Every This and That

ULYSSIPPO
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Does Ben's view resemble that of Ulysses,
3000 years ago or so?

According to legend, Ulysses / Odysseus was the founder
of Lisbon, thus the linguistic connection between the hero's
name and city's ancient name of Ulyssippo, Olissipona,
Olisipo [sometimes with double "ss" or double "pp"], or Lissabon
Once again (see preceding post OXB), I'm grateful to Ben and Cathleen, who not only shared their vacation photographs but also picked out this inspirational souvenir for me:

Featuring clockwise from top:
Cesario Verde, Fernando Pessoa (with glasses),
Luis de Camoes (with laurel wreath),
Florbela Espanca, Mario de Sa-Carneiro
First in the anthology comes Luis de Camoes (1524 - June 10, 1580), a poet so important to the language and people of Portugal that the day of his death is observed annually as Portugal's National Day. Camoes is the author of Portugal's national epic poem The Lusiads. This saga recounts the adventues of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama who sets sail from Lisbon, accompanied by a cast of classical gods, heroes, and muses:

From Canto IV: The Departure
Amidst a noble roar of eager cries
in Lisbon’s harbour – where renowned Ulysses
made berth; where into briny Neptune spills
the Tagus its sweet liquor and white sands –
the ships stand yare at last; and not a fear
bridles from youthful show of zeal the crews,
for these seafaring men with men of Mars
will follow me, across the very globe.

Up from the beaches come the soldiers, clad
in diverse styles and colors, all as much
trimmed in desirousness to brave the world
and seek new regions out. Aloft, calm winds
billow with gentle swells the flags flown high
on our proud carracks, which, as they behold
the seas' expanse, promise one day to rise,
as Argos' ship before, to Olympus, stars.

Camoes was also the author of numerous sonnets. The autobiographical message of this one, for example, captures the introspecitve tone of his lyric poetry:

My own mistakes, cruel fortune, and love's flame
devised a plot together to undo me.
Mistakes and fortune were a surfeit to me;
Love alone would have done for me the same.

I'm past it; yet I still feel the excess
of pain so freshly now from troubles past,
that from their sorry rage I've learned at last
never to take desires for happiness.

The whole tale of my years, I was mistaken,
and with my groundless hopes I did my part
to earn my troubles; Fortune was no cheat.

I've known no love but flashes of deceit.
Oh if some power only would awaken
the vengeance that could sate my hardened heart!

Camoes looks at the passing of time with a similar honesty, concluding in puzzlement rather than nostalgia:

The times change, the desires change, and who
we are, and what we trust, keeps changing with them;
the whole world is composed of change's rhythm,
forever shifting qualities anew.

Constantly we see new things, every this
and that showing our guess was ill - attuned;
and when they bring us hurt, we keep the wound,
while what was good (if anything), we miss.

Time cloaks the ground in green, where it before
lay covered underneath the snowy cold;
in me, it turns to tears what was sweet song.

And as these daily changings pass along,
another change amazes me still more:
things don't change now the way they changed of old.

Camoes' amazement -- that even change itself is subject to change -- reminds me of the Charles Durning's amusing and bemused Thanksgiving prayer in Home for the Holidays:

" . . . even things we hated
. . . are starting to stop
. . . and they shouldn't."
In any age, it seems, despite our preferences, change is the way of the world. Modernist Lisbon poet Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935) repeats the same lament in no uncertain terms:

". . . for change is what I hate,
and something I do not want. . . ."
~ from "I suffer Lydia" ~

and

" . . . Provided life does not weary,
I'll let life pass slowly by,
on the condition that I stay the same. . . ."
~ from "I prefer roses" ~

Photo by Cathleen ~ Ponta Delgada, Azores
[Click for More Tile Art]

Another favorite from Fernando Pessoa:

With one eye on the past
some see which they cannot see,
whilst others in the future see
that which cannot be seen.

Why go so far, look closer!
What is freedom? The day is here!
This is the hour, the moment;
and this moment is who we are and that is that.

Forever flowing, the eternal hour
reveals our insignificance.
In a single gasp we live and die, so seize the day,
for the day is simply who you are.

In the coming weeks, I will look more closely at the work of Camoes and Pessoa, as well as the remaining three poets whose work comprise this enlightening and often heart-breaking volume of verse. Thanks to Cathleen and Ben for opening my eyes to the poetry of Portugal.

Belated Honeymoon

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

OBX

THE OUTER BANKS
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Cathleen's Favorite Place ~ Bennett Street ~ Kitty Hawk, North Carolina
~ Acrylic Painting by Cathleen Amalia ~

My Talented Daughter - in - Law & My Elder Son!
Cathleen & Ben at the Outer Banks

*****************

"In the summer, the days were long,
stretching into each other.
Out of school, everything was on pause
and yet happening at the same time,
this collection of weeks when anything was possible." (387)

~ Sarah Dessen ~ Along for the Ride ~

*****************

The Outer Banks

1

Horizon of islands shifting
Sea-light flame on my voice
burn in me
Light
flows from the water from sands islands of this horizon
The sea comes toward me across the sea. The sand
moves over the sand in waves
between the guardians of this landscape
the great commemorative statue on one hand
—the first flight of man, outside of dream,
seen as stone wing and stainless steel—
and at the other hand
banded black-and-white, climbing
the spiral lighthouse.

2

Floor over ocean,
avalanche on the flat beach. Pouring.
Indians holding branches up, to
placate the tempest,
the one-legged twisting god that is
a standing wind.
Rays are branching from all things:
great serpent, great plume, constellation:
sands from which colors and light pass,
the lives of plants. Animals. Men.
A man and a woman reach for each other.

3

Wave of the sea.

4

Sands have washed, sea has flown over us.
Between the two guardians, spiral, truncated wing,
history and these wild birds
Bird-voiced discoverers : Hariot, Hart Crane,
the brothers who watched gulls.
“No bird soars in a calm,” said Wilbur Wright.
Dragon of the winds forms over me.
Your dance, goddesses in your circle
sea-wreath, whirling of the event
behind me on land as deep in our own lives
we begin to know the movement to come.
Sunken, drowned spirals,
hurricane-dance.

5

Shifting of islands on this horizon.
The cycle of changes in the Book of Changes.
Two islands making an open female line
That powerful long straight bar a male island.
The building of the surf
constructing immensities
between the pale flat Sound
and ocean ever
birds as before earthquake
winds fly from all origins
the length of this wave goes from the great wing
down coast, the barrier beach in all its miles
road of the sun and the moon to
a spiral lighthouse
to the depth turbulence
lifts up its wave like cities
the ocean in the air
spills down the world.

6

A man is walking toward me across the water.
From far out, the flat waters of the Sound,
he walks pulling his small boat

In the shoal water.

A man who is white and has been fishing.
Walks steadily upon the light of day
Coming closer to me where I stand
looking into the sun and the blaze inner water.
Clear factual surface over which he pulls
a boat over a closing quarter-mile.

7

Speak to it, says the light.
Speak to it music,
voices of the sea and human throats.
Origins of spirals,
the ballad and original sweet grape
dark on the vines near Hatteras,
tendrils of those vines, whose spiral tower
now rears its light, accompanying
all my voices.

8

He walks toward me. A black man in the sun.
He now is a black man speaking to my heart
crisis of darkness in this century
of moments of this speech.
The boat is slowly nearer drawn, this man.

The zigzag power coming straight, in stones,
in arcs, metal, crystal, the spiral
in sacred wet
schematic elements of
cities, music, arrangement
spin these stones of home
under the sea
return to the stations of the stars
and the sea, speaking across its lives.

9

A man who is bones is close to me
drawing a boat of bones
the sun behind him
is another color of fire,
the sea behind me
rears its flame.

A man whose body flames and tapers in flame
twisted tines of remembrance that dissolve
a pitchfork of the land worn thin
flame up and dissolve again
draw small boat

Nets of the stars at sunset over us.
This draws me home to the home of the wild birds
long-throated birds of this passage.
This is the edge of experience, grenzen der seele
where those on the verge of human understanding
the borderline people stand on the shifting islands
among the drowned stars and the tempest.
“Everyman’s mind, like the dumbest,
claws at his own furthest limits of knowing the world,”
a man in a locked room said.

Open to the sky
I stand before this boat that looks at me.
The man’s flames are arms and legs.
Body, eyes, head, stars, sands look at me.
I walk out into the shoal water
and throw my leg over the wall of the boat.

10

At one shock, speechlessness.
I am in the bow, on the short thwart.
He is standing before me amidships, rowing forward
like my old northern sea-captain in his dory.
All things have spun.
The words gone,
I facing sternwards, looking at the gate
between the barrier islands. As he rows.
Sand islands shifting and the last of land
a pale and open line horizon
sea.

With whose face did he look at me?
What did I say? or did I say?
in speechlessness
mover to the change.
These strokes provide the music,
and the accused boy on land today saying
What did I say? or did I say?
The dream on land last night built this the boat of death
but in the suffering of the light
moving across the sea
do we in our moving
move toward life or death

11

Hurricane, skullface, the sky’s size
winds streaming through his teeth
doing the madman’s twist

and not a beach not flooded

nevertheless, here
stability of light
my other silence
and at my left hand and at my right hand
no longer wing and lighthouse
no longer the guardians.
They are in me, in my speechless
life of barrier beach.
As it lies open
to the night, out there.

Now seeing my death before me
starting again, among the drowned men,
desperate men, unprotected discoverers,
and the man before me
here.
Stroke by stroke drawing us.
Out there? Father of rhythms,
deep wave, mother.
There is no out there.
All is open.
Open water. Open I.

12

The wreck of the Tiger, the early pirate, the blood-clam’s
ark, the tern’s acute eye, all buried mathematical
instruments, castaways, pelicans, drowned five-
strand pearl necklaces, hopes of livelihood,
hopes of grace,
walls of houses, sepia sea-fences, the writhen octopus and
those tall masts and sails,
marked hulls of ships and last month’s plane, dipping his salute
to the stone wing of dream,
turbulence, Diamond Shoals, the dark young living people:
“Sing one more song and you are under arrest.”
“Sing another song.”
Women, ships, lost voices.
Whatever has dissolved into our waves.
I a lost voice
moving, calling you
on the edge of the moment that is now the center.
From the open sea.

©Muriel Rukeyser (1913 - 1980)
Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968)

*****************

More by Muriel Rukeyser:

Icarus, Who Really Fell

Lot's Wife, Who Gave Her Life For a Single Glance

La Cucaracha

When the Iris Blows Blue

*****************

The Student Body in the Text

All the Little Animals

The Wrong Answer

Another Good Poem By Muriel Rukeyser

La Cucaracha

AND

More Beautiful Ocean Poems

*****************

Cathleen, Carmen, Ben ~ OBX Easter 2016

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Cracker Jacks

AT THE OLD BALL GAME,
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Cracker Jack

Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd;
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back.
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win, it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game.

"Take Me Out to the Ball Game" ~ 1908
Tin Pan Alley song by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer
~ Unofficial Anthem of North American Baseball ~

The turn - of - the century snack was recently featured
in this tasteful tableau at the Richard H. Driehaus Museum

1881 Drawing of the Samuel M. Nickerson House (completed 1883)
Now the Richard H. Driehaus Museum
40 East Erie Street, Chicago ~ Corner of Wabash & Erie

Although the Cracker Jack Prize has now been replaced by a
mobile app that allows you to play a digital baseball game
on your phone, it is still alluded to in plenty of political cartoons:

********************

"That's a crackerjack!"
"The More You Eat, the More You Want!"
~ Product Slogans from the 1890s ~
Somehow, all these years, I have remained unfamiliar with "Cracker Jack" as a colloquialism meaning "of excellent quality." Thus, when Gerry asked me to proofread a speech he was preparing, I was puzzled by his use of "cracker - jack" as an upbeat, gung - ho adjective and advised him that some Americans (surely not just me?) might not think of "cracker - jack" as a positive modifier. I worried that it might sound a bit too much like "crack - pot" or bring to mind not just the caramel corn concoction but also the cheap plastic trinkets, miniscule toys, and faux jewelry offered inside of each box as a prize. Some prize! Conotations of value-less-ness sprang to mind.

As alternative adjectives, I suggested: "compelling, dynamic, energizing." But Gerry was searching for "an antiquated term of excellence" -- those all sounded too new - age. So perhaps best to leave "cracker - jack" in the sentence. I didn't want to steer him wrong, after all. And, despite the fact that it was news to me, I could plainly see that the dictionary was defining "cracker - jack" as "exceptionally good." I thought maybe it was a British thing -- like the popular kids' television show, familiar to Gerry but unbeknownst to me; but no, the dictionary also said "North American informal."

So maybe I am the only one -- in America or England! -- who never uses it that way. I'm the first to admit that I'd probably get only a 20,000 on that facebook vocab quiz -- not a 30,000 like all of our genius friends. In fact, I can't say that "cracker - jack" is really in my vocabulary at all, except to refer to the movie / baseball snack -- and even then, I don't say "Cracker Jack" -- I say "Cracker Jacks." Not to mention that it is not even my favorite kind of carmel corn -- too sticky for my taste; and to tell the truth the prizes have always been just lame -- okay, nostalgic! Still and all, I like the song, even though I've been singing it wrong all my life.

P.S. 2023
Aaron's game day photos / post
********************

Photograph by my friend Elaine Nicol
While we're on the topic of time - honored treats, check out the winner and runners - up of Best Biscuit in Britain! Gerry and I had a lot of fun watching the countdown on British television a couple of Christmases ago. He approved of the winner -- the Chocolate Digestive (either dark or milk; though he usually prefers plain -- futher down on the list at #9). But I was rooting for the arch rival Chocolate Hobnob which ended up in second place (again, either dark or milk; as with Digestives, plain Hobnobs -- #19 -- are also delicious).

Not to brag, but I have gained some small fame by
frosting my Chocolate Hobnobs to resemble Christmas Puddings!

December 15, 2012
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

From the Desk of Simone de Beauvoir: On the Side of Happiness

A DESK WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Re-creation of Simoine de Beauvoir's Study
Spring 2017 Installation at the
The National Museum for Women in the Arts
Last month, I counted myself fortunate to see the writing desk of Ernest Hemingway, in Havana. Every nook and cranny of his Cuban villa remains much as he left it in 1960 -- or has been staged to re-create the mood of the prolific writer's life. Gazing at his wall - to - wall - floor - to - ceiling book collection and his desks and tables covered with books, pipes, pens and papers, reminded me (not that I had actually forgotten) that a couple of years ago I was also lucky enough to see the re-imagined writing desk of Simone de Beauvoir, another prolific 20th Century writer and reader.

You might recall that when asked "Do you suffer when you write?" Hemingway replied, Not at all, only when I don't write, but I "never feel as good as while writing." Similarly, one of de Beauvoir's short story narrators describes her plans to "do a little work during the holidays," despite the shortage of time: "It is not a matter of energy . . . I just could not live without writing. . . . When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values, and it is impossible for me to examine this conviction with an objective eye" (22, "The Age of Discretion" in The Woman Destroyed, 1967).

As Jane Smiley says in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel: “Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book." I suppose that could mean almost any book, but what a specific comfort, indeed, to see this old familiar copy of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women on the de Beauvoir's desktop (below). Apparently, as a girl, young Simone loved Little Women -- especially Jo, the writer! -- as much as I did. In another of Alcott's girlhood novels, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Polly earnestly explains that "Help one another is part of the religion of our sisterhood" -- a mandate carried out in the written work of both Alcott and de Beauvoir.

In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir's comprehensive classic, she discusses "the treatment of women throughout history," a variety of gender roles designated fairly or not by nature, society, literature, politics; the basics of female sexuality; and the development of women through every phase of the human life cycle. She writes poignantly of a young woman's struggle to form a creative identity for herself:

“When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a color, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man. Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity. The young girl throws herself into things with ardor, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All” (374).

― from The Second Sex
Volume 2: "Lived Experience"
Part 1: "Formative Years"
Chapter 2: "The Girl"

If you don't have time right now to read the entire 800 pages of de Beauvoir's feminist history, philosophy, and psychology, you can start with the handy Extracts, barely 100 pages, light enough to carry anywhere, perfect for airplane reading. Look closely (both here & above), and you'll glimpse a copy in the bottom desk drawer:



Simone de Beauvoir's own eloquent,
inspiring description of her life's work:

. . . But at least I helped the women of my time and generation to become aware of themselves and their situation.

Many of them, of course, disapproved of my book; I disturbed them or opposed them or exasperated them or frightened them. But there were others to whom I did some service, as I know from numberless testimonies to the fact, especially from the letters that I am still receiving and answering after twelve years. These women have found help in my work in their fight against images of themselves which revolted them, against myths by which they felt themselves crushed; they came to realize that their difficulties reflected not a disgrace peculiar to them, but a general condition. This discovery helped them to avoid the mistake of self-contempt, and many of them found in the book the strength to fight against that condition. Self-knowledge is no guarantee of happiness, but it is on the side of happiness and can supply the courage to fight for it. Psychiatrists have told me that they give The Second Sex to their women patients to read, and not merely to intellectual women but to lower-middle-class women, to office workers and women working in factories. "Your book was a great help to me. Your book saved me," are the words I have read in letters from women of all ages and all walks of life.

If my book has helped women, it is because it expressed them, and they in their turn gave it its truth. Thanks to them, it is no longer a matter for scandal and concern. During these last ten years the myths that men created have crumbled, and many women writers have gone beyond me and have been far more daring than I. Too many of them for my taste take sexuality as their only theme; but at least when they write about it they now present themselves as the eye-that-looks, as subject, consciousness, freedom.

I should have been surprised and even irritated if, when I was thirty, someone had told me that I would be concerning myself with feminine problems, and that my most serious public would be made up of women. I don’t regret that it has been so. Divided, lacerated, in a world made to put them at a disadvantage, for women there are far more victories to be won, more prizes to be gained, more defeats to he suffered than there are for men. I have an interest in them; and I prefer having taken a limited but real hold upon the world through them to drifting in the universal.

Yes, this she has done.
Thank you Simone de Beauvoir!
― From Force of Circumstances:The Autobiography
of Simone de Beauvoir [1908 - 1986], Vol. III (1963)
Sometimes published in two parts:
After the War: 1944-1952 & Hard Times: 1952-1962

― See also
Vol. I ― Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
Vol. II ― The Prime of Life (1960)
Vol. IV ― All Said And Done (1972)
All translated by Richard Howard

An Overview: “From the Desk of Simone de Beauvoir”

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, June 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

From the Desk of Ernest Hemingway: "But never feel as good as while writing."

FINCA VIGIA: HEMINGWAY'S CUBAN VILLA
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee." ~ John Donne

***************

Finca Vigía
pronounced feen-ca vee-hee-a
meaning Lookout Farm
now a museum
once the home of Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)
where he lived off and on between 1939 - 1960
writing segments of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939 - 40)
and The Old Man and the Sea (1951)
in rural Havana, Cuba
about 15 miles from the City Center

Over the decades, there has been serious concern about the condition of Finca Vigía and the many priceless books and manuscripts housed there. Thanks to joint efforts between Cuba and the United States, the estate is now a living history museum, carefully preserved down to the finest detail. Each room has become a time capsule, seemingly undisturbed since Hemingway's last day there, back in July of 1960. Gerry and I were fortunate to see the Hemingway house / musuem last month, when we were docked in Havana for twenty - four hours as part of a Norweigian Cruise -- before the recently re - instated, travel restrictions severely and unnecessarily curtailed this international opportunity for so many curious Americans.

Still awaiting renovation & water, the elegant pool
at Finca Vigía, on a beautiful spring day:

One room just for writing:

Another just for reading:

Where Hemingway Sat!

Some Reading & Writing
Advice from Hemingway

Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study up about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.

In the meantime, since it is Christmas, if you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara.

Then when you have more time read another book called War and Peace by Tolstoi and see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more than topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are. Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in the fashion now. All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

from "Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba"
in Esquire (December 1934)

***************
The individual, the great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

. . . all stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and . . . no true-story teller . . . would keep that from you.

from Chapter 9 of Death in the Afternoon (1932)

***************
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.

from Chapter 11 of A Farewell to Arms (1929)

***************

Click for more Hemingway Quotes
For example:

"My attitude toward punctuation is that
it ought to be as conventional as possible. . . .
You ought to be able to show that you can do it
a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools
before you have a license to bring in your own improvements."

&

"Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all.
Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before,
and feel empty and f----d out afterwards.
But never feel as good as while writing."
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, June 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

The Painting's the Thing Wherein

EMBLEMATIC ARTWORKS
WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Nighthawks (1942)
by Edward Hopper (1882 - 1967)

“More relative than this: the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
― William Shakespeare ~ Hamlet 2, 2, 605-06

Could it also be that the painting's the thing
wherein we'll catch the consciousness of the nation?
I recently heard a speaker designate Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" (above), along with Grant Wood's "American Gothic," and Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" (below) as the most iconic paintings in the United States.

American Gothic (1930)
by Grant Wood (1891 - 1942)

Christina's World (1948)
by Andrew Wyeth (1917 - 2007)

In First Impressions: Andrew Wyeth, biographer Richard Meryman adds two names to the list. According to Meryman, by the mid 1960's, Christina's World joined not only American Gothic but also Whistler's Mother and Gilbert Stuart's Portrait of George Washington -- to become "one of America's four most indelible images."
Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1:
Whistler's Mother (1871)
James McNeill Whistler (1834 - 1903)

Portrait of George Washington (1796)
by Gilbert Stuart (1755 – 1828)

It is not unreasonable that some art critics, scholars, and connoisseurs might modify this group of five in one way or another. Still it's a fair sampling of images that collectively capture the spirit and history of the United States. I spent a few days musing over what favorites or classics I might chose. Looking at this core collection, what might I add or subtract or replace? I see such severity here, and a persistent theme of isolation: in the city, in the country, in infirmity, in old age, even in greatness.

The next thing I knew -- coincidence! -- I came across a short list of British paintings, also intended to speak for the heart and soul of a nation. In Kate Atkinson's novel Life After Life, set in World War II London, a neighborhood bomb shelter has been decorated by kindly neighbors. Perhaps the theme here is "if only we weren't at war":

"Mr. Miller, in an effort to make the cellar 'homely' (something it could never be), had taped some reproductions of 'great English art,' as he called it, against the sandbagged walls. These color plates -- The Haywain, Gainsborough's Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (how smug they looked) and Bubbles (the most sickly Millais possible, in Ursula's opinion) -- looked suspiciously as if they had been pilfered from expensive reference books on art. 'Culture,' Mr. Miller said, nodding sagely. Ursula wondered what she would have chosen to represent 'great English art.' Turner perhaps, the smudged, fugitive content of the late works. Not to the Millers' taste at all, she suspected." (279)

The Hay Wain (1821)
by John Constable (1776 – 1837)

Mr and Mrs Andrews (1750)
by Thomas Gainsborough (1727 - 1788)

Bubbles, originally titled A Child's World (1886)
John Everett Millais (1829 - 1896)

Knowing how popular these artists are, and how easily recognized their paintings, it's not surprising that several have appeared in previous Fortnightlies and Quotidians:

Hopper: Surface Dwellers
Whistler: Post Mother's Day, Raoul & Marguerite
Wood: American / British / Indiana Gothic
Andrew Wyeth: Saving the River Babies
and also his father, N. C. Wyeth: He Said She Said.
John Everett Millais: Sweet Basil, Ancestors, Love Is Not All

Had we but world enough and time, we could look at a thousand different paintings, and then a thousand more. But for today, we have eight representations -- five American standards, three British standards -- of civilization and imagination. What do these classic artworks say about which exterior and interior landscapes have embedded themselves in our memories and why? Do they depict a quest or an ideal just out of reach, a life that we crave; or one that we fear; or a realilty that we readily / resignedly accept as ours? One way or another, the painting's the thing wherein, century after century, we'll catch a glimpse of our dreams, both good and bad.

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS ON MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ See related post: "Getting to the Truth"
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www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

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