I've had a couple random thoughts I thought I'd like to get out right now, which includes a nice picture and a poem. Multisensory envolvement, Ka-POW!
(1) Sometimes when I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, say, when I'm working on applications to graduate school, I actually briefly forget what day/month/year it is. I forget the present and live in the future. No good.
(2) Some of classiest chocolate in the world is made in Orem. Thank, Amano, for getting me through finals (not to mention the last three semesters). I think Ocumare is my current favorite.
(3) Frank O'Hara is great.
These are some photographs of him and his friend Grace Hartigan. Frank O'Hara was a poet, art critic, and museum curator in the 1950s and 1960s. He wrote this poem called "Having a Coke with You," and it makes my heart sing. Here it is. Please find a quiet place and read it aloud to yourself (or listen to Frank O'Hara read it himself).Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
Great, right? I'm not going to pretend to get it, but I love the bit about a tree breathing through its spectacles and how silly statuary and painting is when you're looking at someone you love and how someone saying an experience is so much a part of having it...
Great, right? I'm not going to pretend to get it, but I love the bit about a tree breathing through its spectacles and how silly statuary and painting is when you're looking at someone you love and how someone saying an experience is so much a part of having it...
i really liked "and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint \ you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them \ i look at you and i would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world"
ReplyDeletethat's great stuff. the whole thing. whew. what a gem.
thanks. I will have to read it again and I will tell you my thoughts on it then.
ReplyDeleteOne thought I do have now, though, in response to your conclusion, is the uncertainty of both kinds of knowledge that he seems to allude to here. This is kinda what I meant when I asked about sex as a way of finding identity at group that one time. Basically my thought was that in being together with one other person that you love(whether sexually together or not, though I think this poem has some of those overtones)makes more sense and meaning out of your life than being part of something "big" that is "important" to the world, like knowing everything about all these artists, etc.
Being with another person is a chance to cast off our pretensions of sophistication and just know that we like sharing a Coke (or maybe coke) with them. It's simple and powerful*, which he seems to suggest is what all these artists are going for but can't actually capture.
(*note -it's also sensation based,more on that it a second.)
I have some reservations about that conclusion, however, because I think there is perhaps more stability in knowledge of things that matter to the world than there is in relationships which though they matter a whole lot to us and our selfish natures, tend to fizzle. (Are they bound to fizzle because we so often base them on irrationality and sensation--two things that are generally very fleeting--as opposed to critical thinking and duty--two things which tend to have a longer shelf life?)
I guess either kind of knowledge is pretty fragile and in the end we don't really choose one over the other with any permanence. Instead, we use each of them to temper our successes and failures in the other.