Summer Nights Edition
Cézanne, Pascal, Vrel. Again Auden. Again Hokusai. Espaillat on St. John of the Cross, Doty on thinking through and in Things.
Happy Fourth of July. I hope you are all, according to your proclivities and your state of life, enjoying in various idiosyncratic combinations: blowing stuff up, shooting stuff, cooking stuff over fire, sleeping in, making love, ignoring emails, rereading Jefferson’s Ur-shitpost, enjoying cocktails, driving vast distances, flying over oceans, avoiding airports and people, jumping in bodies of water large or small, snuggling frightened dogs.
In the meantime, some odds and ends for the month.
Links.
The poet Rhina Espaillat has produced a new translation of St. John of the Cross, the 16th Century Spanish mystic.
Jaspreet Singh Boparai on Cézanne’s radical naiveté: “It makes sense to look at Cézanne first if you are trying to learn how to look at pictures: he had little interest in symbolism, imagery, metaphor, narrative, or any of the elements in a painting that require explanation. He simply wanted his viewers to see what he saw, in the simplest possible sense.”
Pope Francis pays homage to Blaise Pascal on the French polymath’s 400th birthday. The Holy Father describes the mathematical genius (who by age 12 was independently demonstrating Euclid’s propositions) as “a man marked by a fundamental attitude of awe and openness to all reality;” a scientist who saw that faith was not opposed to reason, but its culmination; and a mystic who received the sufferings of his too-short years with gratitude:
If man is like “a dispossessed king,” seeking only to recover his lost grandeur while knowing that he is incapable of doing so, then what is he? “What a fantastic creature is man, a novelty, a monstrosity, chaotic, contradictory, prodigious, judge of all things, feeble earthworm, bearer of truth, mire of uncertainty and error, glory and refuse of the universe! Who can undo this tangle?” As a philosopher, Pascal saw clearly that “the greater our intelligence, the more we discover man’s grandeur and his baseness,” and that these contradictions are irreconcilable. Human reason cannot make them agree, nor resolve the enigma.
An interesting look at how, far from being relegated to the ranks of the deplorables, religion has increasingly become a luxury good. There’s something here related to how public goods, as with marriage or good architecture, are first denigrated and then “bought back” in more exclusive forms by the upper classes.
Adam Kirsch on Edward Mendelson’s definitive Complete Poems of Auden.
How Hokusai’s wave broke over European modernism: “What Hokusai and his successors affirm over and over is that there’s no such thing as a pure “culture” divisible from others—not even the culture of a shogunate whose subjects couldn’t leave on pain of death. Culture is always an ebb and flow of fragmentations and recombinations, of encounters both violent and peaceful. You cannot stay separate; everything floats; your job is to ride the wave.”
Recent work.
Poem on blindness, poems in meter, and poem on June.
Girl and her dog:
Seated man, unfinished.
To think through things, that is the still life painter’s work—and the poet’s. Both sorts of artists require a tangible vocabulary, a worldly lexicon. A language of ideas is, in itself, a phantom language, lacking in the substance of worldly things, those containers of feeling and experience, memory and time. We are instructed by the objects that come to speak with us, those material presences. Why should we have been born knowing how to love the world? We require, again and again, these demonstrations.
—Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
From sea to shining sea,
As ever,
J
I love the new paintings! So evocative, so mysterious…