don't believe a thing i say!

okay, april fools and all that, but i'm not completely kidding (and since i didn't finish this yesterday, it might not count anyway). sometimes in the mythologies i try to untangle for you i get some things seriously wrong for one main reason: i forget to check the dates. in fact i wouldn't be sur- prised if i haven't attributed some things to some artists that happened long before, or long after, they died. i hope you know what i mean!

let us begin with, for example, gustave courbet who died at age 58, in 1877. he was born in 1819. obviously. see his example above right? very natural clouds. no outlines. (they really tend to not have any outlines; i have been checking.) and then we have hokusai: all outlines, nothing realistic about them. while he was born in 1760, he was producing artwork until his death in 1849. quite an overlap in lives, these two. the moment of japonisme would have passed hokusai by completely, while all of courbet's training and experience, and the way he saw, were set by the time of the invasion.

now to put these generational questions into some context, may i mention that hiroshige lived from 1797 to 1858 (getting closer to courbet, aren't we?) and monet lived from 1840 to 1926. monet, the impressionists, were the first artists to imbibe from the teacup of the japanese, but the next gener- ation made things extremely interesting. there were the cowboy painters, painers of the mesas of utah and arizona, dixon, cassidy, and borg: realistic clouds with outlines.

they were the next generation; they, these brilliant western painters, were of the same generation as some of the artists we have gotten to know well over the years: henri riviere, pierre bonnard, frances gearhart, and, only slightly younger, hiroshi yoshida. yoshida did not even begin to make prints (he had been a western-style painter, as they were called then) until he was in his 40s -- one year before arthur wesley dow died!

what this boils down to is that any illustration i have given you of influences yoshida may have had on dow are completely erroneous! arthur wesley dow's birth (1857 - 1922) occurred one year before hiroshige died! dow was more a contemporary of monet than the many proponents of japonisme with whom i have linked him; dow was, as was monet, the first wave -- the primogenitor of influences of japonisme, and not any part of the gang.

henri riviere, pierre bonnard, carl oscar borg, maynard dixon, and hiroshi yoshida all died within four years of my birth. these donors of legacy are no further in the past than is world war II. these artists are of the generation of my grandparents, or great-grandparents. in other words, we still swim in their stream. there was no flood diverting it.

so with regard to clouds (and we have discussed them before; just click on the 'clouds' tag to see the other discussions), we now have a much clearer line of inheritance: it is obvious that the japanese gave us outlines and we gave them perspective. they gave us simplicity and we gave them the multi-pigmented shades of color of which the world is built.

see here the same cloud, albeit different times of day, as offered by frances gearhart and hiroshi yoshida. many similarities. yoshida's work presents far more subtleties than does hokusai's, and gearhart's far more outlining and simplifying than courbet's. but who learned from whom? do they more accurately owe each other a debt as do artists working at the same time? i think they do.

Turning Japanese II

This was the state of the art of printmaking in 1850,
the dark silence before the dawn of the Japanese
influence on everything:

Then the tsunami hit: and the stories
of the means of that onslaught are many.

Perhaps, since the woodblock prints were supposedly used
as wrapping paper on ceramic imports,
they were inadvertently discovered
by painters buying ashtrays.

(That's what they told me on the sightseeing tour to Giverney.)

There were the scholars, vendors, and pilgrims,
many of whom have been discussed here, whose
curiosity drove them to Japan itself as soon
as they could. They were inspired, profoundly awed,
and they looted the back rooms for whatever they could
for museums and private collections.

Extremely important, too were the Universal Expositions
which bloomed on every shore and brought
artist, craftsman, and person-on-the-street
into direct contact with the Japanese items themselves.

To explore the variety in more depth, check out this.

There were entrepreneurs on all shores (also previously
covered here), who opened shops, started magazines (or both),
to display and sell the imports; or in Japan where they began
to marshall artists to produce what the West wanted.

Now, I'm not saying that each artist pictured here was
introduced to Japanese arts and crafts in one of these ways.
What I am saying is that every single one (and all the more
who are not featured here) was influenced none the less.

No longer was the body's content as important as were its bones.
And all of the other Japonisme-y things: flat planes of color,
asymmetry, outlines. Consciously or unconsciously,
people had begun to see differently.

The language changed, and changes still.

charles
clive

the panama-pacific, that is! • part 3

Aside from the construction of the $50,000 pipe organ, which, after the Exposition, will be placed permanently in the Civic Auditorium, the two most important musical items found on the schedule of Exposition enterprises are the engagements of Camille Saint-Saens and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The former, who maintained that "Beethoven is the greatest, the only real, artist, because he upheld the idea of universal brotherhood," is perhaps better fitted than any living composer to write special music for the Exposition.

This he has done, -- writing two compositions in fact; and their presentation has been an outstanding feature. "Hail, California," was dedicated to the Exposition. Scored for an orchestra of eighty, a military band of sixty, a chorus of 300 voices, pipe organ and piano, its first presentation was an event.

The Saint-Saens Symphony in C minor (No. 3) Opus 78, composed many years ago, has become a classic during the life-time of its creator. It was one of the wonders of the Boston Symphony programmes played in Festival Hall. Its yield of immediate pleasure and its reassurance for the works of Saint-Saens to be heard later, grew from the fact that it was scored for orchestra and pipe organ, and in this massive tonal web the genius of the composer to write in magnificent size was overwhelm- ingly evident, thus forecasting the splendors of "Hail, California."

The French Pavilion is a dignified and impressive structure, as those who recall the Legion of Honor Palace in Paris will understand. The entrance to the court is a triumphal arch flanked by double rows of Ionic columns on either side, with figures of Fame as spandrels. The arch is connected by lateral peristyles with the wings of the pavilion, the attics of which are adorned with has reliefs.

Ionic colonnades extend along the sides of the court to the principal front of the building, which is decorated with six Corinthian columns, forming a portico for the main entrance. The portal opens on a stage, above which a great central hall, flanked by lesser halls, extends back through the palace.

More notable than the building itself, or its priceless contents, is the fact that these are here. That, in the midst of war and its demands, France should still find time for the ideal, and for this beautiful tribute to the long-standing friendship between the two countries, is a demonstration of French spirit and of French culture that will not escape the attention of any thoughtful American. For France herself, as it has well been said, her appearance here means as much as a victory on the battlefield.

But the glory of the building is in its exhibits. France poured out the treasures of the Louvre, the Luxembourg and the National Museum to adorn this pavilion. Fine as is the exhibit in the French section of the Palace of Fine Arts, the best pictures and Sculptures are shown here. In the Court of Honor stands the masterpiece of the master sculptor of modern times, "The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin. (p. 158.) In the galleries are his "John the Baptist" and other important bronzes.

Vast, unique and of the greatest interest is Theodore Riviere's wonderful group in bronze representing a triumphant band of desert soldiers dragging captive the Moroccan pretender, secured in an iron cage. There, too, are splendid paintings by Monet, Meissonier, Detaille, de Neuvilie, and many other French artists approved by time. **

(these all are actual pieces shown in that exhibit, accompanied by the music played there, described by someone who visited there. and this is just the teensiest fraction of just one country's offerings, just france. and the world was there. bibliography to follow.)

It’s more than the increasing depth of the day

music

A VERY COMMON FIELD

What is it about this grassy field
that’s so familiar to me? Something
with the beings, the form of the place?

It’s not within
the foxtail,
not within
the brome, not within oat grass
or red clover
or yellow vetch
or the lot of them as one
motion in the wind.

It’s not the morning
or even of the morning,
or of the invisible
crickets, one near, one away,
still sounding
in the damp after dawn.

What is it so resonant and recognized here?
A sense like nostalgia,
like manner,
like a state felt but
not remembered?

It isn’t the center of the purple cornflower
or its rayed and fluted edges, not the slow
rise of the land or the few scattered trees
left in the fallow orchard, not the stone path,
not the grains and bristles of stems and seeds,
each oblivious in its own business,
but something impossible without these.

It’s more than
the increasing depth
of the day and
the blue of its height,
more than the half-body
of the lizard
turned upside down
on the path, torn

and transfigured during the night, more
than the bells beginning their lesson in the background.

It’s not a voice, not a message,
but something like a lingering,
a reluctance to abandon, a biding
so constantly present
that I can never
isolate it
from the disorderly crows
passing over or
from the sun moving
as wind down through the brief fires
of moisture on the blades of timothy

and sage, never separate it
from the scent
of fields drying and warm, never
isolate it from
my own awareness.

It is something
that makes possible,
that occasions without causing,
something
I can never extricate
to name, never
name to know,
never know to imitate.

— Pattiann Rogers

what breaks

listen... you can hear it now....

THE WAVE

As when far off
in the middle of the ocean
A breast-shaped curve of wave begins to whiten
And rise above the surface,
then rolling on
Gathers and gathers until
it reaches land
Huge as a mountain and crashes among the rocks
With a prodigious roar, and what was deep
Comes churning up from the bottom in mighty swirls
Of sunken sand and living things and water —

So in the springtime
every race of people
And all the creatures on earth
or in the water,
Wild animals and flocks
and all the birds
In all their painted colors,
all rush to charge
Into the fire that burns them: love moves them all.

Virgil, translated by Robert Pinsky
The Threepenny Review

LETTER FROM CRANBERRY ISLAND

Today in a meadow beside the sea
I knelt among sea rocket
and lupine
as a deer I’d startled
flipped heels up
and bounded into the spruce grove.
Prebbles cove, the beach of stones
glistening and smooth from the pummel of waves.

And I, who understand pounding,
wanted to walk into the sea, to rock there.

At the far edge of my life
on an island four hundred miles
from home, I lean against
an uncurtained window,
and all my grief
for what is already lost,
for what it may ge too late to find,
jostles up against how much
I continue anyway to love the world.

I am tired of wanting to sleep beyond waking —
tired of the numbing that is no better than death,
But here on the sill,
stones oval as eggs —
blue, gray, black,
a whole row of them —
glow in the afternoon light
and here, across the meadow,
light enfolds even the least
small running creature.

And here. And here. And here.
More light, great sheets of saving light
surge and flash — green, coral, cerulean —
off the turbulent
white-capped waters.

Patricia Fargnoli

from Necessary Light

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

by Edward Hirsch

The poem would address an unseen listener, an unseen audience. It does so through the rhetoric of address since the message in the bottle seems to be speaking to the poet alone, or to a muse, a friend, a lover, an abstraction, an object in nature. . . . It seems to be speaking to God or to no one. Rhetoric comes into play here, the radi- cal of presentation, the rhythm of words crea- ting a deep sensation in the reader. Rhythm would lift the poem off the page, it would bewitch the sounds of language, hypnotize the words into memorable phrases. Rhythm creates a pattern of yearning and expectation, of recurrence and difference. It is related to the pulse, the heartbeat, the way we breathe. It takes us into ourselves; it takes us out of ourselves. It differentiates us; it unites us to the cosmos.

Rhythm is a form cut into time, as Ezra Pound said in ABC of Reading. It is the combination in English of stressed and unstressed syllables that creates a feeling of fixity and flux, of surprise and inevitability. Rhythm is all about recurrence and change. It is poetry’s way of charging the depths, hitting the fathomless. It is oceanic. I would say with Robert Graves that there is a rhythm of emotions that conditions the musical rhythms, that mental bracing and relaxing which comes to us through our sensuous impressions. It is the emotion — the very rhythm of the emotion — that determines the texture of the sounds.

I like to feel the sea drift, the liturgical cadence of the first stanza of Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” It is one sentence and twenty-two lines long. It always carries me away.

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,

Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,

Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot,

Down from the shower’d halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting
as if they were alive,
Out from the patches of
briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,

From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,

From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,

From those beginning notes of yearning and love
there in the mist,

From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous’d words,

From the word stronger and
more delicious than any,
From such as now
they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising,
or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears
a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand,
confronting the waves,

I, chanter of pains and joys,
uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

The incantatory power of this is tremendous as the repetitions loosen the intellect for reverie. It seems to me that Whitman creates here the very rhythm of a singular reminiscence emerging out of the depths of mind, out of the sea waves and the rocking cradle, out of all the undifferentiated sensations of infancy, out of the myriad memories of childhood, out of all possible experiences the formative event of a boy leaving the safety of his bed and walking the seashore alone, moving “Out,” “Over,” “Down,” “Up,” “From,” exchanging the safety of the indoors for the peril of the outdoors, facing his own vague yearnings and the misty void, mixing his own tears and the salt spray of the ocean, listening to the birds, understanding the language — the calling — of one bird.

He walks the shore on the edge of the world, the edge of the unknown. He has entered the space that Emerson calls “I and the Abyss,” the space of the American sublime.

In this region: out of all potential words, these words alone; out of all potential memories, this memory alone. It is the emerging rhythm itself that creates the Proustian sensation of being in two places at once, “A man, yet by these tears a little boy again, / Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves.”

Whitman creates through the rhetorical rhythm of these lines the very urgency of fundamental memory triggered and issuing forth. He splits himself off and moves seamlessly between the third person and the first person. And as the bird chanted to him (“From the memories of the bird that chanted to me”) so he chants to us (“I, chanter of pains and joys”). This is a poem of poetic vocation.

It is telling that Whitman builds to the self-command, “A reminiscence sing.” He memorializes the memory in song. There is an element of lullaby in this poem, the lulling motion of the waves, the consoling sound of the sea. But this is a lullaby that wounds (as García Lorca said about Spanish lullabies), a lullaby of sadness that permeates the very universe itself, a lullaby that moves from chanting to singing. Paul Valary calls the passage from prose to verse, from speech to song, from walking to dancing, “a moment that is at once action and dream.” Whitman creates such a moment here. He would spin an enchantment beyond pain and joy, he would become the poetic shaman who authors that reminiscence for us, who magically summons up the experience in us.

this glorious essay is from here.
the poster at the top is for this.
the image from which that poster was taken is on the other side, and really does not seem to exist outside of the bnf's copy. the bnf, who has also brought us this.

japan, a water-draped nation.
is it any wonder so much art is about fish? and so much rhythm.