XX, page 11
Only art may live beyond compromise.
But merely the intention to create is not enough.
Sometimes bronze is too luxurious, marble too intense,
pebbles shaped by the sea too masterful to equal.
The world provides a treasury from which to choose—
paper or canvas, gouache or charcoal or ink.
Even in my life there were days when the work would not come,
when the child had the measles and the wife was a shrew,
when rain on slate made we wonder how I ever felt affection for Paris.
The Mediterranean rejuvenated me,
junk rejuvenated me.
Bored, I searched the scrap heap and potter’s field
for broken urns and jug handles, string and wire,
wicker baskets I might put to use in some assemblage.
Driving home through Aix after the bullfights I stopped
always at the same candy store to buy their almond-paste calissons,
not for the sugar but the sturdy, diamond-shaped box,
which, filled with plaster, creates an ideal base for a sculpture.
Yes, to see is to possess, and you must invest heart and soul
in the work, but not all hearts and souls are equal.
How much must be poured until a vessel runs over depends
on the size of the vessel, how much must be drunk
depends on the strength of the liquor.
For Braque, a bottle or two of good wine.
For Matisse, a glass of Armagnac.
For Picasso—a spoonful, a thimble, a single drop of blood.
3.
This afternoon, waking from siesta, I watched a column
of light slip between the wavering curtains,
certain as a bar of gold, solid as the cast-iron truss
for some incalculable architecture of the air.
Closing my eyes, the darkness was faceted and cloven
by that brilliant negative, that linear declension
imprinted upon the cornea in an infinite planar regression.
It was a vision of Cubism, I recognized at once,
an argument for its strategy of representation,
its assault upon the viewer, its fragmentation
of continuity and surface into theoretical instances.
I admire it still, but its self-consciousness exhausts me.
I feel as if the canvasses are inspecting my studio
with their insectlike eyes, studying and judging me.
Cubism was like the desert in the American cowboy movies,
or the olive-starred uplands around Horta de Ebro,
a wilderness to be crossed at any cost—
gold dust, drinking water, the lives of the animals—
everything sacrificed for a journey without destination.
Sometimes, waking like that in the heat of afternoon,
things come back to me and I feel not young
but ageless, primordial, like fresh clay in the hands.
Of course it is an illusion. The body withers, the body fades.
Only art carries on, like a riderless horse,
wandering the bone-colored desolation of the canvas.
4.
Among the many forms of human desire, the only one
I cannot claim as an intimate is the wish to surrender
to the prerogatives of a fevered abstraction,
renunciation to the posturing of saviors and overlords,
capitulation of the self to Jesus or Franco or Stalin.
If birds and the sea are not enough, if all figures erode
to sand and representation proves insufficient,
what likelihood that conceptualizations will sustain me?
Whatever they were thinking in the painted caves
it was not to submit to a regime of monotony,
not to weigh themselves down but to lighten the load
of their burdens. Even then they knew that art
was called up from a deep source to enrich human life,
not hermetic but invigorating, not ideological but erotic
as pigment palmed across bare rock and naked skin.
If the Mediterranean piles its silver treasure in my arms,
if the cooing of doves prove balm to my ears,
if the sun, if the moon, if the cock, if the she-goat—
if the world is the only idiom I have mastered
why bid me abandon this body for a paradise of ideas?
5.
I am an old man, though I hate it,
and wish now to immerse myself in raw color
that its childlike state of grace might envelop me.
Drawing on the beach with a stick
I feel a spirit of delight I seldom find in the studio,
but they wince and beg me to stop,
my canny dealers and rich collectors.
They say there is no money in it.
First I destroyed the old masters and then
I destroyed modern painting
and you ask me why?
Because breaking the mold is what I understood,
tearing down temples and monuments,
releasing the Minotaur from his labyrinth.
Why blood? Why the sword? Why poetry?
Why a dab of ochre for a pear,
why blue apples, why ask such questions?
Why do I go forward, am I a fool, do I believe,
like some superstitious Andalusian peasant,
that painting will enable me to stave off death?
Do not mention that word in my presence!
But I will tell you, since you ask, why I paint.
Lean closer, so I may whisper it.
To stave off death.
The Raspberries (1974)
If it’s true, as they teach in elementary school,
that ours is a secular republic, not gods but men
do our temples and sacred monuments adorn,
then how to explain the immediacy with which I recall
my baptism into the cult of American identity,
my consecration as a democratic individual,
the very first things I bought at a store by myself—
a cherry Slurpee in a collectible plastic superhero cup
and a pack of baseball cards, hoping to find Bob Gibson.
This was at the 7-Eleven on Porter Street,
and soon the five-and-dime on Wisconsin Avenue
cycled into orbit, musty aisles of G. C. Murphy Co.
where I might spend my allowance on plastic soldiers,
a balsa wood airplane, a rabbit’s foot key chain,
trinkets of no intrinsic worth ennobled by commerce,
aglimmer with the fox fire of mercantile significance,
toys of thought that blazed in the imagination
every step walking home. Not to jingle pocket change,
not to carry a crumpled dollar bill was to drift untethered
from the enormous comfort and safety of the system,
like the astronaut who crosses HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey,
like a Stone Age tribe wandering into civilization
from some last unmapped Amazonian tributary.
And what does a child crave more than shelter
within the herd, a shared hymnal of commercial jingles
for toothpaste and tuna fish, sitcoms we eyeballed
like a kaleidoscope refracting fragments
of the shambolic wonder-beast, America, I mean,
because even then TV was not only a magic mirror
but a sociological lens, like the revelatory glasses
Roddy Piper wears in They Live, x-ray vision
to lay bare the skeletal urgency of material desire.
Years later, when the Nukak emerged from the rain forest,
their arrival was received as a tragic morality tale,
a corruption of innocence, a postlapsarian seduction,
but the tribesmen expressed little sense of loss
to the journalists, anthropologists and government officials
eagerly gathered at their frontier encampment.
Do you miss your old way of life? Laughter. “No!”
What do you like most about the outside world?
“Hats, pants, frying pans, rice, sugar, matches,
soap, potatoes, onions.” But what about the jungle,
your mother, in which your people lived as one with nature?
“It’s hard catching birds and monkeys for food,”
one hunter explained. “And the caimans have sharp teeth.”
A young woman, breast-feeding her infant, said:
“When you walk all day in the forest, your feet hurt a lot.”
So much for the garden of Eden. So long, utopia.
Let us bid farewell to Creepy Crawlers and childish things,
to Monopoly and Battleship and Clue in the basement—
Colonel Mustard with the Wrench in the Conservatory,
or was it Colonel Klink, or Colonel Kurtz,
or Lieutenant Calley with the M1 beneath the banyan tree?
Was it Charles Manson or Charlie the Tuna,
the Cisco Kid or Ho Chi Minh? Did it matter?
Did we care? Would we ever learn to tell the difference?
The kaleidoscope churns its color-hoard of shards,
the disco ball radiates random asymmetries,
history streams from the darkness like a deliquescent fable,
a blockbuster narrative we live inside, all together,
like a comically dysfunctional prime-time family,
bound by the limitations of the genre and the paradigm
of the marketplace, bound in a social compact,
a civic order, an ethos of shapeless and elusive liberty
shimmering like the aurora borealis on the horizon,
the way the universe, when you are twelve years old,
swims in and out of focus, too large to hold in the mind
but too urgent to let go of, days and nights
spellbound at the wonder of one’s own existence,
all the bafflements and appetites of life on earth
encapsulated in a raindrop sliding down a windowpane,
a ragged feather in a puddle of melting ice,
a song by the Raspberries coming over the radio
to echo in my heart forever.
Orson Welles: Television (1975)
And so the end arrives, in stocking feet,
the great American dream of the movie screen
brought low, domesticated, shrunk to fit,
lions into house cats, forests into lawns,
everything pre-chewed, nibbled at by goldfish,
sold off in dribs and thirty-second spots,
like a taxi meter ticking off the price
to corporate shills in Burbank backlots
of each and every sigh, each song and dance,
each overacted line and misframed shot,
each micronarrative of lust and shame
a carney barker’s fable of diminishment,
a parable of what we have become,
each ad for Fab or Glad a meta-myth,
a proof, reductio ad absurdum.
And so I hocked my final plum, my pearl,
the blue-ribbon heifer of my baritone—
squandered it all—my voice, my wit, my gall,
my gut, my famous name—(O softly run,
horses of the night!)—and sold, like Faust, my soul.
John Ashbery (1976)
That such expression could manifest as variously as light
In a garment of consciousness poses the maker
His first and signal task:
The puzzle of surfaces. How not to recognize this
Face in the mirror, this stream of irreconcilable representations
Flown beyond formal posture to assume
Human dimension, blue-bundled baby or fey homunculus
Sporting dubious headgear,
Mannequin in turban or tea-colored bowler
By turns herculean, effluvial, devout and glib.
Thus to begin
Sheering cross-grain the cheap yard
Goods is one
Approach, gabardine snood
In light melon, form following superficial function,
Hooded, neighborly,
An exercise in mimetic evocation. Or
The manufacture of wallpaper, swaths and swatches
Of meringue organza and lovely taffeta ostrich skin
Stretched like a gallery of Monet astigmatisms
In the Louvre, a penny candy attic of Puvis de Chavannes
In the Louvre. We are always in the Louvre,
Even when we are in Madrid
Spooning pomegranate sorbet. Seeds and myth
At the grand masque of solace, after which renunciation
Tosses her nuptial bouquet to the lions,
A gown of raw silk, oceans of the various
Polymer constituencies, seen and worn, the inhabited
And fabricated, artifice bending its elbow joint
To devise a solution beyond the capacity of the present
Tense to model, as the lightbulb’s pewter skull
Reflecting the spewn embers of dawn becomes
A figure for memory remembering itself,
Spark of cognition drawn through time’s filament
Into flame. We were like that once, burning,
Aglow, transfigured by vistas of clouds and chimneys,
Mossy terra-cotta where the old urn o’erspills
In a pantomime of surreptitious greed and surrender,
Going through and around, curvilinear, not unplanned for,
Not given to compassion. These astonishing balloons
In the sunrise are feelings, sentimental blimps.
What happens to them assumes the capacity to move
Or to destroy us, severity being a species of fulfillment.
So to find our way toward an untarnished modality,
Lush plateaux above the river, tables on the square
Beneath caroling bells, florid stemware,
Odor of bossy lemons.
But the battle of the seraphic robots
Continues throughout the rainy afternoon
Dismantling the haberdasher’s machinery
And nothing can survive it. The finite gleams
Like a revolution in which no goose is cooked,
No rhetoric suborned. Prepared for violent change
The Emperor is crowned with a plastic lobster
While venality totes its own baggage to the depot,
A species of checkroom where what we carry creates
Visceral anxiety, the pain of a phantom limb
Bumped against a sequence of abandoned furnishings
Which are also schools of thought,
An ottoman called Ethics, end tables known as
The Moral Sciences, and so on, and so forth.
Even the river in the foothills resembles a rayon nosegay
Stressed to the point of infarction, glorious
Dialect of a lost tribe of Dutch uncles,
Contemptuous of the harbor lights, yawls and ketches,
Lateen-rigged dinghies so like a cartoonish Mesopotamia,
Links in a dismal chain of indigo inks
From which causality has fled like a rabbit from a hat
Or rats from the ruins of Troy, New York.
Real ruins. Cairns of rubble, sublime
Nuts and bolts, spiked corollas of concertina
Wire, shards, odd morsels, remnants
Wrapped in newspaper dotted with obituaries
And cantaloupe rind.
Sayonara, at long last, to all that
Sorry sheen.
Our small war is over.
Those brash materials, diagrams inscribed upon the dome,
Galaxies burning the ice-blue color of ideas,
The realization that they have constellated us, too,
Fashioned us in their glittering image,
To envision which is to know
The grace of the bare-naked lovers
Enacting their passion in the window display
Of the half-demolished department store at midnight.
Like chocolate poured into silver molds
Beauty seeks its level everywhere,
In coins and kisses, rabbits and stars,
Forming and delimiting whatever can be
Imagined, or spoken, or made, here
Amid the tenebrous, wind-funneled snowflakes at dusk,
Here in the metropolis of rhetorical desire.
Voyager I & II (1977)
Now we begin to speak for you.
To greet, entreat, declaim and argue.
The voices we carry are yours, of course,
your melodies and genetic sequences sourced
and etched into our golden cores.
Like spores
from a broken milkweed plant
we float past planet
after planet, their parabolic array likewise
among the elemental designs
we display. Imagine the moment
of contact, in whichever quadrant
of whichever time-lost galaxy,
when they happen upon us and we
rehearse the tale
of how we first set sail
upon these silent interstellar seas,
replay the encoded dreams and histories
which impel a species
to step into the darkness, to leave
the only home it has ever known
in the hope that it is not alone.
Let there be others, in the great night,
we whisper. Let there be light.
Fernand Braudel: Civilization and Capitalism (1978)
Money gave a certain unity to the world but it was the unity of injustice.
1.
Smiths and millers are history’s heroes,
tillers and herdsmen who keep the hearth burning,
who have forged, over centuries, a painstaking advance
from hut to croft to homestead, hamlet to township to city.
Kings, generals, revolutionary overlords—
how shallow the imprint of their hammers on time’s metal.
History is hills and river valleys, gathering waves
far below the fortified citadel. History is stone idols,
folkways, the stubborn insistence of people to live
where and how they have always lived before.
Populations grow in a simple calculus and fall back
as numbers exceed the carrying capacity of the land,
