

“Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

“For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

“How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

“I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.”

Bill Saroyan, Blinky Palermo and The West

2009-05-15T11:33:00.002-04:00

Patrice was surprised about Bill Saroyan.

That sweet dog has an interesting lineage. In 1974, Thomas—still a Franciscan and living in New York City—became friends with Blinky Palermo (who deserves a blog entry of his own). One night in the spring of 1975 the two of them were sitting on the stairs of Palermo’s building when a very funny dog went by. The West, as they called her, became their dog and when Palermo died she went with Thomas to California. The West is Bill Saroyan’s great grandmother.

Get Rid of Your Excuse (II)

2009-05-13T14:34:00.003-04:00

As a kid—before moral philosophy and its convolutions—I wanted to understand what lobotomy suggests about happiness. I had seen a Russian movie where someone, after being lobotomized, smiled and got along with everyone. This impressed me. I didn’t know anyone who was that happy. Yet, something bothered me about the lobotomy and I spent many hours trying to find what it was. Although, none of the insights I had or have—or have read about—are entirely satisfying, I am certain the answer revolves around the fulfillment of a quality we can call “humanity.” This quality is an aim rather than a condition. It is the pearl of the moral/spirit oyster and it might also be an imperative of the species. Humanity is the limit of the spirit, an unreachable reminder of the best we could be, and the better happiness moves towards it. This indefensible statement is either self-apparent to you or it is not.

Whatever the case might be, it is clear that humanity is a difficult aim and so, most of us—as Hesse wrote—are half-human and half-worm or half-monkey or half-pig. There are many excuses why we fall short and there are also many internal failures we don’t know about. The latter can only be seen through our effect on the world, so they are difficult to resolve. The former—the excuses—are what I want to address here.

Excuses come in many categories, usually manifested in combination: self-loathing (“I’m stupid,” “I’m ugly,” I’m fat”), victim (“my life is so hard,” “the worst happens to me,” “I just didn’t have the opportunities”), unlucky (“I’ve the worst luck,” “the world dealt me a bad hand”), lone wolf (“I didn’t care about that, anyway,” “who needs that”), time miser (“I’m too busy,” “I did my best,” “I tried”), religion (“the meek will inherit the world”), and so on. What all these excuses have in common is laziness. They are ways to avoid doing what needs to be done.

But what do people do with their time if they are not working towards the fulfillment of their humanity? Day to day, they are watching television, dabbling at their work, talking on the phone, feeling sorry for themselves, taking it easy, wasting time. In the long run, they are busy fabricating the lie of why they are not who they could have been. This takes a lot of work but it is the type of work that comes naturally to us. It requires affection for the dressed up game we call “being ourselves,” self-satisfaction with our petty choices, and weakness for easy pleasure. Inevitably, while snuggling in that mud pen, we engage in self-loathing, maybe victim and some lone wolf, for good measure (the brutality of self-loathing is not the same as being self-critical with aim towards action. Self-loathing is self-feeding, being self-critical with aim towards action is life-feeding).

In the case of artists, the excuses apply to their life as well as their art. The problem in both endeavors is the same: it is hard to sustain the imperative of humanity. Most people can get excited to be better by watching a movie, reading a book or having a session of alcohol-induced throw-up. Some can keep that excitement for a week and some for a year, but in the long run, integrity and a higher standard are harder to sustain than it is to fabricate the myth of delightful mediocrity.

If you want to aim higher, the odds are against you. Most likely, you—like me and everyone else—will fail because our tendency is to be superficial and lazy.

A good place to begin is finding people who you admire and who are aiming or have aimed high. Then follow that example by eliminating ideas like, “I am doing the best I can,” “I have no time,” “I tried.” Also, complicate things a little bit for yourself. If, for instance, you find yourself attracted to the model of “the meek will inherit the world,” you might want to layer on it the model of the via crucis.

Get Rid of Your Excuse (I)

2009-05-12T17:52:00.005-04:00

In the last two years—the two years of this blog—I have seen artists who claim authenticity copy my work, my website and my sketchbooks. Once a month someone attacks me through my email, usually hiding in the attack his or her shortcomings and lack of integrity—sometimes they go farther and vandalize something.

I have criticized the mainstream art world but my intention has not been to validate bad artists. If things are not happening for you, it’s mostly your fault. You might have justifications. If you believe them, it’s best to come to peace with what and where you are. If you don’t believe them, do something about it.

All artists should assume they have—at best—a tiny talent, and this reality doesn’t have to be entirely sad. If you are doing better work today than two years ago then things are looking up.

Stop treading water. Stop diffusing your sadness. Stop being small.

Get rid of your excuse.

Small and Large

2009-05-12T08:39:00.003-04:00

Thomas cut three mangoes: one for him, one for me and one for his dog, Bill Saroyan, a scraggly mutt who likes all fruits, except apricots. Bill finished first then lay by my side.

“What are you thinking about?” Thomas asked.

“I’ve been thinking we rarely know the work of an artist in its entirety. We base our ideas on few works without knowing if the effort is small or large,” I said.

“What do you mean by small and large?” he asked.

“Many artists dream of having a great retrospective at MOMA but look what it did to Gerhard Richter; few bodies of work benefit from that level of consideration. You see one piece and it seems interesting. You see four and they seem promising. But then you see a hundred and they don’t live up to the promise. How many pickled animals should one see before the idea becomes less exciting?” I said.

Bill got up and lay again on a sun patch. He looked comfortable.

“Maybe the oligarch buys the pickled animal precisely because there are other pickled animals in the houses of important people,” Thomas said then started to cut another mango.
“Can you imagine Andy Warhol’s catalogue raisonné, particularly the pages of the 1980s? Or a vast Kippenberger show? Or seven pieces by Rachel Whiteread? Luckily, demand and dealer savvy scatter the work around the world, sparing collectors the spectacle of 75 camouflage paintings,” I said.

“But it’s not so simple. The junior-captain of industry who buys the mass-produced thing by Anselm Kiefer or Olafur Eliasson knows he's not buying one of the good ones. And how many people don't know most studies by James Turrell or Christo are merely mementos?” he said.

“They're seeing what's convenient,” I said.

“We are all eager to see what’s convenient,” he said.

The end is important in all things (IV)

2009-05-07T21:13:00.001-04:00

I will end the blog in 30 days.

Another tale from the Hagakure,

“Once, when Lord Katsushige was hunting at Shiroishi, he shot a large boar. Everyone came running up to see it and said, "Well, well. You have brought down an uncommonly large one !" Suddenly the boar got up and dashed into their midst. All of them fled in confusion, but Nabeshima Matabet drew his sword and finished it off. At that point Lord Katsushige covered his face with his sleeve and said, "It sure is dusty." This was presumably because he did not want to see the spectacle of his flustered men.”

You and the Kindle

2009-04-28T17:57:00.007-04:00

It is not surprising that factors influencing status anxiety dominated the goofy article about the Kindle written by someone named Joanne Kaufman in the New York Times on April 24. The article revolved around different versions of the following paragraph:

“The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper. If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.”

Yet there are other issues beyond Kaufman’s article—beyond status anxiety—to consider regarding the Kindle. The most important is whether or not the Kindle will succeed, because of what its success will mean to publishing and to reading.

It seems certain that—even with that name—the Kindle or another Kindle-like reader will succeed. There are at least four reasons why the Kindle will be unstoppable: 1. It celebrates you (user customization); 2. It celebrates money (new products, new markets); 3. It celebrates democracy (softens the barriers of publishing); 4. It celebrates convenience. For these and other reasons, all but the most obscure books will soon be available for the Kindle.

For some, this triumph will be a confirmation of the righteousness of the electronic reader—the future is written by the winners. But to me the certainty of this success, like the success of many other things of doubtful merit, is only a prediction of the way things go. I love books. I like to understand the moment and the context in which they were printed—a war, a failed state, a surge of revolutionary fervor. I like to see that moment and that context in the paper, in the typeface. My library is not something to show someone else but a useful mirror. When I look at my books, I see my history, choices and accidents. I see the worn edges of books I kept in my pockets in high school. I see my teachers. I see random events that brought a book to me or I see a book I shared with someone else. I see special editions of a novel I sought out because its etchings, I open my books to find notes in the cover sheets, paint and ink stains on the pages, loose pieces of paper with drawings, or hotel receipts. I see effort. I also like that books are someone else’s vision. Not just the vision of the writer but the vision of the publisher, the designer, the printer, the age, the tyrants who tried to stop them, the old bookstore that tried to sell them, and so on. Books are content in context.

The Kindle is about content. Content that is convenient and customizable. Freedom to customize and interact (undoubtedly, a form of electronic context will be available at some point) is at the center of the Internet creed, which is part of what makes the Kindle appealing. The Kindle also facilitates content distribution by eliminating the cost and restrictions of publishing, and it is likely most books will soon be published without a gatekeeper (such as I am doing now)—directly from author to Kindle. You will determine what gets published and you will be able to modify the content you like to your liking.

Those attributes of the Kindle are supposed to be good things.

The invisible hand of those who make money from you being you notwithstanding, I find the contemporary importance of YOU, silly, manipulative and encouraging of mediocrity. Much of what's underneath this self-preoccupation is the infantile desire to be pleased—all the time—as well as the notion that our opinions and desires have particular importance, even if we know very little. Knowledge is increasingly becoming something that comes from the gut and/or opinions.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the YOU that made the cover of Time magazine a few years back and that is in the mouth of so many, is nothing too deep. For the most part it is a shell of cravings, prejudices and hang ups that—as many who had tried know—resist dismantling. This you is a farce but trying to dismantle it is painful and, almost always, futile.

Which it might be why we are moving in the other direction. In our age we are stressing the importance of you. You know better. You choose. You define. You tell. You decide. Perhaps, as some contemporary thinkers argue, this concentration on you is the only way to transcend you. They are hoping for a Big Bang. One outcome of this emphasis on you is the suspicion of external expertise. Warhol might have missed the point: we all want—and now can have—our fifteen minutes of expertise. Everyone has a say. Everyone is an expert.

As it relates to books, this democratization and celebration of you will generate a few nuggets of value—mostly those now in regular books—lost in a thick soup of insignificant knowledge and waste. The search engines will then let you find the parts of the soup that appeal not to some snobbish New York publisher but to you. You will suck these soup-parts into your Kindle and maybe write a blog for the world to know what parts are most important to you. Maybe you will hope the parts you found will be important also to your readers—to those who follow you. You might argue this is not the force-feeding of authority but the sharing of peers; not the tyranny of the oppressor but the democratization of knowledge. You have something to say.

You also know best what you need. The Kindle.

An Incomplete Reading List on Death

2009-04-27T11:26:00.002-04:00

I am posting an incomplete list of novels and two sets of poems touching on death.

Seven novels,

La familia de Pascual Duarte by Camilo José Cela
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karerina by Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
El túnel by Ernesto Sabato
The Death of a Nobody by Jules Romains
The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis by José Saramago

And two sets of poems,

Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez (a good reason to learn Spanish)
The Yellow Heart by Pablo Neruda

Art & the University

2009-04-22T15:18:00.000-04:00

I have not written for this blog in some time because I have been absorbed by the world of a new cycle of paintings and writings. Today’s entry is an excerpt from my recent lecture at the University of Nebraska titled Art & the University. If you are interested, the complete text of this lecture as well as the other lectures I have prepared during my three-year appointment will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in the spring of 2010.

Excerpt from Art & the University:

The scenario I have briefly outlined is symptomatic of our age, an age in which art has more kinship with entertainment and leisure than with religion and science. The age sets the tone but most of us are unaware of the way in which it affects our actions and our dreams. We artists believe in our free will as we hurry to become jesters in the minor court of the artworld.

Looking around faculty or student exhibitions, or, say, at the Saatchi collection in London, we see variety and we convince ourselves it is proof will and whimsy matter more than the age. But we see variety because we are so thoroughly imbedded in our age it has become indistinguishable from ourselves. One hundred years from now, those personal and media variations will be less visible, and two hundred years after that most artworks will lay dormant under the blanket of their age. If it is partly true that as Max Weber wrote, a work of art “is never rendered obsolete by a subsequent work of art,” as it is the case in science, it is also true that most works of art rarely transcend the time and the place in which they were made. Weber’s work, for instance, seems well anchored in its time.

The Clever Fountain

2009-03-02T14:47:00.000-05:00

A meditation on art, influence, expertise, intelligence and opportunism:

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was—and remains—ambiguous. Is it a re-framing of art away from the object and towards concept and interpretation? Or is it an example of art’s capacity to incorporate everything into itself? Or is it a joke? In 1964, forty-seven years after being created and lost, the ambiguity of Fountain and its maker went up a notch when Arturo Schwarz, Duchamp's European dealer at the time, sold the urinal as an edition. Duchamp, who signed the urinal multiples, felt they represented an inversion of his process: each readymade—like traditional sculpture—individually hand-crafted.

One of these editioned urinals sold at auction in 2002 for $1,762,500, and in 2004, Fountain was named the most influential modern artwork of all time by a survey of 500 experts.

A Gray Stain

2009-02-10T12:22:00.000-05:00

Then a gray stain appeared on the horizon. It blurred the edge between sky and land until there was only darkness.

Since he had started the new paintings the appeal of something new had grown within him. It was not newness he was after—though at times he inspected its benefits—but the shudder he felt when the dark locomotive of things burst through the barricade of The Known. Yet that morning, after the drunkenness of promise had worn off, the sobriety of familiarity weighed on him. Familiarity, rather than being a mark of authenticity had become a measure of his lack of originality and with this realization his earlier elation gave way to despair. He lay on the painted floor and looked up to the tall shelves and the fluorescent lights. He needed to let someone in.

Innocent Fraud

2009-02-05T14:26:00.000-05:00

Paul Krugman, last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics, has been critical of the late, noted economist John Kenneth Galbraith because, among other things, Galbraith wrote for the public rather than for other economists and because Galbraith’s economic insights were, at times, over-simplified. These criticisms seem curious to me. Paul Krugman is not only a Princeton professor, but also a columnist for the New York Times, a public venue, and a blogger, also a public venue. In addition, Krugman is a frequent contributor to CNN and MSNBC, where the public sound byte is necessarily more over-simplified than anything Galbraith ever wrote. While I agree with much of what Krugman has to say about economics and policy, I detect something akin to ethical envy in his suspicious criticism of Galbraith. Paul Krugman appears to be a man of integrity (his brief role as advisor to Enron can be discounted), however, I think—and Krugman might feel—that it is hard for most of us to measure up to John Kenneth Galbraith. Few can deny that catering to the public is often done at the expense of quality. Yet, Galbraith was not a caterer. In relation to the public, he was an educator and a conscience whose ethics were maintained at a cost to himself and his reputation.

The criticism of writing for the public rather than for the professionals is not merely snobbery, but there is a lot of snobbery in it, which is often misguided and shortsighted. I am reminded of the criticism Wittgenstein—in whom I am interested—launched on Bertrand Russell for wasting his talent by writing books like The Conquest of Happiness. While it might be true The Conquest of Happiness is not exactly Principia Mathematica, it is a gift to be able to observe a good mind like Russell’s tackle something mundane but relevant to our lives. We have a long way to go until all we need to think about is the foundation of mathematics or the economics of trade, and if the thinking of the everyday is left only to Dr. Phil, Joel Osteen and Britney Spears, we are in trouble.

Moreover, the world would have benefited from some “public” writing by Wittgenstein, particularly on his moral struggles, which never saw print, academic or otherwise. The problem of talking about something vs. showing it notwithstanding, the opportunity to see the mind of The Philosophical Investigations deal with the cumbersome challenges of living and making choices would have been wonderful.

Snobbery is an aspect of any community of experts—including the arts—and it must be understood as the result of educated judgment, convention and self-validation. It would be difficult to argue that the popular appeal of Peter Max or Thomas Kinkade is some sort of confirmation of their greatness. But it is also difficult to argue—although many have tried—that the unpopularity of something or its popularity are diagnostic of its quality. Take, for instance, the complicated case of Andrew Wyeth. The late pictures, particularly the Helga series, are not great but he was undoubtedly a better—and arguably more innovative—painter than most of the celebrated titans of the last fifty years. But it is hard for the art world experts to get excited about an artist whose images have been made into posters for college dorms.

Meltingly sweet, in autumn

2009-02-03T13:09:00.000-05:00

The meek and fluffy and beautiful world of ours, this world of contrasts, has best been summarized in a recent article about birds in The Economist: “Four decades after the campaign, sparrows remained scarcer in Beijing than they should have been (though they could reliably be found being grilled on bamboo skewers in the night markets, along with yellow-breasted buntings, meltingly sweet, in autumn).”

I think in the last few entries I have been circumnavigating my discomfort with the whininess, arrogance and fraud that has so pervasively invaded our lives. Many of us have a ready justification for why we are less than we could be and a way to look at things that makes us think we are really more than what we have become.

The effort of much of growing up seems to be the search for a little tool we can use not to carve our way out of our hole but to dig ourselves deeper. In this narrowing effort we are open minded in the help we recruit, which we find in religion; in the way we were raised; in our power in the world; in our powerlessness; in the pity we feel for ourselves; in the pride we feel for what we have done; in the busyness of our affairs and our job and our lives. We find it in the angelic conversion offered by tattooed wings. Maybe we especially find it there.

But all that is foolish talk. That master or charlatan of extreme wakefulness, G. Gurdjieff, wrote, “Everything is dependent on everything else,  everything is connected, nothing is separate. Therefore everything is going in the only way it can go. If people were different everything would be different.  They are what they are, so everything is as it is.”

So we are left with this (and it could be worse): “They could reliably be found being grilled on bamboo skewers in the night markets, along with yellow-breasted buntings, meltingly sweet, in autumn.”

More on Failure

2009-01-30T09:10:00.000-05:00

Let me expand on the previous entry.

What is failure without desperateness?

From the Hagakure (best read if under a portrait of Søren Kierkegaard):

“Lord Naoshige said, ‘The Way of the Samurai is in desperateness. Ten men or more cannot kill such a man. Common sense will not accomplish great things. Simply become insane and desperate.’ In the Way of the Samurai, if one uses discrimination, he will fall behind. One needs neither loyalty nor devotion, but simply to become desperate in the Way. Loyalty and devotion are of themselves within desperation.”

In the judgment of the elders, a samurai's obstinacy should be excessive. A thing done with moderation may later be judged to be insufficient. I have heard that when one thinks he has gone too far, he will not have erred. This sort of rule should not be forgotten.

And one more, also from the Hagakure:

“When someone is giving you his opinion, you should receive it with deep gratitude even though it is worthless.”

Failure

2009-01-23T17:36:00.002-05:00

In the depressed Puerto Rico of the late 70s, no event was as anticipated as the visit of tightrope walker Karl Wallenda; except perhaps Lou Ferrigno’s promised appearance at Safari Park. But since Ferrigno never showed up (the Hulk had to be impersonated by El Tigre Pérez), Wallenda’s visit remains the key event of the end of that dreamy decade.

Karl Wallenda, then 73 years old, tried to walk, without a safety net, on a tightrope stretched between two towers in Condado, a hotel area near San Juan. My brothers and I watched him on live TV as he began his act and we kept on watching when he tried to get a grip on the tightrope and when he fell. Every part of that walk and his attempt at a grip had a different quality than anything we had seen before. For us, kids at the time, Wallenda’s struggle meant more because he had no safety net.

In recent years, it has become fashionable among certain circles, particularly of academic, crafty and self-help-inclined artists, to speak of failure as a welcomed part of the studio practice. What is often meant by failure here is the loose mental amalgam of it's-ok-if-it-doesn’t-work philosophy, some fetishistic concern with process and an excuse for not doing better. Although it is camouflaged as freedom, failure, in this view, is more often than not a form of preciousness, a walk on the tightrope when the risk is small. Failures when the rope is only a few feet from the ground or when there is a safety net are but refreshing winds. These winds, of course, become something else when the rope is raised.

The Great Commission

2009-01-14T15:32:00.002-05:00

"In 1904 Hilma was informed, through Ananda, that she was to execute paintings on the astral plane. This involved paintings that represented the imperishable. In the summer 1905 she was promised that she would be prepared to mediate a message. The names Amaliel, Ester and Georg were mentioned. It was said that she was to work in service of the mysteries carrying out the new building also called the Temple. First she had to go through a cleansing process. Amaliel said: You shall be struck blind. You shall deny yourself so that your pride shall be broken. You shall stumble in order to be tested for your own weakness. A crying voice shall you become, but before that you shall be broken down into dust."

Excerpt from the The Hilma af Klint Foundation website.

Structure (III)

2009-01-09T10:45:00.000-05:00

“I am interested then only in the problem of painting, of how to make a better painting according to certain laws that are inherent in the making of a good picture and not at all in private extraversions or introversions of specific individuals,” wrote Marsden Hartley in his 1928 essay “Art and the Personal Life,” and for the rest of his career he would claim disdain for the personal, the confessional and the emotional.

But anyone who considers a Marsden Hartley painting with some attention recognizes the man, not just the intellect—personally, emotionally and as a confession. What Hartley might be doing is playing a hide-and-seek game most artists play. Thomas once told me the key to an artist’s work is in what he or she denies. It is also possible, though unlikely, that Hartley could have underestimated how much the irrational and rational depend on each other. Whatever the case was, his words exaggerate the opposition of emotion and intellect and of content and form. In contrast, Hartley’s paintings make a great argument for—and are—a reconciliation of imagination and the world, of form and content and of the rational and of irrational. The structure of his work owes its intelligence not only to a great intellect but to a profound emotional sensitivity that can be perceived throughout.

He concluded his essay in an appropriately confusing and reconciliatory manner.

“Underlying all sensible works of art, there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problems understood. It was so with those artists of the great past who had the intellectual knowledge of structure upon which to place their emotions. It is this structural beauty that makes the old painting valuable. And so it becomes to me a problem. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression. For this reason I believe that it is more significant to keep one's painting in a condition of severe experimentalism than to become a quick success by means of cheap repetition.

“The real artists have always been interested in this problem, and you feel it strongly in the work of Da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Courbet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Cezanne. Art is not a matter of slavery to the emotion or even a matter of slavery to nature or to the aesthetic principles. It is a tempered and happy union of them all.”

Heart

2008-12-26T12:35:00.000-05:00

Since I barely have ten hours of experience with the boat, Thomas sailed us through the rough Boynton Beach Inlet. As the sea widened, I noticed the whitecaps and looked at Thomas, who was smiling. Talking was hard to do so I sank in the bow seat and enjoyed the fire of the late-afternoon sky. Against the ocean and everything that comes with it, including the birds, many of my writings on this blog seemed flimsy. But not the bit about Heart, though it might be confusing and likely to be misunderstood. What Heart might be was clear as I watched Thomas head into the waves. It was clear in a way my writing wasn't, and it was a clarity no intellectual machinery could diffuse. I blamed my writing and moved on to the walls of dark water rising above us. The wind had picked up and soon Thomas and I were both soaked. The night was almost upon us. I thought of asking him to turn around but the warm water felt good. We were in the Gulf Stream. Maybe if I were Hemingway or Dewey I could write about Heart, I thought. Really? My shortcomings aside, not even Kierkegaard, who did as good of a job as anyone, could make much sense of Heart in words. Pointing towards a cloud. Hand waiving. That's all we have. And examples. Thomas, for me.

Structure (II)

2008-12-23T15:25:00.000-05:00

It is probably the crudest but also the truest approximation to say what matters in art is Heart. If we were Tilman Riemenschneider, Heart will bring forth and organize, heighten and shape, as it should be. If we are not Tilman Riemenschneider, Heart might not be the fountain or the guide we wish it to be and, for the most part, little can be done about that.

Which might be why anything I say about art or its making often sounds like nonsense to me. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein wrote,

“We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

The pull towards objective understanding is the fool’s effort. The Heart, however, is slippery ice. No work can be done there. The nonsense is the rough ground. Most of my own efforts to understand are centered on concerns with structure, and the main problem I have with the isolationists I mentioned in the previous entry is their structures are seldom complex enough.

A particular structure is a state of the work of art, a state that can be changed by content, purpose and failure. The tensions and points of support in the painting “of an apple” have to be different than those “of a horizon” and then they have to be different if it is “this apple” or “that apple,” handled “like this” or “like that” and so on. For instance, an apple painted by Cezanne exerts less “outward” pressure on the surface than one by Van Heem, and therefore brings about an entirely different armature or structure; a green apple is different than a red one; a mythic one is different than a “factual” one. Which is why there is little chance of doing anything useful with general ideas about structure or simplifying its “physics” to perceptual illusions and formal aspects, particularly aspects imagined to be invariant to content, purpose and failure. Structure is the ensemble of forces and parts in the work of art and these forces and parts are re-made by perturbations of everything that matters to the work and its experience.

Perturbations are the type of elusive thing Heart can account for. There is also some sort of “dark matter,” invisible to most of us, in the ensemble of forces and parts. Heart finds itself in this uncertainty and this finding re-organizes both.

Structure (I)

2008-12-17T17:20:00.001-05:00

Some artists consider structure the most exciting aspect of art and while others might not go that far, it is hard to imagine a musician, artist or writer who is not frequently puzzled by an aspect of structure. To consider structure in the visual arts, literature, dance and music means to take on the relationship between parts and whole, between forces and constraints, between the “in” and “out” of the work. That is, to consider structure is to consider why something works or doesn’t, and since art is only that which works, to consider its working is to consider its essence.

This might be why many visual artists have tried to make structure more explicit in their artwork and why frankness about structure has become expected in most intellectual circles. In fact, structure is one of the foci around which the 250 year-old Modern project revolves. In the last century, the desire to make structure more explicit led a significant number of artists to take structure—somewhat isolated from other aspects of art—as the subject of their work. The effort of the isolationists has, at times, produced work of subtlety and insight and, other times, the work has been mired by cleverness. In either case, the results—for the most part—only have the appearance of art.

Radical Doubting

2008-12-02T13:00:00.001-05:00

People vary in their capacity for accepting doubt, especially of cherished beliefs, and they also vary in how much of themselves they are willing to doubt.

The belief that our experience, our education, our status and our upbringing are proofs and guarantees is vanity. Although never easy, it seems clear that erasing some aspect of attributes-of-self is necessary. In “Fear and Trembling,” Kierkegaard quotes Luke 14:26: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.”

What does one trust? I have considered this question for a long time but neither the question nor its implications have become easier. Some time ago I read Alan Watts: “To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”

Relax and float.

Yet, while relaxing and floating are necessary, they are not sufficient; at least not for doing something interesting and meaningful—admittedly values. To do, and perhaps also to be, something interesting and meaningful, passion and faith must exist as well. Art, like life, depends in part on desperate passion and faith amid unshakable doubts. A leap of faith must not only be taken despite doubts but in fact depends on those doubts. There is no leap without doubts.

While faith—the confidence of a better condition—is probably always spiritual in essence, ought not to be religious in practice, in discipline. Of course, without religious doctrine, as if the case in art, passion and faith often become soft and end up being more attributes of vanity. In my view, the crucial word in the previous paragraph is “desperate.”

Radical doubting.

Painting and Structure

2008-11-11T14:24:00.000-05:00

Why does an image work in a painting while another (a similar one, say) does not? What is the balance between presence and reference and on what does that balance depend? How is distance created in the interaction between viewer and painting and is it possible to speak of the autonomy of a painting?

Usually, painting is seen mostly for the amalgam of attributes that it is, such as treatment, imagery, scale, etc—painting as a sum of sorts. However, if instead of seeing painting as sum we look at it singularly as a state of thought, our view of painting and how it is achieved can change in significant ways. Most of the issues that matter, for instance, will quickly show themselves to be related to structure. That is, related to the underlying supports that give shape to the state of thought, and by thought here I mean the entire force of the spirit: reason, emotion, intuition, etc.

I will try to write more about this in the future.

Mayakovsky, Mandelstam and Barnes

2008-10-31T15:20:00.000-04:00

Two interesting poetry events.

1. Whale & Star's recent publication of “Mandelstam: Modernist Archaist.” The book's editor, Kevin M. F. Platt, assembled new translations by notable contemporary poets combined with an exceptional selection of previous translations. You can buy it here.

2. Thomas tells me that one night in the winter of 1978 Clifford Barnes was holding fort at the White Horse Tavern, where from time to time Cliff lowered his voice, looked at one of his admirers in the eyes and delivered a bit of wisdom. He wielded his softness like a flamethrower and that annoyed Vladimir Mayakovsky, who was drinking quietly nearby. Mayakovsky told Cliff to shut up but the bard, not used to people like the Georgian, smirked, which cost him a beating.

A Sentimental Education

2008-10-21T13:07:00.001-04:00

Sometimes I am asked about my influences or my education, and I sometimes ask others for the same. I am not sure what we expect to find. Causes and effects are usually separated by years and events; a bent here; a twist there; a fear, for instance, that reacts with an image or a song to make a new emotional compound and part of a personality. The stories we build to make sense of what happens or happened are fictions, always oversimplified and often misunderstood.

In 1978, Pablo and I had a sleepover and as part of the rituals we ate late, talked—mostly lied—about girls, and played records. I think Pablo had gotten the records from his father. Through the night Paco Ibañez, Silvio Rodriguez and Joan Manuel Serrat sang and we listened pretending to be more mature than we were; at fourteen we could still take ourselves seriously. At some point we played Serrat’s record devoted to the poems of Miguel Hernandez and laid on the floor looking up at the ceiling, in silence. Since then “Umbrío por la pena” has been an ongoing education.

UMBRIO POR LA PENA
Umbrío por la pena, casi bruno, 
porque la pena tizna cuando estalla, 
donde yo no me hallo no se halla 
hombre más apenado que ninguno.

Sobre la pena duermo solo y uno, 
pena es mi paz y pena mi batalla, 
perro que ni me deja ni se calla, 
siempre a su dueño fiel, pero importuno.

Cardos y penas llevo por corona, 
cardos y penas siembran sus leopardos 
y no me dejan bueno hueso alguno.

No podrá con la pena mi persona
rodeada de penas y de cardos: 
¡cuánto penar para morirse uno!

°
Shadowed by sorrow, nearly black
because sorrow soots when it bursts,
where I am not, it is not
the most sorrowed man.

I sleep alone and one on the sorrow,
sorrow is my peace and sorrow my battle;
a dog that neither leaves nor lies quiet,
always faithful, but inopportune.

Thistles and pain I carry as a crown,
thistles and pain sow leopards
that do not leave a bone uncrushed.

Surrounded by sorrow and thistles
my body can bear no more.
So much sorrow only to die!

[In translating this poem I used Ted Genoways translation as a starting point.]