Suppose it were Friday cxliv: Venturing a point of view

Partners to a quarrel have a way of proposing themselves for that purpose to each others' eyes, whom natural selection identifies, pretty well. One's acceptance is only slightly less predictable. Had the photographer seen the gaping mouth formed by the elbow, holding the umbrella, as a cry of pain from the hatcheting fender and license plate behind, or was the precision of the parallel borders of black above not arranged to frame the extended neck so perfectly? The purpose of the quarrel is to displace acute considerations of quite another kind, to a field agreed upon for the familiarity, the security of its footing. Chaos, however, looks on with all the opportunism of any player, alert to the other's vision.

Ralph Gleason
photograph
1954

Pablo Picasso
Guernica
1937

Jegor Venned
2017

Origins of Wednesday lx: Hurry, now, to drain the silo

  Forasmuch as God hath showed
  thee all this, there is none
  so discreet and wise as thou
  art ..

 

  In a hot and rapine haste
  to grab, now, tax reform
  for their pleasure - to
  empty every silo of the
  Treasury for their own
  revolting fattening - a
  Party in precarious pow-
  er in the United States
  have suppressed an erst-
  while proclivity to hec-
  tor us from sacred texts.
  To what remission of de-
  lusional pride are we to
  ascribe this omission?

  Alabama? 

  Who could have expected
  such modesty among the
  great, as to resemble a
  carelessness to compare
  with Pharaoh's butler?

The Leader of this flimsy

hegemony in the Senate has

opined that Alabama's new

Senator could not possibly

be seated - what with all

that must be done these

days - until some distant

date which must convenient-

ly follow the pending rape

of future generations. And

how baffling this is, may

be measured in the Presid-

ent's certitude, that the

new Senator would aid it.

ii  Comme des Garçons

Alabama goes voting

All that was missing from the Fauve master, Louis Valtat's depiction of the President's great rally for Alabama of last week-end, was the pointillist sea of little red hats. 

How well the swooning basses mimed the maestro's anguished spine, the brasses and the drums arrayed to let the true faith shine. 

To each his own mode, I suppose, 
of delineating the pendancy of a
great moment. Valtat painted the
alternative interpretation, him-
self, to the aroused, fused, and
thundering mass in his orchestra
canvas: the other state, so to
speak, of mind enacted in the
same great moment, of voting. We
have a President who relies upon
the one, and a culture cognizant
of the other. Each of his canvas-
es gives us the glimpse into the
aspirations of the act, indeed
their wellspring, which marks it
as subject to the greatest vari-
ation. Now we test the power of
privity, to counsel this conduct.
I do not believe any Alabamans
are impervious to the finer sec-
rets of this moment, their own.

Louis Valtat

1869 - 1952

The orchestra

ca 1922

Boy drawing

1914

Matthew Holt

  Sara Reverberi, photography

    

Shaving fair

A problem with being willing
to confess to permitting one-
self a degree of enjoyment in
poetic imagery, not fully ad-
apted to that pleasure, is a
reputation to which this can
give rise, of unfairness to
the work of art. I find I am
habitually unfair to the work
of Anne Carson in this way,
and it's not much exoneration
to confess, she is not alone.

And one does like exoneration.
It's just not why I read her.
I find a music in her phrases
I could not exchange for any
glossary, any rosetta stone.

Some may call one to surren-
der naïve belief, given the
catastrophe pending from it
every day, by cruel design.
What evangelic genius is at
work, to serve such scorn?

          It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

          Polarity

                  means

                        plus or

                                minus

                        total

          night.

          Penguins topple like astonished dice

          But

              New York

                      barbers are good

                 on

          ice.

          Morning swings in a moonsplashed hole

          Time 

               zones

                     jam together

                                  at

                               the

          pole.

          His scissors blaze on open black water

          She

              likes

                    the

                        quiet she

                                  may

                          be

                     his

          daughter.

          "Whatsoever of it has flown away is past.

          Whatsoever remains is future."

             (Augustine, Confessions, XI)

Anne Carson

Men in the Off Hours

  The Barber Shop

op. cit.

Random House, 2000©

Louren Groenewald

Johannes Westerwald

Bettina duToit, photography