First day of the Third month
Hardly had she cried her breathless prayer
when a numbness seized her body; her soft breasts
were sealed in bark, her hair turned into leaves,
her arms into branches; her feet, which had been so quick,
plunged into earth and rooted her to the spot.
Only her shining grace was left. Apollo
still loved her; he reached out his hand to touch
the laurel trunk, and under the rough bark
could feel her heart still throbbing…
Ovid, Metamorphoses I
Apollo and Daphne, a marble by Bernini in the Galleria Borghese, illustrates perfectly the pursuit described in the above passage. At the height of trauma Daphne is transformed into a tree.
Published by Skira in 1931 Les Metamorphoses, a French translation of Ovide, was illustrated by Picasso through a series of 30 etchings, with no evidence that he attempted to render Apollo and Daphne. Picasso did undertake the story of Tereus and Philomela, a brutal account of rape where Philomela’s tongue was cut out:
[Picasso’s] efforts depict the physical struggle between
the pair. In these etchings Picasso experimented with the
placement of figures, first concentrating on Philomela’s
resistance to Tereus, then—through a rearrangement of
limbs—on the inevitable rape itself. The final image
manages to represent both actions…movement that, in
this case, suggest Tereus’s repeated thrusts and
Philomela’s ongoing efforts to push him away.
Lisa Florman, Myth and Metamorphosis
Surviving the trauma, Philomela was ultimately transformed into a nightingale. These tales are only myths, yet silence is terminal for untold victims of violence—victims in absolute need of healing change.
Mithridates the Great, last King of Pontus, was poisoned…by himself on a regular basis. Fearing a fate of poisoning like that of his father, Mithridates cultivated immunity by ingesting less than lethal doses of a mixture of deadly agents and in the process created a kind of universal remedy, a panacea for poison. The next step was to bottle it. If only he had hit the road like a wild west medicine show instead of launching a military campaign against the Roman Empire to enlarge his kingdom. Healthy as a horse, despite marrying his sister Laodice, he would live to regret his wars on Rome. Pompey routed Mithridates in 66 BC. On the shores of the Black Sea, the last King of Pontus took poison, desperately trying to kill himself. He had, however, built up such a resistance over the years that the poison was ineffective. In the end, Mithridates died by the sword, run through by one of his officers in order to avoid the humiliation of being paraded through the streets of the capital a captive.
Despite the tragedy, the panacea for poison actually worked: Pompey found the formula written in Mithridates’ own hand and had a preparation made. More than 200 years later Galen, doctor to Emperor Marcus Aurelius, improved the common cure-all formula. By the Middle Ages ‘mithridate’ was used as a preventative for plague, and into the late eighteenth century it was still prescribed by London apothecaries. Quite a legacy. To date, there is no remedy for incest.
Collage after watching the documentary Cuba and the Cameraman:
Revolucion, si!
Our country or death!
Here is where Castro sleeps
A long Cohiba
My indecent instrument
4 lbs of sugar, 5 lbs of rice per person
One bread per day—made from sweet potato
Si, the collapse of the Soviet Union,
The blockade is the problem
Note to teacher (for the daughter of the filmmaker):
Mr. Krinsky,
Please excuse TaMi for her absence.
Fidel
They ate our farm animals
1 ox, 1 cow, 1 horse, 4 calves
There is no meat
The clinic is out of antacids
They made us useless
Three old men left with nothing
They ate our farm animals
It is impossible to work now
This is what a Cuban courtyard looks like
We have pigeons,
Ducks, geese, and roosters
The water is not running
Tourists are more valued than Cubans
It’s the truth
Taxi drivers make more than doctors
They have access to dollars
Happy Birthday, Fidel!
Viva! Viva!
He will guide us forever!
Nobody dies before his time
No bulletproof vest
I am calm
I know I am going to die
I just don’t know when
Author of Birds of America, artist and naturalist John James Audubon (1785-1851) in his own words:
The woods that I continually trod contained not only birds of richest feathering, but each tree, each shrub, each flower, attracted equally my curiosity and attention, and my anxiety to have all those in my portfolios introduced the thought of joining as much as possible nature as it existed…as time flies Nature loses its primitiveness, and that pictures drawn in ten, or twenty, or more years, will no longer illustrate our delightful America pure from the hands of its Creator!
M. de T. [Constantine Rafinesque*] searched the woods for plants, and I for birds. He also followed the margins of the Ohio, and picked up many shells, which he greatly extolled. With us, I told him, they were gathered into heaps to be converted into lime. “Lime! Mr. Audubon; why, they are worth a guinea a piece in any part of Europe.”
*Rafinesque put forth a theory of evolution in 1833 in Atlantic Journal and Friend of Knowledge as well as giving scientific names to certain specimens like the mule deer collected by the Lewis and Clark expedition.
My Drawings at first were taken altogether in Water Colours, but they wanted softness…particularly when trying in vain to imitate birds of soft and downy plumage…One day after having finished the Miniature portrait of the dearest Friend [his wife, Lucy] I have in this World A portion of the face was injured by a drop of Water…recollecting Just then that whilt a pupil of David I had drawn heads and figures in different coloured Chalks, I resorted to a piece that matched the tint intended for the part, applied the pigment, rubbed the place with a cork Stump and at once produced the desired effect!—
Where is the amateur of paintings who could bear the reading of a description of the structure, muscles, and expression of the face of such a man as Rembrandt, after gazing at the portrait of that eminent artist by himself? The study of ornithology must be a journey of pleasure. Each step must present to the traveller’s view objects that are eminently interesting, varied in their appearance, and attracting to such a degree, as to excite in each individual thus happily employed the desire of knowing all respecting all he sees.
—Audubon
A work of passion and vision, Birds of America manifested an awareness of nature steeped in respect and wonder through vibrant life-size aquatint etchings of the original double elephant folio Havell edition—an awareness that reified the first inklings of future conservation movements.
Fifth day of the Third month
The screenplay of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film The Dreamers (2003) was adapted from the novel The Holy Innocents by its author Gilbert Adair. The Holy Innocents is itself an adaptation of sorts of Jean Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles which Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville adapted into a screenplay for the 1950 film of the same name with Cocteau himself voicing the narration.
Both stories revolve around the relationship between twins, a boy and a girl entering adulthood and their odd psychology of dependence and antagonism, attraction and jealousy.
Bertolucci’s version takes place in Paris in 1968, a period corresponding with the politics of the Vietnam war. American exchange student Matthew meets twins Theo and Isabelle at a protest over the government’s closing of the Cinematheque Francaise, a film archive and theatre dedicated to the preservation of cinematic arts inspiring the generation of New Wave auteurs. Matthew is immediately taken up by the pair and literally invited into their world with an offer to stay at their parents’ apartment as their parents will soon be leaving Paris for the summer. Prior to departing, there is a dinner scene with both parents and twins at the apartment where Matthew in jacket and tie lights a cigarette and then begins fitting his zippo along the lines and spaces of the tablecloth pattern—the symmetry conferring a meaning as mysterious as a quincunx—perspectives much approved of by the poet father and foreshadowing Matthew’s own efforts to find his place in the distinct orbit of Theo and Isabelle. For a time life at the apartment is Edenic. Matthew and Isabelle become lovers, but when Theo pursues an outside romantic relationship Isabelle suddenly casts Matthew out. Meanwhile the twins carry on an increasingly erratic existence.
In the original, Paul and Elisabeth, homebody twins of modest circumstance, find themselves alone in the world after the death of their ailing mother. Soon after Elisabeth gets unlikely work as a model and marries a wealthy young suitor who shortly dies in a car crash resulting in the twins living together in a capriciously spacious apartment with Agathe, a model and friend. Paul falls in love with a sympathetic Agathe but painfully shy he decides to reveal the depth of his feelings through a letter. Elisabeth intercepts the letter and by way of lies and manipulation prevents the match. Paul becomes severely depressed and takes poison. Wracked with guilt and feelings of abandonment, Elisabeth shoots herself in the bedroom where Paul lay feverishly dying.
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes phthonos [envy] as the excessive vice of feeling pain at another’s deserved good fortune and the defective vice of feeling joy at another’s undeserved misfortune [schadenfreude] being particular to a spiteful person or epikhairekakos. Developmentally the two emotions of envy and schadenfreude go hand in glove but diminish in expression after adolescence. Schadenfreude frequently gestates in envy.
On the other hand, mudita is joy that comes from sincere gladness at the well-being of others, and metta is benevolence toward others.
What delusion, what sorrow can there be for that wise man who realizes the unity of all existence by perceiving all beings as his own Self?
7thMantra, Isha Upanishad
The deep irony of both sets of twins is that they flaunt their separateness while being enfeebled by their sense of rapacious belonging, perhaps a possessive aberration of the bond of sharing a womb.
Seven youths and seven maidens were sent from Athens to Knossos every nine years to satisfy the bloodlust of the Minotaur.
To hide the shame of the origin of the Minotaur, Minos of Crete bade court polymath Daedalus to construct an underground labyrinth from which the beast could not escape. Daedalus did so and the Minotaur was entombed alive. To ensure secrecy Minos imprisoned Daedalus, the only man who knew the maze and the man who had conspired to help Minos’ wife Pasiphae mate with a giant white bull gifted from Poseidon.
By 1900, excavations of the rediscovered Knossos were underway. Led by Arthur Evans, digging continued for some 35 years. The unearthing of Minos’s palace, Lisa Florman writes, with its dark, convoluted passages and stairways leading nowhere, had revealed a Greek architecture unlike any known before; it had simultaneously lent a certain currency to the myth of the labyrinth.
Ever resourceful, Daedalus plotted to escape his island prison by fabricating a pair of wings for himself and for his son, wings made from diverse feathers carefully arranged and secured in part by wax. Beating the air, Daedalus and Icarus slowly rose poised and flew away. Flying too close to the sun and melting the wax on his wings, Icarus plummeted into the sea to his death.
With a collage by Picasso titled Minotaur on the cover, the first issue of the journal Minotaure was published in Paris in 1933, the name owing a debt to resurgent interest in antiquity from art to archaeology.
A half-crazed Minos traveled the Mediterranean in search of Daedalus, posing the same riddle in city after city. Eventually coming to Camicus in Sicily, Minos once again posed his riddle—holding up a nautilus shell—“Put a string through the many chambers without damaging the whole.” Cocalus the King took the shell to Daedalus who tied a string to an ant that crawled the nacreous insides of the nautilus. When Minos saw the shell on a string, he knew it was the work of Daedalus and demanded custody of the fugitive.
In Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande a part, twenty-something Odile together with noir-styled slackers Franz and Arthur dash through the Louvre—sprinting the long wood-planked galleries, below the skylights, dodging security guards, on past Winged Victory, down the steps—the running of the Louvre for the record…9 minutes 43 seconds…2 seconds better than the American.
Angered over the bitter sacrifice of Athenian innocents, Theseus went to Knossos to slay the Minotaur. At first sight Ariadne daughter of Minos fell in love with Theseus and, on advice of Daedalus, gave him a ball of thread so that he could find his way out of the labyrinth by following the lifeline back. Theseus killed the Minotaur and eloped with Ariadne, whom he later abandoned on the beach of a nearby island.
Theseus’ ship was kept in the harbor of Athens for centuries—rotten timbers and other parts of the ship were replaced as needed so that the ship constantly remained seaworthy. In the end, the entire ship had been rebuilt several times over, raising serious questions about the nature of identity.
Such is the nature of authenticity. Such is the nature of the Minotaur. The light in the Louvre is lovely this time of year.
Abbot Mark once said to Abbot Arsenius: It is good, is it not, to have nothing in your cell that just gives you pleasure? For example, once I knew a brother who had a little wildflower that came up in his cell, and he pulled it out by the roots. Well, said Abbot Arsenius, that is all right. But each man should act according to his own spiritual way. And if one were not able to get along without the flower, he should plant it again.
Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert
As the years went by Ferdinand grew and grew until he was very big and strong. All the other bulls who had grown up with him in the same pasture would fight each other all day. They would butt each other and stick each other with their horns. What they wanted most of all was to be picked to fight at the bull fights in Madrid. But not Ferdinand—he still liked to sit just quietly under the cork tree and smell the flowers.
Munro Leaf, The Story of Ferdinand
Thus the beginner is urged to be especially mindful of the ‘flower heart’…radiant, giving itself lavishly and yet at the same time serenely self-contained. And what he learns by listening to the flower heart and taking into his own heart, he communicates freely and without ulterior purpose to others. In this way a current of love runs from the flower heart to the human heart, to the universal heart and back again.
Gustie Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement
Eighth day of the Third month
From Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, husband of Gustie Herrigel who authored Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement:
The inward work, however, consists in his turning the man he is, and the self he feels himself and perpetually finds himself to be, into the raw material of a training and shaping whose end is mastery. In it, the artist and the human being meet in something higher. For mastery proves its validity as a form of life only when it dwells in the boundless Truth and, sustained by it, becomes the art of the origin. The Master no longer seeks, but finds. As an artist he is the hieratic man; as a man, the artist, into whose heart, in all his doing and not-doing, working and waiting, being and not-being, the Buddha gazes. The man, the art, the work—it is all one.
Here is a man who, turning the emptiness of space into a sheet of paper, the waves of the ocean into an inkwell, and Mount Sumeru into a brush, writes these five characters: so-shi-sai-rai-i*.
Hoyen of Gosozen
*The reason Bodhidharma came from the West
For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it, rather, a Penelope work of forgetting?...For an experienced event is finite—at any rate, confined to one sphere of experience; a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it…Only the actus purus of recollection itself, not the author or the plot, constitutes the unity of the text. One may even say that the intermittence of author and plot is only the reverse of the continuum of memory, the pattern on the back side of the tapestry.
Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust
A Note to Princess Clermont-Tonnerre:
My dear Madam,
I just noticed that I forgot my cane at your house yesterday; please be good enough to give it to the bearer of this letter.
Marcel Proust
P.S. Kindly pardon me for disturbing you; I just found my cane.
Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Instead, the art of the epic theater consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy…The task of the epic theater, according to Brecht, is not so much the development of actions as the representation of conditions…the truly important thing is to discover the conditions of life. (One might say just as well: to alienate them.) This discovery (alienation) of conditions takes place through the interruption of happenings.
Walter Benjamin, What is Epic Theater?
Memorycreates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation.
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
Fire interrupted the skyline of Paris burning Notre-Dame Cathedral. The memory of the sky is unchanged.
How wonderful are islands! Islands in space, like this one I have come to, ringed about by miles of water, linked by no bridges, no cables, no telephones. An island from the world and the world’s life. Islands in time, like this short vacation of mine. The past and the future are cut off; only the present remains. Existence in the presence gives island living an extreme vividness and purity. One lives like a child or a saint in the immediacy of here and now. Every day, every act, is an island, washed by time and space, and has an island’s completion. People, too, become like islands in such an atmosphere, self-contained, whole and serene…Quiet time alone, contemplation, prayer, music, a centering line of thought or reading, of study or work. It can physical or intellectual or artistic, any creative life proceeding from oneself. It need not be an enormous project or great work. But it should be something of one’s own…What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From The Sea
Perhaps the expanding consciousness of Osip Mandelstam, a poet of Polish Jewish descent transplanted to St. Petersburg as a boy, pressured to convert to Protestantism to enter university, intimated a premonition of an artist’s life, a life laid open to political persecution by the Russian state, in lines from “Notre Dame” published in his first collection of verse, Stone:
Fortress Nôtre Dame, the more attentively
I studied your vast ribs and frame,
the more I kept repeating: one day I too
will craft beauty from cruel weight.
I studied your vast ribs and frame,
the more I kept repeating: one day I too
will craft beauty from cruel weight.
During the intense purges of Yezhovshchina, Mandelstam was arrested again for counter-revolutionary activities and sentenced to the gulag. He died in transit of cold and hunger near Vladivostok in 1938. Despite inhumane hardship, the beauty remains.
I am mortally tired of life,
I accept nothing of it,
But I love my poor earth,
Because I have not seen another
—Osip Mandelstam, from “To Read Only Children’s Tales”
Something of this same sentiment is echoed in close friend, some have said lover, and fellow Acmeist poet Anna Akhmatova’s “A Land Not Mine”:
A land not mine, still
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pine trees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.
forever memorable,
the waters of its ocean
chill and fresh.
Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk,
and the air drunk, like wine,
late sun lays bare
the rosy limbs of the pine trees.
Sunset in the ethereal waves:
I cannot tell if the day
is ending, or the world, or if
the secret of secrets is inside me again.
Thirteenth day of the Third month
Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit—qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself…Is this not what the more mature relationship, the meeting of two solitudes, is meant to be?
—Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift From The Sea
From Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece Meets The Big O:
But all of a sudden…The missing piece began to grow! And grow!
The missing piece was alone again…
For a long time it just sat there…
Then…slowly…it lifted itself up on one end…and flopped over.
Then lift…pull…flop…it began to move forward…
And soon its edges began to wear off…
Lift Pull Flop Lift Pull Flop…and its shape began to change…
And then it was bumping instead of flopping…
And then it was bouncing instead of bumping…
And then it was rolling instead of bouncing…
And it didn’t know where and it didn’t care.
It was rolling!
Now happily rolling along on its own, the missing piece catches up to the Big O, and they roll side by side transcendent.
Fourteenth day of the Third month
The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs. Herman Melville
Young Frank O’Hara was a sonar-man in the Pacific War.
He was a homosexual even back then in the navy and later when he wrote poetry and became curator of the Museum of Modern Art. He started at the museum selling postcards.
O’Hara of the Fire Island Franks. First among explorers and friends at Cherry Grove who were unashamedly gay out in the open—a community in the wilds of free.
In her 1838 treatise on ethnographic practice, How to Observe, Harriet Martineau advocated that,
the observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled and unreserved. Nothing was ever more true than that "as face answers to face in water, so is the heart of man".
To the traveller there are two meanings in this wise saying, both worthy of his best attention. It means that the action of the heart will meet a corresponding action, and that the nature of the heart will meet a corresponding nature.
Farrier, Unwritable Dwellings/Unsettled Texts
Excerpts below from Frank O’Hara, Meditations in an Emergency, et al:
Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous
(and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!),
but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture
forth.
Shall you stride on the shingle with an oar
in your hands, or beach my heart, my barnacled?
He turns his back in the sun to pose
for memory, green thumb up. The moment’s gone.
Wish you were here!
Fifteenth day of the Third month
The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touched a virginity of sense…Slowly they took shape in the attenuating darkness…The land heaved up in peaks and rising vales; it fell in cliffs and buttresses; its colour ran through fifty modulations in a scale of pearl and rose and olive; and it was crowned above by opalescent clouds. The suffusion of vague hues deceived the eye; the shadows of clouds were confounded with the articulation of the mountain; and the isle and its unsubstantial canopy rose and shimmered before us like a single mass…Somewhere, in that pale phantasmagoria of cliff and cloud, our haven lay concealed; and somewhere to the east of it—the only sea-mark given—a certain headland, known indifferently as Cape Adam and Eve…The coco-palm, that giraffe of vegetables, so graceful, so ungainly, to the European eye so foreign, was to be seen crowding on the beach, and climbing and fringing the steep sides of mountains. Rude and bare hills embraced the inlet upon either hand; it was enclosed to the landward by a bulk of shattered mountains. In every crevice of that barrier the forest harboured, roosting and nesting there like birds about a ruin; and far above, it greened and roughened the razor edges of the summit.
Robert Louis Stevenson, In The South Seas
Paradise.
Within strictly native society the old laws and practices were harsh, but not without a certain stamp of high-mindedness…Husbands, at least when of high rank, had the power of life and death; even whites seemed to have possessed it; and their wives, when they had transgressed beyond forgiveness, made haste to pronounce the formula of deprecation—i kana kim*. This form of words had so much virtue that a condemned criminal, repeating it on a particular day to the king who had condemned him, must be instantly released.
Robert Louis Stevenson, In The South Seas
*Translated in the MS journal as ‘je mange le cul a’ [I suck ass]
Book the Four Seasons Bora Bora Overwater Bungalow for a singular honeymoon experience, and when the bill comes, in keeping with the tradition of true firsts, loudly declaim “i kana kim,” followed by politely asking for a taxi to the airport. What’s the worst they can do?
Sixteenth day of the Third month
Richard Howard, winner of the National Book Award for translating Baudelaire and the Pulitzer for his own poetry, was a long time editor at The Paris Review. He also translated The Little Prince.
Excerpted from “Natural History”:
I do not know how we fell,
Having once embellished
Every bud with bloom;
Yet if sap runs
At the root
Of time,
Down
Where
The dark
And warm life
Hides away, then
May we grow again,
Re-according by light
The heart of our green season.
Easter anamnesis.
Seventeenth day of the Third month
During the course of the 4thcentury the popularity of papyrus scrolls began to wane in favor of more durable parchment sheets bound into codex or book form. Some works were lost because they were never transmitted to parchment while others were lost due to the scarcity of parchment. Nicholas Basbanes explains in A Splendor of Letters, “Parchment, it is worth emphasizing, has always been an expensive commodity, and when certain texts fell out of favor, it was customary to recycle the old sheets and use them for writings that were in greater demand. This was accomplished by removing the original writing from the surface of the animal skins and creating what is known as a palimpsest…the word derives from a Greek expression meaning ‘scraped again’ or ‘rubbed smooth’…” As a result, a gloss on the Psalms may be written over a much older, rarer Latin or Greek text which is faintly visible underneath, often in its entirety. Later, with the invention of the printing press, incunabula or printed books began to replace hand-copied codices leading to more losses of original source materials.
Intertextuality, a term minted by Julia Kristeva, advances the notion that the meaning of a text is culled from the interplay and interconnection of other texts acting to interpret by way of reference and influence. For example, James Joyce the author of Ulysses understands as well as the reader of Ulysses that the novel is based on the epic tradition of Homer. You might say intertextuality is a metaphorical reading between the lines whereas reading between the lines of a palimpsest is literally just that.
Returning from the Korean War hooked on morphine, Etheridge Knight found poetry in prison and reformed, a living palimpsest of sorts. The nuances of oral tradition—intimate experience, familial drama, vernacular language—inform his work, flowing from an authentic voice at once African and American. And yet, with that voice so his own, he wrote beautiful haiku:
Eastern guard tower
Glints in sunset; convicts rest
Like lizards on rocks.
The piano man
Is sting at 3 am
His songs drop like plum.
Morning sun slants cell.
Drunks stagger like cripple flies
On jailhouse floor.
Eighteenth day of the Third month
Communicating across oceans of time, a book in essence is a message in a bottle.
‘And you have read all these?’ Anatole France is said to have been asked by an admirer of his library. ‘Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?’
—Hannah Arendt
A message in a bottle, yes, but it’s not urgent.
The collection presents a hermetic world: to have a representative collection is to have both the minimum and the complete number of elements necessary for an autonomous world—a world which is both full and singular, which has banished repetition and achieved authority.
—Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
Did someone say authorities? Wha…? It’s The Police. Whaa? The Police.
Message in a Bottle 4:51, self-referentially bobbed to #1 on the UK chart in 1979
Albums are catchier than audiobooks. It’s hard to dance to Dostoevsky. Which is to say that there is an aesthetic threshold, a je ne sais quoi to collecting.
When we are aroused to a life in ourselves, these traditional splendors of letters grow very pale and cold. Men seem to forget that all literature is ephemeral, and unwillingly entertain the supposition of its utter disappearance.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pop songs are dizzyingly short yet surprisingly tenacious. Advertising jingles even more so.
Modern techniques of reproduction ironically have decayed and debased the occupation of collecting while simultaneously fossilizing a cultural archive and generating a detritus of consumable dross. One day the private collector may go the way of the dodo amid a deficit of attention. An outline in shale, a shadow in silica.
Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.
—Walter Benjamin
Nineteenth day of the Third month
I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its place…I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force of the mere typography, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type…I found I had to consider chiefly the following things: the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines; and lastly the position of the printed matter on the page.
William Morris, A Note On Kelmscott Press
As an exceptional designer, craftsman, and writer, it was quite natural that Morris would transition to making his own books by hand to satisfy his rather high aesthetic standards. To that end, Morris invented two typefaces for his projects, a Roman type called Morris’s Golden type and a black-letter Gothic type which he used in the production of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896). Morris elaborates in detail on his selection of materials, two of which preferences concerning the page I will share here:
1. Laid, not woven, handmade linen paper with light ribbed appearance
2. Medieval Layout: Morris believed medieval margin proportions to be the most beautiful. “This should always leave the inner margin the narrowest, the top somewhat wider, the outside (fore-edge) wider still, and the bottom widest of all…a difference of twenty per cent from margin to margin.” Morris, A Note On Kelmscott Press
Looking back to 15thcentury examples of the Book of Hours, a Christian devotional book comprised of psalms, prayers, and a calendar of church feasts, all copiously illuminated with borders, storytelling miniatures, full page illustrations of biblical scenes, and often landscapes in the form of an almanac-like labors of the months, Morris found inspiration for the quality and style of work he himself wanted to produce—artisan work from start to finish before division of labor and mechanization marginalized the concept. Currently, The Cloisters in New York City owns the finest example of just such a Book of Hours, Belles Heures du Duc de Berry by Dutch miniature painters the Limbourg brothers.
Morris completed the Kelmscott Chaucer, an intense labor of four years, just before his death in 1896 with the help of pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones who provided 87 full-page woodcut illustrations. The edition ran to fewer than 500 copies. Even today, it is one of the most sought after books ever printed.
"If we live to finish it," Burne-Jones wrote, "it will be like a pocket cathedral—so full of design and I think Morris the greatest master of ornament in the world."
“I’m trying to figure out two very simple things,” she began. “How to live and how to die. And I’m also trying to have some meals, and some snacks, yell at my children, and do all the normal things.” Maira is a poet of all the normal things: life, death, and a nice snack.
—Michael Pollan quoting Maira Kalman, his collaborating
illustrator for the book Food Rules
In the film Love and Death, Woody Allen has the herring merchant, a man more romantically devoted to a six-inch fish than to his wife, sit up on his deathbed and declare: Swimming out to the open sea like the great wild herring. This scene is both the comic and the cosmic climax of life, death, and a nice snack.
Pollan himself advocates for eating food with fewer feet. Fish have no legs, so that’s even better—next comes chickens, pigs, and cows. I noticed there is not a lot of three-legged food.
“I realized that the answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated question of what we should eat wasn’t so complicated after all, and in fact could be boiled down to just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Michael Pollan, Food Rules
Rule 21: If It Came from a Plant, Eat It; If It Was Made in a Plant, Don’t
Rule 25: Eat Mostly Plants, Especially Leaves
“Vegetarians are notably healthier than carnivores, and they live longer.”
—Michael Pollan
Simple Caprese Salad: One ripe red tomato, sliced. Fresh cow’s milk mozzarella, sliced. Fan out slices, alternating tomato and mozzarella. Throw on a few torn leaves of fresh arugula. A drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. A little sprinkle of sea salt. The olive oil aids in the absorption of the lycopene in the tomatoes. This salad is perfect by itself or you can serve it with wild smoked herring.
A land with lots of herring can get along with few doctors.
Dutch proverb
For something sweet—a spoonful of natural honey which has “a shelf life
measured in centuries”
From The Diaries of Paul Klee:
Munich III, 1900-1901
121. Twenty-one years old! I never doubted my vital force. But how is it to fare with my chosen art? The recognition that at bottom I am a poet, after all, should be no hindrance in the plastic arts! And should I really have to be a poet, Lord knows what else I should desire. Certainly, a sea swells within me, for I feel. It is a hopeless state, to feel in such a way that the storm rages on all sides at once and that nowhere is a lord who commands the chaos.
Twenty-second day of the Third month
And who knows whether my dreams’ new flowers
Will find within this soil, washed like a shore,
The mystic nourishment that would give them strength?
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal
It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
Tick. Tock. is a plot as defined by Jonathan Culler. Time ordered, regular but not permanent. Time remembered, permanent but unreliable. Distant bells.
It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile.
Marcel Proust
The outbreaks of rage are timed to the ticking of the seconds to which the melancholy man is slave.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
If the recognition of a scent is more privileged to provide consolation than any other recollection, this may be so because it deeply drugs the sense of time. A scent may drown years in the odor it recalls.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
A fragrance outside of history. Poetry.
And who knows whether my dreams’ new flowers
Will find within this soil, washed like a shore,
The mystic nourishment that would give them strength?
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal
Twenty-third day of the Third month
From The Diaries of Paul Klee:
Munich III, 1900-1901
184. A poem with the following line-endings:
Eyes/breast/desire/night/laughed/sleep/met/
companions/order/trees/dream/night of the heart.
Here Klee noted the line-endings but did not give the poem. It reminded me of Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou where in a letter to young fan Ned Plimpton, Cousteau-like figure Captain Zissou (Bill Murray) noted in voice-over the letter had been ‘Dictated but not read’. In an entry from the Italian Diary Klee writes: That Aristophanes! I wish I too might write a good comedy (attempts in that genre followed). Again Klee gives no further lines. I think Wes Anderson would approve. Following Klee’s instructions I wrote a poem of my own:
METROPOLITAIN
Beautiful American—eyes
A French postcard of breasts
Smolder with passing desire
Sidelong Champs-Elysees lit night
Miller eating mussels, laughed
Lunatic typewriter sleep
Where bodily Seine met
Bankside bookseller companions
Arms aroused into order
Through the crowded city, trees,
Flowers open like a dream
Wandering night of the heart
From Diary III/June 1902 to September 1906:
Klee pens a funny letter to his fiancé
570/72. Through the indiscretion of Fraulein Pacewitsch, I came into possession of letters and poems by a Japanese gentleman.
I. 4.18.1904. “My dear Fraulein, Lily of the valley, lily of the valley!
My dear lily of the valley! / Thou art pretty and pure like innocent maiden/
The rain, the wind, the hands of men / Threaten to tear Thee from soft
bosom of her mother. / Nonetheless you look so happy / Thy whole fate
thrown in the hands of nature./
Lily of the valley, lily of the valley! / My dearest friend thee has stuck
in the button hole of my coat. / Thy perfume me refreshes out of the
tiredness. / Thy spirit as little angel into my dream comes.
O dear lily of the valley, be thou for ever in bloom! / Respectfully
Dr. Sch.”
Twenty-fourth day of the Third month
Photo albums, scrapbooks, vintage snapshots with rounded corners. A hallway full of photographs—school pictures and family portraits, pets, birthday parties, grandparents, family vacations. A shutter clicks—life is converted to light. Images that give meaning and context to our existence. Images that later fill us with nostalgia. Remember when…? And still further back..the beautiful age.
Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.
Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then certainly with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
Photographs are the trading cards of our existential experience. In the 1950s, tourists traveled the world, collecting images of far off places, and upon returning projected them for friends and family in the comfort of suburban living rooms. As early as 1823, folks gathered round a magic lantern, predecessor of the modern slide projector, to view images of exotic animals, The Elements of Zoology the first set of its kind with over 200 ‘copper-plate sliders’.
The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. In end-of-the-century London, Samuel Butler complained that “there is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.” The photographer is now charging real beasts, beleaguered and too rare to kill. Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature—tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
Protecting wildlife and mindful conservation are more and more a part of modern consciousness yet poaching persists due to black market demand, especially for ivory and rhino horn.
With ever rising widespread gun violence, human populations need to be protected from guns. Mass shootings have become all too common, rooted in causes of hate and anger, in cities and in suburbs across the globe, sadly leaving only photographs behind. Empty hallways and living rooms.
Twenty-fifth day of the Third month
Our Shastras seem to teach that a man who really practices ahimsa [virtue of not to injure and compassion] in its fullness has the world at its feet, he so affects his surroundings that even the snake and other venomous reptiles do him no harm. This is said to have been the experience of St. Francis of Assisi.
In its negative form, it means not injuring any living being, whether by body or mind. I may not therefore hurt the person of any wrong-doer, or bear any ill will to him and so cause him mental suffering…The gift of life is the greatest of all gifts. —Gandhi
Acting in good faith, practicing goodness, kindness, patience, humility, gratitude, free of prejudice, without the divisiveness of clinging to our own particular denominations, cultivating a reverence for the dignity of others and indeed all life should be the foundation for everyday living, nurturing deeper roots of hope, joy, and peace.
But labels never reveal a man’s character, nor does the fact that a man clings to a label show that he deserves it…In the same way, one does not become a Brahmin by calling oneself a Brahmin. Not until a man reveals in his life the attributes of a Brahmin can he deserve that name…This law is the law of one’s being, which one has to fulfill. The fulfillment should be spontaneous and no matter of honour or shame. —Gandhi
Twenty-sixth day of the Third month
3 year-old Leon, Mayberry’s handsomest cowboy and quick draw with a PB&J strode the sidewalks offering a bite of his sandwich to anybody that looked at him. The usual response being ‘No thanks, Leon’…but that never stopped him from holding it up with one hand thrust in the general direction of the person in front of him with an askance beckoning look as if to say go on have a bite. That’s not only good manners, it’s good upbringing. Neighborliness.
Felix Calendar. Paul Klee.
June to October 1909, in Bern
Felix at age one and a half reached the following stage…He eats bread, preferably from both hands. If he’s given only one piece, he demands more, by saying da da. If he isn’t successful he tries to make the one piece do by breaking it. Others have to taste his bread, and this is great fun.
As children we have wonderful instincts and it is only as we grow that we begin to lose our innocence. We often forget our better natures, adopting bad habits and distorted views, hurting ourselves and others at the expense of our own well-being and the greater good of society.
Twenty-seventh day of the Third month
When Adam delved and Eve span,Who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.
—John Ball
The first English translation of the Bible by John Wycliffe in the late 14thcentury provided common people the opportunity to worship for the first time in their own language, to hear the scriptures in their own language, to take the scriptures into their own hands unimpeded by interpretation. Out of this newfound liberty, pre-Protestant reform movements sprung up led by men like John Ball who were seeking more self-determination in their way of life, freedom from feudal lords and taxes and dispossessing land enclosures, resulting in the Peasants’ Revolt, pre-figuring the later European revolutions of 1848 where disenfranchised workers sought similar freedoms in the Industrial age.
As people, our greatest instinct is to be free. What is freedom then? Freedom is overcoming setbacks and stagnation in our lives to find joy, to bring love to bear in everyday situations, to be more than we are. Every waking hour.
Wherfore not Utopie [nowhere], but rather rightely my name is Eutopie, a place of felicitie. —Thomas More
Twenty-eighth day of the Third month
Published in 1516, Utopia by Sir Thomas More was edited by Erasmus and dedicated to Pieter Gillis. Gillis also devised an alphabet for the imaginary nation as well as the typeface itself.
For an addendum to the book, Gillis composed the following verse using his alphabet:
My king and conqueror Utopus by name
A prince of much renown and immortal fame
Hath made me an isle that erst no island was
Full fraught with worldly wealth, with pleasure, and solace.
I one of all other without philosophy
Have shaped for man a philosophical city.
As mine I am nothing dangerous to impart,
So better to receive I am ready with all my heart.
Composed in the voice of the island, the verse imparts that the topos, the ground itself, the heart of the ground is wholeheartedly receptive to change for the better. Making positive changes is hard, like learning another language. Little by little it becomes second nature and before you know it you’re dreaming in it.
Last day of the Third month
Teaching slaves to read and write in South Carolina was an offense punishable by fines and imprisonment due to stringent anti-literacy laws. The consent of the legislature was also required if an owner wanted to free a slave—no such consent was ever granted. This is the climate in which Dave the Potter a man who spent six decades as a slave held by five different owners lived and worked.
Dave was a skilled stoneware potter working from 1834 to 1862 in a pottery near Edgefield, South Carolina. His use of alkaline glaze and sense of craft enabled Dave to turn pots that were thick-walled and twice as voluminous as other stoneware storage jars, pot-bellied shaped with distinctive wide mouths and hooded handholds instead of handles just under the lip of the pot to bear heavy weight without breaking and weather everyday use. The innovation and quality of his jars are evidenced by the fact that so many still exist, but the most striking feature of Dave’s work is that he boldly inscribed and signed them as a slave when even reading and writing were expressly forbidden him.
Dave’s pots survived because they were durable like the man himself. He lived out his last years in freedom. His pots can be seen today in the National Museum of American History among other fine art collections.
Below are some of Dave’s inscriptions:
February 10, 1840
Whats better than Kissing—while we both are at fishing
November 3, 1858
I saw a leppard & a lions face—then I felt the need of—Grace
July 4, 1859
The fourth of July is Surely come—to blow the fife, and beat the drum
August 16, 1867
I wonder where is all my relations
Friendship to all—and every nation
These are the thoughts and feelings of a man—a man, not a piece of property. The fourth of July finally came.
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