Common Place No. 37

“You’ve written a meta obituary, turning the form and its object on itself long back and ahead and doing so in a way that reflects the fluidity of our natures, two perspectives you always see and remind other to hold,” my daughter wrote after reading one of the pieces collected here My friend and longtime writing partner died on 8 October 2022, which prompted me to write an obituary for the local “paper” in his honor, so the form has been on my mind. You can leave biographical facts, a CV, etc., but any self assessment needs to be a meta narrative.

1. Richard Bender: An Appreciation

The architect and planner Richard Bender, Dean Emeritus of the College of Environmental Design (CED) at UC Berkeley, and a longtime resident of Berkeley, died of old age in Oakland on Oct. 8, 2022, at the age of 92.

as a planner of new towns, an advisor on affordable mass housing experiments underway in New York City, and a professor at Cooper Union. Bender moved to Berkeley in 1969 to join the CED faculty and launch research programs funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Bureau of Standards. That work led to U.S. Department of Energy funded research, shared with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the creation of CED’s Center for the Built Environment.

Bender served as CED Dean from 1976 to 1988 He added Donald Terner, an innovator in urban low income housing in New York City, to the faculty. Tapped by Alan Stein, California’s housing czar during Jerry Brown’s first term, he helped set

up and nurture Bridge Housing Corporation, the rgest nonprofit developer, with Terner as its first director.

Bender’s real monument at UC Berkeley is its campus, endangered by unmanaged growth. Enlisting Chancellor Albert Bowker, he explained the campus to itself and helped its community plan it to preserve its sense of place. He added design review to the process by which new buildings were proposed, sited, and developed. His Campus Planning Study Group studied existing buildings and outdoor settings, developing plans and guidelines for each precinct. Among its staff was Emily Marthinsen, FAIA. As campus architect, she extended this work.

Born in Brooklyn in 1930, Bender studied civil engineering at the City University of New York; building construction engineering at MIT; and architecture and planning at Harvard, where his studio leaders included the mid century modernists Walter Gropius, Serge Chermayeff,

and José Luis Sert. Bender and his wife, the former Sue Rosenfeld, then moved to Zurich to help plan CERN, the European nuclear research campus, with his lifelong friend Peter Steiger, a sustainable architecture pioneer who later taught at CED and at TU Darmstadt in Germany Returning to New York, he joined Sert and Paul Lester Wiener to plan new towns in Latin America and teach at Cooper Union.

Bender’s friendship with Professor Shigeru Ito led to a Visiting Chair at RCAST in Tokyo, part of Tokyo University, in 1989, sponsored by Japan’s five largest contractors. That led in turn to research and study tours those companies funded. At their urging, he set up the Urban Construction Laboratory, a think tank focused on urban issues, as a vehicle for this work.

Bender was tapped by the Getty Trust’s John Walsh to help select the architect of the Getty Center in Los Angeles a process that involved a world tour of art museums with the Getty’s trustees. At the James Stirling designed Stuttgart Museum, he recounted later, one of the trustees noted its unusual green stair railings. “Just like his socks,” another trustee said testily.

From the late 1980s through the early 2000s, Bender consulted or advised on master plans and area plans for five UC campuses Berkeley, Davis, Merced, San Diego, and Santa Cruz. The UC San Diego Campus Master Plan, done with SOM’s John Kriken and his studio, built on his work at Berkeley. It looked at the adjoining, fast growing city, and set out a higher density framework for campus growth that preserved valued open space.

The Benders were world travelers, staying at the American Academy of Rome, where they met the postmodernist and CED alumnus Thomas Gordon Smith, who later revived Notre Dame’s architecture school as a training ground for budding neoclassicists. Planning the expansion of Nanyang Technological University took him to Singapore. He became an advisor to the Tokyo developer Minoru Mori, helping him establish the Global City Power Index, a measure of urban competitiveness. He and the planner Kei Minohara worked with a Buddhist sect in Japan to remake a Nissan Factory on former agricultural land outside Tokyo as a sustainable campus.

In France, Bender was long associated with the planners of the Cergy Pontoise new town,

including Bertrand Warnier, François Ascher, Philippe Jonathan, and others. He regularly joined their summer/fall institute sessions, often with the SOM planner Philip Enquist. He also helped revive the town of Apt after the military air base that anchored its local economy shut down.

The Slow Movement, championed in the Bay Region by Alice Waters, informed his thinking about towns and cities. A paper on Slow Urbanism, given at a conference in Rome, was published in Italy, as were his recollections of the community planner Giancarlo de Carlo, who brought Urbino back to life.

Invited by Anthony Teo, a senior advisor to three leading public universities in Singapore, Bender coauthored papers for the Univer Cities conferences they sponsored. As his writing partners, Marthinsen and I joined him in Singapore in 2013. In 2016 and 2019, we spoke without him in Newcastle, NSW, Australia and again in Singapore. Teo included our papers as chapters in the UniverCitiesseries he edited, published by World Science.

Bender had a favorite analogy, “clocks and clouds.” Another favorite was “elephants and sled dogs,” extolling the latter’s flexibility and self sufficiency. Optical illusions that showed how our preconceptions blind us to the fuller nature of many things often illustrated his talks. For his 1970s book on factory built housing, TheCrackin theRearviewMirror , he enlisted Forrest Wilson to make the memorable drawings that underline his points. He was a visual thinker.

Late in their lives, the Benders moved to St. Paul’s Tower, giving up their beloved house on Santa Barbara Road, a landmark for so many of their friends. They remodeled their apartment in mid century modern style, noting that it was the same size as the house Bender designed for Sue and their children in Amagansett, where they counted artists like Tino Nivola as neighbors.

Sue Bender, a ceramicist and painter, did her masters in social work at UC Berkeley and then wrote a bestseller, Plain&Simple , based on her fieldwork in Amish communities in Indiana and Pennsylvania. (She enlisted her husband to make the book’s wonderful drawings.) She survives him, as do their sons, Michael Bender of Seattle and David Bender of Oakland. His loss is also felt by a worldwide network of friends, many his former students from CED and Cooper Union.

2. Sally Byrne Woodbrige: An Appreciation

In the era of Google Maps and Wikipedia, that print was once how architecture news and criticism circulated has mostly been forgotten. The death in late November 2019 of architectural historian and journalist Sally Byrne Woodbridge went unnoticed even in the SanFrancisco Chronicle . As a longtime correspondent of ProgressiveArchitecture , Woodbridge kept the Bay Region’s architects visible nationally, exposing its readers to a broader slice of work than usually made New York City centric editors’ maps. As the main curator compiler of a series of guides to its architecture, she explained the region to itself. Her books on Bernard Maybeck, John Galen Howard, and Bay Area houses gave depth to that broad and discerning overview.

Sally Byrne was born in Evanston, Illinois, in 1930 and raised in Louisville, Kentucky. She studied art history at Duke, graduating in 1951, then went to the Sorbonne as a Fulbright Scholar. While in Paris, she met John Marshall Woodbridge, returning with him to Princeton and working at the art library while he finished graduate school. Sally and John’s circle at Princeton included Charles Moore (with Woodbridge, above), Donlyn Lyndon, and William Turnbull who together went on to later found MLTW, of Sea Ranch fame and Hugh

Hardy and Norval White. They were lifelong friends of James and Pamela Morton. As Dean of St. John the Divine Cathedral, James Morton restarted its construction and initiated its art program.

Sally and John married in 1954. John finished at Princeton in 1956. Moving to San Francisco, he worked initially with the architect John Funk. They became friends with his colleague Albert Lanier and his wife, the artist Ruth Asawa. Through her, Sally met the photographer Imogen Cunningham. Moving to Berkeley, they raised a family in the 1912 house that John Galen Howard, U.C. Berkeley’s first campus architect, designed and built for himself. While John worked as an architect and planner for SOM in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., Sally took up her career as a journalist, critic, and historian.

Although they divorced, Sally and John remained good friends and writing partners. John married the poet Carolyn Kizer, winner of a Pulitzer in 1985. Sally never remarried, living on Vine Street in North Berkeley with her daughter Pamela Woodbridge and her son in law, the cinematographer Elliott Davis, as neighbors.

The final edition of their guide, SanFrancisco Architecture , designed by Chuck Byrne, appeared in 2005. BayAreaHouses , for which Sally was

editor and a contributor, appeared in 1976. Monographs on Bernard Maybeck (1992) and John Galen Howard (2002), two giants of early 20th century architecture in the Bay Region, followed. She contributed to the Historical American Buildings Survey in California and organized exhibits on architecture.

At ProgressiveArchitecture , Sally covered the region’s architecture with critical and historical awareness. Coming of age in Paris and Princeton, hers was a cosmopolitan, even existentialist sensibility that saw how the best work here reflected the wider world, including Finland and Japan’s hybrid modernism, yet was attuned to such attributes of place as terrain, climate, light, view, fabric, and pattern. As Pierluigi Serraino noted in NorCalMod , modernism here varied across a wide spectrum. Lewis Mumford’s “region apart” was never really true, nor was the idea of “critical regionalism” quite accurate. Some architects here agreed. Others were wary of the designation.

Sally dealt with the region by considering the history Maybeck and Howard were products of the Beaux Arts system, but both designed buildings here that looked back to Arts & Crafts and picked up on the Bay Region’s artisan tradition. She also stayed open to everything that arose here. The countermovement around Archetype , with work by Andrew Batey, Mark Mack, Steven Holl, and Jim Jennings, and the postmodern, anticipatory classicism of Thomas Gordon Smith, was a rebellion against a too narrow view of what the region was and what it could achieve. A close friend of Charles Moore, she saw his work embrace such developments as Pop Art, Bobbie Stauffacher Solomon’s super graphics, and the environmentalism as art practice of Larry Halprin. As she observed and wrote, the region was in constant ferment, viewed from within.

She also leaves a son, Lawrence. and four grandchildren. Her daughter Diana, who worked with the San Francisco architect Jeremy Kotas, died in 2002 John Woodbridge died in 2014.

Notes

Richard Bender’s obituary ran in Berkeleyside , 7 November 2022. Sally Woodbridge’s obituary ran in Architect’sNewspaper , 28 April 2020, and also in Berkeleyside , 29 May 2020.

Richard Bender was my advisor, collaborator, and ultimately my writing partner for 50 years an anniversary we marked in September 2022. I knew him so long that I was called him Dick, although his wife made a point of calling him Richard.

Sally Woodbridge became my neighbor after she moved to her house around the corner from mine on Vine Street. I knew her husband first, as we were in the same studio at SOM San Francisco when I worked there in 1971 1972. Her daughters were also friends Diana made drawings for the journal I published, Design Book Review, and I met Pam and Elliott when they moved back to Berkeley from Los Angeles and built their own house a block north from mine on Arch Street. Sally and I often talked on the street, and we had dinners at our house or hers episodically. In the summer of 2022, Pam hosted a memorial at Sally’s house, replete with memorabilia and the memories of her family and friends. She was an artist too in a variety of media, which I didn’t know.

They were contemporaries. Dick had huge respect for Sally, who he regarded as the conscience of the Campus Planning Study Group, the architectural historian on the team. I miss them bot

3. Meanings provisional & relational

At the beginning of 2022, I reached the three quarter point in a trajectory that, if you’re remembered by others, provides them with a marker, your centenary. In 2019, Richard Bender and I contributed to a book marking that of Giancarlo de Carlo, the late Italian architect and planner. As few people get to celebrate the event themselves, it’s reasonable to take an event like turning 75 as a comparable, still available occasion.

Bender’s death in October 2022 led me to write his obituary. During the pandemic, I wrote another for my neighbor, Sally B. Woodbridge. These exercises in summarizing a long life surfaced the fact that people tend not to leave such a summary behind. The famous are written up beforehand, those accounts filed away and then brought up to date as their deaths loom or occur. The rest of us don’t get this treatment, although in Bender’s case, I gave a talk at his 90th birthday on which his obituary drew liberally.

This led me to a draft a “self obituary” that I sent to my daughter. “To be updated,” I noted optimistically. Writing it placed me in a kind of past conditional, a retrospective view that lacks a solid vantage point. I think this is true of obituaries

in general, that their attempts to sum up are hemmed in by the constraints of length and immediacy. Even if I return to mine episodically, this problem persists. And, of course, my summary is skewed by subjectivity and delicacy. I downplay my faults and tics, likely missing some, and fail to name names. (While I could get down to the bone, descriptively, this is better left to poetry or auto fiction.)

Instead of an obituary, I decided to write a Walter Benjamin style look back and ahead. By coincidence, I had a tutorial on Alfred North Whitehead with the writer/actor/filmmaker Ashley Elizabeth Chambers, occasioned by discussions we had and her kindly sharing two papers she wrote in 2019 and 2022. (Citations below.)

As she points out, Whitehead argues that our present is always in conversation with our own and everyone else’s unfolding. What I think of as “me” and “my life” contains this interrelatedness. This is also the Buddhist take. Both are germane to questions like, “What does my life mean to me?” and “Where does it point?” I want to pose such questions to myself responding provisionally, in the past/present/future conditional.

What does a life mean? What’s already unfolded is this question’s object, say the obituary writers, biographers, and critics. They discern early, middle, and late styles or attributes in their subjects’ sensibilities and works. With Whitehead, I agree that history should figure and, as I also learned from Chambers, any meaning is in process. The decisions made, at any point, serve to create life (and its meaning) anew.

Another point Chambers makes is the fluidity of who we are within our lives. In her book length poem TheExquisiteBuoyancies , Chambers calls its subject “baby baby,” a doubling echoed in her term “body body” to renounce the Cartesian split. Dögen, writing in the 1200s, also insists on what Hee Jin Kim calls “radical nonduality,” anticipating Whitehead (as Chambers’ poem also does). When I look at my own life, this fluidity stands out. Like water, my nature flows into every available empty space (as the IChingputs it).

Buddhism views “emptiness” as Creativity’s ever fecund vessel. Whitehead saw God emerging from Creativity, Chambers says, serving it as a cosmic uterus, barren and yet an engine of generation. All the interrelated, generated elements support God in this function, rather than the reverse, so nothing is predetermined: life in its novelty unfolds in endless, inherently random relatedness and each unfolding is a decision that mediates, consciously or unconsciously, between our past and future.

(Everything here about Whitehead draws on two of Chambers’ papers, which place her poem TheExquisiteBuoyanciesand Hildegard of Bingen’s sung play Animain conversation with Whitehead’s metaphysics.)

Decisions you make along the way help keep the game going. As Nicholas Nassim Taleb explains, the fact of surviving shapes a false narrative that you knew what you were doing. I agree. Luck plays a role, but you also learn that failing, however painful, often occasions something better. I tend to try things twice before admitting that they aren’t going to happen. Yet something happens and very little is wasted. (“Nothing is lost,” the IChingsays. It may seem that something has, but then later you have the novel or the poems.)

I always wrote (and sometimes wove) in the spirit of what Aristotle called “leisure,” by which he meant the work one does for purely for oneself, unprompted by necessity. When I retired, just before the pandemic, I began to do my own work

in earnest. I also went back and looked at the work I’d done in the past, collecting and revising it. My sister, reading a collection of my personal essays, compared them to Montaigne. What my life means to me doesn’t hinge on the accuracy of her judgement. What resonates with others, and perhaps especially what resonates with me, ebbs and flows. The lure of creation, to use Whitehead’s word, is a glimmer of what Benjamin called reception how our works are seen once they’re in the world. Archives also figure, enabling scholars to access such contemporary accounts as letters, diaries, and commonplace books.

This is a long way of saying that what my life means to me currently is wrapped up in the leisure it affords me to do my own work. What constitutes my own work is a separate question, yet it seems related. From the perspective of the late period of life I’m in now, the work/life split quandary of the middle period seems akin to the Cartesian mind/body split that Whitehead and Dögen saw as fallacious. What seems true is how the nature of our everyday shifts depending on where we are on life’s continuum. (This is Dögen’s big point; he notes for example that enlightenment is an unprivileged, transient state, not a permanent attainment.)

We could call this “continuum of self” mind body . What we think of as “balance” or as “the ground” from which we can make clearheaded decisions about our unfolding “next” feels constant in being familiar, but varies in that we redefine “familiarity” subtly and sometimes dramatically within our “circus of contingency.”

In the late period of life, the mind body continuum overtakes what we thought as work/life (but was really work leisure). We’re freed to put the second continuum in conversation with the first. They have a parallel, interdependent relationship with its own constant yet varying balance or ground. As the body (in a somatic sense especially) declines, the work leisure continuum becomes superfluous. (It relies on holistic well being; a primary task then is to maintain it within or despite the aforementioned circus’s growing pandemonium.)

“Where it points” has a carpe diemurgency. This is the late period’s paradox, that while you have time at last to do your own work, the actual time available is shrinking at an unknown pace. Questions of capacity arise. We deny and adjust,

shrinking the boundaries of our lives to compensate, to avoid disillusion and indignity.

The pandemic made it almost universally clear that at certain points in life, we come to resent the arbitrary requirement that, for example, we commute to a central location to work with others, or meet them individually unless such meetings are truly desired. In the course of it, I took two online writing classes with a dozen other people, several of whom became friends. I also took classes on poets and specific poems led by two professors who are both poets. These classes were helpful. I finished a short story and began a novella. I read poets I hadn’t read, and was prompted to learn more about them and their work. I heard poets reading poems, which echoed my experience of hearing Chambers recite her long poem, live streamed from a distant stage. This is our contemporary moment, alive with possibility. Where does it point?

Life exposes us to other people’s judgements, for better and for worse. Maturation prompts us to take them in and decide how best to respond with increasing discernment. We’re also confronted with the consequences of our decisions. (We’re back to Whitehead here.) Our personal discretion varies as we make them, but cause and effect governs and Karma rides the range, regardless of which period of life we’re in. (The IChing‘s broad suggestion, its “law of least resistance,” is to go with whatever resonates for us.)

A sage is the important role of life’s late period. It grows out of the middle period, especially toward the end of it, when the ambitions of a career give way to others. My friend Yukiko Bowman noted that ambition often separates real architecture from mere buildings. This seems true for all creative output, reflecting a desire to take yourself seriously and to be taken seriously by others.

The late period also affords experimentation in the sense of doing much more with what comes readily. The constraints the period imposes make this a better route than taking up things that don’t, but I’m not sure. In my own case, it’s meant taking my personal essays, poems, and photo collages in new directions, and making books and pamphlets that collect them, using this occasion to curate, edit, reconsider, and inform “next.”

The IChingalso speaks of “carrying the outer world” (I paraphrase) to which (per Whitehead via Chambers) we’re inextricably interrelated. I take

from this interrelatedness that an ambition to be seen should ideally serve this world carrying. Because Creativity unfolds, making the decision path more evident helps annotate that process hence my tendency to “work out loud.” (By “annotate,” I don’t mean post facto explication, but rather an unfolding progression [by whatever means] that reveals how a given work is developing.)

I write to find meaning in my own experiences what they meant then, what they mean now, and how and why the meaning has changed, if it has. Hovering over this are the art and craft of writing poesis and techne. It raises a work in our estimation if it strikes us as persuasive, serious, meaningful, evocative.

Writing is also how I repay life for my experiences. Even the ordinary in life accrues to surface meaning, I find, and form a leitmotif that makes the extraordinary or uncanny stand out more. Receptivity gives form to the germs of ideas, and this is closely connected to observation. Viewed from within, I see myself as a kind of “observation engine” that takes experience in and then works with it to derive its meaning personal and otherwise. In forecasting, you work with what draws your attention, a signal and noise kind of noticing that’s akin to the way ordinary vies with extraordinary as sources of meaning. Even noise has patterns, while the extraordinary is singular, as Robert Musil pointed out, although (drawing on Chambers again) Whitehead would add that it’s in conversation with the rest, and so, “apparently singular” or “singular.”

My friend Rocky Hanish wrote to me recently about the place of narrative in making architecture. I replied some people appear to lack a narrative sense, seeing life as “one damn thing after another.” Galen Strawson argues that narratives aren’t determinative. While I see my life as a narrative, I agree with Strawson that while my past is present for me in a sense that Whitehead would call its relatedness (if I read Chambers correctly), that takes the form an ongoing conversation with it, mostly an inner one but sometimes involving others. If I write about my past, it’s partly to engage these others and give the dialogue itself a conditional future that I may influence but ultimately cannot shape directly. (Chambers’ Whitehead and my Walter Benjamin both speak of reception, which brings us back to ambition as the

lure of any creative process: this desire that the narrative continue. We set out our stand in this afterlife, offering fragments that we hope are pregnant with meaning.)

We arrive at life’s late period with a boatload of experiences. Ordinary things like names may elude us, but all those rooms and terraces, time alone or with others, are still vivid. Writing in its different forms conveys how they were and what they meant. We’re also aware that whatever we fail to convey will be lost. I think it’s a universal motive, to want to convey what we’ve experienced to others in some manner, to plant ourselves in conversations we won’t live to hear.

This is what I make of Stendhal or Tomasi de Lampedusa, honoring what life gave them by creating windows into minds that experienced what they knew to be remarkable, aiming to capture it in order to reflect on it, and then share this with others. These aren’t monuments to self, but there’s a certain ruthlessness about this fidelity to experiences and their meaning, because it’s done also to enhance the experiences themselves, make them stand out vividly again from ordinary life. With Dorothy Wordsworth, two of whose journals I read last winter, it’s unclear if she meant to show them to others, but she was William Wordsworth’s sister, part of a writers’ circle. She’s reportorial, but then you hear the observation engine whirring, evocative in what it produces. The root of ruthlessness may lie in the fact that such minds observe and they experience, and then draw on the entirety of what they sensed. “Minds” here is a stand in for post facto exposition, since they’re otherwise engaged as the seats of emotion, even crocodiles in heat. “To know,” we say, and we mean body and soul, or really what’s the point?

My life’s meaning is wrapped up in this desire to know. I’ve lost the need to know by touch. Perhaps this is because I knew too much, at points, or discovered the limits of knowing in this sense. It only gets you so far, that horizontal life you craved. Craving fell away, I noticed, but perhaps trying to understand and convey is also a craving, like having a cigarette in bed, talking as we do after fucking across an afternoon, our minds open in post coital bliss, a clarity amid haze, somehow sharper as our bodies cool down, loosen their grip. I experienced this along with the rest, this taking of what can’t be said, then saying it. It’s why I write.

Sources

Giancarlo de Carlo: Paolo Ceccarelli, Giancarlo deCarloandILAUD:AMovableFrontier , ILAUD and Fondazione OAMi, 2019.

Whitehead: Two papers by Ashley Elizabeth Chambers, read in manuscript: “A Process Relational Exploration of Uterine Knowledge: TheExquisiteBuoyanciesin conversation with Alfred Whitehead,” 2019; and her revision and expansion of it, “A Process Relational Exploration of OrdoVirtutumand TheExquisiteBuoyancies : Considerations for Future Work at the Intersections of Performance Studies and Theology,” 2022. Also, Chambers’ book length poem, TheExquisiteBuoyancies , New Michigan Press, University of Arizona, 2021.

Dögen: Hee Jin Kim, DögenonMeditationand Thinking:AReflectiononhisViewofZen , SUNY, 2006.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, FooledbyRandomness , Random House, 2005.

Benjamin: Uwe Steiner and Michael Winkler (trans.), WalterBenjamin:AnIntroductiontoHis WorkandThought , Chicago, 2012, and Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin:ACriticalLife , Belknap Harvard, 2016.

Musil: Bence Nanay, “The Dethroning of Ideocracy,” TheMonist , January 2014, p. 7. (The entire issue is devoted to Musil as a philosopher.)

Galen Strawson, ThingsThatBotherMe , New York Review Books, 2018.

Dorothy Wordsworth, TheGrasmereand AlfoxdenJournals , Oxford, 2008.

Written in November 2022.

4. Taking the Bus

“Took the bus,” my writing partner said, quoting his grandmother’s euphemism for “just died.” In a voicemail left some days before, he noted the tests he was about to undergo, told me that nothing was life threatening, then added, “It’s circling.”

In the fifth part of Eliot’s century old poem, “The Waste Land,” the question is posed: “Who is the third who walks beside you?” Castaneda’s Don Juan describes him as a companion to whom we can turn to ask if this is the hour or the eye blink, as the widow of my grandfather’s cousin put it.

In the first Duino elegy, Rilke writes,

Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are among, or the dead. The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

He continues,

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit’s growth could we exist without them?

The first part is like Benjamin’s Angel of History,

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The “great matter” that some Buddhists note is not merely death itself or even its constancy as an inevitable ending and steady remover of others whose presence we took for granted. We can more readily accept the loss of others at some points in their lives than at others. The late queen dies officially “of old age” and we agree, but we decline to grant our actual human condition explanatory power in most other cases, wanting both a cause and a reckoning of some sort associated with it. We could as well say that someone died of youth or of middle age.

Rilke and Benjamin describe angels confronted with and overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of the

living and dead, but my sense is that we each have an angel personal to us, aware of us. (Klee’s angel doesn’t look impersonal.)

to the past and the future, and also in the Buddhist sense of unfolding.

In her essay on Fleur Jaeggy, Meeka Walsh suggests also that our companion is the angel of our self sufficiency, present when no one else is and able to bring us back to the everyday that, however precarious, is the gift handed us. Our companion, who may or may not be our own creation, personifies our place in the world and a sense of being seen and heard.

Sources

The quote from his grandmother and the comment on it were left in a voicemail by Richard Bender.

The Rilke translation is by Stephen Mitchell, from AheadofAllParting , Modern Library, 1995.

The Benjamin quote is from section IX of his essay, “On the Concept of History.”

Meeka Walsh, “Fleur Jaeggy’s Gift of Detachment,” BorderCrossings , March 2018, collected in Walsh’s MalleableForms , ARB Books, 2022.

Our arrival places us in life with its rhythms and momentum, its wildly varying situations, and its essential randomness. Our social conditioning makes us risk adverse while minimizing our sense of danger sufficiently that we accept the risks our daily lives involve or require. We grasp (at times) that this is our human condition, shared universally. Despite our natural desire to shield others, we mostly understand that it’s unnatural to do so past certain points that these others in their turn have to deal with life as it is, however perilous it proves for them. This is our “great matter.”

“Took the bus” captures the ambiguity of our departure Is our destination Paradise, Hell, Oblivion, or another turn of the wheel? The angel our angel may have some sense of this. Yet “took the bus” is also utterly mundane As the Buddha said of what awaits us, “Who knows? And anyway, this is not our concern.”

For me, this companion of ours is really an angel of our present, of the ground of our being “present” in Benjamin’s sense of tied unpredictably

Written at the end of September 2022.

5. On License

“Painters and poets always had equal opportunities to venture.” Horace

License is traditionally granted to artists and poets, Horace notes, passing over the perils they face from power and the crowd. The boundaries each sets out are inexact and fluid. Sudden, unexpected shifts are prompted by offense taken, displeasure felt, if an artist or poet oversteps the bounds deliberately, by flouting convention, or as the byproduct of her creativity, unaware that she’s trespassing on the sensibilities and good will of others.

Despite the imbalance between power (and/or the crowd) and the individual artist or poet, the pretense of license is kept up lest a desired stasis slips into actual stagnation the rot that sets in when time is called on progress and anything that isn’t top down is immediately suspect as lèse majesté. Art and poetry are patronized by power and the crowd, but official artists and poets are rarely innovators and almost never provocateurs. Apostasy is their one exit, opening frequently onto a blind alley from which rescue is often posthumous. This being so, an early choice for artists and poets in times and places of oppression is to embrace apostasy wholeheartedly. In the wake of a revolution, dilemmas can arise around such choices.

Following the Russian Revolution, artists and poets sought to lend their support. In the 1930s, Stalin had many of them murdered, and those he kept alive were regularly made aware of the cat

and mouse nature of their survival. In such situations, opprobrium rather than neglect is the flip side of patronage. Neglect can be fatal once an artist or poet has experienced fame, but others work on, buoyed by a small circle of admirers or by their own faith in themselves and their work. Opprobrium actively seeks to suppress them and their work.

This gets you Osip Mandelstam, for example, writing for a small circle but more specifically for a Russia in which creative license is restored and broadened a Russia not just without Stalin, but without Putin, either.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Rilke

In discussing the Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone, Seamus Deane notes a wariness in Tone of his own emotions, giving precedence to the cause for which he worked and, in the end, gave his life. Deane also records Tone’s desire to be executed by a firing squad in order to hasten his death. Unable to work, his life was untenable. His apparent suicide in prison was criticized by some Catholic contemporaries as paganly Greek or Roman in its stoicism, Deane writes a Christian would presumably prefer to be martyred for his beliefs.

Let the poet be permitted to perish; he who saves her against her will does the same as the slayer. Horace

According to Jennifer Ferriss Hill, Horace warns his readers that the license granted to artists and poets, et al, can lead them to be carried away owing to their human nature. They experience what he calls facundiapraecops , “rushing fluency” in her translation, which brings the risk of endangering themselves and others. He argues against this, she says, but is aware that it is inevitably part of the creative process when humans embark on it. Inevitable but unlawful for those insufficiently experienced or constitutionally incapable of knowing their limits: Robert Lowell at full tilt in bipolarity’s manic phase comes to mind, along with the many suicides.

Yet Horace condones this, arguing that it is as much a transgression to try to save such poets as it is for them to be carried away. License is license and when it comes to human creativity, there’s no natural limit.

For a poet like Sylvia Plath, for whom suicide was something of a leitmotif, or an artist like Francesca Woodman, who took her life at 22, her work prolific but even less securely in the world, Horace’s critique of taking license too far is pertinent. Even the biographer Lyndall Gordon, considering Virginia Woolf as a writer, was moved to ask how her work might have evolved had she lived on. As readers, we fall invariably on the side of longevity. Katherine Mansfield dies young and Woolf, honest about envying her talent, misses the spur her presence provided.

What then do artists and poets owe us? The younger their departure, the more it pains us, robbed of work “on our behalf” that we foresaw. Horace’s license admits the hermetic nature of creativity how concern for its reception taints it, even as a sense of its effect on others is an intrinsic part of its making. Yet making a full stop is also a creative act, and we deprive it of meaning by relegating it to madness, even when madness figures. If we take an artist or poet seriously, then finding meaning however elusive in their acts is a necessity.

We draw the outer boundaries of license very liberally with regard to gender, for example, yet we categorize suicide as out of bounds, a sign of madness. This is understandable in human terms, as such deaths are often devastating for the

immediate survivors, surfacing all sorts of psychic undergrowth but seeming to give it no place to go except to the grave. It takes real courage to read it otherwise, expose the work in process to others, and take from the act itself meanings that unfold in light of what can be known and intuited from the life and works.

We owe this to them, Horace says, or we will kill just as surely as the artist or poet killed herself. Granting her license is to grant her an afterlife future reception, empathy, and admiration that sees past her excesses.

Sources

Seamus Deane, “Imperialism and Nationalism,” SmallWorld:Ireland1798 2018 , Cambridge, 2021, pp. 74 93.

Jennifer Ferris Hill: Horace’sArs Poetica, Princeton, 2019, p. 54 and following.

Lyndall Gordon: VirginiaWoolf:AWriter’sLife , Norton, 2001.

Photo: Walter Benjamin and Bertoldt Brecht play chess at Brecht’s Danish home in the late 1930s.

Written in May 2022.

6. Recent Poems

1.

4.

When she wrote “Berlin,” I remembered how I love her proximate, a presence her spirit animates that brings me life. When he displayed a book, one of three, and extolled one, inviting others to hear, I remembered that mine sparked doubts until I read them, how their language spoke to me, at least. If I wondered what they meant, really, the world not figuring in them the way others shouted, it isn’t that I don’t see what they do, but that their roots lie elsewhere, soil that I turn over and replant as one does when the winter’s finally over, life being this fecund thing, even as it goes to ground, food for thoughts that arose once she wrote her “Berlin” and tacked it on, sunlight in autumn.

2.

In keeping with summer’s slipping, as it always does, despite a longing for delay, winter forestalled, leaves green for longer, bees out of hives, I put on a sweater, gazed at clouds rising at the horizon: rain, thunder. The days were filled with marches and reports of anonymous graves in the hundreds, not the queen’s tomb but a field cross marked as turned over and the bodies found. Winter lays its blanket on the earthly dead. The living shiver as it approaches.

3. Whim, the lintel said, reason enough to disregard one’s relations. Genius calls me and I hear her. She wants to write my life so you can read it.

Stop or leap. (A moth’s affection, not a birdcall.) Leap because the stop’s too hard. Stop because to leap is to forget, to pretend to do so, to deny. (Moths. stepping stones like Delilah’s turtles.) When the earth is rough, then mothers scream. Still rough, I mean, newly turned over, piled in. Leap, leap. She too, Rilke wrote, can’t yet do it. When we counted, a man wrote, the one we saw went uncounted. How many circled? At the gate? (She sought me, this moth, getting her bearings.) Perhaps disguised he drifted with us. “One of us,” we thought, not knowing precisely who was who. The earth, brought up, set down, was in between, neither stop nor leap but something else, awaiting the rituals of such a place as this, sacred even now.

5.

Crabs dance sideways, I observe. Rain brings them out, also frogs, comes the report, a distant place where I am not, nearer Panama than here. A crab is a remnant of another time, although here inarguably. If queried, the crab would say so if it had the words.

6.

For you, darling, I thought but didn’t say, asked (or asking myself, rhetorically) why I write. The object of this thinking wisps wrong word, since she’s not wispy, but accurate in a verbal way, these categories bandied about like scarves or seven veils within her form, a kind I would desire earlier in life unexpectedly, like the one I danced with in Chicago who laughed because I grew hard against her beauty so expressly warm, the way babes reach for the tit thinking it must be paradise.