Jill Pearlman

I was star-struck the first time I saw The German Pavilion, the model house designed in 1929 by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich at the foot of Montjuic in Barcelona.  This low-slung, elegant landmark of clean lines and reflections remains in my mind for its conjuring spirit –carefully crafted artwork that produces a series of perceptions both stable and evanescent.  It hovers, a seeming experiment in timelessness, though its stripped down modernism certainly broke norms nearly100 years ago.  Its magic struck me last week, mesmerized again after thirty years by the gorgeous “dawn” sculpture by Georg Kolbe, reflections that bind inside and out, elegance, wordlessness.  But words written in the brochure gave it a whole new meaning.  

Quoting the brochure: The 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition “coincided with one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the continent: Europe between the wars. A period marked politically by the breakdown of liberal democracies, the spread of fascism…”  As if the tongue of a bell was swinging and banging against my insides, setting off reverberations – all relevant, this is now.  Breakdown of democracies, turmoil, fascism.   

It didn’t stay on that note – the clapper swung in another direction, to possibilities found in art: “Every period of crisis also brings renewal – and the art scene of the time perfectly encapsulated this spirit, which gave rise to the emergence of the avant-garde.”  Modernism pushed back against obfuscation, fussiness, lies with an idealism that “understood beauty as the manifestation of truth.”  Ninety-five years later, we have exhausted much of that same idealism.  But why not, even in our jaundiced era, in this do-or-die moment, see chaos as an opportunity to reassert all that matters, in language both new and essential?  

How versatile, pliable, handy the word “home.”
Slippery as soap, foamy and comforting in a body way. 
It was someone else’s room yesterday, but today, it has winked,
it has taken our toothbrushes into its interior.  Its name
rolls off our tongues after a day of being on the outside: 
“let’s go home.”   The way of its shutters, the doors,
the morning jasmine, corners where the sun enters
and where it doesn’t, the ways of home. Wherever beauty strikes,
that becomes a home, a place of alignment, shelter, a quiver of peace.

We are pliable, something of wanderers.  Those who are also
between places recognize us.  The Dutch-Swedish-Kenyan
owner of our “home,” now settled in France, peered and asked me, 
“But do you really feel American?”  I could have said the easy no.
It forced me to say I wander by choice, at least partly because
I am, at least partly, American. My complicated hybrid self
longs to constantly de-familiarize.  My heart seeks its
kin, values, values, a parasol pine, a chance meeting with a kind stranger.
The creative need to refind a flowing fountain, to re-source,
to see what trouble I can find on the lost road.