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January 28, 2006

Infinity and the Infinitesimal, PART II

As archetypes, miniatures remind us of the relatedness of everything in the universe, including the fact that we literally are composed of “star stuff.� An absorption in unity-consciousness is an attribute of the creative process. Nature is filled with examples of reduplication such as branches replicating trees, rocks imitating mountains, the resemblance between a patch of moss and a meadow, a fern composed of patterns of miniature ferns. Fractals, those computer-generated designs which create patterns of larger but identical designs, are instructive in revealing the “self-similarity� or “iteration� of forms that exist in nature.

Of countless allusions to miniatures in the visual arts, one example that stands out is The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan Van Eyck, an intriguing 15th-century painting in London’s National Gallery of Art. A wedding is taking place in a lavish bedchamber that’s reflected, in its miniature entirety, in a convex mirror. This seemingly incidental background object is crucial to the meaning of the painting, for it reveals more than the information that appears in the picture plane: the backs of the bride and groom (an unexpected sculptural bonus), and two otherwise invisible witnesses, who are standing outside the physical (if not the conceptual) scope of the painting. Just above the telltale mirror (a light-conducting miniature of the window), a Latin inscription attests Jan Van Eyck was here, identifying one of the witnesses as the painter himself. And so one can surmise that the mirror symbolizes the witness-status of the artist's penetrating eye.

In the New York Public Library is a 19th-century Chinese watercolor, One-Man Puppet Theater. A pensive old man and a lively young boy are watching a play on an elevated little stage that is balanced on the head of a curtain-draped puppeteer. Is it possible that the old man and the young boy represent the span of a single life, with the two puppets reiterating their life drama upon the miniature stage?

Art that deals with scale abounds in the twentieth century. The eccentric assemblages of Joseph Cornell are among the greatest; for example, the boxes in which he fits cosmologies, like Cassiopia. A work that blurs the distinction between painting and sculpture, Max Ernst’s Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924; Museum of Modern Art) is two- and three-dimensional at once, with a house of wood in a painted landscape and a 3-D gate swung open to rest upon the picture frame. A painting by another Surrealist, René Magritte, Les valeurs personnelles (Personal Values), 1952, portrays a dollhouse-like bedroom with walls painted to look like a cloudy sky. What makes us assume that the interior is a dollhouse is a startling collection of everyday objects: a relatively gigantic comb, shaving brush, cake of soap, glass, and match. In The Cicerone, also by Magritte, a hybrid cannon-man supports three miniature houses. In The Voice of Blood, a tiny house with lit windows exists inside a tree; and in The Wrestlers’ Tomb, a rose fills all the space of a room.

The effect of mixing scales is disconcerting and amusing, a popular Surrealistic trick. Giorgio de Chirico, another visual wit and a forerunner of the Surrealists, composed human torsos of roofs and columns in paintings and sculpture. He was fascinated with the conceptual ambiguities of “interior� and “exterior,� as in his enigmatic paintings The House within the House (1924) and Temple in the Room (1967), whose subject is scale.

Of the many artists working today in small scale, Charles Simonds has produced a miniature clay village, Dwellings (1981), which is tucked into a stairwell at the Whitney Museum. In 1972, the prominent artist Miriam Schapiro made a groundbreaking dollhouse as a work of fine artm which is in the National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC. Just about every museum in the world includes art of or about miniature scale. For the creative mind, the miniature can compress a salient moment of awareness in a few inches, just as haiku compresses a complete world in few syllables. There seems to be a universal human desire to yoke the finite to the infinite, the human to the divine, and the breviary moment to eternity.

Posted by Jane on 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

January 21, 2006

From the Infinitesimal to the Infinite

Literature, Art, Science and Miniatures:
Microcosmic Paradigms and Precedents

Part I
One of the smallest microcosms I can think of is William Blake’s “world in a grain of sand.� It’s a supreme concept, and reminds me of sculptures I once saw in a museum—realistic figures the size of grains of rice and scenes the size of a thimble, which had to be viewed through a magnifying glass. I was impressed with the art, and equally impressed with the throngs patiently waiting to glimpse those stunning morsels. Miniatures are and always have been universally cherished; examples of and references to small worlds can be found everywhere.

Why do miniatures possess such allure? Maybe because seeing small is a way for us to order the world and understand our place in the cosmos. Relating to tiny worlds elicits all sorts of uplifting and stimulating perspectives and feelings. Writing about Queen Mary’s famous dollhouse, Clifford Musgrave says: “There is an extraordinary fascination and charm about smallness…. there is a special satisfaction in creating a tiny replica of any object…�

This attraction to tiny worlds shouldn’t be too surprising, considering we ourselves are spiritual and physical microcosms. Our mystical identity with a supreme power is expressed in a 17th-century poem by Angelus Silesius:
"I am like God, and God like me.
I am as large as God, he is as small as I:
He cannot above me, nor I beneath him be."

A thousand-year-old Sanskrit text, The Doctrine of Recognition, states: "Acquiring the power of consciousness, the aspirant assimilates the universe into himself." In other words, the Supreme (God, or Consciousness) is embodied within each of us.

The Italian art critic and essayist Mario Praz wrote that we should “investigate the mysteries of creation in order to see, perhaps in this penchant of ours for the little things, the action of the Creator who amuses himself with His creature, made, naturally, in His own image, only smaller.� And the Canadian comic-book artist Jacques Boivin wrote: “If we wish to understand the nature of the Universe we have an inner hidden advantage: we are ourselves little portions of the universe and so carry the answer with us.�

Physically, we contain all the elements of the universe. Salt water flows in our blood; our flesh is synonymous with earth; air fills our lungs and fire our digestive tract. It’s small wonder that finding connections to the cosmos is as stimulating as it is consoling, and that human beings have probably always created miniature replicas of things.

~#~

Art in miniature survives from ancient Egypt in an endearing house and garden, about 4,000 years old, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Miniatures like this were often buried with the dead for use in the afterlife. Tiny pieces of bronze furniture, indicating the existence of miniature houses in ancient Greece and Rome, have been found. For centuries, parallels have been drawn between the human body as microcosm and the universe as microcosm. Among the Metropolitan Museum’s innumerable tiny works is a Flemish rosary bead, in the Middle Ages gallery. The carved boxwood bead that opens to reveal intricately detailed scenes from the life of Christ.

One of the earliest dollhouses on record was commissioned in 1558 by a Bavarian duke for his daughter. But when it was finished, he decided to keep it as a cabinet in which to display his precious artifacts. A trend for miniaturization in general had begun, signaled by the printing of tiny books. In Troublesome Things, Diane Purkiss writes: “Such productions offered to encapsulate the whole world in a small portable artifact through the principle that the microcosm reflected the macrocosm.�

As people began to get rich in 17th-century Holland, collecting small treasures became a fad. These objects were housed in special cabinets with partitions added to make decorated rooms. Some historians believe that dollhouses originated in Italy because of their similarity to crèches.

While we often associate model trains, dollhouses, and sandcastles with children, small-scale replicas are not their exclusive domain. We can lapse into reverie before a fireplace, hypnotized by the miniature Armageddon within it. We’re drawn to miniatures in snow globes and music boxes, altars and crèches, aquariums and terrariums, Fabergé eggs, Japanese netsukes, key-chain baubles, figurines, birdhouses, models of monuments, refrigerator magnets, toy theaters. It is customary in Japan for businesspeople to begin their day contemplating a bonsai or minuscule rock garden before they leave for work and the world “at large.� I know people who plant miniature gardens in window boxes. I toss orange seeds into clay pots to watch some Lilliputian groves grow.

Speaking of Lilliputian, Gulliver’s Travels is all about odd-scale worlds, and there are many other stories on the subject—to name just a few: Fantastic Voyage, The Borrowers, Stuart Little, “Tom Thumb,� and “Thumbelina,� and the popular “Honey I Shrunk the Kids� series of movies. It may be our own scale that we’re transforming as we enter these alternate worlds.

There are other literary oxymorons and paradoxes concerning scale. Like Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll plays it both ways in Alice in Wonderland, in which an understandably bewildered Alice oscillates in size from HUGE to tiny. “What a curious feeling!� she says, “I must be shutting up like a telescope!� The Annotated Alice has something to say about her size-change, which becomes a sea-change, when the “pool� of tears she’d shed as a nine-footer seems like an ocean, into which she plunges, having shrunk to three inches small. Her size-fluctuation, according to cosmologist Alice-fans, may be a prophetic, dodgy, Dodgson allusion to the theories of the expanding and contracting cosmos, which were not posited until the early twentieth century.

A cosmic metaphor resides at the heart of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, where the normal information you expect to see on an envelope is greatly extended: “Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe�; and ends with the ultimate address, “the Mind of God.� And Shakespeare, who gave us the expression “mind’s eye,� also possibly relished the efficient trope of the miniature. (Come to think of it, “The Globe� is the perfect name for a relatively small platform on which to encapsulate the sweeping dramas of human life.) When Hamlet’s father is murdered by having poison poured into the “porches� of his ears, it seems to me those ill-starred anatomical piazzas become the world’s smallest crime-scenes. The eponymous prince laments: “Oh God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.� (II, ii). That the tormenting dreams reside in the repository of his mind makes me wonder if the cranium can be interpreted as the rudimental (and rudely mental) container for everything real and imaginary.

That reminds me of a scene in Jane Eyre, in which Rochester is looking at the epynomous heroine’s watercolors.
R: Where do you get your pictures?�
J: “Out of my head, sir.�
R: “And does it have more furniture of the kind?�
J:“I should hope better, sir.�

Moreover, Walt Whitman sings: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes).� Lucretius says: “The vivid force of his mind prevailed, and he … traversed the boundless universe in thought and mind.� And Melville, in that magnum opus which has everything to do with scale, writes: “O Nature, and O soul of man! How far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! Not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind.� (Moby-Dick, ch. 70)

The writer George Macdonald wrote, in 1885: “The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and macrocosm were at length atoned, at length in harmony. I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me.� Behind that expression of numinous truth is scientific fact; quantum physics reveals fantastic conundrums about the interconnecting nature of the cosmos. I was amazed to hear that the distance between the cells in our body is relatively as vast as the distance between the planets in our solar system!

TO BE CONTINUED...

Posted by Jane on 2:41 PM | Comments (0)

January 14, 2006

Metro North to Valhalla: The Coincidence of Landscape and Music

The moment the train sways into motion, starting its long roll through Grand Central’s tunnels, the light snuffs out. But I sense after-image ghosts in the orange-black buttresses and arches that are as colossal as Wagner sets. As if on cue, loud in my head comes “The Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla.�

We rock in a measured fugue, pick up speed, and an infinite measure later burst into the gloom of a midwinter noon. Snarled, grizzled skeins of bare trees veil the swathes of burned and eyeless buildings standing at the tracks.

Just now I hear “Immolation of the Gods,� the perfect score to track a tragic passage through Harlem.

A bit farther north the gargoyles crouch. Toothy, clawed, matted, shaggy, and damp, those schist and granite berms patrol the Braquish river palette.

And now, with Siegfried’s regal theme in my ears, there looms an elegant span, a perfect curve, an overarching bridge, like a fine stream of silver mead flung bank to bank.

Posted by Jane on 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

January 10, 2006

Insipid, but Local, Color

A kind person named Gracie has requested more on local color, so here goes.

Well, not long ago I actually left Tribeca and ventured up to the environs of Madison Square Garden. Caught in a sudden freezing rain (you never know what climatic surprise will greet you emerging from the subway), I ducked into an overlit Chinese fast-food dive. It was like a fluorescently lit tunnel, at the end of which was an even brighter light: the menu, a dispirited marquee of faded transparencies, whose choices all looked more or less the same. The place was half filled with strange clientele; one man, bundled in rags, was asleep in a plate of rice. I crept drippingly to the counter, squinted uncertainly at the unsavory marquee, mentally shrugged and ordered “Mu Shu Vegetable.� I believe it was $3.95.

During my wait of seven minutes, I noticed that the brick floor wasn’t brick and the tile walls weren’t tile. Maybe the food wasn’t food either. On one wall was an impossibly narrow door that looked like a prop. It was conspicuously locked and bore the ambiguous sign “Rest Rooms,� though the plural seemed hyperbolic and the adjective spurious. Doubtless the meagerest plumbing dwelled therein, probably as unreal as everything else.

Presently a gray plastic tray was slid onto the gray MDF counter. I was acutely aware that medium density fiberboard contains formaldehyde, as everything else there may have. The tray was heaped with rice, several small mu-shu pancakes rolled tight as tampons, a knob of viscous vegetables, and a thimble-sized plastic ramekin of brown liquid that I hoped was hoisin sauce.

I took my tray over to one of the desolate deuces. As I sat down a toothless woman materialized, exactly like Papagena in her cackling crone disguise. She pointed to the pancakes and exuberantly yelled: “What kind of bread is that?� I muttered that it wasn’t bread, just as the tiles weren’t tile and the bricks weren’t brick. Then I offered her one, but she smiled and stumbled off, vigorously chatting to herself. I supped in silent haste, tossed my garbage and recycled my tray, and went out gratefully, quam celerrime, into the heartening rain.

Posted by Jane on 3:12 PM | Comments (0)

January 1, 2006

AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS

It snowed this afternoon, a prolific preamble to New Year's Eve--big, blossomy flakes, like drenched camillias, littered the dusky streets and splatted the sidewalks. The snow hushed the city until just now, when midnight struck and suddenly hoots and cheers arose from all directions. The bar over which I live has ushered in the year on a hard disco beat. And with everyone’s mind on fresh starts, I begin this blog on fictitious beginnings.

The first words of a great novel are as propitious as any dawn in nature or in ritual. Cicero wrote: “…in the beginning the world was so made that certain signs come before certain events.� This is true of literary masterpieces as well; their beginnings foreshadow the stories to come. David Lodge, in The Art of Fiction, calls the beginning of a novel a threshold to draw us in. Another writer compared the beginning of a novel to the antechamber of a house.

Moby-Dick, which I first read in high school, opened my eyes to great beginnings. The famous first sentence is an ambiguous command: “Call me Ishmael.� Simple, but maybe not so simple. My high school English teacher said, “Why did Melville not write instead ‘My name is Ishmael’? The implication is that Ishmael is a pseudonym. And who was the biblical Ishmael? He is an outsider who wanders the earth, as Melville’s narrator wanders the seas, an observing outsider till the end. Moby-Dick is an epic of wandering, a search for truth on many levels.� That was how I learned to notice the first sentences of literary works. Here are a few favorites.

Hemingway, most famous for The Old Man and the Sea, wrote a memoir, A Moveable Feast. It plunges in, in medias res, with these first words: “Then there was the bad weather.� One can hardly stop reading there!

Bad weather, preventing mobility, introduces Jane Eyre with an insurmountable negative: “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.� This is a novel about a girl devoid of possibilities, and how she overcomes adverse origins to gain wisdom and fulfillment. Another novel begins with a walk taken, in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice: “Gustav Aschenbach (or von Aschenbach, as his name read officially since his fiftieth birthday), on a spring afternoon of that year 19__ which for months posed such a threat to our continent, had left his apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse in Munich and had gone for a rather long walk all alone.� “All alone� tags this as a story about isolation and loneliness; the name-change signifies an impending crisis of identity; lack of self-knowledge in middle age that will set him up for infatuation and heartbreak.

Speaking of broken hearts, my favorite Barbara Pym novel, No Fond Return of Love, begins wryly: “There are various ways of mending a broken heart, but perhaps going to a learned conference is one of the more unusual.� Like Jane Austen, Pym uses polite understatement and tongue-in-cheek as vehicles for social satire.

Dylan Thomas’s great prose-poem, Under Milk Wood, opens in a somnolent little village: “To begin at the beginning. It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter's-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are as blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.�

Alice in Wonderland begins with the child feeling “sleepy and stupid,� a state conducive to daydreams: “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do; once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversation in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’� And so psychology compensates for what is lacking and turns quotidian boredom into outrageous fantasy. (Alice’s descent through the rabbit hole reminds me of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, which begins with a matter-of-fact description of Dorothy’s one-room house, with ladder to the cyclone cellar, another birth-canal symbol, “a small dark hole.�)

A mesmerizing, singsong sleepiness is evoked too by Hermann Hesse in Siddhartha. This mood, however, symbolizes not dreams or imagination but the deluded state of maya: “In the shadow of the house, in the sun on the riverbank by the boats, in the shadow of the sal-tree forest, in the shadow of the fig tree, Siddhartha, the beautiful brahmin’s son, the young falcon, grew up with his friend, the brahmin’s son Govinda."

Perhaps not surprisingly, sleep is a favorite subject of Proust. Three of the seven novels of Remembrance of Things Past begin in a bedroom. Marcel did, after all, write an awful lot in bed, in his famous cork-lined room. Swann’s Way begins: “For a long time I used to go to bed early.� The Captive: “At daybreak, my face still turned to the wall, and before I had seen above the big inner curtains what tone the first streaks of light assumed, I could already tell what sort of day it was.� The Past Recaptured: “All day long, in that slightly too countrified house which seemed no more than a place for a rest between walks or during a storm, one of those houses in which all the sitting-rooms look like arbors and, on the wall-paper of the bedrooms, here the roses from the garden, there the birds fro the trees outside join you and keep you company, isolated from the world – for they were old wall-papers on which every rose was so distinct that, had it been alive, you could have picked it, every bird you could have put in a cage and tamed, quite different from those grandiose bedroom decorations of today where, on a silver background, all the apple trees of Normandy display their outlines in the Japanese style to hallucinate the hours you spend in bed – all day long I remained in my room which looked over the fine greenery of the park and the lilacs near its entrance, over the green leaves of the great trees by the edge of the lake, sparkling in the sun, and the forest of Méseglisé.�

On the other hand, Kafka’s Metamorphosis jolts us, along with his protagonist, wide awake from page one: “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.�

James Joyce launches Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with baby talk: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face. He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.� Another of Joyce’s great works, Finnegans Wake, starts in mid-sentence with “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.� This partial sentence mimes watery recirculation and, in fact, begins at the very end of the novel: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the�.

In David Copperfield, the eponymous hero (whose initials are, perhaps significantly, the reverse of Charles Dickens’), begins the first chapter, “I am Born,� thus: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.�

Compare this birth with Laurence Sterne’s account of Tristram Shandy’s birth in the novel of the same name, a hilarious report of the narrator’s infelicitous conception (hence his lugubrious name). “I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;--that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;--and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost;--Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,--I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that in which the reader is likely to see me.�

Speaking of how authors beget their books, the greatest literary curtain-raiser of all time is, of course: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.� Genesis is without doubt the most mysterious prose ever written, and a hint, as Cicero suggested, to notice signs and warnings--before our acts effect untoward events.

P.S. This appeared in the New York Times on Jan. 4:

Rejected by the Publishers
By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: January 4, 2006

Submitted to 20 publishers and agents, the typed manuscripts of the opening chapters of two books were assumed to be the work of aspiring novelists. Of 21 replies, all but one were rejections. Sent by The Sunday Times of London, the manuscripts were the opening chapters of novels that won Booker Prizes in the 1970's. One was "Holiday," by Stanley Middleton; the other was "In a Free State," by Sir V. S. Naipaul, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mr. Middleton said he wasn't surprised. "People don't seem to know what a good novel is nowadays," he said. Mr. Naipaul said: "To see something is well written and appetizingly written takes a lot of talent, and there is not a great deal of that around. With all the other forms of entertainment today, there are very few people around who would understand what a good paragraph is."

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Posted by Jane on 12:08 AM | Comments (0)