A Pasture For Gazelles

July 19, 2008

"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. " --Kafka

"...I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole..." -- Czeslaw Milosz

“Do not become bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths, all becomes law.” - Rilke

To be alone
It is a color that
Cannot be named:
This mountain where cedars rise
Into the autumn dusk -- Jakuren, 12th century

"… do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." - Romans 12:2

My heart has become able
To take on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
For monks, an abbey. -- Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240)

"What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event - the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather." -- Melville, Pierre

Posted by Jane on 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

Vin-Yet

July 10, 2008

A sudden storm. I duck into an old tavern, with walls of ancient bead-board and yellowed pressed tin. The plank ceiling looks like the deck of a ship. Disoriented by looking up, I’m briefly hanging by my feet from a spar.
.
This dreary Sunday afternoon (my favorite kind), the narrow dining room is empty but for two girls getting tipsy by the window. The silver arc of a car parked out the window unites them in dialogue. The brunette says: “It was raw on the outside and black inside. I mean, raw inside and black outside.” Giddy confusion and gales of laughter. The blonde, though, does most of the talking, twisting up her hair when the check comes. Apparently they’ve complimented the waiter’s flamingo-pink tee shirt, for I overhear him call over his shoulder, as he glides by with their money: “I bought it in 1993, and wear it only one day a year. That would be today. Girls, I’ve gotten so fat, I'm like Elizabeth Taylor squeezed into a dress.”

Posted by Jane on 8:29 PM | Comments (0)

Freedom to Fear, or Not

July 4, 2008

“Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.” -- Montaigne
~
Sitting on a bench at the marina was a very old lady I’ve been seeing on morning walks. In her compact solitude she seemed like a Zen monk. She held out her arms, when I paused to say hi, and asked me to keep the dogs back. She explained: A dog bit her on a finger in childhood, and her fear of canines is “deep-rooted and innate.” Something in her plight stopped me, and I sat the dogs a little distance away. She went on, “No one understands that I do realize it’s not their dogs, that it’s entirely me. Since that bite, before my teens”--she held up the ancient scar—“I never had a pet, never cared for animals. My fear of them is entrenched and I can do nothing about it.”
~
Sarah is 91. She’s unafraid of death, traveling by herself, or being alone. Her husband died years ago. She has no children. She cultivates no friendships, does not take meals with the other seniors in her elegant “independent and assisted-living” apartment house. I asked how she spent her time. “I get up at 6, go for a long walk, and let the day unfold as it will.” To which I said, “It sounds like a nice, free life.”
~
She’d lived a full life, of work and travel all over the world. But not to Australia, she amended, which, being a “new country,” never appealed to her. She preferred old countries like Greece. Was there any place she regretted not getting to? “Africa,” she said, surprisingly, “because of the animals.” I teased: “You’re not afraid of lions and elephants, but you’re afraid of dogs?” She smiled: “I wanted to see the animals. Just see them.”
~
Meanwhile, Caleb and Tracy were sitting very still, watching the old lady gently. “They seem docile enough,” she said, and apologized again for her aversion. She thanked me for not cajoling her to pet them, as well-meaning people always did, to help her overcome her dread through their harmless pets. I said, “You’re free, aren’t you, to stay afraid. We all protect our phobias. One of my biggest is driving. At 15, I chose never to drive. But there’s another Freedom--larger and deeper, which is freedom from fear itself, which overrides our peculiar little tendencies and preferences. I intuit that inner Freedom, but I’m not ready either to give up my fears for it. Not yet.”
~
Sarah looked at the waiting dogs. “Thank you,” she finally said, understanding. “Maybe, if I see you again sometime, I’ll let your dogs come closer. But it might take me the rest of my life to touch them.”

~

Posted by Jane on 9:00 AM | Comments (0)

Slipping Glimpsers, Loafers & Dingledodies

June 27, 2008

“We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.” – Michel de Montaigne
~
“All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)” --Gerard Manley Hopkins
~
“Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within yourself.” – Rainer Maria Rilke [cf. Whitman, “I loafe and invite my soul.”]
~
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Emerson
~
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” -- Whitman
~
“In life, never do as others do…. either do nothing, just go to school, or do something nobody else does.” --Gurdjieff’s grandmother to him, on her deathbed. -- Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson
~
“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac
~
“Y’know the real world, this so-called real world,
It’s just something you put up with, like everybody else.
I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world.
Then I’m in the real world – I’m on the beam.
Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right;
When I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!
It’s not when I’m standing upright that bothers me;
I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff.
As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping
Most of the time, into that glimpse.
I’m like a slipping glimpser.
--Willem de Kooning

Posted by Jane on 7:59 PM | Comments (0)

SOLSTICE

June 21, 2008

Just past 8:00 a.m. by the Colgate Clock, across the Hudson in Jersey City, easily readable because the octogenarian timepiece is fifty feet in diameter.

This morning, on the first full day of summer, the river is glassy, quiescent, dimpled like cellulite. Its pattern is deceptively simple, etched with thumbprint whorls and nearly invisible rings that come and go, imminent and transcendent, from surfacing fish or unseen insects or something else.

In the distance: a barge with a tug, like a nuzzling cow and calf.

At the North Cove marina, the Ventura is about to leave for a trip up the Hudson, to Tarrytown. On the floating gangway, Patrick (“Captain Pat”) Harris, the owner of the sloop, comes over to pet the dogs.

He says people can bring their pets for a sail anytime, for an extra dollar each (www.sailnewyork.com, 212-786-1204). Why leave the family at home? he smiles. With all his passengers aboard, he returns to the yacht and the boat casts off.

As the Ventura slides out of the marina, a mate at the bow blows on a conch, the most archangelic sound.

Posted by Jane on 11:38 AM | Comments (0)

The Artful Dodger

June 13, 2008

"Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius."

Went to an art opening the other night in Soho, a respectable show of tasteful paintings, pleasant, well crafted, glib. The kind of art that does brilliantly over a leather couch in a magazine spread. I left and walked east, to Elizabeth Street where north of Prince is a storefront with a miniature of itself in the window.

I went on to the Lower East Side, to the next opening, at the Cake Shop on Ludlow. In that window, a plastic lawn-deer (wearing a black wig) basked on a collection of superannuated cassette tapes arranged like floor tiles. Inside, paintings of interiors, by my young friend Sophie, hung across a long wall from front to back. Her palette was disciplined, quirkily somber, the perspectives experimental. No easy solutions here, no glibness; the work caught you unawares, like a shivery glance askance. I admire such authenticity, poetry versus product, like a twist in a ribbon, a skip in a song, a chip in china or a rhyme got wrong.
+
From a dour guy in black glasses I bought some cold green tea. I hung out in the back near a large window with a view into an empty courtyard. The crowd, two generations younger than me, was not looking at the art. Some of the boys emoted lonely uncertainty. The confident ones with dates all had a hand on a female knee. Two oblivious fellows typed on laptops side-by-side. Their faces glowed like luminous dials in the glare of their screens. At a teensy table an obese girl exuberantly nibbled the point of a triangular slice. I put in my earplugs and mentally critiqued the paintings. Half an hour passed and no Sophie. The din trumped my earplugs. I left this spectacle for the jammed streets.
+
A chalkboard sign at a bar on the Bowery beckoned: “Happy Hour. Have a Night You’re Sure Not to Remember.” Soon I came to the New Museum, open tonight late and free. The chartreuse-green elevator was enormous, as most museum elevators are. Its two stainless steel doors mirrored and multiplied the occupants like Alex Katz cutouts at a cocktail party. The art in the white spacious galleries was largely multimedia, irreverent and coy–but nothing I hadn’t seen before. Less interesting, I thought, than the incidental rooftop views beyond the strangely narrow corridors and stairs.

Posted by Jane on 9:07 PM | Comments (0)

A Newborn Ferry Terminal

June 7, 2008

~

Early this morning, across from the World Financial Center, I was startled to see a brand new, partially constructed, glass-gabled, cathedral-regal ferry terminal being coaxed into place by two large tugboats, a red and an orange, while a little white-and-blue Push Tug stood by, aft of a barge, rather like an observant midwife. Conceived in Louisiana, the ferry had been floated over from Brooklyn, only a few hours before. As part of the berthing process, there were a couple of immense barges, like inert brown sea cows, whose hodgepodges of barge-clutter--domes, cylinders, spheres, wheels, rectangles, trusses, rope-loops, etc.--resembled the standards of Precisionist iconography.
~

~
The little Push Tug was so close to the railing at the esplanade that I could talk with the captain as if gabbing with a neighbor over a picket fence. I seized the chance to ask about something I should have resolved before my parents died. Had he ever heard of a “Tracy Tug"? “No," he replied, "not specifically; but it might be the name of one of the old-fashioned McAllister tugs, like the one at Pier 17. They all had girls’ names." I said, “While my mother was in the hospital, waiting for me to be born, she said she watched the Tracy tugs from her window, trawling up and down the Hudson. She became so fond of them that she considered naming me Tracy. I never thought to ask her more about it, and I’ve not been able to find any reference to Tracy Tugs. Anyway, it’s a moot point, because after all that, she named me Jane.” The tugboat captain gestured with an elaborately tattooed arm and said, “Well, now, that’s this tug’s name. Her name is Jane.”
~
(But spelled Jayne.)

Posted by Jane on 11:08 AM | Comments (0)

Only In New York?

June 4, 2008

When: May 17, 2008
Where: Hudson River esplanade
Who: woman in group
Attitude: neutral
QuoteUnquote: “He won a medal before he died, but never put it on his ribbon bar.”
*
When: May 23, 2008
Where: Clark St. Station, Brooklyn
Who: Old man to his old wife
Attitude: Chagrined
QuoteUnquote: “I picked up the check by accident.”
*
When: May 29, 2008
Where: Near the river
Who: woman with large dogs
Attitude: Frustrated, unable to control their jumping
QuoteUnquote: “Bad dog! Sit! Sit! I’m the alpha, not you!”
Commentary: (Yeah, right.)
*
When: A while back.
Where: Somewhere downtown
Who: One small boy to another
Attitude: Matter-of-fact
QuoteUnquote: “When you’re ten, you become a pre-teen.”
*
When: June 4, 2008
Where: Central Park West and 79th St.
Who: Two girls.
QuoteUnquote: Girl A: “I know you don’t like taxidermy.”
Girl B: “I think I’m getting over some of my taxidermy issues.”
~
When: June 7, 2008
Where: Starbucks, on Broadway near Walker
Who: One barrista to another
QuoteUnquote: "They give us workers free therapy because this job makes everyone crazy."
~~

Posted by Jane on 2:19 PM | Comments (0)

Flying DUMBO

May 28, 2008

View from St. Ann's Warehouse

It was only a 15-minute trip via subway to the wonderfully strange province beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, designated as "Down Under the Manhattan Brooklyn Overpass (DUMBO)." Since it happened to be the Bridge's 125th birthday, I probably should have walked across, to St. Ann's Warehouse, which is under the bridge on the Brooklyn side. I went to St. Ann's to install two of my miniature opera sets ("Papageno's Nest," from the Magic Flute series; and "Turandot" from the Puccini opera) in the Temporary Toy Theater Museum.

"Papageno's Nest"

"Turandot"

In the hangar-like space at the Warehouse, quite a few artists were already at work on dozens of charming microcosms. My own dioramas, rescued from long stints in storage, had been picked up from my studio the day before and delivered to the Toy Theater Festival site. "Turandot" was literally in pieces; I had to reassemble much of the Ice Princess's palace, and reattach the princely decapitated heads on their spikes. Such fun.

Afterward, on the way back to the subway, I was delighted to see, in a foliate, offhand plot beneath the rumbling Bridge, another miniature theater, which synchronistically echoed my "Papageno's Nest." Someone had installed a bird-feeder made from a half-pint milk container, complete with a drinking-straw perch.

A miniature at large

Posted by Jane on 8:35 AM | Comments (1)