Peter Clothier's Blog, page 18

MUSEUMS

We got started late morning, taking a very slow cab ride up Madison Avenue to the Met Breuer. The traffic stalled a few bocks south of the museum so we decided to pay up and walk for the remaining few blocks through light rain. The featured artist at the Breuer is Vija Celmins, whose work we have followed for many years with huge admiration for its meticulous attention to the detail of each mark and for the overall surface--oceans, desert floors, moonscapes...


We had not seen before, nor were we aware of her extraordinary troupe l'ceil work with simple rocks and children's slate boards.




Breath-taking.

There was still light rain as we walked on up from 75th to 92nd Street, crossing over to the Jewish Museum on 5th Avenue to see the amazing exhibition, Edith Halpert and the Rise of American Art. In our ignorance we had not previously heard of Edith Halpert, a passionate and tireless dealer and promoter of the art of her time for a period of 40 years beginning in the 1920s. Her perceptive taste ranged from the likes of Stuart Davis and Arthur Dove...


... and Georgia O'Keeffe...


... to Ben Shan...


... and other socially committed artists and African Americans who might otherwise have been sidelined, Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin. A truly amazing career, and one whose importance has been restored by an exhibition that will surely amaze others than ourselves.

The Cooper Hewitt is a mere block south of the Jewish Museum, and the rain had stopped, so we made it our next stop. A bad choice for lunch, but that was not our main purpose for the day. And we enjoyed the current exhibition, Nature, featuring art and design projects by scientists, architects and designers exploring the infinite curiosities of the natural world...


Alternately fascinating and overly intricate for my own non-scientific mind, it required, frankly, more time than we were able to allow it.  We did have some fun in the "Immersion Room", where a handful of young people were playing with a digital machine for wallpaper design...



We walked the entire way back down Madison Avenue from 90th to 47th Street, with a stop for tea and cookies at EATS and another at the soon-to-be-closing Barney's, where there were handbags reduced from $15,000 to a mere $14,500 for quick sale...


 Dinner locally at the Lexington Brass.

SMASHING

It's an old English superlative. Smashing. The word occurred to me as we toured the newly-renovated Museum of Modern Art yesterday. As did a long-forgotten, delightfully euphonious phrase from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake: "chalkful of masterplasters..."--from "Starry, Starry Night" and Monet's audacious "Water Lilies"...


... to Picasso's "Demoiselles d"Avignon" ...


...and Matisse's "La Danse" and the "Red Room" to two magnificent drip paintings by Jackson Pollock and... and, and... From one gob-smack to the next. Amazing. We made the tour of international art from the 1890s to the present in six exhausting, non-stop hours. Also amazing is that despite the huge numbers of visitors the vastly expanded space did not feel crowded. A little disorienting, perhaps, for anyone who knew the "old" museum as we did. But there was even no significant wait for the pleasant Terrace restaurant at lunch time, nor for a coffee break at the cafe. Kudos to MoMA for a stunning rebirth.

A joy, too, to hear from our very old friend, the artist Gary Lloyd, who was by sheer coincidence in New York at the same time as ourselves. He'd read my post on Facebook--which does, after all, have uses!--and contacted me via text message. He and JoAnn were kind enough to make the trek to mid- from downtown to meet up with us for dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant. It was too noisy, too expensive by half, but a huge pleasure to spend time with them. Now that they have moved from Los Angeles to New Mexico, it was even more of a surprise and delight that our visits here coincided.

Even the weather is friendly for now, here in New York City. Sunny, and not too cold. And elsewhere, the agony of this benighted nation persists...

WHILE I AM NOT AFRAID....

As is often the case when we're in New York, Ellie and I found our way to the Morgan Library for an early brunch. The library is one of our favorite NYC hangouts--aside from the library itself and the Renzo Piano-designed atrium and restaurant, we often find a jewel of an exhibition there. This time was no exception. We were treated to "Illusions of the Photographer: Duane Michals at the Morgan."

I have been a long-time admirer of this artist. I love the wry subtlety of his narratives, his eccentricity of perception, his intimacy and vulnerability. And I was delighted to find, as a part of the exhibition, a quotation that meant a great deal to my own personal journey.

I'll explain. I wrote a book, a memoir, following a life-changing experience back in the early 1990s. I had found in Duane Michal's work this an epigraph that meshed perfectly with my purpose and feelings in writing the book: "I must write this now/This very moment/While I am still foolish/Before I become sensible again/And know better,/and while I am not afraid/To say these things outloud."

And searching for a title for the book, I found it right there, in the epigraph I had chosen: "WHILE I AM NOT AFRAID."

If you happen to be in New York, I encourage you to spend time with this wonderful exhibition. I was frustrated by the relatively short amount of time we had to spend at the Morgan and--particular given Michals' sometimes spidery handwriting--the fact that I had left my reading glasses in my bag at the coat check counter.

But... I did find my quotation, right there on the wall:

WAKING UP...

... in New York City. A disorienting experience, having woken up just yesterday morning in Los Angeles. You step on a plane, you arrive on the other side of a continent, three time zones away, just five hours later. It's just plain odd, for the human mind and the human body, which are not yet fully adjusted to such time-space wrenches. Going to bed at 11PM was like going to bed at 8PM. Waking this morning at 6:30 was like waking at 3:30AM. It's just not right.

It was comforting, and a little orienting, to do my morning sit. Things do get straightened out that way. I'm, after all, just here. And now.

Looking forward to a chilly day in New York City. Chilly for us, at least. Even at 5 o'clock in the morning in Los Angeles, it's 59 degrees Fahrenheit. So says my I-Phone, infallibly accurate when it comes to time and temperature. And 42 degrees in New York.

WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT: A Book Review

“Where My Heart Used to Beat” by Sebastian Faulks is the story of a deeply wounded man, one Dr. Robert Hendricks. It is narrated in the first person, by himself—which makes it personal, direct, and often painful. His wounds are both physical—from friendly fire, in World War II—and emotional. The man is, frankly, hard to like because he seems passive, alienated, lacking in the initiative and drive we expect in the hero of a novel. If we follow his story it is because of the vulnerability that can’t help but seep past the edges of the invulnerable armor he has built up around himself. If I like him, me, personally, it is because we share some fundamental things in common.
Like me, the fictional Hendricks was brought up in an English country village and like me—though for very different reasons—he grew up deprived of the nurturing warmth of a family hearth. His father’s early death in the First World War is a mystery, to himself and us, until the very end; and then, when we learn about it, shocking. The absence of his father in his early years is perhaps the deepest of his wounds. His mother is remote, peculiar, perhaps mad. He is sent away to board with a demanding schoolmaster; his education is in the classical, Latin and Greek, rap-on-the-knuckles tradition. Like me, he was a lonely boy, cut off as much from himself as from other children, who learned to protect himself from hurt by living in his head at the cost of his heart. As the title suggests, Robert’s story is the largely failing search for this elusive but essential organ.
He finds it—briefly—in the chaos of war. Faulk describes the horror and confusion of the battlefield in dreadful, utterly convincing, you-were-there detail, first in North Africa, then at the costly Anzio beachhead in Italy. During a lull in battle, our protagonist meets a young Italian woman, Luisa, and falls in love with her. He catches a tantalizing glimpse of his missing heart in their improbable, doomed love affair—which ends in sudden, heart-breaking betrayal. Another wound.
After the war, he turns—no surprise, perhaps—to medicine and psychiatry, with a brilliant brain but one that is disconnected from heart, body, and soul. It’s a matter of “physician, heal thyself.” But along with the absent heart and emasculated by his emotional wounds, he is ill-equipped to diagnose and treat them for himself. A seemingly attractive man, he can relate to women only on a professional basis or as paid sexual providers, and eventually rejects even offers of casual, readily available sex. He becomes a man in search not only of his heart but of his elusive manhood—emotional as well as sexual, as if the two weren’t one. He had become, in his own words, “the man who had cauterized his own wounds by insisting that love was a neural malfunction and a category error”—a misdiagnosed psychological and physiological addiction.
There is a teasing, overarching plot that involves an aging, soon to be dying psychiatrist who lures Hendricks to a remote island in the Mediterranean with promises of information about his dead father—information which his host soon proves singularly loath to supply. Hendricks’s occasional visits there, earning grudging snippets of history offered over years before the final revelation that leads him to a connection with his lost father, provide the opportunity for the wide-ranging, thought-provoking discussions of memory and madness, delusion and truth, that form the often engrossing intellectual core of the book.
Does our hero ever find the integration of mind and body, heart and soul that he at once resists and seeks, despite the fears that stand in his way? It’s debatable. Does he find love again? Does he find redemption. In a way. Well, in several ways. Though the book was published some years ago, I’m reluctant to act the spoiler, but I’ll confess I wish the author had found more gratifying ways to salve his hero’s lasting wounds. I ended up wanting a more enduring and convincing healing for a man whose suffering I had shared as he told his story.
I have come to believe that the struggle to achieve true manhood is one that many, if not most men experience. Some never get there. We look around in the world today and find many, even those in positions of power and influence, who mistake vain displays of strength for manliness, who bully and bluster out of fear of seeming weak, unmanly. As I see it, “Where My Heart Used to Beat” is the brave, uncompromising study of a man whose thinking brain denies him access to his wounded heart and leaves him impotent in the face of life’s vicissitudes.

EINSTEIN

I came upon this quote from Albert Einstein in a novel I'm reading now:

"A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This  delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Buddhism, in a nutshell? I have no way of verifying the accuracy of this attribution, but according to the author of the novel it comes from a letter written in the attempt to console a grieving father. It touched me, and I thought it I would share it with others who might not have come across it.

ANOTHER DREAM...

(One to avoid if you happen to be squeamish. It has one kind of nasty graphic moment...)

I dreamt I woke up in a strange city, in a large hotel room--more a single level house, really, than a hotel. Ellie was also there, with a woman of our acquaintance. I was horribly constipated. I was looking for a suppository to help out but was unable to find one, our friend offered me a toothpaste-like tube she said would have the same effect. In attempting to insert a dab of it with a finger, I came in contact with the source of my problem, and pulled out a still-intact teabag, complete with string and tag.

I realized I would be late for work and needed a shower. There was a bathroom, but our friend was occupying it so I had to make do with the other shower that was available. It was placed immediately over my side of the bed, with one of those old-fashioned heads that look like a small flying saucer. The water came out in mostly drips, but I still worried about the pillows and the bedsheets getting soaked. I wondered why the shower had been so misplaced and worried, too, about standing naked on the bed while our friend was in the room. My concern was compounded by the arrival of a maid who was to clean the room and who had caustic comments about the situation.

It was time to leave for work. I was working as a teacher at a local grammar school--as I had in fact done years before, in Nova Scotia, Canada. I dreaded having to go back. I had no idea about my teaching schedule, or even the subjects I was supposed to teach. Besides, I had been on vacation, or skipping classes, for way too long. I had been a lazy and ineffective teacher anyway. I had never bothered to show up in time for morning assembly, and my colleagues thought little of me. The headmaster was the Catholic priest (who had actually been president at a university where I served for a while as Dean). If I wanted to quit the job, as I so much wanted, I would have to call and let him know.

No use pretending, I simply could not bring myself to go back. I got on my knees and begged Ellie to understand that I would have to quit. All I wanted was the time to devote to the trilogy I was (am, actually) writing. But where would the money come from, to support us? It would be a huge risk, a leap into the unknown. (It was the risk I took, "in real life", more than 30 years ago, when I left academia, and decided to become the writer I was always supposed to be. That turned out okay, I haven't had a job since 1986. That's 33 years!)

I don't remember actually making the call in my dream, but I remember clearly the enormous sense of relief when I realized I did not have to go back to my teaching job. Instead, we left the hotel in search of a place for breakfast.

THE ART DEALER'S LEG

I dreamt I cut off an art dealer's leg. I won't name him, but I know who he is. He was with a couple of women, and seemed unconcerned when I cut it off. I had heard somehow from his doctor that there was gangrene or some other problem with the leg, so I started to cut it off. There seemed to be no blood or pain. When I finished, the stub looked as pink and bloodless as a baked ham. It was only then he seemed to realize what I had done. "You'd think," he said calmly, "if my leg was to be amputated I would have been consulted." That was all.

Then I realized the seriousness of what I had done. In a panic, realizing my responsibility, I started to apologize wildly, protesting--which was a lie--that I had tried everything to consult with his doctor first, to have his doctor inform him of the need for the amputation. I was crying while I was trying to convince him.

Then the dream ended. I have no explanation for it. Or... Could it be because I'm no longer very much involved in the art world? Perhaps it was my own leg I was cutting off... And replacing it with a baked ham. That must be it.

KIND OF A BOOK REVIEW: "Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen," by Brad Warner

(A book review in epistolary form...)

Dear Brad Warner,
I have a few thoughts about your new book, “Letters to a Dead Friend About Zen.” (They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I hope you’ll forgive this clumsy appropriation of your letter-writing style!) The dead friend of the title and the one you write to, Marky, is---well, was—a punk rocker like yourself, a black musician who died of cancer at much too young an age. Your
letters build an endearing portrait of the man—and not incidentally of yourself, the letter writer, Soto Zen teacher at the Angel City Zen Center in Los Angeles, filmmaker and bass guitarist as well as an itinerant guest lecturer—and suggest a loving bond between you, an intimacy that it’s nice to be let in on.
Given this relationship, it’s natural that you’d write to him with the slangy familiarity of a couple of musician pals. It’s not my language, so I honestly found it quite difficult to adjust to; I worried, from the start, that it would prove just too hip, even a bit condescending, at least for this reader. But don’t worry. I got over it.
And I found plenty of good stuff. (I hate that word, and wish you wouldn’t use it as much as you do. But then, I use it too, so I’m hardly in a position to complain.) Anyway, I’d like to thank you for a solid introduction to Zen—a branch of the Buddhist tree that has attracted me from afar, but with which I have little familiarity. I did spend a week sitting zazen on Mt. Baldy in the early days of my own Buddhist education, but that was long ago. I branched off elsewhere.
What I like particularly is that you do not make it easy. There are a zillion books out there that make Buddhism in all its forms sound like an easy answer to life’s many problems—and we have enough of them, in this contemporary world! Meditation and mindfulness are all the rage, and there’s no shortage of people—including those in the book-publishing business—who are all too happy to cash in on it. You make no such promises. On the contrary, you stress constantly that the practice of Zen is a long, hard road, and one that requires dedication, determination, and years of hard work. I like that you revert frequently to the example of your own life and admit freely to your failings along the way as well as your successes. Buddhism is no sinecure.
I share your distrust of easy answers, and of teachers who offer them. I share your skepticism when it comes to religions and putative gods of all kinds. Your practical, no-nonsense approach to the conundrums with which life and death confront us appeals to my own learned sense of what I hope is healthy pragmatism. When it comes to the unanswerable questions, you honor the beliefs of others with the proper respect, but test them out with astute critical analysis.
I like that you are unafraid to tackle the unanswerable questions, however, and that you do not make light of the sometimes difficult and confusing concepts that Buddhism requires us to address. You do so forthrightly, and with both humility and clarity. Humility when it comes to not claiming to possess the right, or the only answers; clarity in being able to write about those concepts so that we can understand them. Most of us have a hard time with the Heart Sutra, for example: “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” A conundrum, if ever there was one, not unlike other widely misunderstood or easily diluted concepts like no-self.. Rather than offering explanations, your clarity seems to offer us a way to get in on the secret, helping us to be comfortable with paradox and contradiction, to be open to meaning even when it’s hard to come to a rational understanding.
I like that you are knowledgeable about other branches of the Buddhist tree than Zen, and that you are able to bring that knowledge to bare sparingly, and appropriately. That you can refer us without pretension to literary sources and other fields of thought, providing us with historical, religious and philosophical context. I like that you share your obvious familiarity with many of the colorful characters who have followed in the Buddha’s path, and that you write about them with humorous affection for their foibles. That you make them come as alive for us as they seem to be for you.
I feel obliged to add that there’s some iffy stuff (that word again!) The big one is the reveal that comes at the end of your book, where your very last sentence reads, “And I apologize for lying to you.” Yes. You lied. I won’t be more specific because that would be a spoiler and I want other people to read your book. But I have to say that your last letter, this one addressed not to Marky but to your “Dear Readers,” felt like a slap in the face. You wrote eloquently about the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, one element of which is Right Speech; and about the precepts common to all branches of Buddhism, one of the most basic of which is the injunction: “Don’t lie.” So when I read that you’d been lying to me all along, I was pretty much outraged. Having been taken in by it all I quite honestly felt betrayed…
But then my outrage made me think again. Perhaps I should think of this slap-in-the-face as a kind of Zen wake-up call. Do they still use the keisakuin the zendo, that rod they smack across your shoulders in zazen when you get sloppy or sleepy? Or do contemporary Western sensibilities forbid that kind of physical correction? Anyway, that’s how it felt. So maybe I should read your whole book as a kind of Zen koan, one of those stories you also write about, the kind that often ends with the teacher rewarding the student with a nasty jab—or a kick in the pants—as the inscrutable answer to some absurd, unanswerable question. To jolt him past the quagmire of doubts and questions into enlightenment. Perhaps I needed this reminder, at the end of your book, of the Buddha’s injunction not to take anything for granted, to distrust even teachers, to distrust even his great wisdom, and return to the evidence of my own eyes, my own tested experience. Perhaps I needed that shock to remind me that it all comes back to the present moment.
Which is after all why we learn to just sit. So, okay, thanks, Brad. I enjoyed your sometimes perilous travels in Europe too. And your book is a good read, a good reminder. So, ta-ta for now. Be well. Your friend, Peter

A DREAM TO LEARN FROM...