Literature

A Wave and a Golden Fish.

Literature
Sep 4, 2024
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Last week was so hot that I had little energy to move. Luckily, I had two books at hand that kept me sufficiently engaged, so that I could forgot about the outside world. One was Catalina (2024), by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, and the other was Katalin Street (1969), by Magda Szabó (Katharinenstrasse, in the German translation.)

Small volumes, as different as can be, and yet they hone in on a similar question: how are individual choices, our values, our ability to connect, affected by historical and political circumstances that create existential trauma, by a past that afflicts the present and the future in ways beyond our control?

Cornejo Villavicencio is a young writer whose nonfiction debut, The Undocumented Americans, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award. The collection of essays combined personal narrative with reported profiles of some of the most vulnerable immigrant workers in the United States. Her new book is a novel with strong autobiographical content, a coming of age of an undocumented immigrant from Equador who ends up at Harvard, and whose fate is determined by the absence of a green card, once she finishes school. It garnered raving reviews, but I found it at times difficult to read. (The author, as it turns out, received permanent residency in 2020 and was as of that date a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies at Yale.)

The first person singular perspective oscillates between smart analysis, insight into self and others with biting humor, slyly introducing us to the issues of stereotyping from multiple perspectives. It puts a glaring spotlight on structural obstacles to acquiring citizenship, to belonging in other ways defined by elite institutions, and onto the repeat experiences and subsequent fear of abandonment. It elucidates how the fears about an uncertain future can poison the present, stunt you in all your helplessness to make the right one come about, victim to pandering political decisions of a nation.

But the stream of consciousness, the gushing language and relentless pace made it feel like a wave that tried to rip you into its emotional undertow, pushing you forwards without catching a breath, and eventually cresting, abruptly ending without a sense that the story was fully told – leaving everything and everyone sort of floating in the water. Maybe we are supposed to feel that way, the closest we can come to vicariously experiencing being battered by external forces, but it was exhausting.

——

Nobel Prize laureate Herman Hesse, after reading a forbidden translation of one of Szabó’s novels, called his publisher in haste to tell him he had “caught a golden fish”. I could not agree more. Her more recent novel Katalin Street is everything I want from a remarkable piece of literature: precise language, a challenging structure of alternating between narrators and eras, a focus on female characters who escape conformity, and a philosophical deepening of questions around history’s effects on our lives.

The story is told from the perspectives of various members of three families thrown together as neighbors in the titular street in Budapest, Hungary, starting with the early years before German occupation and ending during the communist regime of the 1960s. Complex relationships – three girls all vie for one boy, three parent generations are driven by different values – are torn apart by the deportation of one Jewish couple, and the death of their daughter at the hands of a Nazi soldier, but accidentally caused by one of her former playmates.

The survivors end up together in a post-war apartment, longingly gazing at the houses that were taken from them during the social rehousing program of the communist regime, as punishment for a bourgeois existence. They are unable to communicate to overcome their sorrow, or grieve together for a past that is irredeemable. Love yields to guilt, and one of them is exiled, harming the family even more. They live in a constant state of fear of prosecution, and appear in their nostalgia, isolation and endless fatigue as if they were ghosts, unable to speak to each other or the one real ghost, their murdered childhood friend, who regularly visits to add her own observations.

I think as someone who grew up in 1950’s Germany among a population of perpetrators the issue of silence is particularly pertinent. Trauma instills silence, regardless of concerning perpetrators or victims. Values disintegrate, memory fades, all fostered by silence driven by fear to re-live the trauma, or inclination to veil it forever to absolve oneself. The titular Katalin, by the way, was St. Katherine of the Wheel, a major Catholic Saint and martyr, who is, surely no coincidence, a patron for philosophers, invoked for diseases of the tongue (the inability to speak) and protection against a sudden death (obviously not working for Jewish neighbors.)

Caravaggio: Die Heilige Katharina von Alexandrien(1595–1596)

She was not a historically established figure. In fact some scholars speculate that the story of her life and persecution was the inversion of something that actually happened: a famous female Greek philosopher and mathematician from Alexandria, Hypatia, was murdered by Christians. The role reversal of persecuted and persecutor would surely fit into the intellectual framework of Szabó’s narrative. (So would the generally clever choices of names for the main protagonists, explorations of which could fill an entire session of a book group…)

What made the book special to me, though, had to do with explorations of aging – no surprise here. Here is an example of the clarity of vision found in all of her writing:

“The process of growing old bears little resemblance to the way it is presented, either in novels or in works of medical science.

No work of literature, and no doctor, had prepared the former residents of Katalin Street for the fierce light that old age would bring to bear on the shadowy, barely sensed corridor down which they had walked in the earlier decades of their lives, or the way it would rearrange their memories and their fears, overturning their earlier moral judgments and system of values.

They knew they should expect certain biological changes: that the body would set about its work of demolition with the same meticulous attention to detail that from the moment of conception it had applied to the task of preparing itself for the journey ahead. They had accepted that there would be alterations in their appearance and a weakening of the senses, along with changes in their tastes, their habits, and their needs; that they might fall prey to gluttony or lose all interest in food, become fear-ridden or hypersensitive and fractious. They had resigned themselves to the prospect of increasing difficulties with digestion and sleeping, things they had taken for granted when young, like life itself.

But no one had told them that the most frightening thing of all about the loss of youth is not what is taken away but what is granted in exchange. Not wisdom. Not serenity. Not sound judgment or tranquility. Only the awareness of universal disintegration.”

The only antidote is the ability to continue to love, something enabled by life’s choices, or obstructed by them, depending where the chips fell. No, not where they fell, but where we put them. After all, as Szabo spells out :

“In everyone’s life there is only one person whose name can be cried out in the moment of death.”

The author died in 2007. I wonder what her last words were. But I delighted in her vision of the after life, as described in the novel, a place where people revert to child-like beings, happily embraced and treated as such during reunions with their deceased parents. Maybe you CAN go home again, albeit in a fantasy world….

The focus, though, is on the emptiness created by a longing for a past that prevents the existence of a meaningful present. The desire to turn back the clock, make choices that reinstate the nostalgic past before we acted in harmful ways, adds up to the ultimate emotional destruction of the survivors of those consequential actions. That is true for all, regardless of where the desire is coming from, narcissism, disconsolate longing, or guilt. In an ingenious move, the author lets us look at the disastrous effects of the idea that time can be folded into itself, past resurrected in the present, even for those who have left time behind – the central ghost of the story.

If all this sounds pretty bleak, yes it is. Let me assure you, the book is worth it. There are so many discoveries to be made, so many nuggets to be found in the universes she creates, a whole school of golden fish. Including many reminders that passive acceptance of “rules of law” during totalitarian regimes, silence rather than opposition, lead inevitably to disaster.

Photographs today are from Austria and Slovenia, parts of the Habsburg Empire, as was Hungary. I have never been to Budapest, alas, but the architecture is said to be the same.

Music today is Bartok’s Sixth String Quartet. Someone said this about its last movement: “The final movement is both a release and a wonder. It is the Mesto theme presented in a language of deep sensitivity, perhaps resignation, perhaps numbed grief.”

Morning Mood

· Beyond the Tree Line ·

Art, Literature, Music
Aug 16, 2024
1 Comments

When I was little, my bedroom was situated right above the room where my mother played the grand piano some evenings. The minute I heard Morning Mood from the Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 by Edvard Grieg, I waited for the piece I really adored, Anitra’s Dance, trying to stay awake through the intervening The Death of Åse. I had no clue how popular this music had become and knew even less about its origins, a dramatic poem by Henrik Ibsen that he made Grieg set to music. I was just taken by the melodies and chords.

Fast forward to 1965, now in boarding school as a 13-year old, at war with an elitist all girls’ world I despise and yet try to find a place in. My piano teacher, she of the permanent bad breath but sensitive understanding of lost souls, complains about my perfunctory performance of the suite – all I can do to stave off my homesickness is hammering the keys mechanically. She hands me a dogeared paperback with Ibsen’s poem translated into German, so I get an idea of what we’re working on. I devour it, like any other book given to me in those years, and don’t have the faintest idea what it really is about – other than having a strong reaction about why a woman would wait and waste all her life to take a narcissistic fraud and con-artist back into her lap after he ditched her. Got my priorities right, early on!

(I also stupidly abandoned my piano teacher to take up the cello – for the sole reason that it allowed me a weekly escape from school into the city where the conservatory was offering lessons. That did not last long, a story for another day.)

The short version of the Peer Gynt poem, now seen through the eyes of an adult, is this: boy tries to be someone, not sure who, and confabulates, lies, tricks and swindles his way through the world, from Norway to Northern Africa and back, with abduction of other people’s brides, intermittent stops in the halls of mythological troll kings, royal interludes in insane asylums and pursuit by the devil. Two women love him, yet see through him and call him on it, his mother, Åse, who dies, and Solveig, who takes him back when he returns broken, unrecognized, still without identity, her love the key to his redemption.

Essential here is Gynt’s search for identity (or the rejection thereof), a trying on of roles, and a desperate avoidance to be cast in fixed form while the searching is so much more exciting. Why be an ordinary person if you can be an adventurer, a rich merchant, a wise man, a king? With the arrival of modernity, predestined class or social organization no longer determines who you are – replaced by a compulsive search for self -determination. Sooooo many options to choose from, why settle on one? And so Peer steals stories from others, trying on their selves, forever non-authentic, as called out by his mother from the very beginning. He runs away from negative feelings with fantasies of omnipotence or flat-out denial, and does not care who gets hurt in the process. No wonder he feels deadened by the end, but then gets miraculously saved by Solveig’s unconditional love.

Young – and – old Heuer: Spare me the romanticism! Give me poetic justice!

In reality, I was probably enraged that in my teenage existence any deviation from “good girl” stereotypes, any trying out of alternative identities would surely be punished – WAS punished – no redemption in sight. Reserved for the boys, as per usual.

The montage is capturing the original childhood joy at hearing the sounds of Morning Mood waft up to my room, the lightness and serenity of the atmosphere mirrored by the sunlit pine sapling. The image also includes two figures in a wishful representation of Peer and Solveig sharing a life as equals rather than foils for each other.

I selected the super-imposed painting, Couple on the Heath, because the woman looks a little bit like my young mother. She often escaped her grief through music and I want to dedicate the image to her, in gratitude of opening the world of art to me from an early age.

The painter, Lotte Laserstein, spearheading the Neue Sachlichkeit movement, was a prominent artist in Weimar era Berlin, where my mother was born and raised. Of Jewish origins, Laserstein fled Germany for Sweden in 1935, anticipating that a particular identity could be a death sentence under the new regime. In an ironic, if horrid, twist, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt was adapted by the Nazis and made into a nationalistic heroic tale with Gynt’s Nordic identity absurdly fixed into the fascist cult, with the trolls representing Jews.

Maybe next time when you roll your eyes that Classic FM is playing the old war horse again, you can think about all this complicated stuff associated with the music. As much as Grieg was set on showcasing the folk tunes of his country, or the sensuality of desert princesses, or the grief associated with losing a parent, all musical transcriptions of concrete events in the tale, he nonetheless reminds us that there was a larger narrative behind it all. Worth a re-read, in a time where identity politics, the need for belonging and othering, respectively, continue to play such a poisonous role across a divided world.

Here is Grieg’s Morning Mood as an orchestral version by the Berlin Philharmonic and as a PIANO VERSION.

Beyond the Tree Line

Art, Literature
Aug 12, 2024
1 Comments

This month I came across a book that was exceedingly clever, merging parallel storylines in seemingly effortless ways and making me think hard about a lot of things. Gorgeously, sensitively written, it was also truly funny and often pleasurably steamy. I wanted to throw it across the room once I was finished, in pure envy.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley alternates the tales of a 19th century arctic explorer with that of the daughter of Cambodian refugees who escaped the slaughter in their native country and try to make a life in an England of the near future. She is employed at the Ministry of Time, an administrative government branch that has somehow acquired a key to time travel. Concerned that they might change the history of the world, they pluck a motley crew of people from various centuries who were all about to be dead in their respective environments (trapped in the ice, wounded in the Great War, etc.) and thus unlikely to create a butterfly wing effect. The expats are put under scientific observation to see if adjustment to a different century is possible without lethal cost, and distributed to handlers who will be their bridges to a new life and spend the first year living with them. Cue the experiences and woes of an immigrant across cultures and time, the adventures of human beings treated like lab rats, a love story among the most opposite of characters, and a lot of historical facts sprinkled in that bring the past to life while you read about the near future.

It gets darker, though, imperceptibly first, then at a fast clip, when the narrative explores why time travel has appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, at Britain’s doorstep. Without giving too much away I will just allude to the consequences of ignoring climate change and desperation to retroactively change an unbearable future. The philosophical questions are hinted at, the psychological issues treated in more depth and deftly. For the present at hand: Whether immigration happens across time, or across continents, will the issues of the past, for first and second generations, get resolved? Is trauma so ingrained that you cannot escape it, even if all circumstances are miraculously changed? When do you realize that colonial exploits were nothing to be proud of? Where do you cross a line when experimenting with humans, and how does love challenge ethics (or vice versa?) Importantly, how do you place yourself in a hierarchy of power, finding yourself trapped in conformity and complicity, when power was the only antidote to your people’s history as victims of genocide?

The novel is thoughtful, elegant, and never ever polemical. You have to work your brain a bit to get to the real questions, although you can also read it simply at the level of a historical fiction/romance romp, if that is all you have the energy for – such is the clever construction of all the intertwining strands of narrative.

I was envious because I have been struggling for some time with creating something that reaches across different realms as well, and giving the cross-over some meaning. The core idea was to link pieces of music that I care for and that come from diverse historical eras, with visual capture of something that echoes the sentiment of the music, but is firmly located in the here and now – all landscapes I photographed across the last decades. I wanted to create a bit of mysteriousness when two genres, music and image, as well as past and present, align. I was open to adding the occasional protagonist, if they carry weight in the music, picking those, too, from different centuries, but planting them in the 21st century. Playfulness was acceptable, but only if the musical mood and style was respected in the overall visualization. So how do you mirror Wagner, Beethoven, Ravel, Schubert, Weill, Janacek, Glass or Satie? It’s been an intellectual rollercoaster: Beyond the Tree Line – Musical Tableaux.

I will post some samples across the next weeks so you can see the progress. We’ll start with a suite for violin and piano from 1914 by Erik Satie, Choses vues à droite et à gauche, (sans lunettes), (Things Seen to the Right-and-Left, without Glasses.) The trees were likely around when it was composed, they are carefully tended plane trees in Paris’ Parc de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement. The sculptural elements below them pick up the interlinking characteristics of the fugue.

Aging sans Parody.

Last week saw me huffing and puffing on a perfectly flat path along the river, bones aching when I returned from a 3.5 miles hike (today’s photographs). My usual inclination would be to be demoralized. Particularly since I had been collecting stories of women my age and older, all of whom pulled off things physically a million times more challenging.

I was thinking of Ernestine Shepard who is a competitive body builder, trainer and model in her 80s.

I was wondering about Ginette Bedard who ran marathons at age 86 four years ago still. She did not start until she was 68 and has run 10 marathons since – good G-d.

I envied Jane Dotchin, a British woman now in her early eighties, who treks 600 miles with her dog and pony every year from Hexham, Northumberland to the Scottish Highlands.

Everything she needs, tent and food included, is in the saddlebacks, and she covers about 20 miles a day. Do yourself a favor and watch the short clip linked in her name above – it brings endless cheer.

Luckily, I had help fighting off demoralized thinking from two recently encountered sources. One is a a book by a contemporary social scientist at Yale University, Becca Levy. Her research, described at length in Breaking the Age Code, tackles how we internalize personal and cultural stereotypes about aging and how these adopted beliefs then have insidious consequences. The book lays out clearly how many structural factors contribute to ageism, but also how we can employ some simple mechanism so that we won’t fall for these beliefs and have them crimp our life expectancy. Here is an excerpt that succinctly tells what her focus is all about.

Her data suggest that activating positive age stereotypes for just 10 minutes or so improves people’s memory performance, gait, balance, speed, and even the will to live. I cannot judge if those are short term effects demonstrated in the lab, or actually extend to real life situations for the long run. I can confirm, though, that my other source of encouragement has captured what I have seen in my own context of aging and being surrounded by aging friends.

Here are the words of Simone de Beauvoir (from The Coming of Age, the obscuring American translation of her original title La Vieillesse, Old Age):

“Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.

There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” (Ref.)

Looks like we’re best served by marching some miles together with friends, passionately demonstrating for a cause close to our hearts. Connections and causes. Nature can wait!

Alternatively, it could be the cause. Some extraordinary lives were linked to nature – devoted to ecological research and saving the forests. Here is the spellbinding portrait of a woman academic who spent her adult life in a hunting lodge without electricity and running water in the Polish woods, sharing her housing with a 400 pound boar called Froggy, a lynx named Agatka and a kleptomaniac crow. Read the story here – it is guaranteed to make your day, another day towards old(er)age with a positive role model no less!

Simone Kossack with Froggy. What about all those clocks?

Music today is by another favorite activist who is still performing in her older years. Chaka Khan, Queen of Funk, and erstwhile member of the Black Panthers, will perform at the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. on July 26,2024!

Tell me something good!

(Song written by Stevie Wonder and originally performed with her band Rufus, heard a million years ago when I still attended live concerts…)

Kairos

History, Literature
May 24, 2024
2 Comments

Kairos: a time when conditions are right for the accomplishment of a crucial action : the opportune and decisive moment. – Merriam-Webster Dictionary

A video has been making the rounds in Germany for the last few days, depicting a group of wealthy young people at one of the country’s most exclusive bars engaged in laughing, singing and shouting racist, nationalistic and even fascist paroles, one of the revelers seemingly giving the Nazi Salute, filming themselves with glee and later posting the recordings. (I refuse to share, giving them more exposure…)

Most commentators remark on this as something that is not novel for the sentiment depicted. What is new is the pride accompanying a brazen openness about one’s ideology that was previously subterraneous in a country blanketed with shame over past sins. There is also a shift regarding who comes forward with explicit racism – once a province of beerhalls and most often associated with lower-education populations mainly in the East, it now seems to be fashionable among the elite. Think a five star drinking hole in the Hamptons, visited by Nepo-babies and their entourage. For Germans who were happy to assign Nazism to poor yokels, this is an unwelcome occasion to have to admit extremist sentiments in all sectors of society across the nation.

Of course, we see an inclination towards unapologetic flaunting of ideologies previously kept close to the chest and only revealed in like-minded company here in the U.S. as well. Just think of Justice Alito’s various flag demonstrations. Or that of evangelical House Speaker Johnson, who displays the Christian nationalist flag in front of his office, signaling his theocratic agenda. The Appeal to Heaven flag is part of the symbolism of the far-right New Apostolic Reformation, a movement fighting for a hegemonically Christian America.

Apparently it is a crucial moment in time, propitious for the public flaunting of racist and nationalistic agendas we thought banned for good. Or at least hoped. It signals a qualitative shift, in my opinion, fostered by increasing desire for and acceptance of authoritarianism colored by religious fervor, whether Christianity or Hinduism as just two example, internationally.

Crucial moment in time is also the title – Kairos – of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel, translated by Michael Hofmann, that won this year’s international Booker Prize. You can read ubiquitous reviews here, here and here. Be warned, though. It is an incredibly sad, cruel, and bitter tale that is unfolding, both in descriptions of a May/December love affair, and a reckoning with German history set at the time of approaching reunification of East and West in the 1980s.

I was grateful to read the original language, having always thought the author has an incredible skill with words to both lure you and distance you at the same time to and from her preoccupation with time. Much of her work is concerned with how time takes things -as well as bodies – apart. Now she shifts to the concept of time as that moment that changes everything, and it dawns on you, slowly, eventually, that we willingly overlook the signs that point to that moment of change, until, basically, it will be too late. True for relationships as much as politics of nations.

By all reports, the English translation is formidable. I, on the other hand, have been struggling to find the right word for an adjective I associate with the author, who was by the way, trained as a director of opera: unerbittlich. In English it is translated as unrelenting, but the German word has more of sense of “without mercy” attached. Not just not giving in to pleas, but exhibiting a punitive streak. She mercilessly holds the mirror to German society preoccupied with “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” a reckoning with the past, showing how often we still look away, or keep things at a surface, too fearful to look deeper. Exactly the situation that the reactions to the video alluded to above seem to reflect. The same pattern emerges for acknowledging signs of domestic violence and abuse. We ignore the creeping signals around us as long as we can, since it can’t be true what we don’t want to be true.

This might not be the moment in time to focus on entropy, Erpenbeck’s continual concern. Do we really want to burden ourselves with yet another downer, a hair-raising, deeply sad tale, when we are so emotionally vulnerable from all the trauma around us?

But if not now, when? Disentangling the lessons of history from wishful thinking will always be hard. Her writing is as brilliant a guide as any. Maybe this novel rises to prominence with the Booker Prize at exactly a propitious moment, before it is too late.

Kairos.

Music by John Dowland today.

Caspar David Friedrich x 2.

Last night I had a horrid dream, likely tied to the day’s reading and writing about Caspar David Friedrich. Emotionally depleted from curating a show of Holocaust photography at a German Jewish museum, I took the wrong train, ending up traveling through Poland. Once we reached the Baltic Sea shore, the train stopped. Throngs of people, me among them, scrambled down the dunes and cliffs to the beach to see Orcas (! they live in all oceans except the Black and the Baltic Sea…) swimming in what looked like jet-black, glassy waves that were suspended in slow motion. Friedrich’s Sea of Ice had melted, but the water was not behaving naturally. I could not really see much given the wall of people, all with their back turned to me and then realized I had left my backpack, wallet and iPhone as well as my heavy coat in the train – what if it left? You can anticipate the rest – trying to scramble up the cliffs, heart pounding, stone crumbling under your feet…

My former hometown museum, Hamburger Kunsthalle, currently offers a blockbuster retrospective of works by Caspar David Friedrich. By all reports it is a curatorial masterpiece, guiding you through the evolution of the work by this preeminent romanticist painter, while the drawings and paintings are simultaneously grouped by thematic content, making for a more comprehensive visual experience. A whale of a show where you can see nothing on opening night because of the masses of visitors celebrating the occasion.

The cherry on top can be found on the second floor of the museum – a selection of contemporary artists whose work references, or is derived from, or parodies Friedrich.

I’d give an arm and a leg to see it, but my days of travel to Europe are over. Luckily we can get some glimpses on-line. Here is a general tour of the exhibition. And here is an audio tour for selected works – the second entry from top in the link is the english version. One below that is one for children, which I find an extremely cool idea.

Alas, nothing visually available in my cursory search on the modern artists who relate to Friedrich. But here is a recent review that goes into more depth.

Concurrent with the exhibition, a darling of Germany’s current literary scene, author and art historian Florian Illies, published a book about Caspar David Friedrich (CDF), Der Zauber der Stille – Caspar David Friedrichs Reise durch die Zeiten (The Enchantment of Silence, CDF’s travels through time – not yet translated.) I am halfway through it and must say it provokes a lot of different reactions.

For one, I have certainly lost my ability to concentrate across the years of the pandemic. Maybe it is just aging, maybe it is the lack of conversational interaction, or the stress levels that impede sustained reading. If the structure of a book is complicated I often get lost and/or frustrated. Well, this book does have a complex structure, but it held my attention by the sheer force of curiosity it instilled: where is the author going next? What seemingly unrelated bits of knowledge will be imparted in unexpected juxtapositions?

Like one of his successful previous books, Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39, which described the fates of numerous famous couples during the ascent of fascism in Europe, drawing relevant parallels to our own times, the new book is an accumulation of vignettes which constantly shift between times and perspectives. The book is divided in chapters referencing fire, water, earth and air as elements relevant to both life and work of CDF. A very helpful time table is in the appendix, as are recommendations for further writings by specialists on the topic. It is a book that helps you learn, without sacrificing amusement.

Reconstructed Frauenkirche that was destroyed in the allied fire bombing

If you ignore the somewhat self-congratulatory tone of an author who knows how clever he is, and his insistent descriptions of what and how Caspar David Friedrich thought and felt – a bit too presumptuous for my taste – you are in for a ride that elates. You learn so much about the artist, his times, the trauma that defined his development, the strange interactions with women (he decided he needed to be married in his mid-forties when the neighbor who kept his wood stove going while the artist went on his daily hikes, went on vacation. He asked for the hand of a 20+ year younger woman, who he had encountered in the store where he bought his art materials, and could not even remember her first name during the 2 year-long engagement…)

The kind of house CDF likely rented an apartment in.

Florian Illies is a quintessential story teller, and weaves tales that help us understand an artist whose rebirth into public consciousness, after long eras of almost complete obsoleteness, is no coincidence. Then and now a longing for something that juxtaposes or lifts the despair du jour was pretty central to people’s existence, and his work captured that longing (and its potential remedies) in ways not seen before.

But the author also makes us think about historical interconnections, often occurring by chance. For example, Walt Disney, during trips to Europe, collected art books galore and shipped them back to the US. When he was told by Thomas Mann, while both received an honorary doctorate at Harvard or some such, that Felix Salten’s tale Bambi would be a great script for a movie, Disney promptly acted on the suggestion and told his artists to use the CD Friedrich landscapes from the art books as the background for the movie. Hitler, a Disney fan, adored the movie. Never mind, that Felix Salten’s book, written by this Jewish author and perceived to be a cloaked substitute for Jewish persecution, was one of the first to be publicly burned.

The Nazis later appropriated Friedrich’s oeuvre into their canon of true Germanic art, to the point where every young soldier sent to his death at the rapidly deteriorating Russian front received a booklet called Caspar David Friedrich and his Homeland, containing black and white prints of his paintings of oaks and the sea. The introduction contained the assertion that the artist carried a life-long, unmovable, holy belief in Germany.

View of Dresden from the surrounding hills

Anecdote after anecdote, one art-history related morsel after another. The extreme colors of the sky, reminiscent of those of his contemporary Turner? Why, Mount Tambora, a volcano on Sumbawa Island, now Indonesia, erupted in 1815, and ash particles that traveled across the world had an impact on how colors in the atmosphere were perceived. The theme of fire and ash replicates itself through out Friedrich’s life. So many of his works lost to fire, so many of the places he was connected to, burned.

The landscapes all constructed, rather than true life depictions, painted in a darkened basement room, fixed with the famous backside views of wanderers and women because the artist felt he could not draw people correctly, the back view being a welcome simplification. On and on it goes, deflating myths, augmenting admiration for a man who struggled with life-long depression, pathological shyness and poverty.

The river Elbe that crosses the city, where he walked during dawn and dusk, every day.

Until you have a chance to read it in English, here is some compensation for the wait: here is a link to a website that has accumulated titles of books that have a truly interesting or innovative structure. I can highly recommend Life after Life and The Warmth of other Suns.

Photographs today are from Dresden, where the artist lived his adult life.

Music today by Carl Maria von Weber, musical champion of the ideals of Romaticism. He overlapped with CDF in Dresden, where he became the director of the German Opera in 1817 and where he wrote the Freischütz. I selected an earlier composition, a beautiful piece for clarinet, though.

Kitsch and Kunst – the Visual Representation of Consolation.

“I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” — Samuel Beckett, “The Unnamable.”

In a recent interview Rebecca Solnit talked about hope amid the climate chaos. She defined the term: “Hope, for me, is just recognizing that the future is being decided to some extent in the present, and what we do matters because of that reality.” She added the observation, “many people are very good at imagining everything falling apart, everything getting worse; they’re good at dystopia, they’re bad at utopia.” Sometimes, I thought, a word of consolation would help, rather than the exhortation for all of us to try even harder during times when despair sets in. The thought was probably triggered by my current reading – I came across the interview while starting a recent book by Michael Ignatieff, The Art of Consolation. How to find solace in dark times. (The link gives you an excerpt of the preface.)

I had liked Ignatieff’s brilliant biography of Isaiah Berlin, but am currently irritated, two chapters into these meditations, about his devotion to religious attempts at consolation with the imperative to just accept the unknowable. No takers for “all has a hidden meaning – only a higher power knows” on this end here. The chapters are organized around a summary and analysis, ordered along a historical time line, of famous people’s dealing with catastrophe and defining forms of consolation, a veritable gallery of the broken and bereaved, as a clever review in The Guardian phrased it. More skeptical review in the NYT here.

Maybe I am just currently irritated in general. Who knows.

In any case, I thought it would be interesting to find some examples of visual representations of consolation. How do you visually translate the moment when we attempt to help someone reverse or shift despair into something more resembling a somewhat normal life, if not hope? The moment when someone or something opens a perspective towards this shift, providing a sense that it is possible, or probable, or even guaranteed that life will be easier to bear at some point?

The search resulted in a mix. It arches from representations of the texts that governed the belief systems of different eras to impressionistic paintings that captured the human interaction associated with comforting, from mannerist paintings to some modern photography. What is art and what is Kitsch I leave to the eye of the beholder.

I’ll start with miniatures from The Getty relating to Boethius’ Consolation de Philosophie, around 1460-70. The Roman philosopher’s book was the most read in Europe after the bible. It contains “a dialogue between its author and the personification of Philosophy, in prison while awaiting trial for treason. Discussing the problem of evil and the conflict between free will and divine providence, Philosophy explains the changeable nature of Fortune and consoles Boethius in his adversity.”

Coëtivy Master (Henri de Vulcop?) (French, active about 1450 – 1485), Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius (called Boethius) (Italian, about 480 – 524/526), Jean de Meun (French, about 1240/1260

Compare that with this:

Matthew James Collins The Consolation of Philosophy (2016)

Here is another consolation of the imprisoned:

Conrad Meyer Consolation of the Imprisoned – I could not find the date, in the collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

More hollow eyes in a lithograph counterpart:

Georg Ehrlich Consolation (Tröstung) (1920) from the periodical Genius. Zeitschrift für werdende und alte Kunst, vol. 2, no. 1

Here is as academiscist a depiction as they come:

Auguste Toulmouche Consolation (1867)

And something, what can I say, 150 years later:

Laura Makabresku Consolation (2014)

There is Munch, there is always Edvard Munch, who we can count on.

Edvard Munch Consolation (1894)

Compare:

PDX photographer, now based in Brooklyn, Olivia Bee Consolation (2020.)

Any thoughts? And what to make of the image (“Consolation”) of a fetus…. at the center of the exhibition Colpo di Folmine (Struck by Lightning) by Dutch photographer Arno Massee?

I, personally, find solace in the somewhat sarcastic poetry of Heinrich Heine, who, in 1832, reminds a woman staring at the sea with setting sun, that the sun will rise again….translated by no other than Emma Lazarus!

Here is one of Kaspar David Friedrich’s back views, alternatingly titled: Woman in front of the setting sun, Sunset, Sunrise, Morning Sun, Woman in the morning sun. No sea in sight, but the solace of a world still turning. That’s my kind of consolation. Then again, that painting might also be a premonition of a burning planet due to unending fossil fuel consumption – wouldn’t you know it, despair is here to stay.

For music today: Here are Liszt’s Six Consolations.

Octavia E. Butler, Beacon.

Today’s musings will be all over the map, geographically, emotionally and with regards to content that has preoccupied my brain for a while. It all leads back to Octavia E. Butler, a writer who I admire for her exquisite, creative world building, her focus on in/justice, and her ability to transcend genres. I am even more grateful for all of her modeling of what it means to have courage and persistence, to stick to goals defying racist, patriarchal, professionally closed systems, while skirting existential poverty and loneliness during formative years.

Mural at the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School in Altadena, CA.

All over the map: Let’s start with Trieste, Italy. Why Trieste? I was somewhat condescendingly amused during my 2018 visit there to see flocks of fans follow the footsteps of their hero, James Joyce, who lived and wrote major works in Trieste for years. Selfies with his statue, tour lines in front of his lodgings, photographs of the multiple plaques conveniently placed by the Bureau of Tourism: Joyce walked over this bridge here! More than once!

Well, I was wrong, I’ve joined the multitudes and never should have sneered. Not pursuing Joyce, nor taking selfies, but I am now trying to walk along the paths of someone I wish I’d understand, taking in the neighborhoods and buildings that were part of her daily life, reading about her struggle, and visiting places that keep her memory alive.

Pasadena, CA, then, is next. No plaques here, but a helpful map laying out routes frequently taken by Butler, prepared by people at the Huntington Library which holds the author’s archives. An even more helpful book by journalist Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky – the World of Octavia E. Butler, which introduces the canvas on which Butler drew both herself and the worlds she constructed from the insights captured by her daily struggles, the physical environment in which she labored, and the mental landscapes that she traveled while growing into the writer some of us now devour. George describes the author with exceptional sensitivity and intuition, during the years before Butler would go on to become a MacArthur (Genius) Fellow and win a Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as Hugo and Nebula Awards for her trailblazing work in science fiction—the first Black woman to win both awards.

Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, CA, to a mother who worked as a maid and a father who was a shoe shiner and died when she was very young. She was dyslexic, isolated in school and not particularly supported by the majority of her teachers. Later she turned to menial jobs, often physical labor, that did not require much thought so she was free to do her own thinking, and could use the rest of her time to walk or visit libraries, some involving hours on the bus.

Historic center Pasadena, including the post office where checks, manuscripts acceptance or rejection letters might have arrived in her P.O.Box.

Lynell George’s account of these early years is, among other things, based on archival items that Butler saved over the years: lists. And lists. And lists. On scrap paper, or any other expandable surface she could write on, perhaps compulsively constructed to organize and likely ward off a flood of fears that might otherwise prove overwhelming. Shopping lists. To-do lists. Lists to evaluate what could be pawned to head off starvation. Lists of goals. Lists of dreams. Lists of exhortations or promises to Self, or incantations about how the world should be and how to make it so.

An eternally slow start to find her way into publishing, with 2 small manuscripts sold in 5 years, interminable stretches of professional drought, and yet this author went on to write and publish over a dozen books, with artists, play-writes, musicians and film makers increasingly inspired by the work since her death from injuries sustained in a fall at the age of 58 in 2006. Her novels are taught at colleges and universities around the country (well, where there are not yet banned, I should hasten to add…) and you can now watch adaptions of her books on TV. (Coincidentally, this weekend’s NYT listed an introduction to some of the essential works, so you can see for yourself how much ground was covered or where to start.)

***

Many of Butler’s books can be found in a small book store on North Hill Avenue in Pasadena, Octavia’s Bookshelf. It opened about a month ago and offers a range of works by BIPOC writers, and a welcome space to sit down and explore.

Here I meet Nikki High, owner of the store, who is helpful in recommending books when I approach her to pick her brain and perfectly happy to spend some of her valuable time chatting with this stranger. Which brings us to the Republic of Ghana, the west-African country where sociologist and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois resided during the last years of his life and is buried. He died on the eve of the civil-rights march in Washington,D.C., where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream”speech and where Roy Wilkins of the NAACP announced Du Bois’s death from the podium. I mention to Nikki that I am currently reading a thought provoking, beautiful novel by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Lovesongs of W.E.B. Du Bois, and she tells me about her recent travels to Ghana to visit Du Bois’ grave and the house he lived in, visibly moved by the reliving of that memory.

Jeffer’s novel revolves around the concept of Double Consciousness that Du Bois introduced in his seminal book The Souls of Black Folk (1903.) So does Kindred, (2003) Butler’s historical fiction/fantasy novel introducing a heroine who time travels between the 19th and 20th century, between the slave plantation where her ancestors suffered and her interracial marriage in 1976 L.A.. The novel has become a cornerstone of Black American literature.

Du Bois argued that living as an African American within a system of White racism leads to a kind of fragmented identity. The double consciousness refers to “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

“It is a socio-cultural construct rather than a baldly bio-racial given, attributed specifically to people of African descent in America. The “two-ness” of which it is a consciousness thus is not inherent, accidental, nor benign: the condition is presented here as both imposed and fraught with psychic danger.” (Ref.)

The socio-cultural existence is defined by a racial hierarchy that includes hostility and suspicion, subtle or outright exclusion, a life lived in uncertainty and guardedness. The individual’s identity, both novels argue, is also affected by the historical fact that harm extended beyond the individual to whole family structures and networks of kin. Only when you understand the legacy of historical trauma and merge it into your own sense of self will it cease to afflict you. Past and present need to be integrated to mend a disjointed self.

***

As luck would have it, the Octavia E. Butler Magnet School‘s library celebrates an OEB science fiction festival the next day. Previously Washington Middle School, the institution’s new name (since Fall 2022) honors its famous alumna. Since I have to avoid crowded indoor settings during the pandemic (it is NOT over, folks!), I cannot join the activities, but manage to get a few photos in a ventilated hallway. New generations are introduced to a role model that leaves you in awe for the obstacles overcome.

On to Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena, CA, where Butler is buried. It is a peaceful place with beautiful old tree growth, als long as you ignore the coyotes that they warn you about, patrolling in packs, by some reports.

Butler’s grave marker is unobtrusive, not easy to find. The inscription is one of her most frequently cited insights, from the book The Parabel of the Sower (1993), where she turned her attention to climate catastrophe and the subsequent militarization of state and rapidly shrinking chances of survival. Set in 2024, it seems utterly prescient in retrospect, its descriptions outlining the contours of our lived or soon to be lived reality.

Allow me one short digression, and some speculation, you’ll see why in a minute. Butler’s last resting place sports numerous strange grave stones, if you can call it that, artificial tree stumps carved with the emblems of a maul, wedge, axe and dove, as well as markers inscribed with repeat phrases, the Latin motto “Dum Tacet Clamet” which translates to “though silent, he speaks.” A bit of research brought me to Omaha, Nebraska, where one Joseph Cullen Root founded The Woodmen of the World (WOW) in the early 1890s. It was essentially a mutual aid society, a beneficiary order that provided death benefits and grave stones to its members by essentially passing around a hat.

That turned out not to work exactly, and so shifted thirty years later to become a regular life insurance company. By 1901 it was the largest fraternal organization in Oregon with 140 camps and a membership of 15,000. Membership conditions: you had to prove yourself in various ways, be older than 16 and – White. A subdivision, Women of Woodcraft, is captured in this photograph.

Women of Woodcraft (likely a drill team), ca. 1910. Object ID: 2011.033.001; Copyright Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center

Would Butler be turning in her grave, surrounded by valkyries like these? Likely not. She would point to the importance of the idea of mutual aid, and to change: if you look at the website of the WoodmenLife Insurance Company that grew out of WOW, you find images of Black, Asian, Brown and other faces among the White beneficiaries, carefully assembled to stress diversity. It might only be on the surface, who can tell, but change nonetheless. And in any case – she might stay silent, but her work speaks to millions, in contrast to the wood people of the world….

***

This brings me to the reason why I, an old White European woman who can take privilege seemingly for granted, am so preoccupied with a Black writer who envisioned change and imbued her heroines with strength and refusal to give up, forever pursuing humanistic goals. She instills hope.

I feel like living in an era where, here as well as internationally, change is pursued or co-opted to move us backwards. The powers that be (or wannabe) want to affirm or re-install structures – and I mean STRUCTURES – that go beyond individual racist impulses or acts, to dominate on top of a hierarchy and use that dominance to extract riches and suffering. These forces are insisting that “differences”exists, be they racial, religious, gender, sexuality or simply cultural. Don’t ever believe in equality! Put a value label to these differing categories, with some “better,” others “worse,” with the dominant category, of course, being the superior one. This valuation is extended to an entire group, depreciating not just single humans, but a whole category. “Negative valuation imposed upon that group becomes the legitimization and justification for hostility and aggression. The inner purpose of this process is social benefit, self-valorization, and the creation of a sense of identity for the one through the denigration of the other. And as is evident, the generation and expression of hierarchy run through it from beginning to end.” (Ref.)

Whether you look at the Nazi play book, present-day Hungary, Russia, India or other authoritarian movements, these principles are at work every single time, with the content attached to the “difference” changing according to local need du jour and historical hierarchies, including colonialism. In addition, progressive movements so often weaken themselves by intra-group strife instead of collaborative fighting against a common enemy. I can think of no better explanation of those principles than in Arundhati Roy’s speech last week at the Swedish Academy.

It is so easy to lose hope, to withdraw by feeling overwhelmed, helpless, powerless to achieve true equality. And yet there was a person who faced obstacles beyond description, who believed in hope and the power of community.

Here is someone who put it in words better than I ever could, Jesmyn Ward, a formidable writer in her own right:

“This is how Butler finds her way in a world that perpetually demoralizes, confounds, and browbeats: she writes her way to hope. This is how she confronts darkness and persists in the face of her own despair. This is the real gift of her work… in inviting her readers to engage with darker realities, to immerse themselves in worlds more disturbing and complex than our own, she asks readers to acknowledge the costs of our collective inaction, our collective bowing to depravity, to tribalism, to easy ignorance and violence. Her primary characters refuse all of that. Her primary characters refuse to deny the better aspects of their humanity. They insist on embracing tenderness and empathy, and in doing so, they invite readers to realize that we might do so as well. Butler makes hope possible.”

Against the backdrop of a legacy of trauma she provided us with a legacy of optimism, that the lessons of successful collective action and resistance in the past will guide us to the right kind of change in the future, with the help of courageous and resourceful Black women.

Art on the Road: The Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.

Art, Literature
Mar 13, 2023
4 Comments

Ursula K LeGuin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986)

LeGuin’s essay on narrative theory is a masterful example of analytic prose describing different types of stories, explaining how and why archetypal heroic tales long held place of honor in our collective imagination. The analysis is interspersed with first person, sometimes lyrical, sometimes funny contemplations by a gatherer who with wit and expressed contempt compares stories of “killing” with stories of “life,” namely stories of origin, myths of creation, trickster stories, folktales or novels. These latter narratives can be seen as a carrier bag, the author argues, gathering up and distributing, saving and sharing, in a non-linear fashion and not necessarily tied to a hero who needs to prove himself in violent combat, linearly leading to victory or defeat, forever memorializing acts of war and destruction.

Barbara Hepworth *Assembly of Sea Form, 1972*

We need alternative stories, and we also need places that hold them, carrier bags of diverse kinds, museums being among them. At least that is what I thought when I approached the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena,CA, wondering if it was empty enough for me to dare enter, masked and all. I was in luck, on a late Thursday afternoon, after a Covid-imposed three-year hiatus of such visits, and, frankly, emotionally roiled by the simple fact that I would see art, and art new to me, in the original. So take subsequent ruminations with a grain of salt, they were affected by giddiness, no doubt.

Barbara Hepworth *Four-Square (Walk Through)* 1966

Parallels between the museum as a vessel and my own carrier bag, a small, beloved backpack given to me by a dear friend years ago, were easily drawn. Both are unpretentious, nicely segmented, and filled with an abundance of seemingly unrelated items. This is of course where the similarity ends – the museum scores with offering an impressive variety of art across several centuries, while my bag simply holds things that might or might not have predictable value. (You never know when that flashlight or that mini umbrella, iron reserve stale candies or a spare camera is needed.)

While the museum’s wings exposit orderly, period- or artistic style-based curations, chaos rules in Heuer’s pouch. Most importantly, the Norton Simon collection contains a mix of masterpieces, as well as an overall remarkable number of lesser, but important works that speak of the eponymous collector who knew what he liked, knew how to acquire it, and knew that the lack of specialization would make this a more, rather than less interesting collection. In contrast to your’s truly who is also an omnivore with regard to liking things, he knew what he was doing – and had the funds to do it.

***

Formerly the Pasadena Art Museum, the building was constructed by the architectural firm of Ladd and Kelsey, with the interior architecture changed in the 1970s by Craig Ellwood, after the industrialist Norton Simon had taken over, changes lost in the 1990s after Frank Gehry redesigned the interior with Simon’s widow, Jennifer Jones Simon, overseeing the renovations in tribute to her late husband. The outside is beautiful: a curvilinear complex of numerous modules, tiled with 115,000 Edith Heath-designed custom brick red and onyx glazed 5 x 15-inch tiles that reflect the light and colors of the surrounding.

The building is surrounded by a sculpture garden with a small pond and outdoors seating area and cafe. The inside contains major exhibition halls lit with skylights and a theater on the main floor, a basement devoted to the Asian art collection, which I did not visit.

You approach the building by running the gamut between rather tall, imposing males, bronze castings of multiple Rodin sculptures. Have your pick: expressions of fury, defiance, status, pride, or vanity in one’s intellectual or physical prowess are all on offer,

Auguste Rodin *The Burghers of Calais*, 1884-95

Auguste Rodin Monument to Balzac, 1897 — Jean de Finnes, Vetu, 1884-95

although the latter might be short-lived, as the shadow tells a foreboding story of crooked aging.

Auguste Rodin *Pierre de Wissant, Nude*, 1884-95

A fitting welcoming committee, one might argue, for the founder of this institution as it now exists, Norton Winfred Simon, a wealthy industrialist who discovered art in his 40s and never turned back from collecting it with a passion. Simon was born in 1907 in Portland, OR, into a family of European Jewish immigrants, learning business practices in his father’s store Simon sells for less, a profitable business that allowed Meyer Simon to build a big house in Portland Heights, and Lillian Simon to drive the first ever Cadillac in Portland, by all reports. (I am summarizing what I learned among others from a biography by Suzanne Muchnic, Odd Man In: Norton Simon and the Pursuit of Culture and from a 2009 lecture by the museum’s then chief curator, Carol Togneri.)

Equipped with a photographic memory and an uncanny ability to do complicated math in his head, the young Simon was fascinated by and stellar at acquisition: a life-long preoccupation developed with finding bankrupt, or weak, or poorly managed businesses, buying them on the cheap and turning them around with harsh reigns, radical cuts and minute personal decision making until he’d extract enormous profits. A 6 week stint as a college student at Berkeley, once the family had relocated to San Francisco after the death of his mother when he was only 14, was ended by Simon with the declaration that he could do without the education. Which turned out to be true. He became a tycoon, rising from scrap metal collecting business to building the Hunt Foods & Industries empire, quietly buying undervalued stock and winding his way onto Board of Directors to ultimately swallowing organizations whole, extending to truck fleets, real estate, cosmetic giants, and the publishing business in later years.

Simon the art collector was clearly driven by more than Simon the businessman’s lust for acquisition and success, but the methods with which he built his collection were inseparable from those used to create his business empires. He was a demanding boss to his staff and advisors, requiring presence at all times and expecting tolerance for micro-managing each and every decision. He was a hard bargainer once he had caught the scent of something that he thought would enrich his collection. The purchases ranged from individual art pieces to the take-over of entire inventories, like the Duveen Brothers Inc. in New York for $15 million. Over the years he amassed close to 7000 pieces – but was as ruthless in selling what didn’t fit, as he was in using unusual methods to buying what he wanted (reports of episodes of aggressive, if not scandalous behavior during auctions abound.) Sales produced enormous profits – in turn, he was one of the first to establish several tax-exempt foundations to buy art for public display. Before he had a museum, he created a “museum without walls” that loaned works from the foundation’s collection that enabled traveling exhibitions.

His involvement in, build-up of and generosity towards the L.A. art scene was appreciated, and the fact acknowledged, that he offered one of the most important collections of the West Coast, but he did not necessarily make only friends. Controversy raged when he took over the museum we are looking at here, then the Pasadena Art Museum deeply in debt, and badly managed in his eyes. Supporters of the failed museum who saw their donated art sold at auction because Simon did not think they belonged in the collection were in uproar, with the remaining Board members resigning and former Trustees bringing a civil suit “charging Simon with cannibalizing the permanent collection and manipulating the museum’s assets for personal gain,” a suit which they lost. (Ref.)

The museum itself is no stranger to lawsuits either – there was a protracted multimillion-dollar battle over two Renaissance masterworks—”Adam” and “Eve”—painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder and acquired by the museum in the early 1970s. The art was looted by the Nazis after their invasion of Holland, and the heir to the robbed art dealer sued multiple agencies, the Dutch government and the museum included. She lost her case after it was heard eventually at the 9th U.s.Circuit Court of Appeals 5 years ago, based on a legal technicality of U.S. Courts not being allowed to invalidate the official acts of the Dutch Government. “The act of state doctrine,” limits the ability of U.S. courts, in certain instances, from determining the legality of the acts of a sovereign state within that sovereign’s own territory and is often applied in appropriations disputes which immunizes foreign nations from the jurisdiction of U.S. courts when certain conditions are satisfied. (9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, No. 16-58308.)The art stayed at the Norton Simon Museum.

The 1970s saw a few few years of personal upheaval for Simon, a divorce after 37 years of marriage, preceded by the suicide of one of his sons, a failed bid to be elected as a Republican for the Senate, a whirlwind courtship and marriage to a movie star, Jennifer Jones, and eventually being afflicted with Guillain Barre, a neurological disorder that confined him to a wheelchair. Why there isn’t a Hollywood movie depicting this quintessential (not quite)rags-to-riches American biography is a mystery to me.

***

The collection is truly impressive, much of it focussed on beauty rather than art historical education or particular fame or theoretical richness, although some famous paintings are present and admirably placed without ado or spot-lighting among the rest of the art (like Rembrandt’s Portrait of a boy – Titus, for example.) The absence of fanfare allows for an unbiased approach and appreciation of those who do not know the genesis of these paintings. Distinguished paintings by pre-Renaissance and Renaissance artists, Old Masters, Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, an extensive assembly of South Asian sculpture; monumental bronzes by Auguste Rodin and Henry Moore; bronze studies of ballet dancers and related works on paper by Edgar Degas are all placed in ways that signal the collector’s focus. As it turns out, during his life time Simon would often rearrange the curation by himself during visits, curious what would emerge in novel placements.

Rembrandt van Rijn *Portrait of a Boy*, 1655-60 (Titus)

If we apply LeGuin’s distinction between literary fiction’s stories that “contain sticks, spears, and swords, the things to bash and poke an hit with, the long hard things,” and those about “things to put things in, the container for the thing contained” to the visual art on offer, Simon gifted us with a few types of the former and very, very many of the latter. Just as an example of the ancient hero worship template, we have Peter Paul Ruben’s 1618 painting of Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar. Plenty of long hard things to poke and bash with, plenty of embedding in a cultural scaffold that needs to be known in detail to makes sense of the scene opening up in front of you (predictably triggering my “oh, another Where’s Waldo?” association that tends to rise up when I see these kinds of mythological depictions.

Peter Paul Rubens *Meleager and Atalanta and the Hunt of the Calydonian Boar*, c. 1618-19

As an example of visual narratives that rely on your emotional reaction, rather than your cognitive assessment or general learnedness, we have many to choose from, including renaissance still lives, some fine Lionel Feiningers (I’m partial – here a street scene from Weimar:)

Lyonel Feininger *Near the Palace* 1914-1915

and the one I eventually settled on, painted by American painter Sam Francis in 1956: Basel Mural I (and two fragments of Basel Mural III.) These paintings are containers that invite you to fill them with new kinds of stories, offering to hold your spontaneous experience. You project your interpretation, if one emerges, or simply your feelings about the beauty that surrounds you into the empty or, perhaps more accurately, quiet spaces of these vessels, spaced that leave enough room next to the configured patterns to hold your connection and absorb it. The beauty loosens something, granting the freedom to abandon demands for deciphering. You can immerse yourself and be moved, without fear of appearing moronic to self or others, because you are unfamiliar with the canon.

Released from analysis you tend to be more open for surprises – the discovery, for example, that in the clouds of primary colors of red, blue, yellow hovering over the white negative spaces all kinds of dots and spots and sparks of other colors hide, including purples and turquoise darkening into some shade of cyan, joyful hints of a diverse universe to be found by looking closely. New stories unfold – well, I am describing my own reaction to a painter I had never seen before outside of print.

More information and exposure will be available to people in this area when a new exhibition, organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with the Sam Francis Foundation, opens on April 9th at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum: Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing, organized by yet another Portland-linked person, Richard Speer, who also wrote a book about the Painter: The Space of Effusion: Sam Francis in Japan.

Sam Francis Basel Mural I Excerpt and Basel Mural III, 1956 – 58, Fragment

Norton Simon, who died in 1993, was after beauty, and knew when he found it. He was also aware what beauty does with people, what it teaches them and how they are able to change under its tutelage. To accomplish those interactions was the core goal, and ruthless methods of amassing the necessary funds can be forgiven, in my book, when building a brilliant collection, and endowing organizations like the museum to display and share it, serve that goal.

“Still there are seeds to be gathered and room in the bag of stars.”

The collector would have probably agreed with this closing sentence of Ursula LeGuin’s essay, forever searching for the seeds of beauty, perhaps these days collecting them in bags among the stars, riding on the extraordinary Bird in Space by Brancusi, one of the central sculptures in the museum’s collection. We are quite fortunate to be able to experience what he left behind.

Constantin Brancusi Bird in Space 1931 Excerpt

The Norton Simon Museum

411 W. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91105

Hours: 12-5 pm Sunday Monday, Thursday, Friday. 12-7 pm Saturday. Closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Detailed visit information here.

Peter Voulkos, *Black Butte Divide 1958*

Muddy Considerations.

I’m not asking you to walk with me today. Rather, sit back and let me regale you with a tale of failure: the failure to hike to a seemingly easy destination, Cape Falcon at the Pacific coast.

The sign should have been a warning, the generously left behind walking sticks not been ignored. The path seemed perfectly fine, until it wasn’t. Landslides that had felled trees could be ignored, climbing over the trunks was not a major effort.

But then the mud set in, in depth and fluidity that you really could not walk on it without sinking in to the ankles. So you had to find stepping stones, utilize the root systems of the old growth trees or make side detours, only to find your way back to a path that was now covered with mall rivulets of running water.

Jumping puddles….

I gave up halfway in, saying good bye to the dream of seeing the Pacific ocean from high up, off cliffs that I had never visited before.

Let me hasten to add that of course it was not a failure. It was an adventure in a damp, dripping, moist, muddy universe that provide innumerable shades of intensely saturated greens, gentle rain that was barely felt, squishy noises that echoed delightful childhood memories of stomping around in your ladybug rubber boots.

The forest verdant. Wet. Full of new growth, pretending spring was already here.

It was also a reminder of how privileged we are to live at the threshold of so many different micro climates, the dry, steep cliffs of the Gorge on Wednesday, the temperate rainforest at the coast on Friday, all easily reached with a short drive.

Failure, as a concept, was on my mind because of two things I read recently. Both told stories about the consequences of failure, with both acknowledging that our society is particularly, grossly even, success oriented, with success structurally reserved for a few. Failure, then, can lead to compensating mechanisms that prove to be intensely destructive. At least that was the upshot of a thoughtful, well argued article by Tom Nichols in the Atlantic, The Narcissism of the Angry Young Men. The essay discusses the misfits who become killers, sometimes mass murderers,

“show(ing) them, in general, to be young losers who failed to mature, and whose lives revolved around various grievances, insecurities, and heroic fantasies…. But these young males, no matter how “quiet,” are filled with an astonishing level of enraged resentment and entitlement about their roles as men, and they seek rationalizations for inflicting violence on a society they think has both ignored and injured them. They become what the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger called “radical losers,” unsuccessful men who feel that they have been denied their dominant role in society and who then channel their blunted male social impulses toward destruction.”

Highly recommended reading, which, in my case, was paired with an essay by Costica Bradatan, a Romanian immigrant and Professor of Humanities at Texas Tech University discussing his new book, “In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility.”

In a tongue in cheek assessment of his own predilections he writes:

“America’s noisy worshiping of success, its mania for ratings and rankings, the compulsive celebration of perfection in everything served only as a facade. Behind the optimistic veneer there lies an extraordinary fear of failure: the horror of going down and going under, of losing face and respectability, of exclusion and marginalization. It’s not success but failure — the savage fear of it — that lies at the heart of the American dream. The country is custom made for an aficionado of failure like me.”

The book is devoted to four major historical figures actively courting failure in their pursuit of meaning and transformation (or religious transcendence.) I have only read the chapter on Simone Weil which is available here, and was much taken by Bradatan’s narrative approach (and skill) and not at all by his conclusions. There is something about the proscription to be humble, to let failure lead you inwards on some self discovery journey that rubs me as too convenient in a society that is set to clamp down on anger and resistance provoked by injustice. (I must also admit that I will never be able to be a neutral reader on the saintliness of Ghandi, one of the four figures discussed in this book. Remember, Gandhi advised the Jews in Germany to offer passive resistance to the Nazi regime—and to give up their own lives as sacrifices. He told the Jews to pray for Adolf Hitler. “If even one Jew acted thus,’ he wrote, ‘he would salve his self respect and leave an example which, if it became infectious, would save the whole of Jewry and leave a rich heritage to mankind besides.”(Ref.)

Yes, excessive anger leading to mass shootings is catastrophic. But humble cowing in front of oppressive forces that promise enlightenment and salvation if you keep your voice down and obey, is not desirable either. There are too many requests for being humble in the air right now and I always wonder about the underlying societal frictions. I do believe it is important to experience failure (and not shelter kids from that experience, in particular) and learn from it, perhaps grow through it, but let’s not tie it to humility beyond curbing our narcissistic streaks. There’s a slippery slope from humility to servility to conformity and consent, in my not so humble opinion.

One last glimpse of Friday’s wondrous views: neither humble nor proud, the elks were taking it easy, some as mud-caked as their photographer by the end of the day. Pretty amazing.