Brown, Bischoff, Fabritius, Vermeer

Eastside Road, May 30, 2013—

I MADE A COMMENT over on Facebook the other day that I've been thinking about on and off since:

I think culture is primarily local — think Vienna in Mozart's day, or London in Johnson's (not to say Shakespeare's!), and Paris at various times. Some of the local cultures develop intense moments; others no doubt simply simmer along comfortably and sustainably. But entertainment as we know it today is global corporatism, like agriculture, and war, and any number of other disasters. Oddly, the Internet supports this global tendency to a degree, but it also facilitates the thing I'm calling local; there are "localities" uniting me [with my readers and] commentators though we live thousands of miles apart.

Yesterday we drove down to San Francisco to see two favorite paintings, here from the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Two of the finest paintings I know, painted within twenty years and ten or twelve years of one another, by painters who must have known one another. To Vienna and London and Paris, add Delft, where Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) and Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) both lived toward the middle of the seventeenth century.

The Goldfinch (1654) seems to be one of the last of Fabritius's paintings, of which few have come down to us. Fabritius was killed, only 32 years old, in the great gunpowder explosion of October 12, 1654, which destroyed a quarter of the city of Delft, including his studio and paintings. Thirty-two years old! He was, you might say, the Schubert of painting. He had studied at Rembrandt's studio in Amsterdam before his unlucky decision to move to Delft. He was certainly taking painting into a new direction. I don't know why he painted this pet goldfinch; even whether it is in fact a finished painting as we see it, or a fragment of a larger work (it's about the size of a sheet of typing paper). I only know it is enigmatic, neutral in mood (to me), beautifully composed, and — seen in the flesh, not through reproduction — amazing for its application of paint to capture light, solidity, texture. The white highlights on the brass rails; the striking yellow-god on the wing, the delicate tracery of the chain… and the marvelous texture of the plaster wall, a triumph of abstraction…

Hardly anything need be said about The Girl with the Pearl Earring (ca. 1665). Hardly anything can be said with any certainty. It is most likely not a portrait, but what was called in its day, by the Dutch, a tronie, an unidentified model, usually costumed, painted half-length or, more often, as here, closer to, concentrating on the face and its expression.

It is possible that its painter, Johannes Vermeer, studied under Fabritius. He was known and respected by the members of the Delft guild of painters, serving as head of the guild on four occasions. He worked slow, experimenting with light in a number of interiors whose walls are often hung with paintings or maps, in which milkmaids or astronomers or ladies are engaged in enigmatic occupation or preoccupied with unknowable thoughts.

It's stupid to single out one Vermeer, so I'll single out two: The Milkmaid and The Girl with the Pearl Earring. The latter has become even more universally known, I suppose, since the publication of Tracy Chevalier's novel of the same title, and the 2003 film made from it. As I stood gazing at the painting yesterday two women behind me were discussing it, one of them helpfully explaining many details of its production, meaning, and setting; she apparently took novel and film for absolute fact. They are pure fiction: but the film has marvelous views of Delft, and some haunting imagery of the studio and, especially, the grinding of pigments. The blue of the turban is lapis lazuli ground to powder: these paintings are rare and beautiful partly because they are literally made of rare and beautiful things.

---

Upstairs from the paintings from the Mauritshuis (which remain on view only through June 2) there's a striking installation of three paintings by Joan Brown (1938-1990), a seated Swimmer by Manuel Neri (b. 1930), and a pensive Bather by Elmer Bischoff (1916-1991), all San Francisco Bay Area artists. (Neri is a sculptor; Brown and Bischoff were painters.) I have always felt the Bay Area of, say, the years since World War II has constituted a cultural energy-spot that can be ranked with the communities mentioned above, particularly in the visual arts but with literature and music not that far behind.

Joan Brown's painting of a girl, from about 1960, is an early canvas among her considerable output, but she was an early master. It was marvelous to contemplate this strong but muted painting with the enormous poster based on Vermeer's painting available simply by turning my head — and with the recent memory of the Vermeer to have for ready comparison. The similarity of mood, though not of execution, is unmistakeable, I think.

The degree of community here! Brown and Neri were married; Brown was the sitter to Neri's sculptor of the seated swimmer; their son Noel is depicted in her painting Noel and Bob, hanging nearby. Noel's eyes repeat Joan's, as Neri paints them on his plaster sculpture. Walking about Delft, by the canals, after dark, on a quiet night, you can be forgiven for thinking you know a little bit what the town may have been like in the 17th century. I know better, I think, what existed among Brown and Neri and Bischoff, and no doubt their work speaks more quickly to me because I knew them and their voices, let alone the streets they walked. They were — and Neri still is — deep, contemplative, yet sociable artists, living the experiences we all do, responding to them, and to their predecessors, with the greater insight gained through knowledge, discipline, patience, and commitment. We are all so incredibly lucky such men and women live and work among us.

• de Young Museum, through Sunday 9:30 to 5:15, Friday to 8:45 pm; Dutch Paintings from the Mauritshuis closing June 2; John Kennedy Drive, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco

The Right Economy

Eastside Road, January 3, 2013—

•John de Graaf and David K. Batker: What's the Economy For, Anyway? (Bloomsbury Press, 2011, ISBN 978-1-60819-510-7>

This is a fine book, I think. It's entertaining, informative, and provocative: you can't ask for much more than that. The authors base their discussion on the assumption that a national economy exists to provide, in the words of one Gifford Pinchot,

the greatest good, for the greatest number, over the longest run.

This assumption is married quickly to another, found in the second paragraph of our Declaration of Independence:

…all men are created equal, … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

No one, it seems to me, can deny that this means that the federal government is therefor under orders to provide our physical security and a social context in which we remain individually at liberty, free and enabled to pursue a happy life.

The objections will come quickly, and they have to do with definition, that cliché of a devil lurking in all details. "Liberty": I'll let Luciano De Crescenzo define that:

the simultaneous desire not to be oppressed oneself and not to oppress others.

Luciano De Crescenzo (tr. Avril Bardoni), Thus Spake Bellavista (Grove Press, 1989), p. 107

(I'll get to a discussion of De Crescenzo's equally fine book next time.)

But what did Thomas Jefferson mean by "the pursuit of Happiness," capital in the original? Maybe he was influenced by John Locke, whose formula was at various times "life, liberty, and estate"; or "life, liberty, health, and indolency of body; and the possession of outward things." (I find these quotes here.) Theories of the organization of civil society were much in the air in the last third of the 18th century, when monarchy was giving way to democracy, and intelligent, educated men — they were nearly all men, in those days — read, discussed, and reformulated their ideas concerning civil society and its government thoughtfully as well as passionately.

Far back in history, near the beginnings of such discussions, stands always the shade of Epicurus (341-279 BC), whose philosophy famously argues that a contented life depends on freedom from fear, absence of pain, moderation in pursuit of pleasure, and common sense in place of superstition. Epicurus's teaching was quickly given a bad reputation by the early Christians, because he directly attacked the idea of god-determined influences on human activity.

(The persistence of beliefs in the supernatural is one of the besetting evils of our time, like all other times; but that's a subject best left to another discussion.)

Locke, Rousseau, and Jefferson clearly considered Epicurus's teaching carefully in their own discussions of civil society, which led to the (literally) revolutionary idea that it should be governed not by divine right but by the people themselves, as stated famously in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

(or, as Lincoln later formulated it more concisely, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people".)

Tranquility, welfare, pursuit of happiness: they, it's argued, define the "good" component of Pinchot's formula; and a national economy exists to provide for it. Not to provide it; to provide for it, by regulating economic systems so as to allow individuals to engage in their own individual pursuits of happness.

De Graaf and Batker investigate the concept of societies directing themselves to providing for happiness, turning to Bhutan's implementation of Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Product as an index of the state of the economy. GNH is measured, to the extent that as subjective a quality as "happiness" can be measured, by requesting individual citizens to respond to carefully written and weighted surveys.

The survey measures responses to thirteen "domains":

Overall Satisfaction With Life
Positive Affect
Mental Well-Being
Health
Time Balance
Community Vitality
Social Support
Access to Education, Arts & Culture
Neighborhood
Environment
Governance
Material Well-Being
Work

You can see one of these surveys, and take it yourself (thus contributing a tiny bit more to its statistical value), here. I took it: my own scores range between a low of 54 ("Governance") and 90 (Social Support), making me happier than the average U.S. respondent on all but two Domains (Access to Education, Arts & Culture and Neighborhood, probably because I live in a rural setting), but below the international average in only one Domain (Time Balance: a typical American complaint).

It turns out an individual's happiness, as defined by spontaneous definitions gathered from great numbers of people living in greatly differing societies, has a lot to do with security, health, freedom from stress, and availability of community. (De Crescenzo neatly lays this out on a coordinate system, whose abscissa is a line from Hate to Love and whose ordinate is one from Power to Liberty. But that's for another day.)

Now you can object that all this is subjective, unquantifiable; that the whole point of Economics is that it's the study of something inherently measurable, quantifiable. But the argument of this book is that to the extent that that is true it deals with only the materialistic aspects of organized society: while government should unquestionably address the organization (and, ahem, regulation) of quantifiable components of the public good, it must not neglect other ones less easily defined or measured.

The evolution of democratic society has been characterized by its address to the increasing complexity and opacity of the systems impinging on individual liberty and the public good. Technology, finance, corporate trading, transportation and communication have all contributed to this increased complexity and opacity, and the great increases in population and in the physical size of nations have contributed further.

This of course has led to a quandary: a society organized and governed for the greatest good for the greatest number, and over the long run, can only be achieved in so complex a context through a great deal of social engineering — engineering and maintenance of finance, health, housing, security, agriculture, occupation and leisure activity, education, the arts.

This can be achieved to an amazingly successful degree, though it has proved easier to achieve in relatively small and ethnically (or culturally) simple societies. Bhutan, the Scandinavian countries, and Netherlands do pretty well, de Graaf and Batker find.

The United States began to address these matters seriously in the early Twentieth Century, though you could argue that Lincoln's pursuit of the Thirteenth Amendment was an earlier declaration of "greatest good for greatest number" as a governmental obligation. President Taft, of all people, argued — in July 1910! — that

The American people have found out that there is such a thing as exhausting the capital of one's health and constitution, and that two or three months' vacation after the hard and nervous strain to which one is subjected during the Autumn and Spring are necessary in order to enable one to continue his work the next year with that energy and effectiveness which it ought to have.

Source here

It took the Great Depression to begin a real effort to train the national economy more toward GNH than GDP, through FDR's New Deal. The most compelling pages of What's the Economy For, Anyway? are its last three chapters: "When (or How) Good Went Bad," the first of these, traces the attacks on and erosion of the institutions of New Deal social engineering, singing the familiar litany of Senator McCarthy, Vietnam, the Kennedy and King assassinations, Watergate, Reaganism, and Clinton's misguided economic policies, and deregulation.

Chapter 12, detailing the crisis of 2008 in housing, banking, and finance, is pretty depressing reading, but as clear and at times even entertaining as these gifted popularizers can make it.

But the real value of What's the Economy For, Anyway?, I think, is that it ends with a practical and optimistic list of specific acts that could resolve both the present crisis and the continuous problem of instituting "an economic Bill of Rights," rights specifically listed by President Roosevelt in an address on January 11, 1944:

The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;

The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;

The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;

The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;

The right of every family to a decent home;

The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;

The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;

The right to a good education.

All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.

America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens.

Source here

De Graaf and Batker list 41 specific actions, distributed among ten general areas*, that could and should be addressed by government. Some are simple, like mandating three weeks' paid vacation for every working American, ensuring physical education classes for students, banning corporate campaign contributions, funding railroads. (Simple to define and execute; not necessarily simple to arrive at through the political process.) Others are more complex, like rewriting the tax code. But all are simply and coherently stated, and should be addressed by everyone engaged in the political process.

Addressing these points will not only move the country to a more just and prosperous society; it will also provide employment and, ultimately, lower the financial cost of governance.

Some of the 41 points might be best addressed at the State or local levels of government, though with Federal encouragement and funding; but most need to be addressed wholly at the federal level. Given the current political situation there's not much chance these points would be negotiated; given our present Congress, there's not much chance many of its members would even read them — though it's only the work of a quarter hour.

Still, we have to make the attempt. I'm going to try to condense this post to something the size of an op-ed piece; and I'm going to write President Obama and my representatives in Congress to see what they think of these points. I'll post any follow-ups here in the future.

(Thanks, Thérèse, for bringing this book to my attention)
__________________

*The ten "general areas":

1: Give us time
2: Improve life possibilities from birth
3: Build a healthy nation
4: Enlarge the middle class
5: Value natural capital
6: Fix taxes and subsidies
7: Strengthen the financial system
8: Build a new energy infrastructure
9: Strengthen community and improve mobility
10: Improve governance

cultiver le jardin…

Excellenz von Schubert

YES, VOLTAIRE. It's from the close of Candide — now where did I put that book? — describing the moment when the eponymous hero of the book, finally disillusioned, gives up his quest for philosophy, turns his back on his tedious mentor Pangloss and his tedium… but let Voltaire tell it:

“Pangloss disait quelquefois à Candide: ‘Tous les événements sont enchaînés dans le meilleur des mondes possibles; car enfin, si vous n’aviez pas été chassé d’un beau château à grands coups de pied dans le derrière pour l’amour de Mlle Cunégonde, si vous n’aviez pas été mis à l’Inquisition, si vous n’aviez pas couru l’Amérique à pied, si vous n’aviez pas donné un bon coup d’épée au baron, si vous n’aviez pas perdu tous vos moutons du bon pays d’Eldorado, vous ne mangeriez pas ici des cédrats confits et des pistaches.’

‘Cela est bien dit,’ répondit Candide, ‘mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.’”

Pangloss frequently told Candide: 'everything's connected in this best of all possible worlds; for finally, if you hadn't been chased from a beautiful chateau with considerable kicks on your behind for the love of Mlle Cunégonde, if you hadn't been sent to the Inquisition, if you hadn't run through America on foot, if you hadn't given a good sword-slap to the baron, if you hadn't lost all your sheep in that fine country of Eldorado, you wouldn't be here eating pistachios and candied citron.'

'All very well said,' replied Candide, 'but we must cultivate our garden.'

Voltaire wasn't talking about a garden of his own, whether in Switzerland or France. Wikipedia provides a pretty good take on the quote (I recommend the entire entry, and that on Voltaire):

The conclusion of the novella, in which Candide finally dismisses his tutor's optimism, leaves unresolved what philosophy the protagonist is to accept in its stead. This element of Candide has been written about voluminously, perhaps above all others. The conclusion is enigmatic and its analysis is contentious.

---

self-portrait, San José

WE SPENT THE WEEKEND in the improbable city of San José, which is greatly changed in the last forty years. (The addition of the acute accent to its name is one of those changes.) With over a million inhabitants it is now California's third city (after Los Angeles and San Diego), and the heart of the city, where we spent most of our time, is an odd survival of the old architecture and street-grid in the midst — well, there is no "midst" here; the city reminds me of Houston, where empty office-skyscrapers thrust up from blocks of bungalows in a wide-spread scatter fully dependent on the automobile.

We were there to attend the state finals in the mock trial competition organized by the Constitutional Rights Foundation. Our grandson Henry was participating, his high school (Laytonville) having won the Mendocino county competition.

We found the trials absorbing, Lindsey and I. We watched four of them, Laytonville arguing for the prosecution twice and the defense twice; and then a fifth one, in which Hillsdale High (San Mateo county) bested the San Francisco School of Performing Arts to win the state. (The national competition is set for May 6-8 in Philadelphia.)

Each high school fields two teams, for defense and prosecution, enacting a single murder case, the details of which are scripted but the arguments of which are apparently left to the teams. A real judge presides; the "jury" comprises a number of legal professionals who score each team member as to effectiveness. (The judge's decision is immaterial to the final rating of the student legal teams.)

There's a good deal of theater in all this, of course: the drama inherent in any courtroom scene, and that of the students as they learn, individually and as a team, from their mistakes and from their opponents; as they respond to completely different styles of questions from the judges; as they meet, best, or fail the crises developing from all these courtroom interactions.

To me, though, the greatest dimension of this theater was the dialectic of Laytonville and San José. Laytonville is an unincorporated community of a thousand souls, an hour's drive from the county seat of Ukiah. Our son and his wife run the local feed store, help out with the rodeo, and interact with much of the community. "I'm comfortable there," he says, "because it's the only place I've seen that's like Berkeley" — the Berkeley of the 1960s and '70s, he means — "all kinds of people, all of them interesting, all of them respecting one another's privacy."

Maybe that shouldn't be in attributive quotes; maybe I'm writing my own observation. Laytonville's citizens seem a deceptive lot, rustic and isolated but intelligent and quirky. The highschool kids are plugged into the world, of course, fiercely tap-tap-tapping at their cellphones, Facebooking and Tweeting. But the difference between their demeanor and that of their first opponents, from Marin county, seemed to speak a grand subject. Marin county per capita income is over $90,000; Mendocino's, and Laytonville's, is less than $20,000. The Marin kids, from Tamalpais High, came out strong, assertive, composed, confident; Laytonville, prosecuting a very weak case, struggled to find their footing.

Affluence, security, confidence: these are no doubt wonderful things, but I'm not sure they necessarily make good citizens, particularly in the context of a society that seems to overvalue individualism and commodity. The Laytonville kids can garden and hunt, ride and build. They use and enjoy the Internet, but for them I think real community trumps virtual community. They're competent and helpful, and my money's on them in case of catastrophe; I'm not sure the complex global community of banking, law, and marketing can survive as well.

---

RETURNED SUNDAY NIGHT to Eastside Road, we entertained eight or ten friends with white wine, Alsatian onion tarts, Lindsey's absolutely delicious Savarin, and sight-readings of two of Gertrude Stein's little plays: What Happened a Play and Ladies Voices. Stein's plays, as I've written elsewhere,

…are famously overheard conversation, but they have an integrity, stylistically and theatrically, that comes from a single observer's point of view (far-reachingly intelligent though it be), filtered through a single writer's editorial and expressive technique.

I've always imagined those overheard conversations took place among settings exactly like Sunday evening's, gatherings of old friends and new, pleasingly fed and judiciously lubricated, comfortably seated and sheltered; and it doesn't hurt that we're in the country; it's quiet outside; and you can see the stars.

A gathering like this is something of a garden, I think. A courtroom is not; a courtroom is an arena. Stein writes somewhere that landscapes are useful settings for two purposes, battles and plays; but there are landscape plays and drawing-room plays, and I think her early short plays fall into the latter category. (Four Saints in Three Acts manages to contain drawing-room theater within a landscape play.) The comedy some of us first enjoy in Stein's theater comes from the apparent first-level non-consequence of these Cubistly juxtaposed overheard lines; the fascination some of us go on to enjoy, to contemplate and consider, comes from the resonance that arises from these lines and their very "meaninglessness," and that grows and enlarges, dissolving our linear and literal response to them in a greater, less specific, more timeless landscape of sound and society.

The landscape of downtown San José hesitates between old and new, always cluttered with wires, signs, and lines; it's almost unvaryingly hardend by pavement, glass, concrete; and the flow of its visible energies is herky-jerky, responding to the tyranny of stoplights for the motors first, pedestrians only secondly. There are of course a number of vacant storefronts. Restaurants, bars, and cafés tend toward the cheap and easy. The Peet's we found did make a decent, individualized cappuccino and was playing Mozart, but it took an humble place away from the main streets where the corporate-scaled faux-village St•rb•cks prevail.

There's a confusion in such a landscape, a disagreement of place and purpose, a disorder of clutter and irrelevance; a confusion that can't help but influence the sensibilities of its citizens. There's a lot of stuff there, but not that much There, as Stein might say. I think the natural, perhaps the normal mental response to such confusion is a shut-down, a turn-off, contrasting with the continual-onward, the opening-outward I feel on reading Stein, on conversing with friends, on hearing the birds and contemplating the stars and the garden.

---

A PHONE CALL from the north, yesterday, got me to thinking about the instrumental extensions at the end of sung phrases of Homer. The singing of Homer is perhaps an arcane subject, but it fed right into the weekend's contemplations. Homer, and the Greek poets who followed him, composed his work; there seems to have been no distinction between "poetry" and music. Ancient Greek was an inflected language in more ways than one: melody — the contrasts and connections of pitches articulated the lines as much as did rhythm — those of the quantities, the lengths, of the syllables.

As my Corvallis friend sings it, Homer's Greek is insinuating, mesmerizing, constantly forward-spinning. The mind can only deal with so much of this rich texture of voice, sound, language, meaning, narration. At the end of certain sections, then, the voice falls silent for a few moments, and the accompanying harp extends the line, giving the singer's voice and the listener's mind a bit of rest.

At least that's what I think the purpose of this extension is. But what is the resulting effect? It lies in what's meant by the expression "letting something sink in," allowing time for external functions, outside the intentionality of the singer and the hearer, to make their own little adjustments to context; to configure — sounds, rhythms, meanings — within a kind of perceptible landscape.

I believe that language, meaning, narration, and music were originally inseparable, like self and society. Homer's Iliad is tragic for its record of war, violence on both an individual and a societal level: but in that degree the tragedy's trivial, compared to that of its example of the devolution of thought and language from a position of prayer and praise toward one of argument and persuasion.

Well: all this in my garden this sunny Tuesday. I think when Candide turns to his garden it's to give his mind time to settle. I think you gentle reader for letting me wander here in mine.

(There's an interesting page about singing Homeric Greek here; on it is a link to a performance of Demodokos' song about Ares and Aphrodite. My Corvallis friend says it's pretty good; it sounds a little rushed to me.)

3/50

GIOVANNA WRITES a nice blog (as she always does) about an idea new to me, 3/50. The idea is to help the local economy by determining to spend fifty dollars a month total at the three locally-owned shops you'd miss most if they were to close.

it's a nice idea; I plan to put it into effect as soon as I get home. I've already started, in a way; some while ago I solved to buy a book a month at my local bookstore, Levin and Company (306 Center St, Healdsburg, tel. 707-433-1118). Quiet, pleasant, well stocked for a small local store, and ready to order special items.

Two more shops aren't hard to settle on: The Cheese Shop, for sure, and, let's see, why not The Gardener? True, both have websites; both are perhaps "upscale" in terms of both clientele and wares. But I would miss them were they to disappear.

What's the right protocol, though, I wonder, when on the road? I've been to two Starbuck's, I regret to say, in the last two days. I would be writing this in a third, except that Starbuck's closed its outlet in this hotel.

(Illy moved in. Little consolation: Illy is the Starbuck's of Italy.)

We were saddened to see thee number of empty storefronts on Charlottesville's pedestrianized main street the other evening. This may be partly the result of the great amount of construction going on, of course. I hope it wouldn't discourage other such projects. How nice it would be to see pedestrian streets around the Healdsburg square!

Crisis and community

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, February 17, 2009

ONE THING ABOUT THE DEPRESSION, it may force us away from extreme individualism back toward a semblance of communitarianism.

From "Sowing For Apocalypse: the Quest for a Global Seed Bank" by John Seabrook (in Seed Savers Exchange, 2007 Harvest Edition):

I asked how his cancers had influenced his work in saving seeds. [Cary] Fowler replied, "The first one, I didn't handle it very gracefully. I was scared. Really scared. And the reason I was scared was that I hadn't done anything — I hadn't contributed constructively to society. And that was frightening."

From This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald (taken from the Project Gutenberg online edition):

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all
inquiries with himself. He was his own best example--sitting in the
rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own
temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in
building up the living consciousness of the race.
In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance
of the labyrinth.

...

Of Amory's attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization
of his disillusion, but of Monsignor's funeral was born the romantic
elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something that he
wanted, had always wanted and always would want--not to be admired, as
he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to
be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of
security he had found in Burne.
Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory
suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing
listlessly in his mind: "Very few things matter and nothing matters very
much."
On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of
security.

...

"I am selfish," he thought.

"This is not a quality that will change when I 'see human suffering' or
'lose my parents' or 'help others.'

"This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

"It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness
that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

"There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make
sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay
down my life for a friend--all because these things may be the best
possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of
human kindness."

OR, AS MY COUSIN Hazel once pointed out to me, there are only two things that really matter: Generosity and Gratitude. Neither works in the absence of the other; together, they make everything work.

Oral history

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, January 12, 2009

JOHN WHITING'S COMMENT to the previous post here sent me an an egosurf to his My KPFA - an Historical Footnote , a repository of “Conversations, Coast to Coast" with a number of the workers in that vineyard we know as KPFA, the non-commercial radio station located in Berkeley, California.I was there as Music Director from 1964 to 1967 and stayed on a couple of years to work part-time. Since many of us tended to cover extra assignments, I was also the Folio Editor for a stretch, editing the program guide.

John has placed on his Historical Footnote interviews with Chris Koch, Phil Elwood, Robin Blaser, Henry Jacobs, Al Silbowitz, Richard Moore, Scott Keech, David Salniker, Marci Lockwood, Dick Bunce, Pat Scott, Larry Bensky, William Mandel, Erik Bauersfeld, Ernest Lowe, Peter Frank, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Maria Gallardin, Charles Amirkhanian, Loren Rush, Alan Rich, Steve Bell, Ned Paynter, Wil Ogdon, Jack Nessel, Frank Sherman and me. Next time your’e laid up and want to listen to a few yours of intelligent conversation about an amazing institution, give this a try!

Two points here: First, on KPFA: SInce I was in the middle of it when I was there, I couldn't really see it from the outside; but I have the idea it was an extremely influential and instrumental agent in the formation of the uniquely energetic cultural atmosphere of the San Francisco Bay Area of those days, and what days they were.

Second, Whiting's work strikes me as an approach to a problem I've been noticing lately: lots of us oldtimers are dying off, and not much about our various work is on the record. We need a series of good, professional oral histories, but the big boys are out of cash and pick and choose very carefully their subjects. We should all begin to carry pocket recorders around with us at all times — I suspect many of us do — and make our own damn oral histories. I think I'll start doing this.

toujours gai

drawing by George Herriman, from the book The Lives and Times of archy & mehitabel

TO THE LOCAL CAMP ROSE PLAYERS Saturday night, there to see archy & mehitabel in shinbone alley. I set the title in lower case in tribute to the lead character archy, the miserable cockroach hero of Don Marquis's collection of columns from the old New York Sun, who hurls himself headfirst to the typewriter keyboard every night, ghost-writing Marquis's column painfully (and unable to operate the shift key), because, as he says in his first missive,

expression is the need of my soul

The columns appeared in the months before the United States joined the First World War, at a time when vers libre and the Armory Show were introducing New York to Modenism, when New York was high on energy and pregnant with cynicism but still fraught with sentimentality.

In 1940 a collection of Marquis's work appeared as The Lives and Times of archy & mehitabel (Garden City: Doubleday Doran & Co.), to considerable success, and in 1954 (probably in the rush of enthusiasm following the emergence of the 12-inch "LP" record) Columbia Records released a "concept album" musical adaptation with a book by Joe Darion and Mel Brooks and music by George Kleinsinger. The cast featured Eddie Bracken as archy and Carol Channing as mehitabel: their songs and philosophical conversation was stitched together by continuity narrated by David Wayne.

I suppose the musical's place in history will be its priority to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats, which made the T.S. Eliot estate rich but did little, in my opinon, to further the musical as an art. I first heard the Darion-Kleinsinger recording shortly after it was released, and before it was expanded into the full-length musical that opened in 1957, with Eartha Kitt replacing Channing. The LP was a favorite of our friend Gaye's, and I must have heard it repeatedly in the apartment she shared with Lindsey and a couple of other girls in the year we were courting. It inspired me to give Lindsey a copy of Marquis's book on our first, poverty-struck Christmas, in a ratty edition printed during World War II:

This book is complete and unabridged, manufactured under wartime conditions in conformity with all government regulations controlling the use of paper and other materials

(those were times when society, through government, took its public activities seriously and respectfully.)

So we looked forward to hearing the musical, and Gaye lent us LP (somewhat worn, it must be said), and Kleinsinger's wonderful melodies and Marquis's sensitive if sometimes sentimental poetry have been in my ears these last few days. Mehitabel, for example:

i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell

and then her tomcat Bill:

persian pussy from over the sea
demure and lazy and smug and fat
none of your ribbons and bells for me
ours is the zest of the alley cat…
we would rather be rowdy and gaunt and free
and dine on a diet of roach and rat

Well, it's nearly a hundred years since archy first hurled himself headfirst to that letter e, and the cynical Bohemianism, the insouciant big-city back-alley wotthehell is perhaps a little dated. Indeed The Lives and Times of archy & mehitabel closes with a few prescient lines in which archy relays what the ants are saying:

…america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
…

ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth

It was about the time that James Thurber released his illustrated book The Last Flower, the first book I remember reading, about an earth blasted by war and fatigue; and it was the time, the early 1940s, when the Limited Editions Club published a book-length poem by either William Rose Benét or his brother Stephen Vincent, a book whose bleak descriptions of insects and robots eradicating humanity scared hell out of me in my early adolescence.

Needless to say, Shinbone Alley lacks all element of scariness. The musical is I think necessarily more discursive, less focusse, than the original LP, but it sure is worth knowing. (I'm told a film version is pretty lame.) Camp Rose, on the river side of Healdsburg's Fitch Mountain, is a rambling frame building whose lowest floor — I don't want to call it a basement — houses a low-ceilinged theater seating thirty-six, with a wide, shallow stage perfect for revues and musicals.

There the Camp Rose Players have been putting on shows for over thirty years, if I read their website correctly. It's community theater with all its flaws and heroic features, and the features get the better by far. The night we went Cheryl Kopczynski, as mehitabel, was recovering from a bad cold, not up to speed, rewarding nevertheless for her laconic impersonation. Bill Garner was a fine, engaging, pathetic little cockroach; Warren Weston a perfect theater cat; John Guilfoy nicely threatening as Big Bill, and the minor characters and chorus well individuated and personable. And the costumes, by Anna Settle, were quite wonderful: no glitzy Cats stuff here, but believable back-alley enterprise.

We'd been looking forward to seeing this for a long time, and Camp Rose did not let us down. Gaye's LP is now safely on my iTunes, the book's down from the high shelves, and what with Geert Mak's In Europe, the return to Gertrude Stein, and last night's reading of Réné Daumal's Mount Analogue, I'm plunged back into the entre-les-guerres: may we all soon in fact enter another such period. (This "downturn" begins to look like a real Depression: maybe we will!)

The Shock of Recognition

LOOKING IT UP ON THE INTERNET I find (as I should have known) that the phrase originated, apparently, with Herman Melville (which makes me think my next reading should be Melville: I'm gradually working my way toward Moby-Dick). Hugh Blackmer's website tells me that what Melville actually wrote, in his essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses" was

…genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round

It's worth reproducing the entire paragraph, in fact, because it builds so beautifully to that final observation

And now, my countrymen, as an excellent author, of your own flesh and blood,--an unimitating, and perhaps, in his way, an inimitable man--whom better can I commend to you, in the first place, than Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is one of the new, and far better generation of your writer. The smell of your beeches and hemlocks is upon him; your own broad prairies are in his soul; and if you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara. Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is. Take that joy to yourself, in your own generation; and so shall he feel those grateful impulses in him, that may possibly prompt him to the full flower of some still greater achievement in your eyes. And by confessing him, you thereby confess others, you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

All this comes to me in the course of writing to a friend, Alvaro Cardona-Hine, in the wake of re-reading his childhood memoirs The Half-Eaten Angel and A History of Light. About the latter I wrote, on a website called Goodreads,

Continuing the lyrical poignancy of The Half-Eaten Angel, this slim collection of prose-poem love-letters by a precocious twelve-year-old boy reads like healthy Colette. Full of the wonder of awakening. An example: "The day you came through my door, my own private door, wearing the furiously white light of your certainty, I had no need for more world, all the world I ever wanted to taste I would taste through you."

(Goodreads seems to be a sort of Facebook for readers; it's my impression so far that it's visited mostly by intelligent and literate women, the sort we used to call "housewives," intent on enlarging their community of books. I'll get in trouble for having written this.)

I THINK ABOUT THAT WORD "shock" and wonder the extent to which Melville thought about it. The word always brings two things immediately to mind: the sensation of a pulse of electricity, as I felt it when, ten years old, I accidentally stuck an index finger into an empty light-bulb socket while scrambling around among the rafters of the communal laundry building in the small Oklahoma town we were spending that year in; and the sight and even more the smell of ricks of hay we'd cut in our pasture the following year, hay we'd mowed with scythes and raked by hand and stacked in sheaves to dry in the California sun.

I think Melville likely knew only the second of these senses in 1850; that and another sense, the disarray (itself really an orderly kind of disarray, for as my grandson likes to point out "nothing can be truly random") of a head of hair, or one's emotions on having been suddenly confronted with something. My Macintosh dictionary tells me the word is from the

mid 16th cent.: from French choc (noun), choquer (verb), of unknown origin. The original senses were [throw (troops) into confusion by charging at them] and [an encounter between charging forces,] giving rise to the notion of [sudden violent blow or impact.]

I'm sure Melville uses the word in all these senses; and they all arose in my consideration this morning of an imaginary conversation among Alvaro, another friend Henry Bridges, and myself, a conversation centering on Alvaro's paintings, which I wrote about here last Saturday. (That's Henry's portrait of me up at the top of this post.)

Henry visited last Saturday, when my mind was full of enthusiasm for Alvaro, and I read some passages from The Half-Eaten Angel to him, and when he was home again, Henry I mean, he looked up Alvaro's work on his website, and then wrote to me his feelings about Alvaro's work, and I forwarded that to Alvaro, who then wrote to me, which set me to thinking further about all this and trying to develop this imaginary conversation, a difficult one to transcribe here as I've not secured permissions from either Henry or Alvaro to reproduce their comments. So I can only repeat a few of my own, as I'd written them to Alvaro:

I am excited; excited by [Henry's] prose, by his re-statement in words of your statements in paint, and by a sudden "shock of recognition," to use Melville's phrase… recognition of my own feeling about your work explained to me as I had never "understood" it before. So your painting, and Henry's description of his reception of it, opens that little creaky door in that not-often-visited corner of my mind. But what does he mean?

I think he writes first of the spaces within your paintings (which are the spaces your paintings themselves enter in order to re-state them), spaces clearly defined by your color fields and their edges ("tiles," he calls them). He then mentions a sort of dialectic that appears between the literal images in your paintings, the animals or birds or what have you, and the quality of the paint-handling that presents those images, which (at least in Henry's mind, and in mine too) produce work in which not only the images are images, but the way those images are limned are also images, images that intensify by transcending the more literal images.

And then, best of all, that dialectic not only emerges clearly itself, but the clarity with which it emerges defines, in pictorial or painterly ways, a vision of clarity, what Henry calls "a heightened sense of clarity". This "opens up ... space to ... the imagining mind", which is your mind, and Henry's, and mine. And then, "to state it differently," he lapses into a kind of poetry… similar to your own poetry as I find it in The Half-Eaten Angel and A History of Light….

All this has to do with what Joan Retallack called continuity and contiguity, as I wrote about that a few days ago; I suppose Retallack's an unknowing participant in this conversation. And, come to think about it, this kind of imaginary conversation, web-based and disjunctive, is the kind of community that I was thinking of in response to Ron Silliman's thoughts on the Community of Poets.

I suppose in a century or two, if we're given them, the human consciousness will become a sort of meta-consciousness, the Jungian concept of racial memory will become a more evident and verifiable species awareness, originally facilitated by this Internet which may one day leave its present technological grounding behind and exist instead, and simply, in a neural network the humans of that day will take for granted, as we take language and gesture for granted.

And then there will be no more Continuity and Contiguity; all will be merged in one splendid Awareness, and with any luck we'll hardly need to talk about it any more, let alone think about it, and we can get back to simple pleasures of daily life.

The Winter's Tale

SHAKESPEARE WAS IN a retrospective mood when he wrote that problematic play The Winter's Tale: just about every theme he ever visited ends up in it, from Romeo and Juliet to The Tempest. It's a curious play, because however retrospective it is it seems unresolved, resolutely so. It ends happily, I suppose, but with lingering sadness. And however unlikely its plot may be, however distant from our own experience, it's one of those plays that always leaves me thinking Yes. That's how it is, all right. Nothing to be done about it.

Last weekend we saw it for the third time in eighteen months: Ashland in July '06; Glendale (A Noise Within) six weeks ago; Healdsburg last Saturday. In many ways the Healdsburg production was the most affecting.

It was staged by the Imagination Foundation, a Healdsburg company whose chief activity is the production of community theater using children and teen-aged actors for the most part. We've followed them pretty closely over the last few years, as one of our granddaughters has been with them from their beginning (this was the first production she has not appeared in. We've seen Pinocchio, The Tempest, Antigone, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, The Crucible, Tonight we Improvise! (Pirandello), and an adaptation of Animal Farm, just to list the more or less standard repertory; along the way there have been imaginative and resourceful productions of other pieces often generated through collective improvisation in rehearsals.

These "Imagineers" have produced some strong theater — work whose strength comes from its return of theater to its community responsibility. Theater is more than entertainment; at its best it presents its audience with a kind of collective awareness, expression, and even resolution of urges and events that are general and immediate. Last September, for example, IF presented The Division/La División, a piece that cast children and seniors from the Healdsburg community in an investigation of both the separateness and the togetherness that can characterize its "anglo" and "hispanic" subcommunities. A short documentary of that production is available on YouTube.

The Winter's Tale was staged, literally, on the stage of Healdsburg's Raven Theater, a community theater that's been carved out of a former movie theater, a place with problematic acoustics and not terribly good sightlines. IF overcame these problems by ignoring the audience space: instead we sat in chairs on the stage, providing the three walls of a theater-within-a-theater, with the cast right in our faces, no sets or props and minimal (though effective) costuming.

The play is really two plays, as I blogged last month. In the first Leontes, king of Sicily, goes completely insane with jealousy, causing the death of his son and queen and forcing a trusted retainer to expose his infant daughter to her death. In the second "play," usually done as the second act, we're suddenly transported from Sicilian courtiers to Bohemian country-bumpkins; Time has skipped sixteen years or so; and the plot begins to play itself out through the usual unravellings.

The play is about anger, comprehension, atonement, and forgiveness; that is, it's about fundamental human qualities that resist rational explanation but drive most human situations, whether court or country. And the play's effectiveness, apart from Shakespeare's splendid language, rests on the abilities of its major characters. Here the Imagineers came through: though minor characters had trouble with memory, clarity, and comprehension — not surprisingly, given their assignment! — the principals were amazingly effective. They may be students, or barely out of school, but they show an astounding degree of understanding: of the text, of their craft; of the emotions and urges that drive this troubling play.

There were only three performances. Imagine: young actors in their teens memorizing and rehearsing this play, all of it, this well, for only three performances. It was a gift to the community, another in a long line of such gifts. I do believe the Imagination Foundation is one of the most significant theatrical organizations in the Bay Area.