I made the prints I needed for the gallery show that opens this evening, but I have nothing for the people coming by the studios today who want to actually buy things. No time. I will forego this opportunity to actually sell pictures. Of course. I give things away. I am not attracted to commerce. It would be better if I had a trust fund, though. It is a gray Ohio day here, damp and cool. It is the way I remember it there. My senior year in high school, I drove up with my friend, Tommy, to see my relatives. It was my first road trip. We drove the car as fast as we could all day and night through the flatlands of Georgia and the mountains of Tennessee, then through Kentucky blue grass country. It was December, and when we got there, it was cool and damp and gray. We sat in a park in Antioch eating sausage and cheese and hard bread and drinking cheap wine from a gallon jug passed hand to hand. Antioch. I liked the name. We sat on top of a picnic table and huddled ourselves against the weather looking down a slope toward a stand of bare trees, the small brown leaves littering the rocky ground that fell away toward nothing. There was no one else around. The wine was bitter but good with the cheese and sausage and brioche. Bread. That is all I called it. I had no other word for it then.
That day stays with me. It is what I conjure up when I'm melancholy in a certain way, remembering the dreary promise it seemed to whisper. Today is such a day. If I were any good at all, I would chuck everything and buy a gallon of cheap jug wine and some sausage and cheese and a big hard loaf of bread, and I would find a lonely place to sit and listen. But I am not that good any more. I have lost that, it seems. I work on through the days and nights. Industrious.
How, I wonder now, did I develop this quality? I would have done better, I think, to have acquired the curse of commerce.
2.
ReplyDeleteThe world was a devious curvature, seen through the goldfish bowl.
The fish swam through a tidy universe of arching skies,
Weedstems, debris, white flakes of soggy nourishment,
And the moss on the castle waved languidly. But even then
The quarrels were constant. "Live my own life..."
Slamming of doors. "Night after night I've tried to sleep...."
And one day someone broke the goldfish bowl, or it fell.
Anyway, the fish were dead on the floor, among the broken glass.
Everyone agreed it was fortunate that the cat had been outside.
--- excerpt from Place of Execution, Weldon Kees
Why is it I am so drawn to Mr. Kees despair? ... I don't know.
There is something child-like in his witness to it I suppose.
I read something about him this morning that struck a chord and answered something for me about this making things stuff.
"His poetry is almost directly autobiographical, but it is rich with half-forgotten dreams, intimations of forbidden knowledge and fragments of a kind of experience that seems to be remembered more in the pulse and sweat glands than in the mind."
Boones Farm Strawberry Wine -- that is what we drank. Awful stuff really but it was uber cheap.
half-forgotten dreams...
oh that should say -- never autobiographical
ReplyDeleteI just got the lecture a couple of days ago about excellence in the workplace from an elderly friend, 'be the best you can be', etc. etc. He said people at work and students in school don't see the big picture and how being excellent everyday brings reward in the future, there is no work ethic anymore, and all that...but still - a day outside with sausage and bread and cheese and wine is another kind of excellence and maybe more important than industry and commerce.
ReplyDeleteL, I will look at some Kees poems today. Don't know of him. Are despair and desperation part of the same thing?
ReplyDeleteI am most attracted to half-forgotten things. They are so much better than the unforgotten the forgotten.
R, As I read, I was ready to reply that there are other sorts of excellence, but you were about to say it. What people have lost is the sense of community, however large that may be. I have a whole dissertation on that, but I don't have the energy this morning. Some other time, though.