incandescence

Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson poems selected by Thomas H. Johnson: after seeing a wonderful Ah Hong concert where she sang three sets (of three different Emily Dickinson poems) by different composers. And she's soooooo one of my Artist Ancestors

I just started Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault: I hadn't read any Foucault since I finished my MFA, but this one found me at just the right willingness to read slowly.

Seasonal, especially after my experiences with the Morrigan, I'm reading Slavoj Zizek's Violence. Also slow going, but I'm about a third finished. I'm sure to be using quotations from this one!

Easier reading, but a challenging topic, I'm reading Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. It is no how-to manual (though maybe I'm ready for that? again?) - but more a historical, literature-based examination of the imagery and ideas about debt and wealth in Western society.

For light reading: I just finished Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Palace of Illusions: a mostly feminist retelling of Panchaali, the fire-born heroine of The Mahabharat. I loved her Mistress of Spices better, but this was still magical.
I'm loving the non-science fiction offering by Samuel R. Delany, Dark Reflection, which I'm afraid will be finished too soon.

Tomorrow I'm teaching a set of poems by different poets that work with the imagery/theme of writing poems, or being a poet: Linda Pastan, Billy Collins, Carol Ann Duffy, and Mary Oliver included.  My classes just started their first Shakespeare studies, and it is always like nails on the chalk board till their reading of the verse starts to sound reasonably okay...  but many in this current class performed a couple of Shakespeare plays across the street at the boys' school, so their level of understanding should be better than usual.

I'm overworking, overgiving - leaving school late several days a week, getting to school before 7 am every morning, teaching straight through, and when I'm not in my "middle management" meetings, I'm grading, grading, grading while still trying to be available, more available for faculty and students.  I managed to get out to watch two advisees playing in two different soccer games this afternoon.  Really, I'm heading for sainthood, and what's that line from Pippin:  "Nothing makes you feel more obsolete than being noted for your morals?"

No gym, again, this week.  But art is moving forward, and so that's important.

But "too many" or "too much,"  and especially "over - __________" and "more" are hardly good signs for living in greater balance, at least, for me. 

The Old Antique Store on Route 404, MD

By Michael Sylvan Robinson

The first time we drove this way, together, 
I discouraged stopping; the porch cluttered                              
with assorted junk, but when we opened                                                                
the door, I knew it would not be a short visit.
 

A narrow labyrinth of pathways, floorboards                                                    
rotten, creaking as we tread carefully                             
between towering walls, shelves and shelves                                                       
of glassware, stacked china, and figurines.

The proprietor, an ancient character                                                                             
as much an institution as his business,
both holding a history accumulated in layers of dust.
Breathed in, this residue of so many households.

Dripping crystal beads, glittering icicles                                                    
in rows of restored chandeliers, tended                      
by his hands to the delight of decorators,                               
raising his prices within this cave of treasures.

Costumed couples with painted faces,                                  
a noble rabbit dressed in a frock coat,
waiting amidst an endless garden of flower-patterns,                      
a tea party for every dreaming Alice.

 

 

Through the barred window, hidden behind                                                                 
the rows of colored glass, beyond the silence
of a clock stilled, stretches out farmland,                                                            
an endless, timeless landscape of corn.

 
Exiting, your boxes held carefully in my hands,                                                 
I spy the tiny movement of multiple legs,                                             
upside down within the glass prison of a tall vase,                                                     
is trapped the most magnificent beetle.

Returning, unsure of my course of action,                                                          
until I call you over, a witness                                       
to its reaching, a repeated failing to upright itself                                                         
within the impossible curve of the vessel,

 
until released, out on the porch, the ungrateful                                                   
bug hobbles quickly away, avoiding,
blurring my every attempt to capture him again,                                                          
only this time with the lens of my camera.

 

 

I know it doesn't sound like a very long drought, but for me, there's not been a month without work ongoing work in the studio since early 2005, and I was beginning to worry.  

Anyway, new work, really deep new work began today.  And I am feeling much better.

Last week, Paul and I saw a free concert at the Roland Park Presbyterian Church, a nice program including a strong vocalist, but what really stayed with me was the presence of an enormous Tiffany window (1916) that filled one of the church’s four quartered areas. 

It is an eerie piece, spectacular, but very gothic, in a manner that we would never reproduce nowadays. A young robed blond boy with arms outstretched stands at the base of the window, behind him a serene landscape including symbolic cypress trees indicating a funerary theme, and central, rising up from behind the boy, past the green cypresses, a beautiful flowering tree that reaches up to the top of the window, its blooming boughs weaving through the upper curves of the window’s vaulted frame.

Closer inspection, during intermission, revealed a scripted line, “Thou callest me,” and a memorial marking the passage of this young boy’s life: John Mifflin Hood III, July 23, 1906 – July 15, 1915. We were sitting in this church on the day before the anniversary of his death, a death that happened decades ago, shortly before his ninth birthday. Days later, I googled, trying to find more out about him, but only his very famous grandfather, a former Confederate general and founder of a railroad turned up. There was no mention of the window’s history on the church’s site, no findable records of his death (of what?).

As the second half of the concert performed, I imagined his mother, dressed and corseted in her late Victorian clothing, sitting week after week in their church, long before its “lightening” renovations, and could practically see her sitting in the dimly lit pews, her son’s face an illuminating gaze across the sanctuary. Their wealth provided such a memorial tribute, but was there comfort for her within this window of beautiful grieving?