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Planetary Motions
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Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
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Wednesday, May 1, 2019

Hitchhiking


     I recall with considerable nostalgia the feeling of free-floating liberation while standing by the side of the road hitchhiking, studying perhaps for a considerable time the rocks at one’s feet, the café across the street, and the householder emerging from her door every five minutes or so, waiting for someone to arrive or just keeping tabs on me. Somehow, casting oneself to the mercy of chance, pretending for the moment to need nothing at all except the lift which cannot fail to carry the rider to the next experience.
     The decline of hitchhiking in the last fifty years surely signals a more general loss of cooperative spirit and a corresponding increase in suspicion and fear. Whereas people had once shared their vehicles in return for a social encounter, a chance at conversation, a chance to do a good turn to a stranger, they now think only of the chance of crime. I acknowledge that this possibility does exist, that either driver or rider might pose a potential threat to the other. Indeed I know someone who was killed while camping by the road alongside a man to whom he had given a ride. Yet prudence need not always mandate behavior.
     In my youth hitchhiking was commonplace. At key intersections there might be several travelers at once thumbing rides. Sometimes a handy telephone pole carried the comments of those awaiting a ride. College students and servicemen outnumbered drifters, I think, most of the time, but everyone moved on in the end, even the couples, even those with dogs. In the opening scene of Morris’s utopian News from Nowhere, a pleasant ferryman, brother to all, offers the narrator a ride, not for a fee, but freely in a spirit of loving cooperation. In the same way some years ago, “back in the day,” to use today’s idiom, a driver, incurring no loss and possibly gaining worthwhile conversation as well as a performing a mitzva, simply pulled over and inquired, “Where are you headed?” There is an entire visionary possibility implied in that gesture.
     I hitchhiked to college, though my parents sensibly offered to drive me to the train. Later I made what was called “autostop” in Europe and Africa where hitchhiking enjoyed a vogue sufficient to inspire pop songs by Karin Stenek in Poland, Anna Vissi and the Epikouri in Greece, and Patty Pravo in Italy, among many others. When I lived in San Francisco, owning no car, I set off on camping trips with my wife and daughter by thumb, and for years kept a permanent sign saying Berkeley on one side and S.F. on the other.
     I recall only one time that I really regretted accepting a ride. On our way to the Copper Canyon in northern Mexico, my wife, my daughter, and I enjoyed a day on a beach just outside of Guaymas. It was a place of marvels with shallow and calm water extending for several hundred feet, clear as glass, with plenty of fish and sea stars and other life. When we were ready to return to our hotel in town, we were gratified when a friendly car with several teenaged boys stopped almost immediately. It was not until we had seated ourselves, with a bit of crowding, that I noticed the youths were passing pints of tequila. I declined. The driver accelerated to an alarming speed. Fortunately, the distance was short and the danger soon past.
     I did, however, like all hitchhikers, meet many people of sorts I would have been otherwise unlikely to encounter. As a suburban kid, for me even encounters with friendly truck drivers, who might buy a stranger a cup of coffee, were novel, but some of the people I met were a bit more unsettling. More than once, gay men made a play for me. I recall one suited man in a huge car with sample cases in the back seat saying to me with a tired smile, “I’m a screw salesman, you see.” No one in my experience was any ruder than that.
     I did run into some nasty political sentiments, though. I once got a lift from a German immigrant who explained to me that Hitler was in fact a benevolent and heroic leader who had perhaps gone too far in his chastising of the Jews. It was only twenty years after the war, and I had never heard anyone speak favorably about Nazism. In southern Illinois a driver correctly pegged me as a college student and began playing redneck, baiting me with racist comments. He told me that a local drugstore still sold postcards of a lynching that had happened long ago, and his tone implied that those were the good old days. It was an occasion to keep one’s mouth shut.
     The joy I recall, though, was far simpler than meeting cranks and characters. Exhilaration arose from simply standing on the road’s shoulder, drifting with the river of time, for the moment like a mendicant monk, willing to accept whatever happened while wandering. Whatever the weather, whatever one’s luck, this sensation was unfailing.
     Hitchhiking had begun early in the history of automobiles when ownership of a motorcar was rare. Vachel Lindsay describes hitching in his 1914 Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Surely the peripatetic jobseekers of the Depression vastly multiplied the number of people on the road, pushing the practice toward acceptability, and the servicemen seeking free transport during the war made giving rides patriotic. The heyday of the custom may well have been the late forties and early fifties, when On the Road made hitching hip and attracted travelers who perhaps could afford other modes of transportation but who preferred the romance and adventure of thumbing.
     By then, however, the nations’ interstate highway system was developing, and along with it the tendency of police authorities to frown on hitchhikers. From forbidding walking along the divided roadway, to bans on standing on entrance ramps, to a crackdown on hitchhiking anywhere, police who had always cast a dim eye on transients had an excuse to hassle people, searching them for dope and the like.
     This judicial suppression coincided with an increase in paranoia and a greatly increased suspicion of strangers, leading many to fear that hitchhiking must be associated with crime. In fact, though, this notion is simply untrue. The most comprehensive study of the question done during a period when hitchhiking was still common (the California Highway Patrol’s 1974 California Crimes and Accidents Associated with Hitchhiking) concluded “the results of this study do not show that hitchhikers are over represented in crimes or accidents beyond their numbers.” Prejudiced notions care little for evidence.
     Not only were hitchhikers subject to harassment from police; they also found far fewer people willing to give them a lift. In addition, car ownership had become almost universal, even among the poorer strata of American society, so those driven to hitching by necessity were not only small in number; they were also more likely to be oddballs or drunks or simply smelly.
     The Wobblies’ preamble states that they mean to form “the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” They felt they had a fix on what society should be like and they tried to make effective actions along that trajectory even while living under a predatory system that rewards only greed. In the sixties many felt that they, too, had glimpses of how to build an alternative arrangement based on cooperation and, dare I say, love, and they sought to realize these ideals with free stores, cooperative nursery schools, and food clubs, as well as political organizing in the era during which the Living Theatre raised the slogan “Paradise Now!” And hitchhiking surely has a place in paradise. The decay of hitchhiking is a symptom of the fragmentation of the human family. Our species, which gained its evolutionary advantage through cooperation, has unfortunately narrowed its sympathies, and we, are in my opinion, the poorer for it.

A Play and an Exhibit in the City



I. Glenda Jackson’s Lear

One enters the Cort Theatre on 48th Street to see King Lear beneath a poster with a blurb from a review proclaiming Glenda Jackson the greatest actor in the world. One can hardly blame promoters for superlatives, but many who attend, I would guess, return to the midtown scene ready to second that judgement. The king dominates the stage in a way truly regal.

Her performance includes at times all Lear’s imperious authority, albeit often in rags and tatters. She cackles and roars, rolls her “r”s in aggressive emphasis, only to project confusion the next moment with the purest pathos, and then recoil in proud irony before turning finally to utter tenderness. Jackson’s primary instrument is her masterful manipulation of voice, all the while maintaining perfect clarity. For over three and a half hours attention is riveted on the voice (and the movements) of the star.

Since the language is inevitably by far the strongest element of a Shakespeare production, one is grateful for Ms. Jackson’s masterful delivery. In this show in particular a slightly weaker lead would make even more noisy (if not intrusive) the direction by Sam Gold. The female Lear (and Gloucester) create no issue as both perform effectively in a manner that does not raise issues of gender; the most traditional of critics would have been pleased. That’s all very well, as is the casting of black actors, including the excellent John Douglas Thompson as Kent and, in a less demanding role Ian Lassiter as King of France.

The Duke of Cornwall, played by the deaf Russell Harvard, is another matter. Michael Arden, in the added role of his aide, translates the dialogue into American Sign Language for him and speaks Cornwall’s own lines after receiving them in ASL. Yet the signs could hardly be useful to hearing-impaired audience members as Cornwall is, of course, not on stage at all times. Thus Gold created a highly distracting business which adds nothing whatever to the characterization. I suppose it gains him a few extra credits on some multicultural rating board somewhere, but it seemed to weaken Cornwall’s scenes. The fact that he appears in a kilt does not help either (though I am aware that Cornish kilt enthusiasts do exist).

The rest of the production was able to quite keep pace with its star. Sean Carvajal’s Edgar is on point. Jayne Houdyshell’s Glouchester is affecting and convincing. Cordelia and the fool are admirably represented by Ruth Wilson. I thought that Pedro Pascal in the role of Edmund sometimes adopted odd and ineffective, though clearly deliberate, phrasing that for me vitiated some powerful lines. I thought Aisling O’Sullivan as Regan sounded peculiar, as though her alliance with a deaf man had somehow refracted her own speech. (Hilton Als in The New Yorker points out that each of the daughters unaccountably speaks in a different accent: Irish, English, American.)

The music by Philip Glass was often effective, particularly in playing up the sentiment, though it seemed at time adventitious. Miriam Buether’s gilded set, clearly meant to suggest the obsession with wealth in contemporary America and its foremost exponent, a bizarre president. The temptation was understandable, but unfortunately the analogy between Lear and Trump is not only very imperfect. Worse, as far as it goes, the comparison serves to weaken our sympathy for a king who cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, while Shakespeare’s play is all about cultivating sympathy and love.



II. Hilma af Klint

There can be no question that the “Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future” show at the Guggenheim took the city by storm. The talk of the town for months, the exhibit set an attendance record for the museum, led to a thirty-four per cent increase in memberships and set the cash registers in the shop to ringing. Her story, by now familiar, is compelling. An accomplished painter within the conventions of her time, she privately painted abstractions (as understood in early twentieth century European art) when no one else was doing so and then asked that these innovative works be withheld from exhibition until twenty years after her death. As it happens, she did not receive a one-woman show until 1988 – a wait of forty years. Prior to that her paintings had received their first modern exhibition in the 1986 Los Angeles County Museum of Art show that might from its title have centered on her: “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985.” At the present time it does her no harm as well that she was a occultist who, with four other women, sought spiritual advancement through courting spirits in séances and the like. Her backstory in itself is irresistible.

Perhaps reacting a bit against this enthusiasm, I had been slightly skeptical about the show and did not attend until the last day when those without passes waited for hours to enter galleries packed to the maximum. All the noise about her superseding Kandinsky (or Mondrian or Malevich or one or both of the Arps) as the first abstractionist seemed to me to ignore the evident fact that abstract art has always existed; in fact, simple lines and forms precede the lovely naturalism of the best-known palaeolithic painting. Then there is Muslim art and all the rest. Secondly, her version of occult spirituality involving communication with the dead as well as a roster of “higher masters” holds for me little appeal. The current vogue for magic and the occult, I thought, might be magnifying a curiosity into a significant artist. Further, the recovery of previously neglected female artists, while overdue and salutary, is not infallibly rewarding.

I did make it to the show on the very last day, in part because I had heard so many acquaintances rave about its power, and I found myself immediately convinced. At the beginning from the bottom one comes first to a set of the Paintings for the Temple she believed she had been commissioned to create by Gregor, her spirit guide. Despite being a practicing Lutheran, she apparently felt that her abstractions would bring people’s consciousness upward toward the divine. Whether that occurs or not I cannot say, but for me it is sufficient that I was struck with wonder at the first group, a series of large canvases named for life’s stages from conception to old age. Especially because of the size the work was overwhelming.

Before going, I had the wrong impression, based on a few images in reviews that af Klint’s designs were largely symmetrical and perhaps a bit stolid. As everyone who has seen the show knows, I was altogether mistaken. These paintings (and many of the rest) were energetic, almost effervescent with a generally light palette, sometimes close to pastel, filled with circles and curves and organic forms. Simply to see them suggested no simple joy but a sort of elated and majestic gravity, like looking through a powerful microscope or telescope and the workings of the cosmos. Gazing at the large images, one felt uplifted. They were even pretty without conceding profundity.

This initial sight of perhaps the most powerful group in the show was profound. The artist claimed to have made these works not only at the behest of someone beyond and above, but without the intervention of her own will. They were, according to her, automatic paintings of the sort the Surrealists began to talk about several years later and in the end talked about more often than actually executed . Though af Klint later assumed more conscious control of her work, she retained an extraordinarily visionary quality in later works.

Though many of her forms are highly expressive without resembling anything identifiable, there are certain recurring symbols such as astrological signs and representational motifs such as the snail forms and the swans. I, for one, would have appreciated translations of the words and phrases that sometimes appear. Such hermeneutic “anchors” provide useful bases for reading the images, but for me the primary reaction was affective, a sort of poised elation, a sense that one has glimpsed with af Klint, even if only vaguely and intuitively and at second hand, the workings of the universe.

Art can do no more. It need not distract us if the Guggenheim is doing a brisk business in ouija boards, tarot cards, and a beginner's guide to astrology "for the modern mystic.” A visitor may or may not accept the use of the word “mystic” there, but the show itself has not been oversold. This is the real thing. The exhibit is less important, though, for its occult educational value or its rewriting of the art history of the opening of the twentieth century than it is for inherent value. These are powerful paintings which provide the viewer immediate pleasure and invite extended study.

In case anyone is looking for a sign from the Beyond for the show’s rightness, it happens that af Klint described visitors to the visionary temple of her imagination as ascending a spiral ramp to the apex of Ultimate Reality which, of course, is precisely the design of the Guggenheim.


Coleridge’s Dialectic of Art


Unattributed quotations are from Coleridge’s essay “On Poesy or Art.”


     Art has been variously conceived as entirely self-justifying, as a tool for the cultivation of a more refined sensibility, as a source of specific truths leading to greater insight or ethical standards, and as pure pleasure, either through the contemplation of aesthetic forms or through the experience of emotion. Coleridge in his essay “On Poesy or Art” proposes several of these possibilities, but then proceeds to outline a dialectic view of art’s potential that goes beyond art for art’s sake, delight, and instruction, which aims in fact at nothing less than enlightenment. [1] His theory, while striking, is muddled, in particular by the intrusion of religious doctrines suggested not by his topic but by the norms of his day.
     Coleridge uses the term “poesy” to refer to all the arts, not just verse or literature. Without considering the complicating cases of music or the abstract elements of plastic art, he accepts, though only as a starting point, the traditional definition of art as imitation. For him no simple imitation, regardless of how perfect it might be, could suffice for art. In fact he concludes that the failures of imitation are in a sense more significant than its successes.
     A pure mimesis in Coleridge’s terminology, adapted most directly from Spinoza, [2] would be natura naturata, “nature natured,” the creation considered as a passive finished product. He contrasts this inferior product to true art, natura naturans, “nature naturing.” This expression well summarizes Coleridge’s view of the role of art, but his usage allows no simple paraphrase.
     Art for him “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man” since it “humanizes” nature “infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything.” “It avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind.” What is added, then, to nature itself is the maker’s affect and inferences so that the art object registers not the external in itself, but always refracted through the consciousness of the poet or painter. As “Frost at Midnight” makes clear, nature is for Coleridge altogether passive in this communion with the individual. [3]
     Yet the artist does not merely represent the data of the world as lived experience, inspirited by human desire and intuition. The chaos of sense data is ordered to be beautiful and, as the cosmos becomes more patterned, significant, and intelligible, beauty, value, truth, and meaning arise. “While it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul.”
     The relation was sufficiently distinctive for Coleridge to generate the neologism eisemplasy (or esemplasy) and to revive the rare coadunation. [4] Throughout the essay the point is repeated in various forms. Art “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man.” “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal.” “This unity in multeity I have elsewhere stated as the principle of beauty.” “The mystery of genius in the fine arts” is “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”
     Since the two individuals, the creator and the consumer of art actively seek to make sense of the phenomenological world, while they employ images recorded by their perception, which provide the raw material and the occasion for their, still their conclusions are their own. Preferring a divine origin for his impressions, Wordsworth had maintained in “Intimations of Immortality” following older Platonic and neo-Platonic writers, that one’s highest wisdom, one’s connection to the cosmos, is originally inborn. Coleridge maintains the same access to a prenatal Truth for his own insights. “I seem rather to be seeking, as it were, asking, a symbolical language for something within me, that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.” [5] The use of the word “asking” reveals the author’s awareness that this inborn wisdom of surpassing importance is based on his desire rather than any evidence.
     That “something within” is neither more nor less than the mystical correspondence, amounting almost to identity, between inner and outer, idem et alter, psyche and world, mortal and divine. Pursuit of that goal requires that the passions, rather than being suppressed, be cultivated. Only through the individual consciousness can the greater be accessed. Rather than striving to reproduce a second-rate reality (as Plato had it) the artist in fact delineates the gap or difference between what one might very nearly call the atman and the Atman. Paradoxically, according to Coleridge’s schema, it is by spotlighting the very limitations of humanity’s perceptive organs and the insufficiency of the mind as it tries to grasp the nut of reality that the individual may solve the dilemma of dualities and mend the divided consciousness.
     The element of order may be clear in the aesthetic object, while the events of everyday life may seem to proceed chaotically or randomly. Art makes the order of the cosmos perceptible. “Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.” [6]
     Art operates, then, through difference and dialectic, playing what is seen without against what is felt within. “Philosophically we understand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates.” This relation is inevitable since, when Coleridge says, “the primary art is writing,” he does not mean to privilege verbal art over others. What he means by “writing” is sign-making. Coleridge recognizes the gap between signifier and signified that is present in all representations of reality, though it is obvious in the difference between inked words on a paper page representing certain sounds and the objects to which these symbols correspond.
      The novelty of Coleridge’s rhetoric lies in his insistence on denying strict mimesis. “Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fullness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or color; but this is the highest, the apex only—it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole ad hominem; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos.” For him the highest revelation would be clear as water or air, empty as a void. By including human desire one muddies but thereby enriches the water, churning up ideas images, attitudes, fears, and hopes that would resolve into nothingness from the eternal viewpoint.
     Coleridge belies the pellucid nature of Reality which he correctly notes must lack all attributes through his prejudice in favor of a moral order. Art he claims not only resolves the multifarious elements of the observed world into a single coherent system, it also “stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.” The skeptic might wonder from whence arose this morality, but for Coleridge “the fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast.” For him the contemplation of beauty involves the processing of “images, totalized and fitted to the limits of the human mind, [so] as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate.”
     The idea that the moral sense is entangled with the idea of beauty is, like Coleridge’s Christianity as a whole, a matter of faith. (Within the churches, this is, of course an orthodox position.) For him, “to the idea of life victory or strife is necessary; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty.” The moral element is not, however, in reality essential to every case of the dialectic of art. Just as life is struggle, drama requires conflict, and we become ourselves through work and struggle, learning through suffering, art, too is generated in conflict but morality may or may not play a role.
     At times Coleridge defines the tension required for art in a formal, structural way that seems quite independent of ethics. “The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it, and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast.”
     Apart from the miraculous appearance of morality in the soul and the art, Coleridge’s theory is limited by its reductiveness. There may be countless ways for the work to imply the sort of denial of duality that for Coleridge constitutes a window into profundity, but the result is always much the same. While this may be quite true, it views all great art as essentially similar and all themes as one. Particularities of form or image may play a role in this omnipresent idea, but their specific implications are lost in taking the grandest view, which, though it may not be wrong, necessarily ignores all the others.
     Coleridge was motivated by his sense of mortality, poignantly suggested by the dramatically eloquent closing passage on the unavoidable physical decline of the individual. “And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth: thence onward the body is first simply indifferent; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature.“ The use of the word “excremental,” when speaking of the flesh, sounds almost monk-like.
     He devised an escape route from this inevitable decay of the flesh in the pursuit of beauty. The faith that art can vault the spirit into the empyrean provided an alternative to nihilism that bolstered Coleridge’s troubled Christianity. Yet he sought to root this doctrine in Plato rather than Christ. “The life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect.”
     A personal god is necessary if one is to see intelligence and intentionality in nature as he did. Man’s creativity and god’s are much the same for him. “The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execution.” God is equally required for his belief in some sort of inborn conscience. Though he roamed about the heights of German philosophy and flirted with atheism before conducting an affair with Unitarianism, he settled down with a sort of liberal Anglicanism. He often preferred to sound Platonic as in this passage. “What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely (formosum) with the vital.” Never quite comfortable with conventional religion, yet unable to do without it, Christianity often appears as here as an implicit subtext.
     Coleridge’s essay claims that the knowledge one gains from art is not dependent on the specific data used in a picture or poem, or even in the new perspective that understanding another’s vision can bring. For him the principal value of the beautiful is that it can resolve contradictions and thus bring a person to enlightenment through realizing the identity of inward and outward, divine and human. He means something very close to the Vedantic “Tat tvam asi” though the concept exists in a number of traditions. This is the bold portion of his thesis. These provocative speculations on art’s power to effect a dramatic alteration of consciousness are weakened by his wish to cling to an anthropomorphic deity who like an artist designed the universe and instilled in humanity a conscience. Through his own polemics with himself, through the contradictions he felt in his own life and thought, through mental wandering, he proposed an aesthetic that can enrich our own semi-blinded blundering in the direction of what seems to be truth.






1. The influence of German philosophy on these thoughts has been, it seems, more studied than the thoughts themselves. My intention here is to consider only Coleridge’s assertions, ignoring sources and influences, though Schelling’s lectures on The Philosophy of Art before and certain recent strains of postmodernism after are clearly related.

2. The expression was originally used by the medieval Scholastics. For Spinoza nature is substantially equivalent to god (Deus sive Natura). See Ethic, Proposition 29, scholium to Part I.

3. Even in the first published text, Coleridge calls the idea that nature is actively “giving” its sympathy to the individual an “idle thought.” In his later revision he is more insistent yet that “the idling Spirit” seeking “an echo or a mirror” of itself is making “a toy of Thought.”

4. The first was his own coining, the second, though rare, is recorded by the OED since 1558. Esemplasy was a translation of Schelling’s own neologism “Ineinsbildung.”

5. Notebooks ii.2546

6. This quantitative stress at the end, which makes the artist sound like a juggler trying to keep a large number of objects in the air at once, is misplaced.