[lit-ideas] Re: SUNDAY'S poem
- From: John Wager <johnwager@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 11 Dec 2004 09:52:28 -0600
Museums are indeed places to stumble over the smoke of those gone.
Your Sunday poem prompts me to ask if you remember the Roy Lichtenstein
tryptich, three views of Rouen Cathedral, after Monet.
I was in the Vancouver museum a couple of years ago and noticed that,
for me, there were only TWO views of the cathedral. The central frame
had no cathedral, only random dots. I'm color-blind; the middle canvas
had dots the exact shades of red and green that I can't see. It was
such a remarkable experience that I got permission to photograph the
works; I thought I could help students realize what being "color-blind"
meant by twiddling with the central canvas so that it was also random
dots to the non-color blind. But when I looked through the viewfinder of
my fancy expensive digital camera, the middle canvas suddenly became a
cathedral, just as alive as the other two! The camera's subtle
alteration of colors, so subtle that I had never noticed it before, and
that nobody else had noticed either, was just enough to make the
invisible visible.
Museums are FULL of the smoke of ghosts; few of us has the eyesight to
notice. Someday, perhaps, all our color-blindness will be cured and we
will all see everything that surrounds us.
(On another tangent, at least YOUR ghost was a friend. Your description
of eating expensive quiche reminds me of the snack bar at the
Metropolitan Museum in NYC. The curators there have placed the snack bar
in the sculpture court just under a huge sculptural piece of Count
Ugolino and his sons. The patrons there eat their expensive quiche
under the gaze of the count, who is gnawing his fist and contemplating
cannibalism to relieve his hunger. I stood at the statue for a couple of
hours one afternoon and asked people if they knew what it was about; no
one did. When I told them a bit about the story from Dante, they were
horrified to think that this was overlooking the tables of the snack
bar. Just having a statue like that over the snack bar doesn't seem to
trouble me, but the fact that, historically, there was a real man who
was in that extraordinary circumstace and who died as a result does
bother me. It may only be my own personal ghost, but thinking that he
is an insider's joke on New Yorker's ignorance haunts me; he was a real
person who died horribly, not some curator's afectation. I sent an
image of the snack bar to the author of a website on Carpeaux; it's
toward the bottom of the page here:
http://www.studiolo.org/MMA-Ugolino/Ugolino.htm .)
David Ritchie wrote:
>At the counter of the Vancouver Art museum's hip trattoria and tea room,
>Mozart played merrily overhead, a relief from elsewhere's Xmas cheer.
>Putting in time before half past four
>and our college outing's re-gathering near the entrance door,
>I was tempted by an early glass of pinot grigio,
>("It's made right here in Canada, you know,")
>while I considered soup's ability to stave off rainy weather,
>and the near-north's unrelenting darkness.
>
>Scooting my tray along,
>I was reminded strangely of earlier,
>when, distributing papers at a committee meeting,
>I intoned cadavorously, (or at least in the key of C of E) "body of..."
>A colleague asked what I meant.
>"Communion." I said, "A blasphemer's memory.
>Greater love hath no man than the giver out of bumf."
>She hurrumphed.
>
>At the entr=E9es, I ran my tongue along my teeth
>and found a foul taste of old tobacco smoke.
>Overnighting in Darlene and the boys' house,
>I'd offered to sort stacks in Stephen's office:
>correspondence, TLS tearouts, parodies, debates, drafts of scholarship,
>university circulars, instructions on how exactly to de-bone a chicken.
>There was POGO on Kant, Hacking's latest,
>charts of marks with exemplary notes.
>
>As you know, smoke lingers longer than ghosts.
>It's in the walls, the books, the carpet, his chair.
>Since I tarried in there,
>I attracted particles that once Stephen had inhaled.
>They must have wiggled free microscopically,
>perceiving, somehow, in my mouth's virginity,
>a chance at post-mortem liberty.
>
>Thus at the museum's desserts,
>where sweetness should have been,
>I found vestiges of Stephen.
>My close friend had become an acquired taste,
>a plaque upon my teeth.
>
>Asked what sir desired,
>I inquired after the cleaning power of mussels in wine sauce,
>with maybe a small blob of toothpaste on the side.
>The sold me wine, salad, boneless chicken quiche.
>
>David Ritchie
>Portland, Oregon
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------
>To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
>digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
>
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
