duchamp dream

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Marcel Duchamp and I are collaborating on a giant wall painting. Duchamp’s part in this work consists of a talking portrait of himself – a profile which appears at the center of a brightly colored rectangle on the white wall. Using a long stick to push the colors around, I demonstrate the niceties of the composition to a large audience standing in a semicircle. “You see,” I say, “we (Duchamp and I) are much the same – but mostly at the edges!” Now the righthand edge of the rectangle explodes in a flashing white light which then “bleeds” into a field of dazzling pellucid orange. The room during this phase of the work has been almost totally in the dark – the only light source being the painting itself – its colors illumined from the inside. Now the room lights up and I am painting the four walls, running back and forth like crazy with my stick. In one corner I draw a huge black gorilla figure and pivoting to face the next long wall, I trace a black line punctuated with a thick gob of paint which sticks out like a fist. I pause, sensing this work is “a great success.”

(Bill Berkson, in Serenade.)

but rather to know these subjects by speaking of them with reverence

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“. . . St. Augustine’s comment on his study of the Trinity (and in the awareness that if my subject is not so exalted as his it is perhaps of an equally baffling complexity): ‘Therefore I have undertaken this work . . . not for the sake of speaking with authority about what I know but rather to know these subjects by speaking of them with reverence.’ “

(Gabriel Josipovici, The Word and the Book: a study of modern fiction, p. xvii.)

complacency

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“We must constantly remember that earlier, at the time of the Impressionists or of Cézanne, modern painting was something you never saw. Or else, when people did open their eyes to it, it caused a scandal . . . Today, provided it doesn’t look like anything that could really be called painting, everything is modern . . . and as soon as it appears it’s a work of genius, and all the rest doesn’t even exist. As though people had suddenly become so perceptive that they knew all about it as soon as it has even begun to take shape. Whereas in reality they see precisely as they always did or even worse. Because now they see in exactly the same way but they imagine they’ve learnt to see properly.”

(Pablo Picasso, 1966, unsourced epigraph to the preface of Gabriel Josipovici’s The World and the Book: a study of modern fiction.)

3. collage, or, the splice of life:

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“3. COLLAGE, or, THE SPLICE OF LIFE:

I turned to collage early, to get away from writing poems about my overwhelming mother. I felt I needed to do something “objective” that would get me out of myself. I took books off the shelf, selected maybe one word from every page or a phrase every tenth page, and tried to work these into structures. Some worked, some didn’t. But when I looked at them a while later: they were still about my mother. (As Tristan Tzara would have predicted. His recipe for making a Dadaist poem by cutting up a newspaper article ends with: “The poem will resemble you.”)

This was a revelation–and a liberation. I realized that subject matter is not something to worry about. Your concerns and obsessions will surface no matter what you do. This frees you to work on form, which is all one can work on consciously. For the rest, all you can do is try to keep your mind alive, your curiosity and ability to see.

Even more important was the second revelation: that any constraint stretches the imagination, pull you into semantic fields different from the one you started with. For though the poems were still about my mother, something else was also beginning to happen.

Georges Braque: “You must always have 2 ideas, one to destroy the other. The painting is finished when the concept is obliterated.”

(Barbara Guest would qualify that the constraints must be such that they stretch the imagination without disabling it.)

Collage, like fragmentation, allows you to frustrate the expectation of continuity, of step-by-step-linearity. And if the fields you juxtapose are different enough there are sparks from the edges. Here is a paragraph from A Key Into the Language of America that tries to get at the clash of Indian and European cultures by juxtaposing phrases from Roger William’s 1743 treatise with contemporary elements from anywhere in my Western heritage.

OF MARRIAGE

Flesh, considered as cognitive region, as opposed to undifferentiated warmth, is called woman or wife. The number not stinted, yet the Narragansett (generally) have but one. While diminutives are coined with reckless freedom, the deep structure of the marriage bed is universally esteemed even in translation. If the woman be false to bedlock, the offended husband will be solemnly avenged, arid and eroded. He may remove her clothes at any angle between horizontal planes.”

(Rosmarie Waldrop, from “Thinking of Follows”.)

the coming of the land of shades

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“Paris is becoming fantastic. Those buses without horses . . . You seem to be living in the land of shades. And this thought comes back to me: ‘Aren’t we all dead without knowing it?’ In these sounds, reflections, in this mist, you walk in anxiety, less with the fear of being run over than with the fear of no longer being alive. The impression of being in an immense cave, and your head in a pulp from the noise.”

(Jules Renard, December 1905, p. 190 in The Journals of Jules Renard, ed. & trans. Louise Bogan & Elizabeth Roget.)

the structure of scientific revolutions

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“To believe in progress and in science you had to know what science was and what progress might be. Having been born in the nineteenth century it was natural enough to know what science was. Darwin was still alive and Huxley and Agassiz and after all they all made the difference of before and after. And now in 1943 none of it means more than it did. Not so much more as not more. Not more at all.

And I began with evolution. Most pleasant and exciting and decisive. It justified peace and justified war. It also justified life and it also justified death and it also justified life. Evolution did all that. And now. Evolution is no longer interesting. It is historical now and no longer actual. Not even pleasant or exciting, not at all. To those of us who were interested in science then it had to do tremendously with the history of the world, the history of all animals, the history of death and life, and all that had to do with the round world. Evolution was as exciting as the discovery of America, by Columbus quite as exciting, and quite as much an opening up and a limiting, quite as much. By that I mean that discovering America, by reasoning and then finding, opened up a new world and at the same time closed the circle, there was no longer any beyond. Evolution did the same thing, it opened up the history of all animals vegetables and minerals, and man, and at the same time it made them all confined, confined within a circle, no excitement of creation any more. It is funny all this and this was my childhood and youth and beginning of existence. War oh yes was but logical and incessant war, and peace of yes, peace because if war is completely understood then peace was the ideal. It was just like that.”

(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 61.)

against gardening

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“But one does get so tired of seeing everybody planting and growing vegetables you think how nice it will be to have those happy days come back when vegetables grew not in the ground but in tins. A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing but vegetables.”

(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 39.)

the war continues

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“Of course there are a good many times when there is no war just as there are a good many times when there is a war. To be sure when there is a war the years are longer that is to say the days are longer the months are longer the years are much longer but the weeks are shorter that is what makes a war. And when there is no war, well just now I cannot remember just how it is when there is no war.”

(Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, p. 5.)

condescension

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“Gertrude Stein proved in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas that, when she want to, she can write straightforward English that any average high-school student can understand. Wars I Have Seen, with a few very minor aberrations, is another such book. The first half, in fact, which conveys an impression that the author was more concerned with foraging food for her dogs than with the fate of democracy, struck this publisher as all too comprehensible.”

(Bennett Cerf, front jacket copy for Random House’s 1945 edition of Wars I Have Seen.)

kings or messengers

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“Once, when there was a choice of being kings or messengers, we, being children, chose to be messengers, arms and legs flying as we romped from castle to castle. We got the messages wrong as like as not, or forgot them, or fell asleep in the forest while kings died of anxiety.”

(Guy Davenport, “The Messengers”, p. 2 in The Cardiff Team.)