Possible way 14

Réfléchissons, Ramon Fernandez

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know

Eccentric billionaire

Trimalchio is forever young. As we read about him in delighted shame, we invest him with all the immortality of our desires. Down the ages his name will change, but he will not. Look at the Jumbotron, reader! Have you ever been silly? High above you on the screen, the billionaire Paul Allen is now throwing money away on his yachts and his Science Fiction Museum. Henceforth, forever, your own silliness will be both known to the universe and safely dead with you. Have you ever been unreasonable? Because the display on the Jumbotron now shows the billionaire Howard Ahmanson bankrolling the creationists of the Discovery Institute, nobody will have to know about that time when you too denied to yourself the truth of death. There will be more billionaires to come, too, because desire will never die. Watching the forecast on the Jumbotron, we suddenly understand how good that news is. In Petronius's original report, Trimalchio communed with his guests in meat and drink and then acted out his funeral. The guests escaped. They -- we -- had been returned to life.

We like that happy ending, and so it has become a genre. But some stories in the genre don't fit well into any idea of a canon. What are we to do, for instance, with the tale of a billionaire who furiously buys multimillion-dollar house after multimillion-dollar house in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the United States, then partially demolishes his purchases and abandons their remains? The billionaire is eighty years old. Does he have long-term plans for a future that, in his case, isn't going to arrive? And why has he used one of his now vacant lots as a dump for dozens of enormous garden statues, and why does he putter around with gardening tools among his ruins? What sort of Eden might this billionaire have in mind? He isn't saying. As of the page we've reached so far, his story is unsatisfactory.

http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2012/05/21/15568-land-barren-japanese-billionaire-is-raising-eyebrows-razing-houses/

http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2012/05/22/15834-land-barren-who-is-genshiro-kawamoto/

http://www.civilbeat.com/articles/2012/05/23/15868-land-barren-since-2005-dozens-of-violations-at-billionaires-properties/

The story isn't satisfactory and the billionaire isn't saying, but we all want somebody to say. Therefore, in partial satisfaction of that desire of ours, the canon has authorized release of a term into the lexicon of journalism: "eccentric billionaire." The term doesn't explain anything, but at least it has the outward generic form of a characterization. It signifies "apparent violation of convention; mysterious character with plot function to be revealed later in the story." Until the next Dickens comes along, that will probably have to do. In any case, it will equip us with some nomenclature to help us think the billionaire has been pinned down for us to observe. Of course, in what the media call real life and you and I call genre convention, the billionaire hasn't been pinned down. He refuses to talk to the media, leaves town to evade confrontation, seems to have found a way to silence anyone who has dealt with him, and in any case can't or won't speak English. But the phrase "eccentric billionaire" grants us the illusion of control over those epiphenomenal details. The billionaire has his billions, but we have our word "eccentric."

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

This poem, Stevens's last, bears an uncharacteristically hopeful title: "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself." It may imply that we can attain to knowing -- knowing the what the word "eccentric" might mean, knowing therefore what the billionaire thinks, knowing some answer to the question "Why?," knowing -- if we can just bring ourselves to unscrew the locks from the doors, unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs, and head outside.

But recent discussions of Gertrude Stein's life from 1933 to 1945 remind us once again that of course there is no outside. Is it even possible to think of Gertrude Stein in, say, 1943, as someone with a life separable from the words she wrote then? Words that have successfully evaded genre, words that have no more concern for other people's categories than a billionaire with a copy of Atlas Shrugged in his man purse has for other people's laws? Bewildered, a blogger covering the controversy for The New Yorker reports that some of those other people seem actually not to want to know Stein -- or, at any rate, seem be be making an effort not to want to know about Stein.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/06/why-wont-the-met-tell-the-whole-truth-about-gertrude-stein.html

The title of that post, "Why Won't the Met Tell the Whole Truth About Gertrude Stein?" comes to us from the courtroom, where witnesses are formally asked, "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?" The title of Charles Bernstein's recent study in archival scholarship, "Gertrude Stein's War Years: Setting the Record Straight," comes from the same venue. Both titles share the optimistic assumption that there is a god -- that is, a stable source of meaning -- and that furthermore this god is a helpful god, a cheerfully obliging setter-straight of records. After he got done laughing at the joke, Wallace Stevens might disagree, and so might the history that Gertrude Stein lived through and helped, with her outlaw words, to write.

The time term

The Kyodo/Reuters image in the MSNBC photoblog at http://photoblog.msnbc.msn.com is captioned, "People take shelter as a ceiling collapses in a bookstore during an earthquake in Sendai, northeastern Japan March 11, 2011." Above the words, dissected out of the passage of time by a flash of light, a snowcloud of debris has leaped down into the middle of the air like a dancer. Now, for this instant, it seems to have been there forever, like a dancer.

Image removed for copyright reasons.

See http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/03/earthquake-in-japan/100022/

Behind the cloud, a man and a woman mime their single instinct as a man and a woman. The woman's body has rotated itself in front of the man's, and her head, cradled by the man's hand, wants to bury itself in the man's shoulder. But the woman also needs to see what is approaching from behind, and so she half-turns her head, glancing out of herself in the instant that she turns away from us to the shelter she has made for herself, of herself.

Image (a detail of the one above) removed for copyright reasons.

It could be a frame from a ballet. Posed and given a context in media culture, a glance over the shoulder can begin belonging to a repertoire of indices that conventionally symbolize femininity.

Or, set into the linear sequence that is language's subdual of perception to time, a gesture enacted by the body might become a lyric poem. "My heart leaps up," cries the heart, pulsing to itself as it leaps word by freeze-framed word through the double beat of iambic movement into a reader's wordy imagination.

The man and the woman in Japan have been pictured in a bookstore but not provided with words. They have no rhythm to pace them into and then back out of their instant before the shutter. An accurate verbal description of that instant will have to omit all the instants before and after, and so it can never be more than a lyric. But language does have a technology for bringing the pulse of time into description. It is the way of epic: Pound's "poem including history."

Consider, for instance, the episode in book 18 of The Odyssey where Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, sits at the feet of the suitors before his own fireside. The suitors mock and deride, but one of them, Amphinomos, takes pity on the wretched old man. He gives him food and sincerely wishes him a change of fortune, and so Odysseus speaks some words which the young man's gesture over bread and wine has made to seem destined.

Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, 1961

Odysseus's foretelling becomes a tributary of Homer's own words as they rush toward the completion of their event in the future perfect tense. The grammar is a tide gathering itself into a fullness of absolute knowledge. Its tidal force is the power of words to create that wonderful illusion. Lift me out of the wordless world, drop me into a dictionary, and I can believe I'm one more wordy component of the dictionary's illusion of omniscience. It's an illusion made of time, and it works by rhythm, sequencing itself word by word into grammar and then syntax and then verse. But if you close the book's cover in my face and lock me and my camera out of the rhythm, in the still instant before the shutter clicks and retrospect and words begin, I'll be able to see only what the camera sees: what Stevens's Snow Man would understand (if he had words) as "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

Hatfirst

1

As I drink my tea, I look at the bottle from which it has come flowing toward my mouth. The bottle assures me that I am beautiful, and furthermore that my beauty has a history. Its legitimacy and reason for being originated in the mouth of the Duchess of Bedford, and the Duchess of Bedford must have been a beautiful woman who wore a hat.

Click to enlarge.


2

The catalog of the art dealer Phillips de Pury opens in my computer, adding icons in the center of the screen to the icons already on permanent display in the margins.

Some of the central icons display as thumbnails: little pictorial allusions to history's way of knowing. Oh, of course: those are the Arbus twins. But the online publisher Issuu.com has opened the catalog to a larger icon, one whose caption we may have to depend on for information. It hasn't been immer schon internalized in the form of ironic connoisseurship, as the Arbus image may have been. Outside the aura of certainty which gives the glow to an iconic name like Arbus, we drift toward the photograph's caption space, and there with some relief we spot a flock of speaking words. The words fly toward us to say that the photographer was named Lillian Bassman, and in 1949 she created an image and gave it a name of its own with some other names inside it: "Fantasy on the dance floor: Barbara Mullen, dress by Christian Dior, Paris."

The photograph forces us to read those words on its own terms. Beyond the word "model," I don't know who Barbara Mullen is, or was -- but the image is peremptory in its insistence that I do know, I must. Fashion photography exists to teach us the lovely deadly fiction that cloth and color and pose are eternally real, real for the only length of time that can be significant: the instant it takes to see and catch our breath and then forget again. For that long and only that long, there was Barbara Mullen. But forever there will be (in ascending order) shoulder fingers mouth nose hat.

3

Hat, encore:

Casper Emerson, Jr., 1918. From 

60 Great Patriotic Posters, ed. Mary Carolyn Waldrep
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2010), image 014.

"The body dies, the body's beauty lives," chants Wallace Stevens. The war ended, the war will never end. See how the hat shapes evanescent life into eternal geometry.

Descartes and Plato: humorists in the algorithm

In the sidebar to the right you'll find a link to an online art gallery where I've posted a few of my photographs for sale. One of the photographs is a shot of a mare and her foal,

 Click to enlarge.

but until today this image was covered by a click-through warning page marked, in capitals, "SAFE FILTER IS ON."

"Well," I thought when I first saw the warning, "the gallery is family-friendly." After all, the friendship filter has long been a part of American culture. We may think of the Jacksonian era as a time of exuberantly expanding frontiers, yet in Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) Frances Trollope describes a civic landscape whose emotional architecture is all House of Usher.

An English lady who had long kept a fashionable boarding-school in one of the Atlantic cities, told me that one of her earliest cares with every new comer, was the endeavour to substitute real delicacy for this affected precision of manner; among many anecdotes, she told me one of a young lady about fourteen, who on entering the receiving room, where she only expected to see a lady who had enquired for her, and finding a young man with her, put her hands before her eyes, and ran out of the room again, screaming, "A man! a man! a man!"  (136-37)

Still, the emotional technologies of reading and seeing do change. The modesty screen before my image of love among the calmly unashamed Houyhnhnms has been taken down. 

Not yet so, however, with the unlucky oeuvre of Leland Howard, an Idaho photographer who specializes in Rocky Mountain landscapes. As of July 13, 2010, his page in the online gallery looked like this. 

The man just out of sight in this blasted landscape could, I suppose, be Edgar Poe, and he might be muttering something like, "Accursed!" My guess about the blocks of gray among the colors, however, is that the gallery's censor isn't an Edgar, or even a human being, but a software routine. An algorithm can't (yet) react to allusion and connotation or the emotions they can stimulate, but somewhere there's a programmer who has realized that some families of curves are associated with sexual desire as stimulus to response. Flag the curves with a warning sign, then. In translation, the sign will read: "Hazardous emotion watch." If the curve then turns out to be a mere mountaintop cloud (as it does in Howard's images) -- well, no harm done. The modesty screen has been programmed to go transparent at a click, and whatever emotion the clearing reveals won't be detectable by the software. 

Still, the moment of clearing is memorable, isn't it? For that memory, then: 

Thank you, René Descartes, great prose stylist who showed us how to reduce curves, those wordless forms, to a wordless mathematical grammar. Transcending the human desire to visualize physically and express the visualization in words, your discovery turned out to be one of the great comedy routines. Malvolio and Laurel and Hardy and Captain Gulliver have an essential family resemblance: by perseveringly refusing to see what's there to be seen in the human world, they dehumanize themselves. For reasons that Henri Bergson explains, that sometimes comes out funny.

Thank you, Plato, for showing us that when we look at a body we see first curvature and then invisible love. 

And (why not?) thank you too, mare and foal standing before my camera two years ago, for helping me understand what the Platonist Wallace Stevens meant when he mused, "The body dies; the body's beauty lives."




Source: Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans. 1832; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949.

Pose

Click to enlarge.

During his great period, Edward Weston returned over and over to a view of the face from below, at an angle. That's the pose of some of Weston's greatest images of the human, such as "Tina Modotti with Tear" (http://jonathan-morse.blogspot.com/2009/07/windows-car-drugstore-light.html) and "Galván Shooting."

The power behind each of these images was great enough to stop and redirect its subject's progress through time. The instant when the shutter of Edward Weston's camera opened and then closed was as definitive a change as the signing of a surrender. In that fraction of a second, Tina Modotti and Manuel Hernández Galván became ceded imagery. From now on, so far as history is concerned, they will be part of that which was taken over by Edward Weston and remade. Aes perennius, their lives have been replaced by shadow and angle and undying light. From now on, things will be different for them.

USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945

But what of Weston's image of his friend Robinson Jeffers? If our reaction to one of  Weston's seizures of power eventuates in words, what will happen to us when we read Weston's conquest of the face of a poet?

In 1933, when Weston seized the image at the top of this page, Jeffers wasn't just a poet; he was universally believed to be a poet. His long lines in their vaguely classical prosody told stories of rocks and hawks and incest and violent death close to the elements along the California coast, and his admirers were fond of dropping the name of Aeschylus. That claim on history was to die during the Second World War, embarrassed to death by Jeffers's lofty pronouncements that it didn't matter in the slightest who won, because all of us are doomed! doomed, I say! But Weston's 1933 image is of a face at the moment when it seemed in contact with the same power that was helping Weston see.

In words, Jeffers's medium, Weston once tried to think about that power after an unpleasant encounter with the lionized sculptor Jo Davidson. Passing judgment afterwards, Weston awarded himself a laurel made of words: the title "portrait photographer." But when he thought about what those words had cost him, his grammar broke down. The subject "Twenty years of pleasing others" was so awful that Weston couldn't bear to see it through to conclusion in a predicate.

Davidson was jealous of my work, his aggressiveness was a defense. My portraits of Jeffers made his bust of Jeffers look weak. That's the whole story. He had to keep his exalted position on a shaky pedestal. Now I know my portraits, and I realize they seldom reach the importance that my other work has, not even when I make them for myself -- with intention. In the first place my professional routine worries me, so I throw my best creative effort into trees, rocks, peppers, to escape the other: I admit, too, that twenty years of pleasing others,-- probably I have made near to five thousand portraits, always trying to please the sitter, for a price, this must often tinge my conception when I work for myself,-- habit! This is my 'out.' But I do know when I rise above habit, often enough to place me far ahead of Davidson, often enough to have me considered by some very fine minds, the best portrait photographer in America which means the world so far as I know from reproductions.

-- The Daybooks of Edward Weston. II. California. Ed. Nancy Newhall (Millerton, NY: Aperture, 1973) 161 (May 19, 1930).

Still, all you have to do to understand Weston's missing words is place a pair of wordless images side by side: Weston's portrait and Nat Farbman's 1948 Life magazine photograph of Jeffers with the Davidson bust.

This photograph shows Robinson Jeffers diminished because postwar. But the change hasn't remade his face into a tragic mask; it has only lent it to a professor at his retirement party, posing between his tribute bust by a commercial artist and the manuscript of his speech of acceptance. Weston's photograph has no props except the poet's own hand, and it's different in another way too. Weston has used his repertoire of studio techniques -- the rapt upward gaze, the pin spotlight aimed at the eyes -- as an extension not of his subject's face but of his own hand. Weston's Jeffers isn't posing; he has been posed. "I am nothing but a photograph," says the image, without words but as clearly as as words could speak if they spoke the language of the sun -- "but to be nothing but a photograph is the quiet destination of my short noisy transit through language. As I'm about to show you, a poet's words are only a way of bringing you closer to the poet's image. To read a poet's words is only the first stage of reading the poet. Reading is only another way of seeing." 

That is: a view of a face seen by Edward Weston reduces to a grammar. It is the most minimal of grammars: a single word, an adjective in transition to a pronoun without a referent and out of time. It strives only to say: this.

Robinson Jeffers, a poet of the sole self, never learned how to write that referentless language. Wallace Stevens, a poet of poetry, did learn at the end of "The Man on the Dump," where the poet he has envisioned into existence realizes that he has been searching all along only for the definite article: "the the."

                That's the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed.

Vision came to the man on his way down through the dump's strata of meaning. A counterpart to that advent, Edward Weston's way of reading a face was a way of seeing upward. And perhaps a Weston way of reading in our own time, post-Weston, would involve us in looking at the shape of words from below, reading upward from language's roots in the soil of the human and toward the space in light where an image comes to be.

Large unconscious scenery

In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests . . .

-- Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, sec. 14

"It's almost as if they can talk," we say when we see patterned activity executed by the non-human. "It's almost as if they're thinking." Something that looks like art is coming into existence before our eyes, but neither this art nor its creator is anything but the play of some molecules under the explanatory dictation of physical chemistry.

I see blue and orange, overlapping like lacquer plates on a suit of samurai armor. I see the wasp's head, simplified like a Brancusi to its essential parts of a sensing apparatus (dark dull still eyes, bright moving antennae) and an active mouth. Knowing too that what I see is being underwritten by a tourist economy and its requirement for light and color, I see the leaf of a hibiscus, whose color and form are part of Hawaii's currency. Under a brilliant sun, a kind of Sotheby's is being reenacted: one kind of symbol system (call it art) sheared away from its originating biology and consumed by another (call it money).

But here there is no auctioneer to call out words that could give human significance to the exchange of reflex communication. The only words I can bring to the experience are my own. A wordy spectator, all I can supply is a stereotyped explanation of what I'm feeling. This, I think, must be dramatic irony. If only the wasp could speak to me and tell me how to feel. If only she could know.

But on college campuses, grassy spaces full of talkatoria, there are times when the play of instinct does take on words. At those instants, the beauty created by reflex action becomes the beauty of high comedy. Consider, for instance, the text known as the Kaye Report, at

http://www.suny.edu/Files/sunynewsFiles/Pdf/KayeReport.PDF.

Written by retired Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals Judith S. Kaye, dated February 11, 2010, and officially titled "Report to the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York," this text documents what happened after the administration of SUNY's Binghamton campus decided that its basketball team needed some really successful players. An early consequence of that decision played out on October 26, 2008, when one of the team's new stars, Malik Alvin, conducted a smash-and-grab raid on a Wal-Mart and collided with an elderly woman while running out the door with a stolen package of condoms ("Report," p. 42). Apprehended, Alvin was sentenced to an apology and some community service.

That much of the report is history. But its text makes the transition from history to art by presenting us these data in its creators' own words. On pp. 83-84, for instance, the report transcribes for us a series of text messages between Alvin and assistant coach Marc Hsu, with Alvin demanding money from Hsu to pay his community service fee and Hsu complying. Offered the opportunity to explain the words printed out on Judith Kaye's page, Coach Hsu simply denied that they said what they did say (85). It was as if he were creating a poem: playing with words as if they were a basketball in motion, nothing but the visible trace of a play of vanished invisible forces.

And then:

Click to enlarge.

Soberly, in accordance with the canons of academic respectability, the report brackets its editorial emendations: "Where [are you] at[?]" (83). Visually, too, the report is canonically academic. Its font is Times New Roman, Microsoft Word's default for all versions before 2007. Named for the paradigmatically respectable London newspaper that sponsored its coming into the world, Times Roman is a conservative font, with its decorative flourishes (such as its asymmetrical W) serving only to set off its sober ensemble like the tiny pattern on a funeral director's tie. Translated from the sans-serif and primary colors of a cellphone screen to the black and white employed by Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Malik Alvin's words transform their new context just as (T.S. Eliot teaches us this in "Tradition and the Individual Talent") a new poem which enters an anthology makes the whole old book new.

And, again, Coach Hsu simply denies that he and his collaborator Malik Alvin have written a poem. But about that wordy gesture, of course, a poem was already in existence to help us make our way through the expanding cloud of new beauty.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

So thank you, text of the Kaye Report, for your brackets and their graceful educational gesture of homage to the old, dead language which colleges once existed to teach: "I left the stuff from the internet the same so you can know what you[']r[e] changing."  Thank you, Times Roman, for fronting for your content the way American universities front for their athletic programs. But above all, thank you, dull expressionless eyes and tightly packed sphere of thoracic muscles, for focusing the drive of a hard aerodynamic shape toward a hibiscus-shaped reward (you could call it a leaf; you could call it a condom) but never once breaking the beauty of silence to call it anything.