After long silence

The beginning of fall, the beginning of September, the beginning of the school year. My school-teacher dreams of being in the wrong place, in the wrong subject-matter (always math), at the wrong time. The leaves drying on the ground, the day turning cool despite the sunshine. The wind blowing fresh from the north west across Lake Erie, the waves scudding towards the shore.

The memories of so many times looking at water, at times of enormous change. This near shore of Lake Erie after a death, the far expanse of San Francisco Bay absent of airplanes in the days after Sept. 11. The sense that everything changes, and that water is one of the great metaphors for that change.

And to find that sense of change to be at the center of the book I choose to read just now. Allegra Goodman's beautiful and moving novel about time, change, philosophy, and (ah!) cooking: The Cookbook Collector. A book to read in the fall, when those perfectly ripe peaches are ready for the eating.

What can I do in this time but turn back to Keats? There he was, almost 200 years ago, in the sun outside the old town of Winchester, thinking about his brother's death and his own tenuous hold on life. And watching the fruit ripen, perhaps he dared to eat a peach, and above all putting process, change, transience, into words. Just the first stanza for now. You can find the rest here. What about those bees, finding more and more flowers, lulled into thinking that it all will last, and yet knowing better?

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness!
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o'erbrimmed their clammy cells.

Wild Things?

Where the Wild Things Are is, as most have said, haunting and beautiful. But the final return home is not necessary (Max eating a late dinner with his mother wordlessly gazing at him).

It's hard to end a story, and the demands of the journey motif -- home; leaving; island; return; home -- must have been too hard to resist; but the film would have been better if we had been left with the anguishing Carol howling on the beach as Max sails away (not quite this image, but it's the closest I could find).

The story's about growing up, yes; and so the ending brings Max home to indicate that he's learned about civilized life from his venture into the wilderness (that is, grown up). But I think it would have been better to let us stay in the realm of the imagination. For me, the film was about the imagination: about how a child -- a human -- uses storytelling, fort-building, games (even violent ones) to understand life.

Keats' Nightingale ode is a place I go back to, to remind myself of the imagination. It begins, like Max's story, in melancholy -- "Here, where men sit and hear each other groan." This grieving poet -- his brother recently dead, his own life deeply uncertain -- "runs away" from home to join the singing of the nightingale, the imaginative power that cuts across time, limitations, categories. He revels in its joyful abandon: "Already with thee! tender is the night. . ." But, as with Max, escape into imagination is no simple walk in the woods; it takes the melancholy and intensifies it until the dark woods become almost a grave:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
  Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess . . .

"Darkling" -- in the dark -- he listens, "and for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death." All vision gone -- that most rational of senses -- the imagination "guesses" at truths that the conscious mind doesn't find. Time ceases to mean anything, the seasons blend together, the generations meld with each other, until windows open on another, strange land:

. . . magic casements, opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

This could be Max's island with its "perilous seas" and its deeply forlorn creatures.

Keats wrote in a letter once about how Milton put the imagination to reality in Paradise Lost: "The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream--he awoke and found it truth." But at the end of the nightingale, Keats is far less sure of that truth: he wakes, not to truth, but to doubt, back from the bird's song "to my sole self," to that rational curse of consciousness and identity. "Fled is that music." Maybe in all romance narratives, we have to return from the quest, come home, wake up; but hopefully we can remember the journey, the island, the bird's song, that deep "ecstasy" -- or "wild rumpus" -- that reminds us of the transforming power of the imagination.

Northeast Ohio in fall

It's been a gorgeous day, half sunny and half not, the ground wet from days of rain, the sky half full of clouds that stretch the eye past the horizon. The soybeans have lost their green; when the sun's not out they are a wonderful dull brown matte; when the sun shines on them, they are golden like the dry hills of California. The sky is an intense, light-filled, watery blue; I don't know how to make pigments, but I'd want to grind up all the lapis lazuli I could find to paint it. The blue of that sky is channeled into the tiny, unobtrusive, glowing flowers of the Michaelmas daisies.

Keats again in my head: "To Autumn," that rich poem about patience and ripening --

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue...

Or maybe John Clare, with his great eye for details and his strange moves into transcendence, is an even better poet for this. One of his autumn poems evokes the way light changes how we see and reminds us that seeing is a relationship, not a fact.

The fallow fields glitter like water indeed,
And gossamers twitter, flung from weed unto weed.

Hill tops like hot iron glitter bright in the sun,
And the rivers we're eying burn to gold as they run;
Burning hot is the ground, liquid gold is the air;
Whoever looks round sees Eternity there.

The pictures I took today with a new camera! What a treat to be able to do so.

Fanny Brawne recreated

Jane Campion's new film, Bright Star, is a gutsy and wonderful film. Among many courageous and beautiful things she does for the story (the love of John Keats and Fanny Brawne), here are three:

1. She trusts the poetry. As the credits roll at the end, Ben Whishaw (as John Keats) speaks "Ode to a Nightingale" in a quiet voiceover. When it began, I doubted whether the film would dare to give us the whole 80 lines of the poem, but I was wrong to doubt. For those who stay for the credits (admittedly, those who, like me, love film and poetry), the poem is given voice. We need that kind of immersion to remember why Keats is great and why we still read these poems. (Unfortunately, the poem is also underlaid by a wordless choral melody that distracts from its power.)
2. She trusts the details. For me, biopic is a genre often marred by a grandiose historicity, constantly waiting for the big, known moments in the life of the central figure --  despondency, love, breakthrough, maybe success, certainly death. In so many biopics, fatality drags the picture down into tedium punctuated by those cameo historical appearances of famous people whom we recognize. Here, the film embraces the small sounds and sights of life in a London house in the 1820s more than it brings out the big organ tones of Keats' impending death. Nobody famous (besides Keats) makes an appearance. The textures of everyday life -- cloth, wood, paper, rain -- carry us along into seeing the story as happening now.
3. She trusts the "bright star." Fanny Brawne here is far from the standard flirt of Keats biography, teasing him and distracting him from his real pursuits. She is passionate, smart, creative enough to be the love of this young poet. She is a craftswoman, a designer of beautiful clothes that become the visual counterpoint to Keats' intricately sewn stanzas. Though ignorant of poetry as the affair begins, she sets out to learn how to read and appreciate it; and by the end, she has internalized Keats' poems. Not the flirt, she is also not the Muse, silently inspiring him. She becomes instead the instrument by which these poems carry themselves into history and into our own appreciative ears. She survives him, and after his death we see her walk out into the heath, grieving by speaking aloud the title poem, "Bright Star." In that poem, Keats hopes "Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath." He cannot -- "to that high requiem become a sod" incapable of hearing -- but we, the world, history, the future, hear her, a real woman, voicing them. The fantasy of an "ideal reader" of poems sometimes dominates our thoughts of how they mean and live in the world; this Fanny Brawne, instead, is a real reader, as we ought to be.
   

Gauguin's waves

Having just plunged into this blog by creating my metaphor about the world as museum, I'll make that metaphor literal with last week's experience in an actual, non-metaphorical museum. At the Cleveland Museum of Art, a show just opened called Paul Gauguin: Paris 1889. It explores, and virtually recreates the exhibit that Gauguin and his friends created at the Café des Arts in Paris, as a resistance and alternative to the establishment paintings shown at the official exposition.

Collaboration amongst these then-unknown artists, in the interests of self-promotion, created a nexus of images that circulate among them, motifs that appear and reappear as one and then another tries his (yes, they are all men) hand at a motif. It reminds me of Keats and his friends' sonnet contests ("write a sonnet on the River Nile"), this time with French motifs, such as the fierce waves of the Breton coast.

The central work in the exhibition is In the Waves (the picture's from the CMA website).

I grew up with this picture. My grandfather, Frank Hadley Ginn, bought it, probably in the 1920s, and hung it in his house in Gates Mills, Ohio, outside Cleveland (my parents gave it to the museum in 1978). The exhibition helped me see that my grandfather, a corporate lawyer who built a beautiful but quite conservative stockbroker-Tudor home, had a radical taste in art. This image even now sears the eye with its powerful colors, its strange surreal flatness, its oscillation of focus (the articulated back of the nude bather; the Japanese-stylized waves; the strange and haunting green of the sea; the fascinating outline of the intense red hair). I would like to know more about what he saw in it, but since most of his personal papers are gone, I can't.

Museums at their best take images that you've lived with (perhaps not as literally as for me in this case) and make you look as if you've never seen them before.