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September 28, 2006

PACK WITH PRIDE

Sunday, eight a.m., and raining cats and dogs. Cats and dogs on the bed as well, wedged like dinghies on a sandbar, which is me. The animals snuzzle, snuffle, purr and sigh. The rain rips down. The sky is blank as a baffle, with an eerie glow. Izzy’s large white tabby paws are intertwined with Tracy’s small sheltie feet. Someone once said that in Chinese, love means "intertwined." Poe is retracted like a turtle in a tight black ball. The first one up is Caleb. He pokes me with his pointed nose. “Hrrrrr,� he mutters gutturally. Gingerly I disentangle. Yes breakfast right away okay.

Needlessly, on goes the TV for the weather: rain until noon. We eat. Then I caparison the dogs, and on the way out, Izzy pounces on a leash end, which stops Tracy in her tracks.

Usually we walk south, along the river. On some mornings, an ocean liner glides by; sometimes tugboats, sailboats, barges. And the landscape always changes. There’s this stand of sunflowers, ten feet tall. In August, the blossoms looked like lighthouse beacons, or suns with radiating spokes, as drawn by kids. By late September the bright leaves dwindle to grizzle-green in desiccated beauty. The stalks hook like shepherd crooks, bent by the flowers' bowed, cumbrous heads. Maybe this storm will bring them down.

This rainy morning, though, we are constrained to circumnavigating our block. We are kept dry by the creaky old warehouse awnings; and by new scaffolding, whose dim caged bulbs illume the gloom.

My Scottish dogs, bred for hard weather, urge me back. In the vestibule they shake shake shake, though they're hardly damp. Upstairs, they tear through the gunshot flat growling and pouncing, playing wolves. When they’ve had enough, Tracy jumps onto the bed and lolls on her back--four paws twitching in midair, head angled coyly. Izzy springs up and they curl into a chummy heap of browns, like twin piles of autumn leaves. They fall asleep.

Meanwhile, Caleb and Poe begin their matutinal tango. Leaning in together, they slowly circle, black shape marking, russet shape herding. After an attenuated duet, they halt in synch. Caleb waits, attentive as a toreador. Poe slinks under his fringy belly, twines beneath the horse-curve of his neck, drapes her tail across his back. His plumed tail waves subtly, like sea-oats. Then they go separate ways.

Such are this pride/pack's morning rituals.

Posted by Jane on 5:34 PM | Comments (0)

September 22, 2006

EQUINOX EPIPHANIES

Minutes ago, I heard an immense clatter of hooves. Out the window, hundreds of police horses were trotting down Greenwich Street. Horses of every color and many breeds – browns, greys, whites, blacks. Clydesdales, quarter horses, Appaloosas. The police stables are a few blocks away; I often hear the clip-clop of a horse or two on the cobblestones. But this equine deluge was something else; a sustained, bountiful energy, a clarity of precision consonant with the brisk, joyous gait of fall.

How remarkable to live near horses. When I first moved downtown, 30 years ago, I left waitress-work one night and walked home, practically in raptures as I neared the stable: just think! police horses asleep in the city!

I remember one cold misty full-moon night when someone emerged from the stable leading a jet-black thoroughbred out into the empty street. Then someone else appeared, from the opposite direction, walking an enormous, jetty Great Dane. The two animals slowly converged, as in a dream. The great dog barely lifted his head; the ebony horse barely lowered his. They touched noses for a second, then gracefully turned from each other and circled away.

Autumn begins. The air cools as the foliage hues warm, change from summertime lime and emerald to sap-loden-olive; in time, flame-wild and brown.

One autumn, I saw three great trees in a row, at the edge of a Soho playground. The first was full of frilly yellow leaves. The second was completely bare. On the third clung a mere handful of little fans. Ginkgos, I think they were. As I looked at them, in their curious order, a line from Sonnet 73 arose, exactly corresponding: “When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang…� Seemed as though Shakespeare was looking out of my eyes, composing on the spot.

Autumn begins and soon the windows will be shut, the street noises hushed for six months. By day the sky is stark blue, bright as a porcelain bowl. Twilight comes ever earlier, a cradling net cast under the fanfare of sunset. A reminder to come inside.

Posted by Jane on 3:37 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2006

Lust for (Literary) Lists

Safe to say that humans like making lists. Itemizations appear throughout literature, as the biblical inventories (the Creation story is an elaborate series of lists; the vertexes of "begat" passages; the 10 Commandments, etc.; in the NT, the vortical list of Jesus's lineage; list of Beatitudes, etc.). The Homeric catalogue inventories ships or weaponry. In more coeval times writers concoct lists too, as the nautical lists in Moby-Dick. F. Scott FITZGERALD penned a sartorial list in The Great Gatsby: “…he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high… He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. ...shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue.�

Fitzgerald again, from Tender is the Night: “…She bought coloured beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house, and three yards of some new cloth the colour of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a traveling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes …�

In her excellent, eccentric Literary Architecture, Ellen Eve Frank lists the literary terminology of Gerard Manley HOPKINS’ poems as reminiscent of the lexicon of architecture: “stress, instress, scape, inscape, arch-inscape, sprung, pitch, centre-hung, end-hung, moulding, proportion, structure, construction, design--...� Hopkins himself was quite a list-maker; in “Harry Ploughman� there occurs this anatomical list: “… the rack of ribs; the scooped flank; lank rope-over thigh; knee-nave; and barreled shank–head and foot, shoulder and shank…�

And in “Pied Beauty� (my favorite poem), Hopkins enumerates praiseworthy piebald things, details patterned in terrain, the stuff of commerce and miscellaneous contrary uniquenesses: a select catalog of God’s handiwork:

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.

In a letter deriding poets "stuck with the old forms," RIMBAUD lists, “among the idiots, A. Renaud…, L. Grandet …; the Gauls and the Mussets: G. Lefenestre, Coran, Cl. Popelin, Soulary, L. Salles; the schoolboys: Marc, Aicard, Theuriet; the dead and the imbeciles: Autran, Barbier, L. Pichat, Lemoyne, the Deschamps, and the Des Essarts; the journalists: L. Cladel, Robert Luzarches, X. de Richard; the fantasists: C. Mendes; the bohemians; the women; the talents, Leon Dierx and Sully-Prudhomme, Coppee.� (Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works, Harper&Row, p.104)

In Leaves of Grass, Walt WHITMAN lists admirable qualities of animals:
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.�

Whitman's Song of Myself is chock full of lists (see section 15, for example), quoted in Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? by Kenneth Koch [Vintage, 1974, p. 257].

Artist and poet Joe BRAINARD writes “A List for The Sake of a List� (Selected Writings, The Kulchur Foundation, 1971), #3 of which reads:
3. Me
(a) constipated
(b) envious, but not too much
(c) author of “Back in Tulsa Again�
(d) painter
(e) flounderer
(f) embarrassed as to terminology; man or boy

Cataloguing can be achieved through a literary device called anaphora, where the same word or words appears at the beginning of each line of a poem, as in Brainard’s book-length poem, I Remember (quoted at poets.org, The Academy of American Poets):

"I remember a piece of old wood with termites running around all over it the termite men found under our front porch.

I remember when one year in Tulsa by some freak of nature we were invaded by millions of grasshoppers for about three or four days. I remember, downtown, whole sidewalk areas of solid grasshoppers.

I remember a shoe store with a big brown x-ray machine that showed up the bones in your feet bright green."

And of course, there’s Frank O’HARA. The following lines are from a poem whose title is also its first line:

“Having a Coke With You�
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary…
(Selected Poems, ed. Donald Allen, NY, Vintage, 1974)

Joseph CORNELL wrote lists and descriptions galore--enigmatic registers of items, impressions, memories, dreams, ideas, like the elements of his collages and assemblages; viz.:

box for Matta
top lined with blocks of pigments
upper right lined with map – folded twisted piece of same material
taking up space
upper left-4 mirror lined compartments each containing piece of rock crystal, except piece resembling meteor blue glass
center mirror in background suspended shells – things pasted on back of piece of glass show only in mirror – attached on front by end paper – left – newspaper vague grey pieces of maroon one swinging – right yellow chamber – streak of mixed colors like a cloud serpent moving diagonally across ground. Coloured head pins stuck in at head of comet
lower left – paleontological lined cylinder & chamber red block & yellow pigment
right – beautiful fish made of twisted green & silver tinfoil thru blue lass with jack-black constellation liing mask of medium grey darker outline of frame
(Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files ed. by Mary Ann Caws, NY: Thames&Hudson, 1993).

Rudy BURCKHARDT kept a travel journal; this passage was written in Lima (Mobile Homes, Z Press, 1979): “Everything is small here: the people, their funny running steps, their shops that all sell the same five or six things, their thoughts and their life span. A boy on top of a truck loaded with sacks is getting ready for the ride home. A woman squats in voluminous skirts as a little river trickles from under her. Two stocky men get into a fight. … A dead dog lies in the gutter, his feet in the air.�

He collected these quotes, listed in the same book:
“Who cares what sensibility or discrimination a man has at some time shown, if he falls asleep in his chair? Or if he laugh and giggle? Or if he apologize? Or is inected with egotism? Or thinks of his dollar?� – Emerson
“Doubt concerning our culture and its values is the neurosis of this period.� – Carl Jung
“Keepa busy.� – Old Italian Proverb
“Nothing really matters.� – Joe Brainard
“Nothing in this drawer.� – Ron Padgett
“You have nothing to do before you die.� – Andre Breton
Finally, my contribution: a list of thematic chessboards that were in the window of the chess shop on Thompson Street, south of W.3rd, on September 15, 2006: Qin army: terra cotta; Aztec: onyx; Roman busts: brass; Kisii: stone; cows: plastic; Coca Cola: metal; Alexander vs. Porus, Greece + India: camel bone; philosophers: soap stone; dragons + unicorns: brass; Phoenician warriors: metal; Italian Staunton: metal; bongs, grass and hookahs: plastic; dinosaur tea party: resin; Caesar vs. Napoleon: resin; pirates: wood; the Mexican War: malachite; medieval Guibiles: metal; Alice in Wonderland: painted pewter; Fairies: crushed marble + resin; Queen of the Nile: gold-plated pewter; Michelangelo’s David (metal) on Einstein laser etched granite board; onyx ingles; gnomes; Sherlock Holmes; Lord of the Rings; New York City; Maria Stewart; Wizard of Oz; Trojan War; Camelot bar vs. bat mitzvah; endangered animals; chuppa chups; pewter Isle of Lewis; firefighters; George + dragon; Winnie the Pooh; Army vs. Navy; Neptune’s orgy; golf in Scotland; Egypt vs. Rome; Crusades; Good Vs. Evil; Betty Boop; Justice Vs. Evil; Art Deco; Mayans; Rock’n Roll; Football; alabaster pieces from Volterra.

Posted by Jane on 3:33 PM | Comments (0)