Mother Love

"At bedtime, instead of my charming boy, ... I found a lifeless corpse--laid out in the white robes of innocence and death.  Though I wept and pressed him, he could not look at me.  How could I endure it--much less compose myself--but by believing him gone to perfect rest and happiness.--there to wait for his father and mother."


        ---Diary of Louisa Park,  qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000).  Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and  quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.

I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form.  This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century  that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead.  What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss.   The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed.  The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child. 


In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby  who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33.  Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?"  comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work. 

Superstition: The Power of Basil

"The Creole sauntered across to the counter and nipped the herb which still lay there.

          'Mr. Frowenfeld, you know what some very excellent people do with this? 
          They rub it on the sill  of the door to make the money come into the house.'

Joseph stopped aghast with the drawer half drawn.

          'Not persons of intelligence and-----'

          'All kinds.  It is only some of the foolishness which they take from the slaves. Many of your best people consult the voudou horses.' "

This quote is taken from George Washington Cable's The Grandisssimes (1880) a novel set in New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.  In this scene, Agricola Fusilier instructs the newest apothecary, the northern born Joseph Frowenfeld, in the local practice of voudou.  The herb in question is basil or basilic and it has been requested of Frowenfeld by the major female character of the novel, Aurore Nancanou, who does not have enough money to make rent.  Frowenfeld, who is the naif for most of this novel, is surprised by the citizenry's superstitious beliefs. 

For Cable, superstition is but one outer manifestations of a society that is weak and rotten--economically, politically, and racially. Seemingly exotic--much like the landscape, flora and fauna---Creole superstitions are nevertheless part of a system of beliefs that is irrational and that relocates agency in spirits rather than in human effort or worthiness.  I've written about the power of herbs before.  And while this is not the most significant passage in Cable's novel, it is interesting to think about the strong hold that superstition has on the imagination--even in contemporary times.  The idea that charms can safeguard us, or that supernatural beings can work to our advantage is a persistent one.  If Cable's assessment is historically specific in some ways, it also underscores something about human fears about the essential insecurity of life and the way we look to the material world for reassurance of our good fortune.

Honeysuckle Blossoms

"A few days ago you and your mother came home with flowers...You had honeysuckle, and you showed me how to suck the nectar out of the blossoms.  You would bite the little tip off a flower and then hand it to me, and I pretended I didn't know how to go about it, and I would put the whole flower in my mouth, and pretend to chew it and swallow it, or I'd act as if it were a little whistle and try to blow through it, and you'd laugh and laugh and say, ""No! no! no!! And then I pretended I had a bee buzzing around in my mouth, and you said, "No, you don't, there wasn't any bee!"  and I grabbed you around the shoulders and blew into your ear and you jumped up as though you thought maybe there was a bee after all, and you laughed, and then you got serious and you said, "I want you to do this."  And then you put your hand on my cheek and touched the flower to my lips, so gently and carefully, and said, "Now sip."  You said, "You have to take your medicine."  So I did, and it tasted exactly like honeysuckle, just the way it did when I was your age and it seemed to grow on every fence post and porch railing in creation."

--Marilynne Robinson, Gilead  (2004)

I knew that if I searched long and hard enough, that I would locate a quote devoted to explaining how to extract the "honey" from honeysuckle.   I was surprised, however, to locate one that also documents the bittersweetness of advanced parenthood and the recognition of one's own mortality.  In this quote, a man in his seventies whose health is failing is reintroduced to the succulence of honeysuckle by his very young son.  The poignancy of this scene and the intense feeling of longing that it evokes is dependent on the juxtaposition of "medicine" and nectar, spring blossoms and the late of autumn of life.  But it is also clear that the nostalgic practice of honeysuckle sipping--which is both familiar to the speaker and yet also made new through the experience of rediscovering it with his son-- is a secular ritual.    In this simple pleasure, we discern a gesture towards historical continuity.

Adultery and Suicide

"His Wife had said: 'If you don't give her up, I'll throw myself from the roof.' He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof."

--Edith Wharton, "The Day of the Funeral" 

Leave it to Wharton to treat two taboo subjects with dry humor in the opening sentences of this short story which reflects on adultery and its aftermath.

Euthanasia

"La vraie morale se moque de la morale...
We perish because we follow other men's examples...
Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae--bugbears to frighten children...."


---Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (1907)

In Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree a young nurse, Justine, administers an overdose of morphine to her friend Bessy, who has been paralyzed in a riding accident. Justine discusses Bessy's case with her doctors, her clergyman, and her lawyer--all of whom confirm that "human life is sacred" and that she must be kept alive at all costs.  Stumbling into the library at Bessy's estate, Justine finds these quotes (among others) carefully pencilled into a flyleaf in a volume of Bacon that belongs to Bessy's husband, John.  These little snippets, taken from Pascal, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, provide her with the strength of conviction that she needs to euthanize her friend.   Yet, while Justine never doubts the rightness of her decision, she is made to pay the price for venturing outside the bounds of societal constraints and norms. 

 One of the book's most interesting twists is its entwinement of euthanasia with feminist politics---that a woman could make a rational (as opposed to emotional) decision to end her friend's life is thought to be the most disturbing aspect of the case.  The other characters are willing to let Justine off the hook if only she will confess to having made the decision while distraught over her friend's condition. But because she insists on defending herself by explaining her careful thinking, she is condemned. 


These quotes induce goose-bumps and provoke deep contemplation about how we arrive at our sense of what is right and what is wrong. The rules we live by are never so simple and so clear as we might wish for them to be.

Spirochetes

" 'What happens is that the spirochetes, if they aren't treated right away, change form, so that the treatment can never catch up with the disease.  Each time the doctor tries something new, the form is different.  The disease goes deeper and deeper into your system.  This man has it in his spinal cord, and it's gone into his brain, he has neurological symptoms.  Now he's going to doctors who have it themselves, to see how they're treating their own diseases.'

I stare down at my arm, mesmerized with horror. 

As she talks, against my will, I am picturing the spirochetes in my own body, spiraling deeper and deeper into my defenseless system, burrowing their way into my spinal fluid, sliding unstoppably into the crevices of my brain.  Each word she speaks makes this real, inevitable, incontrovertible.

All my feelings of triumph, of power and victory, are sliding downward, cascading toward ruin. She is destroying everything I have accomplished."

---Roxana Robinson,  "The Treatment" in A Perfect Stranger (2005)

In this very tight short story, Roxana Robinson captures the struggle of a middle-aged woman who is most likely afflicted with late-stage Lyme disease.  Robinson has tone-perfect dialogue and some very memorable descriptive passages, in particular one that focuses on the apparatus through which the protagonist adminsters her intravenous antibiotic, Rocephin.  What is most remarkable, however, is this story's accurate rendering of the mental enervation of chronic illness, and the divisive and humliating boundary between those who enjoy good health and those who struggle with disease.  In this passage, a patient who has managed to convince herself that she is recovering from her infection has her healing vision dismantled by a nurse (memorably described as "powerful and clumsy, like a shaggy little bull")  who reveals the devastating reality of her disease.   Robinson's account of the "other[ness]" of disease  is a crucial text for anyone who must treat patients with serious illnesses--Lyme disease or otherwise.

'A Gastronomic Rainbow': Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from The Bee Dance. Today's quote is taken from a Scribner's Monthly essay published in 1871.  The essay  rues the passing of the traditional Thanksgiving feasts of old even as its exclamatory prose seeks to preserve the excitement of the holiday.  I was very much torn over whether to entitle this entry "A Gastronomic Rainbow" or simply "Ineffable Pork and Beans."  Could pork and beans ever be so good as to defy description?  Apparently so. 

"Who that ever tasted can forget the aroma of those dusk-red depths where yet the fragrance of blazing hickory lingered? What chicken-pies emerged thence!  What brown bread, what unimaginable piglets in crisp armor of crackling, what ineffable pork and beans! [...]  How we longed to eat more pumpkin pie, and more; how, following the advice of our elders ,we stood up and 'jumped three jumps' and then couldn't.  How even our favorite little tarts, crowned with ruby jelly, passed us by unscathed, while we sat, replete and sorrowing!  [...]  Shall we ever again see those marvelous spheres, one for each person, whereon, in many-colored segments, cranberry pie, and apple, mince, Marlborough, peach, pumpkin, and custard, displayed themselves like a gastronomic rainbow?  Shall we ever rove with unsated fork through a genuine, old-fashioned Indian pudding, of the land which in those good days bubbled day and night over wood fires, spicy as Arabia, brown as chesnut, flavorous, delicate?

---"Home and Society,"  Scribner's Monthly: an illustrated magazine for the people, Volume 003, Issue 2 (December 1871), 240-242.

Today, let us celebrate the old rituals and traditions that we have maintained and welcome the new ones that we have infused into this most American of holidays. [Finally, I am thankful for the outstanding Making of America project at Cornell University (and also at Michigan) which enabled me to bring you this quote from the comfort of my couch, and in view of the televised Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.]

Paean to Pies

Today, I offer you yet another quote from A Modern Instance-- one that is straightforward yet still delightful in its humorously extended reference to savory pies. In an ode to a pastry that sounds suspiciously similiar to its twentieth century cousin, the Hot Pocket, the speaker posits pie as a rival to fish in its power to nourish the brain and feed the imagination.  Only a reference to pecan pie could improve this paean to pies. As the expression goes, The Pies Have It. 

     "He turned round, and cut out of a mighty mass of dough in a tin trough a portion, which he threw down on his table and attacked with a rolling pin.  'That means pie, Mr. Hubbard,' he explained, 'and pie means meat pie--or squash pie, at a pinch.  Today's pie-baking day.  But you needn't be troubled on that account.  So's tomorrow, and so was yesterday. Pie twenty-one times a week is the word and don't you forget it....they say old Agassiz recommended fish as the best food for the brain.  Well, I don't suppose but what it is.  But I don't know but what pie is more stimulating to the fancy.  I never saw anything like meat pie to make ye dream.'
     'Yes,' said Bartley, nodding gloomily, 'I've tried it.'
     Kinney laughed. 'Well, I guess folks of sedentary pursuits, like you and me, don't need it; but these fellows that stamp round in the snow all day, they want something to keep their imagination goin'.  And I guess pie does it.' "

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance (1882)

Don't Chase Boys

 Or so suggests William Dean Howells in this quote taken from his novel of 1882, A Modern Instance. In this scene, a mother and father contemplate their daughter's engagement to a slick journalist.  We might think of their advice as the nineteenth century rendition of the more familiar parental refrain.   Sound advice?  Or perhaps not?  Twenty-first century parenting might sound a bit different...

"He's smart enough, "said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.

"M-yes, most too smart," replied her husband, a little more quickly than before. "He's smart enough even if she wasn't, to see from the start that she was crazy to have him, and that isn't the best way to begin life for a married couple, if  I'm a judge."

"It would killed her if she hadn't got him.  I could see 't was wearin' on her every day, more and more.  She used to fairly jump, every knock she'd hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wasn't coming, she used to go out, in hopes't she sh'd meet him; I don't suppose she allowed to herself that she did it for that--Marcia's proud."

"M-yes," said the Squire, "she's proud.  And when a proud girl makes a fool of herself about a fellow, it's a matter of life and death with her.  She can't help herself.  She lets go everything."

---William Dean Howells, A Modern Instance  (1882)

Decomposition, Or, "Maggots Already"

This blog showcases composition and seeks to foster creative activity through the reading, collecting,  exhibiting, and curating of "pollen"  as food for thought and the inspiration for future productions.  It is therefore quite odd to be offering a quote that showcases decomposition and yet may still inspire the same sort of reflections.   

Today's quote is taken from Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (which was also made into a film released in the fall of 2007) which documents the life and untimely death of the young Christopher McCandless, who ventured into the Alaskan wilderness in the early summer of 1992 and died three months later.    Krakauer's book offers deeper insights than the film into Chris's own writings.  In this scene, Chris describes his futile efforts to preserve a moose that he has killed. The appearance of the maggots indicates his failure and he second-guesses his slaughtering of the moose. In these diary entries he appears as earnest yet youthfully idealistic.  The maggots appear as a naturalist convention in this work, underscoring the harshness and struggle that survival in the wilderness entails--and, perhaps, the inevitability of our own decomposition.    The selection begins with Krakauer's words and moves into the diary entries:

"Alaskan hunters know that the easiest way to preserve meat in the bush is to slice it into thin strips and then air-dry it on a makeshift rack.  But McCandless, in his naivete, relied on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances.  'Butchering extremely difficult,' he worte in the journal on June 10.  'Fly and mosquito hordes.  Remove intestines, liver, kidneys, one lung, steaks.  Get hindquarters and leg to stream.' 

June 11: 'Remove heart and other lung. Two front legs and head.  Get rest to stream.  Haul near cave.  Try to protect with smoker.'

June 12: 'Remove half rib-cage and steaks.  Can only work nights.  Keep smokers going.'

June 13: 'Get remainder of rib-cage, shoulder and neck to cave.  Start smoking.'

June 14:  'Maggots already! Smoking appears ineffective.  Don't know, looks like disaster.  I now wish I had never shot the moose.  One of the greatest tragedies of my life.'    "

---Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)

Bonbons in Abundance

Today's quote is rich.

     "A few days later, a box arrived for Mrs. Pontellier from New Orleans.  It was from her husband.  It was filled with friandises, with luscious and toothsome bits--the finest of fruits patés, a rare bottle or two, delicious syrups, and bonbons in abundance. 
     "Mrs. Pontellier was always very generous with the contents of such a box; she was quite used to receiving them when away from home,  The patés, and fruit were brought to the dining-room; the bonbons were passed around.  And the ladies, selecting with daity and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, all declared that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world."

---Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899)

Summer Epiphanies

As promised, I am reprising my focus on artist Joseph Cornell.  Today's quotes come once again from the superb volume of Cornell's letters and diary entries edited by Mary Ann Caws.   Whereas the last set of quotes focused on dreams about food, these will focus on the experience of summer and its relationship to the artist's inspiration.  This season, while represented most commonly by the image of the hammock, also suggests the hum of mental activity, of progress in art.  When Cornell writes that he has a "very warm feeling at night" it's clear that he is not referring to the temperature of his room or of the outdoors.  As Caws clarifies, the asterisk (*) denotes those days on which Cornell experienced an epiphany. Summer is a season of discovery and wonder.

*On the weather beaten gray picket
fence running along the old red
Barn vibrant blue morning glories
entwined.
     ---Summer 1945


August 1946 *
during hot days gathered examples of Golden rod grasses on bike--threshed them down to pulverized
essences for OWL boxes--the pungent odor filled the cellar with Indian summer~very warm feeling at night.


7/17/56 Tues. at home
drop of water too deep for sun so-so day in box work~glistening in sun around 3 PM sunny after rain etc. yesterday grasshopper on side of house
bumblebee in the snapdragons


Friday August 29, '58 Labor Day weekend
[...] scent of mint (atomizer) brings the Adirondacks back* with that poetry of memory and surprise


--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Potatoes = Buried Treasure

One good turn deserves another and so today's brief quote will once again showcase Tasha Tudor's Garden, this time in a self-explanatory quote that illustrates the role of the imagination in enlivening daily chores:


" 'I love to dig potatoes.  It's quite satisfying, you know, like searching for buried treasure.  Although it can be irksome when your spade slices a plump, promising potato in two.'  The naughty corgyn, always out for a lark, go running off with potatoes in their mouths and gnaw them ruthlessly to pieces before rushing back to steal more tuberous victims. But there are plenty of potatoes to spare..."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin with Photographs by Richard W. Brown

Heirlooms

Today's quote comes from Tovah Martin and Richard Brown's whimsical book Tasha Tudor's Garden.  Text and image come together in this biopic to afford the reader/visitor intimate access to Tasha's world and the inspirations for her art.   Her rustic home in southern Vermont was modeled after an 18th century farmhouse and created by her son Seth with hand-tools.  Tasha's  rootedness in the past is manifested in the roots of her garden and gardening practices as well.  It is difficult to determine whether it is most accurate to describe Tasha as "out of sync" with the time period in which she was born or simply highly skilled at hitching historical time to the present. Her life seems to bear few of the "seams" of a reenactment of the past (in which one is always conscious of the closeness of the contemporary world--often jarringly so.)    If time in the garden is cyclical, heirloom plants and heirloom practices confirm the linear nature of time by underscoring the importance of repetition in promoting remembrance. Yet the very concept of the heirloom also acknowledges the passage of time.  The heirloom garden allows us to experience the excitement of the appearance--and reappeance of the past.  Curiously, heirloom plants are relics of the past but also made brand new ...over and over again.


"If Tasha's garden is a fantasy, its vision is rooted in the past... She plants varieties that would have been perfectly comfortable in a cottage garden several generations ago. The oldest roses nearly extinct dianthus cultivars, heirloom narcissus dug from her mother's garden---these are the sorts of plant[s] that find their home with Tasha....we are bound together by a mutual respect for heirloom plants.  Tasha lures her friends up to ther garden with descriptions of seldom-seen primroses, peonies, lilies, and cinnamon pinks.  And we come to discover those plants and more combined with inspired artistry.  We wander among divine daffodils framed in a lacework of crab apples and along forget-me-not paths disappearing into flowery glades.  We become transfixed by this place lost in time.  Then we tarry by lamplight until late in the evening, listening spellbound to stories of eccentric uncles with incredible green thumbs and chimney campanulas stretching nearly seven feet tall.  We come to share the fantasy."

--Tasha Tudor's Garden, Text by Tovah Martin, Photographs by Richard W. Brown (1994)

Horoscope

The word "horoscope" derives from the French words for "hour" and "season" as well as the Greek word for "observer." To locate destiny in the alignment of celestial bodies is nonsensical and yet enticingly dramatic.


Those who favor this quote will know that it was also chosen by Lucy Maud Montgomery for her book Anne of Green Gables. 

"The good stars met in your horoscope,
     Made you of spirit and fire and dew--"

--Robert Browning (1812-1889), "Evelyn Hope"

What Not to Wear

     "On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold-thread, appeared the letter A.  It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore; and which was of a splendor in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony....It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.
     'She hath good skill at her needle, that's certain,' remarked one of her female spectators; 'but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it!' "

----Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Facing It Part IV: Faith / Face

It was difficult to think of a title for today's installment of this series, "Facing It."  And so, at some point in the future, the title may be exchanged for something less dramatic.  Below are three quotes from Annie Dillard's  "Holy the Firm," an essay/story about a writer's quest to locate meaning in the tragic burning and disfigurement of a seven year old girl.  The narrator  conveys the extreme suffering of the child as well as her own agonizing quest to find an answer to a philosophical question: "What is God's relationship to the  substance and experiences of this world?"  If the question seems rather pedestrian, the sort of question on which people typically reflect (or worse, pontificate upon) in the aftermath of tragedy--the narrator's  insights prove less so.  She offers neither the voice of complete reassurance nor the voice of abjection.


The first quote links very closely to my two earlier entries, here and here, in which the role of the face is clearly a public one:

"How can people think that artists seek a name?  A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone."


And here is the second:

"You might as well be a nun.  You might as well be God's chaste bride, chased by plunderers to the high caves of solitude, to the hearthless rooms empty of voices, and of warm limbs hooking your heart to the world. Look how he loves you!  Are you bandaged now, or loose in a sterilized room?  Wait till they hand you a mirror, if you can hold one, and know what it means.  That skinlessness, that black shroud of flesh in strips on your skull, is your veil.  There are two kinds of nun, out of the cloister or in.  You can serve or you can sing, and wreck your heart in prayer, working the world's hard work.  Forget whistling: you have no lips for that, or for kissing the face of a man or a child.  Learn Latin, and it please my Lord, learn the foolish downward look called Custody of the Eyes." 

And finally, in a last segment, the narrator imaginatively assumes the sacrificial role for the young girl:

"Julie Norwich; I know.  Surgeons will fix your face.  This will all be a dream, an anecdote, something to tell your husband one night: I was burned.  Or if you're scarred, you're scarred.  People love the good not much less than the beautiful, and the happy as well, or even just the living, for the world of it all, and heart's home. You'll dress your own children, sticking their arms through the sleeves.  Mornings you'll whistle, full of the pleasure of days, and afternoons this or that, and nights cry love.  So live.  I'll be the nun for you.  I am now." 

--Annie Dillard, "Holy the Firm" (1977)

Facing It Part III: Concealment

Today's quote is taken from Nella Larsen's novel Passing, published in 1929.  The book focuses on the relationship between two light-skinned, racially mixed childhood acquaintances, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry.  Reunited after a number of years, Irene, a New Yorker,  learns that Clare is passing for white in Chicago and has married a racist white man who does not know of her past or her identity. He jokes that Clare is getting "darker and darker" and refers to her by the pet name of "Nig."  Clare lives in fear of being discovered yet keeps taking considerable risks to reunite with the African-American community she left behind.  In this scene, Irene describes the "polite insolence" as well as the mystery conveyed through Clare's unusual features:

"[...] she'd always had that pale gold hair, which, unsheared still, was drawn loosely back from a broad brow, partly hidden by the small close hat.  Her lips, painted a brilliant geranium-red, were sweet and sensitive and a little obstinate.  A tempting mouth.  The face across the forehead and cheeks was a trifle too wide, but the ivory skin had a peculiar soft lustre.  And the eyes were magnificent! dark, sometimes absolutely black, always luminous, and set in long, black lashes.  Arresting eyes, slow and mesmeric, and with, for all their warmth, something withdrawn and secret about them.
     Ah! Surely! They were Negro eyes!  mysterious and concealing.  And set in that ivory face under that bright hair, there was about them something exotic."

--Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)

Facing It Part II: Putting on a New Face

Today's quote comes from a New York Times article on the first U.S. face transplant that took place in December 2008 at the Cleveland Clinic. The exact date of the 23 hour surgery, the identity of the recipient and the donor, and the cause of the woman's facial injuries are not identified in this article.  However, it does offer surgeon Maria Sieminonow's matter-of-fact insight on the value of a face,  generally speaking:

"'You need a face to face the world.'"

Sieminonow's commentary seems almost too direct and too reductive when compared to the nuanced and elegant treatment of facial trauma as expressed in Lucy Grealy's account, which I wrote about in my last entry.  Nevertheless, her commentary proves interesting in that it suggests a gap between the identity of an individual and his/her face. So significant are the injuries of face transplant patients that a passable face--even one that bears little resemblance to the original face of the patient--is a prerequisite for "facing" others.    You need a face. The cadaveric face--a permanent mask of sorts-- is a prop for negotiating the world.

--Lawrence K. Altman, "First U.S. Face Transplant Described," New York Times, December 17, 2008

Facing It Part I: Mirror Image

In the first quote from this multi-part series on faces, writer Lucy Grealy describes the "habits of self-consciousness" to which she succumbs in the years following her lengthy bout with Ewing's sarcoma of the jaw.  Diagnosed at the age of nine, Grealy endures 2 1/2 years of chemotherapy, the removal of a third of her jaw,  and dozens of reconstructive surgeries--none of which prove successful.  In this scene, Grealy describes her surprise at seeing her own reflection in a mirror following one of her reconstructive surgeries--an image that immediately dismantles her false sense of confidence by confronting her with a reality that does not coincide with her own perceptions.  What is perhaps most remarkable about this quote is the way in which Grealy uses the mirror image to suggest exposure as opposed to reflection--the gap between how she imagines herself  and how she is seen.  The mirror offers only a temporary answer to the question: "What do other people see when they look at me?":

"Spending as much time as I did looking in the mirror, I thought I knew what I looked like.  So it came as a shock one afternoon toward the end of that summer when I went shopping with my mother for a new shirt and saw my face in the harsh fluorescent light of the fitting room.  Pulling the new shirt on over my head, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a mirror that was itself being reflected in a mirror opposite, reversing my face as I usually saw it.  I stood there motionless, the shirt only halfway on, my skin extra pale from the lighting, and saw how asymmetrical my face was.  How had that happened?  Walking up to the mirror, reaching up to touch the right side, where the graft had been put in only a year before, I saw clearly that nost of it had disappeared, melted away into nothing.  I felt distraught at the sight and even more distraught that it had taken so long to notice.  My eyes had been secretly working against me, making up for the asymmetry as it gradually reappeared.  This reversed image of myself was the true image, the way other people saw me...That unexpected revelation in the store's fitting room mirror marked a turning point in my life.  I began having overwhelming attacks of shame at unpredictable intervals" (185).

--Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face (1994)

Grealy granted Charlie Rose an interview in which she discusses her book. 

Hair Part VI: Honor Killing

I have selected today's quote from a New York Times article from 2004 by Hadil Jawad and Lauren Sandler.   As Sandler explains, the tradition of honor killing "gives family members the right to kill a woman who has sexual intercourse (even if it's a case of rape) without her family's permission."  In her interview with Ms. Jawad, included in the article in translation, she attempts to capture how this practice affects the family dynamic in surprising ways. 


Having read accounts of women who have been disfigured and killed through the practice--many of these accounts quite graphic---this particular quote captured my attention for its directness as well as its understatement of what this practice can entail.  As Ms. Jawad recalls:

"When I was a young woman and still living with my family, I once went out to the market and let my hair down my back without tying it up.  My brother saw me, and when I came back home, he hit me repeatedly with a hard plastic hose.  I nearly died.

My brother was very difficult to live with and would not allow my five sisters or me go out of the house or wear trousers.  My father was also strict.  My mother was helpless; she could not open her mouth."

The reference to hair appears only in passing, and yet in conjunction with Ms. Jawad's reflections on her mother's muteness, it suggests how we assert ourselves through our bodies as well as through our words. Although the exposure of hair might suggest the importance of modesty, conjoined with muteness and helplessness it also suggests the importance of containment, and the threat of self-expression.


Ms. Jawad later fell in love with a married man with children, and the two eloped, eventually becoming refugees in Pakistan, and finally returning to Baghdad after Saddam Hussein's regime ended.  While Ms. Jawad's actions seem to suggest a sense of agency, her testimony reveals her curiously bifurcated feelings about her family upon her return to her homeland:  

"I was terrified that someone from my family might see me.  Yet at the same time, I was eager to see them. I heard that my sisters are married now, and that my youngest sister married an old man who was married and had a big family. When I walk down the street, I worry  that someone from my family will recognize me and kill me.  I try not to show it but I am terrified. I have no objection to death, but it seems unfair: my only crime is that I fell in love with someone and wanted to marry him."

--Hadil Jawad and Lauren Sandler,  "When Love Is a Crime," New York Times, October 7, 2004

Hair Part V: Big Hair/Bald Head, Or, An Allegory

Today's quote comes from Charles Chesnutt's short story "The Goophered Grapevine."  This story was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887, and was reprinted in Chesnutt's collection The Conjure Woman (1899).  In this tale, a plantation owner has the conjure woman, Aunt Peggy, put a "goopher" on his scuppernong vines to prevent them from being eaten by slaves from other plantations in the vicinity. The "goopher" is supposed to cause those who pilfer the grapes to die within twelve months.  Unfortunately, one of his own slaves, Henry, eats the scuppernongs.  While the overseer takes Henry to Aunt Peggy to remove the goopher, she is only able to partialy remove it.  Henry's state of heath begins to follow the life cycle of the grapes--he waxes in the summer and wanes in the winter.  His master, seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this new situation, begins to sell him during his waxing period and re-purchase him during his waning months.   Gradually, Henry begins to fade away in a story that is an allegory of slavery's misuse and destruction of both land and bodies.  This quote describes Henry's new life cycle in terms of the growth of his hair.  While initially "bald as a sweet potato" as the story goes, he begins to exhibit hair that resembles the grape vines--unmanageable "grapy hair,"  the "biggest hair on the plantation":

"So Henry 'n'int his head wid de sap out'n de big grapevime des ha'f way 'twix' de quarters en de big house, en de goopher nebber wuk agin him dat summer.  But de beatenes' thing you eber see happen ter Henry.  Up ter dat time he wuz ez ball ez a sweeten' 'tater, but des ez soon ez de young leaves begun ter come out on de grapevimes, de ha'r begun ter grow out on Henry's head, en by de middle er de summer he had de bigges' head er ha'r on de plantation.  Befo' dat, Henry had tol'able good ha'r 'roun' de aidges, but soon ez de young grapes begun ter come, Henry's ha'r begun to quirl all up in little balls, des like dis yer reg'lar grapy ha'r, en by de time de grapes got tipe his head look des like a bunch er grapes.  Combin' it didn' do no good; he wuk at it ha'f de night wid er Jim Crow, en think he git it straighten' out, but in de mawnin' de grapes 'ud be dere des de same.  So he gin it up, en tried ter keep de grapes down by havin' his ha'r cut sho't [...]

But de mo's cur'ouses' thing happen' in de fall, when de sap begin ter go down in de grapevimes.  Fus', when de grapes 'uz gethered, de knots begun ter straighten out'n Henry's ha'r; en w'en de leaves begin ter fall, Henry's ha'r 'mence ter drap out; en when de vimes 'uz bar', Henry's head wuz baller 'n it wuz in de spring, en he begin ter git ole an stiff in de j'ints ag'in, en paid no mo' 'tention ter de gals dyoin'er de whole winter.  En nex' spring, w'en he rub de sap on ag'in, he got young ag'in, en so soopl en libely dat none er de young niggers on de plantation couldn' jump, ner dance, ner hoe ez much cotton ez Henry.

--Charles Chesnutt, "The Goophered Grapevine," In The Conjure Woman, Ed.Richard H. Brodhead

Hair Part IV: High (or Low?) Resolution

In today's quote taken from Margaret Edson's play W;t,  Professor Vivian Bearing reflects on the briefing she receives from her oncologist regarding her upcoming treatment for Stage IV ovarian cancer:


Kelekian: The antineoplastic will          Vivian: Antineoplastic. Anti:
inevitably affect some                           against. Neo: new.
healthy cells, including                          Plastic: To mold. Shap-
those lining the gas-                              ing. Antineoplastic.
trointestinal tract from                           Against new shaping.
the lips to the anus, and
the hair follicles. We                             Hair follicles. My
will of course be reyling                        resolve.
on your resolve to with-
stand some of the more                        "Pernicious" That
pernicious side effects.                          doesn't seem---


Kelekian:  Miss Bearing?


Vivian: I beg your pardon?


Kelekian: Do you have any questions so far?


Vivian: Please go on. 

--Margaret Edson, Wit: A Play, (1999)

Hair Part III: Assimilation

Today's quote is taken from Sioux Indian Zitkala-Sa's "American Indian Stories."  This scene describes one of  her experiences as a student at a Quaker mission school in Wabash, Indiana--an institution that required assimiliation.  In this scene, Zitkala-Sa is hiding under a bed at the mission, and is forceably removed for a haircut:

     Women and girls entered the room.  I held my breath and watched them open closet doors and peep behind large trunks.  Some one threw up the curtains, and the room was filled with sudden light.  What caused them to stoop and look under the bed I do not know.  I remember being dragged out, though I resisted by kicking and scratching wildly.  In spite of myself, I was carried downstairs and tied fast in a chair. 
     I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids.  Then I lost my spirit.  Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities.  People had stared at me.  I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet.  And now my long hair was shingled like a coward's!  In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but no one came to comfort me.  Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.

---Zitkala-Sa ("Red Bird") (b. 1876), American Indian Stories, Legends, and Other Writings, Edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair  is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

     In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
     Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy.  Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied.  The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted.  On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified.  Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)

Hair Part I: Sweet Tensile Strength

Last week's entries on the boundary between life and death have prompted me to think about material memory, sentiment, and the body.  Along these lines, the entries for the next few days will focus on one particular bodily manifestation of sentiment, memory, selfhood, sexuality & health: hair.  The first entry is taken from a familiar fairy tale:

"One day, after three years had passed, it happened that a young prince who was hunting in the forest passed close to the tower and saw Rapunzel standing in her window singing and brushing out her hair.  She sang so sweetly that the prince fell in love with her at once.  But since there was no door to the tower and no stiarway or ladder, he despaired of reaching her.  Still, after that day, he went to the forest again and again and made his way to the tower and listened to her songs. One day, as he was standing concealed in the shadowy wood, he saw the wtich come down the path and call, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down thy hair."  And she, thinking it was the witch, let down her hair, not braided now, but flowing like a golden waterfall, and drew him up."

--"Rapunzel," in The Magic Carpet and Other Tales, Retold by Ellen Douglas with the Illustrations of Walter Anderson (1987)

Boundaries Part VI: Inconceivable

In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.

     Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
     of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
     at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
     against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
     of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
     She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
     They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)

Boundaries Part V: Dead Bodies

Today's quote comes from Michael Sappol's study of the rise of anatomy as a medical discipline in the nineteenth century and its relationship to racial, gendered, and class-based identity politics. This study moves fluidly from the dissection table to the funeral parlor, dime museum, and literary works and treatises to trace the complex way in which nineteenth century persons located identity within the body. Here Sappol considers the role of funerary practice in securing the meaning of selfhood:

"If death was a haven in a heartless world, then here the anatomist and the grave robber willfully transgressed. Against the invasion of the body snatchers, the living struggled mightily to protect the honor of their dead, to safeguard the material integrity of their helpless dead selves, to narrate their lives and therefore their deaths. For them selfhood did not terminate with death; rather, death stripped away the duplicitous masks and inessentials of being, leaving an existentially pure residue. Post-mortem photoportraiture, which from the earliest days of photography emerged as one of the most popular genres of the new medium, was intended not so much for spectatorship, but to freeze the self into an iconic last frame--many of the pictures were tucked away as keepsakes, never meant to be displayed, viewed only infrequently or not at all. Nineteenth-century Americans of all classes took this very seriously: how one died fixed symbolically how one lived"(39).
--Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Ninteenth Century America (2002)

Boundaries Part IV: Incarnation

Today's quotes come Myra Jehlen's essay "F.P." in which she recounts the death of a friend. The first quote captures her encounter with the permanence of death, something she discovers through the unmalleability of her friend's body:


"They said to choose clothes in which they would 'prepare' her. I thought, having had to die, she shouldn't have to undergo being prepared and said I would dress her, not knowing how difficult it is to dress a dead person. To begin with, I couldn't pull out the intravenous tube that still connected her to a morphine drip. The tube had been inserted into a catheter through which she had been undergoing a chemotherapy. When I tried to pull out the tube, blood seeped from the opening of the catheter. So instead I cut the tube and so doing saw that she was dead. I had wanted her to wear a favroite gray cashmere turtleneck, but I couldn't put it on her. She was too heavy, although she weighed less than eighty pounds, and too stiff, so I dressed her in a shift and pants. She looked terrible, yet fully and definitely herself. You're never so wholly incarnate as in death.
When I was dressing my friend, I expected her to help. The utter stillness of her arms and legs filled me with hopelessness."

In the second quote, Jehlen describes her own feeling of being "stuck" in the memory of a last excursion with her friend and "stuck" in the night before she died. But in an interesting twist, she juxtaposes another story of a woman who is "stuck" in the night of her child's birth. As Jehlen muses:

     "You get stuck, then, when you meet up with something that makes the limit of your perpetual motion just too obvious.

     Stuck, you turn back. My friend didn't appear to me, so I made her appear: one night, I dreamed she had come back to life, or rather that she hadn't died. At first, in my dream, she was as she was in the moments before she died. But, in the dream, as I bent over to see how she was, she grew better and better, until, in the dream, I called out to the doctor to do something, since something could be done."


---Myra Jehlen, "F.P." in Raritan, Spring 2002

Boundaries Part III The Harlem Book of the Dead Part II

This third installment of quotes focusing on the boundary between life and death (and the second installment of quotes from The Harlem Book of the Dead) features a portion of the interview between Camille Billops and James Van der Zee conducted in his 91st year of life. Van Der Zee not only photographed dead strangers, but also his own mother (who died at seventy-five) and daughter (who died at the age of sixteen). If Van der Zee's responses seem strange to modern ears for their pragmatic viewpoint towards life and death, they also offer a strange comfort in their refusal to make too much of either of these states of being--or perhaps too much of a distinction between either state of being.


The conversation begins with this comment from Van Der Zee:

"Why should a spirited mortal feel proud, when like a swift, fleet meteor or fast-flying cloud, man passes through life to his rest in the grave?" They've asked me, "How do I feel?" I told them that there's nothing to it; you do things the way they ought to be done. I don't see anything to be proud about. It's pretty difficult for a man to feel proud when knowing as he does the short space of time he's here and all paths, even those of our greatest glory, lead but to the grave. So it is very difficult to feel proud when Death says this. You're here today and gone sometimes today."

His description of his feelings about the death of his one-year old son, Emile seems to illustrate a surprising detachment, and yet this word does not capture the whole of his sentiment:

"I think he came when we was living in the Victoria Apartments on Lenox Avenue [in New York City] at that time. He only lived a year, and I didn't get a chance to know too much about him."

Not troubled by his role, he relates a mildly humorous dream that he had about a photographic subject. The humor emanates from his own response to the curious behavior of the subject. But in referencing a dream world Van Der Zee's commentary also draws attention to a space that seems to reside between life and death...the surrealist dream world:

"One time I dreamed I went to make a picture of a dead woman who reached in her chest and took out her heart and threw it over here, then she reached in there and took out something else and threw it over there. I just waited to see if she was going to take out something else...but I wasn't scared or nothing like that in the dream."

And finally, his thoughts on death in general.

Billops: HOW DO YOU SEE DEATH, MR. VAN DER ZEE?


Van Der Zee: So when one more clean shirt lasts me the rest of time. When I pass out on this long journey that I shall ever make and I cease to soothe with soft words and song a heart in which there is an ache, I trust that tears will dim few eyes and those who do weep will soon forget.


Billops (editorial note): (At this point, Mr. Van Der Zee lights up his cigar.)



--Camille Billops, Owen Dodson, & James Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part II The Harlem Book of the Dead Part I

Continuing with the theme of the boundary between life and death, today's group of quotes are taken from Owen Dodson's captions for The Harlem Book of the Dead, an experimental documentary published in 1978. The work as a whole is comprised of commercial funerary images from Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s taken by African-American photographer James Van Der Zee, an interview with Van Der Zee conducted by Camille Billops, and, as mentioned, poems and captions by Owen Dodson. While it is impossible to fully grasp the power of this text without displaying the images, a few brief quotes offer a sense of its strangely pragmatic and yet poignant viewpoint towards death--and life.


Owen Dodson's startling poetic captions illustrate the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia,--revitalizing the dead by allowing them to speak again as in this quote, which accompanies a photograph of a dead man posed by Van Der Zee with the prop of a newspaper:

"I prayed that on the day I died
Nobody else prominent would be dead
The obituary page was supposed to be all about me today.
Florence Mills, the greatest, died on my day
Look-a-here Lord,
I was a faithful servant
Over many a money year."

In others, such as ones featuring parents holding their dead infants, the living address the dead with the hope of reunion:

"You'll always be my baby now, Johnella. Dream sometimes of Papa.
When you marry an angel boy,
The very best,
I'll attend your wedding."

Sometimes the dead speak to each other, as in this caption which accompanies a double funeral (and one of the most resonant of the work):

"We grew so far away from each other
And got lonesome. Please was
Our only vocabulary.
Now and again: Will you be with me please.
A word with a vegetable sound:
Please..."

Tomorrow, excerpts from Camille Billops' interview with Van der Zee...

---Camille Billops, Owen Dodson & James Van Der Zee, with a foreword by Toni Morrison, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part I: Hibernation

In this multi-part series, I will feature quotations from works of different eras and genres that share an interest in the blurry boundary between life and death, yet come to radically different conclusions about death's familiarity, permanence, and meaning. The first quote, taken from Anthony Doerr's short story, "The Hunter's Wife" is fairly recent and addresses this subject in the most direct manner. It offers an easy segue into the landscape of these two realms through a discussion of what we might call a death-like state of living....hibernation.

"As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the trees. She felt the soft, silver tips of its fur brush her cheeks. Against her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard blood slug through veins. Want to know what he dreams? she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his coat. Summer, her voice echoed. Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles."

--Anthony Doerr, "The Hunter's Wife" in The Shell Collector (2003)

Small in Stature

Insults for tall people will follow in another quote:


Hermia: "Little again? Nothing but 'low' and 'little'? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her.


Lysander: Get you gone, you dwarf! You minimus of hindering knotgrass made! You bead, you acorn!

---William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Eidetic

"Listen, I will speak of the best of dreams, of what I dreamed at midnight when men and their voices were at rest."

--The Dream of the Rood, late 10th century

Wondrous Layers

Lawrence Wechsler begins to uncover the many layers of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Object lessons prove more complicated than we might think:

"[David] was quiet a few moments, and once again the ironylessness seemed momentarily to crack. "You know, certain aspects of this museum you can peel away very easily, but their reality behind, once you peel away those relatively easy layers, is more amazing still than anything those initial layers purport to be. The first layers are just a filter..."
He was quiet another few moments, and just as surely I could sense that the crack was closing up once again, the facade of ironylessness reasserting itself inviolate.
I mentioned the stink ant. "See," he said, "that's an example of the thing about layers. Because at one level, that display works as information, as just this incredibly interesting case study in symbiosis, one of those adaptations so curious and ingenious and wonderful that they almost lead you to question the principle of natural selection itself--could random mutation through geologic time be enough to account for that and so many similar splendors? Nature is more incredible than anything one can imagine.
"But at another level," David continued, "we were drawn to that particular instance because it seemed so metaphorical. That's another one of our mottos here at the museum: 'Ut Translatio Natura.' Nature as Metaphor. I mean, there've been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant--impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense. That ant is me. I couldn't have summed up my own life better if I'd made him up all by myself."
"But, David," I wanted to say (and didn't) "you did make him up all by yourself!"

--Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (1996)

Form

Edward Said reminds us that form conveys content and in so doing prompts reflection on modern day reading habits. A culture of skimming--indeed, a culture which tends to gut sources simply for simple "facts"--overlooks the importance of the media form itself in conveying the message.

"The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at [...] In Kanafani's Men in the Sun much of the action takes place on the dusty streets of an Iraqi town where three Palestinian men must petition, plead, and bargain with "specialists" to smuggle them across the border into Kuwait. Impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinians need to carve a path for themselves in existence, which for them is by no means a given or stable reality. Like the history of the lands they left, their lives seem interrupted just before they could come to maturity and satisfaction; thus each man leaves behind family and responsibilities, to whose exigencies he must answer--unsuccessfully--here in the present. Kanafani's very sentences express instability and fluctuation--the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another--in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished framgent of the past. Thus, the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other.
     Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations."

---Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)

Cornell Part I: Sweet Dreams

In Mary Ann Caws' superbly edited volume, the boundaries between Joseph Cornell's dream world and the space of the street begin to blur....Note especially Cornell's passive voice construction in his entry on March 1, 1947 which suggests his receptivity to his environment. This is the first part of a multi-part series which will focus on Cornell and his world....to be continued at a later date.


Feb 8, 1947


dreamed of vaults with all kinds of whipped cream pastries. Rich
day....layer cake~cherry Danish~calm feeling


Mar 1, 1947


~before going into library a pink icinged vanilla cream-filled
rolled cake had been observed~later when stopping by to purchase
some things its disappearance from its plate glass pedestal in
the window brought a real kind of regret of a delicacy that went
beyond the mere regret~lunch in a diner, banana creme pie, doughnut,
and drink


Feb 6, 1950


lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving
for New York

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Material Memory

In this provocative article, Teresa Barnett defines a type of relic collecting that cannot be captured solely by the Victorian sense of material memory. She uses as her example the schoolteacher and collector Christian Sanderson whose home is now a museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania:


     [Christian] Sanderson's commemorations were more interesting when they dealt with time itself, when they found a formal structure, that is, which somehow encoded a piece of the lost time they were attempting to preserve. Looked at in this way, his relics, solid objects though they are, can be seen as bits of congealed time. And they are at their most poignant--and intriguing--when, in their reified form, they manage to reenact the vanished time of their making.
     To commemorate Woodrow Wilson's death, for instance, Sanderson saved the pages of a counting exercise his schoolchildren were working on as the school bell tolled for the funeral. That exercise may summon memory simply because it was literally "on the spot" at the significant moment, but in a twist that can be seen as a form of wit, it also summons memory through its simple mimetic form: "one, two, three, four, five," like the tolling of the bell itself, as if the children transcribed the knell of mourning onto the coarse paper of their exercise books. Looking at the counting exercise some seventy years later, then, is like summoning up a fragment of 1920s time.

--Teresa Barnett, "Tradition and the Individual Memory: The Case of Christian C. Sanderson" in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, Edited by Leah Dilworth (2003)

Gone

In Maile Meloy's short story, bodies and hopes fall away. Missing limbs--dismemberment--signify not only crippling loss but impotence. More quotes to come that feature missing limbs, amputation and bodily damage.


       Cort set his water glass down by the sink. "The baby's feet are falling off," he said. "One of them's already gone."
     "The tendon isn't growing back and there's nothing there to hold the feet on," he said. "Perfectly good horse except she's not going to have any feet." His voice cracked on the word "feet." He turned and rummaged through his kitchen drawer, beneath unpaid bills and Kite's registration papers, until he found two small keys on a ring that jangled in his hand. I watched him go into the laundry room, unlock the file cabinet there and bring out a pistol with a revolving chamber. The gun dangled awkwardly in his hand [...]
He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn't be; I'd never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort's hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.

---Maile Meloy, "Kite Whistler Aquamarine" in Half in Love (2002)

Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Managing

Joan Didion offers some insight into the elite class and its illusion of control:

One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice. The management skills of these people were in fact prodigious. The power of their telephone numbers was in fact unmatched. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her English-language newspapers and get her onto an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris. If Quintana was suddenly stranded in the Nice airport I could arrange with someone at British Airways to get her onto a BA flight to meet her cousin in London. Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events.

---Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

In this quote, taken from his autobiographical work, A Small Boy and Others, James helps to explain the difference between two words that we often assume to be synonymous. James identifies his own state of suffering to be one of envy...the slightly less vile version of these two green-eyed evils.


...if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one's own companions able to do--as against one's own falling short---envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other--that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question....It wasn't that I wished to change with every one, with any one at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

---Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913)

Meant to Be

It was not, Britomart, thy wandring eye
Glauncing unwares in charmed looking glass,
But the straight course of heavenly destiny,
Led with eternall providence, that has
Guided thy glaunce, to bring his will to pas:
Ne is thy fate, ne is thy fortune ill,
To love the prowest knight, that ever was
Therefore submit thy wayes unto his will,
And do by all dew means thy destiny fulfill.

---Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen (1590)

Longing

Take note of Edith Wharton's use of punctuation marks and italics in this quote which captures the sharpness of intense longing and reunion:


"Do you know-- I hardly remembered you?"


"Hardly remembered me?"


"I mean: how shall I explain? I--it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

--Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

Grief

The Honeybee is fascinated by stories that make reference to sign language. Perhaps this is because sign language is at once very expressive and yet very limited in its pared-down status as an "informational language" that eschews details and  in some sense, defies nuance. But sign language as performance conveys a deeper message than a simple translation will allow. Perhaps we might consider it as a form of dance. Amy Hempel's story makes especially poignant use of sign language in this story, in which the simplicity of this performative language conveys the experience of grief in an understated way:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

---Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, 2007.

Mad Talent

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's study of Enron invites speculation on how competition manifests itself in the workplace. "Guys with spikes" almost seems to be a double entendre:

[Skilling] used to say that he liked to hire "guys with spikes." By this, he meaant that if an executive had a singular narrow talent--a spike--Skilling was willing to bring him into Enron and lavish him with money, no matter what his other shortcomings. Egomaniacs, social misfits, backstabbers, devotees of strip clubs: Skilling didn't really care about their foibles so long as they had a skill he needed. Nor did it much matter to him whether they were team players. "Jeff could care less whether people got along with each other," says one of his early hires. "In many cases, he felt it was better if they didn't get along, since it created a level of tension that he believed was good for helping people come up with new ideas." A former trading executive adds: "Jeff always believed pitting three people against each other would be the quickest way to assure the best ideas bubbled to the top. He wanted them to fight."

---Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, 2003.

Glorious Amplitude

Lois Palken Rudnick's edited volume offers this rich nugget from Mabel Dodge Luhan....a celebration of one very large body that defies conventional expectations:

[In the summer of 1912] Gertrude and Alice came to stay at the villa. The year before, Gertrude had lived in Fiesole--and she had trudged down one hill and across town and up another to see us. She used to wear a sort of kimono made of brown corduroy in the hot Tuscan summertime, and arrive just sweating, her face parboiled. And when she sat down, fanning herself with her broad-brimmed hat with its wilted, dark brown ribbons, she exhaled a vivid steam around her. When she got up she frankly used to pull her clothes off from where they stuck to her great legs. Yet with all this she was not at all repulsive. On the contrary, she was positively, richly attractive in her grand ampleur. She always seemed to like her own fat anyway and that usually helps other people to accept it. She had none of the funny embarrassment Anglo-Saxons have about flesh.

---Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences, in Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edited by Lois Palken Rudnick, 1999.

Degenerate Tourists

John Kennedy Toole's novel refers to hot dogs as "gimmicks." Oddly enough this portion of the pollen suggests the broader category of food and its strange manifestations in literature and elsewhere:

     "I'm gonna put you down in the French Quarter."

     "What?" Ignatius thundered. "Do you think that I am going to perambulate about in that sinkhole of vice? No, I am afraid that the Quarter is out of the question. My psyche would crumble in the atmosphere. Besides, the streets are narrow and dangerous there. I could easily be struck down in traffic or be wedged against a building."

     "Take it or leave it, you fat bastard. That's the last chance you get." Mr Clyde's scar was beginning to whiten again.

     "It is? Well, please don't have another seizure. You may tumble into that vat of franks and scald yourself. If you insist, I imagine that I shall have to trundle my franks down into Sodom and Gomorrah."

     "Okay. Then it's settled. You come in tomorrow morning, we'll fix you up with some gimmicks."

     "I can't promise you that many hot dogs will be sold in the Quarter. I will probably be kept busy every moment protecting my honor against those fiends who live down there."

     "You get mostly the tourist trade in the Quarter."

     "That's even worse. Only degenerates go touring. Personally, I have been out of the city only once. By the way, have I ever told you about that particular pilgrimage to Baton Rouge? Outside the city limits there are many horrors."

---John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

Night Drama

Here, Van Gogh describes the theatrical qualities of the cafe.  Van Gogh's Night Cafe is seductive, eerie, irresistible:

"In my picture of Night Cafe I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."



"Pale sulfur and greenish citron-yellow color"....a "night picture without any black in it"..."beautiful blue and violet and green"..."it amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot"..."A cafe, with the terrace lit up by a big gas lamp in the blue night, and a corner of a starry blue sky."

---Vincent Van Gogh, Letters to Theo, September 1888

Numbness

Jhumpa Lahiri captures at once the displacement of the immigrant and the enervation and ill-fittedness of modern motherhood:

His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen's concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. "It's delicious," she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn't like the tastes; she'd told him so once in the car. He also knew she didn't eat lunch at work, because the first thing she did when they were back at the beach house was pour herself a glass of wine and eat bread and cheese, sometimes so much of it that she wasn't hungry for the pizza they normally ordered for dinner. She sat at the table as he ate, drinking more wine and asking how his day was, but eventually she went to the deck to smoke a cigarette, leaving Eliot to wrap up the leftovers.

---Jhumpa Lahiri, "Mrs. Sen's," Interpreter of Maladies (1999)

Body Parts

This new exhibit at Houston's Menil Collection assembles a wide range of representations of fragmented bodies, including reliquaries, surrealist paintings and sculptures, and tribal arts that meditate on this theme.  Upon entering the exhibit, the visitor encounters a set of mirrors installed at an angle that produces a fragmented reflection.  The visitor is thus made a part of the displays in a manner that underscores the centurality of identity and selfhood to any discussion of bodily fragmentation:

Exaggerated scale is also deployed in a fifteenth-century French reliquary that contains bone fragments. Depicting an erect and over-sized index finger, it speaks to the continued vitality of the body, even after death, from which the bones issued. Similar themes can be addressed through a reduction of scale...In one photogram, Light Borne in Darkness, ca. 1951, the artists' hands appear ethereal and weightless. This, combined with the hands' diminutive scale, would seem to allude to those immaterial aspects of the subject--intentionality and consciousness--that cannot be captured by its physical boundaries.

--Mary Lambrakos, Curatorial Assistant, Menil Collection. From the exhibition pamphlet for "Body in Fragments" on display at the Menil from August 21, 2009--February 28, 2010.

Gifts

Julia Glass only hints at the significance of bodily gifts in this quote from her National Book Award winning novel Three Junes.  The novel focuses on several different love relationships, including the one featured below between the intense NYC bookstore owner and art historian, Fenno, and his (temporary) partner, free-wheeling Tony: 

Among those charms was Tony's talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams's Journey to Love (its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. ("Here. Picked this up for you.")

---Julia Glass, Three Junes

Absent Parents

Micky Thompson continues to show himself as charming child, with cheerful disposition, good manners, and excellent health. Enquiry reveals that he is an orphan, which does not surprise me in the least. Have often noticed that absence of parental solicitude usually very beneficial to offspring.

--E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady

Material Things

In this superb collection edited by Gary Schmidgall (sort of a commonplace book of Whitman) we begin to understand the deeper impact of everyday material things on the act of composition:

Whitman explains his preference for Mammoth Falcon quill pens: "I find I get to like the vast pens: they give me something to take hold of: they encourage me to write spacious things. There's a spiritual side: more than that: a spiritual outcome." A few days later: "it makes a great difference what sort of pen...I am sensitive--I especially hate the little bits of pens--the dwarf ladylike pens: I don't seem to be able to do anything fullsized with them: they interfere with my ideas--break my spirit."

---Taken from Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892, Edited by Gary Schmidgall.