the longest day!

MIRACLES

Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me I know of
nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs
of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me
riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness
of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light
and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior
swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim—the rocks—the motion of the waves—
the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?

Walt Whitman

MIRACLE FAIR

Commonplace miracle:
that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:
in the dead of night
the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:
a small, airy cloud
yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:
an alder tree reflected in the water,
and that it's backwards left to right
and that it grows there, crown down
and never reaches the bottom,
even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:
winds weak to moderate
turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:
cows are cows.

Second to none:
just this orchard
from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:
scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:
today the sun rose at three-fourteen
and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:
even though the hand has fewer
than six fingers,
it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:
the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle,
as everything is additional:
the unthinkable is thinkable.

Wislawa Szymborska
translated by Joanna Trzeciak

oops... almost forgot

painting in a minor key

this whole rather stream-of-con- sciousness meandered from one inspiration to another (i'll get to that), and since much of this travel was through the nabis' neighborhood, i tried to find that tune in my head. forgive my synaesthesia, but i realised that the only way i could describe it was through sound.

this adventure began when i when i saw the elmes poster at the (below right). i knew it reminded me of something,
and it was clearly indebted to nabi music.
(see more at this amazing blog!)

i looked through my nabi books, and i think that this vallotton (above left) comes the closest, and that perhaps the ones i was seeing in my mind's eye were conflations of a few of the other ones.

the next two are just echos, the synapses skipping.

while bernard was the only one of these two who were part of the pont-aven crowd, you can surely see the route. but all this made me want to grasp what message i was getting from their work.

and i found that for me, it is non-verbal. it like the minor- key in the key- strokes of symphony, like a rotation that leaves every- thing rotated, not quite in

free-fall...........

three of these bottom images are from another won- derful site, i added the fourth, from ernest batch- elder, but its original artist is not attributed. personally, i think the bonnard more matches the batchelder.

there is something terribly attractive about that skewing, that minor key; it can be almost unbearable to come right-side up again. yes, the artists were heavily influenced by japanese prints, their flatness, their blocks of color, and their their knowledge of the importance of the non-linear line, and symbolism, and a response to the impressionists. but i believe that the goal, probably unconscious, was to play by the music that they heard, not anyone elses.

which is like so many of us today.

no faces of eve

What great evil has man committed that he deserves this terrifying partner called woman? It seems to me that with such violently contradictory thoughts and so clearly opposed impulses, the only possible relationship between the sexes is that of victor and vanquished. *

Is it fair to understand Felix Vallotton through his artwork? Through his written words? Is it fair to feel one understands a man through his history as told through facts? Through the opinions of his contemporaries? Each is probably just as fair as when we, in all our inescapable subjectivity, judge one of our fellows. All I can say is that, from what I've read, quite a number of his interpreters and critics, and there are many that agree with my conclusions, and many that are wrong.

I'd like to just say... though... or shall I say, "state the obvious" -- These women have no faces! Not only that, but their colors are often practically inhuman, unhealthy, surely, and they look more like moulded plastic than flesh and blood, polished like fine wood, and constructed with all the right angles in all the right places. If touched, these bodies, even sitting by a fire, would be cold.

Consider, if you will, the very numerous images of "intimate" scenes. Here too, women consistently have no faces. As with the nudes, we seem to be peering closely, and yet cannot avoid a feeling of distance. Whose distance is really being registered? Is Vallotton commenting on the falseness of the apparent closeness depicted, demonstrating his despair at this "truth," or is the distance with the heart of the artist, leaving Vallotton himself the one with the inability to close the deal?

Many analyses of his work seem to take misogyny for granted: "the men were frightened by woman's new-found freedoms...." There have been those of his critics, both in his day and now, who will interpret Vallotton's work either as a brilliant and unsentimental exploration of the duplicities and failures inherent in marriage, or as evidence of his fear thus hatred of women. Should we excuse misogyny as temporal? Tell me when it started and when it stopped.

A smooth brow. A pale eye, well placed, but without brilliance under sickly eyelids, a short aquiline nose, a prominent upper lip where the beginnings of a retiring moustache could be detected, a thick-lipped mouth purposefully half-opened over quite beautiful teeth, but separated, and then, suddenly, the failure of everything in the weak little chin, a haphazard little chin which blemished the ensemble and spoiled it with its weakness. *

(He could almost be narrating his own artwork.)

The facts of Vallotton's own sentimental life are also ambiguous: was he a simple loving man dissolved by life's necessities, or a callous, selfish charlatan, motivated only by his need for fame? For ten years, Vallotton lived in the Latin Quarter with Helene Chatenay, a working-class woman whom he painted often, and cherished dearly, grateful for her generous emotional support.

At that ten-year mark, Vallotton leaves her, and marries a wealthy widow, Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriques, with associates in the world of gallery owners and patrons of the arts. Has he thereby confirmed his own worse suspicions on the nature of love, or merely followed the instructions of his heart? He is quoted as saying words to the effect that, Helene knew I had plans to go off and marry some day.... He is reported to have been dispirited since the day he left her behind choosing, apparently, love over money. However he is also reported to have been, from the time of the wedding, happier than he had ever been in his life.

* The two excerpts in italics are from Vallotton's posthumously-published novel, "La Vie Meurtriere." It is about a painter with many biological details that match Vallotton's, who murders his working-class lover with a distant though passionate blood-lust. These deaths, which are supposedly accidents, fascinate him as participant, as observer, and as narrator.

How I miss my simple stupid days when I thought, when I looked at Vallotton's work, that I was seeing Eros, without catching a whiff of the
Thanatos lurking so closely by.

it's all cinderella

imagine, if you will, what these blended titles may be.
pick one from each list....

PROTAGONIST

• a stressed-out lawyer

• a busy fashion executive

• a determined bride-to-be

• a workaholic hollywood publicist

• a driven marketing executive

• a successful but overworked business woman

ACTION

• warily welcomes a stranger into her home

• ends up hitchhiking to her wedding

• meets a life coach and is granted 12 wishes

• is knocked unconscious in a car accident

• is visited by the ghost of her former client

• wishes to see what her life would be like if....

HAPPY ENDING

notice i didn't say 'happy endings.' they all, of course, end the same way. a good man will always be more satisfying than a life lived in the business world. nowadays, some women do hold on to their careers, but only once they have reinstated the man where he was meant to be.

her work will then be denigrated, the guy rescues her from some dastardly foe, she thanks (her lucky star, elf, santa, whatever), and they ride off into the future, with bells ringing.

these are all, as you've probably guessed, taken from plots of christmas movies (frequently on lifetime or the hallmark channel). but i ask you: how often must women be sacrificed upon the logs of christmas?

and so as to not come across as an miscreant fool, i will admit that sometimes the protagonist is a man (like nicholas cage or ebeneezer scrooge -- except for that time susan lucci played scrooge). but, i believe, my point is still well-taken. the warmth of christmas mainly serves to remind us that jesus has preferred roles for all of us, and if you choose to rebel against these values, they just may come and make a movie about you.

why i don't believe in hell

my father kinda looked like a mixture of mayor bloomberg and alexander nikolaevich yakovlev (photo composit). today would have been his 99th birthday, if he had not died in 1980.

he smoked a pipe, sometimes cigarettes, he had a manhattan every night when he got home from the office. with a cherry. and he played 'fur elise' on the piano. he bought himself an eames chair, and was always the second son, the one least favored.

as a pup, he had done some disc jockeying on the radio, and he was the best dancer i ever met.

when i came home from dates, he would be sitting at the dining room table eating corn flakes and reading the paper.

as i thought about him, new of his talents kept popping into my mind. singing 'scarlet ribbons.' acting in musicals at the jewish center -- 'captain sammy's showboat' (directed by my mother). he could draw middling good, and had wanted to go to art school, but ended up following in his older brother's footsteps to go to medical school at the university of chicago.

a month before he died, my mother's mother died. in the car on the way to the funeral he cracked jokes the whole time.













when i look at him in the tangle of my memory, i can only seem to find a mangled creature, partially melted into himself, some darkened parts that look like they might be from burns.










no, i don't think i'm seeing him now. i thinking i'm finally seeing him with clarity, he who will always be in my memory. how can one believe in hell? a man may spend some kind smiles in his lifetime but if he also places his own pain & fear & terrors onto his children with a scream and the back of a hand, he is being rightly tortured at that time.

involved in the minutiae

(interview between ada calhoun & michael lewis, here)

Ada: I was taken aback by some of the things in [your new book, Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood], like, if I can read you one quote: "At some point in the last few decades the American male sat down at the dining room table with the American female, and let us be frank, got fleeced." I was shocked by that, because when I look it our generation, it seems like men are happy to play their part.

Michael: Ah, well, you must know different men than me.

Ada: I think I do.

Michael: Bear in mind that most of the men I'm surrounded by are in Berkeley, California. So, the men I know are very much in the left end of the spectrum. Relatively highly involved dads. On the one hand, it is completely true that there are a lot of men who take great satisfaction in being involved in the minutiae and messiness of actually raising children. But, it is a much smaller universe of men who take any pleasure in the newborn stage. Men, I think, tend to engage once they start to be able to play with the thing and talk to it and have some kind of communication.

But, even so, there is just a wealth of bitching and moaning about the responsibility that I hear and it never really gets voiced. In the universe I'm talking about it's men who are potentially breadwinners at the same time that they are having all these new caretaking responsibilities and they don't have a real mental model to use....

But I do think that there is just enormous friction about who is supposed to do what. I think, actually, that when men are made to do things they don't want to do, like take care of a child, which they assumed the mother was going to take care of — I think they can get enormous rewards from it, but nevertheless it can be messy getting to that place.

(continued here)

don't tell me it isn't happening

NEW

The long path sap sludges up
through an iris, is it new

each spring? And what would
an iris care for novelty?

Urgent in tatters, it wants
to wrest what routine it can

from the ceaseless shifts
of weather, from the scrounge

it feeds on to grow beautiful
and bigger: last week the space

about to be rumpled
by iris petals was only air

through which a rabbit leapt,
a volley of heartbeats hardly
contained by fur, and then the clay-
colored spaniel in pursuit

and the effortless air
rejoining itself whole.

William Matthews

these are the sixteen kinds of irises that grow in my garden.
the ones with their names attached DID NOT BLOOM this year.
profuse iris, with, at most, one bloom.

i called the local experts,
and they said that they're hearing this from a lot of people;
i said that in 20 years this has never happened,
and they said that they're hearing about things
that haven't happened in as long as 100 years.