Ecuador: hummingbird, just because . . .

. . . just because it is so beautiful, and blue, and purple, and green, and incandescent, and its wings and heart have the same velocity.

hummingbird, Ecuador

Magnify photos for personal pleasure!

. . . just because the hummingbird flitted into my view, pure gift, moments before leaving Ecuador, after a week in the Galapagos with the big birds: blue-footed boobies, miniature penguins, Galapagos hawks, wide-winged frigates, flamingoes, and pelicans, plus Darwin’s finches.

hummingbird, Ecuador

 

. . . because beauty is to be shared.

 

 

 

 

 

IMG_0122

 

… because hummingbirds are traveling light.

 

IMG_0118

photo 1

 

 

 

 

 

Ramada Inn and Beyond

Dear friends, this is my message after a night on the lesser side of Houston where I have just left the Ramada Inn (the lesser of two Ramada’s) to plunk down at the United Club at the airport, and where I am stuffing myself with “pure butter shortbread” cookie thingies.

The things I have learned in the past 24 hours:

1) if you are destined to miss your plane, you will no matter how fast you run from the end of one terminal to the end of the other.

2) when an airline says they will put you up for the night, it does NOT mean at a luxury place or a place near to the airport (and they will fudge what they tell you or deflect or otherwise be unhelpful.)

3) locked windows policy does not apply to 3-story Ramada’s, which is good because opening a window clears away the bug killer smell.

4) you can be satisfied with a dinner of canned peaches from a salad bar at a place named Hot Biscuits that also, btw, serves breakfast at $3.99.

5) “Velvet” is the name of a real woman who works the night shift at the Ramada and she is sweet as they come.

6) there are automatic waffle makers that make damned good waffles. Now if only the syrup were the real stuff and the butter pats weren’t frozen.

7) the breakfast waitress calls you “ladybug” and you shouldn’t be flattered. She calls all women that.

8) closets, bathroom counters, complimentary toiletries, something in the minibar are all unnecessary luxuries. A good bed is a necessity, and it was.

9) what they lacked in ambiance was compensated for by the largest best selection of whiskies in the area, judging by the hang dog clientele draped over the bar through the night.

10) I enjoyed it, immensely, especially in the past tense. And now back to reading “Origin of the Species” and eating shortcake thingies. Next stop, Quito.

Photos below: note cement bags in lobby

image

Checking in

imageimageimageimageimage

 

 

Wonder Woman Ballet: whence cometh God?

In the tension between astringent mind and sloppy emotion, I am landing in the slipshod stuff of emotion. That is my selected connection to God – and don’t we all want to be connected to God, don’t we all intuit “home” and miss it?

The poet Jane Hirshfield – we used to be email friends many years ago – called simultaneously seeing and living in both mind and emotion as “double vision,” feeling passion and remaining dispassionate at the same time. She followed Zen and pulls you into the life of a tree or a rabbit or a dog or a jar of jam as though it is the story of all existence right there right then. But it makes me ache, that discipline. I want more. I want to dance and know not that I’m in the thrall of what’s around me but that I am disturbing that thrall. I dance therefore I am.

Wonder Woman, scooter, girl, costume

Wonder Woman on a scooter:
“I’m flying!”

There is nothing like the juxtaposition of the sense of being surrounded by the just-released dancing spirit of your just-deceased (and until then rule-bound) mother and seeing your 4-year-old granddaughter dance her “Wonder Woman Ballet” to understand that there are “more things in heaven and earth, . . .” and so forth than analytical understanding. There is STUFF. There are banana peels to slip on and finger cuts in the kitchen and lost mittens and weather that slams you one way or another. There is love and passion and desire that make you salivate. Your body knows.

And I will meditate, I will take that up again. Heaven knows, my body knows that my mind is cluttered to overflowing, that my dreams are so filled with Bosch-esque images of sight and sound and touch, both good and bad, that no storyline has any hope of shining through, no dream messages have a chance to guide me. Sleep is still assigned as cleaner-upper – which is vital, but meditation is too. When was my mind last clear of want and need and habits and ruts and patterns?  When was my mind empty and light as the air under a bird’s wings?

Yes, I know that being inside passion and being outside as observer contradict. I know that an empty mind is also a portal to the Greater Essence, the thing I’m trying to evoke in my garden where I planted nearly 100 iris bulbs this fall on the theory that gardens are poetry overlaid on Source Emptiness.

Yes, I know that mind stillness and emotions have both separately been embraced as being with God. You do understand here that I’m not even vaguely talking of the costumed creature that religions call God, don’t you?

And don’t talk to me about mind-body balance. Got that half a lifetime ago.

Because there is dancing, wildly without form, that is sometimes called for. Don’t talk to me about Bach and mathematical relationships, not even the Golden Mean. Because there are also supernovas and black holes and the touch of a rose petal and their math is beyond calculation.

Surely my body is fighting now to escape death, to grab the life left of a person with no parents left. Surely that is true. Surely it wants to escape a death of my spirit before the death of itself. Surely that, too, is true. And that involves passion, large passion even about small things.

The intent is not to go splat, I am not self-destructive. The intent is to survive the super-reality that being alive is such a large thing that we all always filter it into bits and pieces so we can have the safety of the illusion that we understand or manipulate our life. If we hear only one note of the symphony, we can feel master of it, fools that we are.

How much energy, how much electricity bursts one’s cells, overcomes one’s rational mind? How much? I have no illusion that I can process the whole symphony, but maybe instead of one note or one instrument I can gain a passage, a measure or two, the high notes of the flute or the vibrations of the cello. Or with luck and trying and persistence maybe sometimes both at once . . .

. . . because that is what processing pain and loss and birth and creation and living here in bodies is about. We cannot know the whole symphony until we can hear more than one thing at a time . . . and somewhere in there passion rises not because we start to understand but because we begin to feel. I trust this impulse even though I feel it could burst open my mind into the terrifying nothingness of salvation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Once Upon a Funeral

Sheffield, Iowa is the kind of town where when you have a funeral, they serve lunch in the basement of the church afterwards and if it includes an interesting salad, they give you the recipe – and if they leave off an ingredient, someone tracks you down later to tell you to include a cup of glazed walnuts. I might have preferred a funeral with more hair tearing, perhaps professional wailers, but as everyone said, “Your mom had a long and full life.” It was long, certainly – 96 years. I hope she felt it was full. I’m not so sure as others about that.

I am writing in the first few hours I have been by myself in the eleven days since the call came that my mother was suddenly failing. I prefer the word “dying.” She wasn’t failing anything, she was dying quite well.

After the lunch with the delicious salad and your choice of a turkey or ham sandwich and several dishes made with Dream Whip, . . .  oh, first, someone was tracking that there would be a turkey sandwich left for me. They snagged the last one and brought it to me. Who was that? How did word get around that I don’t eat animals with four legs?

After the lunch, my daughter, sister-in-law, niece, and cousin (adopted brother), as the remaining immediate family members, were driven in a white limousine out to the West Fork Cemetery two miles from the farm where I was raised. 2014-01-04 16.03.33The cemetery residents are almost all from families I knew, and it is where my father was buried 26 years ago.

Take the weeded-over trail on the right of the cemetery into the exact middle of that square mile and you come to a deserted house I explored in summertime as a barefoot girl, a house where a white owl once stared me down from atop an abandoned homemade table in the upstairs bedroom.

Four days ago it was 6 degrees below zero at the cemetery. I thought she would be cold. We certainly were. Mom hated the cold.The minister kept the graveside service short, and the cars were kept running as we huddled in parkas and blankets.

2014-01-03 12.00.09

One nice thing was that my cousin/ brother’s remaining siblings (all five of them) came with their families from everywhere, drove across states to be with him, and with us, and with each other. Some cousins I hadn’t seen in decades. Mom was, somehow, the matriarch of the family. (In front sits her youngest brother, the last remaining sibling.)

The next day my daughter and I returned to the cemetery and to the house where I was raised. . . . oh, first, the night before the funeral my daughter went to eat with my niece at the West Fork Wharf (Sheffield’s thriving new restaurant – only restaurant? – in the old bank) and she discovered the waitress is getting married next September in the barn on the farm where I was raised. I love that barn. I cannot tell you enough how I love that barn, its symmetry, its grounded-ness, its purposefulness. Evidently others do too.DSCN21342014-01-04 21.04.33

 

 

 

 

My counter-life to that in the house was in the barn where wild cats hid their kittens, calves were born, and Rubert the bull tried to get out the window to mate with the cows in the meadow. I watched him from above, in the hayloft. A valiant struggle, but futile.

Once, I stepped into the barn to tell the hay-balers that dinner (the noon meal) was ready when I was hit in the face with a rotten egg thrown at my brother who ducked just as I entered. Sometimes I sat in the upper window of the barn, cradled in the bleakness of adolescence.

DSCN2139

Now the barn is being repaired for a fancy wedding, all cleaned up, concrete flooring, new siding. In front, holding planks of wood out of the snow, was my childhood bathtub, the very bathtub I spoke of in my blog on “The Christmas Pageant.”

It was 28 or 29 years since I was last at the cemetery in the snow. Deep snow, at least a foot and a half. My father was determined to show me their newly-placed gravestone, ready and waiting for the time.

I was determined to follow him even without boots. He went ahead of me, blue overalls and blue coat and a red and black plaid wool cap with ear flaps against the white of everything, and as I stepped into his footsteps, I thought, “I will never forget this moment.” And I didn’t forget it so strongly that it was only in the limousine on the way to Mom’s burial that I realized the photograph I thought I had of it was only in my mind.

2014-01-04 16.00.20

Now that they are together again I hope they get on well. In the photographs we did find, ones I’d never seen, Mom was young, laughing, flirtatious, someone different than I knew. Mirthful and playful.

Cascading round and round and down she goes. I loved my mother and have convinced myself she is in a warmer place where she is young, flirting and laughing. The cold cold ground has nothing to do with anything.

.

 

 

 

Butterflies, or Mom has left the room

Exactly two weeks ago I wrote about my mother in a blog titled When Mom Was My Age. Five days ago I received a call that she was failing and I should fly to Iowa immediately. Three days ago she slipped into another form, the one we cannot really see or know about. The call came moments before I planned to post a blog on butterflies after a visit with my grandchildren to the butterfly house at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. In the preparations for the funeral and the clang of being thrown back into family history, butterflies and life and death have melded in my mind. She was the last member of my immediate family, except for my younger cousin who was raised by my parents and adopted as my brother two years ago. Below is the blog as originally written, with a new poignancy for me:   

butterflyphoto copy 23

 

Butterflies weigh nothing but you can feel when they land on you, and when they move, it tickles, and when they stay still, there is a microscopic clutch. They make their presence known. Some miracles are like that, and it is difficult to figure out if the miracle is meant for you or randomly distributed and you just happened to be close by.

At the butterfly house you are not supposed to touch the butterflies but the butterflies are allowed to touch you. This is why my grandson held his finger still near one for ten minutes while it slowly made its way to him, finally tentatively touching his fingernail.butterly fingertouch

Butterflies are miracles that are made of transparent colors and they don’t have to walk from here to there. They fly, live off sweets, and bury their heads in flowers – keeping company with their flora kin.

The butterfly that finally touched Ben’s finger flew away shortly after contact. Yet moments later a much larger one landed on his pants and refused to leave. It is the way with some miracles that they are not only unexpected but determined.

photo copy 8photo copy 20

Before they became flying bits of exquisite glistening color, a butterfly is liquid. It is liquid that knew what it was doing inside a chrysalis made by caterpillar that moved on its belly.

The day was a blessing with the grandchildren running from dinosaur skeletons and early sea creatures like the basilosaurus, which is more than 55 feet long, to gem and crystal formations that make humans’ sculptures look like amateur stuff. It was complete with Ben’s getting separated and lost and explaining it all calmly to the security guard, doing exactly as he had been told to do, except for having a side conversation on how rockets work. In any case, I sighted him with the guard from the second story balcony overlooking the giant stuffed elephant.

And then suddenly there was the butterfly house! I had wanted for half a year to take them there and it never happened for so long that I forgot until it was in front of us and together we exclaimed, “The Butterfly House!”

photo 2

Nature’s organic colors never clash with each other because embedded in them is the full spectrum of colors even if we don’t see all of them. Chemical commercial colors are not like this so we experience them clash. I say this by way of saying we can’t see everything. We cannot see the miracles behind what is visible to us that never clash with anything.photo copy 19photo copy black crop

 

 

 

 

 

 

We are always in a miracle, an unexplainable existence of which we can see and process only a sliver at a time. Butterflies give us a glimpse of what we cannot know – transient creatures that they are, born of liquid born of caterpillars that answered their calling.

 

 

THE CHRISTMAS PAGEANT: salvation revisited

Perhaps I was 10, certainly no older, and I longed to be saved. I wanted Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit, the entire trinity, to inhabit me – not Mary, that was the Catholics’ thing – and lift me out of Iowa’s “Lord God Almighty, the flatness does go on, doesn’t it?” landscape. I wanted to soar, to be chosen. I wanted my cells burst and my mind split in two “… or more gathered in His name.” I was ready to give my all but I needed help. I needed proof. I needed evidence.

I had been asking God to show Himself to me since before I could write anything much beyond my name. Well, I could write my own name and my brother’s name, and I knew that God was spelled “G O D.” My few words were all in caps because that’s all I knew. I was four years old.

I put a paper and a Funk’s G Hybrid pencil – my father sold their seed corn – on my night stand each night and asked God to write “G O D” on it. After a year or so, I asked Him to just make a mark on the paper. I was older now and understood He couldn’t let others know He played favorites, He couldn’t make His preference for me known, so if He could just please draw a line, or a squiggle, I would know it was Him even as He was assured I couldn’t go bragging on it to others.

By age six all I asked was that He move the pencil. I’d memorized the position. By age seven I took a break from God searching.

But the urge to be saved remained. A Bible fell open once – maybe when I was 8 or 9 – to some verse about “Oh, ye, of little faith.” It gave me a moment’s consideration, but not for very long. I didn’t need chastisement, I needed visitation.

country church, church, old church,

The West Fork Evangelical United Brethren Church in Franklin County, Iowa was 2 1/2 miles from our farm. It was wooden, white, had a steeple of sorts, a bell rung by a long rope that hung in the entry. You entered by walking up concrete steps – or a side door if you were going down to the Sunday school classes in the basement.

I would be delivered to Sunday school and picked up afterwards by my mother, though sometimes she and I stayed for Sunday services. By the time I was 13, I played the church piano for most services, and later the organ when we got a Wurlitzer. Or my brother played the piano and I played the flute. Or I played the piano or organ and my brother sang. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My father only went to church on Christmas Eve, possibly Easter, as I remember it. We did, though, have a painting of Jesus at the last supper painted on a polished slice of wood (the bark still on it) hanging in the dining room. We never prayed, and never discussed religion.

It was I who secretly longed. Or if anyone else longed, it was an even better kept secret since no one in our house talked with anyone else.

In principle, I wasn’t asking specifically to be saved on Christmas Eve. It was such a beautiful night just as it was. Every year the men would bring in a tree so high it almost touched the ceiling. Underneath were mounds of presents, and apples and oranges and walnuts for everyone. We sang Christmas carols, lights shaped like candles were in each window, and the youngest children were angels, and shepherds, and wise men, and Joseph and Mary.

The year I was saved, I was too old for costumes. I had been given a poem to recite, a rather long one as I remember.

To prepare for this Hallmark night – it always snowed – I took a bath, rubbed my body with Lanolin Plus (a yellow viscous lotion), put on my best dress, and a pair of black Mary Jane shoes.

The moment of salvation was after my poem, about an hour into the program. I was in the third row of pews. Smaller children fidgeted around me.

Salvation crept in, tickled itself into my awareness, and grew into a crescendo of waves. My life was being transformed right then, right there! I was immobile, awe-struck. The Holy Ghost had scanned that church from somewhere near the top of that tree and selected me. God knew, I had been waiting.

My visitation lasted through the rest of the pageant and songs and prayers and the handing out of fruit and nuts – which I declined to do, feeling this was a personal quiet thing, not to be trashed by motion. Besides we were not a church of holy rollers but of quiet Germans and a few Dutch. We did not make spectacles.

When it was time to leave, I made my way to the doors trying not to touch anyone and emerged into the night and annual Christmas Eve snow that always wafted and never blew. It was not until I was in the back seat of the Chevy, riding home in the dark, that I realized salvation was starting to itch.

I went to my room, took off my cloths, and saw hives over my entire body. I waited until everyone was through in the bathroom and went in, locked the door, and soaked in the tub, silent. My mother knocked and asked if I was okay. I said, “I just wanted to take a bath.”

Lanolin has not touched my body since then so far as I know, . . . but the Holy Spirit still lingers in the vicinity.

WHEN MOM WAS MY AGE, or who am I now?

My mother is 96 years old. She has lived in a community center, i.e. nursing home, for almost five years. We talk by phone three nights a week, and see each other on Skype most Thursday mornings. She has outlived my father by 26 years and my brother by 14. Lately she has slipped a lot, it seems.

Chit Chat cafe, Iowa

Mom and Kevin in front of the Chit Chat cafe in Thornton, Iowa, which collects Marilyn memorabilia.

My cousin, now also my adopted brother, visits her . . . well, until the past couple weeks he visited her every day and taken her out for lunch (mostly to the “Chit Chat” or “Jean’s”) every Sunday and Monday, and then taken her to her home where he has lived with her or alone for decades. My sister-in-law, my cousin-in-law, and I recently convinced him that he must take Tuesdays off for himself.

Mom and I live far from each other but I’ve heard her say thank you for “rounding out my day” probably a thousand times. (The first two years I called every day.)

When Mom was my age, she had already fallen on the wet kitchen floor, broken her hip, had a metal pin inserted, and was walking with a walker. She’d had a heart attack that was followed two days later by a cardiac arrest that was, at that time, the longest heart stoppage ever at Mercy Hospital in Mason City, Iowa, and the second longest ever at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where she was transferred. She was in and out of consciousness for more than a week. The doctors came to me three times to sign papers to let her go if she started to slip away again. I told the doctors to go away, they didn’t know my mother.

Generations of women, grandmother and granddaughter

My daughter, grand-daughter, and mother at the nursing home.

When my sister-in-law told her I was there, she didn’t recognize me but tried to take off her wedding ring. She had told me years before that it would come to me. Two weeks later she sat up in bed and started doing crossword puzzles. That was 26 years ago.

Now we talk about the weather. It is cold in Iowa, she doesn’t like it, but “we have to take what’s given us.” She played cards today, or did she? She feels good “considering.” She asks how I’m doing and says “Oh, I’m glad” to my answer. We repeat this a day or two later, or maybe again in the same phone call. We no longer talk about books she is reading, because a year ago she stopped reading books. She reads magazine articles and local news items. They are short and she doesn’t have to remember the storyline from day to day. She made the transition seamlessly and never explained, but I didn’t need an explanation.

I yawn when she talks, not out of boredom but from releasing accumulated tension. I have a mother and she is the loving gentle creature that she was not when I was young. So what if the conversations are repetitive, the sound of her voice has become a mantra I hear as “You have a mother.”

Mom and daughter, Iowa

Mom and me in what’s left of Dougherty, Iowa. We lived on a farm five miles south.

It is holiday time and I am becoming obsessed with my family, those alive and those gone. I think about who my mother and father were aside from our parent-child mismanagement. In the last months I’ve revised memory and history to make them more comfortable and intriguing. Mom has done it for years. In her, it is called senility. In me, it is called “erasing and embracing.”

I am nothing like my mother at my age. I am more alive than ever. My health reports have never been better. I feel good and look good, my mind is snapping and passions are rising. I will be snorkeling in the Galapagos in January and expect to be taking photographs and doing interviews in Afghanistan or Gaza this spring. There is nothing I really want to do that I can’t do except marry someone half my age. That’s a bit of a bummer – but marriage as a concept has lost much of its charm anyway.

And I am not alone. My life is overflowing with (usually single) women “of a certain age” who shine. We are burnished and glow. We are vintage with bouquet. We are graciousness over steel. We have the energy, talent, and often love lives of women decades younger, and we cap it off with experience, style, compassion, beauty, and humor. We laugh a lot.

Yet we haven’t all made it. Some of us are ill or gone. This closeness of loss makes each day more vital, precious, and to be savored.

1410907_10151867228101969_1526881581_o copy

My daughter at her aerial recital.

I am at the pivot point in the expanse of what I experience as my family, those gone or leaving and those emerging. Looking one way, I see a frail 100-pound woman trying to remember what she did that day. The other way, I see my daughter as a spokesperson for NASA or twirling upside-down from red ribbons at her aerial recital.

And I see a 6-year-old boy captivated by math and the size of the universe and the size of quarks, and a 4-year-old girl who stops giggling only long enough to assert her will, and who dresses herself in wondrous absurdities, and whispers, “When Mommy’s gone, let’s have dessert before dinner and not tell her.” This is my family and it extends from when my mother was born until when my grandchildren leave.

That’s what I see from my catbird seat, and I say, “Yeah, this works.” Or as my mother tells me at the end of every call, “Have a beautiful night and a beautiful tomorrow.”

LACES OF REMBRANDT

Some things are perfect in themselves, require no explanations. Flower petals, for example, are not metaphors for other things, they are wholly themselves, unexplainable, irreducible. Bird song, the same.

Rembrandt

Laces painted by Rembrandt require no explanations, they are irreducible, they are their own reality, larger somehow than what they represent. (All images in the blog can be enlarged for better viewing.)

The paint of them, the white of them, the brush strokes step outside of time and history and reference, the way feathers are timeless, the way whispers are forever, the way intrigue and make-believe and dress-up travel through time.

Rembrandt, lace

Rembrandt

That’s sort of the way with Rembrandt, though the humanity in his self-portraits shocks you into knowing the man behind the painting, the real human of complexity who understood white and lace, especially against black.

Last Friday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) the laces stopped me on my way to see the Vermeer paintings a few galleries further on. Surrounded by hundreds of masterpieces, the laces are stunning in their confidence of what they are.

Rembrandt, lace

Rembrandt, laceRembrandt, lace

STENDHAL SYNDROME with KANDINSKY: at the Neue Galerie

STENDHAL SYNDROME or Florence syndrome: a psychosomatic disorder, a sort of attack, named after the 19th century French author Stendhal who was taken over by it on an 1817 visit to Florence. He wrote that when he visited the Basilica of Santa Croce he saw Giotto’s frescoes for the first time and went into “… a sort of ecstasy, … absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … where one encounters celestial sensations …. Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. I had palpitations of the heart. I walked with the fear of falling.” Named in 1979 by an Italian psychiatrist who observed more than 100 cases among visitors to Florence, the illness includes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion, and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to particularly beautiful art or a large amount of art in a single place, such as what would happen at the Uffizi.

Today it happened to me. At the Neue Galerie in NYC. With Vasily Kandinsky. Direct transfusion from the canvas to my sensory receptors. Lights popping. Knees weak. And why not? If not today, when?

hidef_page_048_image_0002.publication

VASILY KANDINSKY (1866-1944): first artist to formulate concepts of an art, and create art, of abstraction that would generate emotions without needing or using specific subject matter.

It’s mostly about the colors being “just there,” hanging out, having conversations with each other. “Black Form” can be dissected into about ten different sections, each a marvel of jewel tones nudging each other or shooting across one another. Then you put it all together and … become speechless.

Black Form (1923). Click to enlarge.

Black Form (1923)
Click to enlarge

It’s not that I suddenly discovered Kandinsky. He’s had a special file in my brain for decades. What is it about these Russians? I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov in the play “Man with a Case,” based on two Chekhov stories, at the Shakespeare Theater last week and the effect was about the same.

No, I’ve always know about Kandinsky, I’ve just never seen so many of his paintings in one place, and there are 80 separate works at the Neue Galerie at 5th Avenue and 86th Street, New York.

Building

 

 

The mansion was completed in 1914 and lived in by industrialist William Starr Miller and later by Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III before being purchased by Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsy in 1994 to become an art museum. The Neue is home to several famous Gustav Klimt paintings, and has a charming Viennese café specializing in savory krauts and decadent desserts. I had the Linzer Torte.

Back to Kandinsky and colors: a week ago I wrote about sensuality v. sexuality and how sensuality incorporates the entire body’s responses to touch, taste, sound, sight, and smell. His paintings enter through your sight, of course, but he was greatly influenced by his love of music, especially of Arnold Schoenberg’s compositions that broke from having a central motif and are referred to as “pantonal,” though more familiarly known as “atonal.” Also he was intrigued by the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art that combines art, music, and theater. Further, he experienced color as sound and sound as color, which had to have been a handy gift.

white_sound_1908

White Sound (1908)
Click to enlarge

SYNESTHETE: one of the very rare people, including Kandinsky and other brilliant people such as Nabokov, Liszt, and Richard Feyman, who saw colors when other senses were stimulated. (For Feyman, it was his physics equations.) For Kandinsky, he saw the colors for his paintings when hearing music. Here for your viewing, and perhaps listening, pleasure is “White Sound.” While it may take a moment to absorb the first onslaught of color, once you have, it turns into something amazing.

This overlay of art forms captivated him. Perhaps because it is how he experienced the meshing of his senses, i.e. his sensual life. He compared painting to composing music, saying “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” He called this devotion to inner beauty and intensity of spirit and spiritual desire as an “inner necessity.” His book “Concerning the Spirituality in Art” was published in 1910.

improvisation 31

Improvisation 31 (1913).
Click to enlarge.

In the largest exhibit room were several of Kandinsky’s most famous and beautiful works, including a personal favorite, “Improvisation 31, Sea Battle.”

I know if you look for them, you will see figures and things in his work. Particularly in “Picture with an Archer.” And that is charming and all. Some evidently refer to Russian or German villages and folktales. A bit of Chagall-esque stuff, but to me it’s irrelevant. Remember I’m in Stendhal syndrome. It’s about pure sensation, not story lines.

Archer

Archer (1909)

 

The abstraction is the color. You can touch and taste it. And somehow the man mastered paintings that are visually 2 – 4 feet deep. They are neither 2-dimensionally “flat” on the canvas nor give the viewer a long depth of field. It’s as though you could reach in behind the surface and rearrange the parts if you wished, but only for a couple feet of depth.

In 1914 he painted four panels for the villa of Edwin R. Campbell, co-founder of the Chevrolet Motor Car Company. At that time a Chevy looked like this:

Chevrolet Baby Grand

This should give you perspective on Kandinsky’s breakthrough genius. He was doing these gliding, flying, succulent beauties, these first abstract paintings, when cars were tin buggies.

The Campbell panels are below. The exhibition is open until February 10, 2014. Stendhal syndrome, too, can be yours!

Panel for Edwin R. Campbell No. 3   campbell panel 2   Campbell3  Campbell panel 4

SISTERS

A cool scalpel, slice-thin, and so clean,
Hands sanitized, gloves two seconds away,
Mask in place, breath dew already forming on my upper lip.

Separating past from now from future,
No place for dreams, or wishes,
A basin ready to receive them, cut away, refuse.

Why are we not allowed ornamentation?
Why this minimalist line?
What harm fantasy, a moment’s dream?

Don’t tell me I don’t know reality.
I know reality, it is the dreams,
Real as vapor, hard as crystal,
Or sometimes onyx. I hold onto my illusions,
And flee naked, gown flapping, from the OR,
Down the hall, screaming.

As my surgeon smiles, kindly even, sure surgery
Is necessary, and that I will return worse for the wear.
Best not delayed is how she sees it.

… while I curl into a cluster of small damp flowers,
Smelling the earth as dirt from which all life grows, beautiful, oblivious,
before reasoning sets in with its sister: dreaming.

cerastium-arvense-577x433