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April 28, 2006

TRAIN PASSAGES

The journey is the goal, say the sages. So, along the way, are new impressions. A train will float through landscapes of extraordinary imagery, inviting one to succumb to a rare paradox of transience and timelessness. To note--and then note down--passages like these:

I. NY TO PHILADELPHIA (AMTRAK)
We hurtle out of Penn Station (NY). Tints are vivid and shadows rich. The westward sun smacks the factories flat. Under arched stone highways, weeds with palomino manes dance in quirky, gooseflesh ponds. The azure-and-ermine sky turns yellowish fish-eye gray. Spectral white oil tanks like World’s Fair relics slowly wheel by…

Newark… Metropark…Trenton, one by one flash gold domes and charred spires. Between cities lie factories; between factories, fossil-skinned houses misshapen as pinch pots. A pasture of new lumber, laid in A-rows; industrial plants, fixed by neat tense trees and blackboard parking lots with chalked slots…

Spectacular wasteland. Chalice-shaped allsorts mounds (twisted and vivid as sopping wash) reel out continuums of multiplicities: Mount PlasticGallonJug, Mount BlackRubberTire, Mount RustedIronWorks. Soutine-scribble of apricot, ginger, chartreuse foliage. Beneath a glassine sky & pollen-tawny leaves, a moment of madder-red fields, ridged as the roof of a mouth or the grooves of the ocean floor…

So much forest whips by so fast, the colors bleed in spitfire foreground massacres. Through an occasional breach I see (as through a funnel or a tunnel) a fairy-tale farmscape rounding slowly in the distance, like a charm that’s reflected in the deepwood, clairvoyant hand-mirror said to belong to Beauty’s Beast.

II. NY TO MATWAN (NJ TRANSIT)
Twenty-minute chug through landfill hills of yellow grass basted with green copper cables. Poles arranged in groups, like Calvary. An empty armature of dispirited billboard scaffolds propped against a newsprint sky. Power lines suture the ozone, as intricate as Klee drawings or cat’s-cradle twine. A tableau of gas-belching, combustible structures in stricken industrial cities: Elizabeth…Bethune…. Monstrous depopulated refineries with scum-lidded, multi-mullioned windows (cracked ajar in dusty rhombuses, glinting in the glowering sun. Stalky white towers with spiral stairs like nobbed spines; knolls of shattered glass; car parts packed in scintillate cubes…

The black bridge skyway—leviathan roller-coaster, something from Bladerunner (antediluvian & futuristic)--cradles our tonnage in surreal embrace: complex of black X’s, galaxy of girders. We hang over a viscous river that’s rife with effluvia, and ominously roiling in dun corrugations...

At Penn Station (Newark), we wait for the Matawan train. In the tracks: rusted stakes, spikes, lath. Birds clamor in riveted station rafters. The new train scrapes in, chuffs us off through another linkage of idle, old, empty towns. On the pallid vista, acid-yellow forsythia imposes its intrusion of blooms. The willows, thinking about coming into leaf, trail sparse tresses like pickle-juice tearstains. Describo ergo sum. I sit back, lullabuoyed along hilly raillands; coast over Lilliputia; muse on what I might find in Matawan, to furnish a private micro-world of my begetting.

Posted by Jane on 8:03 PM | Comments (0)

April 22, 2006

Cozy Zones

What a sweet little, quiet little, provincial city Philadelphia is, compared to NYC. (I suppose anywhere one is NOT is bound to seem more peaceful than where one actually is.) Philly was a big city to me when I entered graduate school at the U of Penn in 1971. I’d grown up in sleepy 60’s Miami, which was still tropically rural and slow. For culture, we’d drive out to the Tamiami Trail to watch alligator wrestling, or visit the Everglades to watch the swamps and egrets. I thought I’d stay in Miami for good, but to my surprise I went north to college. Sarah Lawrence was tucked in a Westchester suburb like a Tudor village, very tranquil. I rarely went into New York, as close as it was, for various neurotic reasons. After college I vaulted to Philadelphia for more school. It took a while to adapt to a municipal psyche: ubiquitous public transport, an anonymous populace, and lunch-meat-colored office buildings (the full spectrum ranging from liverwurst to olive-loaf). Of course, refuge is a state of being, but being in a raucous hullabaloo doesn’t help one’s quest for inner peace.

The University was not indicative of the City of Philadelphia, but a kind of self-sufficient hamlet of picturesque old buildings: College Hall, on the quadrangle, seemed a gothic movie set (Charles Addams, a Penn alum, based his Addams family’s spooky manse on it). The art department was housed in a cauldron-walled Romanesque fortress of red stone designed by Frank Furness, famous for his elaborate 19th-century train stations. The spectacular campus architecture was both formidable and inviting, and once inside, you felt a frisson of complementary coziness. The scale was embracing, not alienating, as post-modern buildings can be. Center City and Rittenhouse Square had their muted charm. I would have settled in Philadelphia, but fate nudged me a couple inches farther up the map, in 1974, to an even bigger city.

In New York, provincialism is a rare commodity. You find it more downtown than uptown, more on the West Side than the East. For intimate nooks you borough-in to Brooklyn and Staten Island. In Manhattan, your options are fewer, but you can always peek through a fence at a churchyard lawn, or walk in a quaint Village alley, or find some potted tulips on a loading dock. On Duane Street, close to Greenwich, someone is cultivating a weed-field on the old metal warehouse awning. Homey!

Finding cozy zones of humor and humanity is challenging amid anonymity, noise, and colossal scale. Take banks, for instance. Old Miami banks were more like family rooms with their indoor palms and stucco walls of cheery sailboat prints. The tellers, sans bars or any barriers, always smiled and knew your name. Extra reassurance was discreetly provided by Muzak. How different from New York banks--mausoleums of impenetrability, high ceilings that diminish you, massive dusty windows filtering out sunlight, amplified rock that’s more dispiriting than the pittance in your account. Until recently, banks eschewed colors other than black, white or gray, save the bit of red on a deposit slip. Things are changing, though. Financial institutions are experimenting with a “user-friendly� approach, replacing bulletproof glass with armed security guards; painting the walls with heart-stopping geometrics like magnified Ellsworth Kellys. Happily, they’re also replacing “NO PETS ALLOWED!� signs with bowls of dog biscuits. Despite such humanizations, many retain an imperiousness meant to reflect the sere, serious tendering of money. But even the grimmest bank has its unexpected whiff of bonhomie. A few years ago a message appeared on the thick glass tellers’ windows: “Beware Strangers Attempting Distractions By Squirting Mustard Or Catsup On Your Person.�

How sweet is that?

Posted by Jane on 12:01 PM | Comments (0)

April 15, 2006

The Remains of the Beast

In one of my favorite novels, The Remains of the Day, a cold-hearted butler in a great house spurns the quiet offering of love by the housekeeper. Eventually Mr. Stevens and Miss Kenton part ways, but meet just once again years later, in the West Country, where Mr. Stevens has gone on holiday. Miss Kenton has capitulated to a nondescript marriage; she wistfully looks forward to having grandchildren. When she asks what the future holds for Mr. Stevens, he coolly replies, "...there's work, work and more work" -- as if work will guard his emotional oblivion into perpetuity. This is the portrait of a heartless man set in the landscape of a wasted life.

I once hankered after a similar sort of person; I tried to paint him to capture his likeness, if not his love. But his image was just as elusive as the man. Repeatedly I scrubbed out the face, leaving a bruise-gray ghostly smudge like Branwell Bronte’s famous eradicated self-portrait. Was the struggle a subconscious ploy to keep my subject simultaneously at large and at bay? What resulted was a study not of a man but of a relationship: the tracking of small advances and large retreats, the momentary gleams amid the obfuscations. It was an obsession that had sprung from delusion. Perhaps I’d conflated disparity into congruence, as when I failed to realize that while he was private but not secretive, I was secretive but not private. Multiply the misperception a hundred times.

In the midst of this struggle I reread “The Beast in the Jungle.� With baroque subterfuge, Henry James’s language drives the terror and tragedy of a theme that Kazuo Ishiguro would use 85 years later in Remains of the Day. In “Beast,� another woman stands by, also a kind of psychosexual lady-in-waiting. She too is silently devoted to a self-absorbed man who’s both proximate to and distant from her life. In "Beast," John Marcher’s sole interest in May Bartram is that she faithfully watches with him, year after year, as he avidly waits for the Beast to spring—the Beast being whatever prodigious thing he’s certain he’s being kept for. She knows what it is but neither can tell him nor save him from himself. Of course the “thing� would have been to love her. It would have been, as James says, “the chance to baffle his doom,� just as the arid Stevens might have been saved (read humanized) by Miss Kenton'a love. In the end, Marcher’s fatal oversight (or undersight) does spring at him, but too late, and he throws himself, in the horror of his realization, upon May Bartram’s grave.

In trying to paint that portrait, I wrestled with my own bête noire of vain longing. With Jamesian irony the remains, the wash-out, the obscured effigy became a kind of inverse portrait. The thing that was to have emerged did emerge, the subject effaced, the erasure more telling than the image pursued. Like John Marcher I had kept a futile vigil. What finally sprang at me was the real subject, which I saw with a Jamesian shock-of-recognition: assumptions spawned by blind egoism.

As for John Marcher, Mr. Stevens and my erstwhile friend, an apt epitaph for them all might be a caution from Seneca, who said, “Man’s fear of his fate is often his fate. Leaping to avoid it, he meets it.�

Posted by Jane on 10:12 AM | Comments (0)

April 5, 2006

The Lifetime of Flowers and Towers

Today began drizzly, grizzled and chilly. An hour ago it briefly snowed flakes like magnolia petals. I heard that two minutes and a few seconds past one o’clock the time will be 01-02-03-04-05-06, a sequence that won’t occur again for another thousand years.

To herald this fleetest of seasons are flowering pear trees and other budders and bloomers. Dim green things, not there yesterday, today are poking up through pavements and in remnant soil from last year’s flower pots. Restaurants brandish long branches of quince and forsythia. Impromptu daffodils appear in coffee cans (or Steuben vases), glaring from smudged (or dazzling) windows in rent-stabilized walk-ups (or million-dollar lofts). The caustic yellow splotches outshine the red, superannuated light bulbs that still linger in industrial shaftways.

This particular lover of rubble, at home in glass and steel, has a renewed interest in nature. During winter, I forget about it (cognitive dissonance?) or regard it as frivolous, a garnish on a plate. Now I appreciate every chance ailanthus beginning to green the parking lots, and the queues of curbside ghinkos. Verdure chants “rebirth� in public parks. Outdoor markets offer sprouts in pots. Bookstores headline gardening books to leaf through, pardon the pun. Here comes the sun.

In a small park, on a damp wood-slat bench, I sit amid a prolix accretion of little flower plots not unlike miniature graves. The wind duets with the hum of traffic. From a clutch of seed packets has sprung a miscellany of thready growth, jumbled like the wrong side of an embroidered tablecloth. Come summer there'll be unwieldy, tremulous hollyhocks; fulsome peonies in tissuey wads; day lilies & tiger lilies; marigolds, daisies. And rows of indeterminate chartreuse wicks, trussed to unwieldy bamboo spindles. And sunflowers big enough to stitch into gowns. And baleful furry blooms in heavy browns and violets: velvet-clad doyennes of matinees, with petals drooping like downcast eyelashes; all hinting at the paradox of indomitable fragility.

I wander to the river, which looks viscous and muscular; flexes and ripples like a snail’s foot. A girl hobbles by in a black nylon slip worn like a dress. Her leg is in a cast painted black. Small, flinty boys on skateboards ricochet off stone berms. Tides of visitors flow in and out of ferries. Those boats blast diesel smoke, arc wide as hoop skirts, straighten course, diminish, vanish . . . in the apparent cycle of emergence and demise.

Embryonic skyscrapers teeter in construction sites like tall-necked dinosaurs raising ungainly heads. The sky is gored with trusses, punctured by skeletel lifts and bright red cranes. At the boatless marina, I suddenly remember . . . Sept. 10, 2001. I'd stood here, looking up and thinking: One thing for sure--the towers will outlive me.

Posted by Jane on 2:29 PM | Comments (0)

April 1, 2006

The Cloisters

You get to the Cloisters by taking the A train to 190th Street. Underground, you enter a large old elevator faintly illumined by a flickering bulb. The door grates closed; the lift yanks upward like a tired old Clydesdale heaving to its tired old feet. The ascent is slow and jarring, with plenty of time to observe the cage, which is like a derelict room.

Hanging from a semi-detached wall-hook is a potted plant of indeterminate species, and not exactly thriving. Its sparse, trailing vines sway listlessly with each lurch of the lift. The steel walls are covered with faded photos of baby animals from Life and National Geographic, which ironically contribute to the sinister gloom.

The cage is dominated by a battered upholstered chair, whose cottony innards protrude from slashes in its dirty Naugahyde. Like the sullen bulb and the denatured plant, it too emits an indefinable air of dismay. The chair, it seems, is the personal property--and persona--of the elevator operator, who bears a pungent and reified likeness to it (the way people come to resemble pets through entropic, almost conjugal association). The distressed upholstery's oozing stuffing resembles the paunch of the operator that peeps from the button-gaps of his stiffly unwashed, brownish shirt. I imagine the man subsisting here, in his semi-furnished elevator room, which for all I know may be an antechamber to an extended Stygian world of boiler closets, shaftways, and the remotest tracks of the underground.

After a minute or so the elevator finally accomplishes a halt-gaited landing. With an audible shudder, it shimmies imprecisely to its berth.

Emerging from rank dimness into broad sunshine is a shock. The verdant expanse of Ft. Tryon Park looks artificially green, the sky like a painted theater flat. After a longish walk, I spot the Cloisters rearing from its pediment, which is a dun and craggy ledge like Sassetta's in “The Stigmatization of St. Francis.�

Within are stained-glass rondelles, Gothic tomb slabs, sepulchral effigies of youthful chevaliers, capitals carved with grotesqueries. The wallks are think and dank and perpetually cool. In the Unicorn Tapestry chamber, I try to parse the symbolism of Christ’s Incarnation. I suddenly remember, with a heady wave of dejas-vu, that all the colors in the tapestries came from just three plants. I wonder if I’d extracted, from tint-begetting botanicals, the hues in the weave, and if I’d once sat at the ancient loom.

I slip outside to survey the wrinkled and desultory Hudson, the gleaming bridge and majestic Palisades. In the colonnaded portico of the herb garden I play Hildegard von Bingen on my Walkman. All around are little wattled plots of pale-green herbs, and squat, gnarly quince trees, whose dwarfish proportions and clusters of unfamiliar fruit look like illuminations in a Books of Hours.

In the shop I browse among books piled on a long wood table. When I glance up from my reading, the visitors across from me look just like the saints and apostles in my hands.

Time to find some java. I look for a café but there’s only a concession stand that’s grubby, crowded, and out of almost everything. But they do have coffee, which I sip on my way back to the sepulchral elevator-reliquary, which will ferry me by fits and bumps to the 21st century via the IRT.

Posted by Jane on 2:07 PM | Comments (0)