Encounter Last Day of Year 2013

Encounter Last Day of Year 2013

It seems not a particular or special day of the year this New Year's Eve as I work in my studio. There have been few tourists in our Canyon Road shop.  Those visiting the numerous galleries on Santa Fe's Art and Soul walk seem primarily interested in the ambiance, not serious study of works on exhibit.   I note their interest in the adobe structures, the gardens, outdoor displays of seasonal holiday decorations, and, as always, the colorful transients, dog-walkers, skateboarders, cyclists and exhibitionist-strollers who come from all over town to Do The Road. We're not in Kansas anymore.

Out studio/gallery being the one longest in business on the Road (founded 1956), and I at 90 likely its oldest artist-owner, I'm accustomed to its various moods and changes, adept, I think, at evaluating interest or sales possibilities from the out-of-staters and foreigners who cross the threshold. One of the biggest challenges is not to give too much time to the many people who want to speak to the artist him/or herself, not a gallery director. Especially one so long in the tooth who can spin stories of an unpaved residential Canyon Road before it exploded into the famed Art Colony of today.

 

A few uninterrupted hours this afternoon furnished hours for considerable paper work, including the start of year-end reports for inventories, gross-receipts taxes, etc. Tasks resented for the time they steal from creative stabs at drawing, clay-modeling, manuscripts. And the tasks today, paging through calendar months, inevitably had me reviewing sober events of 2013 -- Ben Ghazi, the Obamacare debacle, our divided Congress, my own painful convictions that the news media cannot be trusted, that our politicians, indeed Washington itself, has betrayed us. Refuge from such drear thinking came as ever in the arts -- I opened streaming music on the computer, listened to opera as I worked, and was delighted to hear my canary Giorgio lustily accompany the tuneful arias!

 

Shortly before closing time, a man and woman came into the shop and I immediately detected an accent. Not Italian, French, Spanish or anything that I could determine. Risking conversation about anything other than exhibited work, I asked the gentleman if he were from Europe. Yes, Belgium. And of course I had to add that I'd been to his country, liked it very much, had made friends with its citizens. He wanted to know which areas I'd seen, and when I mentioned the Ardennes, studied me attentively. I saw his youthful eyes take in my silvered hair, the shawl giving warmth to bent shoulders, the cane on which I leaned. "World War II? The Bulge?" he asked. When I conceded, he impulsively crossed the room, swept me into his arms and muttered "Thank you, thank you very much."

 

Not much more was said before he and his companion departed. But I've wondered since how a person so young -- he couldn't have been forty, and was trembling with emotion as he embraced me -- would have exceptionally strong feelings about the horrors in his country which he'd never seen. Stories told by grandparents? History teachers? A fine farewell to 2013, afterall, this spontaneous gesture to we elders who often feel that the indelible world events of the 20th century which we experienced are irrelevant to today's youth. I am grateful to the stranger from Belgium who ended my year with the recognition and acknowledgment we frail humans desire. 

 

 

THE SOUND

 

Among the visitors to my studio this April 2013 was a man from Colorado requesting that I tell his female companion "the vision you wrote about more than 10 years ago." It took me long minutes remembering to what he was referring. When I did, I refused to try recalling or speaking those written words; and silenced his insistent urging by firmly stating that I've always preferred to write rather than speak about exceptionally personal experiences. He asked if I had copies of the newspaper in which the essay had appeared and if so could I possibly send him a duplicate. I wasn't sure I'd find a copy among decades of voluminous files, but the next day did a search.

 

Originally published as First Place Non-Fiction under the title The Sound in The Santa Fe Reporter's Writing Contest Edition, 5 December 2000, the feature had wide distribution and gained enthusiastic response. But, like most works of the past, I'd put it behind me, moved on. The Colorado man's request prompted finding copies, one of which I'll forward to him. And share with new readers of the Social Network.

 

* * *





 

As a child of the Great Depression, I often sought escape from that impoverished world by resisting surrender of sleep and dreams -- fantasies -- in the early mornings. Better in the pre-dawn to lie abed, listen to the chirping of birds or to my mother softly singing to herself in the kitchen as she prepared modest breakfasts and bag-lunches, to the chugs of nearby trains or the distant moans of foghorns from the Chesapeake. Why rise to another day of streets crowded with unemployed gruff elders, schoolmates in tatters, dire radio newscasts and newspaper headlines one couldn't fully understand, the relentless need to earn pennies which drove children to after-school and Saturday odd jobs?

 

I shared a room with a bachelor uncle, his large bed at right angles to my cot wedged into a wall niche. The uncle was one of the fortunate ones: employed, working in a waterfront market as a butcher, essential to our family for the meats and fresh produce he frequently brought home from the job, paying modest rent to my parents. A chain-smoker, the acrid scent of cigarettes reliably betrayed his approach to our room in the wee hours following his nightly rounds about town. Fortunately, as I was often at a forbidden vice, reading instead of sleeping, off in realms of adventure, fantasy, far-away-places-with-strange-sounding-names, heroes and heroines, the initial intoxicating discoveries of great books and sustaining literature. The smell of an approaching cigarette gave me time to douse the shaded bed-lamp, secure that my nocturnal misconduct would not be reported to my mother. When Dumas, Defoe or Dickens so engrossed me that I failed to detect the oncoming cigarette, I could anticipate Mother's greeting in the morning -- "Your uncle says you're ruining your eyes reading all night again."

 

Despite late hours, my uncle was a hard worker and early riser, his first cigarette of the day and ritual hustlings more often than not shattering the dream -- or daydream -- I'd been enjoying. With closed eyes, I followed his movements by the sounds of his actions, the coughs, the traipsing back and forth to bathroom, the snapping of buttons and buckles, the innumerable tonal accompaniments to his fastidious wardrobe -- finally, his tread down the stairs, the slam of the back door, the engine of his car in which he took such pride and which was the envy of the neighborhood. And only then I had the room to myself, luxuriated in the privacy and in those beguiling strains of birdsong, train whistles, foghorns, the city slowly stirring to life.

 

But one morning, even before my uncle rose, I was aware of a new and different sound, unlike anything I'd ever heard before. It wasn't Mother in the kitchen downstairs singing along with the canary, my most cherished wake-up call until then. It wasn't music, nor words, wasn't the wind or rain or any other natural beat of tempo I well knew. Wasn't of this world. And was incredibly, infinitely beautiful, flooding me with total peace, purity, happiness. Acutely aware of that, I embraced the Sound, hugging it to me, wanting to keep it forever. When I opened my eyes, His face close to mine, there was the Christ. For just an instant. Then gone, and with Him the Sound, never in a very long life to be heard again.

 

How does a boy of the Depression Era deal with such an epiphany? You keep it to yourself, tell no one. For already you've been advised that "you've more imagination that is good for you," that a nascent interest in literature and the arts is impractical, that one's youthful obligation is education for a wage-earning trade, that manliness is hanging out with the good 'ole boys, not nurturing solitude lost in thought. And as the 20th Century matures, clobbers you with intolerance, persecution, wars, as societal values crumble, though you ache to once again hear that Sound, know its deliverance, you often suspect that you never heard it in the first place, that visions don't exist, that those Children of the World are right in condemning the Children of Light as irresponsible fantasizers, day-dreamers.

 

But I'm spared total disbelief in that childhood experience because of my mother's greeting when I came to breakfast that morning. The quizzical look she gave me was one I knew well, that addressing the mystery of this unconventional son she was struggling to understand. Abandoning her brutally demanding chores of care for a large family, she sat at the table and spoke to me as I ate. My uncle had talked to her before he left for work. "That kid is spooky, he said," she reported. "Said you seemed to be sleeping this morning with your eyes wide open. He thought you were awake and spoke to you, but you didn't answer. You eyes stayed open, but you didn't look at him."

I ate in silence.

"And he said that even in the dark, no daylight yet in the room, your face glowed like an electric light-bulb. Said 'That kid reads too much.'"

 

I like to remember her remarks when troubles, doubts, torments mount. Nearing fourscore years, acceptance of the fact that I'll not hear again the Sound in this world, my mother's words help me believe it wasn't all imagination, not a dream, that something profound actually did happen when I was a little boy. And hasn't left me since.

 

* * *

 

Not edited, updated, otherwise altered from its original publication

in the Santa Fe Reporter, 5 December 2000

Michelangelo - Giant Among Giants

Michelangelo For Me

The Giant Among Giants -- 1475-1564

That's a self-portrait on our left of Signor Buonarotti -- Signor Michelangelo Buronarotti -- a detail from his great monumental sculpture The Florentine Pieta. Michelangelo portrayed himself as Nicodemus in the act of lowering Christ from the cross, this Deposition begun before the year 1550. In that same year, the French traveler Blaise de Vigenere saw the artist at work and wrote: "He had passed his sixtieth year, and although he was not very strong, yet in a quarter of an hour he caused more splinters to fall from a very heavy block of marble than three young masons in twice or thrice the time. No one can believe it who has not seen it with his own eyes. And he attacked the work with such energy and fire that I thought it would fly into pieces. With one blow he brought down fragments three or four fingers in breadth, and so exactly at the point marked, that if only a tiny piece of marble more had fallen, he would have been in danger of ruining the whole work." It is a quotation by a contemporary which for me perhaps best expresses the passion I see behind all of Michelangelo's work.

---

Though I've stood and studied, on many occasions, all of Michelangelo's four Pietas -- the most famous one, and most known and loved by the public, at St Peter's Basilica, Rome, executed when he was 24 years old; the Florentine Pieta now at the Museo del Duomo, Forence; the Palestrina Pieta, after 1555, in the Accademia di Belli Arti, Florence; and the Pieta Rondanini, 1555-1564, at Milan's Castello Sforza -- my favorite has always been the Florentine Pieta.

---

I first saw the Florentine Pieta in 1950 while living as a graduate student in Firenze. The monthly subsistence check from the Veterans Administration (under the GI Bill of Rights for World War II vets) did not go very far, and during that time of La Miseria in Italy, most buildings, including the impoverished pensione where I lived, were without heat. When not at school, I did what the Italians did to keep warm -- went into the streets, walked the city, lingered in sunny piazzas.
Most days, on return from these long hikes, I stopped at the Duomo, that great Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, only two short blocks from my room in Via Ginori. I could rest, delay return to the room (even colder than the Cathedral), and of course, look again on the great treasures of art within that architectural marvel. For me, the finest treasure was Michelangelo's Deposition or Pieta, at that time standing in a dark side chapel. Visitors could not enter the chapel, the light was very poor, but even restricted viewing revealed the strength and sorrow of the masterful composition. Denied access to the chapel, I could not study the marble from the side or back, but came to know every line, contour, expression of its front. Some days, by tricks of light entering the chapel or the reflection of candles, I detected golden rays moving over its surface. On rare occasions, these rays would touch the face of the dead Christ, or of Nicodemus lowering Him from the cross. Eventually, daily visits to the Pieta became something I had to do -- even when Spring arrived and the weather turned warm. If anything kept me from it, the day was somehow not complete.

---

Firenze, of course, provided the finest opportunity for familiarity with other Michelangelo works. The Accademia housed the great David and the unfinished Prisoners (sometimes referred to as Slaves) struggling to free themselves from the marble. In the same hall with the Prisoners was the Palestrina Pieta, compelling, infinitely sad. During breaks from classes, I could go to the Rotunda, look again on these marvels. Five minutes from my pensione was the Medici Chapel with its magnificent sculptures of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici, the Medicean Madonna and the great tomb groupings of Day and Night, Dawn and Evening. My treks about the city took me to the Bargello, where several of Michelangelo's youthful works -- the Faun's Mask, a smaller and softer David, the imposing Head of Brutus, the bas-relief tondo Madonna with Book, and a drunken Bacchus -- display the genius which Lorenzo de Medici recognized while the artist was still a teenager. And there was Casa Buonarotti, where Michelangelo once lived, and which still today shelters his reliefs The Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna on the Steps. At the Uffizi Gallery, one could study the only existing easel painting ever finished by the master, his Holy Family.

---

Limited funds prohibited extensive travel during my year of graduate study in Firenze, and I saw little of Italy other than the city and, occasionally, nearby Tuscan towns. But subsequent visits to Italy have always led me, intentionally or not, to more works of Michelangelo. Once in Bologna, visiting a friend at the monastery of San Domenico, I was surprised to find in the chapel, statues of Proculus and Petronius, and the Kneeling Angel with a Candlestick, previously known only through reproductions in art books. I also "happened across" the four statues of the Piccolomini altar, attributed to Michelangelo and assistants, in the Siena Cathedral. At Castello Sforza in Milan, I saw the Rondanini Pieta, unfinished, abstract, tortuous, a testament to the fact that he was working on it in the days before his death during his 89th year. In Rome, I sought out the Risten Christ in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva -- poorly stationed and lit, but the strong and expressive face of the Savior was luminescent in the darkness. And in Rome, of course, one goes again and again to the Vatican, and -- despite the crowds -- always stops before that first and most acclaimed, most loved of the four Pietas. I've seen strong men weep in its presence.
The Sistine frescoes today -- after the long-term meticulous cleaning, freed from centuries of dirt and grime -- are newly glowing glories, even to those of us who've gazed on them countless times over half a century. For me, more than ever, Michelangelo's figures and forms on ceiling and altarpiece, though masterfully painted, are sculptural, endorsing his lifelong insistence that he was not a painter but a sculptor.
In Paris, I went to the Louvre to see as much as possible, in limited time, the famous masterpieces of that renowned museum. But when I stumbled into the gallery containing Michelangelo's The Dying Captive, I found it difficult to move on.
But I haven't seen it all yet, and particularly not one of the greatest works, the Moses. On three different occasions on three different visits to Rome, I went to the church of San Pietro in Vincoli determined to finally see this celebrated marble. Each time, the church was closed. Photo reproductions convince me it's a "must," I can't really claim knowledge of Michelangelo without studying this monumental, significant work. If rationale is needed for still another return to the Eternal City, that's one for me.

---

My love for the works of Michelangelo -- and of the man, because his works are the man -- could be threatening to my appreciation of other painters and sculptors, other genres of art. Could be, but isn't, as I continue to stand in awe beore so much which other masters have given us. Perhaps another lesson from Michelangelo, who's taught me so much. Afterall, wasn't he the first to exhalt the work of Ghiberti, to name that artist's superb doors of the Baptistery in Florence "The Gates of Paradise." Even so, enamored of all that's good in art, I esteem Michelangelo above all others. My Giant of Giants.

---

Decades after I'd completed graduate work (sometime in the Seventies, I think), I read that the Forentine Pieta had been moved from Santa Maria del Fiore in Firenze to the Museo del Duomo, just behind the cathedral, in the shadow of the great dome. Remembering my visits to the cathedral to visit the sculpture, remembering mystical moments before it, I was disappointed to learn of the move. But I've seen it many times in subsequent years, and the new location is excellent. The Pieta stands on a spacious staircase landing, brightly illuminated with natural light from an adjacent window, imposing and arresting as you first view it from the bottom of the staircase. And what a thrill to ascend the staircase, slowly approach that wonder in marble. The landing is large enough to allow one to circle the sculpture, view it closely from front, sides and back, observe the rough chisel marks, that characteristic conclusion so often seen in his late work, the insistence that once the form was as he wanted it, Michelangelo felt no need to "finish," "polish" the work. And the dim golden glow I'd once observed in the dark cathedral now floods the entire sculpture, as the stone itself is of that hue.
Italians have told me that Michelangelo carved this Pieta for his sacophagus. True or not, his portrait in the figure of Nicodemus shows not only tender compassion for the dead Christ but an intense yearning for oneness with God. I can't stand before it without contemplating the words spoken by Michelangelo on his deathbed: "I regret that I have not done enough for the salvation of my soul and that I am dying just as I am beginning to learn the alphabet of my profession."

A Road Chosen

 





A recent tourist in the studio tells me that it's been 30-plus years since she last visited Santa Fe and our gallery when a very young woman, is surprised that I'm still here. I don't ask if the surprise is that the business has lasted so long or that I have. She reminds me -- of course I'd forgotten, who can or wants to remember all things from decades past -- that she'd purchased, "before Santa Fe prices soared," a large ceramic-tile painting I'd made, still cherishes it in her home and will pass it on to a grandson. Amazed that I've remained in the city and on Canyon Road which has changed so much, "is not at all as I remember it," she says she bought online a few of my books, read about the travels, different places I've visited or lived in, the studies, work and pleasures abroad. She wonders what attracted me to New Mexico in the first place and what's kept me here.

It is only after she's gone that I indulge the luxury of recall.

 

Not yet six months after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, not yet my 19th birthday, but Roosevelt's proclamation "this generation has a rendezvous with destiny" was whispering at my back. Lack of time and funds negated possibilities for college before the call to arms. Awaiting with most young men my age what we knew was coming, I labored in war industries, most of the paychecks turned over to Depression Era parents.

Qualified as a ship-fitter after merely two weeks of training, I worked with rough crews building Liberty ships. "Shiver money" we called wages paid because of the numerous shipyard accidents -- including fatalities -- caused by under-skilled workers attracted to the Chesapeake's promise of earning. Often in the dark inner-bottoms of ships at keel, among men we city boys called "hillbillies," their strange dialects uttering obscenities new to youthful ears, I clung to thoughts of the arts -- the books, music, theater I loved, the dream of creating things -- and wondered how a world gone mad made beauty feasible. Perhaps this shipyard and whatever lay ahead on foreign battlefields was all there was or would be.

Then one day a riveter, middle-aged, far from his home in the Appalchian Hills, sat beside me on an open deck during lunch break. He said he had sons of his own, one of them already somewhere in the Pacific, had been watching me, "reckoned" that I didn't belong here. He foully cursed our labors, a war claiming his sons, his absence from home. And muttered something about grabbin' while the grabbin's good, raisin' hell in this life while you were still alive. When our break was over, I didn't follow him into the inner-bottoms. Instead, went to the front office, asked for pay owed me and walked out of the shipyard.

Next stop the Greyhound Bus station where I purchased a cross-country ticket. If I were to perhaps die for my country, I wanted to see it first.

 

A nation beyond the streets of East Coast cities was foreign to me. For someone familiar with the port of Baltimore and the sky-scappered canyons of New York City, who'd rarely seen open country, there was schoolroom gography and history come alive, wonderment beyond bus windows. Crossing the Mississippi, hitting the Central Plains, under bright sun or dark of night, I'd recall the words, books of American writers I'd devoured through youth -- Mark Twain, Willa Cather, John Steinbeck. Dodge City and Tucson, the Continental Divide evoked images of the many Western Movies I'd seen, the John Ford vistas I'd long loved and yearned to roam. In my ears echoed the strains from songs of faraway place (in those Depression days limiting travel) with strange-sounding names -- the red river valley; the streets of Laredo; California, here I come. And I did come and saw my country and marveled. Countless hours with many changes of busses and schedules, no hotel overnights, frugal snacks, wash-ups in bus-station restrooms during waits for connections, sleep upright in bus seats or on station benches. With end of the road in San Diego, seemingly such a small provincial town at that time but armed against invasion as I'd not seen on the East Coast. Manned antiaircraft gun-positions in the streets pointed out to the Pacific as well as toward the skies. Barrage balloons floated overhead. Eloquent manifestations of what my world was all about and justification of a teen-ager's exodus from home -- how it had pained a wartime mother -- to see his country before he might well perish for it.

 

The one image and singular memory of that trip which recurred again and again during the years in France, Belgium and along the Rhine, was my introduction to New Mexico. Somewhere north or east of the state, in Colorado or Texas, I'd fallen asleep on the bus in afternoon, woke as the sun was setting. The landscape was bloodred, distant adobe homes tinted fiery burn-sienna, their small windows goldenly aglow. Across vast fields dotted with pinon, a seraped horseman rode against the burning sky and a shawled woman drew water from a well.

Tableau, seared upon the mind for a lifetime.

Later in that cross-country jaunt, the Santa Fe of 1942. Dirt roads and unpaved streets, open fields, few cars, more Mexican and Spanish than American -- exotic! -- to a boy of the streets from east coast cities. Images to haunt one in the foxholes of Normandy and on the snows of The Bulge. That Tierra Encantada, will it still be there if and when there are no more masssacres at Malmedy, no extermination ovens. If and when The Lights Come On Again All Over the World?

 

It was. And claimed me, and I am here.