School of Athens, by Raphael. 1510
Have been away, in limbo, on leave, out of sight and out of mind, for ages now. As you can see, the gears of Spinozablue have ground to a halt, and whispers fill the corridors. There may still be time for a renaissance of sorts, but it’s looking more unlikely by the hour. Though we will make that attempt and give it the old college try tonight and perhaps again very soon.
The reason for the painting is simple. It’s similar to the reason for my absence here. It reminds me of the disconnect between what we see and what remains hidden. Greeks have a beautiful word for truth, “aletheia,” which can be literally translated as the state of not being hidden. What is no longer hidden is the truth.…
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The Headless Woman, 2008. Directed by Lucretia Martel.
“La Mujer Sin Cabeza” is a brilliant film, with subtle social commentary that never hits one over the head. Like the mystery in the film itself, it’s something the audience must pieces together. The director, Lucretia Martel, presents the evidence, but no editorials. Class and race are paramount, but they remain as unspoken, perhaps even ghostly components of the film. Amnesia, real and feigned, are a part of the mix as well.
Maria Onetto plays Verónica, a bourgeoisie dentist, living in comfort in Northwestern Argentina. Surrounded by a close-knit extended family, in a house where many Indigenista servants appear and disappear, her life takes a sudden turn when she runs over something on the highway. She hits her head and becomes disoriented, but goes on, not looking back…
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Monastery burial-ground under snow, by Casper David Friedrich. 1818.
(Destroyed WWII)
Millions of people drive during the holidays. To and from. Rarely just to. I drove through ice and torrents of rain south, then through a cloudy day north and into white mist and fog. The drive, something about the drive, and the time, and the strangeness of endlessly moving forward in relative terms, led to the poem below, and a work in progress:
The Trip
The vanishing point teases us
Tempts us with the power
Of horizons
So I tried
I really tried to outrun it
What exists beyond the V?
What exists?
How does it stay just beyond our reach
As we hurtle forward like a car?
Can we go beyond the center…
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Community Still
What can the Lords of Everything
about dull eccentricity complain?
A fine shill, which is to see kirtle
cock-eyed and expect its rounding up,
would cheer, would meet the sun.
And then at sacred hoops the banners
stream, and yet no historian
writes with finish the broken
horizon, and these Prodigals replay
their Herculean task unnoticed,
while grownups pass and joggle,
sniff and blow and jo, and shuffle, prattling feet.
Witness, at cost, the skipping girl:
She finds in a book honors
of wet cheeks and high ploys to relief
in bouncing from flue to pratfall; silvers
schooldays yet in stern lessons, polymath craze.
Or coal-boy, rougher than the dirty feathers
of his temperatures, dreams a leaf
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No Title
You can’t say it that way any more. / Bothered about beauty you have to/Come out into the open, into the clearing,/ And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you/ Is OK
– And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, John Ashbery
The greatest problem in the arts today is the title; this tag that tells us what something is about: Battle of…, Portrait of…., Bowl of… Of course this gives even the most humble subject a coat of arms, presto a seigniorial dwelling, white picket fence and garden, all the dignity it deserves and Sunday painters so admire. But is this good? This, I would argue, has infected poetics, this aboutness, this supernatural force like it can’t be escaped. It’s the tongue lolling like a lazy sunflower tropistic by default. But now I’m bored with this riff and…
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THE GIFT
My Lord, what a morning,
My Lord, what a morning,
O my Lord, what a morning
When the stars begin to fall.
–Entrance hymn,
(Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine,
Second Sunday after Epiphany,
January 15, 2006)
After seven years of inter–
stellar wanderings, the spacecraft
that journeyed halfway to Jupiter,
beyond the Earth-Moon Orbit,
came back today.
It bears precious freight—
ageless dust motes, the most
primitive particles in the universe,
gathered from the outer limits—
from the time when there was no time,
when there was universe inchoate—
undifferentiated matter—the becoming thing
that was always there.
It brings nameless particles that existed
eons before our solar system was formed,
before there was water,
before there was…
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modern moments (main-à-dieu, nova scotia)
sun & cloud (reproduction)
bright
band, slow mov–
ing, copy–
ing
the
sea
nest (goodyear)
rock–
weed, dulse &
sorrel, moss a–
round the
tire
night journey (disconnect)
shoot–
ing star,
far
cry, jet st–
reams in
the
bay
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