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THICKET
by Mike DeCapitePat,
I hit a thicket in my work: a very simple scene that I couldn’t get right. I worked on it for a couple of weeks—it’s only two paragraphs—and couldn’t get anywhere. Then I decided the problem was not the way I was describing the scene, but the way I was seeing it. I thought about flying to Cleveland so I could go out to Euclid and sit beside the railroad tracks at the intersection of Babbitt Road and get it right—I even checked the flights—and then I hit on another approach.
I’d been reading Rilke’s Letters On Cézanne. I went to the library, where I took out books on Cézanne and also Alfred Korzybski, the developer of General Semantics whom Burroughs talks about.
Cézanne urges us to “see in nature the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.”
One night and again the next morning I stood near the bus stop and studied the building across the street, the liquor store with apartments above. Finally I saw that I could break it down into rectangles and squares, boxes, repeating patterns, a narrow vertical bar of light at the doorway, which is cut at a slant. I was rebuilding everything on a flat surface. And then I applied the same procedure to the view up the hill. This underlying order is strangely elating and reassuring...
I went for a long walk that night, I was out about two hours, breaking everything down to essential shapes and planes, and the effect was similar to a mushroom trip in which you become aware of surfaces and planes and the movement of shadows across them. I wound up in a warehouse part of town sitting at a bus stop across from a loading dock, fascinated with it, and then I started to feel very alone in it all and made my way back home.
Back on the corner, a sunny morning, I was gazing at all the wires, hundreds of them, crossing over Folsom street. I know those wires are black, so I see them as black lines until I can see with a quiet enough spirit to realize that many of them are reflecting the sunlight so they’re bright lines of light...
Then I was studying the row of trees along Folsom, turning it into words, as you do, and telling myself that while the general "movement" of the trunks formed a broken arch over the street, the branches went off in all directions. But there we hit a semantic snag, because the trunks and branches are continuous: the branches aren't separate from the trunks. So I corrected my internal description of them to say that the trunks tended toward a broken arch over the street before branching out in other directions...I love this, the ability to mentally frame a scene and read its alphabet, its Vs of perspective, its Hs, As, and Ts, to quickly sketch its lines, lovingly like a painter might, and describe it by a painterly shorthand, all of it resting on the tilted sidewalks and rounded streets in their beds.
“Perhaps one has to have a clearer insight into the nature of one’s ‘task,’ to get a more tangible hold on it, recognize it in a hundred details. I believe I do feel what Van Gogh must have felt at a certain juncture, and it is a strong and great feeling: that everything is yet to be done: everything.”
Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, translated by Joel Agee
I feel excited and grateful and happy to be alive, but also nervous, as though I'm entering into something which will require much more of me.
“This is what must be attained, and I have a definite sense that it can’t be forced. It must come out of insight, from pleasure, from being no longer able to postpone the work in view of all there is to be done.”
Rilke, Letters on Cézanne*
“He wanted to paint what he saw, but he also wanted to paint what he felt about the things he saw.
Richard W. Murphy, The World of CézanneOne of the library books I checked out is called Explorations In Awareness: How to Improve Your Skills in Observing, Thinking, Communicating, by Korzybski’s disciple J. Samuel Bois (in his black-&-white photo on the dustcover he looks like the CEO of a small manufacturing firm who’s written this as a manual for his sales force, and this picture gains from the revelations inside a sinister or subversive iridescence). The most valuable result so far is my conclusion that any verbal expression is subjective. If there is such a thing as objective reality, it’s not for us to know, much less describe, because language is automatically subjective.
Maybe instead of thinking of each word representing and obstructing reality a little more, as I normally do, it’s better to see them as the Ancients understood the stars to be holes in the sky which told us what we could know of the divine fire behind it. Maybe it’s better to see words as holes which allow the light to shine through. Some words and combinations of words let more light through, some less.
Because beauty’s nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear...
Rilke, Duino Elegies, transl. PoulinI don’t know if you ever get out of the thicket. You start analyzing it, framing it, describing it. I'm still working on those same two paragraphs. You'd laugh to see the results, which are so similar to the original.
Last night I watched the first of a four-part series on Shakespeare. It was annoyingly upbeat, like a travelogue or a cooking show. But there was the schoolroom where Shakespeare studied Latin as a boy, and the volume of Ovid which he treasured and snuck away to read, and the stage where he performed school plays with his classmates. It was like tracking the materials and means which went into the making of a bomb which exploded and changed the world forever.
Because I’ve been working harder I felt a momentary sensation of what he opened himself up for, the glimpses of eternity he endured to leave us one and then another and then a couple dozen more of those plays. The terror of getting it right is worse than getting it wrong. It’s a lot of electricity for a person to hang onto, and he was only flesh and blood, after all, which is what’s easiest to forget.
“Life’s so terrifying!”
CézanneNear the end of one of these books on Cézanne is a two-page spread of one of the many paintings he did of Mont Sainte-Victoire. This one he painted at the end of his life, he worked on it for two years. It’s nearly abstract: a weave of cross-hatching colors, mostly greens and blues, that coalesce into a plain and the mountain... It’s so beautiful...
Beside it there’s a quote. “Old age and failing health will see to it now that the dream of art I have spent my life pursuing will never come true.”
These landscapes and still lifes have begun to trouble me. I’m a nervous wreck. This is three weeks of this now, I feel like I’m on coke. I don’t even know if it’s about Cézanne anymore or if now it’s about itself and just an indulgence, but Cézanne is shattering some of my certainties.
I go out, I walk around. It’s good to go out for no reason, not carrying anything, walking slowly, looking without thinking, just trying to see. I’m thinking too much. Your insights cause an opposite reaction. They make you want to scoot back to your zoo cage and hide. They make you want to pick up whores, rent movies, shop, lie around in a t-shirt eating Popeye’s chicken jacking off and watching music videos in a room littered with comic books. (Of course, watching six hours of Stephen Hawking’s Universe this week to relax didn’t help. What kind of person does that? I’d watch two hours and turn off the light and go to bed because my head was too full. There’s no end to it. If you stare at something long enough, physics becomes metaphysics. When we’re told that at the subatomic level, observation changes the behavior of what’s observed, it should end the subject/object discussion once and for all. So—) For now, I’m going to put Cézanne and theorizing aside and remind myself of Garry Winogrand’s statement that “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described.”
I just went into the kitchen to pour another cup of tea. The dog, a golden part-wolf, is looking up at me from a sunbeam on the back steps.
I call her Juniper, I don’t know her real name.
Love,
Mike