Sunday, July 31, 2011

Historical Setting


In 2005 my job sent me to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, for a week of training; the classes were held in the beautiful building pictured above; it once had been the main building of Storer College (1865-1955), one of the first institutions of higher learning for black people. I can't say I learned much in my classes but it was an honor to spend time in such an historical setting, and I love the classic photo below, taken in 1906, of progressive men sitting outside the building and in its windows.

(Click on photo to enlarge it)

Saturday, July 23, 2011

RIP: Amy Jade Winehouse - 9/14/83 - 7/23/11

Amazingly original.  Now -- like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin,
Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, and Jim Morrison -- dead at twenty-seven.

Friday, July 22, 2011

Happy Birthday to my nephew, Mike!

Mentone, Indiana; 1972; bell-bottomed corduroys

Saturday, July 16, 2011

My Friend Janet

She paints these really charming, always small, much-detailed themed scenes.  Now in her seventies she gets to have an opening in a real gallery! Come one, come all! Or send her a card! (Her lines are sharp but my scanner blurred them.)

Ireland
The Beach

Halloween

Friday, July 15, 2011

Cathedrals & Aspirations & Lytton Strachey

Lytton Strachey portrait by Vanessa Bell,
sister of Virginia Woolf.

I just finished Michael Holyrod's way-too-long and way-too-heavy 1994 biography of Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), the eminent author of Eminent Victorians .  I liked it but, jeez, it could have been half as long and still be just as good.

When Lytton Strachey visited the cathedral at Chartres, he wrote to a friend: “It was wonderful coming into it yesterday in the dark, only able at first to discern dim shapes of pillars and those astonishing blazes of stained glass.  Gradually, as our pupils expanded, we saw more & more - all the glorious proportions at last, and the full sublimity.  Oh, my dearest creature, I wished so much for you to be with me as I stood at that most impassioned point - the junction of the transept & the nave, where the pillars suddenly soar and rush upwards to an unbelievable height, and one is aware of the whole structure in its power and its splendor.  The christian religion itself positively almost justified!   

Unmatched spires of 13th
century Chartres Cathedral




I have experienced that awe-in-a-cathedral feeling often; I recall attending Mass at Notre Dame in Paris on a Sunday morning in 1991.  Notre Dame is stupendously gigantic.  The organ, soaring heavenward, drenches one's soul.  The choir is so heavenly that it hurts.  One's passion for ritual and beauty could not be better fed; I felt sodden with the richness of an aesthetic exhilaration which, in my case -- as in Strachey's case -- was not enjoined by faith, making it all seem oddly barren, so that I stood there marveling at what, flooding my senses, man had wrought in his reach for a majesty that he refers to as God.


(I like the hint of blue in the sky on the day I photographed those spires.)


North windows of Chartres Cathedral

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Happy Birthday Marcel Proust - Born July 10, 1871


There are plenty of great writers but Proust's In Search of Lost Time is what I'd want with me if I found myself stranded on some island.


Proust's ideas stretch across my own thoughts as the sky stretches across the earth; I ponder something and I am led to Proust; I look at the sky and I think of Proust; I take a hard fall on a patch of ice and, bedridden, think of Proust's asthmatic confinement to his cork-lined bedroom.  He is not a guide, but a beacon -- I am within a moment; a moment is immediately swallowed by the past; the past is rich.  Proust discovered that the past can be returned to involuntarily; and then recognized that it could be returned to voluntarily -- it was possible to dwell within that past.


In reading Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time, a study of Proust by one Roger Shattuckpublished in 2000 (there seems to be at least one new study of Proust each year), it illuminated for me that when, for instance, I, along with a couple of friends, was a pilgrim in the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, the birthplace of Jack Kerouac, marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road; it occurred to me that, once back home, it would be fun to write up an account of the the events I was experiencing in Lowell but I felt that nothing was happening which would lend itself to narrative.


I did not feel, in Lowell, that I was living a story.  Certainly it was a great fun day, but there was nothing really that I could see as story; nothing, as it were, that would lend itself to my favorite past-time of letter- or journal-writing.  And yet, after I returned home, I wrote a lengthy account of my day in Lowell.


I wondered about this; I wondered how it would have been good to expect that I was going to write about the day; it would have been good to have made some notes along the way.  And why wouldn't the account sort of compose itself on the run, so to speak, in the present?  When, for instance, I stood at the foot of Kerouac's gravestone, why didn't I recognize that it was an experience that I would be transforming into words?  (What had happened to my self-identification with Virginia Woolf when she said, "My mind runs hither and thither with its veil of words for everything"?)


In Shattuck's Proust's Way  I came across the answer in one of his quotes from In Search of Lost Time:


     How many times in the course of my life had reality
     disappointed me because at the time I was observing
     it, my imagination, the only organ with which I could
     enjoy beauty, was unable to function, by virtue of the
     inexorable law which decrees that only what is absent
     can be imagined.


That does not, as I see it, say that I did not enjoy or appreciate those things happening in Lowell on that gorgeous October day ... I was in no way disappointed ... but that to write of them must involve imagination of them.  There is reality, and then there is imagined reality.  How brilliant Proust is!  He is like Dylan's Louise in "Visions of Johanna" who makes it "all .. precise and .. clear".

(And I might wonder, too, since Shattuck is quoting directly from Proust's novel, and I have read that novel three times ... why it was only in a study of Proust that the passage struck me as so relevant?)


In some other year I read Henri Peyre's short essay on Proust, from the series called Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, in which Peyre comments:


     For [Proust] the past alone is laden with density and
     reality.  The present is thin and poor; imagination,
     working its magic over the past, endows it with intensity
     and with depth.


I noted somewhere else a Proust remark:  "Let us leave pretty women to men who have no imagination!"


In an essay by Robert Frost, called "The Figure A Poem Makes," I guessed he was expressing the same idea, but in a denser fashion:


     For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering
     something I didn't know I knew.  I am in a place, in a
     situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out 
     of the ground.  There is a special recognition of the long
     lost and the rest follows.  Step by step the wonder of
     unexpected supply keeps growing.  The impressions most
     useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware
     of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the
     conclusion is come to that like giants we are always
     hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future
     against the day when we may want to strike a line of
     purpose across it.


In creating the past, Marcel created not just the past, but, as if miraculously, guidance for the man a boy born in 1940 in Indiana would become.


Marcel Proust's bedroom furnishings and cork-lined walls
preserved in Musee Carnavalet in Paris.

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Don't Mess with Greene


When an editor at Simon & Shuster asked the British author Graham Greene (1904-1991) to change the title of his Travels with My Aunt for the U.S. edition, Graham replied by cable: EASIER TO CHANGE PUBLISHER THAN TITLE.

Friday, July 1, 2011

Patterns/Nureyev/Carpets

And on Google Images I found a picture of Nureyev wrapped in one of his "beloved" oriental kilim carpets; one which could have been the pattern for the mosaic of his gravemarker shown in yesterday's post.