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February 27, 2006

“Unprepossessing Individual in an Indeterminate Setting�

It’s Friday or Saturday night. I sip wine on the balcony of the Museum. An echoey string quintet, Schubert, I think, is accompanied by the continuo of vague palaver and dimly percussive applause, like matterings of rain or rustlings of cellophane. In the overarching vaults, the mix of sounds bounces and ricochets, dueling and dueting inside a skull bent on soliloquy.

Outside -- beyond the gothic arches, alcoves of stone Romans, masonry balustrades and urns bursting with forsythia -- a long Mylar banner shifts in the breeze like a silky negligee. The fluid marquee announces Cezanne; perhaps Fra Angelico or Medieval Reliquaries. Odd to see it from here, inside, rather than from the Avenue, as if I were backstage, behind an opera curtain.

This banner, one of three or four, is an ineffable Giotto-pink. It is punched with unobtrusive holes that keep it from billowing too much. Through the punches gleam bright azure crescents hatched with charcoal trusses. Takes a moment to “get� what’s shining through like blue glazed shards: the sky — not up, where heaven ought to be, but straight ahead, as if the sky were hanging on a wall. Quartet of blue, pink, yellow, gray; a Diebenkorn tangram.

A drop of wine is left at the bottom of my glass, like a cabochon garnet or a glittering eye. Rather than jumping up to leave (as is my wont), I decide to wait and see. In both senses.

The spread of cocktail tables is rife with high spirits, dressy businesspeople celebrating this and that, tourists with gift-shop bags and street guides. Tawny Japanese toast with flaxen champagne. Their flutes, lifted horizontally to lips, are translucent with viscous gold - they seem like ships-in-bottles - and turn the champagne into Turners before my eyes: sun-drowned seas, mercurial skies.

Time slows.

Beyond the revelry, cryptic Asian antiquities abide in airless vitrines. Bronze bird vessel, incense box, enamel jar, snuff bottle, cylindrical cup, porcelain pot, red lacquer cabinet — so many small enclosures. A pocket-size Chinese monk grins from inside his lapis lazuli grotto — detached and snug: “an unprepossessing individual in an indeterminate setting,� says the catalog. Of course a thread or two of Yeats wafts in: “Every discoloration of the stone, / Every accidental crack or dent / Seems a water-course or an avalanche, / Or lofty slope where it still snows…�

Observation slows time to meaninglessness. What one’s eyes alight on does tantalize! I squint down, paring my vision to the thinnest possible lash-crossed crescent of light. Plate, goblet, knife, spoon, an assemblage framed in a tabletop. My concave portrait shifts like sauce in the spoon. The gesso-white plate has become a palette of condiments mixed into an accidental landscape: an indeterminate setting spelling everywhere.

At this stoppage of time, when microscope turns telescope and back again, when inner and outer converge, the oil-vinegar-mustard fusion of fugitive perfection is exquisite, as everything truly is. I wish I could show you.

Posted by Jane on 9:18 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2006

Wow, Mom!

Mom died many years ago but I miss her with the same intense longing and strangely ecstatic heartache. Every day I encounter tangible reminders of her jubilant presence, which was understandable since she had many enthusiasms, like calligraphy and its instruments, Crane’s stationery, Scrabble games and crossword puzzles, the New York Times (which she read daily at home in Miami), dictionaries and other word-reference books, works of literature, good coffee drunk black from a fine white cup...

One Sunday, exactly nine months after her death (a significant span of time, considering) I wandered aimlessly in the flea market uptown on Amsterdam Avenue. The huge parking lot was transformed for the day into tented booths and ad hoc stands. Every few feet I’d think: Oh, Mom, you’d love this handmade paper; these ceramic bowls; these tiny stone earrings, these carved little boxes, calligraphy nibs . . .!

In the middle of the lot a tall woman was standing behind a flimsy card table that held ceramic dogs. It seemed she had just about every breed. Automatically I looked for a collie and a standard poodle, like Mom's dogs. Yep, there were Heather and Beau. Among the figurines, incongruously, was a basket of miscellaneous dollhouse accessories, two dollars each. Strangely, there was only one of each item. As I looked through the offerings I was amazed to see specific emblems of my mother’s life -- crossword puzzle, dictionary, packet of Crane’s, Scrabble set, leather-bound journals like the ones she wrote in, a bundle of New York Times, Florida road map (our family took many car trips throughout Florida. Dad drove and Mom navigated with a Florida roadmap). There were even copies of “Pat the Bunny� (her stock gift to every newborn); Jane Eyre (she’d collected illustrated editions for me all my life); a Superman comic (private joke: she never let me read them as a kid); Sherlock Holmes (but she approved of my becoming a “Baker Street Irregular� at age 11); and a tiny cup of black coffee in a delicate white cup.

With each familiar item, I felt my awareness shift subtly inward. I grew still, floaty, and breathless. There was an unaccountable buzzing in my head. All these items were specific and evocative, but I kept thinking they were there by coincidence.

However, when I saw the last two items in the basket, I realized this was no accident. There was an exact reproduction of a poster in my mother’s calligraphy studio: an alphabetical and numerical grid of photos depicting pattern details on butterfly wings. How amazing was that! And the last object, at the very bottom of the basket, was a miniscule notepad. The inscription, in calligraphy, read: “Memo from Mom.�

Posted by Jane on 10:02 AM | Comments (0)

February 6, 2006

Blog in February

At dawn I ventured into the wintry park nearby. It was empty. The sky was a pearly, silverfish gray, and both the sun and the moon were out. The untenanted gazebo glowed like a stage-set phantom. The wasted gardens were in full, majestic decline — a tenebrous spectrum of inscrutable hues. I looked around, naming them: green-gray, brown-gray, blue-gray, pinkish-gray, yellow-gray . . . and became awash in an amplitude of close tones.
A raven glided down, jetty feathers swishing like satin. He looked like an inkblot on parchment. I thought of his country fellows whom I’d once seen posing in profile on dirt roads and at the apex of feather-shaped trees. This raven strutted and cawed upon the cobblestones, then took off with much ebon-satin rustling. He flew into the hairnet skeins of branches, unsuspectingly calling my attention to what looked like a derelict nest. It was no nest, but a perfectly still squirrel that, disturbed by my attention, sprang clear to another tree. His leap and his landing caused me to note a nearly invisible, static assembly of pigeons lined up on a branch. They were puffed up and looked like a display of dusty odd-lot ornaments.
A human being appeared. The park-keeper, a young Ethiopian, who looked like Krishna’s eager understudy but without a flute. Instead his arms were full of burlap bags. He struck up, as if in mid-conversation, a cheerful chat about the raven (whom he seemed to know). Naturally, I thought of Dicken in The Secret Garden. As it turned out, he was neither Krishna nor Dicken.
“My name is Abel,� he said, and shook my hand.
“As in Cain and Abel?� I said, surprised by his warmth.
"Right," he chortled. "And if you see him, tell him I'm looking for him. That brother owes me!"
He laughed outright and I laughed too, mirth between strangers on an off-kilter morning of beautiful, gray things, of small events that live beyond the outskirts of harsh light and perished dreams.

Posted by Jane on 9:34 PM | Comments (0)

February 1, 2006

A Verbal Collage and a Gift from Yeats

About a week ago someone threw out a stack of art magazines dating from the 1980s. Just think, it took that person over twenty years to discard an unwieldy bunch of dated periodicals. Perhaps that stranger shares two of my more contradictory compulsions -- to hoard, and to dispose of the hordes of the hoarded.

A scavenger by nature, I hauled the mags home and up four flights, despite the fact that they were damp and wrinkled, and had become partly unglued from their night spent in the rain. I spread them out on the floor and, with a scissors, pored over them as destructively as the rain had poured over them. I cut out images of art and bits of erudition, fragments of descriptions and of history. I arranged and rearranged the chosen lines of text until they slid into a sort of surrealist collage poem:

A Sort of Surrealist Collage Poem

Improbable encounters with pointless arrows –
Images (books, boxes, paintings, and pots) –
A row of blue light bulbs, a corridor:
A train track leading into darkness.

Two small houses tucked among the beams,
The circuitous mathematical maneuverings
In her mind.
Side by side with the Apollonian dwelt the Dionysiac,
Joys, sorrows, doubts, and magical sensations:
Intimate pockets of interior
Space.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

One can get cobbled poetry of epiphanic cadence and accidental intrigue simply by reading the Index of First Lines of a great poet like William Butler Yeats. If you have a copy of his Collected Poems, turn to the back (in my edition, Scribner Paperback Poetry, the First Lines begin on p. 533). Now, start reading:

A bloody and a sudden end,
A certain poet in outlandish clothes
A crazy man that found a cup,
A cursing rogue with a merry face,
A doll in the doll-maker's house
A man came slowly from the setting sun,
A man I praise that once in Tara's Halls
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
A most astonishing thing
A pity beyond all telling
A speckled cat and a tame hare
A statesman is an easy man,
A storm-beaten old watch-tower,
A strange thing surely that my Heart, when love had come unsought
A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Acquaintance; companion;
Ah, that Time could touch a form
All the heavy days are over;
All the stream that's roaring by
All things can tempt me from this craft of verse:
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,
Although crowds gathered once if she but showed her face,
Although I can see him still,
Although I'd lie lapped up in linen
Although I shelter from the rain
Although you hide in the ebb and flow
An abstract Greek absurdity has crazed the man,
An affable Irregular,
An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
An old man cocked his ear upon a bridge;
And thus declared that Arab lady;
Around me the images of thirty years;
As I came over Windy Gap
As the moon sidles up
Autumn is over the long leaves that love us

...and so on, through the alphabetized first lines, to the end:

You ask what I have found and far and wide I go,
You gave, but will not give again
You say, as I have often given tongue
You think it horrible that lust and rage
You waves, though you dance by my feet like children at play,
You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
Your eyes that once were never weary of mine
Your hooves have stamped at the black margin of the wood.

(Kind of makes me swoon.)

Posted by Jane on 3:45 PM | Comments (0)