Change of season: vital transition: Material transfusion: new juice.
How does the introvert welcome that? Mixed. Don’t make me give up heavy curtains pulled to nurture my wild interior! My own twigs being burned for my inner heat and observation.
Observe what comes up from winter’s meditation. Attention to what comes up: ground seethes: undigested. Knuckles and roots. Women’s bony fingers scraping for their rings; from the mud everything breathes.
What bones rise alongside tulip shoots; what shame to resolve; what liquid transitions, connective tissue, whatever rises, as gunk or random stuff — all holds clues.
We’ve entered the dirty socks part of March, the dingy linen stained grunge metal time when winter’s rough hide pokes up in earth’s skin. It’s the shoulder season – not white shoulder, not tanned shoulder – the prickly wan unexercised but already slapped into a strapless dress season.
You can see it in the raw mud and thawing wood planks, the expanding pot holes. The cheeks and legs of twiggy yards are in bad need of a shave. They have been caught off-guard – they are still thinking winter, and no one told them it is time to emerge!
In a way, it’s fabulous…there is physics of sorts in the works. A physicist on the radio explained that not every part of an organism gets news of change at the same time. There’s an information delay. The head of a slinky knows it is falling and begins to collapse after a hand has released it. But the lower rings defy gravity, hovering and remaining in suspension for a fraction of a second.
So the information delay about spring…my plants, in the final stretch of indoor captivity, seem to be giving up, dropping their leaves, and one after another, my fingernails are breaking. Yes, daylight lasts much longer. But they haven’t gotten the memo yet!
Once we become aware of something, we start to see it everywhere. The long-ignored thing, which existed but meant little to us, asserts itself with a vengeance, a passion of the slighted and overlooked.
Thus my relationship with chapbooks, small book-objects, often handmade, that slide in your pocket, call to you whimsically because they’re cheap and they can.
A panel at AWP literary conference sparked my appetite, reminding me of my days when I preferred indie records to corporate labels. Last week when I uttered the words aloud – “How can I get into this world?” – it seems the chapbooks heard me and said, let’s give the chick a ride. I sparkled to wonderful names such as Carrion Bloom, Eulalia, Small Orange, Sibling Rivalry, Ethelzine and my favorite name, Rinky Dinky.
Immediately afterwards, I fell into a Webinar about the role of Jewish artists in Dada and Surrealism. Jean Khalfa, professor at Cambridge, gave a wonderful lecture about outsider artists whose contributions and agitations were central to European modern movements. In the First World War era, Romanian artists Samuel Rosenstock (Tristan Tzara) and Marcel Janco mocked and disrupted traditional art in small editions, disposable ephemera, etc., With ferocious wit and steely eye, they made Dada an underground force that shocked those stuck in a single language – “a minority wakes up a majority language.” Isidore Goldstein (Isidore Isou), Moïse (Maurice) Lemaître, Benjamin Wechsler (Benjamin Fondane), and Salman Locker (Gherasim Luca) followed later, in the ‘40s, restlessly inventing vocabularies in the trenches of Surrealism, Surautomatism (Luca), existentialism (Fondane), Lettrism/Situationism (Isou). The work of these artist/thinkers has been rediscovered, visited with scholarly and public verve – I encourage anyone to go beyond this truncated listing to discover more.
Finally– Paul Celan. A little vellum popped up from Small Orange Press that recreates the world of Pierre Joris’ translation of “Todesfuge/Deathfugue,” Celan’s most famous poem. (The recommendation came from Aviya Kushner’s “Being and Timelessness” substack.) Yet another example of a cultural migrant who was fierce about the recomposition of language (in this case German), leaving dominant linguistic forces in the wake.
One quote floats from the lecture: “The totality of what is to be known allows anyone to create anything.” It’s scrawled in my notebook, separated from its “author,” a watchword of creative faith.
February gives us thinking waters trees of dessicated lace reeds hanging on memories of yellowness
The pause, the somnolence, the hard work between the desert and ecstasy
Then shoots of crocus grow fresh nerves in last night’s snow banks. And fat drops of melting snow slide from the pitch of a roof, washing the lines of the parking lot slot white.
A parking lot with rain: How jagged the concrete How silken its puddles Its poured-out watery silhouettes Magic concentric circles Fast like a dazzling tap dancer Whose moves outpace the eye Or a spinning vinyl in black light
How the mind anticipates what it sees How a camera reorganizes pixels differently How a Barbara Kruger slogan reveals digitally What the eye doesn’t see: An angry face in a vinyl LP Sometimes the camera will unveil Sometimes the surface is scrambled That hidden message in the “White Album” “Paul is dead” when dragged concentrically
Backward. Remember the walrus. Turn me on, dead man. Kruger on The collision of looking & being: The eye is the major player. A threat to that eye is a threat to what it means to live another day.
Frost from people’s mouths, and vapors like chilled aerosol rolling across a blurred surface, and wind, a muffled character from offstage unwinding its repression; now sandals won’t do.
An artist made me hear silence with his violin; at first, the irritation of a bow bothering a string – people coughing, dropping pens. But then ice shards talking? Longer shards
with more between; the breath of dreamers in the spheres, spectral celebration and those who ease noise into quiet presence.
When I said I believed in lightness, I wasn’t kidding. Over and over, I return – not to escapism or fantasy or ostrich necks– but to dissolving solidity, breaking up the world’s fixity.
My holidays – as if a wild angel came reeling from the wings and slammed into despair – as simple as reckless laughter, unplanned, unbidden or a piece of hot bread with butter and a shard of salt.
The way of the heart – to be renewed every day, no matter how many times the heart breaks. Knowing that everything can be transformed into something else (see Ovid); that winged
leaps – words in whorls of motion, fugitive emotion — lead to a poem, and person, that seeks freedom.
“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears,” Gertrude Stein famously said, in a tumult of the senses. She was echoing Picasso, and the motif echoes loudly – as a rose is a rose is a rose — across Paris. Curators and painters, it seemed, are tripping over each other to subvert the common pairing of eye & seeing. Not that appearances fool the eye, but that appearance is a collaborative process and to seize a fuller reality, the artist employs (his mind’s eye) instinct, feeling, whole self, total focus, third eye, mind’s eye. A juju, a mix of intoxication and inner penetration.
For instance, Jean Cocteau recounts Picasso talking about the wife of a half-blind painter describing a castle as he painted it. “…painting is a blind man’s job. He paints not what he sees, but how he feels about it, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”
Sophie Calle, in several rooms of her massive show in the Picasso Museum, questions the nature of seeing by showing us the photographs of “the unsighted”: the last thing people saw before they losing their sight (i.e., a streetcar), and videos of people born blind standing wide-eyed before at the sea for the first time.
Modigliani, in an exhibition at Musée de l’Orangerie, gives us portraits of familiars with filled-in eyes, or two eyes each sporting a different color. Eyes with the holes of masks. As masks, as people with expanded vision that see paradox, each eye seeing in reality a different, conflicting aspect.
And Rothko, after immersing us in color, color, color in a retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, pulls the veil: “I’m not interested in color. It’s light I’m after.” The forty-four candles of Hanukah have been lit and extinguished, and the times are dark. But light comes in many forms. Remembers the watchword: “It’s light I’m after.”
