The Bottom Line on Happiness

Double happiness (Chinese). I like the concept, but where does it end—gazillion billion trillion? Maybe best not to get started on multiples…

Amy Bloom is a terrific writer. Her latest book, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, was published last month. Therapist and storyteller, Bloom is in a unique position to write about our peculiar literary relationship to happiness. Her essay in the New York Times Book Review a week ago, The Rap on Happiness, offers an overview of recent books addressing this persistent topic, both positive and negative. She begins by acknowledging what most of us know: “Smart people often talk trash about happiness, and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries — just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it. The fashion is to bemoan happiness studies and positive psychology as being the work not of the Devil (the Devil is kind of cool), but of morons.” And I loved this line: “It is true that ever since Americans began turning away from Calvinism (and who could blame them: long winters, smallpox and eternal hellfire?), the country has been a breeding ground for good news, for the selling of paths to contentment.”

So we read about Barbara Ehrenreich’s lambasting of the positive thinking movement in Bright-Sided and Eric Wilson’s thoughtful questioning in Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. These are countered with more upbeat reports including Ariel Gore’s Bluebird: Women and the New Psychology of Happiness and Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project. Sensible and even-handed, Bloom strikes a reasonable middle ground:

We could canvass Gore, Rubin, Gilbert, the Dalai Lama and the many authors on the happier.com Web site and produce the Fundamentally Sound, Sure-Fire Top Five Components of Happiness: (1) Be in possession of the basics — food, shelter, good health, safety. (2) Get enough sleep. (3) Have relationships that matter to you. (4) Take compassionate care of others and of yourself. (5) Have work or an interest that engages you.

I don’t see how even the most high-minded, cynical or curmudgeonly person could argue with that.

The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; it’s happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in its transience. It is deep but often brief (as Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, “It seems there is a sort of calamity built into the texture of life.” To hold happiness is to hold the understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.

Ah, there’s the rub. Adult understanding? Sometimes I have some of that, and sometimes not so much.

In a somewhat related note: Several people were disturbed by the Heather Bell poem I posted last week (here). “It was so dark!” wrote one reader. Another friend wanted me to reassure him that I was of sound mind and body. My answer to him was, hey, give me some space for my dark little moments. I don’t have a lot of them, but that poem encapsulated something powerful for me. And yes, it is a dark vision but one that is artfully delivered.

Speaking of Bell, I just received the hand made book of her poems that I found online. Titled Nothing Unrequited Here, this chapbook is published by Verve Bath Press.

I liked this brief description of the venture provided on their Facebook page:

verve bath press is a micro-press that publishes an annual zine, chapbooks, all handmade… with the love of the word & the lust of spreading it on the brain.

DIY enthusiast!

verve bath is all about poetry…
wild enough to get dressed up
in its finest attire before it
goes out to slay the mind.

Amen that all that.

1000 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Listen, Tell, Draw at Bergamot Station

Another memorable exhibit seen while we were in LA: This one was at Bergamot Station (in Santa Monica) although not inside any of the many galleries at that location. Sponsored by the Santa Monica Museum, the installation featured the art of children responding to Wallace Stevens’ poem, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird*. “Listen, Tell, Draw” is a project by installation artists Kim Schoenstadt and Rita McBride. They presented Wallace Stevens’ famous poem to classrooms of elementary school students and then asked them to tell the story “telephone” style. The works on the wall are versions of the original poem several iterations removed.

The work is so fresh, so engaging. Each child’s column felt uniquely rendered and non-derivative. Very cool.

Interestingly one of the most common “errors” promulgated somewhere in the listening and the telling was the one geographic place name referred to in the poem (see below). For these California students, Connecticut frequently transmogrified into Kentucky. Face it, when you are a child viewing the country from that western edge, things get bunched up as you look east. (This is like the west coast’s answer to the famous poster from the New Yorker, “The World As Seen From New York’s 9th Avenue.”)

Partner turned art maven Dave in front of “Listen, Tell, Draw”

*I have referenced Stevens’ legendary poem in earlier postings here and here.

The full text:

13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Inner and Outer

The Crossing, video/sound installation by Bill Viola (Photo: Kira Perov)

One of the added pleasures of the MOCA Los Angeles show (reference to this is in the blog below) was the quotes from artists that accompanied their works. Many are worth sharing and are compelling even without the specific context of the work on display.

Here’s a sampling:

***
When I paint, I liberate monsters. They are the manifestations of all the doubts, searches and gropings for meaning and expression which all artists experience. One does not choose the content, one submits to it.

–Pierre Alechinsky

***
I never violate an inner rhythm. I loathe to force anything. I don’t know if the inner rhythm is Eastern or Western. I know it is essential for me. I listen to it and I stay with it. I have always been this way. I have regard for the inner voice.

–Lee Krasner

***
My work is non-objective. But I want people, when they look at my paintings, to have the same feelings they experience when they look at landscape, so I never protest when they say my work is like landscape. But it’s really about the feeling of beauty and freedom that you experience in landscape.

–Agnes Martin

***
The rational mind constantly wants to be in charge. The other parts want to fly. My painting is the encounter between the minds’s necessity for control and its yearning to fly, to be free from our ever-confining skill.

–Ed Moses

***
I am not trying to illustrate religion. I’m a storyteller with a broken history.

–Anselm Kiefer

***
The most basic thing to say about painting: it’s a limiting condition within which absolutely anything goes. But it’s a negative premise. It’s not, “I like painting because it’s so wonderful—it can do all these wonderful things.” It’s more, “I like painting because it’s so limited, it’s so uptight, so old and so flat and so rectilinear.” Within that, you’re good to go.

–Carroll Dunham

***
I believe that art us socially useful. If it is destructive, it is constructively so. What helps some hurts others—all art is not made for the same audience. We are in a very restrictive period where many think it is necessary to narrow the limits of what is allowable, to set up unitary reality and condemn the idea of multiple “realities”. I support an art of multiplicity, which is why I am an “anti-classical” artist. In fact, I like to think that I make my work primarily for those who dislike it. I get pleasure from that idea.

–Mike Kelley

***
I prefer to consider the painting as a thing in the world than the painting as a picture of things in the world.

–Gillian Carnegie

***
I do not distinguish between the inner and outer landscapes, between the environment at the physical world out there (the “hard” stuff). It is the tension, the transition, the exchange, and the resonance between these two modalities that energize and define our reality.

–Bill Viola

Reporting in on the Other Coast

View of the Pacific Ocean from Marin County, with the Farallon Islands in the distance

How does it work, those mysterious tendrils that some part of us knows how to sprout, rooting us to the places that feel hospitable, that feel like our native habitat? I spent my childhood in California but expatriated to the east coast when I was just 21 years old. But the years away can’t wash out a primal sense of homecoming. There are those smells, earthy and fragrant, that I have only encountered on that western coast of this country. And then of course there is the issue of the light. I remember an article in the New Yorker many years ago that offered up the scientific explanation for what makes the sunlight so distinctive in California, none of which I can remember now. But it IS different, decidedly, and I loved the chance to bask in it for 10 days in the company of my daughter Kellin and so many good friends.

Some public art viewing highlights, of which there were many:

**
Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. What a collection ranging from Asian to European to contemporary. A special show, Divine Demons: Wrathful Dieties of Buddhist Art, was small but spectacular.

From the Norton Simon site:

As embodiments of the “demonic divine,” wrathful deities serve as protectors and guardians of the Buddhist faith. Mahakala is an especially fierce deity who militantly tramples a figure that represents obstacles. Resplendently adorned with a tiara of skulls, writhing snakes and a multitude of spiritual weapons, he is one of the most important protectors of the religion.

But then I do have a thing about Mahakala, with a massive image of him hanging in my living room.

My own personal wrathful protector, Mahakala

**
MOCA Los Angeles is currently featuring an exhibit, “Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years.”

From the MOCA’s site:

On the occasion of its 30th anniversary, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), debuts Collection: MOCA’s First Thirty Years, the largest-ever installation of its renowned permanent collection featuring more than 500 artworks by over 200 artists. MOCA’s collection, which numbers nearly 6,000 works dating from 1939 to the present day, is internationally regarded as one of the most important collections of postwar art in the world. While works from the collection have been seen in more than 100 thematic exhibitions at MOCA since the museum’s founding in 1979, the new installation will make a significant portion of the collection accessible to the public on a long-term basis.

The show spills out of the Grand Street location into the massive Geffen exhibition space a few blocks away. This was a day-long feast of more Robert Irwins than I have ever seen in one place as well as some gorgeous works by Agnes Martin, Ed Moses, Mark Rothko, Franz Klein, Sol LeWitt. Arranged chronologically, the later years feature artists who are primarily working in and around Los Angeles. That bias is to be expected given how many west coast artists have been given little or no traction in places like New York.

Robert Irwin, Untitled (Dot Painting), 1965 (Photo: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
Note: This image is extremely subtle—you may need to look very closely to see the intricate pattern of dotting that sits on the surfave of the painting. One of the reasons Irwin hated photographic representations of his work!

**
SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) is also featuring works from its collection, “75 Years of Looking Forward” as well as a companion exhibit, “Focus on Artists.”

From the SFMOMA site:

From its early days, SFMOMA has been devoted to fostering close relationships with artists, and these ties often have led to significant holdings of their works. This exhibition looks at SFMOMA’s long-term relationships with 18 modern and contemporary arists whose iconic works have been influential in defining movements from Abstract Expressionism to Postminimalism and beyond, with individual galleries featuring works by a single artist. The first half of the exhibition includes eight American artists whose practice fundamentally impacted the development of abstract art in the United States: Richard Diebenkorn, Philip Guston, Ellsworth Kelly, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Frank Stella, and Clyfford Still. The second section showcases an international selection of artists — Diane Arbus, Matthew Barney, Robert Gober, Dan Graham, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Kara Walker, Jeff Wall, and Andy Warhol — whose work has signaled a shift toward more psychological, social, and historical content in art.yuuuuuh

Another jaw dropping set of amazing art, particularly rich with works from some of my all time favorites. A gorgeous wall of drawings by Brice Marden. A room full of Diebenkorns that includes pieces from the Ocean Park series as well as earlier work. Exquisite Robert Rymans. Richter. Salcedo. And most powerfully for me, two of the most spectacularly visual and visceral Sigmar Polke pieces I’ve ever seen, both from the “The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible” series from 1980s.

The Spirits That Lend Strength Are Invisible III, by Sigmar Polke (Photo courtesy of Sigmar Polke)

**
De Young Museum. Just being in this exquisite space (hats off to Herzog & de Meuron) is a joy. And this trip I was particularly moved by the Art of the Americas collection, one of the best assemblages of Pre-Columbian art I’ve ever seen.

Figure of a Crawling Baby, Olmec, 1200-900 BC (photo courtesy of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

Much more to share, so check back later this week.

Twining the Text

Witness

I saw that a star had broken its rope
in the stables of heaven—

This homeless one will find her home
in the foothills of a green century.

Who sleeps beside still waters, wakes.
The terrestrial hands of the heaven clock

comb out the comet’s tangled mane
and twelve strands float free.

In the absence of light and gravity,
slowly as dust, or the continents’ drift,

sinuous, they twine a text,
one letter to an eon:

I am the dawn horse.
Ride me.

–Liz Waldner

Another gem by Liz Waldner.

New Media to Old

Two of my all time favorite blogs have now been transmogrified into a version of themselves as old media (i.e., books). The first was BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, compiled by my friend and master archivist, the inimitable PK from his very popular site of the same name. Published at the end of 2007, PK’s book brought together his extraordinary gleaning of images from web image coffers all over the world. The book was a venture undertaken by British small publisher/design company Fuel where BibliOdyssey shares a book berth with other Fuel titles such as Home-Made, a compendium of objects made by Russians when the Soviet Union’s demise made access to manufactured goods difficult, and Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Volumes I, II and III).

A second conversion from new to old is Strange Maps. Frank Jacobs thought his love of weird and eccentric cartographic imaging was something only he and his map geeky friends were interested in. So the success of his blog—10 million hits as of March of last year—came as a surprise to him. His Strange Maps: An Atlas of Cartographic Curiosities was published late in 2009 and combines both maps and commentary. His categories range from cartographic misconceptions to zoomorphic maps to a great catch all, watchamacallit.

Each media has its advantages. The random access quality of stopping by either of these sites and never knowing what will pop up is engaging, but the organizational advantages of the book form has its place as well. I just love the panoply of images that PK and Jacobs have gathered for our general enlightenment and delight. More, more.

Heather Bell

Love

The truth about Klimt is: when he painted “The Kiss,”
he was also beating his beautiful wife. He beat her
with one hand and painted with the other. He got
two sad blisters on his right palm from this. His wife
sometimes slowly pulled up the roots to his favorite
willows and cut them, delicately, and then buried
them again. He jokes, “that’s what I get for marrying

a woman from a sanitarium!” but she was from
Vienna, they met in the street, he stopped her and
she believed his eyes said, “I do not want to die,
do not let me die,” so she touched his face, there,
in the street, as a person touches a comma on a
page after they have returned home from a place
that has no commas. On their wedding night, she

ran him a lukewarm bath and his testicles looked
like overripe plums. He raped her until a low moan
seemed to come from the walls, as if wolves were
angry and coming and Klimt went to bed forcefully
and his wife went to bed with dirty blood around
her nostrils and mouth. It goes on like this for years,

just as it goes on for years for everyone who marries
someone they cannot love. You step, body over
body, into the kitchen to kiss your sweat and rot
good morning. “Let me tell you something,” she
says on the day that he paints “The Kiss” and he
hits her in the head before she can remember the
something. She thinks it might have been important.
It might have been something. When he shows

the painting to his friends, they say he must be
the most romantic man in the world and she nods.
And the man in the painting pushes the woman
down further, flows into her, gold and angry, and
her eyes are shut and they do not look clenched
and this is puzzling, but no one else seems to notice.

–Heather Bell

Brutal but extraordinary. I must read more by HB.

Jones on Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst

Gotta love Jonathan Jones at the Guardian. He’s calling it as he sees it.

Bad art is ugly art, in the end. Whatever language we might prefer to use, it all comes down to beauty and ugliness. Hirst’s ideas seemed to me once to possess an intellectual and emotional beauty – and their own physical beauty, too. Now everything he does is ugly, ugly, ugly, and it adds to the world’s already copious stores of junk. His paintings betray a stupidity and arrogance that makes me lose all interest in him. I love painting and I hate to see it abused.

But … I could probably kid myself otherwise, given time and a change of direction. That’s why I have decided to shun Hirst. He’s wasted so much of my time over the years. I freely admit that my determination to believe in him distorted my judgement. I won’t get fooled again.

I’ve got my personal list too, of artists whose works haven’t worn well over time—visual artists, writers, poets. Not that I have a need to broadcast it and focusing on what doesn’t satisfy. There are, after all, so many wonderful vista points in my aesthetic landscape. But I admire Jones for speaking his truth.

I’d Pick This One Not Once But Many Times

Ganesh, Southern India, 2008

Homage to Goa

The ceiling fans in the house go round and round
as if to whisk us off to a different sky.
I squirt Deet at a thin mosquito whine;
gods chuckle softly from a garden shrine,
fruit ripen in the gloaming without a sound.
Shiva, Parvati and Ganesh the elephant boy
promote the comical to the sublime; though, shown
a choice of deities, I defer like most
to violet Krishna in the heat and dust,
brother of Dionysus, expert in everything -
flute-player, hero and lecher, comedian, king.

I rock on a warm veranda as daylight goes.
The hippies too revered him in the old days
of hair and beads, torchlight and astro trance,
trailing from poppy field to lamasery
as irksome and imperious as Camões.
It’s snowing in Kashmir, but here in Goa
we already have spring temperatures. Anandu
waters the earth and brushes up the sand.
Banana leaves and plantains in a daze
trade oxygen for tar; tat tvam asi.
Already a heavy mango strikes the ground.

A mozzie once myself, I buzzed and bit -
but only foot and elbow, ear and knee;
a cheeky monkey keen on human thought,
with a reach greater than my grasp, I’d dance
wildly at times, conscious of ignorance,
or chew on my own morose inadequacy.
Still, I behaved, and so the next time out
I got to sit to a half-mad sadhu
at Brahmin school. “The body is a shadow”,
said he, “it tells you in the Upanishads”;
but spirit knows no slapstick or romance.

Clouds dream the people and we spread like plants,
waves smash on beaches for no obvious purpose
except to deliver the down-to-earth palingenesis
of multitudinous life particles. A porpoise
revolves on the sky as if in outer space
where we started out so many aeons ago.
Goa fact file: infant mortality low,
average life expectancy seventy-five,
functional literacy sixty-nine per cent;
the porcupine and flying fox survive,
also the sloth bear and shy Chital doe.

“The streaming meteor, is it dead or alive,
a deliberate thing or merely gas and stone?
Some believe in a life after this one
while others say we’re only nut and leaf.
An ageing man repents his wicked ways:
we began so innocently, and may again”
- Abu al-Ma’ari, tenth century, Syrian.
Given a choice between paradise and this life
I’d choose this life with its calamities,
the shining sari, the collapsing wave,
the jeep asleep beneath the coconut trees;

skyflower, flame-of-the-forest among the palms,
ripe mangoes dropping from the many limbs,
the radio twang of a high-pitched sitar,
“Kareena Kapoor in Hot New Avatar”!
A gecko snaps a spider from a window.
Given a choice of worlds, here or beyond,
I’d pick this one not once but many times
whether as a mozzie, monkey or pure mind.
The road to enlightenment runs past the house
with its auto-rickshaws and its dreamy cows
but the fans, like the galaxies, go round and round.

–Derek Mahon

In “Homage to Goa,” Belfast-born Derek Mahon explores the essential question of how the spiritual and the material coexist. As Sam Sonick has described it, “The internal balance between mystical and mundane is key to Mahon’s poetry. For all his Hindu allusions, he displays a resistance to the transcendental: eschewing good Karma, he sprays ‘Deet’ at a mosquito, despite being reincarnated as ‘a mozzie myself once’. Flitting between terrestrial specificity and its cosmic significance, Mahon, like his chuckling gods, ‘promote[s] the comical to the sublime’ and builds a sense of wonder at the movement of material and spiritual energy.”

One is Cool, and One is Overheated

Sharon Olds and Elizabeth Bishop

Due to my ongoing interest in any and all times Bishopian…

This excerpt is from a review by Moira Richards at Rattle of Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic by Alicia Suskin Ostriker:

In another essay, about the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds, “I Am (Not) This: Erotic Discourse in Elizabeth Bishop and Sharon Olds,” Ostriker takes that feminist approach to the way the poetry of those two women is often misread, misunderstood–perhaps “pigeon-holed” is a better word–by patriarchal readings. She looks at marginalisation and argues and illustrates her points with lines of poetry in a way which is both inviting and accessible for a lay reader like me. Perhaps the cornerstone of this essay is her point that:

Bishop mostly evades, Olds mostly asserts erotic connection – but for both, the erotic is a power preceding and defining the self; for both, it exists at the liminal border between language and the unsayable; for both, it abuts on a realm we may call spiritual. Technically, however cool the voice of Bishop, however seemingly overheated the voice of Olds, the metaphors of both poets enact the erotic.