1 February 1999: Trace Elements

The Eggshell

We had planned to ski yesterday but instead spent the day in the city, doing city things. We bought a New York Times and had breakfast at the Eggshell, a simple appealing name for a a simple appealing place with yellow walls and blue checked tablecloths and really, really good food. Possibly the first restaurant I (with extremely limited experience, mind you) have been in that offered real Vermont maple syrup. I had French toast. RDC was surprised I didn't have raisin French toast, but I wanted challah bread. Is it me or is it an interesting thing to make French toast with challah bread? Whenever that bread they make in New Orleans is unavailable, challah bread should be substituted. Really yummy. And orange juice from oranges. RDC had some egg thing and the book review. I had the front page.

Museum

Then we went to the Denver Art Museum, which has borrowed a private collection, 600 years of British painting, all belonging to one family. Plus some not-paintings: an altarcloth Amy Denver would have liked and stained glass.

George Stubbs dissected horses and manipulated equine corpses in pulleys to approximate their movement, and he was famed for the accuracy of his horse anatomy. I don't remember which of his paintings the DAM had, but it was about as bad as the Racehorses Belonging to the Duke of Richmond Exercising at Goodwood, which The Art Pack uses as an example of what rockinghorses even he represented real horseflesh as, before photography. Eadweard [sic] Muybridge took stills of horses running, which led to a tardy (I'd say) understanding of horse gaits. No more rockinghorses.

Muybridge also took a series called "Nude Descending Stairs" to show human movement, which Duchamp turned back into a painting, Nude Descending a Staircase. This painting hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The next step in the assimilation of the idea is Bill Watterson: Calvin escapes his bath and strides down the stairs, dripping, proclaiming "Nude Descending a Staircase," and as his mother scoops him up and returns him to the tub, he laments that no one understands art. Appropos of nothing, Richard Adams mentions Stubbs in Watership Down but--it's making me crazy--I can't find the reference.* Something about neither sun- nor moonlight being part of the downs, but we always imagine the downs with sunlight and consider moonlight to be inconstant.

There were Tudor portraits, also, and I ruminated on what I consider an irony but might just be expected in royalty: the redemption of blood. Richard Earl of Cambridge was executed for treason in 1415 on the eve of Agincourt. His crime threatened Henry V. Despite or perhaps because of his executed grandfather, Edward (to be IV) battled his cousin, Henry V's son, Henry VI, and thus it is Richard Earl of Cambridge's blood, through his great-granddaughter Elizabeth's marriage to Henry VII, that runs in the veins of everyone Brit sovereign since, up to and including the current monarch of England. Henry V and Henry VI's son and grandson, their own Edward, never made it past Prince of Wales.

Similarly, despite all Henry VIII did to ensure his line, none of his children procreated. No Tudor blood but Catholic Stuart hemoglobin runs in bonny Wills's veins.

Actually that was Antonia's Fraser's parting line in Mary Queen of Scots: that it might be some satisfaction to Mary to know that her son's line prospered whilst that of her executrix Elizabeth I came to an abrupt end with herself. But I don't buy it: 200 years after both were dead, about 50 closer, Catholic relatives were passed over for the monarchy in favor of Protestant, Hanoverian Georges I II III and IV. How purely Mary Stuart's blood in the current family runs is therefore quite debatable.

I love family trees. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Also we browsed the newly reinstalled 20th century exhibit. RDC went off to join us up for DAM membership again while I began the exhibit. True to my nature, which is to explore corners and risk being yelled at by guards and parents, I peeped into and entered a short gray hallway that I thought was of an "Employees Only" nature. Having just left the brightly lit main hall, I could not immediately see as I turned a corner and entered a largish chamber. Soft lights illuminated both the far upper corners, and on the wall between them hung a dark frame. Was this safe? asked my prudent, female, urban mind. Did someone forget to turn on the lights? asked my mother's voice. Meditate, I said. Silence would be a good addition to this piece. It reminded me of a pair of photographs in I think MOMA, color self-portraits of the naked Caucasian photographer at 10:00 on a sunny day and then again at 3:00. The little explanatory bit on them said the artwork included photograph paper and sunburn. Melanoma for art. Because my own pupils now were contributing to this installation I was standing in. As I adjusted to the dimness, I realized I could see quite well. Certainly I could now see any possible assailant, but I was, happily (both luckily and gladly) quite alone. I could make out dimensions and angles and the frame, which turned out to be not a painting but a large rectangular hole in the wall, a window to an unlit space into which I could reach but whose ceilings and walls I could not touch. The floor inside was reassuringly at just the same level of my own feet outside.

When I sensed RDC enter the main exhibit, I left the chamber to join him. The installation is Trace Elements, 1991. That's odd, I didn't recollect that I had sensed him until writing this. I didn't wear a watch; I don't have a particularly keen sense of time; I didn't know how long his errand would take. Is it coincidence, or just that we've been together for six years, or did my relaxing and reaching into Trace Elements heighten whatever extrasensory senses I have? I prefer the last option, but I'm too cynical to believe it.

Another piece I liked was another pair: Antidote Drawing and Poison Drawing. The latter was ink and snake venom blotted symmetrically, Rorschach-esque. The other was correction fluid and antivenim and looked like your arm after a tine test for tuberculosis. An interesting choice of media.

That waste of time and money, that intrusion into my Sacred Personal Space

The reason we were going to ski was that every mountain would have been empty and offering cheap lifts because of that thing that happened last night. We didn't ski and we didn't escape that thing that happened last night anyway because of course we live in an apartment complex and could hear everyone responding to every littlest bit of that thing that happened last night. Then in the interest of knowing what's happening in our community, we watched the local news cover our esteemed populace's reaction to that thing that happened last night, which included bonfires, riots, people lighting firecrackers that they held in their mouths, overturned cars lit on fire, and thousands of dollars worth of other damage.

During the thing, I read the Martin Amis review RDC had precis'd for me over brunch. Someone please explain why London Fields is considered a weak effort. And The New York Times Magazine. Which I threw across the room after an initial skim told me I knew two answers to the crossword puzzle. I'm out of practice. Also I read Possession. Corelli's Mandolin had reviews for four books in its endpapers: Possession, All the Pretty Horses, The Remains of the Day, and The English Patient. The latter two prove that some books simply cannot be translated to the screen. Possession would be impossible to screen, but A.S. Byatt's Morpho Eugenia worked as "Angels and Insects." You'll notice the first novella in that volume, The Conjugial Angel, being literary, was passed over for cinematization. And "Morpho Eugenia" is too much of a tongue-twister for most moviegoers, but it had sex and bugs so it worked as a movie, which was named for the volume and not its tongue-twisting novella. And I shouldn't say Possession would be impossible: I liked "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," even if it did strip layers of meaning off the novel. Anyway, I can honestly say I loved all five books, and Corelli's Mandolin deserved such noble company.

The above paragraph is twisted grammatically and thematically and I'm not going to untwist it because it was an exercise in my own conceit of intellectualism. I hate Denver right now because of the thing that happened last night (see two paragraphs ago and this next one):

Today was staged a parade in vicarious celebration of the thing that happened last night. I grit my teeth and asked for the afternoon off. My boss, who is, as I've said before, the coolest boss, said fine: I have put in extra hours recently so be off with me. At noon I went out to catch the 12:15 bus home, and at 12:45 I caught it. The bus station is along the parade route, and since we pay taxes for both buses and football stadiums, bus service was disrupted before noon for a 2:00 parade--which began closer to 3:00. No bus came to the temporary stop a few blocks away that I'd been advised of, so I walked (Going Backward) several blocks in the other direction until well clear of the parade route. And only the least favored drivers must have been conscripted for service, because the driver nearly blew off that stop, at which I flagged him down, and he did entirely blow off the stop I wanted to exit at. So I had to Go Backward again. I went to the grocery to get a roll of quarters, and stopped in the hobby store for some neat stuff which did not include, this time, scrapbooking stuff, and finally strolled home. I was in so pissy a mood that I refused to carry a half gallon of OJ with me, thus ensuring my fourth morning without this life-giving liquid first thing and therefore a continued pissy mood tomorrow, because I am so damn rational. Well. Yesterday I had some--at noon--with brunch and this morning more from Starbucks, so I'm not exactly going without.

A filthy, littered city; a populace that can't use "whom" correctly but that understands pointspreads; no OJ; and two occasions of Going Backward. Piss bitch moan.

I did, however, decide that all my walking excused me from the Nordic Track for the day. Heh. Not that that reprieve ameliorates my opinion of that thing that happened last night, the people who participated in that thing that happened last night, or the people who in any way cared anything about that thing that happened last night. **

Nine hours after I got home, I now am listening to "I'll Make Me a World" on PBS, sitting on a chair on a vacuumed carpet, with laundry drying on hangers in the scrubbed bathroom, my belly full of garlic, cheese, and tomato, surrounded by one (1) Riverside and one (1) Pelican Shakespeare (mine and RDC's, respectively) and Antonia Fraser's The Wives of Henry VIII (for British royal family trees), Watership Down (for elusive Stubbs reference), The Art Pack (with Stubbs's painting, Muybridge's two photographic series, and Duchamp's painting), and a few volumes of Calvin and Hobbes, and Possession. Tools of the trade. And a whining cockatiel who must be ready for bed.

As am I, now that I'm calmer, cleaner, tidier, and with drawersful of clean underwear.

Except that I have to say the one (1) thing is because I'm also rereading The Phantom Tollbooth because of something Columbine recently said.

Correspondence

I have, thanks certainly to Beth's recent link, received a lot more email about this site than ever before. I've been enjoying reading what people find appealing about it. It's got me thinking about journalers' extrovertedness, though. I suppose it makes sense that the IXXXs of Myers-Briggs spend more time online than the EXXXs, but why are most journalers Is? I'm an ENXX--by which I mean I'm ambivalent and the last two letters change with my mood, and this is what I think, and here I am, a Chatty Cathy doll pulling my own string. So why are most journalers Is? Doesn't seem to go with the medium or the expression. However, it makes more sense that most journalers, being Is, have cats instead of dogs. In my experience, more outgoing people have dogs and more reserved people prefer cats. I am outgoing, and, like a dog or a Tigger, am neither subtle nor always welcome when I come bouncing and sniffing around.

* Aha! 3 February 1999: A passage from Watership Down can evade me only so long!

The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as we think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass, undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse's mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity--so much lower than that of daylight--make us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.
Scribner, p. 148

(I still can't find that Calvin and Hobbes strip. But I don't have all the collections and maybe it never was culled for one anyway. So I have to go through five years of paper journals in quest of it. Right.)

**The thing that happened last night, for the sake of those spared it (through living under a rock, outside Denver, or outside the U.S.) was the so-called World championship of U.S. football, which of course is not football at all.)