Having in some friends

              And I can speak of the disturbances
              That nature works, and of her cures;
                which doth give me
              A more content in course of true delight
              Than to be thirsty after tottering honour,
              Or tie my treasure up in silken bags,
              To please the fool and death. 



In the departure of Jupiter
from a play which Auden ad-
mits, reveals glory's short
supply, he nevertheless dis-
covers verse in bridge pas-
sages which transcend their
context. What an exact de-
piction of this language,
and of the table where it 
lavishes its least hoarded
light:


The marble pavement closes;
  he is entered
His radiant roof. Away! and,
  to be blest,
Let us with care perform his
  great behest.

              

William Shakespeare

Pericles

  III, ii

Cymbeline

  V, iv

W.H. Auden

Lectures on Shakespeare

Princeton University Press, 2000©

op. cit.

American scholar

Yes, of course, I am excited by

the totally integrated work of

art. But the truth is that there

is something far more important ..

than this unitary idea .. What I

really want from art is a variety

of qualities, a multiplicity of

qualities, a kaleidoscope of qual-

ities, the unpredictability of

qualities, qualities that are as

varied as the artists who create

the works of art. And I suspect

that when artists are shaping and

deepening and clarifying the qual-

ities that mean the most to them,

then quality in the sense of whole-

ness and oneness takes care of it-

self.

    I only wanted to see you
    Bathing in the purple rain.

  

                     When I first started out ..

                     I was most concerned with

                     freedom. Freedom to produce,

                     freedom to play all the in-

                     struments on my records, 

                     

                     freedom 

                     to say anything I wanted to.

    Such intentions, recalled
    in retrospect, were famous-
    ly, prolifically placed in
    play, and then, witnessing
    the fulfillments, we saw a
    profuseness of integrated 
    elements, mastered, which 
    awed us in Charles Chaplin.

    The education we enjoy in 

    this country, in what we

    want, lost a straight A

    student in him. Wherever

    now we do play fair, he's

    expected us. He drew us.

    

Yves Klein
Anthropometry
1961

Condé Nast
Magazine cover
2016©

i    Jed Perl

      Antoine's Alphabet

         Watteau and his world

      Knopf, 2008©

      op. cit.

ii, iii

      Prince

      2004

Arm music iv: Advantage, Sanders

  No matter:
  Mine's the road
  That leaps time,
  Till Io distract
  From the gadfly's sting,
  Came where the Nile teems,
  Her belly quick
  With the touch of Zeus ..

 

Bacchylides
Adam M. Parry
  translation
Io - for the Athenians
Yale University Press, 1961©
op. cit.

Frank Shields

Origins of Wednesday xxv: Wondrous renovations of the jersey

Oh, life is going to get
interesting, if New York
voters have their way.
Supposed irreconcilables
are going to emerge from
sprints in Cleveland on
Lake Erie, the Old Guard
behind a new champion of
forgotten glitches of as-
similation. What a differ-
ence, a stroke can make,
what a difference the cur-
rents that he churns.

  

No prey, no politics?

   Staten
   Island

and when the shepherd sees the gorgeous rays
of that great planet sinking toward its nest
and all the eastern pastures growing dark,





he rises to his feet and 
leaves the grass
and leaves the springs 
and beech trees, 
takes his crook
and gently uses 
it to move his flock;

then far from other people
he finds a hut or cave
and strews its floor
with greens
and stretches out to sleep without
a care.




Oh, cruel love ~ It's then you urge me most
to hunt the wild creature who destroys me
her voice, her spoor, her tracks;
but you don't help me catch her as she flees.

Francesco Petrarca
1304  - 1374
The Poetry of Petrarch
David Young
  translation
Canzoniere
  50
  fragment
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004©

Much ado of unseemly denial

We don't usually venture into

statistical disputation, but

a grievously prejudicial man-

ipulation of a comment by Mr

Sanders, stipulating to an

incongruous weighting of bal-

lots from demographic minor-

ities in the Primaries, from

States which cannot be won in

the Electoral College, has ex-

posed a hideously cynical ef-

fort to denounce the messenger

as racist. Krugman and Silver,

among usual paragons of stat-

istical interpretation, have

championed a sad deception,

based on a refusal to grasp

the subject: their candidate's

negative renown in States any

Democratic nominee must carry.

The complaint, that Mr Sanders

would read people out of the

Party for being useless to it,

betrays the perspective he is

challenging, of who should be

useful to whom. No one is less

useful to his opponent's can-

didacy, than its candidate.

We've already discussed the

futility of antiquity's re-

liance on demographic groups

cobbled together by the dis-

crimination they've suffered,

such as the white Southerner

in internal exile, in a year

when the subject is corrup-

tion and its maldistributions.

The old plantations of parti-

sanship are being recast, as

no one knows better than Krug-

man and Silver. 

We don't fault the rain that

brings the Spring. We fault

the window of its definition,

treasuring static droplets a-

gainst renewal's lavish pour.

People who wonder

I have friends, it should
probably be said at this
point, who get in touch to
say, What is this thing a-
bout Sanders?

It hasn't anything to do
with Sanders. It has to do
with his rising to the de-
mands of contemporary time,
to make himself available,
for people to be democrats.

This could have gone a

different way, as we've

seen, across the aisle:

the single aisle, we all

walk, on axis to the bal-

lot box. This could have

gone in the streets, as

no one needs to warn us.

But Sanders came along at

a moment when democrats

seemed ripe to be harvest-

ed as pawns, driven by a

pervasive, angry blackmail

in our time; and utilized,

at long last, to redeem a

legacy stunted by success.

He said, The way is open,

and whose fault is it, he

was the only one?

Now the parterre, most a-

ligned with the spirit of

the time, resounds chaotic

in the frolic of its heirs.

ii    Minor White
       Man with flag
       undated

iii   Sabine Weiss
       Jardin de Tuileries
       1952

Arm music iii

On his abduction by police
for incarceration, torture,
and a Stalinist show trial,
despite his loyalty to the
Party, in Costa-Gavras' 
The Confession, the charac-
ter played by Yves Montand
settled his last glimpse of
the free life upon a youth,

Running in a park. On his
descent into heart attack 
in Venice, Thomas Mann's
Aschenbach settled his fi-
nal glimpse of life upon
another at the beach, sway-
ing from umbrellas thrust
into the sand. Britten, in
that opera, structured his
ballet upon this vision.

Even I, just yesterday, in
the asphalt of a parking lot
in darkest dour Dixie, saw
a boy break from his parents
in a headlong, giddy run to
the family truck, to fling 
himself within. Think tanks, 
left and right, have bicker-
ed for that boy throughout
our lives, to no avail. He
has elation, unaccountable.

If I had known music, would
I not embody it? If it bade 
me dance, how should I not?

This characteristic strikes
to the core. We will discuss 
American politics this year,
because we have to, for mem-
ory and desire make it ours.
The characteristic lies deep-
than the trend, deeper than
tendency or temptation; and
is essentially impregnable.

Boys! No running! is a man-
tra for defeating elation.
Even against worse policy,
it is fallacy, and would
exchange certain degeneracy
for hypothetical catastrophe.
It seems we may be offered
this choice, by alignments
stifling any other.

i     Sabine Weiss
      Paris
      1956

iii   André Kertész
      New York
      1940s