Scribblings with Green Chalk

and similes and — of course — very, very bad movies. See Rudraksh, an extended Bollywood rumination on how you get better hair the more evil you become. The movie sort of alludes to Highlander, at times pretends to have a plot, but in reality it is a clever measuring device. If you don’t know how much ludicrousness you can take, see how far you can get with Rudraksh. I listened to the faith healer/night club bouncer explain that God is like the internet and was so astounded by the pure idiocy of the explanation that I kept watching. After our hero rescued the posse of 20-year-old American scientists/lingerie models from the threatening debris of styrofoam pillars, I got what obviously was an email from the “divine internet” which told me to take a shower. When I came back, the movie was over. Debbie, who bravely sat through the hairstyle adventures, told me it ended quite abruptly, without the anticipated resolution (the hero purging himself of evil and getting the girl). Her hypotheses were: (1) the crew and cast realized they could not stuff more absurdity into the picture and just stopped, (2) they ran out of money, (3) Sanjay Dutt (faith healer/nightclub bouncer) had to go to prison.

Only the “divine internet” knows why people cannot resist bad movies.

Honestly, I feel discouraged. The lack of comments makes me wonder whether I should continue with this blog. Perhaps I fail to appreciate voyeurism and am not enough of an exhibitionist, but I don’t like to feel like I’m talking to myself in public. If I wanted an intimate overflowing monologue, I’d stick to keeping a personal journal. If, in addition, I liked the thrill of having the monologue unanswered but seen, I’d leave copies in public places. But I wanted neither of the above. What I had in mind putting up the first post was to have some sort of exchange of thought: precious trivia for my trivial observations. Apologies for the scarcity of serious matters and deep thoughts, but didn’t I warn about this at the very beginning? Why read at all? I believe it is knowing that sometimes someone happens to read this that makes me so upset. (No, I will not post a link to Baudelaire’s “Au lecteur” even if the decadent misogynist was whimsical in a more charming way than I am. I would be tempted, though. Quoting Baudelaire seems to me a bit like sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night to eat chocolate. Baudelaire was the midnight snack my BA thesis revolved around. Baudelaire is a midnight snack and therefore ought to be eaten by defiant women.)

I should perhaps set out on a pilgrimage to the land of unnecessary parenthetical remarks instead of finishing this post. And what I will do very soon is take my machete to MA thesis territory. And what will you do then, reader? Find something good to read, I hope. Baudelaire had good reasons to get annoyed, I don’t. The world is littered with bad metaphors, bad blogs, unnecessary insights.

I would like to have a life-giving rigor: getting up with the sun, being able to drink the first cup of coffee without the burning sensation in my stomach. Or doing away with dreaming of the scent of coffee, at least. Welcoming the day in silence and with pleasure. Not crawling out of bed after trying for ten minutes to unglue myself from sleep. Not the low blood pressure blackouts I know.

But I have not just gotten up. I am undulging in the reverse of what I wrote a few seconds ago. Which makes it more desirable, perhaps. But how can the morning be calmer than the night? Until I find my discipline, this is what I have: I am wide awake and wondering if I could take the fat cat out to the patio and show him the stars in a hopeless but, you must admit, endearing attempt to share my quiet hours with someone who won’t make them less quiet.

… I’m rereading Jane Hirshfield. I say ‘rereading’ even though, of course, I’m reading many of the poems for the first time. But my idea of her poetry keeps changing as I go on and the poems I’ve known sound different now. So reading too plays out between knowledge and disbelief. And the poet says

Neither a person entirely broken
nor one entirely whole can speak.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

– from “In Praise of Coldness”

My last visit to the museum of modern art in Vienna. For several weeks it’s been just my impressions scattered in notes and remembered titles of paintings, that I’ve been wanting to put together. If you happen to be in Austria before September, you can still see the exhibition I went to. The Sigmar Polke retrospective where Mary Jo Bang’s poems brought me.

I am hopelessly word-bound. I don’t think I was really conscious of it before going to a yet different exhibit. It was contemporary Korean art. Most of it I completely couldn’t get into. Maybe because I am not an art connoisseuse but a mere museum-goer, but maybe because I wasted a lost of time looking around the rooms for the works’ titles. It’s difficult to see the installations when what your eye desires most is writing. “What do you need the titles for?” asked the friend who was accompanying me. There isn’t any smart answer. Could it be a bit of masochism on my part that even when the artist refuses to put the image into language, I would still want them to throw into my face the eight letters of the word “untitled”?

For a brief moment in childhood I felt I wanted to become a painter. And then it dawned on me that what I like most is book illustrations. I don’t mean to say that ever since that discovery at around the age of seven I’ve been only able to appreciate botanical prints, Audubon, and Tove Jansson’s moomintroll drawings. But I do tend to like artists who seem to be chatting up the eye. Polke’s good at it. His early sketches use recurrent elements, such as objects, characters or short texts. They are like disjunctive anecdotes of the artist’s engagement with people and products.

In his later works, the story changes and Polke nudges you to think what an encyclopedia of art could do in a dressmaker’s workshop. In This Is How You Sit Correctly the superimposed images float on the surface of what looks like a child’s bedroom wallpaper. As if the smiling figure from Goya, balancing a chair on her head, wasn’t bizarre enough.

William Carlos Williams observed that we should not try to explain poems; however, explanation (or attempts at it) helps. As limiting as it may be, my dependence on text made me feel that I can sneak into this crazy dialogue. It was Polke talking to Goya, talking to yet another work of art, unacknowledged in the title (I remembered what it was, but tragically lost it), talking to the silly wallpaper pattern, and lines from Mary Jo Bang’s “This Is How…” interjecting: Anything can become // an object. The smiling girl is not a girl at all. These things are things and enjoy being things.

A finger would point

out a question. So sitzen sie richtig
(nach Goya). The hem of her floor-
length dress raised the tooth
of the surface, each hit of the fabric
made a wickerwork wave
until the motion became an alignment

of doors inside every which was a head
plus a hand, part of a life

The pleasure of ekphrasis is about having your cake and eating it too. Ekphrasis sits in Dr. Williams’s “however.” All that it tells you is that you can walk from one object (the poem) to the other (the work it relates to) along a line of somebody’s insights or non sequiturs. It does not promise understanding.

So after an afternoon at the museum I did not feel like I had a key to Polke’s world, but I was amused and intrigued. What may be given away, may be given away in glimpses. Baron Münchhausen levitates towards the Virgin Mary in Annunciation. Through the transparent background you see how the beams of the frame come together at the center.

The two takes at Dürer’s watercolor Junger Feldhase bring you back to the realm of things. The earlier painting breaks the realist detail of the image to a hasty outline on a white background, which is little more than a stain on a piece of cloth. The later work is perhaps the wittiest and most arrogant among the ones exhibited at MuMok: a plain blue background and on it a bunch of nails connected by a white rubber band. Is it the outline of the hare or a joke about imagination? Because we do want to see Dürer’s hare within the space outlined by the rubber band, it doesn’t take more than the few nails to bolster our efforts. Make your own Dürer, the hungry mind will fill out what was left empty.

Because it’s not about the nail and the rubber band, and because the wit may not be stolen, I didn’t even get a postcard from the museum gift shop. Do I want to make a big statement that memory is fallible and art is great, too great too be compressed, repeated or even recalled? No. I want to say it and make it small. I am remembering this (and inventing as I go) — the exhibition, the splinters of afterthought. Also the last day of February, when in a library copy room I was reading Bang’s poems to a friend. The whirr of the photocopier. The snow.

The snow is gone now. And I have my own copy of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (signed, which makes me guard it jealously). Because, in some way or other, we are tempted to possess. Well, I am.

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

I got an email today from someone whose opinions and ideas I always find very interesting. I consult him often about various things, or rather pester with my ideas and unfinished thoughts. This person, who was my teacher for a while, tends to respond to my half-bitten ideas with wounderfully rounded thoughts. We talked about Complete Thoughts once but it was too hot then to, er, complete the thought. Perhaps one day I might get my mental balancing act to reach that level. I feel I have learned a lot from my teacher but this may not be something that I could learn. Maybe my ruminations on milk cartons and teeth are meant to stay frayed?

What if we all had Complete Thoughts? Would we then want to share observations so eagerly? As things are, there are shapely insights and questions with brand new wisdom teeth, just waiting to nibble at completeness. And then Complete Thoughts bite back and there are crumbs everywhere — tasty non sequiturs and aphorisms.

Before I get carried away into the world of tastes, let me just say that I was very surprised to learn that my teacher reads these entries sometimes. I realized I had been writing them with the assumption that absolutely no one reads them (except Denise, who is wonderful and was kind enough to comment on some of my frayed thoughts). I did feel slightly embarrassed because the overall triviality of my postings after reading my teacher’s letter. After all, who cares about my blueberry obsessions and toothache? But, well, if you can see the world in a grain of sand, then think of what may appear in a blueberry that is not a blueberry in the European understanding of the word and for many people does not exist as concept nor fruit at all…

We are back to tastes again and the little things that make up my postings. I am writing this after a day of tastes and shameless gluttony. It all began with a salad called Flower Power, followed by a trip to the Cornell Dairy Bar, a Shakespearean cookbook that Debbie found at Borders, dinner at home (that Shakespeare certainly would have enjoyed), and lemon ice cream with fruit (Shakespeare might have wanted to count the blueberries and write a blueberry poem which I might have enjoyed). And there are crumbs of ideas, of course. And I really do not think I want to do anything about that.

PS: It was New England clam chowder.

Or the doctor with soft hands who told me
it’s best to think of pain as a numberbetween one and ten.
– Mary Jo Bang, “Electra Dreams”

It’s two… sometimes three. Not sharp but persistent and annoying. Now that I’ve taken a painkiller it’s just the irritation caused by a tooth where there used to be no tooth. I would like to write about watching raccoons with Zuko, but then my tongue touches the unfamiliar shape of the new tooth and the tooth becomes the story. Maybe I should put up a category called “teeth” and treat this new element of my jaw more seriously. People get pets, beautiful objects. I got a tooth. If it’s not with me next year, I could always celebrate its birthday (hatch-day? eruption day? or, somewhat too proudly, coming out day?).