ALONE WAKEFUL

 58 of #100daychallenge

"The larger story of the intersection of commerce and the popular arts, within which history sits, is not a wholly negative one, but it does have a specific shape. High moments in popular art begin when no one has cracker the commercial code sufficiently to know what will work—will an Einstein cartoon take off?—and a proliferation of possibilities becomes available, including, above all, the possibility of open-ended, unkempt emotion. This proliferation of possibilities happened with pop music in the late sixties, with American film in the early 70s, and with long-form television in the first decade of this century. A receptive audience, a plurality of artists, and the basic commercial uncertainty about what works or what can be made to work, and presto, you get "Sgt. Pepper" and "The Godfather"; then someone cracks the code of commerce and you get "Frampton Comes Alive!" and "Smokey and the Bandit."

The good stuff never disappears, but it does subside. We are living through a moment subsidence now. Flexibility of form meets the certainties of commerce. Damned. up, the flow of commerce. Damned up, the flow of creative energy retreats, re-forms, finds a new opening, and starts to flow again. ... All art aspires to the condition of music, a wise man said once, and perhaps all cultural history aspires to be the condition of cartooning: a seeming fluidity of movement, made up of countless small stops and starts."

— Adam Gopnick, Hot-Ice-Cream Dreams: The Marvellously Mix-up Masters of Early Animated Cartoons, The New Yorker, 12/28/20

Sorry about. yesterday. I just couldn't. The black dog, or maybe just the black puppy, had ahold of me. I couldn't do much of anything save for watch bodice ripper television (The White Princess ... not as bad as it could have been at all) and work on my needlepoint. At one point the Queen tells someone to "Pick up some embroidery, Margaret. It soothes the mind." And it rather does.

Hours and hours and stitches and stitches later ...

I was finally able to tear myself away from the needlepoint hypnosis. I have been commenting that I needed a bit of a break and so these last two or three days have rather felt like I had a bit of one I binge watched The White Queen AND The White Princess. It's a wonder I am not writing with an English accent. I suppose The Spanish Princess is next and then I can re-watch Wolf Hall. Funny that I don't know what the hell I am going to do with this piece when I am done with it. Somewhere floating around is another finished piece I probably finished in the seventies. 

I cannot continue to indulge myself in this manner, although it is likely preferable to drinking too much wine or plant shopping on line. I need to get the laundry I have desultorily been doing actually put away and finish some other tasks along the lines of finishing cleaning the bathroom and vacuuming. So quotidienne. I also got my last batch of Spring bulbs (Dahlias) and I should get them planted while it is still Spring.

The Gopnick quote speaks for itself. I do wonder what the next artistic flowering will be ... or maybe a new strain of great music is just around the corner. One can hardly argue that sixties were neither the first nor likely the last time we will see so much great music. Nothing could dislodge the sixties loyalty of the baby boomers.

EARLINESS AT THE CAPE

The color of silence is the oyster’s color

Between the lustres of deep night and dawn.

Earth turns to absence; the sole shape’s sleeping

Light—a mollusk of mist. Remote,

A sandpit hinges the valves of that soft monster

Yawning at Portugal. Alone wakeful, lanterns

Over a dark hull to eastward mark

The tough long pull, hidden, the killing

Work, hidden, to feed a hidden world.

Muteness is all. Even the greed of the gulls

Annulled, the hush of color everywhere

The hush of motion. This is the neap of the blood,

Of memory, thought, desire; if pain visits

Such placelessness, it has phantom feet.

What is physical is lost here in ignorance

Of its own being. That solitary boat,

Out fishing, is a black stroke on vacancy.

Night, deaf and dumb as something from the deeps,

Having swallowed whole bright yesterday, replete

With radiance, is gray as abstinence now.

But in this nothingness, a knife point: pleasure

Comes pricking: the hour’s pallor, too, is bladed

Like a shell, and as it opens, cuts.

— Babette Deutsch, Poetry Magazine, August, 1938