inevitable

inevitable. looking back across the 20th century, it seems that every movement in art history peels smoothly off the one before, uncurling itself as though new. but it's not; it's an inevitable step on the road, given that, expect this.

modern abstract art is inevitable, given the stripped-down shape-for-shape-sake of the bauhaus years. art had been making the dive into abstraction for decades, to the point where meaning and reference become moot: sheer existence. ("just dance! don't think!"1)

art deco into bauhaus is obviously inevitable: abstraction of shape into outline lent itself to form over fantasy. clearing out, clearing away to make way for the modern age in which everyone was too busy to think a wasted thought, or waste a single movement. the line was important then, which was inevitable.

and yes, i am simplifying, but i wouldn't want to fall behind the times! also bold were the times leading into the art deco moment. art nouveau was about that line, that curve, that color, that biological reference...

and art nouveau... that was not inevitable. yes, one could say it was preceded by impressionism, well, it was preceded by impressionism, but impressionism was more about an entire field whereas art nouveau and all of its inevitable followers were about one thing: the line.

to my eyes nothing whatsoever in anything that preceded the arrival of the east predicted what was to follow. the beginning of the line which was not to end. nothing in the tiny and drab patterns of western textiles hinted of the explosion that was to come. (nor predicted was the inspiration by a zionist art nouveau designer from galicia of a british-turned-american designer named louis rhead!)

it wasn't always a linear progression; some of the textiles of the deco stylists more resembled the japanese textiles than did their earlier counterparts. but was this exuberant jump to boldness predictable? i think not!

was the festoonization of clothing with flora and fauna an expected result of incoming culture? why should it be? not a chance! or was it to be expected that practically overnight color broke the color barrier? i pale just thinking of it.

that upper-crust drawing rooms might be thrilled to adorn their walls with spiders might have raised some eyebrows, but other than little miss muffet, everyone would have it no other way. for it was nature and color bursting from their wraps in the holds of the black ships arriving from japan.

and while japan likely viewed their latest fashions as being inevitable, given the season before, not a soul, i would bet, would have ever guessed that in the west they would inspire a series of inevitable progressions for decades and decades to come.

(check out MODA's new blog.)

blue skies

PRINCIPALITIES OF JUNE

Original light broke apart,
the Gnostics say,
when time began,

singular radiance
fractioned into form
— an easy theory

to believe,
in early summer,
when that first performance

seems repeated daily.
Though wouldn’t it mean
each fracturing took us

that much further
from heaven?
Not in this town,

not in June: harbor
and cloudbank, white houses’
endlessly broken planes,

a long argument
of lilac shadows and whites
as blue as noon:

phrasebooks of day,
articulated most of all
in these roses,

which mount and swell
in dynasties of bloom,
their easy idiom

a soundless compaction
of lip on lip. Their work,
these thick flowerheads?

Built to contain
sunlight, they interrupt
that movement just enough

to transfix in air, at eye level,
now: held still, and shattering,
which is the way with light:

the more you break it
the nearer it comes to whole.

Mark Doty






copyright mark doty
all rights reserved

love the wild color

(for princess to welcome her back)

before japanese prints arrived in the west, this on the left may have been what passed as riotous color; imagine the response to this on the right. nice girls didn't, but raoul dufy did.

LOVE THE WILD SWAN

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.

Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.







Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.

Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”

—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.

Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.

Does it matter whether you hate your...self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

Robinson Jeffers

Robinson Jeffers, “Love the Wild Swan” from The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, edited by Tim Hunt. Copyright (c) by the Jeffers Literary Properties.

Source: The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford University Press, 1988).

The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it’s in
the reptilian dance
of the purple-tongued
sand goanna,
for there the
magnificent translation
of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.



And some declare it to be an expansive
desert — solid rust- orange rock
like dusk captured on earth in stone —
simply for the perfect contrast it provides
to the blue-grey ridge of rain
in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches
of come and retreat over the mounting
hayfield.

Others, for gran- deur, choose the terror
of lightning peals on prairies or the tall
collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas,
because there they feel dwarfed
and appropriately helpless; others select
the serenity of that ceiling/cellar
of stars they see at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.



But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with
parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and
stepping sideways,
with tumbling
white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots
or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

© 1994 by Pattiann Rogers

from Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems (1994).

solstice II

YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ALL

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands

gloved with green. You can have the touch
of a single eleven-year-old finger

on your cheek, waking you at one a.m.
to say the hamster is back.

You can have the purr of the cat
and the soulful look

of the black dog, the look that says,
If I could I would bite

every sorrow until it fled,
and when it is August,

you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,

though often it will be mysterious,
like the white foam

that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys

until you realize foam's twin is blood.

You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,

so solid, so doll-like.
You can have the life of the mind,

glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,

never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you

all roads narrow at the border.

You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,

and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave

where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,

but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands

as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful

for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful

for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels

sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,

for passion fruit, for saliva.
You can have the dream,

the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.

You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,

at least for a while,
you can have clouds and letters, the leaping

of distances, and Indian food
with yellow sauce like sunrise.

You can't count on grace
to pick you out of a crowd

but here is your friend to teach you
how to high jump,

how to throw yourself
over the bar, backwards,

until you learn about love,
about sweet surrender,

and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind

as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,

you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond

of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas

your grandmother gave you
while the rest of the family slept.

There is the voice you can still summon
at will, like your mother's,

it will always whisper, you can't have it all,

but there is this.

Barbara Ras

From Bite Every Sorrow by Barbara Ras,
published by Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Ras. All rights reserved.