Leap into the void

Yves Klein was a neo-Dadaist. Or a modernist. A judo master. Quite possibly a huckster. But I love this photo called "Leap into the Void." You don't have to know anything about it, though the backstory  is interesting. Klein said this was proof he could fly and used the photo to mock NASA's space exploration. Klein claimed he knew how to fall from years of judo. The consensus is that he doctored the whole thing with some pre-Photoshop manipulation. None of that matters. This is art. This is metaphor. Klein is completely vulnerable and completely ecstatic. A combination we should experience for a few fleeting moments over a life well lived. It reminds me of a Hunter S. Thompson quote (which I can't find at the moment) when a man climbs a maze of ladders and finds his own private white space, blowing fuse after fuse, and eating them like popcorn on the way up.

Chaos

The expressionist painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was a Jewish painter from Belarus. While living in Paris, and inspired by classical European painting, he developed his own stylized vocabulary of shape and color.

Soutine's series of paintings of beef (Le Boeuf Ecorche)



may be an antecedent to the paintings of Francis Bacon.



But I digress. A Soutine painting (I don't know the name) caught my attention because it immediately reminded me of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I was in the city then, working with an NGO helping to rescue pets -- dogs and cats -- left behind.



Each day we convoyed into New Orleans. The city was abandoned and utterly silent. A perfectly blue sky and blazing sun greeted us. That such violence was presented with so much tranquility engendered a profound reverence, like the feeling that seizes oneself upon entering a darkened European cathedral.




Everything were devastated. Ravished. The scale impossible to imagine. House after house. Block after block. Neighborhood after neighborhood.


 

Entering each house felt like a transgression. Again the silence. Again the heat. But also a stylized chaos. Individuated. The brushstrokes of a personality still visible after the water and the wind.

And it got me thinking about the chaos we all carry within our hearts. How impossible it is to know the ecology of one's own heart, let alone another. How this breeds a certain insistence on self-centeredness. And the courage it takes to face the chaos again and again, to sort it, to order it, to attempt to make it into something beautiful.

From Mary Gaitskill's Veronica

When I say that the songs we listened to at the hostel had a feeling of sickness in them, that doesn’t mean I don’t like them. I did like them, and I still do. The sick feeling wasn’t all in the songs, either. But it was in many songs, and not just the ones for teenagers; you could go to the supermarket and hear it in the Muzak that roamed the aisles, swallowing everything in its soft mouth. It didn’t feel like sickness. It felt like endless opening and expansion, and pleasure that would never end. The songs before that were mostly about pleasure, too – having it, wanting it, or not giving enough of it and being sad. But they were finite little boxes of pleasure, with the simple surfaces of personality and situation.

Then it was like somebody realized you could take the surface of a song, paint a door on it, open it, and walk through. The door didn’t always lead to someplace light and sweet. Sometimes where it led was dark and heavy. That part wasn’t new. A song my father especially loved by Jo Stafford was “I’ll Be Seeing You.” During World War II, it became a lullaby about absence and death for boys who were about to die and kill. I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you. In the moonlight of this song, the known things, the tender things, “the carousel, the wishing well,” appear outlined against the gentle twilight of familiarity and comfort. In the song, that twilight is a gauze veil of music, and Stafford’s voice subtly deepens, and gives off a slight shudder as she touches against it. The song does not go any further than this touch because the veil is killing and dying, and the song honors killing and dying. It also honors the little carousel. It knows the wishing well is a passageway to memory and feeling – maybe too much memory and feeling, ghosts and delusion. Jo Stafford’s eyes on the album cover say that she knew that. She knew the dark was huge and she had humility before it.

The new songs had no humility. They pushed past the veil and opened a window into the darkness and climbed through it with a knife in their teeth. The songs could be about rape and murder, killing your dad and fucking your mom, and the sailing off on a crystal ship to a thousand girls and thrills, or going for a moonlight drive. They were beautiful songs, full of places and textures – flesh, velvet, concrete, city towers, desert sand, snakes, violence, wet glands, childhood, the pure wings of night insects. Anything you could think of was there, and you could move through it as if it were an endless series of rooms and passages full of visions and adventures. And even if it was about killing and dying – that was just another place to go.

Photos of Edward Burtynsky

“As we destroy that which is natural, we eat ourselves alive.” -- William Kittredge

From AR Ammons' book-length poem "Garbage"

We are primates: apes: we’re meat wrapped round
Knotchbone spine: we can’t untangle ourselves

Productively from stalwart lacing, bone, artery.
Nerve compact but, turned around, there is the

Spiritual face, thoughts lightbeam light,
Twinklings like minnows surfacing waves, the

Rosy rushes that rouge or loft flesh, the
Interface of meat and madness, love and lumbar:

It is, I think, remarkable that we are there in
The form of apes: mulling apes: walky apes:

But Newton, a lone one in his room, flowed
Figure into calculus that found on a sheet of

Paper the slow Saturn fell into passing Jupiter:
This kind of ape will join his fellows in a

Dirty street and hack another fellow who has
Done ungroupliness to death, axe him right

In the pleading face and let him bleed reconciled:
Purity of cluster will override good or bad in

Us: I have a low view of us: but that is why
I love us or try and move to love us:

From Tony Hoagland's What Narcissims Means To Me

Patience

“Success is the worst possible thing that could happen
to a man like you,” she said,
“because the shiny shoes, and flattery
and the self-
lubricating slime of affluence would mean
you’d never have to face your failure as a human being.”

There was a rude remark I could have made back to her right then
and I watched it go by like a bright blue sailboat on a long gray river
of silence,
watching it until it disappeared around the bend

while I smiled and listened to her talk,
thinking it was good to let myself be stabbed by her little spears,
because I wanted to see what I was made of

besides fear and the desire to be liked
by every person on the goddamn face of the earth—

To tell the truth, I felt a certain satisfaction in taking it,

letting her believe that I was just a little bird
opening my mouth and swallowing
the medicine she wanted to administer

--a mixture of good advice combined with slow-acting poison.

Is it strange to say that there was something beautiful
in the sight of her running wild, cut loose in an
epileptic fit of telling the truth?

And anyway, she was right about me,
that I am prone to certain misconceptions,

that I should never get so big or fat that I
can’t look down and see my own naked dirty feet,

which is why I kept smiling and smiling as she talked--.

It was a beautiful day. I felt like crying.

I knew that if I could succeed at being demolished,
I could succeed at anything.

From Donald Barthelme's Essay Not-Knowing

“The problems that seem to me to define the writer’s task at this moment (to the extent that he has chosen them as his problems) are not of a kind that make for ease of communication, for work that rushes toward the reader with out-flung arms – rather, they’re the reverse. Let me cite three such difficulties that I take to be important, all having to do with language. First, there is art’s own project, since Mallarme, of restoring freshness to a much handled-language, essentially an effort toward finding a language in which art is possible at all. This remains a ground theme, as potent, problematically, as it was a century ago. Secondly, there is the political and social contamination of language by its use in manipulation of various kinds over time and the effort to find what might be called a ‘clean’ language, problems associated with Roland Barthes of Writing Degree Zero but also discussed by Lukacs and others. Finally, there is the pressure on language from contemporary culture in the broadest sense – I mean our devouring commercial culture – which results in a double impoverishment: the theft of complexity from the reader, theft of the reader from the writer.”