Twenty years ago, I had an accident that caused me to lose function and feeling in my right hand. I was a kid playing ice hockey. My friend’s skate somehow hit me on the back of my wrist. I bled profusely. I had surgery and years of physical therapy. I was right-handed at the time.
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I was 11 when the accident happened, and still young, so it was possible that I would regain some sensation and motor skills, and over time, that happened. But from the moment I woke up in the hospital, it was clear that I would never again be right-handed, the surgeons told me immediately. Whether consciously or not, I would no longer be able to move around in this world relying on the dexterity and coordination of the hand I was born with (if it even worked).
The process of switching to my left hand was not quick, and in fact I would say it is ongoing. Writing. Brushing my teeth. Using silverware. Throwing darts. Tasks that I once performed mindlessly became, and to some extent still are, small problems to solve. There used to be pretty much only one way to pick up a pen, hold it, and write my name. But overnight I had to develop a new way, testing the dexterity of my left hand and exploring what felt most appropriate and comfortable. Rereading this paragraph, this process is very similar to the experience of limitation. For years I would have described it as having something and then having it taken away.
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On the first wall you see as you enter the permanent galleries on the second floor of SFMOMA, hangs a brown painting with a composition that gives the impression of pieces of wood. To me, it’s as if the artist had smashed a cello on a hardwood floor, made a semi-sculptural object with the pieces, and then painted it. The artist is Cubist innovator Georges Braque, and the painting is “Violin and Candelabra” (1910).
I live in the in-between space, the area between the singular demand of a task (write your name here) and the myriad ways to accomplish that task.
To the extent that there was a purpose attached to the development of Cubism, and thus to the earlier Cubist works of Braque and his distant collaborator Pablo Picasso, it had to do with presenting subject and form from different perspectives within a single composition. For example, the candelabra of the title of Braque’s painting can be seen in profile at the centre of the painting; we see it from the side, as we might when we enter a room and see a candelabra on a dining room table.
However, immediately behind the depiction of the candlestick, we can see its pedestal tilted upwards, as if we were looking at the object from directly below. This play of perspective allows the viewer to see, experience and think about the candlestick in different ways, and it also creates a formal dialogue between the upward-tilted pedestal (which is round) and the painting’s other major object, the violin (whose round body is discernible, albeit fragmentarily, in the bottom left corner of the composition).
The relationship between the candlestick and the violin, or at least the fragments of it that catch the viewer’s eye, evokes for me a certain lyrical association: the two forms are structurally separate, yet subtly linked by a common roundness in what can only be described as a geometric and fragmentary composition.
“The subject is not the object,” Braque writes. “It is a new unity, a lyricism that arises entirely from the means used.” Here he is speaking partly in the language of poetry, and I interpret this quote as meaning that the objects in the painting — the candlestick and the violin — what in poetry we might call the content, are less important in Cubism than how these objects relate to one another in the composition, that is, the form. I find it profound that these round shapes seem to find each other from different places in a fragmented, angular composition.
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In his book The Queer Art of Failure, cultural critic Jack Halberstam uses the term “low theory” to describe a mode of thinking that rejects dualism and “seeks to find all the in-between spaces,” a knowledge practice that “enjoys the detours and twists and turns of knowledge and confusion, and seeks to engage rather than explain.” I’m no longer right-handed, but I wouldn’t call myself left-handed either. For example, I wrote this essay with my left hand, but if I were asked to draw a circle on a canvas or a chalkboard, I’d probably use my right hand. I live in the in-between spaces, the realm between the single demand of a task (write your name here) and the myriad ways of accomplishing that task.
When I look at Braque’s painting, I immediately make the connection between the rounded upturned candlestick base and the rounded outer edge of the violin. This doesn’t mean I’m right or that it was the artist’s intention for every viewer to feel a connection between these shapes. It’s simply where my mind, my gaze, goes. Your gaze may be drawn elsewhere as you look at the painting.
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“The Violin and the Candlestick” reminds me of John Ashbery’s early love poem “Some Trees,” especially its opening lines. These are startling, each connected to the next, as if speech were a static performance. I am especially reminded of the way in which the poem’s title, the trees, become a stand-in for speech, or language, in just a few lines—the way that, by a series of rapid sound connections, the word “trees” becomes the word “speech,” or at least develops a lyric connection. Trees, these, each, speech, I hear the words evolve as we move down the page, and there is a logical gap between where we started (the trees) and where we are (speech), but there is an unconscious trust in rhyme and homophones that creates an associative relationship in the reader’s mind between two seemingly disparate words. Suddenly the intertwined trees become an expression of love, or something of love that words cannot express. It is a new sense of oneness, a lyricism that can only come from the means used.
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I’m beginning to realize that the reason I return to “Violin and Candelabra” again and again is because the act of looking at it — and not at other paintings in the same gallery, like O’Keeffe’s “Lake George” — feels like an act of creation. I am invited into the composition, to identify shapes and fragments and forms in the larger painting that beg to be seen together, to puzzle together, and to be reassembled on the canvas only I can see. In other words, I am allowed my own unique experience of art. And for similar reasons, as a reader, I am often drawn to poetry, especially those that are described as elliptical or fragmentary.
[pullqu0te]This type of art offers the experience of diversity rather than a single, linear interpretation: the question is not “Do you see?” or, in poetry, “Do you understand?”, but “What do you see?” and “What is your interpretation?”[/pullquote]
The title sequence of Ben Lerner’s third collection of poetry, Mean Free Path, which follows on from the Ashbery aesthetic, spans 34 pages across the book’s two sections, and at its heart, like “Some Trees,” is a love poem—or, at least in content and procedure, a poem that engages with or challenges the possibilities of the love poem form.
To prevent light from falling off the object
Quietly in a small clearing. They
Like rain that doesn’t reach the ground
Reading like a bird to lure predators
Virga, or out of sight
The sentences in this poem do not always start at the beginning of a line, and they rarely continue from one line to the next. Sentences disappear and stop midway, sometimes resuming later in the poem, and sometimes never returning.
For example, rain that does not fall to the ground refers to virga, a weather phenomenon, but in the poem it appears two lines down, rather than the line following its description.
Syntactically, a meteorological description is applied to the word “read,” as if to say that no single reading can “get to the ground” and bridge the gap between the poet’s creation and the reader’s interpretation.
Personally, in Lerner’s poems it sounds as if the narrator is trying again and again to formulate words proportionate to his emotions, and again and again failing, and having to summarise, and trying again.
That’s love // That’s lamentation
What the reader is left with is not a poem that moves in a linear fashion, but rather one that offers different ways of proceeding, conditions of possibility, a multiplicity of interpretations. According to Black, the aim is not to reconstruct anecdotal fact, but to construct pictorial fact. I feel invited to enter into a mean free path, to make my own associations and meanings, to jump between ideas and images that are not necessarily next to each other in the composition. In this kind of work, the eye is bound to reach; it lands where it lands.
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I can’t claim that my disability and the daily puzzles that come with it necessarily prepare me to experience the art of Black, Ashbery, or Lerner. But when the teller at the liquor store on the corner of Perkins and Grand hands me my change, I have to pause for a moment, deciding which hand to reach out to receive the money, whether I can complete the gesture without dropping the groceries I’m holding. I can say for certain that these moments, my days are little puzzles.
I feel welcomed and welcomed by a painting like “The Violin and the Candlestick” or a poem like “The Mean Free Path.” This type of art offers an experience of diversity, rather than a single, linear experience of interpretation. The question is not, “Do you see that?” or, in a poem, “Do you see it?” but, “What do you see?” and “What is your interpretation?”
I was at the store today and needed some eggs, fruit, crackers, two large bottles of soda, and a block of cheese. The cashier handed me two $1 bills and some coins. His hands were full, so he put the change on the counter. I told him he could keep it.
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Featured image: “Violin and Candelabra,” Georges Braque, SFMOMA Collection, gift of Rita B. Schreiber in memory of her husband, Taft Schreiber.