A Monumental Modesty: Morandi at the Met

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Peter Selgin

For as long as I can remember I’ve been drawn to Morandi’s paintings of bottles and vases arranged with “fearful symmetry.” Maybe because the artist was Italian, like my parents, and named Giorgio, like my cousin in Genoa—or because his paintings put me in mind (they still do) of my father’s humble paintings that adorned my childhood walls. Or they reminded me of my own paintings—those I had yet to paint, but when I did they would bear his influence.

The exhibit is located in the Robert Lehman wing, the paintings arranged in chronological order, more or less, around the circular hall. The earliest works date from 1914, when the artist was clearly influenced by Cezanne, cubism, and the Futurists. Born in 1890 in Bologna—the city where he would remain his entire life—Morandi served briefly in the army during the Great War, but suffered a mental breakdown and was soon discharged. For several years afterwards he experimented with Metaphysical painting, his own canvasses reflecting those of his fellow Italians De Chirico and Carlo Carrà. But within a few short years he would settle into his own permanent style, one that would carry him through four decades to his death in 1964.
Like all of my favorite artists—like all artists worthy of the name—Morandi was his own man. Though he dabbled in all the “isms”—Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Primitivism—he never remained in any “school” for long. Like Rouault, his contemporary, he shunned all trends and marched to his own drumbeat while enduring the silence, scorn and faint praise of critics and curators. 
Even for a man who cherished his privacy as Morandi did (in his lifetime he granted only two published interviews), such contempt and neglect couldn’t have been easily born. Swept aside by the whirlwinds of Picasso, DeKooning, Dali and Pollack—his quiet little paintings shoved into a dusty corner of art history, and the artist himself treated like a shy boy among shouting drunken louts: that’s how I think of Morandi. As a drab diffident among colorful brutes. 
One thinks Morandi and one thinks “bottles.” Yes, there are paintings of bottles—bottles and vases. But to see only bottles is to miss the point. Really they are paintings of silence. Of silence, of patience, of devotion, of acceptance and even of resignation: the paintings of a man who has had a glimpse of the larger world and rejected it, who has said first to himself and then to the world through his work: this is mine; this is enough. His are devotional paintings; paintings as prayer painted with the colors of earth: sand, mud, sepia, flesh, chalk, stone, clay, soil, dust and ashes.
As the term “still life” (natura morta) suggests, they are dead, these paintings, both in their silence and in the cadaver-like range of their hues; not subdued, as some might have you think, but absolutely, resolutely dead—drained of color and life, embalmed in silence and stillness. This sounds like an insult, but isn’t meant to be: I mean it as high praise. To capture the stillness of death isn’t easy. And when I say “death” I mean the death that implies eternity, for only through death is eternity achieved. Morandi knew this. Or at any rate his paintings know it.
So tentative, so meek: such diffidence is rarely known in art. To approach it one needs to look to such paintings as one finds occasionally in flea markets, or jammed into the corner of a junk shop—paintings of unknown amateurs whose modesties are entirely accidental, the result of amateurishness. But theirs are small, inconsequential modesties as compared with Morandi’s monumental modesty—a modesty arrived at through years of hard study and work; a modesty held in place by the armature of an enormous, unflinching ego. That quivering pencil line, those tentative brushstrokes, the tenuous forms verging on (and often spilling into) amorphousness—to paint like that one must be one of two things: a complete amateur or a genius. As Picasso is said to have responded to a man who remarked of one of his paintings, “My six year old could have done that!” 
“True, but could he do it at my age?”
But more than their forms and outlines I’m drawn to Morandi’s colors—drawn to them as one is drawn to the smell of leaf smoke in autumn, or to the yawning shells of abandoned buildings. Morandi’s palette is so low-key you need a spectrometer to distinguish one hue from the next, but not really: the attentive eye will do. The ochres and pale pinks and browns remind me of the crumbling walls of the Bologna where he lived. Desert colors: cream and sand, butter and dust, butterscotch and clay, terra-cotta and dried blood.
To choose a favorite among Morandi’s paintings is impossible, since they are all the same painting, essentially, rendered in colors so subtle they do not even yield a whisper but stand mute as the stars in heaven, humble as the walls over which they hang. These paintings are so modest you see the struggle of the framer to select a frame that will not overwhelm the masterpiece, a struggle lost in every instance, for even the most modest of cornices cannot fail to compete with and overwhelm Morandi’s supreme modesty. 
One thinks of the martial artist who defeats his opponent by doing less, by doing nothing, by simply holding his ground, conserving energy as his adversary exhausts himself. In this sense Morandi’s paintings are great conservators of energy. No wonder Morandi’s dusty bottles have survived so well for so long. Through two World Wars they emerge dusty as ever but without a chip or a crack. The dust is that of decades. It is the dust raised by wars and by other artists of great broiling aggression—a dust that has at last settled to cloak Morandi’s paintings in an ever more perfect and enduring silence. One walks out of this exhibit into the halls of modern art as from a cloister into Times Square. 
What sort of man paints himself into such a silence? A man who preferred empty vessels to his fellow creatures—as wed to his dusty bottles as a monk to God. I doubt I would have liked him. I don’t for a minute imagine him charming, like Picasso. A misanthrope, perhaps. But if so this misanthrope has left us a great gift—the great gift of peace. He has, with his brushes and paints, grabbed hold of eternity and framed it forever.
Or should I say: he has poured a measure of eternity into his dusty bottles that we may sip from them in appreciative silence.
Posted in Dreaming on Paper, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Mr. Fesh and the Meaning of Life

Posted on November 10, 2008 by Peter Selgin

Yesterday afternoon I read at a Barnes & Noble book store in Danbury, Connecticut, a few miles from the town where I grew up and lived for eighteen years. A beautiful autumn day, sunny, breezy and cool (as the forecasters like to say). On the drive up from the Bronx my companion and I marveled at the fiery displays of bright colors in the trees along the Saw Mill Parkway. This is my favorite time of year, when the leaves begin to fall, when the sky rains dry flecks of yellow and the earth wears a bright-colored quilt of red and golden leaves. I wondered, on such a beautiful day, who would want to spend an hour indoors listening to someone read from a book?

To my surprise—quite a few people, many of them strangers, and many more familiar. My proud mother invited many of her friends, and there were faces I recognized from my undergraduate year at Western Connecticut State University, and even a few faces of people I’d gone to high school with in Bethel. One friend, Mark, had driven down from Vermont with his new family, a beautiful wife and two equally beautiful boys, one still at his mother’s breast. Mark and I had been in touch but hadn’t seen each other in years (Mark looked good—a little huskier, his hair gone completely white, but otherwise unchanged, and with a fixed smile that spoke eloquently of the pleasures of fatherhood and family).
But of all the faces familiar and unfamiliar one touched me more deeply than any other. I was speaking to Mark’s wife when I looked up and saw a man approaching. He wore a white windbreaker and a baseball cap—Yankees, I think. He was tall, broad-shouldered. It took me only a moment or two to recognize him despite his being out of the narrow focal range of my nearsighted eyes; and even after I had recognized him, still, there was a moment of confusion, since I was unprepared to believe what my eyes told me, and what seemed a little too much like a dream. For here was my sixth grade teacher, Mr. Fesh, come to check on his pupil.
“I know this man,” I said to myself and out loud as he approached, a smile already spreading itself across my face.
In forty years he hadn’t changed that much. He was still tall, still good-looking (from what I could see under the shadowy visor of the baseball cap). I recognized his deep voice. “Mr. Selgin,” he said—the same form of address he had used in sixth grade. I didn’t say, “Mr. Fesh!” I didn’t have to; my smile spoke for me. 
We shook hands, but that wouldn’t do: I had to give him a hug. 
In sixth grade I had a crush on him. Not a homosexual crush, but the crush of a sixth-grader ripe for role-models. My father, after all, was much older than most fathers a I knew, and though I loved him dearly I found him lacking in certain physical respects (he detested all sports and refused to jump into water). And here was this teacher, a man—the first male teacher I’d ever had—handsome, tall (my father was handsome but already gray, half-bald, and with a paunch, and not tall), scarcely twenty-four years old. He looked like Paul Newman. 
Back then, Mr. Fesh still had all of his hair and didn’t need the baseball cap. He wore spiffy blazers, pale blue oxford cloth shirts, and sharp red and blue neckties with silver tie pins. I remember going to the local Caldor department store and searching among the racks for ties and blazers like the ones Mr. Fesh wore, and gleaming tie clips to go with them. I had no reason to where such garments and no place to wear them to, but still, I wanted them, because I wanted to be like Mr. Fesh. He wore shiny brown wing-tips; I begged my mother for a pair. 
I think Mr. Fesh must have known that I had a crush on him—a teacher’s pet crush. I suspect he enjoyed it (I’m a teacher now and wouldn’t mind thinking that one or two of my students look up to me that way, though I don’t imagine any of them do; but they are older undergraduates, children of a more cynical time, and much less inclined to look up to their teachers). 
I remember one evening my mother invited Mr. Fesh and his wife for dinner. What an exciting night! For me it was like having the Pope or the Beatles over for supper. About that evening I remember nothing but my excitement. Mr. Fesh drove a red convertible Mustang: the perfect car for a male role-model. I remember watching through the window and seeing it come up the driveway, the feeling of unreality that accompanied this spectacle, the sense that the impossible was happening, that miracles existed in the world.
Having taught sixth grade for a year or two, Mr. Fesh went on to become a phys ed instructor. His son—one of his sons—had a brief baseball career and played in the major leagues for several seasons (I forget what team) until an injury of some sort cut his career short. I imagine that this was a huge blow to his father, a kind of death. Mr. Fesh, meanwhile, became a baseball scout. I learned these things through the grape vine over the years.
Now here was Mr. Fesh, my sixth grade teacher, alive and looking well. Retired, he told me. I asked if he would stay for the reading. “Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t think so. Too boring.” And then I recognized that glint in his eye, and remembered his dead-pan delivery. “Now there’s someone I need to say hello to,” he sad, and I followed the trajectory of his eyes as they took in my eighty year-old mother. I remembered how he and my mother used to flirt with each other, how several times on school field trips they had sat together on the bus until someone warned Mr. Fesh, “You’d better stop sitting next to that lady; people are starting to talk.” My mother and I both had a crush on Mr. Fesh. But hers was reciprocated.
While I read, I saw no sign of Mr. Fesh in the audience; perhaps he had left, after all. But when I had finished he appeared again, off to the side, giving me the thumbs-up. “I’m proud of you,” he said. If my dead father had risen from the grave to say the same words to me I wouldn’t have been more pleased. 
If over the years I’ve had reasons to wonder if it’s all been worth it, if all the rejection, all the struggle, all the disappointments and despairand disillusionment  have served up any purpose, if there’s been a meaning to all that I’ve done or tried to do over the last forty years. Most of all I’ve wondered if the sacrifices (money, children, sound sleep, peace of mind) have been worth it. Yesterday afternoon when Mr. Fesh gave me the thumbs-up I had my answer and the answer was a resounding “Yes.”
Sometimes, if only for a moment or two, life really does mean something.
Thanks, Mr. Fesh.
Posted in Dreaming on Paper, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Okay, so That Was a Bit Harsh. . .

Posted on October 31, 2008 by Peter Selgin

The other day I wrote to you, my students:

I love you all BUT:

I’m disappointed (and annoyed) at how few of you did the assigned reading. Some of you admitted honestly that you simply hadn’t done it; others claimed the material was boring.* (see footnote). But there is NO EXCUSE for not doing your assigned work. What it says to me is that you don’t care. And that you don’t belong in a university.

Furthermore, given that you don’t care to learn, why should I or anyone care to teach you? Or give you a passing grade?

Sometimes students are so advanced that they can afford to skip classes and assignments and will still turn in papers so accomplished, so brilliant, that they’re professors have no choice but to pass them. Rest assured that is not the case with any of my current students.

That you’ve missed this last assignment will be reflected in your grades.

On a related note: I have spoken to you several times about the need to make appointments with me and (if necessary) the writing center. Many of you have yet to do so. I suggest you do. The responsibility is yours.

On Thursday, Nov. 6 we will begin discussing your final paper: the research paper.

And don’t forget to vote!!!

*footnote: When students say they are bored by someone else’s work (like Carl Sagan, who, by the way, was one of the most accomplished and brilliant scientists of the last 50 years), my response is that it isn’t the man or his work that is boring, but you who bored yourself through your lack of intellectual curiosity, patience, and engagement. You want knowledge to be spoon-fed to you in sugary, bite-sized pieces—like candy? But knowledge is not candy; you won’t find it at the bottom of a box of Cracker Jacks. True knowledge requires EFFORT. And EFFORT means enduring something that may not be as entertaining as a vampire novel or a Disney movie, but may have MUCH MORE to teach you. This is what college is all about: to expose you to realms of thought that you might not be exposed to otherwise. But it is also why some people—those with NO intellectual curiosity or interest in expanding their minds—should probably not be in college.

End of editorial.

Okay, so that was a bit harsh … and not meant to apply to all of you. To those to whom it didn’t apply my apologies. But I see my job here, with this course and for you, as not just a matter of helping you to become better readers, writers, and thinkers, but to see to it that you are equipped in other important ways to succeed through these next few years of university—and beyond—into what I hope and imagine will be successful futures.

Let me tell you a story, a little personal anecdote, if I may. In 1983 I got my bachelor’s degree—I say I “got” it because, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure that I earned it. It took me a while (I graduated from high school in 1975; do the math). What did I do in those eight years? Well, mostly I ran around in search of “experience.” And though I did have some good (and bad) experiences, and may even have learned a thing or two, mostly I was running AWAY from my education. I told myself that life was too interesting to waste four years of it moldering in classrooms. School was unreal. Who needs it? That’s what I told myself.

In fact I was AFRAID of school, afraid of the whole academic world: afraid of tests, of professors, or grades, or being judged and, worst of all, of finding out I wasn’t as damned “brilliant” as I pretended to be, but—somewhere deep inside—suspected I wasn’t.

Like someone walking down a flight of stairs into a basement, I transferred from one college to another, in order of descending reputation, until finally I ended up in a state university (Western Connecticut—a place no better or worse than Montclair). If I went to school at all it was only so as not to break my mother’s heart. But I honestly still thought it a waste of time.

Like many of you I phoned in my assignments and barely studied. And like some of you I was a wise-ass in class in a way that charmed some of my teachers, and annoyed others. (It should go without saying that I thought I was smarter than most of my teachers; after all, look where THEY ended up!)…

Well, here I am, turned into one of those teachers that I so took for granted back then. But then I’m actually lucky; I’ve done okay, considering. Over twenty years after taking my despised Bachelor’s Degree (the whereabouts of the actual document escapes me, that’s how little I cared), with a VERY different attitude toward education, I applied for graduate school and got in—no thanks to my undergraduate grades, but because, in the meantime, I worked hard at my writing and, since I had published some stories, was able to convince my sponsors that I was not the complete academic jackass that my college transcripts may have suggested that I was.

I consider myself VERY fortunate to be able to stand in front of you and be your teacher—a position that, twenty years ago, in my youthful defensive arrogance, I would have frowned upon.

The short of it is that—had I known back then what I am sure of now—I would have taken my education MUCH more sriously; I would have seen it as the glorious privilege and opportunity that it was, a chance to deepen my mind and soul, to learn from men and women older and wiser than I, to read things I would NEVER have read on my own; to surrender my arrogant, defensive, and largely pretentious beliefs, and replace them with earned, genuine, and generous ones. To replace cynical arrogance with humble authority: THAT’s the main purpose of education—one of the main purposes.

Ah, but if I had known way back then what I know now! What I am doing now at age 50 I might have started doing at age 40 or 30 instead; I would be that much further ahead. As it is I’ve had to struggle very hard to get where I might have gotten much more easily if ONLY I had taken more seriously to my studies as a younger person.

Consider mine a cautionary tale. I believe that many of you can and will do better by your own education. If I am hard on you, it is because I WANT you to do as well as you can, to not waste your time—and, more importantly, to have the futures that I’m sure you deserve.

So—I take back what I said in frustration. You all DO belong in college. So did I 30 years ago.

But I didn’t believe it, and I wish that you all would.

Posted in Dreaming on Paper, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Reading Out Loud

Posted on October 23, 2008 by Peter Selgin

I write to read–not just to myself, but to others. There is something about holding a book in my hands and reading words off the page to others that fills me with a warm sense of communion and connection, of reaching out and touching others. Writing is a lonesome practice. You sit alone in a room, alone with your thoughts, alone with your words. The page doesn’t laugh or smile, doesn’t gasp or applaud; the computor screen stares at you. Your words echo off walls and ceiling, or fall with a dead thud to the floor. Words live only in the eyes of readers or in the ears of listeners.

With two books coming out I’ve had plenty of opportunities to read to people, with a dozen readings booked for October and November alone, here in New York City, but also in Westchester, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachussetts.

Last night I read at the only book store in the Bronx, a Barnes & Noble at Baychester Mall, near Coop City. A small but packed audience of mostly black and Hispanic people. I was among four performers, including two poets and a singer-songwriter. When my turn came to read I chose a story about an impoverished Dominican who steals and drives off with a shiny convertible as a means of regaining some of his lost dignity and youth. I read without a microphone, choosing instead to stand in front of the podium, close to my listeners. As I usually do when I read I focused on one audience member, a dark-skinned, middle-aged woman seated with her husband in the second row. Why her? Because her eyes had an intent gleam and she smiled and I knew she would like the story. I read to her: she was my real audience.

When I read, I feel as if I am feeding people, spoonful by spoonful, a special broth that will enrich their lives in a special way. The soup is warm and savory and made of words. I feed them my special soup which they ingest through their ears and digest not in their bellies but with their minds and imaginations. Listen carefully, I say to them: I have a story here to tell you. If I have done my job well, then my words will beckon them like a curled finger to come hither, to listen deeply, to pay attention.

As I read my story about the Dominican and the car the woman’s smile grew more and more fixed, and the gleam in her eyes grew brighter, and I knew I had her; that she had left her stiff seat and entered the world of my story, with its hot Dominican sun and sweet brown smoke from the sugar cane factory. The act of listening smoothed the wrinkles from her face, released the tension from her jaw. She left her body. I saw it. When a story works, it makes you forget yourself. You leave the hard world behind and enter the soft world of imaginings.

I try very hard to read slowly, to pronounce each and every word, to enjam certain sentences so that prose turns into poetry, to read the words as if they are poetry. I try to seduce the listener with the sounds of images. It is very much like making love: each word a touch, a caress, a kiss, an embrace. There is but one way to read to people and that is with love. You have to love them with each word, to let each syllable offer its caress. With each sentence you draw them closer to you, until you have drawn them into your heart and your mind, until these become shared organs, until you and your listeners form a single joined entity, like Siamese twins.

If a reading goes well, then an act of surrender occurs. The audience must surrender to the power of your words, must abandon the body’s insistence on the evidence provided by one set of sensory data–on the immediate sensory phenomenon of hard chair and fluorescent lighting–and accept instead the sensory phenomenon provided by a story’s words. That this secondary set of sensory data can overwhelm the first, that is the miracle of good writing. The hard world melts away; the fictional world takes over; the dream solidifies into something more solid and real than the room, the lights, the chair.

When I read out loud to somebody, when I am able to draw them away from the hard world and into my dreams, this, for me, is the point of writing, of my writing. It is what the writer in me lives for. At bottom I am a sensualist and a flirt, or no, not a flirt: not a flirt because I make no promises that I’m unwilling to fulfil. I sincerely wish to make love to the world through and with words, my words. I want to seduce, but also to carry through on the act of seduction: to love, to connect.

When the story ended and the old Dominican took his death plunge in his Cadillac over a cliff and into the ocean, I heard the woman give a little gasp. The story had done its job. My words had touched at least this one person. For a few minutes she belonged to me and to my story; she was an old Dominican with no teeth driving a stolen car. So was I. She took the plunge over the cliff. So did I. That a stranger could trust me so much, could leave herself in my hands, could accept whatever experiences I put her through with my words . . . This is the beauty of writing, which is really an act of trust, an act of love.

To love someone is to trust them, to trust, and, to a certain extent and by mutual agreement, to surrender to their powers. A mutual surrender. When I read to an audience, I put myself at the mercy of their willingness to open themselves to my words and understand me. Maybe they won’t understand; maybe they will refuse the world I offer to them as a temporary alternative to their own world. Maybe they will sit there with arms locked and jaws jutting defiantly, and they will refuse to be moved. There is that risk writers  take.

But if they do listen, if they do let themselves be moved, then that is the greatest of all rewards and author can get for his work.

Posted in Dreaming on Paper, Uncategorized | Leave a comment