They’re with us all summer.
How a constitution is breached
… the executive department had not been innocent of frequent breaches of the Constitution. … The great proportion of the instances were either immediately produced by the necessities of war or recommended by Congress or the Commander in Chief. … In most of the other instances, they conformed either to the declared or the known sentiments of the legislative department.
James Madison in Federalist No. 48
On photographer Francesca Woodman
Is she daring us? To what? Her self-portraits from her intense, brief life burn with some secret hunger. Do her images contain clues for answers? How I wish she could speak or at least listen.
In contrast, she leaves us baffled by her short career, ended when she leaped to her death from an open window at age 22.
She can be seen as fascinated with death itself. A few images, such as those with her arms wrapped in bandages or holding a knife, may be from a suicide attempt that’s mentioned in passing.
Her images are infused with a gothic premonition of death – the Romantic obsession with tragic, youthful demise, and lost opportunity. To speak of an eroticism of death is eerily heightened by knowing of her suicide to come – the images of her holding a knife or extending her bandaged forearms or climbing (sometimes naked) through Victorian gravestones become eerily chilling, leaving the viewer with a morbid fascination.
Her shots appear to surface from the birth of photography itself, an homage enhanced by black-and-white – often scratchy – prints.
And then there’s the matter of her family – both of her parents and her brother were artists, each in a different medium.
Consider the sense of self-entombment in her photographic legacy.
As I delved into the images her family had released (there’s criticism they’re withholding much more), I pondered alternative directions my What’s Left novel could have gone. These photos, to me, could have been by Cassia’s father if he hadn’t taken up the Tibetan Buddhism and then been granted the support he received from his wife’s family.
In contrast, I encounter her after three of my novels followed a hippie-era photographer, and the newest tale picked up on his legacy nearly a half-century later. This time, it’s told by his daughter, Cassia, who’s trying to uncover his essence after he vanished in a Himalayan mountains avalanche when she’s eleven. Her biggest evidence as an investigator stems from his cache of photographic negatives. The way we do with Woodman.
Cassia’s research paradoxically forces her to reconstruct her mother’s side of the family in depth and all of the reasons her father found refuge among its members.
His, I’ll presume, are professionally competent and moving increasingly into color as the technology advances. Woodman’s work turns inward; his ranges outward, through the changing times around him. His death comes unexpectedly, in a period of blissful encounters, among the monks and mountains who expand his vision.
So I return to the darkness of her vision and the imagined brightness of his. Both, in their own ways, tragic.
Beaver lodge across the water
Growing up in Ohio, this would have blown my mind. Now I almost take it for granted.
A nod to famous Maine artists, most of them ‘summer people’
The Pine Tree State has long inspired painters and other visual artists, most of them attracted from elsewhere.
Here’s a sampling:
- Marsden Hartley, an American Modernist master born in Lewiston and died in Ellsworth. What the desert was for Georgia O’Keeffe, Maine was for Hartley.
- Neil Welliver, a Pennsylvanian who moved permanently to Lincolnville. Renowned for his large, square interior Maine nature studies – and a life of controversy and tragedy.
- Three generations of Wyeths – N.C., Andy, and Jamie. The most famous, even as summer residents.
- Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Led a parade of summer people who made the state’s rugged surf iconic.
- Alex Katz, a New Yorker who forged a strong Maine connection from 1954 on in Lincolnville. Best known as a precursor to Pop art.
- Frederic Church and Thomas Cole of the Hudson Valley School. Made their way to the Pine Tree State, too.
- As a child, sculptor Louise Nevelson came from Russia to Rockland. As an adult, she relocated to New York City, something of a reversal of most artists.
- Rockwell Kent. Spent five prolific summers on Monhegan Island.
- Charles Herbert Woodbury. Founded the Ogunquit colony.
- Lithuanian-born William Zorach. His family bought a farm on Georgetown Island in 1923 where they lived, worked, and entertained guests, juggling between New York City. Daughter Dahlov Ipcar also became a noted artist.
Care to look at people around you carved in stone?
What would your obituary say about you? What would you say there, if asked? Before you reply, pay attention to everyday stuff and your aspirations, especially what you love. Note as well how others see you. Besides, how do you fit into your neighborhood or wider community? Feel free to exaggerate, reflecting everyone else.
As a human, you assume a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Protestant, Freemason, middle-class, married. “Grandfather” wasn’t high up in his awareness, from my perspective. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.
The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.
Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. At least, most of the time.
Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.
Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.
All that brings us around to my latest poetry collection, Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles. There, many of the imaginary individuals profiled are identified by occupation while their confessions typically reflect the more intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. These are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.
Hamlet, of course, is a small town or a village as well as a famed play. In this collection, the inhabitants are profiled in five acts of two scenes each, plus intermissions and intermezzos. They’re even exaggerated, the way a stone carver would in creating gargoyles and grotesques.
Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. This collection of poems builds on such moments, constructing a community as a web of each its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may even be more like the part we deny. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.
Just think.
Having originally appeared in literary journals around the globe and then as chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions, this collection of poems is now available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.
The move unites the poems in a single volume, rather than a series of ten smaller chapbooks and ten broadsides, and makes them available to a wider range of readers worldwide.
Welcome to town, clown.
Acid test novelist: Ishmael Reed (1938- )
Assigned as part of a contemporary novels course in the spring of 1970, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down was unlike anything I had previously encountered. The lively tone and style were a kind of pre-rap, I suppose, as were the content. He was amusing in a way Leroi Jones wasn’t and also an example that we can be free of having to “write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago,” as Kurt Vonnegut put it.
He certainly introduced a new world to my essentially suburban Midwestern nature.
Reed was, as critic Anita Felicelli wrote of a later novel, a firebrand, crackling, overflowing, pugnacious, “someone who doesn’t care about genre boundaries any more than he cares about historical boundaries, but who does care deeply about innovating.” In other words, right up my alley.
The novel Mumbo Jumbo confirmed my impression, but, somehow, I haven’t encountered him since, even though he’s written and published prolifically. Note to self: Rectify ASAP.
Kinisi 211
Airbus
Symphony
Airbrush
Foggy island with swimmer
how would square-riggers look on these waters?
Lost behind a small island
finally, a shadow
and a tinge of warmth
Eliot burial ground
On what was the Asa Austin farm, the oldest part contains unmarked graves of Quakers, in contrast to the newer headstones.
For more, go to my book Quaking Dover, available in both paperback and ebook editions online or at your favorite bricks-and-mortar bookstore. Or ask your local library.
Jnana's Red Barn 