Music and Spring and All

Chase Coble
Henri Matisse, Music, 1907-1910
Henri Matisse painted a great number of pieces centralizing on the form of the human body. In this series, painted between 1907 and 1910, his figures can most commonly be found capering, playing, and making music. These works, at the time, were considered uncomplicated in both composition and color. Yet, Matisse’s work with the human form left an indelible impact on his successors.

“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind.” – Henri Matisse

In Matisse’s series largely characterized by the human form, Music, stands closest to the aforementioned quote. The painter’s five subjects conjure a peculiar reaction: synaesthesia. The image possesses colors that are all exceedingly close in tone creating this pseudo-resonant effect, which gives its viewer a feeling of composite sound. The subjects complement this resonance by forming an even more musical cadence, rising and falling across the painting.

William Carlos Williams’ 1923 poem Spring and All parallels Music in an unconventional way. Now, one could relate a poem like Langston Hughes’ Life is Fine to Music, through highlighting the metaphorical rise and fall of Hughes’ narrator with Matisse’s oscillating subjects. Yet, Williams’ poem of awakening and self-awareness more closely parallels what Matisse accomplished in Music. Williams’ prose forms a gradual crescendo of activity; from a wintery, cold, and desolate setting, to a livelier and less ominous one. Music’s subjects mimic this crescendo perfectly, moreover they parallel Williams’ object in their battle against the ground.

Spring and All
By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -- a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines --

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches --

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind --

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance -- Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

  • 3:13 PM

The Stonebreakers and The Communist Manifesto

Courbet
Gustave Courbet, The Stonebreakers, 1849
The Stonebreakers by Courbet undeniably depicts the concern for the plight of the poor and the working class. The two figures toil to remove stone from a road in construction. This work requires little skill and almost no intellectual capacity and is usually reserved for punishing chain gangs in modern times. Rather than glorifying their work, Courbet dresses his figures in tattered garbs to further illustrate the nature of their work and the intense amount of physical exertion needed. Additionally, this work embodies the realist movement as Courbet paints an accurate account of the ill-treatment and of the workers that was an all too common facet of mid-century rural life in France. Courbet makes a point to retain the workers identity in order for the work to transcend the individual and serve as a universal representation of suffering.

The two stonebreakers and the surrounding scene are painted with rough brushwork, reflecting the work itself. The figures are positioned against a low hill typical of rural France. The hill rises and takes up the entire upper half of the composition, leaving only a small window to the sky in the upper right hand corner. This effectively isolates the laborers and suggests that they are physically and socio-economically trapped by their work. One year prior to Courbet’s The Stonebreakers, Karl Marx and Frederic Engels published The Communist Manifesto. They write about the plight of the worker in Chapter 1 of the manifesto titled Bourgeois and Proletarians, “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed — a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” Courbet, whether intentionally or not, embodies the ideas of Marx and Engels through his realist depiction of the plight of the laboring class in France in his work The Stonebreakers.
  • 12:00 AM

The Palace at 4 a.m. and Shakespeare Sonnet 30

Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti, Palace at 4 a.m., 1932
My dear friend and mentor Robert Demeritt lies in a hospital struggling with cancer and pain. I want to speak to him. I want to tell him bad jokes from the Borscht Belt. I want to read to him passages from Wallace Stegner's The Angle of Repose, which he gave me several years ago. I want to gripe about my day. I want him to explain the intricacies of the Chinese language to me, tell me that story again about cutting high school and running into his dad at a burlesque theatre. I want him to, as he always does about five minutes after setting foot into his home, offer me the good scotch. And then we will talk and laugh. 

Alberto Giacometti constructed Palace at 4 a.m. in 1932, and at one point he called it, "a fragile palace of matchsticks." While the structure's outlines remain set, even sturdy, the interior openness strikes me as particularly isolated. Some may take that as speaking to the distance that we feel from each other, but I do not. Instead the sculpture contains its figures, in fact even celebrates their enclosure. The human condition may be frail, Giacometti tells us, but we do share that fragility with each other. 

In his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell uses Giacometti's sculpture as a controlling metaphor for his protagonist (really Maxwell) and his feelings towards his childhood and an old friend, focussing particularly on the two boys climbing and playing on a still-being-framed house. But Maxwell's novel goes so much deeper, exploring how we remember and what that memory - whether real or created - means. He writes: 

"What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.  Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.  In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."

The passage proffers a hard truth in pillow-soft rhythms. We all may change our stories from time to time; we all may feel sorry for ourselves because something doesn't go as we envisioned. However, we also get to live in that palace of matchsticks with others. And that abiding friendship helps salve our pains. 

As I sit here with the house quiet, worried about my friend, I am somewhat comforted by Bob's earlier admission of being at peace with what he faces. Bob and I love words, and those words often bring us to the Bard, who in Sonnet 30 wrote:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

My dear friend and mentor Bob lies in a hospital bed, but I shall not moan this sad account. I shall be happy he's my dear friend. 

  • 11:23 PM

Tommies Bathing and The Wasteland

John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent, Tommies Bathing, 1918.
"After the torch-light red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience"
 - T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland"

Lying by the water, nakedly savoring the peace of the grass, two British soldiers take a brief hiatus from the poisonous gas and flinging bullets that plagued the trenches of World War I. Yet despite this image of a short peacetime, death still looms, willing to take even the most vulnerable men under its wing.

John Singer Sargent and T.S. Eliot both shuddered at this atrocity, unwilling to accept the disposability of human life that filled European battlefields for four years. Yet Sargent's Tommies Bathing and T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" have a similar sentiment of futility regarding the deaths resulting from the first World War. The nudity and curled positions of the two British soldiers in Sargent's painting show a heightened vulnerability, as they sprawl on the only patch of living shrubbery in sight. Surrounding the men is an abyss of dead, muddy grass, encompassing the image of new life with a looming death. Even without "the shouting and the crying" of the battle, the men still face inevitable expiration. World War I left all artists barren, replacing joyous, carefree images with desolate, nihilistic portrayals of human nature. Death became simply a body count, and individuality meant nothing in the wake of such large-scale extermination.

  • 12:00 AM

Siegfried Forgets Brunhilde and Cat's Cradle

Anslem Kiefer
Anslem Kiefer, Untitled (Siegfried Forgets Brunhilde), 1975-80
Depicting a pitch black, dystopian world, Anslem Kiefer's Untitled gelatin silver print captures a hauntingly eerie scene. Illuminated by a harsh spotlight, the mushrooms stand as testament to nature's tenacity, while the glass bottle is a stand-in for man's presence. Reminiscent of photographs taken after the dropping of the atom bomb, the contrast in this photograph makes the white snow taken on an ashy quality. The singed nature of this photograph is further explained by the text written in with pen, reading after translation, "Seigfried Forgets Brunhilde." 

Alluding to Richard Wagner's epic opera in four parts, "The Ring of the Nibelung," Untitled documents the devastation Valhalla after, according to Norse mythology, all of the gods and demons have an epic battle that engulfs the entire world in flame. 

But what drew me to this photograph wasn't its mythological content. I found this world to be more like Vonnegut's Snowball Earth from his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle.

"There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked up tight." 

Slashing through the photograph is what seems to be a valley formerly filled with water. Now it gleams metallic. The long shadows cast by the light source have more substance than shapes casting them. Only the glass bottle seems held firmly in place. I imagine it was this uncapped bottle that housed the shard of Ice-Nine before it was released. 

Drawing on ancient and modern influences, Anslem Kiefer captures with his camera what writers aspire to describe in hundreds of pages of text. This photograph serves as commentary on past destruction as well as a warning against future devastation. 

  • 12:00 AM

The Parliament in London, Stormy Sky and The Silmarillion

Jonah Jaax
Claude Monet, The Parliament in London, Stormy Sky, 1890-1910
“But Sauron was not of mortal flesh, and though he was robbed now of that shape in which had wrought so great an evil, so that he could never again appear fair to the eyes of Men, yet his spirit arose out of the deep and passed as a shadow and a black wind over the sea, and came back to Middle-earth and to Mordor that was his home. There he took up again his great Ring in Barad-dur, and dwelt there, dark and silent, until he wrought himself a new guise, an image of malice and hatred made visible; and the Eye of Sauron the Terrible few could endure.” --J.R.R. Tolkien, The Simarillion.

Monet paints The Parliament in London, Stormy Sky with an unusually menacing tone. The contrast between the violent sky and sea with the black buildings contributes to Monet's abstract evil. The shroud-like tower piercing the orange sky does not provide any feelings of peace or justice, but only a dreamlike essence of fear. 

J.R.R. Tolkien's dark and evil character Sauron would seem fit in this painting. The vicious force of the sky and eerie calm of the sea seem incredibly Mordor-esque. It is almost surprising that the all seeing Eye cannot be found perched atop Monet's dark tower. Monet's depiction of a stormy day in London could also be perceived as a typical afternoon in Mordor as seen in J.R. R. Tolken's The Silmarillion.

  • 12:00 AM

Ophelia and Being Dead

Being Dead
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851
"She did not have the leisure or the knowledge to be fearful. She just felt -- for a tumbling instant -- like she'd often felt at night, half conscious in the falling shudders of a dream. Winded, weightless and betrayed. Hear heard collided with her ribs. Her body shook and arched. Her head was loose and hurtling through rimless chambers. Some conjuror had vaporized the earth and emblazoned all the space through which she fell with pixilated, pulsing lights. Her final moments were kinetic, abstract, pointillist."--Jim Crace, Being Dead.

Millais's Ophelia depicts Ophelia, from Shakespeare's Hamlet, floating in a river just before she drowns and meets her demise. Ophelia's face symbolically reflects her quickening transition from life to death, as her eye lids seem to be on the verge of closing. She is surrounded by a pitch-black pool that seems to be draining the life out of her. In addition, the painting's representation of her body position shows a sinking movement. Her waist seems to be pulling her down under water while her hands drifting right above the water with curled fingers, exhibit a drowning sensation. It seems as though death itself is sucking Ophelia into its grasp--a bottomless pit of despair.

While Millais's painting of Ophelia shows a girl in despair, it also showcases a type of romanticism of her situation. Though the black water is murky and sinister, the dying Ophelia is depicted rather beautifully through her facial features, dress, and flowers floating around her. In addition, her arms are spread out and her facial expression is strangely provocative. Just like Ophelia, Celice from Being Dead is quickly approaching her end. The narration shows rapid progression from the state of consciousness to death. In addition, Celice's physical positions while dying (her head being loose and her body arched) show her vulnerability and weakness in the face of death, just as death sucks Ophelia into the water. Neither ever had a chance and both only committed the "crime" of love. The last main similarity between Ophelia's situation and Celice's situation is that both are victims of nature. Ophelia's body is surrounded on all sides by plants, grass, and other forms of nature which prevent her escape, the same way that Crace's novel expresses the nihilist concept that life is a product of nature and will end in nature's hands with no real purpose.

  • 12:00 AM

Nightmare and Eurydice

Eurydice

Henry Fuseli, Nightmare, 1781
“Eurydice!

Before I go down there, I won’t practice my music. Some say practice. But practice is a word invented by cowards. The animals don’t have a word for practice. A gazelle does not run for practice. He runs because he is scared or he is hungry. A bird doesn’t sing for practice. She sings because she’s happy or sad. So I say: store it up. The music sounds better in my head than it does in the world. When songs are pressing against my throat, then, only then, I will go down and sing for the devils and they will cry through their parched throats.

Eurydice, Don’t kiss a dead man. Their lips look red and tempting but put your tongue in their mouths and it tastes like oatmeal. I know how much you hate oatmeal.

I’m going the way of death.

Here is my plan: Tonight, when I go to bed, I will turn off the light and put a straw in my mouth. When I fall asleep, I will crawl through the straw and my breath will push me like a great wind into the darkness and I will sing your name and I will arrive. I have consulted all the almanacs, the footstools, and the architects, and everyone agrees: I found the right note. Wait for me.

Love,
Orpheus”    -- Scene 17, Eurydice, by Sara Ruhl

When confronted by Henry Fuseli’s Nightmare, one cannot help but feel a sense of unease, if not from the awkward proportions, then surely the strangeness of the subject and their eyes. Although love does not come to mind when staring into this painting, it brought me to a scene from Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. At a glance, the two works seem to be completely different. Yet allowing my mind to wonder, I imagine Orpheus, driven mad from Eurydice’s death, ponder on how to regain his lover. The king of the underworld in this case would be the horse, luring him in.

The painting allowed me to imagine, in a peculiar way, this emotional tragedy. In Orpheus’s letter to Eurydice, he compares his actions to animals, acknowledging that he lives as an animal they way they do. That his actions originate from necessity as animals do to.

The king of the underworld, the horse in the painting, wants both Orpheus and Eurydice to die so that he could have their souls. He enters their lives and leads Eurydice to death with temptation. He then uses her to lure Orpheus.

Fuseli's Nightmare fully encompasses the dark emotions that pertain to the play. An odd couple, they complement each other nicely.

  • 12:00 AM

Fishermen at Sea and Dagon

Alex McDonald
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fishermen at Sea, 1796
“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium” – H.P. Lovecraft, “Dagon”

The ocean floor houses more secrets than the space in between planets and lies closer to home. Telescopes allow for scientists to glimpse places trillions of light years away, but they cannot clearly gaze upon the thinnest portion of Earth’s crust. We do not know what rests on the ocean floor. We do not know what lives there. But we do know things can lurk and survive in the deepest ocean trench. This dearth in knowledge shrouds the ocean in mystery, leaving the deep waters of the world as an unexplored frontier. And we always fear what we do not know.

In Turner’s Fishermen at Sea, a whirlpool threatens to swallow up the fishermen’s boat and drag them to a watery Hell. The ominous feeling arising from the overall darkness of Fishermen depicts the ocean as an unstoppable force of nature that possesses the powers of a god. The darkness also gives the ocean an aura of primordial ambiguity.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, a horror and science fiction writer of the early 20th Century, also explored the god-like qualities and mysteries of nature in his short fiction, such as “Dagon.” Lovecraft, unlike Turner, embodies the dark savagery of nature in a fictitious pantheon of dark gods that take pleasure in tormenting humanity. In both Turner and Lovecraft’s work, man fights nature, and man loses. Repeatedly.

In “Dagon,” a man who has been stranded at sea during a WWI naval raid accidently sails his raft into a portion of the ocean floor that has mysteriously risen to the ocean's surface after a large earthquake. The man finds obelisks decorated in images of sea monsters and other odd life forms and eventually comes face to face with Dagon, a weather god Lovecraft borrowed from ancient Canaanite lore. In Lovecraft’s tale, Dagon appears in the form of some humanoid monster and later haunts the nameless protagonist after he gets back to dry land. Dagon embodies the power Turner’s ocean has over the fishermen. Turner and Lovecraft painted and wrote of nature's conquest of mankind.
  • 12:00 AM

Peasant Women Digging up Potatoes and Elizabeth Bentley

Elizabeth Bentley

Vincent van Gogh, Peasant Women Digging up Potatoes, 1885
This excerpt comes from Elizabeth Bentley, a young women who worked in a factory, and was interviewed by the House of Commons Committee in 1832.

"It was so dusty, the dust got up my lungs, and the work was so hard. I got so bad in health, that when I pulled the baskets down, I pulled my bones out of their places. I was about thirteen years old when it began coming, and it has got worse since." 

An excerpt from Isabel Wilson, 38 years old, mother and worker.

"I have been married 19 years and have had 10 bairns [children]:...My last child was born on Saturday morning, and I was at work on the Friday night... None of the children read, as the work is no regular..When I go below my lassie 10 years of age keeps house..."

Van Gogh's, Peasant Women Digging up Potatoes, is similar to other van Gogh paintings with peasants as the subject. But this one directly relates to the excerpts above. Times were tough for peasants and the working class during the time of industrialism, even more so for women. This painting depicts a women hard a work and uncomfortably bent over.  Van Gogh was an expert at capturing the laborious work that the peasant had to perform. It's telling that he doesn't show their faces - they are anyone, everyone.

Especially in comparison to the excerpt from Elizabeth Bentley, this painting is the image one would picture while listening to the words of the women above. Women had to not only worry about themselves, but often times their children. The statement from Mrs. Wilson exemplifies the toil that had to be done.

  • 12:00 AM