pilgrimage.

yesterday, george and i made a pilgrimage to pasadena, which has become my southern california art mecca.  we went to visit ganesha at the pacific asia museum.  we started, appropriately, by enjoying delicious indian food for lunch.  the pacific asia museum is small and lovely, full of interesting asian artifacts.  the ganesha exhibit was primarily photographs of modern ganesha festivals and a video explaining the traditions surrounding ganesha.  the video was the highlight of the exhibit, as it captured the sheer energy and vibrancy of the festival.

after finishing up at the pacific asia museum, we moved on to the norton simon , which i think has one of the best permanent collections in southern california.  when we walked in, we each named the pieces we wanted to visit.  george wanted to pay homage to the norton simon's ganesha, since it was what first captured her interest in him, so we made a stop downstairs where the norton simon has a fantastic collection of asian art.

before heading downstairs, we stopped at my choices.  first up was an absolutely gorgeous 16th century adam and eve .  then a stop at my favorite matisse and my favorite picasso.  i've been wanting this picasso for my wall for ages, so i finally caved and bought the print, which hopefully i can have framed as a birthday present.

it was a lovely day spent with incredible works of art.  unfortunately we didn't leave early enough to make a stop at the huntington for a visit to their amazing art collection.  maybe next time.

harmony.
about a month ago, i helped run a training workshop for grad students teaching literature for the first time. my cohort was out of town for a wedding the two days immediately before the workshop. and my parents, who i had been counting on to take me to costco to get some materials, were also out of town. all of which resulted in me running around on my own, begging favors from friends, and left me generally a bit frazzled. on sunday afternoon my right foot started hurting and by the end of the evening my foot was swollen and hurt so badly that i was limping. this was A Bad Thing, as i had to be on my feet much of the next two days, not to mention hauling all kinds of stuff between my car and the classroom. in tears i called seymour and asked if he would come give me a blessing. which he did, along with mbn. and then they helped me wrap up the last minute details i still needed to finish. i actually ended up in bed before 1 in the morning.

monday was a long day and my foot was aching and swollen by the time i got home. but i had to do some prep for the workshop the next day. and my parents were coming home, so i needed to do a bit of cleaning. my time was limited and i knew my foot couldn't handle too much, so i made my list of tasks in my head and set about accomplishing them as efficiently as i could. no movement was wasted. every trip from one room to another served multiple purposes. complete economy of motion. i was in that mode where mind and body and purpose flowed together so smoothly that the only way to describe it is harmony. i have these moments occasionally and they feel like perfection. everything fitting together to make a whole that is more than merely the sum of its parts. there's a feeling of grace, of blessedness, that comes, leaving me feeling like life makes sense, even if the work i'm doing is as menial as dishes and laundry and taking out the trash.

as i reflected on that feeling, i thought back to the morning i spent at fallingwater in august. the building is such a work of absolute harmony that it seems wrong to call it a building. everything, from the glorious design to the building materials, works together to manifest perfection. there was absolutely no detail too mundane for wright to consider so that it would add to the being of his creation. this is true of all of wright's work. for instance, at the pope-leighey house, wright used long horizontal lines to reinforce the design and to add a sense of spaciousness to what is a very small building. in laying the bricks, the mortar that ran horizontally was recessed a good half an inch inset from the front of the bricks, while the mortar that ran vertically was flush with the bricks, allowing the shadows cast by the bricks into the recessed horizontal mortar to create long lines. wright even dictated that the screws used in the building be flathead rather than phillips and they were to be turned so the groove on the head of the screw formed a horizontal line.

fallingwater is full of gorgeous details that contribute to its harmony. the boulder around which wright built the house jutting up to form a rough hearth in the primary living space of the house. the stone floors inside polished so they look like the stones of the terraces when they are wet. the glass corner of the house opening out so the corner disappears altogether, breaking the box of the room, the house refusing to inter its occupants in a living tomb. the low ceilings and vast stretches of glass directing the eye out to the beauty of the forest. how could anyone live in such an environment and not find herself existing more often in that state of harmony that i find only so rarely?

in my mind, wright's magnificent masterpiece is akin to the gorgeous perfection of beethoven's symphonies--beings in their own right, full of life and beauty that can make the world better. when i left fallingwater that day, i resolved to go back. as often as i can. to immerse myself again in a place where all of the best of humanity and nature work together to manifest god's glory.

wordless.

wednesday.

five.
questions from caroline, who in turn got her questions from jana.

1. who are your two favorite authors--one prose, one poetry, and why?
ah. the favorite author question which always stymies me. i can't definitively name favorites, but i'll give you two from my larger group of favorites. poetry: emily dickinson. she's always up there. because she packs a lot into a small package. because she's irreverently spiritual. because she has a slant approach to truth. prose: i really truly do not know. so i'll just say arundhati roy cause i'm looking forward to reading the god of small things again. it's a gorgeous, disturbing novel that completely entranced me on my first reading and about which i have written twice and about which i will undoubtedly write again. a fascinating examination of boundaries and identity in relationship to love.

2. what were the saddest and happiest moments of your day (friday, when caroline sent these)?
saddest: that's tough cause friday was all in all a very good day. maybe getting home from the arcade fire concert at 1 in the morning and realizing that i couldn't hear them live again. i quickly decided i should go to their show in l.a. next month. that's a pretty rare day for me; i usually have much sadder moments brought on by my own ineptitude or by the news. happiest: well, there was the post-concert euphoria that stayed with me all day. but a single moment? probably while i was looking at matisse's 'the black shawl (lorette vii)' because i had one of those moments when image and reality came together in a provocative way.

3. what is your favorite thing to do on a saturday?
getting out in the world to discover something new, whether it's a museum or other cultural event or a restaurant or a mountain trail. and preferably done in company with good friends.

4. if you were a congresswoman, what is the first thing you would try to accomplish?
well, there are a million things i'd like to see change. but highest priority in my mind is addressing international crises--first and foremost the situation in darfur. i don't know exactly what steps i'd take, but there are a few. divestment of any and all government funds invested in corporations that do business with the sudanese government. imposition of sanctions against the sudanese government. a more powerful mandate for the african union and greater u.n. involvement. there's a start.

5. what's your favorite flower?
another impossible question. there are just way too many. but i'm going with the predictable: roses. but not for the predictable reasons. i like hot house roses, but i prefer the more chaotic beauty of roses on bushes. there's just something so profligate in their beauty. that said, i have yet to meet a flower i didn't love.

{if you want five questions of your own, leave me a comment telling me so. you should include either an email address so i can send you questions. or you can leave a link to your blog and i'll post questions in a comment.}

explore.
i had a perfectly lovely weekend. i listened to great music. i ate good food. i explored a little more of my world. and i got my first sunburn of the season. here's a brief rundown:

art. i spent friday afternoon (after an hour and a half in traffic) wandering the norton simon. it's a beautiful little museum in pasadena with an impressive collection. i started with the 20th century and worked my way back in time and ended up in the scuplture garden, where the water lilies are promising to burst into bloom anytime. i didn't take the time to go downstairs to the asian collection, prefering to spend my time contemplating the works i loved rather than cramming it all in. i'll go back, i'm sure. my favorites:

• picasso's 'woman with a book.' a brilliantly colored portrait that i'd never seen before. i love its combination of dramatic lines and air of contemplation.
• matisse's 'the black shawl (lorette vii).' i love the way that black shawl is simultaneously insubstantially transparent and inescabably heavy--almost confining. it seems a fitting representation of beauty and sexuality.
• adam and eve. luminous. and such a fascinating mix of innocence and sensuality.
• the humanity of joseph holding the infant christ; personality captured in portraits; and the dutch tendency to include insects in still lifes of cut flowers (as i looked at a couple, it struck me as a humorous trend).
• as much as the dutch cut flowers amused me, it was cezanne's tulips that i loved.
• and rodin's burghers of calais always absorbs me, especially the figure of pierre de wissant. the norton simon has the full size nude and clothed studies of de wissant as well as the ensemble. rodin's ability to capture intense emotion through hand and foot gestures and with exaggeration amazes me.

books. on saturday, i spent my afternoon at the l.a. times book festival. it takes place every spring on ucla's campus. with 300 exhibitors and hundreds of authors in attendance, it's a book lover's kind of event. i found a few treasures to be given as gifts. and a book or two for myself. the highlights include:

• meeting bill peet's son. as a child, i knew exactly where bill peet's books were in the children's room at our local library. his stories of creatures in crisis and fantastic beasts fascinated me. there's something almost magical about forging a real life connection (no matter how brief or secondary) with the source of one of my childhood dream worlds. if you don't know bill peet's books, you should.
  
• walking ucla's campus. i'd never been there before. it's a gorgeous campus.
• taking a break for a diddy riese ice cream sandwich and an hour spent reading aeschylus.
• don cheadle and john prendergast's presentation based on their new book, not on our watch, about the crisis in the darfur region of sudan. their passion about the issue was inspiring. and their suggestions for actions practical, with potential to effect real change. i was frustrated that the corporate sponsor cut short their presentation in order to have them sign books. they had been scheduled to speak until about 4:45 and then spend an hour signing, but for some reason they couldn't stay as long as previously planned. so barnes & noble's shill tried to end the presentation and Q&A at 4:30. the crowd (with my vociferous contribution) called for more Q&A, rather than the signing, but needless to say a corporate sponsor couldn't give up the opportunity for a marketing event in favor of disseminating actual information. i'll be writing more about this book (which i bought and started reading last night) and this cause.

food. i stayed with RAF and JP overnight. which of course meant i could count on not only great company, but also wonderful food.

• mexican at la cabinita in montrose. not the best mexican RAF and JP have introduced me to in the last couple of months (that distinction is reserved for another restaurant which shall remain nameless for all but the lucky few), but incredibly good. some yummy cheesy, creamy spread with fresh corn tortillas for an appetizer. followed up with some very good carnitas. and topped off with a positively delicious guava and cream cheese empanada.
• RAF's homemade chocolat chaud. which is positively, absolutely delicious. so completely decadent. a lovely way to start a day. followed up by his homemade pancakes. which were wonderful. and i'm a little demanding in my expectations of pancakes. i eat them with nothing but butter, so there's no syrup or sugar or fruit to mask their quality. these passed with flying colors.
  

and between my excursions, i had a few hours spent in the company of RAF and JP, complete with great conversation, my first ever northern exposure episode, and photos of paris and london.

as you can see, it was a fabulous weekend. and to top it all off, i got to raise temperatures a notch or two today for the, ahem, rather conservative member of my sunday school class by suggesting that the society in which christ lived was sexist (shocking of me, i know).

homage.
in the last week, i've found two or three references to a recent article about world-renowned violinist joshua bell busking in a washington, d.c. metro station. tonight i took a break and read the original article.

it was a stunt. have the best violinist in the nation (one who is paid up to $1000/minute) stand in a busy metro station during rush hour playing difficult and beautiful music on a $3.5 million stradivarius and see just how many people stop. or even notice. when consulted, the music director of the national symphony orchestra surmised that 70-100 people would stop (a small crowd) and 40 or so may know the quality of what they heard. the reality? 27 gave money (a total of $32.17). only 7 stopped to listen. two or three knew the quality of what they heard. and one recognized bell (who is highly recognizable, as he's something of a classical music heartthrob).

the article is beautifully written and well worth the time it takes to read. the accompanying video clips are interesting to watch. as i read, and watched, i longed to have been there. to have discovered that kind of music being played in a metro station. would i have stopped? i don't know. it wouldn't have been the first time, as i often stopped to listen to buskers in both london and boston. and i probably would have dropped some cash into his case before i went on my way. but i know myself. and i know i can get caught up in the stress and busy-ness of life and, while i'm positive i would have noticed, i may have hurried through without much pause.

the article's questions about context and framing in relationship to beauty are of great interest to me. i've been thinking about those questions for a long time. and some of my favorite intellectual arguments with friends have arisen in response to those questions. i'll never forget the day that started with a conversation about the relationship between context and art/beauty on a bus to stratford upon avon and ended with the most incredible adaptation of 12th night. it was one of those days that stays with you for years, reverberating with thought and laughter and beauty. i enjoyed the article because of its subject and its questioning.

but the thing that made me stop as i was reading was john picarello's reaction. a fan of joshua bell (though he didn't recognize him), picarello came off the escalator, heard the music and immediately stopped. he spent nearly ten minutes standing in l'enfant plaza engrossed in the music. having trained as a violinist as a child and teenager, with the aspiration of becoming a professional musician, he recognized the perfection of the playing and the quality of the instrument. he called it "a treat, just a brilliant, incredible way to start the day." he was bewildered by the fact that no one else seemed to recognize what was happening.

this is what really made me stop and notice picarello:

"When he left, Picarello says, 'I humbly threw in $5.' It was humble: You can actually see that on the video. Picarello walks up, barely looking at Bell, and tosses in the money. Then, as if embarrassed, he quickly walks away from the man he once wanted to be."

here was a man who loves music. who once aspired to be what joshua bell is, and who is now a supervisor at the u.s. postal service because he knew he didn't have the ability to make it as a concert violinist. but he still knew the beauty of what he heard and acknowledged it. this response resonated with me. because i often feel this way in my own work. i love the literature i teach. it's magical. because it's not just stories, words conveying set meanings. it's infinitely complex--always greater than the sum of its parts. the work i do--writing about literature; teaching literature--is a form of homage. a humble acknowledgement of beauty and wisdom and raw humanity of a kind i know is beyond my ability to produce.

disgusted.
i'm using guernica tomorrow in my class--part of an effort to get my students to understand the multiple levels on which a work of art can be realistic. and as i was poking around, getting a little historical background on the painting, i ran across this tidbit:


"A tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the Security Council room. It was placed there as a reminder of the horrors of war. . . . On February 5, 2003, a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations. On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Diplomats, however, told journalists that the Bush Administration pressured UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other U.S. diplomats argued for war on Iraq."


i'm not especially surprised that such a request (cough cough) would be made. i am disgusted. and it does confirm most of my opinions of the current president and his administration. i realize that some wars must be fought, but this one was not one of them.

sums.
we all know that 2+2=4. right?

generally, i don't disagree with basics of mathematics (except for the whole idea of imaginary numbers; and i don't disagree with it [i mean, it's good to have a square root of -1, right?]; i just find it a little bit odd). but i think that sometimes putting two and two together is not just four; sometimes it's four and something a little bit more than the sum of its parts.

so what am i talking about? the fact that people extrapolate from this little formula, usually learned very early, the aphorism that if you have the components of something, then you have the thing itself. the statement that 2+2=5 has become shorthand for not only a logical error, but also for dangerous forms of mind control. we all know, and must not forget, that 2+2 always equals four.

the problem is that sometimes the parts of something add up to more than their sum. i may have four sunflowers lying on a table in my house, waiting to be trimmed and put in a vase of water. and they are just four sunflowers. but when i see four sunflowers laying on a table in a van gogh painting, they're more than just four sunflowers. they're also a work of art.

this is particularly true, in my opinion, of poetry. tonight on my way home, i happened to catch garrison keillor's writer's almanac for the day. the five-minute mini-program consists of interesting tidbits of literary history, factoids about authors' lives, and a poem. tonight keillor read the poem "how to tell if you're a participant or a staff (a handy guide for day programs)" by david moreau. i listened as the narrator listed all the ways in which to discern whether you are staff or participant, all the while waiting for that something that would turn this rather mundane list of statements into the magic of poetry. because poetry has magic in it. all poetry. even poetry that i dislike. i'm sorry i can't explain it better than calling it magic, but i can't. and this poem--it didn't have it. sure, it calls attention to the difficulties of being in the position of needing assistance in daily living. it nicely illustrates some of the simple things that you and i take for granted every day. and achieving that is worthy of a literary effort. but there is nothing that this work does that demands it be poetry. it would have been as effective written in prose format. the only thing that makes it poetry is the fact that it's been broken into verse shape and labeled "poem." and poetry is not like 2+2=4. words written in verse form do not a poem make. poetry is always more than the sum of its parts.

wordless.

color.
i was in virginia last week, which made me remember some of the many reasons i love the east. this time of year, one of the primary reasons is color. everywhere you look, the world is bursting with warmth. red. gold. leaves burning brilliant against an indian summer sky. and the world is full of promise. it’s an odd thing--death bringing hope. endings filling you with wonder, not desolation.

the first few days i was there were chilly. perfectly autumnal. gray skies. rain. making color more brilliant. sunday was brisk, sunny, clouds scudding. and monday dawned beautifully clear--a perfect Indian summer day. the world was full of magic.

after a gorgeous drive into the city from loudoun county, i started my meanderings around the city at the east building of the national gallery--one of my art meccas. and by pure serendipity, i began on the lower level (which i usually save for last). i go there for the calders. i love the rothkos and the pollocks, among other incredible works from the last fifty years. but it's the magic of the calders, with their melding of concrete and nebulous forms and their magical shadows, that draw me back to the east building every time i'm in d.c. i love them so much that i save them for last, so that their magic leaves with me. but this time i went down first. and as i walked down the last half flight of stairs into the exhibit space, i discovered big beautiful rothkos that i had never seen before. in shades of red, orange, brown, maroon. warmth and peace. as if the palette of fall had been captured and transformed into these magnificent canvases that beckon you into pure color. and in that color you find your self.

reflect.
about eight years ago, i spent a semester studying in london. upon my first trip to the national gallery, i decided i would work my way through the national gallery and the tate chronologically, beginning with the earliest works and moving on until i reached the contemporary work displayed at the tate. after about four weeks of madonnas and crucifixes and other medieval and early renaissance pieces that generally failed to speak to me, i gave up on my plan and found my way to the tate. where i experienced 20th century art for the first time. and experienced is the correct word. i found myself especially drawn to the abstract expressionists. david smith's sculpture, which relied as much upon surface variations and the way they played with light as it did upon form. mark rothko's beautiful, intense color fields. and pollock's wildly erratic, vibrant, massive works. as i encountered them, i realized that where all of the early art i'd consumed at the national gallery tried to communicate a specific story--often one laden with specific subsurface messages to go along with the story--, these works of abstraction were all about surface. about line and texture and motion. about hue and contrast. but the lovely discovery was that because they are all about surface, they have so much more depth. there is no pat explanation, no set understanding to be gained looking into a pollock. there's no moral of the story to be taken home from a rothko. there is only the color and the form and the texture and your own soul.