"I had love once..."

I had love once in the palm of my hand.

See the lines there.

                                      How we played

its game, are playing now

in the bounds of white and heartless fields.

Fall down on my head, love,

drench my flesh in the streams

                                of fine sprays. Like

                                       French perfume

so that I light up as

                                     mountain glorys

and I am showered by the scent

                          of the finished line.

~ From "A Poem for Painters" by John Wieners

Untitled, Ismael Nery (1900-1934)

"to kiss you with kisses of so great a number..."

You ask, how many kisses of yours, Lesbia, may be enough and to spare for me. As the countless Libyan sands which strew asafoetida-bearing Cyrene between the oracle of sweltering Jove and the sacred tomb of ancient Battus, or as the many stars, when night is silent, look upon the furtive loves of mortals; to kiss you with kisses of so great a number is enough and to spare for passion-driven Catullus: so many that prying eyes may not avail to number, nor ill tongues to bewitch.

Poem 7 from The Carmina of Gaius Valerius Catullus, translation by Leonard C. Smithers, 1894.

Drawing by Mihály Zichy (1827–1906)

The one that got away, sort of

So, here we have hard evidence that I don't always get the shot I want. The truth is that I almost never get the shot I want. I get shots I like pretty often, but they're hardly ever exactly what I had in mind. Sometimes, as in this case, they are not remotely what I had in mind, but I like them all the more for that. I love this one. It strikes me as symbolic of the creative process generally: You get an idea, you try to realize it, and then you watch as it goes irretrievably wrong. Once you get through mourning, you salvage what you can and present it as your "work."If you're lucky, you get praise and maybe even some cash. What a racket.

***

Here are a few famous quotes about photography that I've always liked. All of them seem to be contradicted in some degree by the photograph above:

"To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge — and, therefore, like power." ~ Susan Sontag

"In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish, a purely impersonal, unmanipulated photograph being practically impossible." ~ Edward Steichen

A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know” ~ Diane Arbus

Photo ©2014 Maria Browning

"Listening with the whole body..."

No longer speaking

Listening with the whole body

And with every drop of blood

Overtaken by silence

But this same silence is become speech

With the speed of darkness.

~ Muriel Rukeyser, from "The Speed of Darkness"

The Embrace, Egon Schiele, 1917

It's so noisy

Do you ever feel that your ears and eyes are just too big? That they take in too much of the world at once? Sometimes it's a pleasure to be hyper-aware, but other times it's a poisonous distraction. When there are storms inside — creative storms, storms of grief or joy — the noisy whirlwind outside becomes intolerable. That's my state at the moment. I can't bear the noise. I feel quite sad. It's not a desolate sadness; on the contrary, I think it's more like the fertile sadness Rilke described so well. And it needs a certain amount of quiet to blossom. So I'm going to seek more quiet for a while. I won't be so visible out there in the virtual world, but I will be here, chez BitterGrace. I welcome visitors. Just leave the noise outside.

The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of. If only it were possible for us to see farther than our knowledge reaches, and even a little beyond the outworks of our presentiment, perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy embarrassment, everything in us withdraws, a silence arises, and the new experience, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it all and says nothing. ~ Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet


Photo by Maria Browning ©2014

Undomesticated

I'm a terrible housekeeper, but every now and then the urge to live like a civilized human being will come over me and I'll spend most of a day scrubbing and dusting. I never feel like I've accomplished much at the end of it, though. My house is old and hasn't been significantly refurbished in more than 20 years. Time and my slovenly ways, not to mention a steady succession of pets, have created an ineradicable griminess. Once the cleaning binge is over, I always wind up looking around and thinking, "Well, at least it smells clean in here." And then I always think about my Great-Grandmother Bullard.

We called her Mammy, and she was nearly 90 by the time I knew her. I remember a frail, sharp-faced little woman with a long mane of white hair she kept pulled into a ponytail. She was blind and held court in her bedroom like the Empress Dowager. Whenever the family would gather at my great-aunt's house, where Mammy lived, the kids would be sent in to her room, one or two at a time, to say hello. She'd pat us on the head and give us money. I can still see her fumbling with her old leather coin purse while Bella, her hired companion, hovered nearby.

By all accounts, Mammy had not always been the sweet creature I recall. Her children and even her grandchildren remember her as vain, hot-tempered, and bossy. Not unlovable, mind you, but not the easiest woman to deal with. And she didn't like housework any more than I do. She had six kids, four of them daughters, and as soon as they were big enough to wield a mop, the girls were expected to take care of all the drudgery. My grandmother used to tell me about the day my great-grandfather decided this was not the way it ought to be. The house was in particular disarray one morning, and before he left for work he told Mammy that he expected her to clean it up. "I don't want you making those girls do it. I want YOU to do it." The day went by and, true to character, Mammy didn't turn her hand to do anything. When my great-grandfather's return was imminent, she sent my grandmother and her sister off to the dimestore to buy a bottle of cheap perfume, which she proceeded to spray all over the house. "All right then," she said, "that oughta satisfy him."

My grandmother, who was as meek as her mother was fiery, would put her hands on her hips and mimic her mother's smug look when she delivered that line. She loved this story. I love it, too, even though I wonder whether it ever happened. I have a sneaking suspicion my grandmother read it or saw it in a movie and adopted it as her own. Who could blame her? It's almost too good to be true, especially from the kids' point of view. Escape from chores and the entertainment of watching the adults try to get the best of each other? Anyone who has ever been a child has got to love that.

Whether it's true or not, the perfumista in me is delighted by the idea of perfume as a weapon of female defiance.* My grandmother never said what the perfume was, and I never thought to ask, but I've always imagined it as Blue Waltz, which was the dimestore perfume of my childhood. Amazingly enough, you can still buy Blue Waltz — it's cheap as dirt, and still comes in a little heart-shaped bottle. I don't know what the current stuff is like, but I have a bottle that's about a dozen years old, and honestly, it's not bad at all. I'm wearing it as I type this, and the scent that's wafting up to me is very similar to Canoe, with maybe a tad more spice. People spend boatloads of money on stuff that isn't half this pleasant. I'd spray it around my house any time.


*Speaking of the subversive possibilities of perfume, Barbara Herman, author of the terrific vintage perfume guide Scent & Subversion, is currently raising funds to create a new fragrance with some of that wild, retro spirit we love and miss. There are a just a few more days to contribute to her Indiegogo campaign. Check out this interview for more info on the project. I've chipped in, and I hope you'll consider doing the same. This is going to be an amazing perfume.


Room in a Dutch House, Pieter Janssens Elinga, c.1670

"To be good..."

"To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability." 

~ Oscar Wilde*



*From The Critic as Artist

Nudes, Paul Delvaux, 1946