#55 "The Bread Worked, Mr. Wilbur: One More Spring."

Or, Gaia Mater may have just skipped it all together--in deference to our suffering through so protracted a winter. We've been getting summer temperatures hereabouts, since April. Several: record-breaking.

I'm sure the record depredations of the Winter of 2010, which ended only a matter of a couple of weeks ago on the East Coast, had something to to do with the desperation behind "Ecclesiastes 11:1." This entitled poem appeared in the New Yorker about a month ago, and it is testimony to my slackitude lately that before I could get it to the Blog, the old man (89) has gone and done another one for this week's issue! (That one being a nice take on Arnold's "Dover Beach"--both of which recommended.) Twice Pulitzered Richard Wilbur has always been one of my favorites, noted for using traditional poetic forms--here the tercet stanza and even rhyme (a-x-a), of all things--to explore modern themes. (To oversimplify.) Thus:

We must CAST OUR BREAD
UPON THE WATERS, as the
Ancient preacher said,

Trusting that it may
Amply be restored to us
AFTER MANY A DAY.

That old metaphor,
Drawn from rice farming on the
River's flooded shore,

Helps us to believe
That it's no great sin to give,
Hoping to receive.

Therefore I shall throw
Broken bread, this sullen day,
Out across the snow,

Betting crust and crumb
That birds will gather, and that
One more spring will come.

It's a poem about spring, but mostly about Love, especially in the agape/caritas sort of way. Bread, birds, people connect transcendentally in the natural rhythm of give and take. Note the key word "sullen"--a people-adjective primarily, but here gloomily projected upon the natural landscape, "affective-fallacy"-wise. The speaker un-sullenizes himself and Nature by joining with Her in that very traditional love-gift: bread. An item, by the way, symbolically merging the Raw of nature's granary and the Cooked of the man-made world. And the birds mediate between the two.

For Sandro Botticelli and the Ancients, it was always the power of Love that moved the earth from fallow to fecund. The artist's famed "Birth of Venus" above (which I compared in a little different context to Farah Fawcett's immortal poster in MM #7) is really about the arrival of Spring. That's the titular Goddess of same offering Venus the cloak, and those on the left are the warm-west-wind Zephyrs blowing flowers all over the place.

The Greek mythos behind Aphrodite (= "foam-arisen") and transferred to the Roman Venus represented Love in the most primitive form. Not bread; rather the testicles of Uranus were cast into the sea by his son Cronus after he had so very Oedipally cut them off. Later, they emerged from the ocean on the shore of Cyprus quite logically in the fully-grown form of the Fertility Goddess herself. Spring in the mortal world could officially begin; Love had arrived. Sort of like:

Cast thy BROAD upon the waters, for she will amply be restored, after many a day.

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#43 Boulder Bolder? Not Even in Las Vegas

Salacious curiosity aside, here are a couple of outre' news stories that happened to collide yesterday in the Blogman's idiocyberspace having everything, or nothing-at-all to do with life vs. art, and the education of children.

I'll get to the Colorado story in a minute. First, pictured here is a small segment of an expansive graffiti-style mural adorning one outdoor wall of the Erotic Heritage Museum in Las Vegas. The "pasties" affixed to the nipple-age are not part of the artists' (incl. a couple of women) original design. Some upright (sorry) citizen must have called the cops, because sometime after the mural's inaugural "unveiling" adhesive pastie facsimiles were now seen covering the naughty bits. Turns out, right there in Sin City, there's a county sign-code that prohibits the "showing of the aureola of female breasts" (full report here), believe it or not. Too titillating, I guess. The county claims that the wall-mural is signage, advertising a strip-club which just happens to be next door. In rebuttal, a clever but politically-incorrect lawyer on the museum's behalf might--if the thing went judicial-- have directed the court's eyes to the figure on the left. (If these were live models, Clark County must also be a strict enforcer of EOE laws.)

Now here is the AP report of life-imitating-art in Boulder. Colo.--

A nudist in Boulder who was threatened with eviction last spring for gardening outside wearing only PASTIES and a THONG has caused another stir by gardening topless. At least four callers told police 52-year-old Catherine Pierce was in her yard topless on Wednesday. STATE law prohibits exposed genitals, but Pierce was wearing a thong and gardening gloves.

Police spokeswoman Sarah Huntley said an officer told Pierce to consider wearing a shirt because CHILDREN at the SCHOOL ACROSS THE STREET were playing outside.

Pierce's husband then complained to police. Huntley said a police supervisor agreed with Pierce wasn't breaking any laws.

Boulder is considering expanding its anti-nudity law. (3/18)

Note the fine distinction between pastie-bleeped nipples and "topless." No photos except after the fact, where ironically she's not only fully-clothed, but poses with mouth taped-over in protest of her free-speech = nudity being violated. (See full local reportage here.) However, only in their dreams could the prepubescent schoolboys across the street imagine such a randy sight: an obviously trim and handsome middle-aged mother-figure wearing only a yellow thong and pink (yes) gardening gloves (no coordinating color mentioned for the pasties). Otherwise, "sky-clad," as the new-age pagans might say. Youthful fantasies abundantly fulfilled.

And indeed there is some "signage"--some advertising going on here. Not for a strip-club, but for free-speech rights, and the LIBERTY to express one's way of life. "We're a naturalist family," says Mr. Pierce, "and we'll stay the way we are." Much to the relief of the young males on the playground across the street, I'm sure.

I'm also sure that there's some jealousy and fear involved too, resulting in a real test of parenting skills. For the most part, it's a flunk. Listen to Mary Ernest from across the street, who's not worried about her 5-year-old daughter seeing the naked lady--"That doesn't bother me"--but "If I had a SON, it might be a different situation," she said earnestly. How so? Well, a son or two might ask Mom some pointed questions that extend beyond simple nudity. Thus:

Lisa Sanchez who lives next door to to the Pierces, said she has mixed feelings about seeing the couple in public. "For me, I don't care," she said. But she is concerned that her two boys, 7 and 5, have ASKED her about the topless neighbor. "They say, 'Ma, that lady's crazy,'" she said. (Boulder Daily Camera 3/18)

Or did SHE explain it away that way? Okay, enough salivation over these two delicious stories of heartland-America's moral conundrums and insecurities. In fact, I've drooled over them so much as to cause "dry-mouth"--in medicalese: xerostomia = Gk. xero-, "dry" as in your office copier + stoma, "mouth" as extended to lower down the alimentary canal. Also called "cotton-mouth," and in many parts of the country: "the pasties."
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#39 January Jottings IV

But the truly old and original Romulan Calendar (you Trekkies out there) makes more sense, surely, in re-starting the 12-month Cycle of the Sun with a 4-week unit more attuned to Nature and Her new beginnings. Like March, or maybe just to make sure, the next one: Kalendis Aprillis, which meant obscurely something like "budding" or "flowering" time. Thus Chaucer and Eliot, but with two opposing views about that, as we have seen. During the reign of Roman King Numa, though, not only were the theretofore unspeakable days between December and March given names, but it was decided for some reason that the first one of them, January, should also become the first month of the Solar Year. For all time, as it turned out, and for all of Western Civilization. Thus ever the breathtaking quirkiness of History.

Speculation: Outside of the godless numbered months (four of which still survive as such), the deities Mars, Maia, and Juno had been honored already with one of their very own. "What about our even older and most venerated god, Janus, who stands head and halo with the best of these," the Janusite priests and lobbyists might be heard saying at Numa's weekly cabinet meeting, "as long as we're getting back into the month-moniker business. And, if it please Your Majesty, he's a two-faced god; that's right, two for the price of one--and he'd be simply fabulous as the month opening each new year because--get this--he's the divinity in charge of exits and entrances, endings and beginnings ... "

However it happened, we're stuck with it. So January has to this day, in an almost divinely-inspired way, been a month of taking stock, making resolutions, faking prophecies, etc. (Obama's State of the Union was last week.) All of this might have also been influenced by another Janus-month deity, Carmenta, a native Roman goddess of PROPHECY, but also in a very interesting way an Overseer of future female states as procreation, gestation, child birth (and midwifery), and the newly natal. Whew. Interestingly, she would also look out for the growing new-born's education, pictured above (in a quaint and typical no-sense-of-perspective medieval manuscript--love 'em).

Accompanied by her Carmentine nymphs, this simply divine lady was a nature-fertility god at bottom like Janus, but she had him beat with TWO feast days, Jan. 11th and 15th-- because, I guess, it took two of them to take care of her very busy goddess-hood properly. They were attended by women only, so the ancient sources say, and part of the celebrations included rice-dishes being offered the goddess, and cream-center pastries in the shape of male and female genitalia being feasted upon by her votaries! Ah, those long and dark winter nights.

(Some of this was cleaned-up by the Latin middle-ages, as you can see above, where the goddess is in school-marm mode. She's got a KEY [in left hand over her shoulder] like Janus, but here it's to open the tower of learning next door for the boy to whom she offers the primary-school HORNBOOK [you can just make out the alphabet thereon] in her right hand, rather than Janus' spear.)

So much for January.The "cruellest month"--with some qualifications and compensations touched on above. The god's 31 days end in a deadened whimper around these parts. (Sort of like this post.) It's an arctic 8 or 9 degrees outside, but in beautiful, bright sunlight. And I know that the lovely panorama of blinding-white snow around a solar-glistened pond filling my picture window can do naught but good for the "SAD" wintertime blues.
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#38 January Jottings III

Janus has just shut down the last weekend of his month here in North Carolina, and most of the mid-Atlantic states. The god's reign of terror--sub-teen-ish, "wind-chill" temperatures, multi-inch snow, sleet, and freezing rain, cloud-darkened daytime hours--would seem to allow for little debate about the "cruellest month." On the other hand, the balcony view of my duck pond--white-blanketed banks, frosted trees reflected on its glistening mirror-like surface--has its own chiaroscuro beauty. Nothing at all, obviously, like Nicolas Poussin's technicolor fantasy, "Dance to the Music of Time" (1639)--that French Renaissance painter's Olympian version of Kalendis Ianuarius.

The drawing of Janus in last post (q.v.) is many more than a thousand years older and gleaned from a temple-frieze. In that ingratiating anthropomorphic form or others like it, this native-born nature-god was worshiped by the Latins for millennia. And most likely propitiated vociferously at his festival on New Year's day--"Father Janus, be gentle with us in your eponymous month to come" ... "Lighten up a bit" ... "How about giving us a break on this cold weather thing?" ... "Make it a real mensis misericordium for your humble votaries this year!"--or such like.

But they would have known he could be tough: notice his SPEAR, at rest, but right-arm ready. The KEY in his left hand is symbolically more benign, promising the opening-up of new possibilities for the coming year (his affixed double-visage had always, more practically, guarded Roman door- and gate-ways). The COCK is an obvious icon for beginnings of things. But as a fertility symbol it might also invoke in every supplicant's mind what certain things they ought to be doing during the long winter nights--things to be brought to fruition nine months or so later at about harvest time.

The old nature-deity is stylized almost out-of-existence--he's a statue--in Poussin's painting above, but it's fair throbbing with fertility nonetheless. Well, it throbs with just about everything--hard to find a more baroque conglomeration of classical images. Lots of fun. But to the point: Janus is well to the (sinistrum) left, so his backward visage mercifully looks at nothing in the past. All is forgiven. Everything in the frame is thus pictorially rightward and optimistically forward-looking. The voluptuous Four Seasons will be linked one to the other in cosmic and irenic harmony in tune with the rhythms of old Time's lyre, dancing their way through the coming Solar Year--which is personified over their pretty heads in the divine presence of Helios/Hyperion/Apollo and his train careering across the sky. Look for the golden hoop and halo.

But look especially at the foreground figures once again. To the rightest is Time, hoar-headedly-balding but buck-naked and buff, who stares lustily at three of the Seasons while playing on his crotch-clenched harp. The ladies glance approvingly and willingly back. The fourth one? That's right, her smiling gaze--MonaLisalike--is directed solely at YOU, the Viewer. How sly, but how joyfully seductive, is her over-the-bare-shoulder, come-hither look! And she's got to be Winter!--as far to the left and closest to Janus as she is. Dame Winter says silently: Alas, the cold, but think of the warm and snuggly potential of nights long and dark. A couple of rosy-cheeked cherubs like these playing in the corners might be the result.

Aroint thee, then, thou anti-depressants and 1000-watt light-panels, the prescription for Seasonal Affective Disorder is to gaze on the delights of Poussin's "Dance to the Music of Time" for an hour or so. (more)
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#26 Mona Lisa's Pupillae

I was able to view Da Vinci's (see last posts) most famous painting "up close and personal" at the Louvre in 1973 while we were on our "Paris break" from one of those British-Isles-oriented, college-courses that I led overseas. This was before the museum began installing an ever tighter series of security barriers, including now a kind of plexiglass bubble-box that I must assume would keep the spectator at some distance--and optically interrupted--from the live surface of the world's most notorious near-anonymous face. Pity. Because ... if I had to view the original work in that constricted way for the first time, as others must do today, I never would have figured out what was so special about it.

For in those more trusting times--when you could actually hug a stone at Stonehenge--if you were a devotee of the divine La Giaconda, you had simply to LEAN (albeit awkwardly) over the conventional velvet-rope-and-brass-standard "barrier" lining the the gallery at a distance of about three or four feet from the wall. That is, if you manage to wriggle through to the front of the crowd. Not a problem for an aggressive Ugly American.

When once you're close enough, then comes the surprise. It's not the smile. It's all in the EYES. Okay, it's the eyes in conjunction with the smile. But here's the enormous difference between viewing the painting in an art book or on the TV screen and viewing it in person: you get to see the dots of her eyes, so to speak. The PUPILS.

For one thing, the actual portrait is larger than you might imagine: somewhat over 2 ft. x 3 ft.--big enough to see all of Da Vinci's detail, if viewed from a reasonable, fairly close-up distance. Now in the small photo of the painting above--and however/wherever else you are most likely to see it--her eyes come off as sort of unfocused brown and white. (A blue-eyed Italian lady might have been a different story.) Our little black lens-apertures are missing from view. They're simply below your threshold of perception, under these second-hand circumstances.

Even so, there's no doubt she's looking at you; Leonardo positions the irises just right, binocular-wise. He didn't study Anatomy for nothing. But in person, it's the pupillae that will effectively bring about the irresistible BOND between her eyes and yours. They take the woman's gaze, locked with yours, to another level of intimacy altogether. That's the secret to her fame, I believe. For those who have seen the real-life "Mona Lisa" under the formerly ideal conditions, her "look" becomes more than a casual glance: rather, it's a penetrating, philosophical, kind of Sartrean le regard. As if she knows something about THE YOU standing there--the painter, the viewer, whoever catches her eternal eye--that might be better left unknown. And knowing that ... she smiles.
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#25 Da Vinci Vindicated

Thought I'd better bring out the original, after shamelessly exploiting his "Vitruvian Man" for rhetorical purposes over in the Daily Mosteller. And it gives me a chance to recount an encounter with Leonardo, some 35 years ago.

First of all, it's an evocative piece of work. No wonder the drawing has been redacted/exploited for all manner of logos by myriad health/fitness/science entities like Blue Cross and Sky Lab II--though usually stylized and decidedly non-gender-specific, unlike the original here. Setting aside the artist's always interesting homoerotic subtext in almost everything he did--q.v. especially the Da Vinci Code conundrum about the ambiguous male/female figure at "The Last Supper"--this piece is a fascinating blend of art and science, or at least pseudo-science. It's the thought that counts.

And no man ever thought so much about so many things as Leonardo, as we all know. In fact, it got in the way of his work, more often than not. No greater "Renaissance-Man"; no greater procrastinator. My hero. All told, his greatness rests on a very small number of actual accomplishments. This one, though, is particularly interesting because it's an overt attempt to resolve, through his art, that persistent conundrum of his age: New Science vs. New Humanism. He was trying to humanize science here, and vice-versa. We know from the drawing's footnotes that he was faithfully following "scientific" guidelines for perfect human proportions, laid down by the Roman architect Vitruvius. (The artist had already been forced to study the "New Anatomy"--people were finally carving up people in the name of medical science--by his first teacher, and we can see it in those macabre "muscle-and-bone" sketches of his, which were nonetheless well ahead of their time for accuracy.)

All this went along with the optimistic Renaissance notion of the perfectibility of man. "Drawing" upon a countryman from the classical period, Da Vinci used the architect's questionable geometrics to construct a human figure of ideal proportions. He was serious:

For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height ... from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the the underside of the nostrils is one third of it; the nose from the underside of the nostrils to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. ["Mona Lisa?"] The length of the foot is one sixth the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that that the the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown.

Leonardo even tried to crack that ancient chestnut, "squaring the circle," in his drawing above, and supplemented in the following:

Then again, in the human body the central point is naturally the navel. For if a man be placed flat on his back, with his hands and feet extended, and a pair of compasses [think of the bygone, I assume, grammar-school chalkboard-compass--a giant one!] centered at his navel, the fingers and toes of his two hands and feet will touch the circumference of a circle described therefrom. And just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square may be found from it. For if we measure the distance from the soles of the feet to the top of the head, and then apply that measure to the outstretched arms, the breadth will be found to be the same as the height, as in the case of plane surfaces which are perfectly square.

Perfect nonsense, of course. But it seemed to make good art. How about the perfect face ... the perfect "enigmatic" smile? (more)
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#7 More Dead Icons--Farrah Fawcett

Though not close to the posthumous status of Michael Jackson, for whom the mourning around the world is approaching insanity, Farrah Fawcett, at the very least, had the most "iconic" HAIRDO of the late 70's and 80's. Almost every co-ed in my classes mimicked it for years, along with every other pre-teen on the planet.

Here is Botticelli's famed version of the "wind-blown" look in "Birth Of Venus," where the elaborate coiffure serves to cover at least one naughty bit. The right hand though, while coyly covering the right breast, deliberately directs the eye to the exposed left one. And notice that the west-wind Zephyrs are blowing the goddess and her elaborate "do" to the shore so that the goddess of Spring will cloak Venus more modestly ... too late. But that's the erotic point, isn't it? Not enough, not quite in time.

Farrah was a sex-goddess too, and her Botticellian poster of more than 30 years ago (you've seen it--it's all over the internet right now) surpassed even Betty Grable as the best-selling pin-up of all time. All the naughty bits are covered ... but not enough, not quite. The pubescent eye is deliberately directed to the very center of the poster where the skin-tight whatever-it-is reveals the right-nipple-outline underneath (Ahh ... the bra-less era.) Same erotic effect as the more demure but more naked Venus above. Accessible only maybe. But in contrast to the goddess's sidelong glance and subdued grin, Farrah looks at us directly with an unashamed toothy smile of unprecedented dimensions--still Ultrabrite wholesome but with the randy undercurrents.

In the very early 70's when I first noticed her in those toothpaste commercials, I remember pointing out to my sons that this "unknown" was destined to become a star. Later, sure enough, my sons would never miss an episode of her "Charlie's Angels" heyday. (Okay, me neither.) She had made it as a genuine "sex-symbol"--to use the term in the old-fashioned Marilyn Monroe sort of way. Unlike Marilyn though, she didn't progress much beyond that, and her later years were much of a muddle. But by all accounts she was a sweet and caring person, and remained lovable and semi-"famous" to the end. Her rare cancer was of continued media concern for the last two years. But still beautiful and slowly dead at a youthful 62? ... a cosmic injustice.

She lives up to the "icon" epithet in an ironic way ... literally. Her IMAGE has become more famous than she has. That pin-up poster IS somehow transcendent. Almost sacred, in an Eastern Orthodox kind of way. I don't think Ms. Fawcett would be ashamed to achieve that little bit of immortality.
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