Common Place No. 34

Notes & Annotations Common Place No. 34 | Winter 2021

These are notes to self, reflections on my unfolding life, and thematic comments on the poems I recently collected as a briefer manuscript (in Common Place No. 33). The cover photo shows Leslie Laskey, who led my second-year course in basic design at Washington University in 1967–1968, sketching—part of a program I watched in which he was accompanied by a musician improvising on a bass viol. Back cover artwork (clockwise from top left): Patricia Sonnino, Leigh Wells, Sonnino, and Elizabeth Snowden,

NOTES & ANNOTATIONS

Preamble

Early on Sunday morning, 24 January 2021, I awoke from a dream which I got up and wrote out.

We were ill—something like this—and there was a knock on the door and my father, dressed as he was in the early 1980s, pushed the door open. Entering, he placed “pills” in my mouth, medicine he’d brought us. One of them was a tiny hourglass - a moment-glass. I thought of asking my grandson to walk him back. Then I woke up. “Time is short,” I thought, and don’t follow my father’s actual example of evading life or waiting for Death to come for him (although it’s more complicated than this, as he was chronically ill and paid the price of earlier neglect). “Live for the moment,” I thought next. “Work as if mortal.” And finally, I remembered the hexagram, “Grace,” and its judgement, “Success in small things.” I came here to write this down, and to thank my father for stopping by, as he clearly came a long way.

"Here" is my Tumblr site, which I use as a running diary and a place for poems just written. My father was wearing the dark green-brown raincoat he wore when we met up in Norway with his sister Evelyn in 1983.

Later, I wrote a postscript.

Thinking about the dream, I realize that we contain a psychically younger self who conflates the actual aging self with the parents we increasingly resemble. But our real parents also figure in dreams, carrying certain messages “from the past” to the present. After my father died, a psychic told me that he was increasingly oriented toward the spirit world (something like this) late in life. I have the sense that the porosity of the two worlds becomes more pronounced as you grow older - that more of it bleeds through and is momentarily present - like my briefly viewed angel. But in fact, the dead have always had a place in my dreams, like Auden, telling me, “Give up your European self.”

Earlier in January, I recorded another memorable dream.

Waking from a dream, I saw before the cupboard in the room where I sleep an angel with an overflowing basket, a harvest that was offered me. It was a projection and yet I saw what I saw—the angel was present long enough for me to be fully awake before it left. As an allegory, it speaks to what I’ve harvested from life and lineage. It also relates to the harvests of my own work I’ve made and my thought to submit one to competition. Not every day an angel appears.

"I saw what I saw" is a phrase I've used in the past in reference to the uncanny, especially when it takes the form of a concrete sign. In the case of "angel of the cupboard" the sign pointed to harvesting what I sow. I drew on this idea in replying to a letter from a friend in Zurich. She's pondering how best to start a journal and find her writing voice, she wrote. Writing always begins in some sense with an opening move that is the seed of what follows. A lot of what I write is brief, getting down a thought, a poem, or simply a note on the events of the day. Their several repositories are seedbeds for whatever follows. Time is a crucial dimension for a writer. The spatial aspect of writing is keeping the projects one has underway in view. In a preconcert lecture, Jordi Savall said that he had a room with 40 tables, each devoted to a project. I don't have 40 tables, but I understand the impulse: you have to take stock of things to keep them all alive. This is especially true when the work is mainly or entirely your own. A journal runs in parallel, tracking an everyday in which headway is made on the projects you have in mind, however preliminary or abortive.

A friend in Montréal who writes novels showed me Scrivener, a word-processing program with features for writing at length, like a digital corkboard on which to post notecards to track characters or plot moves.

A friend in Brooklyn who writes book-length nonfiction mentioned the program to be some years before.

I don't write like this I told my Montréal friend. I struggle to write at length, writing incrementally to arrive at approximations of the whole that are then modified successively. Everything is provisional. The whole is rarely more than chapter length. When a friend who lives close by was finishing her dissertation, I read its first incarnation—five articles thrown together—and focused on how to knit them together. They were written separately, but behind them was a larger intention not yet fully understood. One role of an editor is to note the different strands running through the separate parts and where they point, their telos.

(Later.) I often come back to my writing process and to the role of an editor, which comes naturally to me.

My nature is receptive—midwife to the seeds of ideas that come my way. Receptive and observant, I'd say.

Despite my misgivings, I bought the Scrivener program and a book for how to use it. In theory, it should lend itself to my incremental and nonlinear approach, although I've muddled along with Word thus far.

I altered my introduction to this number to say that it would look thematically at my poems. The idea would be to discuss the themes they raise or draw on as content, not try to explain them. I've noticed that many of them give a highly concise account of actual events—so concise that its generality comes forward.

What a poem is for me

I started writing poems in high school. They were word exercises, I think, that lacked spark. The spark came later, driving back and forth from Washington, D.C. with my college girlfriend. I wrote a poem called "Richmond, Indiana," that conjured up a woman friend who floated in and out of madness. She was from there, and her convoluted history attached itself to the place, but also to my girlfriend, my love for whom had released me from a psychological prison from which this woman friend also tried to free me.

The poem doesn't spell this out, although parts of it are memorable and would make a good short story.

My college girlfriend and I didn't survive our move west, although we are friends to this day. In the wake of our separation, while working as a modelmaker at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco, I wrote 20 poems, roughly, that I still have. They're longer than the poems I write now, and I'm not sure about them, but they have an expressive power that reflected the heightened way I looked at the everyday.

This might be the aftermath of taking acid, a singular experience that set the landscape roiling. Once you see it, you never quite stop imagining that it might start to roil again.

(Much later.) A poem I wrote in 2019 finally appeared in the latest West Martin Review, an annual. When the editors took it, surprisingly, I thought, "This is a poem about nothing in particular." That's a tradition in poetry, to look closely at the ordinary, the everyday, that we normally pass through without taking it in.

For that round of submissions, I sent it 15 poems (at $10 per three, so, for $50). The competition is blind.

When they chose it, they wrote to say that their criterion was that the poem had to resonate for all of them.

That's a daunting standard, I thought. My poems don't resonate consistently even for me. But then my brother-in-law Ben Brinkley, also a poet, wrote me that he read it "again and again." So, you never know.

Which is to say, I never know. I post my poems on my Tumblr site as I write them. Sometimes I'll revise them then and there, reading the post and seeing something obvious or, the next day usually, rewriting it.

I tend to keep both versions if the revision is extensive enough and the original has its own attractions.

For about five weeks, may be longer, I put a manuscript together for the Bergman Prize. The ultimate judge is a Nobel Prize-winning poet, but the entries will pass through other hands. Getting it in front of them is the more realistic reason for me to submit, as the prize itself seems unlikely. But the exercise of making it, which involved three rounds of editing after making the initial selection, was interesting.

Earlier, I made a longer selection of poems written over the previous decade. I kept its basic organization in the prize manuscript: sonnets; poems about the gods, the uncanny, and fate; and poems arising from experience or regret. These are porous categories, even for the sonnets. (Two of the poems draw on Rilke, although more for their rhyming scheme than their form, so not really sonnets. My uncertainty about this reveals my "amateur" status, noted by the West Marin Review in its editorial preface. I once took a course on Restoration poetry, but I remember the professor who taught it more than the content of his lectures.)

I read poetry to some degree, along with a journal of a poet and interviews with them. I read A Little Book on Form by Robert Hass and also heard him discuss it (quoting chunks of it from memory, I found when I read it, although I was more impressed than put off by this realization). Reading that a reviewer considered a poem by Basil Bunting to be "among the best in English in the 20th century," I bought the book and read that poem and others. I like Bunting, whose work has a surface you can read for pleasure and a depth that he explicated in an unsystematic yet somehow thorough way. (His "best" is "Briggflatts," a long memoir poem that exemplifies my own sense that aspects of memoir are best expressed poetically.)

Something about novels and stories

My taste in novelists leans toward writers of my parents' generation—Penelope Fitzgerald and Natalia Ginzburg, for example—and others, a half-generation older, that my mother favored. Virginia Woolf was partial to writers of her parents' generation and found the fiction of her contemporaries problematic.

(Short stories seem to have been an exception. Katherine Mansfield's sparked Woolf's envy. A story like her Bliss is really a masterpiece of that form. Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, perhaps a novel "about nothing in particular," is, also. [I haven't read To the Lighthouse.] Had Mansfield not died young of tuberculosis would she have written novels? I think yes. Someone should make a short film of Bliss.)

I wrote a story, "Love & Marriage," and when I collected it for a prose manuscript, I revised it yet again.

The story transposes aspects of my life to the era, roughly, of my great-grandparents. It's not an exact fit, but it uses the summer house that my great-grandfather built. His wife is made up, but other characters are drawn from what I know about that era, mainly by visiting the National Gallery in Oslo many times.

I wrote a second story, begun and abandoned, then almost completed, but it has never worked. I think the reason is that it never attached itself to real people, which seems necessary for me to write fiction. Writers of fiction, the real ones, have a facility for developing characters "with lives of their own." I don't have this, although I am able to elaborate and the elaboration in some ways frees the characters to be "themselves."

But the other thing about this abandoned story is that it kept going in the direction of a mystery or even a thriller, when this wasn't my intention. My original model was William Morris's New from Nowhere, and I still think that's a good starting point, as the story was cast in the future—imagining a matriarchy there, a loose empire based on family ties. It also drew on Sei Shonagon's The Pillow Book and the Heian Court.

Shifting back to poems but first considering stories

It would probably benefit my second story to write a treatment that considers the "time and place" in which it's set in more detail, so that the story could direct itself to that setting's principal features. Like the first story, though, it began with my own history, transposing parts of it to this imagined future. In my first story—one of its breakthroughs, actually—I was able I think successfully to imagine another's inner life.

Most of what I write is from my own perspective, which I read last night is the mark of a bourgeois and the basis of the language poets' critique of much of the poetry they found and tried to get past. After reading about this, I went upstairs and wrote: Wielding language like a sieve, they pushed through their identity until it bled in colors, black, and white.

A sieve, they thought, is like a cloth or perhaps a funnel, and language is like a fan, unfurled to obscure the selves they brought along.

They are born, they said, and yet is birth not an accident? They (some other they) spawn and they result, but then they wield language like a sieve until they bleed in colors, black, and white. A sieve, they think, is like a trick, three cards on sidewalks and the mark, rubes from suburbs to fleece. They wield the cards, no accident. Fate alone they respect, their identity narrowed down to one, a tag tied around a toe.

Blood is red is black or brown, dry on floors or winding sheets.

They are born, they said, and yet in time one is dead, alone.

I don't know enough about the language poets to know if any of them would place it in their category, but it departs from what I typically write and/or, conversely, comments on their project. "They" now refers to one person in "their" repertory of identities, a coat of many colors, the absence of color, or all of them, like the primordial block that the Tao Te Ching invokes, before difference became a thing in the world.

The thing about poems for me is that they lend themselves to a very immediate experimentation. I've written elsewhere that I was struck by a comment by Ward Schumacher, an artist friend, that he "just paints" and then periodically takes a look. I know from conversations with another poet that it's also possible to labor over them, to work line by line to improve what's there. I do this too to some extent, but this is usually occasioned by rereading—the next day, for example, when I post a poem on Tumblr, and then whenever the process of gathering and selecting leads me to reconsider it.

Part of this process involves setting poems aside. One reason I collect them initially with very little editorial intervention is simply to document them, in the form and order they were written. There's a benefit to looking across a body of work—over a year, in this case—to see what themes are taken up and what words and images figure. The prize manuscript was the first time I really considered a selection partly from the standpoint of word choice, noticing small repetitions. In one case, I left it in, but in another, I reworked several lines. Substitution is rarely a matter of a single word, because making it alters the sense or points to a different kind of repetition—of a thought—that also warrants revisiting.

The dilemmas of publishing considered (again and again)

The magazine Poets & Writers makes it clear that publication is possible if you give sufficient time to finding an outlet sympathetic to your writing. But your ambitions for your writing may be at odds with the outlets where you'd like to appear. A short story-writing friend in Maine exemplifies the dilemma. Her stories have appeared in what appear to be first-class outlets—serious journals—but she presses on. Her weekly letters record the notes of encouragement she gets from the other end of her press. Send more, they write, and yet they haven't taken any. I had this experience with the West Marin Review, to which I submitted poems three or four times, purely out of admiration for it. The issue before the one in which I finally have a poem had no poems in it that resonated for me, and I commented to an editor friends that I might be wasting my time. Yet my admiration remained and I tried again, sending in a larger sample.

It's no doubt an error to proceed on the basis of admiration, but then errors are often what leads us into things. The desire for another, acted on, flies in the face of reason. One of my cousins, sensing herself falling for someone who was not her husband, put a halt to it, noting that it wouldn't work out, despite her falling—despite her husband's philandering, part of his nature, as she realized. Men rarely show such insight. When they do—I'm think of Mike Pence's decision only to dine alone with his wife—it feels like a sin against nature. It would be better to acknowledge upfront that women's natures are similar.

I self-publish almost everything I write on my own account. Some poetry journals hold this against poets, but I think this is a mistake. Working openly is for me a necessary part of the process of writing. Some poets recite their work and reciting is intrinsic to it; others—and I fall in this category—write and read poetry as written out. I have thought sometimes of reading my poems in short clips, again as a record.

There is something interesting about hearing a writer talk, a poet say aloud how they read something.

What I self-publish appears to reach an audience of several hundred people. It's hard to know, as the stats are imprecise. The geographic breadth of these readers is interesting, even if their numbers aren't large.

But I self-publish partly for editorial reasons—that I can amend easily and also draw on my own past. I put a prose selection together, for example, and cut a substantial amount of it. The poems are similar: what still resonates for me is my main criterion. Yet nothing is lost. My preference is to select and edit, not to delete the documents on which I draw. They are what they are, and I may change my mind, and will.

Self-publishing also satisfies my desire to produce, speaking to my own background as a publisher and as an editor within a publications group. I derive some pleasure from getting the printouts I order from blurb.com, however small the runs are. Print is tangible and there's some pleasure to be had in sending copies to friends, especially if those friends are known readers of the evolving work (and me of theirs).

This journal, started in 2009, is my main vehicle. This is number 34. Time is a crucial dimension, this tells me. Just write, just document, just put what's written into coherent, readable form: these acts add up.

Cross the rivers in between, a dream told me

I tried to write to this when it first happened, but was unsure what it meant. I pictured a meandering river that one has to cross at different points in life, thinking that each encounter has its specific issues. In a talk, the artist Jocelyn Beausire described how, being born female, she embodied a void overlaid by meanings.

This is emptiness in the Buddhist sense, a vessel of possibility. One of her works explores the division of self that occurs at birth, the mother and her child separating "necessarily" so the child can develop as a self.

Born male, I lack this vessel and its layers of meaning. At least one river of mine meanders through gender, a terrain that—viewed from within—is more like a marshland or fens than a border. And yet a strongly feminine woman brought a correspondingly masculine terrain forward. Where they touched was a narrow and foreshortened place that heightened the events there, making them unrepeatable. Every encounter between two people in love involves two terrains joining and finding their crossing points.

"In love" here means the passion that physical love expresses, shoving us past our normal selves to bring out what the passion of the other demands of us. Writing this, I see why it's so hard to sustain, and how marriage exists to get us past it, back to our own terrains, from which we reconnect on commons less fraught—ours in a different sense, amenable to cultivation. Friendship is the other way we cross the river, viewing the terrain across it but declining passion's invitation to plunge in or perhaps to be pulled across.

Within me, gender is fluid, but never so much so that I've felt incorrectly embodied. But I have a degree of self-sufficiency that accompanied these encounters with others, desiring them and caught up in that, but at the same time experiencing a heightened awareness of the other. This was what crossing meant for me.

(I wrote these paragraphs after hearing Ms. Beausire's talk, and then I wrote a poem that illustrates how the same thoughts manifest themselves differently depending on the form in which they're invoked.)

I try to explain how the terrain of gender inside of me is like marshland or a meadow through which streams meander, but when I loved you the distance of hills foreshortened to edge the river we sometimes crossed.

I was so taken by that riverbank, our brief commons, that I missed the high plateau behind it, immovable.

Was it just how you, once so open, turned to stone?

I don't know. Love makes the loved one transparent.

Within I'm self-sufficient in many ways, but I long sometimes for your embrace, to have it once more— this happened to me in a dream, you reaching out as if nothing had happened or it no longer mattered.

I try to explain how I live distant from much else, a correspondent and observer, loyal and reviled in turn depending on who is asked. One friend, close—if it's what we're given, could be worse.

Talk about two talks with a friend and neighbor

Three times over the past week I've been the audience, or part of one, for rehearsals of talks to be given to students of literature and history at a distant university. The speaker is Dr. Peiting C. Li. Her dissertation is set in Shanghai in the 1920s, a period when medical science and practice were in transition. Its focus is an American-educated Shanghai medical doctor, a founder of China's first western-style medical journal.

His focus was on tuberculosis, a cure for which had not yet been found. During and after these rehearsals, we discussed the content. One thing that came up several times is the pandemic. It's usually compared to the Spanish Flu epidemic, but tuberculosis in 1920s Shanghai has similarities—the lack of a cure meant that preventive measures were paramount and unproven treatments were rife. Dr. Li's account draws on the personal writing of her physician-protagonist, as well as on accounts—in newspapers, for example—of how traditional and western medical science and practice were viewed and documented.

How will historians address the pandemic, 100 years from now? That was one question we noted as a way to get a conversation going with her second talk's audience. The materials with which those historians will work range beyond those available from the 1920s. What do today's historians owe their successors?

Are there ways they can help them sort through the material this era leaves them? How much more does social media really add to our current understanding of what we're experiencing? Can we summarize in any meaningful way how we read or interpret what we're living through? This is of course also the task of artists, filmmakers, journalists, and novelists, among many others. Who among them speaks to and for us?

I mentioned Walter Benjamin's now-time, his sense that our unfolding present is in reality a continuum with our past and future. And they are ours, these fragments of memory and insight—the resonance we feel is specific to us, although it can be (and often is) induced. One task of today's historians may be to help people situate themselves in now-time, understand when "what resonates" is the result of manipulation— that is, to consider it carefully and critically without losing sight of its potency and potentiality.

A side conversation about reading—how I read and why

A friend posted a list of novels, mostly, that he'd read during the pandemic—a long list, I thought. I wrote out below his post the novels I'd read. In conversation later with Dr. Li, I mentioned this. "I read slowly," I said, but then added that I have to get into a book to read it at all, and once in, I slow down because I'm either absorbing what I'm reading—making sense of it—or savoring the prose, or both. Some writers are evocative and the pleasure of their work is partly in what it evokes rather than the unfolding of the story.

An example is a scene in Penelope Fitzgerald's The Arrival of Spring in which two characters walk out into a forest and encounter ghostly people embracing birch trees. The scene and one of the two characters are mysteries that Fitzgerald leaves unexplained, even unresolved. It illustrates Robert Musil's contention that part of life, when we enter into it, is singular and unrepeatable, but also indelibly memorable, a scene.

My wife and I saw the film Orlando when it first came out, and afterward she commented, "the set piece on the ice was very true to the book." I hadn't read the book, but I understood that literature includes set pieces in her estimation—parts of a story or a novel that you remember in isolation from the rest. I believe that I read similarly, although the beauty of the writing—Fitzgerald writes especially well in this respect— both halts me, as I read it, and leads me to reread the book despite in some sense knowing it. I don't read it again to discover what she's doing as a writer, although Clare Wigfall, the Berlin writer who led a class I took, described this as part of her own practice. I do so because it draws me in and reveals more.

My books laughably exceed the time available to me to read them. They say something about my tastes and interests—each book has its small history of how and why it's in my library, but the more interesting story is how I come finally to read a book. The odds are stacked against this, but I have three strategies for overcoming my usual difficulties at the beginning. The first is to read a section at a time; the second is to read back-to-front or, less often, from somewhere in the middle; the third is to stop and start, but this is likely to be a full stop unless the book still draws me. Lectures by Eric Griffiths, which I read in sections, stop and start, is an example. His lectures are well done and each of them prompted a lot of thoughts.

Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet—I read a 2017 New Directions translation—was meant to be by section, became stop and start, and was put down. I'm not sure yet that it was put down for good, but other books read in this fashion seem to sit on the shelf more expectantly because I think of them as waiting for me. I found Pessoa repetitious, although I believe that repetition in the sense of minute variations is the point.

There are passages of great beauty and aphorisms worth setting out, which I did, but also vast expanses of sameness. This I take to be the life Pessoa lived, which he set out heroically: write what you know, maybe.

Fleur Jaeggy came to mind as I read it. Her books, models of concision, turn Pessoa inside-out, placing her disquiet in the foreground like the pianist Liberace's contention that he omitted all the boring parts.

Pessoa could perhaps have written something like this. Given his trunks of manuscripts, he may have.

And yet even Jaeggy''s slim novella I stopped reading, although fully intending to finish it.

I won't count these books as read, but there are quite a few of them. The likelihood of my finishing them varies. I have a good memory for what I read, and if the memory is unfavorable, that tilts the odds. On the other hand, there are a few books that can be picked up again whenever and read, another section closer to the end. These books are typically long, but naturally divided into brief sections that manage to convey a sense of continuity that follows me through them, making the time in between no real factor. It's like a place you visit episodically, renewing your affection for it and learning a little more, a little more.

Dr. Li lines and annotates her books. She asked me about my practice. I used to underline; now I don't.

Rereading and trying to make sense of "Twelve Years of Prose"

Last week, I reread the entirety of a selection I made of prose pieces written from 2008 through 2020.

Drawn from past numbers of Common Place, they're hard to categorize. A miscellany, I thought, although there are themes and a considerable part of it is memoir. I reread it to edit it. Most of this was copyediting, but I excised a few repetitive passages and rewrote a few others to be truer to my intent.

Memoir is the better part of my prose writing. The past constantly churns through my head. Certain people resurface and I look at what's in front of me in that moment—the specific memory and why it might be arising now. How to write about a past that involves others is always a question. A memoir is a kind of personal history, narrated from the writer's point of view but taking into account what's known or can be inferred about others' accounts or demurrals. One thing I've learned, writing in this vein, is that no narration of the past is ever definitive. The vantage point is always the moment that a fragmentary past resurfaced, demanding to be reconsidered. How I might do so varies over time. Meanwhile, the others have their own lives, separate and in some cases removed from mine. The fragments occasion poems, often, and the two play off each other. Of the two, the poems seem truer to the fragments as feelings.

A few days ago, I recalled again an evening I spent in Aix-en-Provence that, at another point, made me realize it was a miniature preview of something that followed—almost a warning, had I been paying attention. My sense of life is precisely that we are constantly warned in the most direct way possible, but we fail to see it, because the event foretold has not yet played out. This may be especially true for me, an optimist quite capable of walling off doubts in the interest of desire. One peculiarity of this episode is that an allusion was made to it at a later point that I couldn't quite pin down. It seemed to be a third- or fourthhand account of the evening in Aix. When I heard it, I thought that in one sense it was true. Goethe's phrase "elective affinities" applies to situations where we note an affinity and decide whether to act on it.

Between the sexes, this can be fraught territory if desire and fecundity still figure for both parties. This is one of the tragedies of human life, in reality, only transcended when death shows up as its competitor.

Age then is liberating. Women have noted this, but it can be equally so for men. I spoke yesterday with a friend and former colleague, now 60, who spoke of weighing his last working decade and deciding to do something other than the role others had assigned him. It reminded me of another friend and colleague who, stymied by others, exited and found a second life. Cancer cut his life short, it proved, but he had his unquestioned moment in the sun, a rebuke to those who overlooked him and his considerable talents.

Personal history unfolds, trying to find the right medium to convey what's felt and thought at different points. Others may resent being caught up in it, although I'm unsure on this point, but of course they're more like characters in a novel than biographical subjects, at least as I think of them. We're all like this, I think—actors in a pageant we outlined somewhere else that runs across the actors' lifetimes, at best a day in the cosmos through which we travel, our states varying with our circumstances. It's a game, in reality, this pageant, although we take it seriously when we're immersed in it, forgetting most of why we're here.

If we thought of it as a pageant, I think we'd be more tolerant of the actors, called on endlessly to make sense of their roles, and to improvise their actions and reactions. But cause and effect is part of the game, one more variation that another pageant gives us. I can imagine in this endless universe that we migrate from world to world, experiencing other pulls beyond what our humanity and planet give us. Swedenborg may have erred in attributing these worlds to our solar system's immediate planets, as Emerson noted, but his insight that other worlds might exist and harbor lives specific to their conditions seems plausible.

"On making sense"—some notes on a topic that came to me at night

I woke up thinking that to understand a phenomenon of any complexity, you have to look at it broadly and follow it through time, taking account of new points of view as well as how phenomenon has evolved. It's the necessity of staying open that makes the idea of building an ideology around complex phenomena so questionable. But building and then espousing an ideology is at the same time a very human response to complexity, a determination to reduce it to a program, a slogan, a cause for which one can advocate. And others push back with ideologies of their own. The fight between them becomes reductive and bitter. No common ground is ceded, but meanwhile some critical distance arises, particularly on the part of activists dealing on the ground with real situations and the cross-sections of humanity they attract. The activists may begin with their nominal ideological positions, but arguing it out inevitably pulls the two sides closer.

And those in the middle, struggling to understand the ideologies in play, question them from standpoints that are rooted in the particulars of their situation: not just their hopes and fears, but also their knowledge.

The tendency to reduce complexity in order to "make progress" tends to serve what the Slow Movement characterizes as Fast. Slow values complexity because it seasons the whole, much as the diversity of flora and fauna is important in itself, and the eroding of it weakens Nature in ways we can't fully comprehend.

Much of that erosion is a heedless byproduct of human ignorance. We tell ourselves that land should be left in its natural state and that farming, ranching, and foresting for profit is incompatible with this. We then find that we lack the resources to deal with land in this state. Those who worked it had a stake in it.

"Local" has an almost pejorative sense. It's the last refuge of the counter-enlightenment, a holdout from universalist agendas in their various top-down forms. From the perspective of Fast, local is there only to throw whatever it can into the gears and wheels to delay, impede, or imperil Fast's inexorable march. If local has any residual value to Fast, it's the cachet of a name or the charm of a few remnants still standing.

Slow is not No. Slow is there to ask questions of Fast. Who will really benefit from this? Why is it worth dismantling what exists or altering it beyond recognition, if there are other ways to address the problem?

Slow also looks at history, then asks What makes you think things will evolve from here in a straight line?

Slow rejects reductivism and the simplifying of complex phenomena. It sees regions as ecosystems that are both uniquely resilient and uniquely vulnerable to human intervention. It sees humanity as stewards. To settle in a region is take on the responsibility to husband it effectively. We are gardeners first and last.

A conversation prompts a postscript that speaks to our divided times

Two housing activists told me that many of the reservations expressed about maximizing the production of housing by removing obstacles to development and increasing the density of individual projects are "weaponized" by those who oppose development reactively and will use any and all arguments to halt it.

To them, these statements are dog-whistles that cue up this opposition and display solidarity with it.

I can see this. The struggle to develop new housing at scale is a longstanding one with its own peculiar history. Local politicians have done well by undermining by-right development and making it mostly case by case, politicizing the process in ways that draw it out, add to its expense, and favor people with money, whether they're trying to get something built or block it. Reform at the local level is long overdue.

This might unfold dialectically—a reaction to local hegemony spurs actions that overreach, leading to correctives that tip the balance toward a new consensus. At minimum, top-down will shift debate at the local level from projects to broader questions of policy and its reasons. That may help with making sense.

My sister sends a manuscript on her museum work, prompting thoughts

My sister Alice has been involved with museums for more than 50 years, both on the inside and, as a writer and planner, from the outside. Her manuscript, Trade Secrets, recounts her experience on the grounds that knowing it will be useful to others in the field. But it's also valuable as an unusually frank and detailed account of women's careers, including her own, over the last half-century. Men figure in hers, but women are more often her key collaborators. Museum work was a team effort, and every woman counted.

Especially when traveling, I give considerable time to museums. I have a time-lapse view of some of them, aware because of this (and because I have a remarkably good memory for settings) how they've changed. I don't know enough about museums to know if stasis is a sign of neglect or a regularly renewed decision.

The National Gallery in Oslo was relatively unchanging, and then it changed markedly. Now there's a new building closer to the harbor. I haven't visited the city since 2016, so I'm unsure if it supplants the old building entirely or it will continue to house its current collections. They were arranged chronologically, which showed clearly how narrative atrophied in painting, finally losing its hold on painters altogether.

Figurative painting isn't, strictly speaking, a narrative, but it long had a story to tell—a history, an event, or personal character. The twinned Holbein portraits of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas More in the Frick speak to two eventful, fatally entwined lives by men whose characters are portrayed by the painter with his subjects' collaboration. The National Gallery in Oslo has many stories to tell, but then figurative shifts to say more about how what the artist sees resonates with her as light, form, texture, and color. And this paves the way to abstraction, which opens a door to the figurative as resonance and again as story.

The photo above is of a performance I streamed—a dancer and a musician improvising together. I haven't watched very many streamed performances, but this one reminds me that art is best experienced directly. I realized this when I saw Velasquez's "Las Meninas" at the Prado. No reproduction conveys what it is.

Yet there is a lot museums can do to extend to and engage audiences beyond their walls. Lectures are one example and films are another. Some museums stream gallery tours with commentary by curators. These all have value, over and above the direct experience of artworks, projected films, and lectures in real places.

Concerts, too, can be streamed, just as they are and have been broadcast. As my daughter documented, a museum in San José, Costa Rica, organized events across the city's different districts, making use of parks and plazas as venues in which to mix culture with the city's different communities. The pandemic has left us with a greater appreciation of the local—what we can experience on foot without being overwhelmed by crowds. As the pandemic lifts, we may find that our orientation toward what's close at hand remains.

Our local parish church, a shoebox in California Mission style, was a popular venue for early music, which is resplendently present here. It could also be a venue for theater, I think—it has good sightlines and the acoustics are well-suited to unamplified performance. It's an active parish that welcomes culture. It has a music director, a choir, and a smaller ensemble of singers who perform separately. The music director is a harpsichordist with ties to the early music scene. To be able to walk to these concerts was one pleasure of pre-pandemic life, and I look forward to its revival. I'd come to prefer music in smaller venues to the larger concerts, usually with imported talent, on the U.C. Berkeley Campus. That has its place, but of the three larger venues, only Hertz Hall has good acoustics. The others have dead spots. Paradoxically, the worst seats from a viewing standpoint are the best for listening. What the small venues offer is the unexpected excitement of a superb performance—a soprano with a gorgeous voice, a violinist of stunning presence.

There are such moments in bigger houses, but in small one, you're right there. The feeling is visceral.

An art museum has such moments, too, whether the work is new or seen again after a hiatus. For me, at least, the resonance of a particular work is palpable and it holds me and bids me return to it several times in order to take in what I see. This may be part of visual memory—mine, which is somewhat holographic.

In the Prado, at least when I visited it in 2007, "Las Meninas" dominates a room with other paintings by Velasquez. The room is large enough that you can view the painting from a middle distance. It is much richer than any reproduction I've seen reveals. It's also very much a family portrait, like finding a miracle of a photograph in an album—one that lifts off from the people who inspired it, yet carries them along.

I miss the old University Art Museum, a Brutalist building of the same era as the modern extension of the San Francisco Art Institute, won by Mario Ciampi and two younger collaborators in a competition.

Designed as a series of galleries that wound around an expansive ground level, the rooms flowed into each other, were partly open, were overlaid by the interior use of concrete, and yet had an individuality that lent itself to presenting art. The new museum has this is part, but its largest gallery still feels undifferentiated. I write this even as I've grown to appreciate the building and even this space, very effectively naturally lit.

The same architects designed the Broad, whose upper story is a masterwork of natural lighting. I don't regret the move and the old museum is seismically a disaster waiting to happen, but I miss its galleries.

(Later.) My friend and neighbor sent me video clips made last night, which I viewed today and responded with a letter. The way communication happens has been altered by the pandemic, and I imagine some of it will persist. She ended her final clip by thinking ahead to a time when I won't be around to reply. I'm 36 years older than her, but I superstitiously try not to speculate about anyone's comings and goings, leaving this to fate and the actuaries. Meanwhile, we discuss a variety of topics. Perhaps one reason I write prose and poetry both is to leave a trace of the internal discussions I've had, influenced by interactions like these with others who, at different points and for many different reasons, engaged with me. Some still do, but others only rarely surface or not at all. Interaction has its seasons, I suppose, but prose and poems live on.

Common Place No. 34 | © 2021 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com