28 May 2020. Ulica Glogera.
Urgent need to begin again. Desperate even, after two days solid dealing with outside matters (contractors, the city, the beautiful oak tree in back--all vis a vis my very decent neighbors, but still, but still..). All resolved this morning--quite amazing, really--and I sat down to begin a drawing. But the pull of the everyday kept interceding...
So, there I am (above) reaching out again--is it for a place to start (as in today) or for all time? Always the sense that somehow I intend both. You can't hold your arms like this without invoking duration. Maybe it's because a friend queried me recently about final things, and of course I turned once more to the story of Jewish midwives in Egypt, the word hayot, which I always think of as meaning alive. (It's a one-time occurrence--hapax legomenon--so meaning depends on context.) Vigorous, perhaps. Full of vitality. A matter of focus--where one wants to look...
Then the figure with suitcase appeared. From Poland, inevitably, which means it's also me. Ulica Glogera, one of the streets I lived on in Warsaw--in Ochota, an old neighborhood--and a quick look shows that there are views even today that appear much the same...
I wasn't really thinking about this--the point being to get a drawing going, the flow of association matching the movement of the lines, the erasures, which are what tell me, finally, what the drawing means, (towhee, always)--but it's a beautiful early summer day here-- the warm air, light breeze--same feeling as when I'd walk out of the apartment in Warsaw fifty years ago--an old structure, pre-War--onto the leafy street, set in an arc, with paving stones, beautifully detailed facades--playing Supraphone Corelli on my Czech phonograph (I still have the album) which felt so appropriate and true...
And now all these times have merged, layered together--but each detail remains distinct, distinct...
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Reading late last night--one of David Hinton's new versions of Tu Fu. He's eliminated all the rhetoric, it seems--just the images from the poems, juxtaposed, set in a world of ancient China. His world, I should say, in the way he repeatedly reaches for that connection. But I'll go with him in this. The vision is too valuable---the cosmos enjoined...even if in part his own...
