Signature Colors

A different color of ink identified each year: 1956 was green and 1957 a ribbon of red, replaced the following year by bright lavender, and now, in 1959, she had decided upon a dignified blue.  But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily--as though she were asking, "Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that?  Which is me?"

---Truman Capote, In Cold Blood (1966)

Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood was inspired by the murder of the Herbert Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas in 1959.  In this quote, Capote recreates the character of Nancy Clutter, the family's sixteen year old daughter.   While Capote's characterizations can become tedious at times, he offers a valid interpretation of what is an almost universal teenage activity---filling notebooks with variations of one's signature.

Magnificent Asparagus Fountain

The care with which the rain is
wrong and the green is wrong and
the white is wrong, the care with
which there is a chair and
plenty of breathing.  The care with
which there is incredible justice
and likeness, all this makes
a magnificent asparagus, and
also a fountain.

---Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (1914)

To be brief, Stein's off-beat allusion to material objects, weather, colors, foods, bodily functions, and domestic work in this ground-breaking collection of poetry conveys the excitement and pleasure of possession in its deepest and most intangible sense. Vitality! 

[Side note:  observe Stein's use of the word care.  See also this entry, HERE]

Embroidery

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color

---W.S. Merwin, "Separation," 1973

Merwin's use of sewing as a metaphor reveals that the experience of separation is not that of absence, but rather, a painful kind of presence. 

One Delicious Compound

We also, I say, ought to copy the bees, and sift whatever we have gathered from a varied course of reading, for such things are better preserved if they are kept separate; then, by applying the supervising care with which our nature has endowed us...we could so blend those several flavors into one delicious compound that, even though it betrays its origin, yet it nevertheless is clearly a different thing from that whence it came.

---Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84 "On Gathering Ideas"

Seneca discusses the art of commonplacing and the alchemy of composition.  His words reassure the shaky and insecure young writer that although he/she gathers pollen (quotes) from flowers (the writing of other authors) the "honey" he/she produces from this raw material will indeed be something new--and more importantly, something delicious. 

[Note Seneca's  reference to the word care in this quote.  The word care and the word curate have the same root. To care for something is to preserve or maintain--but it also suggests selection, arrangement, and exhibition. Thus copying quotes is not meant to be a derivative act but a generative one--much as a museum exhibition makes a new argument through the presentation of pre-existing objects, so too do authors produce new ideas by drawing upon those already in existence. ]

A Gallop Down Memory Lane....On a Seahorse

How are memories retrieved?  The part of the brain called the "hippocampus" is believed to be integral in this process.  This region of the cerebrum has a broad S-shaped sweep; its elegant curvature reminded classical anatomists of a seahorse, so it was given the Greek name for that creature.  One type of memory that the hippocampus mediates is "declarative memory," which we experience when we consciously reach back in our minds for previous experiences.  The hippocampus also appears to contribute to the linking of objects and events around us with past experiences. 

---Jerome Groopman, The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness (2004)

A Circular Staircase

Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

---Linda Pastan,  excerpted from the poem "The Five Stages of Grief" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

In this wry, and a certain points, satiric poem Linda Pastan exposes the less clinical side of the experience of grief.  I selected this poem because its final lines manage to convey the feeling of futility--the sisyphean experience of grief.  One vicariously senses not only circularity but falling down the staircase.  Here is the poem in full:

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after an amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two.  I passed you the toast--
you sat there.  I passed
you the paper--you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining.  What can I exchange
for you?  The silence
after storms?  My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string.  In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep.  I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing
thought my feet slip on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards:  Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting,
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of.  Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

Botched

When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet.
Dark red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut
shapes of fungi.

That was the only appearance made by that
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly.  A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information:  that we could
botch something, you and I.  All wrapped in purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.

---Sharon Olds,  "Miscarriage" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

I really love Olds' choice of words--especially "information" and "messenger" in this quote. But the most memorable part of this poem is the information offered at the sill :  " ...that we could botch something, you and I."

Joy

"IN A DREAM YOU SAW A WAY TO SURVIVE AND YOU WERE FULL OF JOY"
   
                          ---Jenny Holzer Untitled (In A Dream)


Note that joy and happiness are not exactly the same thing.  Look HERE and closer HERE, and  HERE and my favorite, HERE.  (scroll down)

Dream House Part V: Outer Space, Andrea Dezsö, and "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly"

"The imaginary lunar landscapes reference the Apollo 13 expedition, which never actually made a landing on the Moon.  'Houston we have a problem' was uttered during the mission and continues to be a magically compelling turn of phrase.  What captured my imagination is how not being able to go somewhere physically opens the possibility of epic mental Odysseys, and how we can stuff empty space full with rich imaginary worlds, then move in."

     ---Andrea Dezsö (b. 1968), "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly," Exhibition Pamphlet, Rice Gallery (2010)

In "Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly" now on exhibition at Rice Gallery in Houston, Romanian-born artist Andrea Dezsö creates an enchanting dream world inspired by space travel.  As Dezsö explains, as a child growing up in Communist Romania without a passport, travel was an impossibility. The space missions of the 1960s and 1970s offered her the vicarious pleasure of the odyssey, catalyzing her artistic vision of a whimsical other-world, untethered by the limitations of reality.  

Known for her "tunnel books,"  Dezsö translates this smaller scale media form into the larger space of Rice gallery.  Through small and odd-shaped windows placed at different heights, we gaze into multi-layered laser-cut tunnels up to six feet in length extending back into the gallery space.  Against the softly glowing cerulean and sea-green landscape, we see the silhouettes of those who populate this space---mythical figures that intermingle the features of humans, insects, and plant-life. Dancing on the edges of these tunnels, the joyous poses of Dezso's surreal characters welcome us and make these vistas seem less remote and less austere than most depictions of outer space. 

Along these lines, I am most taken with Dezsö's characterization of her work as a domestic endeavor.  Perhaps the allure of this space is not visitability but inhabitability--the desire to "move in" as she expresses it.  Dezsö, while new to this art form, thus grasps the inherent play between interiority and exteriority that large scale installation invites.  The mind's eye creates both voyage and destination, but the medium of art turns this imaginative world into a physical reality.  Much as Dezsö longed to travel, we desire to cross the glass window of the gallery to occupy this world. Yet although this is an impossibility, her exhibit also reminds us of the possibilities for creating the worlds that we wish to inhabit.  Dream houses are precisely that--the architecture of the imagination.

On exhibit at Rice Gallery April 8th through August 8th. 

Dream House Part IV: The Dugout

     "All around that door green vines were growing out of the grassy bank, and they were full of flowers.  Red and blue and purple and rosy-pink and white and striped flowers all had their throats wide open as if they were singing glory to the monring.  They were morning-glory flowers.
     Laura went under those singing flowers into the dugout.  It was one room, all white.  The earth walls had been smoothed and white-washed.  The earth floor was smooth and hard. 
     When Ma and Mary stood in the doorway the light went dim.  There was a small greased-paper window beside the door.  But the wall was so thick that the light from the window stayed near the window. 
     That front wall was built of sod.  Mr. Hanson had dug out his house, and then he had cut long strips of prairie sod and laid them on top of one another, to make the front wall.  It was a good, thick wall with not one crack in it.   No cold could get through that wall. 
....The ceiling was made of hay.  Willow boughs had been laid across and their branches woven together, but here and there the hay that had been spread on them showed through...
     They all went up the path and stood on the roof of that house.  No one could have guessed it was a roof.  Grass grew on it and waved in the wind just like all the grasses along the creek bank.
     'Goodness,' said Ma.  'Anybody could walk over this house and never know it's here.'
     But Laura spied something.  She bent over and parted the grasses with her hands, and then she cried. 'I've found the stovepipe hole! Look, Mary, Look!'
     Ma and Mary stopped to look, and Carried leaned out from Ma's arm and looked, and Jack came pushing to look.  They could look right down into the whitewashed room under the grass."

---Laura Ingalls Wilder, "The House in the Ground," in On the Banks of Plum Creek

Today's entry features a dark and hidden house built under morning glories.   Nearly all of the homes featured in Wilder's series are idealized in some way as evidence of the family's industry, innovation, thrift, creativity, love of beauty, and order. The books certainly espouse a very particular political stance--especially considering the date of their publication if not the date of their setting.  Yet there is a narrative of loss that underwrites every volume.  These losses, I suspect, are only visible to the adult reader.  

Dream House Part III: Cliff-Dwellings

"The moon was up, though the sun hadn't set, and it had that glittering silveriness the early stars have in high altitudes.  The heavenly bodies look so much more remote from the bottom of a deep canyon than they do from the level.  The climb of the walls helps out the eye, somehow.  I lay down on a solitary rock that was like an island in the bottom of the valley, and looked up.  The grey sage-brush and the blue-grey rock around me were already in shadow, but high above me the canyon walls were dyed flame-colour with the sunset, and the Cliff City lay in a gold haze against its dark cavern.  In a few minutes it, too, was grey, and only the rim rock at the top held the red light.  When that was gone, I could still see the copper glow in the pinons along the edge of the top ledges.  The arc of sky over the canyon was silvery blue, with its pale yellow moon, and presently stars shivered into it, like crystals dropped into perfectly clear water."

---Willa Cather, The Professor's House (1925)

In this scene from Cather's novel of modern life, The Professor's House (1925), the orphaned cowhand, Tom, describes the enchanting cliff-dwellings of the Mesa Verde.  Once inhabited by the Anasazi Indians, these dwellings have remained untouched for centuries, preserved as if in "amber" by the sun and the dry climate.   In Tom's account, he narrates his discovery of the dwellings and the amateurish archaeological project that he, his friend Roddy, and their housekeeper, Henry, pursue in the hope that the Smithsonian will take an interest in their findings.   When Tom returns to the Mesa following an unsuccessful trip to Washington, he discovers that Roddy has sold the artifacts to a German trader. After a bitter feud, Tom evicts Roddy and remains on the mesa for a solitary summer.  

This particular scene follows the loss of the men's friendship, their idealized family housekeeping-museum project, and the loss of the relics.  Tom's description of these homes from a position below  is one of the most vivid passages within the novel, and its detail and splendor suggests an oneiric home.  The dismantling of the idealized or utopian home is a modern conceit for Cather, and this story is set within a longer story about (in the simplest sense) the loss of cultural meaning in the 1920s.  Yet the intensity and purity of Tom's final experience on the mesa resonates with our very contemporary longing for wholeness and well-being.  As Tom discerns, the unadulterated happiness he experiences in these final months will only be temporary.  In a similar way, while we strive for happiness (almost as if it were a state that could be attained or sustained for any length of time) such moments are likely to be unpredictable and fleeting--something we grasp from a distance, in a flash of quickly changing color and light.