Shiver - blue fingertips. The air outside still below zero metric and inside it's colder, white paint into the empty apartment of a next year. Photos of the Gulf fell out the window into the snow. It's only fair.

Mabel and Carrine sent me a photo of Charlie at "the orphanage." Winter in Florida.

Gram isn't coming home.

The Role of Society in the Artist

Society sent me this invitation to go to
hell and
delighted not to be overlooked I thought

I could make arrangements to accommodate
it and went off
where, however, I

did the burning by myself, developing
fortunately some fairly thick shields
against blazing and some games

one of which was verse by which I used
illusion to put the flames out,
turning flares into mirrors

of seeming: society
attracted to this bedazzlement wanted me
to acknowledge how it had been

largely responsible and I said oh yes it gave
me the language by which to send me
clear invitations and society

designated me of social value and lifted me
out of hell so I could better share
paradisal paradigms with it

and it said isn't it generous
of society to let you walk here
far from hell---society does this because

it likes your keen sense of acquired sight
& word: how wonderful of you to say so, I said,
and took some of whatever was being

passed around but every night went out
into the forest to spew fire
that blazoned tree trunks and set

stumps afire and society found me out there
& warmed itself and said it liked my unconventional
verses best & I invited society to go to hell

-- A.R. Ammons

might as well face it

Reward mechanism involved in addiction likely regulates pair bonds between monogamous animals

(from Emory)

___________________

I've never met Art, but I understand he's a nice guy.


on understanding Art

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art, all art, not just painting, is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. No one is surprised to find that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and the art.
We have to recognise that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.


[Roger Fry] gave us the term 'Post-Impressionist' without realizing that the late 20th century would soon be entirely fenced in with posts.


Art has deep and difficult eyes and for many the gaze is too insistent. Better to pretend that art is dumb, or at least has nothing to say that makes sense to us. If art, all art is concerned with truth, than a society in denial will not find much use for it.


Canonising pictures is one way of killing them...so that what was wild is tamed, what was objecting, becomes Authority...When the sense of familiarity becomes too great, history, popularity, association, all crowd between the viewer and the picture and block it out.


'I don't understand this poem'
'I never listen to classical music'
'I don’t like this picture'
are common enough statements but not ones that tell us anything about books, painting, or music. They are statements that tell us something about the speaker. That should be obvious, but in fact, such statements are offered as criticisms of art, as evidence against, not least because the ignorant, the lazy, or the plain confused are not likely to want to admit themselves as such. We hear a lot about the arrogance of the artist but nothing about the arrogance of the audience. The audience, who have not done the work, who have not taken any risks, whose life and childhood are not bound up at every moment with what they are making, who have given no thought to the medium or the method, will glance up, flick through, chatter over the opening chords, then snap their fingers and walk away like some monstrous Roman tyrant. This is not arrogance; of course they can absorb in a few moments, and without any effort, the sum of the artist and the art.


Mostly we work hard at taming our emotional environment just as we work hard at taming our aesthetic environment. We have already tamed our physical environment. And are we happy with all this tameness? Are you?


If we say that art is no longer relevant to our lives, then we might at least risk the question 'What has happened to our lives?' The usual question 'What has happened to art?' is too easy an escape route.


Jeanette Winterson - from "Art Objects", in World Art, v.4, 1995.

john keats/john keats/john/put your scarf on.

j.d. salinger

Forty-three. Snow and working.

*

WOMAN:
More.

VOICE:
till in the end
the day came
in the end came
close of a long day
when she said
to herself
whom else
time she stopped
time she stopped
going to and fro
all eyes
all sides
high and low
for another
another like herself
another creature like herself
a little like
going to and fro
all eyes
all sides
high and low
for another
till in the end
close of a long day
to herself
whom else
time she stopped
time she stopped
going to and fro
all eyes
all sides
high and low
for another
another living soul
going to and fro
all eyes like herself
all sides
high and low
for another
another like herself
a little like
going to and fro
till in the end
close of a long day
to herself
whom else
time she stopped
going to and fro
time she stopped
time she stopped

WOMAN:
More.


Samuel Beckett - from Rockaby

postscript

Eighty-two report cards, the quarterly budget prep, four errands and three hours in Marketing, and I come home to John Kerry. I'm taking that snow day tomorrow whether or not a single flake falls.

good things

On this grey and heavy heartbroken morning, out of nowhere, Yael brought me homemade baklava for breakfast.

Last night I stayed up in flannel and watched Gia, which is almost as good as ice cream out of the pint and just about as guilty a pleasure.

Tonight: dancing in Northampton.

Tomorrow should see 5-7 inches of snow and temperatures all the way up to mid-twenties. If there isn't a snow day I will forswear whiskey for a month.

An open letter to Vice President Dick Cheney's overbite

ylem: y·lem ("eye' lem")
Noun: A form of matter hypothesized by proponents of the big bang theory to have existed before the formation of the chemical elements.
Etymology: Middle English, universal matter, from Old French ilem, from Medieval Latin hYlem, accusative of hYle, matter, from Greek hUle.

we all pray for pluralist babies

There's nothing more paradoxical than the female mind, and you can never convince a woman of anything -- you have to arrange matters so that they convince themselves. The chain of reasoning they employ to overcome their own prejudices is extremely original, and if you want to master their dialect you have to turn all the textbook rules of logic upside-down. For example, a normal approach would be: 'This man loves me, but I'm married, so I mustn't love him.' But a woman's approach would be: 'I mustn't love him, because I'm married, but he loves me, so...' I have to use dots here, for now the voice of reason is silent, and it's mainly the tongue, eyes and heart (if there is one) which do all the talking.

If a woman ever chanes to read these notes there'll be outraged cries of 'Slander!'

Since poets began writing and women began reading them (for which our heartfelt thanks), they have been called angels so often that, in their simplicity, they've come to accept this compliment as truth. They forget that the same poets -- in return for money -- acclaimed Nero as a demigod.

...

Women should wish all men to know them as well as I do, for since I stopped fearing them and understood their petty weaknesses, I've loved them a hundred times more dearly.

- Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time

" Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well. "

- Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Forty-two. the Answer.


a new constellation

We go intertwined, him and you
and me, her and him, you and her,
each the center of our own circle
of attraction and compulsion and gravity.
What a constellation we make: I call it
the Matrix. I call it the dancing
family. I call it wheels inside wheels.
Ezekiel did not know he was seeing
the pattern for enduring relationship
in the late twentieth century.

All the rings shine gold as wedding bands
but they are the hoops magicians use
that seem solid and unbroken, yet can slip
into chains of other rings and out.
They are strong enough to hang houses on,
strong enough to serve as cranes, yet
they are open. We fall through each other,
we catch each other, we cling, we flip on.

No one is at the center, but each
is her own center, no one controls
the jangling swing and bounce and merry-
go-round lurching intertangle of this mobile.
We pass through each other trembling
and we pass through each other shrieking
and we pass through each other shimmering.
The circle is neither unbroken
nor broken but living, a molecule attracting
atoms that wants to be a protein,
complex, mortal, able to sustain life,
able to reproduce itself inexactly,
learn and grow.

- Marge Piercy, from "The Moon is Always Female"

Forty-one.


Careful Not To Let It Happen Again

Walking down the hall
of my apartment building
it hit before
I reached outside.
The man
across the hall
brought me back--
forty-two, sweaty, he'd
learned CPR only last weekend.
My first new sight
his blue suit jacket
crumpled in the corner,
decrepit on a floor
the colour of
your forgotten eyes.

Now, I fill colouring books and
wander the halls. I have caused
two separate fire drills
because I can still read
the handle
"PULL."

To fool the nurses
I hide pillows
in my bed-sheets and
sneak outside.
Once, it took
an entire
afternoon of searching
to find me sitting
beside
the oak tree
watching turtles,

but outside is not good for me. I
died once and we
have to be careful
not to let it happen again.

- David Parsons

forty.


Is/Not

Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,

nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller.

Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger
and permit me mine

which needs neither
your approval nor your surprise

which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease

but against you,
which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead,

to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

I am not a saint or a cripple,
I am not a wound; now I will see
whether I am a coward.

I dispose of my good manners,
you don't have to kiss my wrists.

This is a journey, not a war,
there is no outcome,
I renounce predictions

and aspirins, I resign the future
as I would resign an expired passport:
picture and signature are gone
along with holidays and safe returns.

We're stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings

where there is nothing spectacular
to see and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs

where we must walk slowly,
where we may not get anywhere

or anything, where we keep going,
fighting our ways, our way
not out but through.

Margaret Atwood