Hojin, 2007

Valley Land

Blurry road on a rainly day, somewhere in the valley, Highway 120, walnut groves and fruit trees in gray morning light. Twin palms hold their own against a faint line of power poles, all cast at a slight angle by the movement of the car--Lartigue, maybe--that's what comes to mind, a roadside in France, 1913...

Aquí Me Pongo a Cantar

Aquí me pongo a cantar
Al compás de la vigüela;
Que el hombre que lo desvela
Una pena extraordinaria,
Como la ave solitaria
Con el cantar se consuela.

from José Hernandez: Martin Fierro

Yurodivy

A fool-for-Christ (yurodivy) is determined to follow the crucified Christ and to live keeping completely away from all earthly comforts. But at the same time he is aware that such behaviour threatens to create for him the reputation of a saint among the people and to strengthen his self-love and increase his pride as being one of God's elect - which is one of the most dangerous rocks in one's struggle for sanctity. So as not to be taken for a saint, a fool-for-Christ rejects the outer aspect of dignity and composure of mind that inspires respect and prefers to appear a miserable, weak creature, deserving mockery and even violence. Deprivations to which they subject themselves, their heroic, almost superhuman ascetic podvigs - all this must seem to be devoid of any value and to evoke nothing but contempt. In other words it is a complete denial of human dignity and even any spiritual value of one's own being - humility raised to a heroic degree and at times, as it may seem on the surface, falling into the extreme. But in the heart of a fool-for-Christ lives the memory of the Cross and the One Crucified, the slaps on His face, the spitting and the flagellation, which encourages them at any moment to endure any reviling and oppression for Christ's sake. (Leroy Bolier)

Małgorzata

From a Greek source--margaron--meaning "pearl." Margarita in Latin, then Marguerite (Old French). Saint's name day--the 18th of January--along with Bogumił, Jaropełk, Krystyna, Liberata, Piotr,and Pryska... But here as a girl scout trio, Warszawianki, where Levis become a ballroom gown, the only smidgen of the 18th century being perhaps the unintended gracefulness of their poses--Ovid redone after a waxy dressmaker's guide--szablon...

Van Gulik

In Fresno, it is 1923, and your shy father
Has picked up a Chinese fan abandoned
Among the corsages crushed into the dance floor.
On it, a man with scrolls is crossing a rope bridge
Over gradually whitening water.
If you look closely you can see brush strokes intended
To be trout.
You can see that the whole scene
Is centuries older
Than the hotel, or Fresno in the hard glare of morning.
And the girl
Who used this fan to cover her mouth
Or her breasts under the cool brilliance
Of chandeliers
Is gone on a train sliding along tracks that are
Pitted with rust.

Larry Levis, from "Lost Fan, Hotel Californian, Fresno, 1923"
(lines 1-16)

Reb Ahron

Hodu l'hashem ki tov, ki l'olam chasdo... Naugehide banquette, whispy beard, the volume of Likutei Torah close at hand, two narrow columns on heavy white page... Velvet yarmulkah and the freckles of a young man, now magnified by the lenses of his horn-rimmed spectacles. Spectacle--the quiet afternoons, learning in chevrusa, with a like-minded soul, warm breeze through the high Yerushalmi windows, late cup of tea. The very overlapping...

This morning, even before dawn--the lulav and esrog...

Po Chu-i

Beside the Pond, Under Bamboo

A path winds past brambleweave fence and simple home,
jade-green: ten acres of idle dwelling, a pond gracing half.

After eating my fill and dozing refreshed at the window,
I wander off under the trees, alone, my feet light as air,

for water clarifies the spirit no less than a perfect friend,
and bamboo is a master that frees the mind to emptiness.

Why worry about that world of people, why plague mind
and ruin eyes in search of a kindred spirit here or there?

Po Chü-i
(translated by David Hinton)

El Colegio Nacional de La Plata

El Colegio Nacional de La Plata... a symposium on interdisciplinary education, from a posted photo. But just what is it that Iike so much here? The woman's expression, certainly, in parallel with the authoritative bemusement of the man with the microphone--held almost delicately, as if a certain refinement were required. The rumpled suit--a daily costume, it seems, his thoughts on other matters? But it's her face I return to, each time--a locus of feeling.

Bachillerato in 1962, La Plata, Argentina, Quinto Tercero--my own class. A long time ago. I wonder about Professor Agavios and his lectures on Cosmographía ("Se toma una esfera celeste tan grande como se quiera...") and also Profesor Escalante--La Literatura Europea. Baudelaire, Charles Peguy...Edgar Allen Poe...

Solano, morning...

Red-orange neon of Clean-Living Cleaners, under the eaves of the 7-eleven... View through window of the copyshop, particularly beautiful on a gray morning. Interior light against run of darkened sky... Final scene in Antonioni's The Passenger, a town late afternoon, somewhere in Spain, setting sun, lamplight from within. "A lantern pushing away the darkness , such a friendly image..."

Autumn Thoughts

Autumn Thoughts, Sent Far Away

We share all these disappointments of failing
autumn a thousand miles apart. This is where

autumn wind easily plunders courtyard trees,
but the sorrows of distance never scatter away.

Swallow shadows shake out homeward wings.
Orchid scents thin, drifting from old thickets.

These lovely seasons and fragrant years falling
lonely away— we share such emptiness here.

Po Chü-i

(David Hinton translation)

Larry Levis: Those Graves in Rome

Those Graves In Rome
There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats's name isn't even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn's,
And Joseph Severn's infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
But you'd have to know the story--how bedridden
Keats wanted the inscription to be
Simple, & unbearable: "Here lies one
Whose name is writ in water." On a warm day,
I stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn't. All we did was follow
A lame man in a rumpled suit who climbed
A slight incline of graves blurring into
The passing marble of other graves to visit
The vacant home of whatever is not left
Of Shelley & Trelawney. That walk uphill must
Be hard if you can't walk. At the top, the man
Wheezed for breath; sweat beaded his face,
And his wife wore a look of concern so
Habitual it seemed more like the way
Our bodies, someday, will have to wear stone.
Later that night, the three of us strolled,
Our arms around each other, through the Via
Del Corso & toward the Piazza di Espagna
As each street grew quieter until
Finally we heard nothing at the end
Except the occasional scrape of our own steps,
And so said good-bye. Among such friends,
Who never allowed anything, still alive,
To die, I'd almost forgotten that what
Most people leave behind them disappears.
Three days later, staying alone in a cheap
Hotel in Naples, I noticed a child's smeared
Fingerprint on a bannister. It
Had been indifferently preserved beneath
A patina of varnish applied, I guessed, after
The last war. It seemed I could almost hear
His shout, years later, on that street. But this
Is speculation, & no doubt the simplest fact
Could shame me. Perhaps the child was from
Calabria, & went back to it with
A mother who failed to find work, & perhaps
The child died there, twenty years ago,
Of malaria. It was so common then--
The children crying to the doctors for quinine.
And to the tourists, who looked like doctors, for quinine.
It was so common you did not expect an aria,
And not much on a gravestone, either--although
His name is on it, & weathered stone still wears
His name--not the way a girl might wear
The too large, faded blue workshirt of
A lover as she walks thoughtfully through
The Via Fratelli to buy bread, shrimp,
And wine for the evening meal with candles &
The laughter of her friends, & later the sweet
Enkindling of desire; but something else, something
Cut simply in stone by hand & meant to last
Because of the way a name, any name,
Is empty. And not empty. And almost enough.

Larry Levis

In the Studio

And down by the brimming river... —W.H. Auden

A friend of mine once observed—his source, I believe, was in Marx—that the world in which seems most true to us is the one we experience in the first five years of our lives. We were driving down San Pablo Avenue into Oakland at the time—the year was 1976—and given intensely palpable layers of the city on every side, my first inclination was to exclaim, "But just look at the present all around us!" Nevertheless, his point is one I've continued to think about, and I still find it a good way to pose the question of time (past and present) in painting. Not just the point about childhood, but also the one about a world which seems true.

The paintings I make have various sources: lost songs, city shadows, family stories, the water's edge. These stories—or moments, if you will—are important to me as points of departure. But more crucial still are atmosphere, the cast of the light, a lowering sky, or tones of warm and cool. For the meanings here—like the pictures themselves—emerge in the act of painting, hidden in the movement of the brush.

90th and Park

Arrival on Sunday evening. Our driver, from somewhere in Africa, a warm face, inward-seeming. “Triborough Bridge or Midtown?” We select the latter (for the Triborough there’s a toll). Across Queens Boulevard, Rego Park, massive girder viaducts as we approach the river from the other side. Finally, last span, and down into the familiar numbered streets of Manhattan, crosstown block of apartments, dailiness of people’s lives right to the rivers edge—you enter in…

1111 Park, at 90th, Ann L.’s apartment, on the tenth floor. She’s still in Maine for the last of the holiday, quiet evening. Two doorman stand as we enter, offer to help with the luggage. One hands me an envelope, folded in half the long way, key inside, attached to a photo of Ann’s grandson, wearing a yarmulkah.

Apartment at night, an entire life, and past. Paintings by lamplight, some Ann’s own, a Milton Avery kind of feel. A horizontal run along the walls, nicely irregular, one to the next, but all of them chosen with one sensibility. Folk art from Ann’s travels, tucked in here and there. A wooden frog from India? Flat pieces, off-beat shapes, connected by small metal pins. Strings for movement—a puppet, or children’s toy.

View from all the windows, buildings by night—a view of old New York, shape of water tower on black girders just in front of the window—Antonioni, but without the anomie. A joining in, vast open-armed city, anonymous and alive.

Apartment lights, warm and discreet, each all different distances. Window shades, lights behind, balconies etched against glowing black sky. Pencil-thin high-rise off towards the river, dots of light on various floors. Nearer—bank of windows on Lexington, something commercial, but old.

East River, Evening

East River, late afternoon, Labor Day 2007. Swirls and churning, gray-green beast pouring down the chanel towards Roosevelt Island. Hot afternoon, city folk gathered along the promenade, strolling, an old rottweiler on his master’s leash, a shepherd, a retriever… People sitting on the dark green benches, reading, books of all kinds—a city of readers, where the words matter, or so it feels, fragility of the printed page, or perhaps just the intimacy of figure with a book set against the expanse of the river.

The air goes from warmer to cooler with each slight breeze—you wonder where the wind comes from here, not constant, off the bay as at home.

John Finley Park, at 90th Street, Gracie Manshion, the mayor’s abode. Hizzoner, hidden away behind the trees. Sloping up and above, the East River Drive with muffled roar of cars carved out below.

Languages of all kinds—people calling their children in phrases you’ve never heard. Young guy with elaborate SLR squatting to frame his lithe Southeast Asian companinion. She sits, graceful and a touch self-conscious, in front of the ancient curved iron railing running along the water’s edge.

Looking downtown, a broad view of the city, antique steel bracelet of the Queensborough Bridge, silver filigree, 19th century arch. One section covered with a padded blanket, as if for the evening. Tall buildings, always, topped by energetic cranes. Feeling of age and potential.

The Tropics of New York

The Tropics of New York
by Claude McKay


Bananas ripe and green, and ginger root
Cocoa in pods and alligator pears,
And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit,
Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs,

Sat in the window, bringing memories
of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills,
And dewy dawns, and mystical skies
In benediction over nun-like hills.

My eyes grow dim, and I could no more gaze;
A wave of longing through my body swept,
And, hungry for the old, familiar ways
I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.



The Archives of Claude McKay, Carl Cowl, Administrator

T'ang Yin

T'ang Yin
Secluded Fishermen on an Autumn River
Inscription by a friend dated 1523
Section of a handscroll
Ink and colors on silk (h. 11-1/2 inches)
Palace Museum Collection, Taichung

"His beginnings were brilliant; he took first place twice in provincial examinations, the first time when he was only fifteen years old. Su-chou scholarly society befriended and supported him, and at the age of twenty-eight he set off for the capital with high hopes, to take the state examination that was the entrance to a career as a government official. Again he passed in first place; but it was later disclosed that a playboy friend had bribed the servant of the examiner to get advance information of the essay subjects; T'ang Yin was involved in the ensuing scandal, and degraded. Finding himself thus barred from the standard vocation of the literatus, and, unlike Wen Cheng-ming and others, too poor to live in elegant retirement on private means, he settled into an in-between existence, selling paintings when he needed money, forgetting the bitterness of his disgrace in the taverns and pleasure quarters of Su-chou one day, transcending it through Ch'an Buddhism meditation the next. Throughout all this he kept the friendship of that paragon of virtue Wen Cheng-ming, who admonished him in vain for his profligacy."

James Cahill, Chinese Painting (Geneva: Albert Skira, 1960)

Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank

(from a Sung Dynasty painting)

Mei Ri-qiang (b. 1929)
Guangling Qin Music (Volume 6)
(Hugo cd 7144-2)
Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank

From the album notes, "A Descriptive Prose on Listening to Mei Ri-qiang's Qin Playing, by Dong Xin-bin (transcribed as translated and printed):

Mei Ri-qiang, alternative name Nan Yi, is a hermit who withdrew from society and also a great Qin master of the refined style.

Mei never scrambled for power, but worked throughout his life. Although he faces a lot of narrow views and villains, he is wise and healthy in mind. He is a great man who lives among the common people. He is an unusual person--generous and open-minded--of the time.

Mei has a close friend--the Qin. For 60 years, he played it and reached the highest level of Qin study. His style of study is "tolerant and gentle, and never discusses an insignificant problem. He could never be compared with those who want to please the people in power or thos who ingratiate themselves."

If sound is correct, music would be deep. If the music is deep, the notes would inevitably be harmonious. So good and harmonious music is originated by involving heaven and earth, it shows good sense and it conforms to the mystery of the universe.

And beyond...

This week's special... Saw a man at the 7-eleven counter this morning, middle-years, portly, maybe from somewhere in South Asia. He looked like someone's unce, with a good haircut and woolen trousers...until I noticed the small revolver tucked into a holster--well-oiled--on the right side of his belt. A jeweler, perhaps?

Story from Shelley Winters, in Los Angeles during the war years. Close with Bertolt Brecht, she once invited him to her mother's home for dinner. Long afterward, her mother asked about "...that fellow in the jewelry business you once invited here." "Jeweler? I don't remember anyone like that..." "Oh yes, when I asked him about his work, he told me he made jewels for poor people..."

Above the River...

From James Wright--Above the River: The Complete Poems. A view of the Ohio, at Martins Ferry. (Photograph by Madeline Zulauf)


AS I STEP OVER A PUDDLE AT THE END OF WINTER, I THINK OF AN ANCIENT CHINESE GOVERNOR

An how can I, born in evil days
And fresh from failure, ask a kindness of Fate?
--Written A.D. 819

Po Chu-i, balding old politician,
What's the use?
I think of you,
Uneasily entering the gorges of the Yang-Tze,
When you were being towed up the rapids
Toward some political job or other
In the city of Chungshou
You made it, I guess,
By dark.

But it is 1960, it is almost spring again,
And the tall rocks of Minneapolis
Build me my own black twilight
Of bamboo ropes and waters.
Where is Yuan Chen, the friend you loved?
Where is the sea, that once solved the whole lonliness
Of the Midwest? Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter.
Did you find the city of isolated men beyond mountains?
Or have you been holding the end of a frayed rope
For a thousand years?

Shuijing in Studio

It was one of those moments, talking with Shuijing, here in graduate school from the capital of China . Always a sense of the distant place she comes from, even as she makes such an earnest effort to communicate. (To make things objective, share in common.) Late afternoon, ninth floor of Wurster Hall, wide bank of windows to the south, looking out over misty winter rooftops of Berkeley and Oakland, backlit by the sun. Beautiful light. Desks still unsettled--not yet inhabited--it's just the beginning of the term. A rucksack, computer gear, pile of books and notes. Shadow opening on concrete wall--the new seismic pour--a burnished gray expanse, maybe four-feet thick, heavily reinforced... and within, another shadow, someone you almost know...

Oceanside

Pounding waves rake the pilings, white foam all across sea. Sand blowing over the road, lapping worn facades of beachfront motels--their Oceanside names--La Siesta--half a century of faded stucco, bleached tile. Not listed on any of the guides, low end-- with off season rates, some boarded up. A single shorebird at lip of incoming wave, rest of beach empty. A soccer ball--blue and white--blowing across the sand, very much on its own. Anomie--or maybe not even that. Marine Corps hair cuts, young guys in uncomfortable civilian clothes--what they've brought from somewhere else. Locals--as chalky as the walls, ungainly face of young boy at Horne and Mission--with his mother, the same features, and his mother's mother too--an ageing girl. His head at an angle, a long box, imagined future containing much of the same...

Edwin Dickinson

Fairfield Porter on Edwin Dickinson:

Dickinson makes the most out of the least, especially in Winter Woods, Wellfleet, or View of Green Island. Least is, green, flat ground and blue-green sky; or an impression of trees that gives, with trained simplicity, a single essential for landscape, namely, the presence of nature. In these little paintings, or quick ones, he is in touch with an elusive, and fleeting, essentiality. In his large exhibition pieces, he is in touch with not entirely coordinated ideas of art. In the large paintings, he expresses, like an inadequate classicist, the limitations of a formality that originates outside himself; in the small paintings he has been able to surrender to his deepest self which has a profounder form than the form one can know and understand. It is a form that does not impose itself on his subjects, nor is it outside them. Chekhov said he wrote about the inkwell, and in the same way, in Dickinson’s small paintings, there is none of the manipulation of the artist who has lost contact with himself. (Art in Its Own Terms, p. 118-20.)