CHANGING FOCUS OF ATTENTION

 

nude descending a staircase

marcel Duchamp

A picture book, large paperback, good quality paper and printing, has been staring at me for some time wanting to spend time on my lap. It is the works of Marcel Duchamp with text by Pierre Cabanne, whose book of interviews with Duchamp has a place in my house about like the Tao Te Ching, though not for the same reasons. Picking a random page in the Duchamp interviews is something like reading a few small verses by a Japanese monk, Ryokan, Basho. Duchamp does not wax Nineteenth Century deep about Truth and Beauty. Duchamp's art was of the mind. It takes the eyes for the mind to see it. In his found art series, "readymades," the object is divorced from its associations, like a bottle rack, a bicycle wheel, a snow shovel, basic shapes, and most famous, the urinal with its story, designs associated with function. Take away the function and see IT, the thing itself, separate from considerations of taste. This is such an over-simplification I beg you not to mistake it for information. I bought the book at a very reasonable price several years ago, had it down from the shelf recently looking at some of the images, reminding self Cabanne wrote the text. It is a book-length essay illustrated with the body of work. I picked it up today with intent to read the text. Very readable and insightful. I've been looking for something to read lately that will make me turn the pages. Thought I'd try a Tom Clancy. His stories have the reputation of page turners. The first page was enough for me. Never turned to see what page two said. Did not want to know. I could not read 700 pages of that prose. I tried a John LeCarre. Again, did not care what page two said. Cabanne has pulled me in like I hoped he would. Cabanne has studied Duchamp all along his way, knew Duchamp, his world and his language.

 

readymade

marcel duchamp

 

Julio Cortazar has found his way off the shelf again. Haven't read his beautiful writing in way too long, long enough that I've forgotten the stories and can read them freshly now as new. The first story I went to was, End of the Game. I will go back and read it again. It was like seeing a fabulous movie and wanting to see it again right away. Three young girls strike poses of well-known statues, and an attitude at the same time. Two of them dress one of them who strikes a pose in some spontaneous outfit beside the railroad track when the passenger train goes by at a certain time each day. May dive next into The Gates of Heaven, a tango dance parlor in Buenos Aires. It has a good chance of being next. I discovered Cortazar's stories after seeing Antonioni's film, Blow-Up. The film was an Antonioni remake of the story his way. It is one of the few films I must see every now and again to keep it fresh in memory. It never grows old. I had the good fortune to see it in a theater when it was making the "art house" circuit. I like Cortazar's story too. The film is not telling the story the same way. They are two entirely different versions of the same brief outline of a story. Both tell the story beautifully. Cortazar's original title for the collection was End of the Game and Other Stories. The movie created the market for a paperback, which the publisher changed to Blow-Up and Other Stories. The film has kept the volume of short stories in print. Reading today, I was getting frequent reminders of why I love his stories so much. I've taken another volume by him off the shelf, 62: A Model Kit. It is a "novel" composed of 62 unnumbered sections, stories, chapters? He recommends they be read in any order the reader chooses. Thought I'd read a few of these stories too, just read them as independent short stories. Mainly for the joy of reading his writing. I'm not going to get into it's better if you know Spanish and translations miss everything important. I'm all with translations. How else could I read Pierre Cabanne and much of the most beautiful writing I've read along the way?

 

fountain

marcel duchamp

 

Another one that found its way to the reading stack is volume one of the discourses of Upasni Maharaj. He is an enlightened master from the western part of India, inland a ways from Bombay, a place called Sakori. I'm looking for a place on the wall for a painting I made of him for myself. I think I know where I want it to go. It's just a matter of doing it. I like his discourses. He defines words breaking them down to their simplest parts. He says rock and wood are the most intelligent beings. Everything we know, we learned from rock and wood. He wore a sack-cloth draped around himself like a small toga (1870-1941). I wanted to read one of the discourses again about the City of the Dead. He talked about the spirits of the dead being among us. We don't see them. I'm wondering if these are different dimensions he is talking about. It mystifies me. Makes me think of Apollinaire's poem, La maison des morts, The House of the Dead. It's too much to even start attempting to give a brief. Mannequins step out of their showroom windows and join people passing by. I'm making a logjam for myself. Back to Maharaj, I like his perspective. It's straight-forward and clear. I'm in a time now of wanting to spend less time reading TruthOut articles online and seeing clips of Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher. They are funny and I like the way they approach current events as comedy, but I'd rather read Julio Cortazar. First I let go of paying attention to the glorification of ignorance, and now want to let go of the parts I like as well as the parts I don't like. I like facebook for the personal interactions with others, friends, and don't want to give up facebook. Not that I'm a facebook junkie. I find it a fun way to keep in touch with the people I keep in touch with there. It is the political I want out of my mind. I'd rather read good writing for the sake of good writing. It will give me a change of perspective for the better.

the large glass

marcel duchamp

I'm in the middle of a Japanese film that is four fairy tales, Kwaidan, 1964, almost three hours long. I watched the first two and took a break. Will see the other two tomorrow. They are ghost stories. I was a little hesitant to put it on. The hesitation did not last. Right away I saw this is going to be something special. I flowed in the beauty of it. The visuals are constantly stunning. The scenes are like stage sets, Japanese style. The stories are tales of karma. Do somebody wrong and they come back to haunt you. Each story is uniquely itself. One of them, The Woman In The Snow, stays with me and will. They are stories of karmic self-creation. Classic old stories that director Masaki Kobayashi made into exquisite film. 1964 is half a century ago, but it is not dated. It seemed as contemporary as if made in the last decade. I cut it in half to savor it, enjoy some one day, and some more the next. It is too beautiful to watch without full attention and Caterpillar on my lap. I was wasting too much time and mind on people not worth a second's thought, even the ones I think I like. There comes a time I want less Rachel Maddow and more Julio Cortazar, less Jon Stewart and more Apollinaire. Makes me think of the UNCF ad slogan, A mind is a terrible thing to waste. It sure enough is on people like in the media spotlights. Al Sharpton is even taken seriously now. I think of a sign I saw on facebook, Stop making stupid people famous. Then I ask myself, has it ever been otherwise? Just reading what little bit I read today about Duchamp inspired something within. Reading the Cortazar story excited something within that reminded me I have several of his books I can read in any time I want. John Kerry in Ukraine telling Russia, Don't do as I do, do as I say, makes me laugh with derision. Why pay attention? I have a choice. I can flow in the story-telling mind of Julio Cortazar and I can see what Pierre Cabanne has to say about Marcel Duchamp. I don't have to worry my mind with the Koch brothers and the rule of mthe rich. I want to do like a tortoise and pull my head back closer to home.    

marcel duchamp himself

 

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APOLLINAIRE AND THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

       francis picabia

Yesterday in the morning, a question came to me about Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet from the first two decades of the 20th Century. Apollinaire kicked off the Modern with his poem ZONE. It brings to my mind Allen Ginsberg's HOWL that kicked off the second half of the 20th Century. Apollinaire looks to the modern world with fascination from the first decade of the 20th Century. His book of poems, ALCOOLS, was published one hundred years ago, 1913. That was the same year Duchamp painted Nude Descending A Staircase that kicked off the Modern in the world of visual art. ZONE welcomes the new century, airplanes, the Eiffel Tower, Pope Pius X (the most modern European).

     You read the handbills catalogues posters that sing out loud and
          clear
     That's the morning's poetry and for prose there are the
          newspapers
     There are tabloids lurid with police reports
     Portraits of the great and a thousand assorted stories


It would be another 10 years for Surrealism to take shape after WW1. Apollinaire expresses the hope that came with the New before WW1. He survived the war, but only by a couple years after a head wound. If you think of Symbolism in poetry parallel Impressionism in painting, then Apollinaire's book of poems, Alcools (poems 1898-1913), is there with Post-impressionism (vanGogh and Gauguin), Fauvism (Bonnard and Matisse), Expressionism (Kirchner and Kandinsky), Cubism (Picasso and Braque), just before Dadaism (further breakdown of form and color during WW1, the chopping block of before and after), then Surrealism after "The Great War." Apollinaire's place was between Symbolism and Surrealism, that tremendously gestative time. He wrote in a March, 1913, essay, Through The Salon des Independants, For the past twenty-five years, it is the Salon of Independants that has brought to light the newest personalities and tendencies of French painting, which is the only painting that counts today and which is pursuing in the face of the universe the logic of the great traditions. This year the Independants is more alive than ever.

The poem I went looking for that set off this morning's spell of reading Apollinaire's poems was THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, very much a Symbolist poem creeping toward Surrealism. The poem is like a dream in the way the story unfolds. It concerns walking by a row of shops called an arcade, shops with big glass windows and mannequins. He calls the mannequins the dead.

     A diamond angel shattered all the windows
     And the dead accosted me
     With looks from another world.

The dead stepped out from their glass mausoleums and joined the living people walking by. Some fell in love, some rowed boats in a park's lake, some walked holding hands. A dead woman sitting on a bench / Next to a barberry bush / Allowed a student / Kneeling at her feet / To speak of betrothal.

     "I'll wait for you if I have to
      Ten or twenty years
      Your will shall be mine."

     "I'll wait for you
      All your life,"
      Replied the dead woman.

At a given time the dead return to their windows and lie down,

     Waiting for burial behind their windowpanes

     They did not suspect
     What had taken place
     But the living remembered it as
     An unhoped-for happiness
     And so real
     They had no fear of losing it


Several years ago I discovered that Apollinaire wrote The House Of The Dead to the music of Pachelbel's Cannon in D, which he evidently had in his head very well. They didn't have recording devices then like we have now. I don't recall how I discovered that. Possibly I heard its slow progression in his short story in verse of the living and the dead having a night out together. I had Pachelbel's Cannon on LP to listen to then, but don't have it on CD to listen to it now. It works to read the poem slowly at the rate of the music's flow. High places match, low places match, the feeling carries all the way through and it ends at the right time.
\
I've been going nuts trying to remember the title and author of a novel written maybe in the 1930s or 40s that is the story of Apollinaire's poem told in Symbolist prose. It is a little-known classic. I have searched until I've convinced myself I gave it to somebody many years ago. I don't even know how to search for it on google or amazon. I'd remember the writer's name and the title if I saw them. Not able to call them up from the ocean floor of my mind. Maybe like a rising bubble it will surface in a few days. When it does, I'll note it here. I've been so distracted today so many times attempting to write this that I've lost the sense of it. The translator I've used here is William Meredith from his 1964 translation of Alcools.


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BOB DYLAN AMERICAN POET

Tis the day before Christmas and all through the house the buzz of the refrigerator motor and the ticking of the battery-run clock on the wall blend with the rain dripping from the edge of the roof into small puddles in the stone pathway. Now the kerosene heater's fan joined the trio to make a quartet of the sounds of my silence. In my head is Bob Dylan singing Soon After Midnight, "A gal named Honey / took my money." This new Dylan stays with me like in the early years his album The Times They Are A Changin. At his beginning was Mr Tambourine Man, Blowin In The Wind, even making Man Of Constant Sorrow his own on his first album, and Like A Rolling Stone. I can't think of any song that could top Like A Rolling Stone as a song beautifully conceived, composed, written and performed. I have a Rolling Stones album with Like A Rolling Stone on it; Jagger made it his own, blues style. In youtube parlance, he owned it. All the way along, Bob Dylan has been a Star to me. But since his last five albums he has gone beyond to the place where I hold an artist like Harold Pinter, Constantin Brancusi, Larry Rivers, Marcel Duchamp, Patrick White, William Faulkner, John Berryman, Mona van Duyn. Dylan is in that level of my respect for artists. Others I read and see with appreciation and sometimes awe, but with these people I am in the presence of something so great, great in immense vastness, that I am in full appreciation of everything by these artists and several others, too many to list, Chinese writer Gao Xingjian among them.

I find when I hear Dylan now, after listening to him all my adult life, I am hearing the poet, who to my way of seeing is a great poet and songwriter in one, the great American poet, the Whitman of his time. Sometimes at the end of the day when I'm done chasing the moon, I'll click the remote to start the Dylan album. It has stayed in the cd player since the day it arrived in the house. I'll sit back, turn out the light and hear every word of the whole album like watching an audio movie. I hesitate to call him the great American poet, because it sounds like nonsense, like The Best, Number One, a Ten, unless it really is the case. Calling Whitman the great American poet sounds right to my ear. I try to think of another for that position and can't do it, unless it might be John Berryman, but that doesn't fit somehow, yet. It may in the future. But it fits Dylan at least as much as it fits Whitman. A new Bob Dylan album is the same, to my mind and ear, as a new book of poetry by Robert Lowell, great poetry. Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-1968, is one I must sit down with again in near future. My first time through it, I read it front to back like a book of prose. It scorched the tips of my hair almost as much as the first reading of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. Yes, Jeffers. Jeffers blows my mind with poetry the same way Bob Dylan does. We have a lot of great American poetry.

 

I have loved about Dylan from the beginning that he is writing poetry in the song form of the day, rock, which Dylan kicked off. Before Dylan went electric it was called rock n roll. From Dylan on, it was rock. His poems are contemporary concerns, everyday life observations, stories both nonfiction and fiction. I imagine a future where the collected Dylan songbook is firmly in the American tradition like the Carter Family songbook for traditional musicians of the mountains. Dylan will go through time with a name up there with Shakespeare, Mozart and Tolstoy. Dylan's integrity has been a model for my own, like Gore Vidal has been in another vein, politically. At the same time I make these lofty exclamations about the artist still known as Bob Dylan, it's totally without concern about his private life, people he's shit along the way, women who divorced him, his junkie son, or even his spiritual life. I don't think if we met there would be any more to it than a handshake and a how-ya-do. That'd be it. What can I say? Yer really cool, man. I'm a nutcase living out in the mountain; he's a multi-millionaire businessman in charge of a tremendous staff of musicians, roadies, managers, recording studio, accountants, gofers, hangers-on and probably in his mind an infinite list of responsibilities and obligations when all he wanted to do was make music. With all that, and it compounded by the major trials that go with tremendous wealth and international fame, he continues to write songs that get better in a stairstep climb, much like Harold Pinter's plays in that way.

It doesn't seem far-fetched at all that Dylan needs the Nobel Prize in poetry, not for his personal sake, but for balance in the universe. Even better is to be with Tolstoy and James Joyce, distinguished for not winning the Nobel. How many poets have people wearing tshirts with their pictures and names on them? How many poets can fill a huge auditorium for a reading? How many poets sell millions of copies of every new book? You say he's a songwriter, not a poet? I say nearly every, if not every, living American poet is influenced by Dylan's writing in varying degrees per individual under 70. He took poetry back to music where it came from. Chinese poetry through the centuries was written to traditional tunes. The French poet Apollinaire wrote his poems to what we call classical music. Read his poem Zone slowly in the flow of Pachelbel's Canon while listening to it. Dylan gave his poetry to a world of people who don't read poetry anymore, except a few here and there, like a few people here and there like to listen to old-time fiddle and banjo music. That's how it is with art forms. Art goes unnoticed in pop culture but by a few unafraid of being regarded retarded by the tube-gawkers. A poet I would call Dylan's equal as poet is Louise Gluck, though she is speaking only to some of the people who read contemporary poetry. I believe I could read different poems of hers as frequently as I listen to Dylan songs. Her poem Averno I could read happily as many times as I've heard Like A Rolling Stone.

walt whitman

 





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