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.  

Plum Blossoms and Moonlight

Taken from the back of a box of Metropolitan Museum of Art Correspondence Cards featuring a plum blossom design modeled on a woodblock print by Suzuki Harunobu:

" One Japanese Poet said, 'On a spring night when the moon shines through a blossoming plum tree growing by the eaves, the moonbeams themselves seem filled with perfume.' "

Iron Bones

"Iron Bones Giving Birth to Spring"

"Learning from Bamboo's Lofty Spirit Though it is Hollow;
     Following the example of Plum Blossoms Which Bloom on Iron Boughs"

"Before Peach and Pear Trees Come into Bloom, Winter
     Plum Blossoms Spring out of Iron-like Trunks"

"Tested by Wind and Frost, Plum Blossoms Smell Stronger;
     People Who Expect Nothing Have More Noble Quality"

---Wang Chengxi, titles from his paintings, collected in A Hundred Plum Blossom Paintings (1992)

Wang Chengxi, a contemporary painter of plum blossoms, continues a tradition in existence since the Tang Dynasty.   In explaining his interest in the plum blossom, Chengzi echoes those of the artists and poets who preceded him who appropriated the plum blossom to signify the coming of spring in both the literal as well as the more figurative sense--rejuvenation after a difficult time, such as illness.  Chengxi writes, "Braving snow and frost, plum trees blossom defiantly to spread their fragrance .  The noble character and morals of the people can be likened to plum blossoms which are burst forth in adverse circumstances and bring encouragement to the world."

The plum blossom is one of the "Three Friends of the Cold" (which includes pine and bamboo, mentioned above) as well as one of "The Four Gentlemen" , which includes orchid (spring)  bamboo (summer) and chrysanthemum (autumn). The plum blossom is an example of what we might call the spiritual underpinnings of the material world.   The strength of the plum tree's "iron bones" which bring forth blossoms in abundance even amidst cold and ice offers us a narrative of resurrection.

Tomorrow's entry will feature plum blossoms once more to celebrate the advent of spring. 

A Play of Light: The Still Life Paintings of Janet Fish

"When people look at realist paintings, they focus on the objects, which I don't think are the subject at all.  I think the object is one of the tools, like the paint and the brush.  The real subject is the light, movement, and color, and echoes of the objects in one's mind.  All those things are part of what I use to make the painting."

    --Janet Fish, qtd. in the exhibition pamphlet for "The Art of Janet Fish" (October 2, 2009-January 17, 2009, Naples Museum of Art).

Janet Fish is known for her vibrant and colorful paintings which play with light, shape, and texture. Like still-life, many of her works feature glassworks, foodstuffs, cut flowers, and domestic objects--all rendered in jewel-like colors that she suggests are inspired by her island upbringing.  Yet as the curators of this exhibit suggest, Fish is not a "realist" proper, but an artist whose work intersects abstract expressionism with realism to create expansive, bright and "juicy surfaces."   

  As is well-known, the sensory perception of fragrance is closely linked to memory. A familiar fragrance can prompt a mental journey into one's past.  Yet the sensory perception of subtle differences in light similarly draws the mind away from the mundanities of the present and into an alternative dimension.  On my first pass through this exhibition--which was sort of like a domestic coral reef---nothing much caught my eye.  But on my third pass, as I began to linger over certain paintings, I moved into a more meditative state---developing a keener awareness of the possibilities of the present and a heightened interest in the everyday.  The domestic scenery--while exotic--is not unfamiliar.  

 I was most drawn to one painting, "Cracked Eggs and Milk" (2005) featuring some particularly poignantly rendered cantaloupe-orange glass bowls and raw golden yolks set off in morning light.  The preparations of breakfast or brunch (I'm not attuned enough to the subtleties of light to discern the precise hour of the morning that Fish captures but in my mind's eye it is 8 am) appear in freeze-frame---we have no desire to see the ingredients to come together or to watch the meal being consumed.  There is an intense feeling of pleasure in the moment-- taking note of it, being in it. It is a very rare experience to linger over anything, to reflect on anything, to be rather than to do--to experience the luxury of time. Fish's art thwarts our desires to get to the end of things. She captures a familiar reality and yet makes it startlingly unfamiliar in its delicate allusion to what we fail to notice and what we take for granted.    

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.

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)

On the alchemy of composition

The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with pieces borrowed from others, he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

--Michel de Montaigne, Essais, "Of the education of children."