Excerpts From: SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE : A CONVERSATION IN FOUR AFTERNOONS
"spooky action at a distance"– Einstein on Quantum Entanglement
Cathyrn Colman and Elena Karina Byrne
EKB:
Cathy, I love how we can riff… You were talking about Don Delillo’s "Hammer and Sickle" in the Dec. issue of Harper's Magazine some years back, regarding complicity, non-complicity, the “unlanguaging” of a story—very apt now! Unlanguaging the story makes me think of a poem's arrival at a final image. Somewhere, there's a girl's pony-pink outfit which lies next to a cactus in the far desert…the wind is blowing the sand into them, but we cannot hear it. Language begins in the body and in image…it leaves the body too. Society reduces the beauty of language, not in the way a poet condenses language.
Look at the mounting internet slang and acronyms! Advertising seems to aim at the vernacular meaninglessness that is part of our society's short attention span. The meaningless becomes so newsworthy, so meaningful! I think Flaubert said his ideal book was one with no words. I didn't read Don's story, but I'm feeling the right wing political prison we are trapped in, the place where our leader can’t articulate a simple sentence and the "so-called" freedom fighters want to take away all our freedoms.
CC:
The acronyms, the politico-speak, the quick image-cuts in movie trailers that explode in my eyes and ears, it is all about an exponential shift for which the electronic age is a metaphor. When is our attention span the shortest? When we're dead. We're very busy killing and dying so we don't have time even to write out more than 140 characters. This snacking on language, this fast food vernacular is about fear. Fear of lack, fear of the future, but mostly it's about the certainty that our civilization is in its last throes. Advertising aims at the id, the lizard brain. It tells us how to best survive while we are dying. Or to cover up the knowledge that we are dying. It also gives us Big Pharma cures which have dying as a side effect.
I guess dying is a side effect of living. But I don't mean it in a personal sense, that we all are going to die. I mean that, as I see it, we have gone more than halfway to killing the planet, hence ourselves.
"Unlanguaging" pleases me because truth may be the only grace left. Time itself feels co-opted by a collective unconscious desire to not be the first one over the cliff when really, every domain space should read: lemming.com.
EKB:
YES!! Aggressive ignorance is especially frightening–– as with fundamentalism and extremism when someone (ones of many some) falls easily into the throes of lemming-ness while listening! The ignorant Trump cabinet phenomenon, like any fundamentalism-religion equals exclusion, destruction, segregation and death: moral, political, spiritual, intellectual, psychological and literal. We all have some tendency toward this: look at the power of that advertising engine. My id wants to resist those commercials, in fact, it is afraid of them, especially late at night when I'm either Pavlov-induced-hungry or sexually starved. But wait a minute, don't you (minus context) love or hate the polaroid flash of images advertising throws like cards into the bathtub game? The collective unconscious just became cultural-conscious-confused. I think our consciousness continually self-interrupts and battles these assaults.
In a 2009 issue of BOMB magazine I read an interview of two artists who talked about the use of music in warfare and was disturbed when Guiermo Calzadilla recounted the Bush Iraq war loudspeaker assaults, "cultural offensiveness" of rap, rock etc. music to keep the insurgents from sleeping.
I saw a program on the brain that explained why there are mass murders, how empathy, compassion, and conscience is registered in the pain formatted receptors of the brain. Despite what people want to believe, the spiritual therefore has a concrete context, a physiology that lights up in a scan, the way the lightbulb appears above the head of a cartoon character.
To tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help us…? I can't help but repeat Kafka's truth which he says has a lively changing face. If truth means being a human (i.e. compassionate, kind, equally inclusive of all who live on this planet, with living plants and animals) attaining peace, then peace is our only grace we can achieve but right now, we seem to be moving backwards and that is so horrifying.
CC:
Yes, the id drives us toward pleasure but also includes the instinct of destruction directed towards the external world and other organisms through aggression. The pleasure principle and the death instinct can exist side by side in the id without conflict. Going to war is a decision our government makes based on imperialistic needs. But convincing the American people that war is necessary, through fear-mongering, inciting bigotry, demonizing another race or religion, that's all aimed at the id. Music as torture. Pleasure flipping its own coin to destruction.
I like the idea of consciousness self-interrupting but I think it dangerous to take advertising images out of context. Context manipulates. I love the bumper sticker I once saw in San Francisco: Subvert the Dominant Paradigm. Although context is most likely a personal projection. I don't think the id says "I understand", I think it just says "I want, I need, I hate, I destroy." It needs to work in tandem with an organizing force. According to the poet Stan Rice and his deep study of the philosophy of aesthetics of Suzanne Langer, poetry's primary illusion is the illusion of "aliveness." It comes to us through the senses, but it is mediated, differentiated from pure instinctual drive even though it uses the sensual, feeling, it also uses form. And we can perceive this dynamic form because it contains the components we recognize as ordered sentience.
I think the Kafka quote is accurate. Truth is relative, or ever-changing, but now with Fake Facts and Fake News brought in with Trump’s tsunami of malignant narcissism, pathological lies and meanness, as well as his mean distractions meant for us to take our attention, say, away from his team’s possible collusion with the Russian hacking of our elections, Truth has been both watered down and weaponized. Philosophically speaking, I suppose there is no absolute Truth, but when I write, I feel like I'm always trying to write toward "It", or "unlanguage" it.
EKB:
Brilliant Lucille Clifton, in her interview with Bill Moyers (Language of Life, ed. James Haba, NY, Doubleday, 1995 p.85) said, “Poetry doesn’t have to fact, it only has to be true.” She reminds us that truth and history are often different things, boiling in the “cauldron.” I recently re-read Greg Orr's essays on order and disorder in his book, Richer Entanglements, where he talks about our protecting ourselves (through poetry) from fear and terror, random horrors, with "formal disordering." I'm probably wrong regarding the original intended meaning of the id, but I disagree that those impulses completely lack understanding; it's my take of course, but I think we have far greater capacities for emotional understanding, intuitive understanding when it comes to impulses and desires. Intended by chance centered in desire as "an accidental" or in the poet's case, deliberate "of exceptional or accessory effects taking on the appearance of finality" (Aristotle) when metaphor perhaps opens the painting in the brain?
Maybe that was my naive response, but it is an instinctual one for me. I like things out of context (at least in poetry and the in-coming images of a world known but unseen as if for the first time). I feel like I'm in a process of some 'other' understanding when my id is active. In this respect, I'm still stuck on your unlanguaging and there has to be a bit of Whitman in there: "unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"… and please unscrew me from language's first recognized order of logic so that I may find another way of seeing/feeling! Hence the images thrown out of context, and yes in that "illusion" made alive again. One feels like you're always trying to write toward "It" (toward being the operative word here) yes, yes, and yes, Keats says "––Here it is–– I hold it towards you" (are it and id neighbors?) but how interesting the words that row us toward it must dissolve, un-recognize themselves to keep moving forward freely, away from expectation! I think of the marvelous octopus or those cuttlefish changing color and pattern as they swim over the terrain. (Reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and Origins of Deep Consciousness) I'd prefer to be an octopus but I think the poet is a shark who, her whole life, must keep moving in her work in order not to sink!
CC: Perhaps we should drop what could become a semantic argument about the definitions of "id" and "understanding." I think there is a difference between advertising "context or lack thereof" and the "out of context" imagery of art/poetry. The creative sabotage, the "sabot" or wooden shoe thrown into the machine to stop it, IS enlivening, even thrilling. Way before Freud, Blake wrote "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in which he says "the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." He creates a depolarized cosmos where physical desire (one could call it the id) is not opposed to but enlivens the material world. Hell is not evil but unrepressed and it must temper the more authoritarian Heaven. He wanted to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutionalized religion.
But back to "unlanguaging" and the forward motion of the poet. Mustn't she move not only toward/forward but down? Deeper. Or are directions dissolved in the dissolution of time and space in the chaos from which the art object springs?
EKB: Yes to your last question. Dissolution: I hate definition # 3: the undoing or breaking of a bond, tie, union, partnership, etc. my heart being recently broken by loss, but like definition #9, especially when used as analogy for poetry: Chemistry, the process by which a solid, gas, or liquid is dispersed homogeneously in a gas, solid, or, especially, a liquid.
And yes, to the first question since all movement is the key here–– even backwards is ok.
Creative sabotage is thrilling as long as it's not too self-conscious, too intellectual, no? I can't stand when people think throwing the lines of an otherwise mundane poem, makes it interesting, and oops, innovative. I grew up amidst some of the best innovators in conceptual art and so, I'm not easily convinced by mere word architecture. Of course, I beg for fresh lines, especially through the disengaged image, but still ask the poem for the passion-play of the combustible heart. I think as artists we want to privately trespass, to traverse that time/space passage to close its gap so we can become witness and accomplice at the same time.
To address a form of "Hell," man-made of course, what you said about "fear-mongering, inciting bigotry, demonizing another race or religion"–– those things, coupled with violence are the most frightening horrifying part of "our human nature." My heart-intellect doesn't understand those things, nor find them natural.
How can people who call themselves “good” and religious, support such hatred? My body doesn't understand those things! Philip Larkin's line-become-mantra "Man's inhumanity to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf."
II
EKB: I grew up with art and artists. I attended shows, even performance art shows from the age of nine. But I remember when I was eleven: It was a year I was taken to many shows and performances, and the year mother began to share things about herself to me, the year she asked me intellectual questions too. One night, she told me she was very shy. It's odd how family will suddenly announce something about themselves as if we didn't know them. It's like they bring out an empty gilt picture frame and place it on the dining room table in front of you. She never talked much about herself, but she told me some terrifying stories that seemed to coincide with her private personality. The time mother was twenty-five, her mother dying of bone cancer. Mother went to the bathroom at the movies and saw a shiny red purse lying beside the sink –– how odd someone must have left it behind. When she reached for it, it simply disappeared. She was alarmed and told no one. During one of the final bedside visits, her mother exclaimed, "Marcia, what a beautiful shiny red purse you have!" Mother never owned a red purse and in fact, did not even carry a purse that day. I said nothing as she told me this.
There was a contemporary museum show that year in NYC that included contemporary paintings, sculptures and film. In the middle of the room there was a Plexiglas box with a miniature bedroom scene: a copulating couple, strewn white sheets, and under the floor, a deep layer of life-size cigarette butts and a deep layer of gray-blue ash. I stared. I wore Indian moccasins and bit my nails. I told myself that I understood. I accidentally said “I know” out loud. Emily Dickinson reminds us: "without the date, like Consciousness..." It seemed to be the first time I enjoyed being consciously caught off guard. The guard wore a tight blue suit. Today, one of my favorite books: On Being Blue by William Gass
CC: Gertrude Stein said "Everything precious is blue". I've always loved blue flowers, bluebells, delphiniums, bachelor buttons. Van Gogh's blue about which enough has been written. The religious blue of the Italian painters who portrayed The Madonna with a blue robe. Even though I can't remember when I first saw any exhibit in a museum, looking at paintings has been one of the greatest joys of my life. There are paintings in certain museums that I "visit" whenever I am in that particular city. At the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan it is a painting of cypress trees by Van Gogh. On one occasion, I stood and looked at this painting for so long that I felt a rush of energy enter my body and flare up through my brain. I "felt" the molecular force, the atomization of his brushstrokes so that every inch of the canvas was pulsing with aliveness. The cypress trees, the blue sky around them, everything was moving without moving. I could feel the "particles" of what we now know as quantum physics entangled with the particles of my body.
The other epiphanic experience I had was the day I first saw the cathedral Saint-Chappelle in Paris. I stood outside the church in the cobblestone courtyard and looked up at the building. Suddenly, a loud roar commenced. It began at the bottom of the building and grew in volume as it seemed to burgeon upwards. It may have lasted for minutes or seconds. The beauty had a sound! The beauty caused a sound!
EKB: A color-field can exist in speech… Watching underwater creatures makes me feel I have taken hallucinogens and I swear, the beauty is unbearable… weren't you the first to tell me about the Stendhal syndrome? During my time in college, I bodily believed in Roethke's immersion with nature and the co-mingling of the senses seemed necessary when putting on the mind of poetry.
So, I'm seven I think, lying on the fresh cut grass in our front yard, the green rising all around me in its olfactory paint spill…. staring at the sky until the sky seems to press down into my body, fill my face. I knew I would remember that moment and someday “say” something about it. It was the first time I remember feeling separate and yet whole, frightened and thrilled, the first time my sight was not merely a painting of one sense. It's a wonderful confusion, an unattended exchange with interiority, a welcome rebellion of perception. “But the final word, you know, is never fully master,” Jacques Derrida says, the “vibrant desire to write binds you to a terror that you try to control, to handle, all the while trying to keep intact, audible, in ‘this’ place where you must find yourself, hear yourself out, yourself and reader, beyond all reckoning, thus at once saved and lost.” (“An Interview with Derrida,” in Derrida and Difference, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi [Evanston Ill.: Northern University Press, 1988 p.73)
CC: Many years ago, I was hiking alone on a trail in the Rocky Mountains of Aspen, Colorado. I had hiked to a ghost town about three hours from the trailhead. Suddenly, the light began to change as enormous storm clouds emerged seemingly out of nowhere. The aspen trees, the wildflowers, the grasses, the rocks, the whole landscape became completely transformed. It was as if I had entered a here-to-fore unknown room of wild beauty so intense that I began having a panic attack. I couldn't move as it began to rain in torrents. My mind felt like it was exploding with this sight and I felt light-headed, stricken by anxiety. I had to hike down. Finally, drenched to the skin, I reached the bottom of the trail. Later, I read somewhere that what I had experienced was called yes, "Stendahl's Syndrome": the confusion, panic, heart palpitations, fainting, etc. that some people feel when exposed to extremely beautiful art or a large amount of art or immense beauty in nature. It was coined in Florence, Italy as many tourists found themselves suffering from this syndrome in that city. It was named after the author, Stendahl, who first described this experience when he visited there.
Recently there have been terms invented such as ringxiety: when someone’s cell phone rings and dozens of people think it's theirs and they frantically search pockets and purses for the phone. It is also used to describe the phenomena of hearing a distant sound and thinking it is your cell phone ringing. Another interesting term is "wrap rage", which happens to "over-50's" when they can't open a CD and often injure themselves in the process.
EKB: That's too funny, "far out!" My nervous system responds to the antecedents and I guess that brings us back to the poet's naming, the vocabulary of the time in which we live, poster and commercial propaganda, and the impoverished mind asking for more porridge! How many Turners left in our time will strap themselves to a boat mast to know the relentless battering of the sea and sky for their art? Two artists: Ann Hamilton put a box camera in her mouth. Barbara Kruger's poster "What Are You Looking At" brings up the hyper-looking or over magnified sight in question: Jorie Graham's sight often turns in on her own mind, Hopkins looks and looks so intensely he invents a sound grammar freshness of "inseeing" until it enters our bodies. 2017 Kate Tufts winner Phillip B. Williams turns language displacement, relentlessness and the visceral surprise into a kind of sensual optics. Ruskin said he had to draw a tree to truly see it.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. –– Einstein
Cathy, I love how we can riff… You were talking about Don Delillo’s "Hammer and Sickle" in the Dec. issue of Harper's Magazine some years back, regarding complicity, non-complicity, the “unlanguaging” of a story—very apt now! Unlanguaging the story makes me think of a poem's arrival at a final image. Somewhere, there's a girl's pony-pink outfit which lies next to a cactus in the far desert…the wind is blowing the sand into them, but we cannot hear it. Language begins in the body and in image…it leaves the body too. Society reduces the beauty of language, not in the way a poet condenses language.
Look at the mounting internet slang and acronyms! Advertising seems to aim at the vernacular meaninglessness that is part of our society's short attention span. The meaningless becomes so newsworthy, so meaningful! I think Flaubert said his ideal book was one with no words. I didn't read Don's story, but I'm feeling the right wing political prison we are trapped in, the place where our leader can’t articulate a simple sentence and the "so-called" freedom fighters want to take away all our freedoms.
CC:
The acronyms, the politico-speak, the quick image-cuts in movie trailers that explode in my eyes and ears, it is all about an exponential shift for which the electronic age is a metaphor. When is our attention span the shortest? When we're dead. We're very busy killing and dying so we don't have time even to write out more than 140 characters. This snacking on language, this fast food vernacular is about fear. Fear of lack, fear of the future, but mostly it's about the certainty that our civilization is in its last throes. Advertising aims at the id, the lizard brain. It tells us how to best survive while we are dying. Or to cover up the knowledge that we are dying. It also gives us Big Pharma cures which have dying as a side effect.
I guess dying is a side effect of living. But I don't mean it in a personal sense, that we all are going to die. I mean that, as I see it, we have gone more than halfway to killing the planet, hence ourselves.
"Unlanguaging" pleases me because truth may be the only grace left. Time itself feels co-opted by a collective unconscious desire to not be the first one over the cliff when really, every domain space should read: lemming.com.
EKB:
YES!! Aggressive ignorance is especially frightening–– as with fundamentalism and extremism when someone (ones of many some) falls easily into the throes of lemming-ness while listening! The ignorant Trump cabinet phenomenon, like any fundamentalism-religion equals exclusion, destruction, segregation and death: moral, political, spiritual, intellectual, psychological and literal. We all have some tendency toward this: look at the power of that advertising engine. My id wants to resist those commercials, in fact, it is afraid of them, especially late at night when I'm either Pavlov-induced-hungry or sexually starved. But wait a minute, don't you (minus context) love or hate the polaroid flash of images advertising throws like cards into the bathtub game? The collective unconscious just became cultural-conscious-confused. I think our consciousness continually self-interrupts and battles these assaults.
In a 2009 issue of BOMB magazine I read an interview of two artists who talked about the use of music in warfare and was disturbed when Guiermo Calzadilla recounted the Bush Iraq war loudspeaker assaults, "cultural offensiveness" of rap, rock etc. music to keep the insurgents from sleeping.
I saw a program on the brain that explained why there are mass murders, how empathy, compassion, and conscience is registered in the pain formatted receptors of the brain. Despite what people want to believe, the spiritual therefore has a concrete context, a physiology that lights up in a scan, the way the lightbulb appears above the head of a cartoon character.
To tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help us…? I can't help but repeat Kafka's truth which he says has a lively changing face. If truth means being a human (i.e. compassionate, kind, equally inclusive of all who live on this planet, with living plants and animals) attaining peace, then peace is our only grace we can achieve but right now, we seem to be moving backwards and that is so horrifying.
CC:
Yes, the id drives us toward pleasure but also includes the instinct of destruction directed towards the external world and other organisms through aggression. The pleasure principle and the death instinct can exist side by side in the id without conflict. Going to war is a decision our government makes based on imperialistic needs. But convincing the American people that war is necessary, through fear-mongering, inciting bigotry, demonizing another race or religion, that's all aimed at the id. Music as torture. Pleasure flipping its own coin to destruction.
I like the idea of consciousness self-interrupting but I think it dangerous to take advertising images out of context. Context manipulates. I love the bumper sticker I once saw in San Francisco: Subvert the Dominant Paradigm. Although context is most likely a personal projection. I don't think the id says "I understand", I think it just says "I want, I need, I hate, I destroy." It needs to work in tandem with an organizing force. According to the poet Stan Rice and his deep study of the philosophy of aesthetics of Suzanne Langer, poetry's primary illusion is the illusion of "aliveness." It comes to us through the senses, but it is mediated, differentiated from pure instinctual drive even though it uses the sensual, feeling, it also uses form. And we can perceive this dynamic form because it contains the components we recognize as ordered sentience.
I think the Kafka quote is accurate. Truth is relative, or ever-changing, but now with Fake Facts and Fake News brought in with Trump’s tsunami of malignant narcissism, pathological lies and meanness, as well as his mean distractions meant for us to take our attention, say, away from his team’s possible collusion with the Russian hacking of our elections, Truth has been both watered down and weaponized. Philosophically speaking, I suppose there is no absolute Truth, but when I write, I feel like I'm always trying to write toward "It", or "unlanguage" it.
EKB:
Brilliant Lucille Clifton, in her interview with Bill Moyers (Language of Life, ed. James Haba, NY, Doubleday, 1995 p.85) said, “Poetry doesn’t have to fact, it only has to be true.” She reminds us that truth and history are often different things, boiling in the “cauldron.” I recently re-read Greg Orr's essays on order and disorder in his book, Richer Entanglements, where he talks about our protecting ourselves (through poetry) from fear and terror, random horrors, with "formal disordering." I'm probably wrong regarding the original intended meaning of the id, but I disagree that those impulses completely lack understanding; it's my take of course, but I think we have far greater capacities for emotional understanding, intuitive understanding when it comes to impulses and desires. Intended by chance centered in desire as "an accidental" or in the poet's case, deliberate "of exceptional or accessory effects taking on the appearance of finality" (Aristotle) when metaphor perhaps opens the painting in the brain?
Maybe that was my naive response, but it is an instinctual one for me. I like things out of context (at least in poetry and the in-coming images of a world known but unseen as if for the first time). I feel like I'm in a process of some 'other' understanding when my id is active. In this respect, I'm still stuck on your unlanguaging and there has to be a bit of Whitman in there: "unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!"… and please unscrew me from language's first recognized order of logic so that I may find another way of seeing/feeling! Hence the images thrown out of context, and yes in that "illusion" made alive again. One feels like you're always trying to write toward "It" (toward being the operative word here) yes, yes, and yes, Keats says "––Here it is–– I hold it towards you" (are it and id neighbors?) but how interesting the words that row us toward it must dissolve, un-recognize themselves to keep moving forward freely, away from expectation! I think of the marvelous octopus or those cuttlefish changing color and pattern as they swim over the terrain. (Reading Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and Origins of Deep Consciousness) I'd prefer to be an octopus but I think the poet is a shark who, her whole life, must keep moving in her work in order not to sink!
CC: Perhaps we should drop what could become a semantic argument about the definitions of "id" and "understanding." I think there is a difference between advertising "context or lack thereof" and the "out of context" imagery of art/poetry. The creative sabotage, the "sabot" or wooden shoe thrown into the machine to stop it, IS enlivening, even thrilling. Way before Freud, Blake wrote "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in which he says "the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom." He creates a depolarized cosmos where physical desire (one could call it the id) is not opposed to but enlivens the material world. Hell is not evil but unrepressed and it must temper the more authoritarian Heaven. He wanted to reveal the repressive nature of conventional morality and institutionalized religion.
But back to "unlanguaging" and the forward motion of the poet. Mustn't she move not only toward/forward but down? Deeper. Or are directions dissolved in the dissolution of time and space in the chaos from which the art object springs?
EKB: Yes to your last question. Dissolution: I hate definition # 3: the undoing or breaking of a bond, tie, union, partnership, etc. my heart being recently broken by loss, but like definition #9, especially when used as analogy for poetry: Chemistry, the process by which a solid, gas, or liquid is dispersed homogeneously in a gas, solid, or, especially, a liquid.
And yes, to the first question since all movement is the key here–– even backwards is ok.
Creative sabotage is thrilling as long as it's not too self-conscious, too intellectual, no? I can't stand when people think throwing the lines of an otherwise mundane poem, makes it interesting, and oops, innovative. I grew up amidst some of the best innovators in conceptual art and so, I'm not easily convinced by mere word architecture. Of course, I beg for fresh lines, especially through the disengaged image, but still ask the poem for the passion-play of the combustible heart. I think as artists we want to privately trespass, to traverse that time/space passage to close its gap so we can become witness and accomplice at the same time.
To address a form of "Hell," man-made of course, what you said about "fear-mongering, inciting bigotry, demonizing another race or religion"–– those things, coupled with violence are the most frightening horrifying part of "our human nature." My heart-intellect doesn't understand those things, nor find them natural.
How can people who call themselves “good” and religious, support such hatred? My body doesn't understand those things! Philip Larkin's line-become-mantra "Man's inhumanity to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf."
II
EKB: I grew up with art and artists. I attended shows, even performance art shows from the age of nine. But I remember when I was eleven: It was a year I was taken to many shows and performances, and the year mother began to share things about herself to me, the year she asked me intellectual questions too. One night, she told me she was very shy. It's odd how family will suddenly announce something about themselves as if we didn't know them. It's like they bring out an empty gilt picture frame and place it on the dining room table in front of you. She never talked much about herself, but she told me some terrifying stories that seemed to coincide with her private personality. The time mother was twenty-five, her mother dying of bone cancer. Mother went to the bathroom at the movies and saw a shiny red purse lying beside the sink –– how odd someone must have left it behind. When she reached for it, it simply disappeared. She was alarmed and told no one. During one of the final bedside visits, her mother exclaimed, "Marcia, what a beautiful shiny red purse you have!" Mother never owned a red purse and in fact, did not even carry a purse that day. I said nothing as she told me this.
There was a contemporary museum show that year in NYC that included contemporary paintings, sculptures and film. In the middle of the room there was a Plexiglas box with a miniature bedroom scene: a copulating couple, strewn white sheets, and under the floor, a deep layer of life-size cigarette butts and a deep layer of gray-blue ash. I stared. I wore Indian moccasins and bit my nails. I told myself that I understood. I accidentally said “I know” out loud. Emily Dickinson reminds us: "without the date, like Consciousness..." It seemed to be the first time I enjoyed being consciously caught off guard. The guard wore a tight blue suit. Today, one of my favorite books: On Being Blue by William Gass
CC: Gertrude Stein said "Everything precious is blue". I've always loved blue flowers, bluebells, delphiniums, bachelor buttons. Van Gogh's blue about which enough has been written. The religious blue of the Italian painters who portrayed The Madonna with a blue robe. Even though I can't remember when I first saw any exhibit in a museum, looking at paintings has been one of the greatest joys of my life. There are paintings in certain museums that I "visit" whenever I am in that particular city. At the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan it is a painting of cypress trees by Van Gogh. On one occasion, I stood and looked at this painting for so long that I felt a rush of energy enter my body and flare up through my brain. I "felt" the molecular force, the atomization of his brushstrokes so that every inch of the canvas was pulsing with aliveness. The cypress trees, the blue sky around them, everything was moving without moving. I could feel the "particles" of what we now know as quantum physics entangled with the particles of my body.
The other epiphanic experience I had was the day I first saw the cathedral Saint-Chappelle in Paris. I stood outside the church in the cobblestone courtyard and looked up at the building. Suddenly, a loud roar commenced. It began at the bottom of the building and grew in volume as it seemed to burgeon upwards. It may have lasted for minutes or seconds. The beauty had a sound! The beauty caused a sound!
EKB: A color-field can exist in speech… Watching underwater creatures makes me feel I have taken hallucinogens and I swear, the beauty is unbearable… weren't you the first to tell me about the Stendhal syndrome? During my time in college, I bodily believed in Roethke's immersion with nature and the co-mingling of the senses seemed necessary when putting on the mind of poetry.
So, I'm seven I think, lying on the fresh cut grass in our front yard, the green rising all around me in its olfactory paint spill…. staring at the sky until the sky seems to press down into my body, fill my face. I knew I would remember that moment and someday “say” something about it. It was the first time I remember feeling separate and yet whole, frightened and thrilled, the first time my sight was not merely a painting of one sense. It's a wonderful confusion, an unattended exchange with interiority, a welcome rebellion of perception. “But the final word, you know, is never fully master,” Jacques Derrida says, the “vibrant desire to write binds you to a terror that you try to control, to handle, all the while trying to keep intact, audible, in ‘this’ place where you must find yourself, hear yourself out, yourself and reader, beyond all reckoning, thus at once saved and lost.” (“An Interview with Derrida,” in Derrida and Difference, ed. David Wood and Robert Bernasconi [Evanston Ill.: Northern University Press, 1988 p.73)
CC: Many years ago, I was hiking alone on a trail in the Rocky Mountains of Aspen, Colorado. I had hiked to a ghost town about three hours from the trailhead. Suddenly, the light began to change as enormous storm clouds emerged seemingly out of nowhere. The aspen trees, the wildflowers, the grasses, the rocks, the whole landscape became completely transformed. It was as if I had entered a here-to-fore unknown room of wild beauty so intense that I began having a panic attack. I couldn't move as it began to rain in torrents. My mind felt like it was exploding with this sight and I felt light-headed, stricken by anxiety. I had to hike down. Finally, drenched to the skin, I reached the bottom of the trail. Later, I read somewhere that what I had experienced was called yes, "Stendahl's Syndrome": the confusion, panic, heart palpitations, fainting, etc. that some people feel when exposed to extremely beautiful art or a large amount of art or immense beauty in nature. It was coined in Florence, Italy as many tourists found themselves suffering from this syndrome in that city. It was named after the author, Stendahl, who first described this experience when he visited there.
Recently there have been terms invented such as ringxiety: when someone’s cell phone rings and dozens of people think it's theirs and they frantically search pockets and purses for the phone. It is also used to describe the phenomena of hearing a distant sound and thinking it is your cell phone ringing. Another interesting term is "wrap rage", which happens to "over-50's" when they can't open a CD and often injure themselves in the process.
EKB: That's too funny, "far out!" My nervous system responds to the antecedents and I guess that brings us back to the poet's naming, the vocabulary of the time in which we live, poster and commercial propaganda, and the impoverished mind asking for more porridge! How many Turners left in our time will strap themselves to a boat mast to know the relentless battering of the sea and sky for their art? Two artists: Ann Hamilton put a box camera in her mouth. Barbara Kruger's poster "What Are You Looking At" brings up the hyper-looking or over magnified sight in question: Jorie Graham's sight often turns in on her own mind, Hopkins looks and looks so intensely he invents a sound grammar freshness of "inseeing" until it enters our bodies. 2017 Kate Tufts winner Phillip B. Williams turns language displacement, relentlessness and the visceral surprise into a kind of sensual optics. Ruskin said he had to draw a tree to truly see it.
The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift. –– Einstein
