Sunday, May 29, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Portrait Of ATulip
Gardens, half a yard of day lilies, borders of tulips and herbs, dozens of pots of African violets on every window sill, extraordinary cakes, pies, coffees, roasts, doughnuts, gaudy Dutch plates, cups handed down from the mother’s grandmother, a cappella hymns, handmade chests, old trunks filled with garments and show towels, rich to the touch and significant selves added generations in succession, double stitched wool car blankets alongside large shipping boxes of chocolate, metal containers of sugar from the Franklin Sugar Refining Co., Philadelphia, Stangl ceramics. When the services of morning and afternoon end the evening sing begins. It was an a cappella era that lacked diversion, but more open to expression and interpretation than accompaniment of an organ.Her visitors were praising my art on her wall and the written Tulip on her table. Her lawyer took Aeyrie’s 16x 20 print home when she died, which she
When this one declared herself terminal I had secretly written and prepared the substance of her life from years of phone calls, tapes, and letters. It was already done, but the versions since broken down into blogs on the internet then took up five volumes. Before the month was out I sent her two bound copies, Portrait, along with a wider consideration of her family called, A Tulip Blooms From the Heart.
is thinking about doing while we consider her history. The earth wave on the wall changes colors in the light. She calls me Bosy after James Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s biographer. I am learning to write. She says nobody has ever been able to understand what I wrote. Reductionists. Realists. Let us praise ordinary men. Visitors want to borrow the Tulip, some kind of democratic thing, that depends on these agents. The puzzle has many pieces and the more to fill the better you understand. Tulip and Portrait show the huge conflict between childhood memories and the present person, the conspiracy of silence in the family of Mennonites.
End of An Era
(after August 25, 2004)
Four days later in the evening, a message on my machine.“This is Aunt Libby. Don’t call in more than a half hour.”
I am too late. Next morning there are two calls, one message in a faint voice, “you are cleared to call Carol Watkins November 3, 4 or 5 around noon to arrange a visit.”
I come home after badgering tennis balls with Shakespeare in the conflict of business and art. "Who’s your favorite poet?" They ask, but save the pearls.
I call right after lunch, a new number, her private room.
I have the green light.
She has had to change all the addresses on her magazine subscriptions. It will take till June she thinks.
“I’m not coming to see your house you know. When do you want me to come.”
“Not before 10 AM.”
“No, when in weeks and months?”
I ask, “is there something you want me to take from your house? Where are the photographs of your father, the watercolor of Jesse.”
“You’re welcome to anything in photographs. Marvin’s album of old plane stamps is in the cocktail table of living room. Old photographs are in the bottom of the wardrobe in the back bed room. The watercolor is in the little chest in the hall, in blue plastic. You can do pretty much what you want.”
What you want is to take them to dinner and a show.
13 November 04
Call to confirm visit. Yesterday she got her easy chair and lamp delivered. Says it’s too bad they have to be in a hospital instead of her house, which raises questions.
She, “if anybody had told me I would have to endure this I couldn’t possibly.”
Articulate, “I am busy making myself happy, being cheerful to people. I got an idea from a meditation book about putting monsters in the closet so that’s what I do with the possibilities of what I may have to go through. I put them in the closet.” But her monsters turned into such stamps.
Terminal, but on aspirin? Does she believe the favor of God in a quiet death?
24 November 04
Her lawyer cooks his turkey in two parts. First soaked in brine and cooked, then the white meat removed and the brown meat cooked later while the white is kept moist. This, people, is on a need to know basis. She is a thoroughly institutionalized turkey, so we talk about gassing cats. You see the connection.
Somebody we can’t mention, has just mercifully gassed their cat. Quality of life issues. My AZ nephew doesn’t have the guts to get rid of his. I ask how she’d like to be done. She says her brother nearly did himself one time while gassing cats in his garage with good old carbon mono. She says she has no thoughts except that the monster is behaving in his closet.
I close with, “Aunt Libby, my friend, my aunt.
She, “my ancestor.”
30 November 04
Various birds descend. Susan, Christy, Robert, Cynthia etc are coming December 16th or so. She says she hopes she won’t be too vegetative from medications when they come. Aspirin can just loop you out. Too vegetative, these observations provoke silence in me. Four or five thoughts come at the same time, but none of them do I permit expression. After all, it’s a little late to say what I want after so many years.
She introduces the notion of selecting the day of your death, gives some examples. I tell her that as far as I’m concerned she’s not going to die, not that I want or would ever think of limiting her choices in any way, can’t have that, but what death?
They say the creed all their lives then when it matters they renege, “life everlasting!” I’ve known her all my life, but it is inevitable that this attitude be taken.
She told the factotum that she’s heard physicians can identify the last two weeks, so she says she’ll just give him a call, sort of a snooze alarm to prepare. He didn’t like that much, likes her more than is good for him, as other men have.
"He’ll get over it!"
She's just not forthcoming to the male race. I have an advantage because I knew her before she knew that I knew her. She didn’t know I was conscious during all the embraces and hugs and kisses. She didn’t know I was conscious as a five year old sleeping in her bed. She says I think she’s a saint. But I have to tell her others do, not me. I think she’s a beautiful woman.
She absolutely crowed at her announcement that she was marrying Marvin. Felt like she really put one over that time.
I used to taunt her horribly about the merchandized greeting card profanations of Easter and Mother’s Day promoted by department stores. Pro mercantile, she says, “don’t you believe in Mother’s Day?” The graphologist was right about her, “while you possess much emotional depth, you do not make it a practice to display your feelings.”
Selecting the day of death she has already counseled a Catholic lady on the afterlife from John 14, which she now quotes to me and says “you get a new body but it may be spiritual, you will recognize each other, but there will be no gender.”
The lady says, “say it again, say it again.”
Since you’re going to be seeing people in heaven, I ask her, “when I die are you going to come running up to me and say na na na na na?”
She’s not going to bite on that one. We bandy Lewis’s Great Divorce with the grass and light so real they hurt your feet and eyes.
No, she says, she’s doing pretty well on her new pain schedule. A Tylenol every four hours and a small Percocet at night that gives her hallucinations from 9:30 to 11:30. Has had a good intellectual talk with Senior Pastor about the end of things.
I tell her that volume 2 of the 3, A Tulip Blooms From the Heart, is going to be ready and sent to her in pre-proof next week. How it’s all about love. She quotes Thornton Wilder, Bridge of San Luis Rey, “…but the bridge is love.” Yes it’s love, love in love about love in life. Beginning or end, alive or dead, the old and young remember love. The young are influenced by the old to a thousand generations of those that love Him. Still going.
“Here’s their story,” I tell her of the Tulip Blooms, going through the table of contents by memory, “you’re last, sweetheart.”
Henry is first, tragedy, gravity, humor, laughter, joy. All you Pennsylvania Dutch nuts. She’s said for years she comes of a line of peasants back to Adam. It’s because they ate wheat and the Italians ate pasta, she maintains. Food makes the man. The individual character traits, the strengths are common to the community. Wry. Full. Hidden.
As if I’m getting too close she says she never liked having her picture taken, tells me of the worst picture she ever took in 1944 when she was a plane spotter. In that day planes were everywhere and people were on the roof of the Media courthouse to forestall the Nazis, sending warning descriptions downtown for analysis. She worked in the Chestnut Street branch, her own version of MI 5. Had to get clearance. One morning they herded them into a prison-like room at 4 AM and took their pictures. She destroyed the jail mug.
“No, I don’t think you’re going to die,” I say.
Henry and Anna and Flo and Howard and Jay and Bea are still living, challenging youth with their lives’ boundaries.
She says people are praying for her.
“Can I pray for you.”
Yes.
“Can I pray for you now.”
Yes.
Can I pray for you out loud?”
Yes.
I do.
We say goodbye.
7 December 04
Call around 5. No answer.
Call again. No answer.
Resisting asking Mr. Riddle again, I call again.
“So you’re still there?”
Yes, on the new regime of Tylenol, and wowsie, just had a Percocet.
"Are you hallucinating?"
No, but she’s learning to ask for help. There are rituals of self defense where she has a box of tissues and flashlight on one side of the pillow, call button on the other, feet slightly exposed at the bottom of the bed. Has hot feet!
We talk of releasing life.
She told factotum: “I had written up an obituary but I guess I lost it. I can do another one for you before you need it.”
Mellow.
Says she has told Pastor she wanted no family eulogies. Said what Robert and I did at the parents’ occasion was a sibling contest. I’m silent.
But she wants to fight about it, says, well you’re being awfully silent. It feels like her finger is on the call button here. Is there no shock value in her remark?
“You see the world through ideas and eyes that oppose romance,” is what I would say if I had replied. I tell her that I’m practicing negative capability, holding in mind two conflicting truths without having to choose between them. Just sittin’ releasin’.
I ask why her sister claimed she was the family deviate.
She says that she always thought her sister had an abnormal immune system because she got twice what others got only once, that she even contracted impetigo from one of her students in her first teaching job. As to her sister’s religion, she was less Mennonite, only 10 when her father died. Uncle Will, having a daughter her age, Gladys, sent both to camp with the Reformed. Later she was Presbyterianized.
Lib says she has warned Pastor that family is going to descend on her death. So he should look out. But I’m descending now, it’s Thanksgiving, seat belt fastened. She saw her picture in A Tulip Blooms from the Heart, Vol. II, says it was taken at 15 ½ for her school year book, that Jake’s letters were really pathetic in their presenting the view that he was caring for his grandchildren. Grind his bones.
Her façade is opaque as ever. Referring to her letters therein somehow she thinks I have earlier letters. I don’t. She says she had mixed feelings at her father’s death. That Anna tried to give her children normalcy in that June of ’29, after Grandfather Jake’s death, had a house party for graduation at Penn State where she was a house mother, then a surprise birthday party for Lib’s 19th. Sounds rather a celebration.
She is pleasantly surprised that Carole Watkins stayed up all night reading her story, Volume I, called A Red Portfolio. I tell her it needs to be called Conversations with a …. We can add different words here depending. Beastie?
She says that although Bee was always kind to Rena she also always thought her an intruder and never warmed to her. And who has Lib ever warmed to? I told her that when Edwin Arthur Yeo and Rena visited in Pittsburgh I had heard my mother say words to this effect and as soon as they arrived went up to Rena and told her “I think you’re pretty.” As to saving Browns Mills from the auction block she quotes Shakespeare “be not the first by which the new is tried…” meaning, bear realistically the fact that loss wins. My decreasing sympathy for realists thinks loss sucks.
Keep a low key. An even keel. Don’t keel over, is that it? Don’t rock the baby. Releasing life.
I should send her Chuang Pomes. Then she would complain I’ve gone from garrulity to brevity.
On the theology of sin and self examination she says she can’t help, that after charging sibling rivalry at two successive funerals! Yes, she missed her biweekly shower attending a jazz Te Deum concert at the Rest Home. Strings, oboe, viola, violin, everything but a harp. That’s coming. Saints or sinners, I can’t make up my mind. Successive visits: Joey & Melissa, Robert, Cynthia, Sue, Christy, Nick, then, as of 12/26 Aeyrie, me, Anne.
I say, do you remember who I am.
“I can’t forget it.”
Always opaque, she says “we feel we have to protect the image we have of ourselves, therefore we say nothing or everything.” She is learning to ask for help for sure, is interested in the subject of dying on demand. The old folk’s grapevine has it that within limits people can die when they want to, that is when they have accomplished their desires. The aged are as culpable of myth and fantasy as children, scheme with great cunning. The underbelly of the institution, the secret code of the resigned spreads in little cocktail hours and wine tastings among the little old ladies who glow and tickle to each other like Sexton and Plath about death, about how they want to die. That’s where they share the initiated secrets, tell how. The glory of pneumonia! Then they boast to their sons and daughters, like they just got an A on their homework, that they know how to do it.
In some sense she is more beautiful than ever. The pink chair is reupholstered with silver thread. Silk and rose. Sometimes she wears a pink sweater and the white hair flies out over the sides of her head. She jokes they think she’s an angel. It’s a little spare, flying just the same, a halo around a sun on fall days in the mountains. The aurora whitens the brow. Since we are in the mountains I saw a cliff with patches whiten in the blizzard, a little locus amoenus, lovely place. She is proud to wear it, not the nature of the golden age, but the silver verge of afterlife, beauty swallowed in light. Beauty is the highest flesh can come. Human garden spots of grass, residue greater than memory, fruit, the spiritual fruit of life they don’t see or we either, culminate in a suspended natural law, the corn is gold, the ox with the lion, earth recreated. You in the midst of Broadway think this exaggeration? The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout.
Virgil, before the Renaissance, said “the ram in his pasture will change his fleece’s color.”
See the gold flower in her face?
Where silver is can gold be far behind?
They believe a certain godly nature in the gold!
Black wires turn to white, silver wings, the mild accepting eye.
There are more ways to go, in a flash, all fleshed up, but consider the true for a minute, the case of the vine raising its “clusters on the neglected thorn” (Fourth Eclogue).
Hallowed does not mean soft, eyes lit with resignation. She had not lost her temper until some days after the Thanksgiving visit, but signs off the phone again with bite. Do you want beauty in flesh, the dreaded subcutaneous layers shimmering slightly, intact when they walk? Or with the deeper life eternal, a faithful kind, your own mother if you like, whom gravity has flattened to the skeleton of a face? Do you want the brow, the bone, the bite, the jaw at resurrection? You love more the flesh you’re about to lose.
On this verge she won’t play my game any more than I play hers. She wants to say something outrageous to provoke me. I want her to speculate, something she disdains as purely a male phenomenon, therefore beneath her. “When you come running up to me when I get to heaven what are you going to say?”
She really wants to tell me she has found another misspelled word, a factual error in this manuscript.
9 December 04
It is December 9. I live in Phoenix but planted a red oak last year. Its leaves are changing red, vermilion, scarlet, maroon, will end in brown. Across the street a cottonwood turns gold. Leaves shower the street, covered in gold. I pull back the curtain, sit in a chair. Maturity is not a new thing. Get that? Just disrespected among the argumentative youth who have grave reserve about authority.
Not to offend, but it suggests her relatives should get in touch with their eternal selves, look at the last name on the driver’s license. Equivocating theys, something I’ve always wanted to do, they never bothered to Americanize it. Just as old world as ever. Isn’t the new world anyway just a bunch of nuts cracked open?
Sadly for puerility, their last name combines meanings of completion and maturity. Yes and no Tolkien’s ring and winter’s age, white hoarfrost up to the knees. The man-woman ripe, filled like a lieder in the northern ear.
They snipped off their braids of hair and stored them in the trunks. Now I’ve got them.
It doesn’t suggest death, effort satisfied, but progeny and ancestry. The bone-hard skeleton of principle, the virtue proven circumstance, a solo 90 year old who converses first with God each day. This certainty seems to bring youth into judgment. "I'm as good as you are! Who are you to tell me what to do?"
Who wants to grow old? Everybody. Maturity balances, reconciles, adjusts. Youth exaggerates, advocates, accelerates. Less is more, we say. Arrested development is not maturity. Ironically, maturity prolongs youthfulness, decreases lines in the face, diminishes toil, fret and care. Why not balance, reconcile, adjust? "Well, you have to learn it for yourself." (Ecclesiastes 8:1).
15 December 04
She doesn’t see how all the obese women on her floor manage to maintain their weight with the small portions they eat, worries for their handlers’ effort in moving them all. She’s in the middle of family visits. Joe III and Melissa last weekend, Robert, Susan, this. They have not called to confirm. Don’t expect it. But I tell her I see it could get better, communication, because when people get older they get wiser? She says that visiting a relative on the way out reminds them of family.
I amuse her with my vigilance and care of children because she sees people divesting themselves of them. Maybe they don’t realize how long it takes to grow up, 38 years. Depending on their choices that is near or far. Look at Milton. The modern shudders. Milton was close to and dependent on his father until this age. You don’t want your children to grow up to be Milton or Mozart do you?
She says she expects it of me, look at my care at extending our old dog's life. Other people would have gassed him she says. He is an analogical joke between us, "you won’t get rid of him as long as I’m alive." Not quite. He left Palm Sunday, she waited till the Saturday after Easter. He’s blind in one eye, can’t hear, his right hip makes him walk in circle, incontinent at best, can’t get up, can’t sit down, has to have 5 minute breaks when he walks across the street, pants like he’s run a mile. His last days were heart howling.
I already told her how my father made me watch him drown the kittens. Multiple times. I don’t tell her that Joggy is the agent of deliverance to our family. God can work in a dog. Sounds like a story from Guideposts. He can’t really stand up unless he leans against something. When he leans on me it is just about like rocking your son to sleep in your arms at 3 AM when he has a fever. He perks up when he sees another dog just about the way she does when visited. Makes her feel a little special for people to fly out from earth to see her.
But you don’t have to worry darlings, earth isn’t going to end, death is going to be swallowed up in victory.
She says she’s still not in total agreement about my effort to collect and distribute her things. I tell her, just say so and I’ll cancel it. But she says, “oh no.” Far be it from her to make decisions.
One of my tennis buddies is going to give away his wife’s wedding ring! Well why not. The people in church gave theirs in the offering plate. Along with their '54 Chevy Belair. Another guy gave the royalties for his talking book, $110,000. Just stood up and announced it. I myself bought shares in the restoration of a grammar school.
In a way it was reparation for Jacob the Elder (see Book III). All these Christians giving everything away. One time we took 11 large boxes of medical supplies and drugs to St. Vincent De Paul. Just carried it up to their storeroom. Never got a thank you. Sent also large boxes to missionaries in Thailand. Never heard a word. In those days if you were in leadership in any way at all you got invited to a dinner in the sanctuary and afterward pledges and checks were taken. The first time you think it is maybe a dinner of appreciation. So all this worn furniture, just auction it off. My grandfather’s tables and chairs and copper kettles. His letters gone. This old world: Farewell sorrow, praise God the open door / I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.
Her original opinion was that it was all tawdry used junk. “So what do you care what happens to it?” But of course it matters.
Do you reject the body, spurn the material flesh? Immolate temptation? Up in smoke. Is that a heresy, the rejection of the body, or shall we keep the body under. Mind / body opposition. Marriage is honorable in all? Do you know what happens in marriage people? Like she says, in heaven there is no gender. Get it while it’s hot. The earth is the Lord’s, he gave the dominion of his hands. Make up your mind. Opposition or union. Sow to the flesh, reap the spirit? I believe in the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting. They all think they’re going to live eternally in heaven. What a joke when they won’t be there five heavenly minutes when oops, it’s back down to earth again. The passenger pigeon and buffalo, the Apache but not the businessman will thrive. Oh restored prairie, pure ocean.
Do you have a version of the afterlife, new heavens and new earth? Read to the end. Does she think that a piece of the true cross meaningless, the Bible of St. John, the manuscripts of the Pope? Nothing material is invested with meaning. Hear the Mennonite? Put not your trust in horses.
Odd notes left over. The house next door, 198K. If she sells for that she can live on it a year at $300 a day plus the lawyer. “There’s only one electric line to the attic.” That explains it! “Jerry broke the plumbing,” cost her $67. She thinks I’m Bosy because Boswell rewrote. Her friend Betty wants to write. The yellow forsythia in the turquoise vase was kept by the school.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Watercolor Miniature
The art in these pieces is like miniature. Not that it was so intended, but the details are capable of much exploration. Measures to the inch in the original hold their integrity in a magnified field. To account for such beauty in life and art is a generalization the artist herself would not allow. Being an antiquarian and curator of two centuries, an intellectual and water colorist, her life was a history of a family's memory of itself. The historian in her nineties enabled this narrative with documentation by chests, embroidery, letters, manuscripts, quilts and books, but mostly with conversations pursued over the last four years of her life, an oral record pieced together after like the Times crossword she did at night. There were also collections of speeches and wood cuts, wood carvings and rolled sheets of watercolors.
A fierce Independent, she lived alone, successfully negotiated lame feet, a broken hip, cataract surgery, transportation systems and daily chores. This demonstrated a way to live in hope for its own sake. She did not exactly live alone if the heirlooms had voice. China spoke with linens, cabinet called to attic. Gravestones and German books called and left their cards. This revived the innate as much as any email address. In these examples was a light for viewing, names illumined by other names, linens by linens, chests by chests, books by books. Right away, to place them and their creations among contemporaries was a method of proceeding, Contextualizing and exploring the miniatures, small because far away, involved art, history and language with some startling surprises. The dark was found shot with light. It makes one think more of dawn.
She spoke with her mother’s voice and her sister’s, her grandmothers' and grandfathers.' With the preservative of gravestones, the heirlooms are a means of restoration, suggest even a way to get back the antiques heard of but not found, like the etched wood sign in an attic barn. Pretty often last wills exist. More than the will, sometimes their own words exist impossibly in court filings defending actions, conflicts revealed in the quotation of their words in the letters of antagonists. This is notably the case with Jacob the Elder in the letters of Boehm. The words prove the character. So little a diplomat it seems like a family trait, at least in Jacob the Elder and his brother Conrad. When all text and context is counted, false and true resolved, Conrad's celebrated atheisms are likewise resolved in his will in faith. The more you look the more you see.
The fine art crowd elevate themselves and this judgment and deny entrance to whoever breaks protocol with the present empire. Really fine art eventually finds an audience.
But everything has utility, landscapes, portraits, all words, you can use. The only thing that doesn’t have use is what you can’t use, but what is that? Money? So the curse that folk art has “utility” is meaningless.Were someone of this folk denial to be also of clandestine mind their secretiveness could be debated as paired opposites of some kind, modesty and fear, prudence and intensity, beauty and self loathing. People are always complicated. Rimbaud proves this. To say the artist hid herself might be accurate. She covered her trails in burnings and disposings of compromise so complete that even if there were such, the personal was expunged. While John Singer Sargent was doing charcoal portraits in Massachusetts, anonymous itinerant portrait makers went farm to farm in Pennsylvania doing charcoals of children with also taufscheim, geburts and frakturs, baptismal certificates. There an application of art to a family, some purpose that made it folk, a kind of furniture making with decorations extends to the words penned on the fraktur which were their reason for being, a spiritual allegory of the Friend.
Interiors were most decorated in their use by a family, a habit stemming from the inward source. Embroideries showed this purpose. Show towels meant to do just that, decorate with quilts, silver smithed napkin rings, cups for children, leather tooling of the designs as on the towels, iron work, wood carvings, but the names of the artists scarce, pieces largely unsigned. Even in 2003 they were still apologizing for poetry, folk art and folk bodies, as though they would never dare claim to beauty themselves.
That which is lost must be restored. Anna’s Elizabeth, our subject, made the first complete effort of those generations toward the intellectual life. She was the first artist and intellectual but the last surviving family Dutchman. She wanted to be free of earth, but in the same ironic breath told me, “I’m a peasant, you’re a peasant,” as if, in the next contradiction, she might find out that in this life she had contracted for a buggy but been given instead an airplane. "I don't know where I got my mind,” she said, affronted by the perception of a first class mind in what prejudice ruled was a second class body. We can ask of her and of ourselves where the mind comes from. I cannot believe I am going to say it comes from the environment and physical artifacts, only follow the trail.
Good In The Natural
Direct access to this good occurs in folk art, but not much spoken, even if sung, a reticence that in a hyperbolic age seems welcome. The boast of Stoudt holds good that the Pennsylvania Dutch “produced an American decorative art which, with few minor exceptions, is the only indigenous art of its kind in our land” (3). The lily “dominates the poetry and the literature; tulips appear rarely in verbal form.” That Pennsylvania Dutch nurture surrounded her in its host of domestic particulars in her mother’s gardens full of tiger lilies, tulips and herbs and dozens of pots of African violets on every window sill. She got her mind from those extraordinary pies, cakes, coffees and roasts, doughnuts made whole by the kitchen artist. She got that mind from the Gaudy Dutch plates and cups, old when her mother’s grandmother had them, from hymns she sang at multiple church services, from the handmade Berks county country chest with its chamfered drawers, walnut wood and heavy boards. She got that mind from her grandfather’s blanket chest and its porcelain knobs in the attic with old trunks with her father’s initials and his father’s, filled with the show towels and double-stitched woolen car blankets, bedspreads and linens alongside shipping boxes of chocolate from her father’s warehouse: Walter Baker & Co. Ltd., Premium No. 1 Chocolate, large metal containers of sugar from the Franklin Sugar Refining Co., Philadelphia, artifacts, vases, Stangl ceramics.
The household artifacts and gardens compound with the hymns in mutual quotations about flowers, roses, lilies, and morning-stars expressed in jewelry, pottery, and linens. A “use of natural events and objects,” says the disdained Stoudt, “to describe spiritual conditions” (100). It was an easy thing for one who had good taste anyway to translate this into being. She was a New York buyer of gifts for her department store for 35 years.The bygone Pennsylvania German imagination retrospective for the “lily age,” symbolic of images in hymns, gardens, and art mutually exposed a state of mind with Christ as the lily, but that lily was also the believer in a compounding paradise of “uncontaminated good with natural reality” (Stoudt, 101).Mennonites were prone to contemplate the eternal in such temporal and floral images, “the first indigenous folk art in America” (Stoudt, xviii). She got her mind from this milieu, but we are not so eager to learn from whence her prejudice against the body came, largely a result of the longstanding war between Pennsylvania German and English culture. Body and mind were in conflict in her life always with the proviso that one should not reveal to the other. That would be pride. Flesh must be disdained. “There was no “self-expression” in the religious folk art of Eastern Pennsylvania for he who insists upon having his own way, either in art or in life, is an egotist” (Stoudt, 9-10). Mennonite theology is a refrain she doubted or believed, but its psychology was suspicious of the motives of another and herself. It was against egoism. Of course bathing in submerged tradition is endemic to art. The great freedom is freedom from oneself.
Collective biblical images buoyed her health, courage and faith in the same way that Pennsylvania German folk art took meaning from the literary tradition which accompanied it, the Bible, medieval and Pietistic hymnody and hymnals portrayed in artifacts and in the tradition of the literary. But do not say that art was not favored in Mennonite families, that is disproved by the “tulips” embroidered in
in the soul.
Pennsylvania RimbaudA search of artistic denial leads to the celebrated life of the early 20th century French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, who renounced his greatness at 19 to never write again. The work she never did, accepting that it was never done, makes her a kind of Pennsylvania Dutch Rimbaud. He accomplished his by dissolution. She consummated by retailing. “Tired from long days” as a motive for avoiding fraktur might be believed were it not yoked with the distrust and distaste for glory she dares to call “realism,” a fearsome display of the tiger stripes of beauty and austerity.“Not good enough for fine art,” she says when I ask the right question, “not a genius,” she says with self-effacement, but the causes are counter causes.
e: Hopkins, Blake, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Rimbaud! The nerve and the pain of it she casts with aplomb. She had shredded them in a fit at her husband, in a fury of rejection tore them up in a fury right in front of his eyes.After this, not really in an attempt to get even, I sent some prose to Marvin, who liked to write, with the advice that it should be drunk with a bucket of sea water. Vulcan revered part (Pancake Syntazz (66-71) and Eyeshot thought another wayward with symbolic acts. I gave her an acrylic, now returned after her death, where earth and sky wrote cursive yellow swirls of blue, white and brown, a language not reduced to formula, to remind her, the brushstrokes like the swirls of her great grandfather’s signature, that the outdoors come in again, that even though the road is not taken, the road is taken. What drives the beautiful out of twilight into full sun? She says she studied art because she hadn't the patience to be a teacher.
So the Red Portfolio was gone, but left behind a conundrum that didn't fit the world of art school and watercolor to the social but go nicely annihilation. It went with the sardonic, critical view of the foibles and follies of life. It went so well it fueled four years of riposte by phone, hours by the week and thorns for the crucified when she had no fame and hardly any visitors, but survived anyway on the slender pickingsof teasing calls, with packages of oranges and apples appearing mysteriously on the porch. She never got it that these were sent to her in homage of the still life oils, that is, returned in fruit. She only became famous when she was able to declare herself terminal and was admitted into the niceties of permanent care. Then governed wit made nice. Her walls held photographs and paintings of which she might consider herself part muse. Her nightstand held copies of many bound versions celebrating herself. If I will assume what she assumed, there is a long while yet to drive back shadow, indeed they burn, torched by light.
Blame fortune, the death of her father, personality, ambition, that she was able to give it up. Blame duty, sacrifice, she gave it up for her mother. Blame the Mennonites. Somebody’s got to pay. She sacrificed to work, provide a home, protect her mother, did not continue as an artist in any manner but life. It’s like she lived on the farm, spurned her passion of life and invented ways to doubt even her own beauty, upbringing, religion, gender, poverty. Beauty might not have been known by its own name if they thought it vanity, being consumed by beauty’s sister, truth. Anabaptists sought truth and God for their own sake, not some use, as opposed to their reputation in art, for beauty might be associated with pleasure. But where was beauty hid? In the city they ruled by utility, formality and duty, in the country more so. Like the English they were their own worst enemy.Of the contradictions and vagaries of the lives of people, Beethoven running down stairs to finish a chord, high passion and dudgeon, we may have things reversed. Borges was the god of the fabulists but called a priest at the end of his life. The celebrated atheist was buried near Calvin. It will be said an aberration; it was Maria; he didn’t mean it; old age turns men weak, but the true weakness is youth, Rimbaud’s madness, drugs, guns and preachings about prophets when he was not one, for to be a prophet means more than erratic speech. At the end of his life Rimbaud calls on God, has a priest and comes to equipoise. They must exhaust themselves before they see. This is a new take on the literature of exhaustion.
The Red Portfolio
Given the nature of things it should be no surprise to learn that the work was done, just that it did not survive. Death notices of family members, behests and bequests survived. Wastebaskets covered with flowers embroidered out of burlap survived. “Wilkom” painted with love birds in a big circular poster in the basement survived. The compensation for me has to be all those notes taken in the last years of her life by phone, hundreds of pages of reflection and anecdote survive, done with the same intention I had to get the best I could of literature of the 20th century in the last decade of its millennium.This was the harvest she reaped, sent in that first draft by mail after she announced her impending death in September 2004.She was not surprised at the metaphor-laden subtexts to her thinking revealed there, like her house, her literal home, her whole sense of family, the culture of which she was a part and her own mortal being.So yes, it turns out that there was some work of her maturity, despite austerity and self denial, duty and perfectionism, for when the rolled sheaf of watercolors was recovered from the attic she said there had been another collection, painted much later to her own taste in watercolors, in what she called the plain style, “as watercolors should be done,” without extras. Suggested stems with whitecaps detached? Were these seen, she asked, in a large red portfolio in the attic?
No sign.
"I guess I threw them away."
Whatever can be said of this absurdity fits in with her humor. She is not guessing and knows well what happened. She did not throw them away. The story comes out. She tore them up in her husband’s face. How many times must we be warned not to share our work with those we know? And if we do be prepared to explode. In the midst of some discussion or other, she uncharacteristically wanted to reveal herself further, retrieved The Red Portfolio and showed the contents to her fanatic Dutchman husband of his own seventh generation. Marvin had such ferocious ideas of art that he then and there declared they weren't art! She destroyed them in front of his eyes. Tore them in a fury. It’s nice to compare this with the time the rejected Blake, being criticized, gouged every word with a chisel from the copper plates of Jerusalem suggesting his “love,” or “friendship” for the reader (Blake,10-11).
Auto de Fe
Artistic suicide refuses to paint. Auto de fe, destroying the red portfolio isn’t solely a Dutch rage, but there is a tradition of it in the collection and burning of German devotional books by Peter Miller and Conrad Weiser in 1732. They immolated the Heidelberg Catechism to prove they weren’t Lutherans! Good true Sabbatarians, they were and not the last immolation of that century according to critic Julius Friedrich Sachse (I, 245). But it wasn’t even the first such immolation of her family either.
Before she ever graduated art school her brother, my predecessor in the roster, had profoundly misplaced their errant grandfather’s estate papers. The post hoc justification for this act never changed, but the story itself varied. Late in life he said he just didn’t pick them up, but the early gleeful passionate account was that he burned them. Of course a child is not supposed to remember such things, but allow that they will twist unchallenged.
With art or without, she admits a temper. A Dutch species? Her mother destroyed every letter she got after she had read it (but not the post cards!), not from temper but from the belief that once read the letter was worthless. Why then save all the post cards? Because of the utility, the pictures! Flurries of cold reconciliation swirl about. Mennonites do not save the errant past. That is why antiquarian Jacob Mensch’s saving of the 48 letters of Bishop Andrew Mack is such a rarity and exception. There are ever greater rarities revealed. She pulls the aplomb of centuries around her, "you'll get over it," she says, as if she did.
I don’t. I piece the shards, array the clues of attic, basement, history, court records, china cabinet, chests.
If this rejection of the body is a Pennsylvania Dutch paradigm, book, papers, or whatever oeuvre, it’s not art, letters, estate papers or devotional books that offend. That’s just how she expressed herself. When she retired to the hospital towers at $300 a day, a desk drawer with diaries of the 70’s and 80’s was found, meticulous dailies, but which yielded no personal comments or observations whatever. Asked what she wanted to do with them, she replied, “I’ll get my lawyer to burn them.” She declared that she had old records of her trip to Greece. Should she send them to me or “tear them up?”
Just a manner of speaking? Estate traders live their lives off rejected detritus, but they are treasures of the past. My wife’s grandmother burned all the letters she got from her sisters in Sweden after moving to Texas in 1920. Her recipe book was handed down though; her daughter glued recipes cut from magazines over the original ones handwritten in Swedish. I at auction got a rosemaled Norwegian dower chest with the hand painted name Magdeli Jahns dr [dotter] Laupsa 1889.
Why Did You Go T
o Art SchoolIn the end the errant Peter Becker retired to live out his years on a farm in Skippack. Did he get over the destiny generations find so hard to attain? Many forces oppose the inevitable. Considering all this she is asked, “why did you go to art school?
“I didn’t want to be a teacher.”
“Why did you go to art school?
“Well I wanted to be a doctor but that didn’t go over at home.” Now the evasion begins to ring true.
She didn’t apply to Women’s Medical College, but surely she belonged. Not good enough for fine art either she thought. One cannot totally blame the environment, every earthen vessel has to believe against all odds. Maybe that’s why she loved the Russian émigré who boarded with her mother for a time, who did a bust of her. The soul of hope against all hope.
She despised entitlement, but didn’t have any, yet it was not forever denied her. It came in the end in the wise hands and mind of her interlocutor’s wife, a sole doc, a lone doc in the old sense, but with as fine a research brain as she herself had, which means, as any.
Much unrealized, deferred, remains to be made right, fulfilled. When she finished art school she painted murals for cash, floral scenes above wainscots on restaurants and the walls of rich ladies such as Mrs. Sheldeker of Oak Lane, who insisted on having her driven home by chauffeur, for which patronizing attitude the artist terminated the position.
She didn’t lack talent, but hubris, the reverse genius who believes the opposite so strongly, the opposite of what is real, what is seen so much that it doesn’t matter what others do or what happens. I feel the weight of it, not just herself but her mother too, to make plain their beauty, for surely they all gave me their gifts.
What if all the high flown questions of the Pennsylvania Dutch aardvarks about celestial chastity, Dunkards, Schwenkfelders and rebaptizers came down to just fulfilling a need to belong, be accepted, but which everything they did caused them to be excluded from?
Before the Mennonite: The Fragrant Husband
There are ironies in these ironies. She disdained farmers and ignorance, favored the maternal families, though farmers and Mennonites, but cast a cold eye on the paternal because of that errant grandfather, a huge irony in a life of them because this man’s family beginning in Pennsylvania was not Mennonite nor poor farmer either, but blacksmiths, professionals and elected officials who founded amid much controversy, the first Reformed church in Pennsylvania and one who attended as a delegate the Pennsylvania Assembly for the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
Such activities require a separate monograph, but they figure largely, with an edge, in a number of 18th century sources, the Journals of Henry Muhlenberg of 1753, the Letters of the Rev. John Philip Boehm 1728-1748, Gottlieb Mittelberger’s Journey To Pennsylvania of 1756. As political and social leaders they were everything her mother Anna, eight generations later, wanted to be. Before Anna ever sought to escape the accent, the farm and country ignorance these paternal forebearers spoke multiple languages, including English and held public office. Anna sensed a fragrance of the life she wanted in her husband’s past.
Briefly, that first new world progenitor, Hans George, settled his family in Salford at least by 1717 (Strassburger, 414). Although no Mennonite, he signed his name “with a firm hand” (Heckler) as witness to the Mennonite Trust agreement of 1725 that allocated land for that burial ground and school. Maybe he put this agreement into English. The terms of his will show him to wise and implicitly educated. Some think he married the daughter of a Dutch Reformed Church minister. His son "was entrusted by the Colonial government as agent… to collect partial payments from settlers on their lands in 1723, he must have been here some time before, well acquainted, and in the confidence of the leading men". (Dotterer quoted in Heckler, 31) This Jacob, was Philadelphia County assessor in 1741, deputy for the probate of wills for Philadelphia County, 1743 to 1748. Heckler in his Historical Sketches (1886) said he was "the most prominent man in the early history of Salford" and among the four most "rea
sonably well educated” men of the area who were classically trained, “a man of great force of character.”The next generation’s oldest son, another Jacob, was the first elected member of the Pennsylvania General Assembly from Montgomery County (1786-89) who voted for the Convention to adopt the Constitution of the United States, was also one of several founders of the Wentz Reformed Church which continued the Skippack Reformed the begun by his father and grandfather.
The second son, George (1740-1808), from whom she descended, married Elizabeth Hendricks, the daughter of Leonard Hendricks, son of the immigrant Lawrence Hendricks, part of the so-called Krefeld group who settled Germantown in 1683 whose progenitor signed the anti-slavery tract in 1688. That’s how her father’s family became Mennonite.
George and Jacob’s cousins, Daniel and Phillip, were officers in the Berks Co. Militia during the Revolution. Their wives were educated, wrote and spoke English, were mentioned honorably in contemporary affairs. These activities however would fall under Mennonite prohibition, but how many generations does it take to get assurance for the immigrant mind?
Compelled to answer the questions raised here just because the puzzle exists, I sent her such genealogical papers as I had found at the time, but she was by then disinterested. I continue because from the earliest age she was the image of beauty to my mind.
When she first declared herself terminal with cancer and an early draft of this piece was rushed out for her to read with its thousand disorganized details, I asked, “People are going to ask me whether you read this, but it’s very chaotic, the Mennonites, for instance crop up everywhere. What do I tell them?”
“That’s the way it is with me, the Mennonites are always following me around mentally. I’m still a Mennonite in some way or other.”
Works Cited
William Blake. Jerusalem. Edited by Morton D. Paley. Princeton: William Blake Trust. 1998.
James Y. Heckler. The History of Harleysville and Lower Salford Township. 1886. Bedminster, PA: Adams Apple Press, 1993.
Sachse, Julius Friedrich. The German Sectarians of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, 1899. NY: AMS Press, 1971,
Strassburger, Ralph Beaver. The Strassburger Family and Allied Families of Pennsylvania. Privately Printed: Gwynedd Valley, Pa. 1922, 414.
John Joseph Stoudt. Pennsylvania German Folk Art. Allentown, PA: Schlechter’s, 1966.
J. C. Wenger. History of the Mennonites of the Franconia Conference.
Telford, PA: Franconia Mennonite Historical Society, 1937. Republished by Mennonite Publishing House. Scottdale, PA, 1985.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Poems on Cans
Dada Poems and Food
These conversations take the sudden Dada turn so much in demand against commercialism and piety. I get hold of her right before the cleaner comes, expected a slam- down, for she is a prickly elder, but the cleaner doesn't come so we rationalize why the neighbor's sheared Pekingese won't come out on the porch. Shame? But our black chow shivers in the Phoenix heat.
I say, "dogs, at least our dog, eat better than most people."
“People food is better, but you have to read the label.”
“Read the label! What's on them, poems?”
She's been reading labels for years since before they didn't have enough books. She read the shredded wheat box, volume after volume. It had pictures too of strawberries and Niagara Falls.
“I don’t save for worth, only for sentiment and use."
Complete Watercolors Below
Who would know better about labels than a retailer? My favorite label, told to my mother-in-law one day made her break down in laughter, but you have to draw out the syllables of the first word:
Mennonite millennialisms as poems on billboards will read:
Clothing labels, cereal boxes, everything has a message. I say, “Too bad you didn't keep those boxes, they'd be worth hundreds on the Internet.”
So that is how our conversation begins, but it has snowed 3 inches in 3 hours. Aphorisms and facts fall from the phone.
Banquet
People worry about old ladies in snow storms with thin pantries since there has been no shopping for ten days. She says that she can make the dish from the 30's when she traveled and took a room with the rudiments. Into the one pan went tomatoes, ground beef, rice, seasoning. She had makings for the dish, but there is also tuna fish, spaghetti. My Welsh-speaking wife overnights gourmet crackers, two kinds of cheese, a large bar of chocolate. Oranges and grapefruit, a bi-monthly event, are already ordered. The Dutch like to eat. In Phoenix, debating Christmas, whether salmon, roast or Mexican, she volunteers salmon Christmas Eve for the Italian, roast on Christmas day for the English and Mexican the day after. But we have enough to eat already to survive so the sound of the words is enough.
Recipe
Spend isolated but important moments in a life, combine them into one day for the 30 seconds or five minutes of consciousness allowed in the mortal span, and we are going to go round the grill, hungarily looking at the shadows these images cast on the dining room walls. What is there to think about anyway but memories, the dolls we played with, meals, recipes?
Shoofly
Well, shoofly, which is heavy in molasses. It is so good it was named for the paper rolls or strips with molasses and syrup hung above tables to catch flies. I knew this stuff when it was current. Now it is like a two dollar bill. Hence shoo, fly.
Breakfast
"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars..." (Thomas Traherne, First Century 29).
She says it is worth it to stay alive as an end in itself; living well, she breakfasted on half a grapefruit and shredded wheat, had a good read from the back of the box. Robert Frost I should think, since it is snowing, he will not see me stopping here / to watch his woods fill up with snow. Miles to go before I sleep I mutter. You'd think Dylan Thomas would go better maybe on the granola bar where once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light. Anyway, bananas and strawberries (from Florida), coffee and toast. She likes to eat, gained three pounds from lack of action in the weather. I like half an onion charred in olive oil. A little deer sausage, brown rice and cayenne. She says cayenne wouldn’t agree with her belly. Her kitchen mug says, sweet in the belly if hot in the mouth.
Free at last from the low sodium, low fat foods she gave Marvin, she carefully watched Alan Alda take a 3 month video trip through his belly. The clip showed a fat operation that cut the stomach and the fat. Lovely thing, but the wrong people were watching. She is spare, lean as a dime, lives on carbs. I have her surgical tools now, the artist's straight edge with which I make the line for such as these. Video the belly and see what wonders wait! You really just need a goal. And a camera. Throw down that mattock and dance while you can! Of the varieties of cookie, tart and fruit by mail she says she was unaware the raspberry outsourced to Indonesia, Dare Cookies distributed by Global Cookies, made in Canada. She recommends fruit juice on your cereal, cranberry on shredded wheat.
Sunday Dinners
Then occurs a confession of fried potatoes. They must be peeled, cut thin, crunched brown and chewed with salt and pepper, but still with a tendency to over-buy, she only lives for one and how much can the 90's eat, so has to throw things out. Age concentrates the mind, boils it down to epigrams. The wise eyes of poems open with epigrams. The rule for throw outs is, "when the green things brown and the browns green.”
There is only pretense amnesia of the boned chicken her mother served at Sunday dinners, mocking, "that's because I got the bones.” But Anna deboned all her chicken by hand, made the coffee so strong by boiling all it could stand, adding more coffee till it boiled again. Then she turned off the heat and put on a lid. The cherry pies were made with sour red pie cherries with sugar. Anna had picked cherries from a tall ladder on Henry's farm in Clayton when she was light and strong. Small farm means no acreage assigned. Somehow the thought of the cherries makes her say she can’t eat cinnamon buns with a clear conscience. She is no Wallace Stevens, who like my father, would run to Horn and Hardarts for a cinnamon bun.
Robert, Cynthia Visit Apple Butter
Robert, Cynthia, Laura visit. They are from Minnesota which provokes a mutual interest in Vikings. No pun, but it doesn’t matter whether you go to attic or basement or anywhere in-between, it’s all old, a legitimately antique life to boot. Laura is interested in gardening and canning, a pint of apple butter “made the old way over a copper kettle and stirred all night.”
“I’m not devoted to apple butter.”
But Laura’s friend had apples, so turned loose in the basement, she came up with canning jars, the old-fashioned tinted ones Grandma used that were boxed up with zinc tops. This was Saturday. On Sunday Laura packed them into 2 boxes and flew them out. Last night the artist called New Orleans to see if the jars had arrived safely in their new life! She is that jar with the zinc top. Every part of her converse is symbolic.
Pork. Sauerkraut
Consider pork and sauerkraut, the Pennsylvania German mainstay:
Marvin put the pot on top of the stove.
Bea put it in the oven in a large baking dish with meat in center. The pork chops were centered up, not cut apart. In the oven 2 ½ to 3 hours cooked with mashed potatoes with pieces of “country ribs” and another can of sauerkraut.
Marge has apples in it and seasoning.
“But the way we, Grandma did it, didn’t need a recipe.” So we cannot relay that.
Citrus and Nuts: Next Level Austerity Longevity
Weaknesses to be purged at the next level of austerity have milk in jasmine tea, “...but not sweet things, no milk, no sugar, a little lemon juice occasionally.” Marvin liked red tea and mint. Her father had a sweet tooth for the caramelized halves of grapefruit and orange; he’d cut them the night before and put an eighth inch of sugar on each half, by morning they were ready. She puts seedless grapes on her cereal. This nearly justifies calling the police. Acme has white, red and black (from Chile) grapes. No doubt they have their eye on her at Acme after the grape juice situation when she challenged them with anti-semitism over the kosher grape juice, but she manages to get some. She cuts these grapes in half and puts 2 or 3 on her cereal. She likes the surprise when you open the refrigerator: “they are almost as big as a small date, like the huge bunch of grapes the spies found in Canaan.”
The citrus we sent came on Saturday, but Bruce can’t eat citrus, is being given steroids, had his first radiation today which is to run 5 days a week for 4 weeks. He wears a knit cap to protect the incision which goes over the left eye into the hairline. She can’t peel the orange skin, it’s too thick. Her real problems are tying shoes, putting on socks, peeling citrus. But no nuts for the last 30 years because she gets diverticulitis.
“I love nuts, pecans and walnuts, curved nuts, cashews. Grandma made salted almonds, a rite because you had to shell them." With the dark skin of the nut removed , boiled, popped from the skin, dry, put in a flat pan with butter and salt. Bake a short time. Celery is bad for her too, with almonds. The cure was to stop everything for a week. Everybody has these problems, especially with brussel sprouts and rhubarb.
“One rose is enough” she says.
After Christmas
She allows driving in the daylight, doesn’t like living alone, cooks three nights a week. On the list of infirmities she is a little hard of hearing. I suggest that she get a voice projector as a sideline.
Coffee in the morning. When Bessie Collins drank tea in S.F. the counter man was disgusted when she said, “I take tea.” For Lib it’s orange green tea, but make it weak. Why not a blend of black and green? Has she heard of the new long liver tea made of apricot pits?
"No.
I tell her, “You’ve got three months to rationalize ’03.”
Her answer is toot suite. She has a Christmas tree this year. It is 3 in. tall with burlap at the base covered with little white lights. Boiled down, the sap remains in life, if not the tree. She is more vibrant than she could wish, surrounds gargantuan packages of crackers and a dozen kinds of tea in her own handmade mug with her girlhood. When she was a girl she got just an orange some years, but now the oranges and grapefruits are bigger. So is she in the spirit. One other present, another expensive floral arrangement from Bruce.
We range back and forth among the nieces and nephews. I tell her we are considering sending our 8th grader to college. She says, “they need time to mature,” as if in the produce department. But she's right. The next year he loses interest in college, goes back to high school. High school is such a waste of time. Probably the best reason to do this is so he can get more sleep.
It is 26 degrees. She says she “could hardly bear to open” the packages of crackers and tea, wrapped individually with Pat's handmade Japanese tea cup with the mid-red splotch of Indian color from the Southwest. She is impressed with Aeyrie’s pen and ink of hills and landscape, very “simple” she says, “great feeling, gives a feeling of space, that’s rare.”
New Year’s Resolution: “Be thankful is my resolution, for what I’ve got and not complain about what I’ve not.” I don’t burden her with my poem, “Tankful.”
She’s got Aeyrie’s art and Andrew’s thank you note, brilliant in pastels, to keep her company. But she’s got more arthritis in the right hand so her own thank you notes are unwritten. Her Hindu doctor has the Hippocratic notion of "don’t do no damage" so she’s sticking with the aspirin and Advil of old age.
Winter
Another call:
“How are you Ma'am?”
“Medium.”
“How do you like your meat?”
“I don’t eat meat much anymore”.
“How about prime rib?”
(Chuckles) “Medium rare. I like it but it tastes bad later in my teeth and belly.”
“How old do you think I am anyway?”
“62.”
“Not chronologically, really.”
“Don’t make me think.”
2010, I think of what's in store.
These conversations take the sudden Dada turn so much in demand against commercialism and piety. I get hold of her right before the cleaner comes, expected a slam- down, for she is a prickly elder, but the cleaner doesn't come so we rationalize why the neighbor's sheared Pekingese won't come out on the porch. Shame? But our black chow shivers in the Phoenix heat.I say, "dogs, at least our dog, eat better than most people."
“People food is better, but you have to read the label.”
“Read the label! What's on them, poems?”
She's been reading labels for years since before they didn't have enough books. She read the shredded wheat box, volume after volume. It had pictures too of strawberries and Niagara Falls.
“I don’t save for worth, only for sentiment and use."
Complete Watercolors Below
Who would know better about labels than a retailer? My favorite label, told to my mother-in-law one day made her break down in laughter, but you have to draw out the syllables of the first word:
“Leeeaves!
Adam had’em.”
Mennonite millennialisms as poems on billboards will read:
“Just say no to Pride."
"Say No to War."
Clothing labels, cereal boxes, everything has a message. I say, “Too bad you didn't keep those boxes, they'd be worth hundreds on the Internet.”
So that is how our conversation begins, but it has snowed 3 inches in 3 hours. Aphorisms and facts fall from the phone.
Recipe
Spend isolated but important moments in a life, combine them into one day for the 30 seconds or five minutes of consciousness allowed in the mortal span, and we are going to go round the grill, hungarily looking at the shadows these images cast on the dining room walls. What is there to think about anyway but memories, the dolls we played with, meals, recipes?
Shoofly
Well, shoofly, which is heavy in molasses. It is so good it was named for the paper rolls or strips with molasses and syrup hung above tables to catch flies. I knew this stuff when it was current. Now it is like a two dollar bill. Hence shoo, fly.
Breakfast
"You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars..." (Thomas Traherne, First Century 29).
She says it is worth it to stay alive as an end in itself; living well, she breakfasted on half a grapefruit and shredded wheat, had a good read from the back of the box. Robert Frost I should think, since it is snowing, he will not see me stopping here / to watch his woods fill up with snow. Miles to go before I sleep I mutter. You'd think Dylan Thomas would go better maybe on the granola bar where once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light. Anyway, bananas and strawberries (from Florida), coffee and toast. She likes to eat, gained three pounds from lack of action in the weather. I like half an onion charred in olive oil. A little deer sausage, brown rice and cayenne. She says cayenne wouldn’t agree with her belly. Her kitchen mug says, sweet in the belly if hot in the mouth.
Sunday Dinners
Then occurs a confession of fried potatoes. They must be peeled, cut thin, crunched brown and chewed with salt and pepper, but still with a tendency to over-buy, she only lives for one and how much can the 90's eat, so has to throw things out. Age concentrates the mind, boils it down to epigrams. The wise eyes of poems open with epigrams. The rule for throw outs is, "when the green things brown and the browns green.”
There is only pretense amnesia of the boned chicken her mother served at Sunday dinners, mocking, "that's because I got the bones.” But Anna deboned all her chicken by hand, made the coffee so strong by boiling all it could stand, adding more coffee till it boiled again. Then she turned off the heat and put on a lid. The cherry pies were made with sour red pie cherries with sugar. Anna had picked cherries from a tall ladder on Henry's farm in Clayton when she was light and strong. Small farm means no acreage assigned. Somehow the thought of the cherries makes her say she can’t eat cinnamon buns with a clear conscience. She is no Wallace Stevens, who like my father, would run to Horn and Hardarts for a cinnamon bun.
Robert, Cynthia Visit Apple Butter
Robert, Cynthia, Laura visit. They are from Minnesota which provokes a mutual interest in Vikings. No pun, but it doesn’t matter whether you go to attic or basement or anywhere in-between, it’s all old, a legitimately antique life to boot. Laura is interested in gardening and canning, a pint of apple butter “made the old way over a copper kettle and stirred all night.”“I’m not devoted to apple butter.”
But Laura’s friend had apples, so turned loose in the basement, she came up with canning jars, the old-fashioned tinted ones Grandma used that were boxed up with zinc tops. This was Saturday. On Sunday Laura packed them into 2 boxes and flew them out. Last night the artist called New Orleans to see if the jars had arrived safely in their new life! She is that jar with the zinc top. Every part of her converse is symbolic.
Pork. Sauerkraut
Consider pork and sauerkraut, the Pennsylvania German mainstay:
Marvin put the pot on top of the stove.
Bea put it in the oven in a large baking dish with meat in center. The pork chops were centered up, not cut apart. In the oven 2 ½ to 3 hours cooked with mashed potatoes with pieces of “country ribs” and another can of sauerkraut.
Marge has apples in it and seasoning.
“But the way we, Grandma did it, didn’t need a recipe.” So we cannot relay that.
Citrus and Nuts: Next Level Austerity Longevity
Weaknesses to be purged at the next level of austerity have milk in jasmine tea, “...but not sweet things, no milk, no sugar, a little lemon juice occasionally.” Marvin liked red tea and mint. Her father had a sweet tooth for the caramelized halves of grapefruit and orange; he’d cut them the night before and put an eighth inch of sugar on each half, by morning they were ready. She puts seedless grapes on her cereal. This nearly justifies calling the police. Acme has white, red and black (from Chile) grapes. No doubt they have their eye on her at Acme after the grape juice situation when she challenged them with anti-semitism over the kosher grape juice, but she manages to get some. She cuts these grapes in half and puts 2 or 3 on her cereal. She likes the surprise when you open the refrigerator: “they are almost as big as a small date, like the huge bunch of grapes the spies found in Canaan.”
“I love nuts, pecans and walnuts, curved nuts, cashews. Grandma made salted almonds, a rite because you had to shell them." With the dark skin of the nut removed , boiled, popped from the skin, dry, put in a flat pan with butter and salt. Bake a short time. Celery is bad for her too, with almonds. The cure was to stop everything for a week. Everybody has these problems, especially with brussel sprouts and rhubarb.
“One rose is enough” she says.
After Christmas
She allows driving in the daylight, doesn’t like living alone, cooks three nights a week. On the list of infirmities she is a little hard of hearing. I suggest that she get a voice projector as a sideline.
Coffee in the morning. When Bessie Collins drank tea in S.F. the counter man was disgusted when she said, “I take tea.” For Lib it’s orange green tea, but make it weak. Why not a blend of black and green? Has she heard of the new long liver tea made of apricot pits?
"No.
I tell her, “You’ve got three months to rationalize ’03.”
Her answer is toot suite. She has a Christmas tree this year. It is 3 in. tall with burlap at the base covered with little white lights. Boiled down, the sap remains in life, if not the tree. She is more vibrant than she could wish, surrounds gargantuan packages of crackers and a dozen kinds of tea in her own handmade mug with her girlhood. When she was a girl she got just an orange some years, but now the oranges and grapefruits are bigger. So is she in the spirit. One other present, another expensive floral arrangement from Bruce.
We range back and forth among the nieces and nephews. I tell her we are considering sending our 8th grader to college. She says, “they need time to mature,” as if in the produce department. But she's right. The next year he loses interest in college, goes back to high school. High school is such a waste of time. Probably the best reason to do this is so he can get more sleep.
It is 26 degrees. She says she “could hardly bear to open” the packages of crackers and tea, wrapped individually with Pat's handmade Japanese tea cup with the mid-red splotch of Indian color from the Southwest. She is impressed with Aeyrie’s pen and ink of hills and landscape, very “simple” she says, “great feeling, gives a feeling of space, that’s rare.”
New Year’s Resolution: “Be thankful is my resolution, for what I’ve got and not complain about what I’ve not.” I don’t burden her with my poem, “Tankful.”
She’s got Aeyrie’s art and Andrew’s thank you note, brilliant in pastels, to keep her company. But she’s got more arthritis in the right hand so her own thank you notes are unwritten. Her Hindu doctor has the Hippocratic notion of "don’t do no damage" so she’s sticking with the aspirin and Advil of old age.
Winter
Another call:
“How are you Ma'am?”
“Medium.”
“How do you like your meat?”
“I don’t eat meat much anymore”.
“How about prime rib?”
(Chuckles) “Medium rare. I like it but it tastes bad later in my teeth and belly.”
“How old do you think I am anyway?”
“62.”
“Not chronologically, really.”
“Don’t make me think.”
2010, I think of what's in store.
Note:
Howard II had grey eyes and a ruddy complexion. Anna had dark brown eyes. Flo, her sister, had black hair, fair skin. Father Howard on bill paying: “don’t spend more than you have.”
Monday, November 10, 2008
Sketches
We don't begin beforethe sketches, but the whole makeup and disposition is there to tell, if words. So we look and see what's finished, but think the person before and after more. Her sketches to the fractional inch of the balustrade of Chalkley House, the dimensions of tables and chairs, designs
of wall paper hide an intellectual edge to the core. What original, what real? Sketching from life the eye has its fill, 
styles a vision of the divine particular. 
The portraits on the walls of these paintings, the lamps 
and shadows are gone. The bombed out shell of Chalkley House doesn't exist, but it doesn't change much from the sketch of 1930 to the photograph of 1955. The watercolor of the Hall is fantastical more than monochrome stepped up to color. It is an architecture of the idyllic, not a reality of 1930, 1955, or 2008 when this is that. The real Hall is a series of snapshots where none is permanent. It resembles lives as evasive in the final building as also in each stage. Imagine climbing a step ladder to measure a tree branch for its length and girth to get a picture of the tree. There is a lot of weighing and measuring going on in these interiors which the finished product doesn't make obvious, but it is a deliberate result.
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Chalkley Hall, Pennsylvania Museum
Gray Lady of Chalkley Hall
The Gray Lady appeared in any number of haunts from the New York Times to TV castles and halls. Clues of her habit also appear in the artist's notebooks of 1930 in comment and quotation symbolic of the building itself. Later in the account she says the building became a ghost. Grey Lady is reported in Philadelphia: A Guide to the Nation's Birthplace (Federal Writers' Project, 1937): "several interesting legends have clung to the city and the memories of its inhabitants, and in a measure have become sectional traditions. One of these centers about the old Chalkley House, or Chalkley Hall as it is more popularly known, the residence of an old Quaker family in what is now Frankford. The legend described a tempestuous romance, disavowed by the Chalkley family, between one of the Chalkley girls and a suitor who failed to win the family's approval. The affair culminated in the suicide of the girl, who had been distraught over her misfortune. For many years, residents of the district declared, the wraith of the unhappy young woman hovered about the old mansion. Even with the advent of modern skepticism and the apparent disappearance of many ghostly traditions of the past, there are those who believe the girl's ghost still walks in Chalkley Hall. A local historian who had been chatting with the watchman of a factory nearby, was whimsically assured by the latter : That Chalkley
ghost comes around once in a while at night."Chalkley House was a stop on the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia before the Civil War. Construction began in 1727 by Quaker preacher Thomas Chalkley, but it was unfinished until 1776, one of the first three-story houses in the Colonies, completely razed however in 1955 after 228 years, a service of industrial progress. Similar landmarks in the Frankford area survived, Cedar Grove was moved to Fairmount Park, Port Royal mansion was partly reassembled at the Winterthur Museum. Chalkley went unsaved.
Mayors in the '50’s envisioned salvaging it. George R. Staab (Evening Bulletin, 4 Jan 1955) called it a "memory-haunted old mansion." Though not directly involved in Revolutionary events, its Gray Lady "floated about the old staircase whenever someone was about to die." Symbolic echoes of itself and its past reecho. Different parts were recycled, the old stonework filled Frankford creek, the staircase, pictured here, was "hauled off to a museum," but the original two story west wing, demolished in 1941, was a precursor of its end in 1955. Here is the Google photo again.
These furnishings were the motive of its attempted preservation, not its use by Indians who would camp the early ground or its use as a stop on the Underground Railroad. Restoration efforts of the 1940's however began a decade earlier by seven women students of the Moore School of Interior Design, (Moore College of Art & Design). To encourage Chalkley Hall's restoration they took measured drawings of the exterior and interior details in winter and spring of 1930, proposing interior restoration and redecoration. For weeks these seven spent "half a day measuring the dirty woodwork and making notes and sketches." Her choice was “the center hall and stairway,” habitat of the Gray Lady who went missing when "all of the interior woodwork, the splendid old staircase, the very floor beams and joists from nearly all of the buildings" (Staab) disappeared.
In recollection in 1955 the artist wrote:
"In the late winter and early spring of 1930, seven eager young women, students in Interior Decoration at the Philadelphia School of Design
for Women, arrived at the gate of the American Engineering Company at Wheatsheaf Land and Sepviva Streets. Their project was to make measured drawings of the exterior and interior detail of Chalkley Hall, and to propose ideas for interior restoration and decoration. To the amazement of the employees of the company, each week these girls would arrive and spend half a day measuring the dirty woodwork and making notes and sketches. Of course the men never saw the finished project which was only moderately successful. My choice was the center hall and stairway, and the problem was one of the last to be finished before graduation. While there was a little sentiment for an actual restoration and probable removal of the building, this was the beginning of the Great Depression, and the students ideas were all forgotten. In 1955 a Philadelphia group tried to raise funds for removal of part of the building to the new Independence Mall. No money was forthcomin
g, so Chalkley Hall became one of the ghosts that haunts Philadelphia."Her finished watercolor of the architectural ghost remains. Notes reveal that the Hall, not included in the clippings in her desk, was just what one dreamed to find in her four level home, hidden passages:
“Two brick arched chambers with ends and low lateral walls of stone… about alike in size… parallel to one another, being separated only by the dividing wall and communicating with the cellar by wooden doors. The top of the arch is at least nine feet high, the floors are beneath the level of cellar floors, necessitating three steps to descend. Both chambers are about twenty feet long and are to the left of the main house built by Abel James. Extend at right angles from cellar wall beneath the drive, and at the further end of each chamber there is in the arched ceilings a circular opening. The iron gratings, covering these openings can still be seen from below. These were not passageways for means of escape to Frankford Creek but storeroom cellars. They must have been built by digging from above and not by tunneling so could not have been constructed secretly. The difficulty of carrying such a large passageway thru swampy ground and the difficulty of emerging preclude the possibility that they were used for the escape of slaves. Similar chambers at Valley Forge were also storerooms not secret passages.”
Secretly constructed in plain sight so they could needs be denied that they were, the idea completely suits a preparation to view her life with its large helping of clandestine. Chambers not a means of escape, but storehouses, sum up the beauty of her life. Every one of the levels of her home was a Chalkley House which no longer exists, but which we revive. The Hall today in photographs, drawings notwithstanding, is as her home and herself we may say. Compare the impending fate of Lynnewood Hall.
Measured Furniture Drawings from the Pennsylvania Museum
Elizabeth in Philadelphia, left his blanket chest when he retired to son Philip's after their move to Media. It is not a decorated blanket chest, Henry being an Old Mennonite, but the laminate sides, porcelain knobs, square nails, painted top and base are ornament. Thus there is a species of artist as cupboard, who goes to the museum to sketch by day and comes home by night to live in the same, American natives, brown, gold, plain to contrast the Italian Renaissance examples she did for the Institute.
Friendship with the brown grain understates her possession of those heirlooms inherited through her mother who had inherited through hers, at which time they were already "old," like the hand made walnut case with craquelure of centuries. "Annie had that from before she left home (1901) which had been her grandmother's." This case sat in the middle upstairs room in Media for six decades after it had lived in Philadelphia and Barto. The over-sawed keyholes, asymmetric dovetails, scored lines of scribe marks, square rosehead nails, thick bottom boards, chamfered drawer bottoms were a kind of speech. Lifted out the door with some others before being loaded into a truck, it sat on the lawn that December, had a breath of air. Admirers lined up. hey thought it was a sale. It was covered and put back inside. "Measured Furniture" was personal with her who had grown up with the subtleties of sideboard which in the same breath she would disdain as "peasant furniture." We will know what these things mean.
The domestic Pennsylvania raison d'être of hundreds of years built the barn outside from within. These three women lived at its heart, Anna, her mother, dollmaker, baker, gardener, Elizabeth the artist, celebrant, curator, Florence, her sister, emancipator of classrooms. Their philosophy can be reduced in single terms to the long view taken.Sheraton Settee
Of settles, settees and couches, this upholstered Sheraton Settee was one of the furniture masterpieces that existed in many variations, but the affection for furniture in these paintings suggests an interior garden of which not all effects are in the scene. The great length-wise cushion of Sheraton Settee seats at least six across. It is made to reflect the sun with long upholstered pan
els of vertical pale yellow stripes alternating with light, a gold green alchemy. As the sun shines upon the green the wood frame outlines the whole with equidistant spindled legs. The watercolor shades up and down the middle of the stripes, washes from pale to a more constant color at the top and from the middle down to show it worn where backs have rested. The cushion, it is thus implied, is curved, a metaphor of wear, color, time supported by the brown edges. Whatever the real life model, the near luminescent washes suggest a lighting perhaps that did not exist in that room.
Pennsylvania Room - Philadelphia Museum
dress sits above the table for her portrait, hair with red gold highlights, like her auburn haired grandmother made young. To the right, above and below, an empty spindle-backed wood chair, a country cupboard with another wood chair, and Pennsylvania Dutch folk designs embroider the wall paper. Baskets of flowers, part of a barn, a rooster, the designs continue under the table and chairs, interwoven with shadows. Her sketchbook shows each detail prepared, measured: front stretcher, its dimensions, side stretcher,
its dimensions, the chair, positive and negative space measured. Different versions of the wallpaper exist, the one chosen, designed on hand drawn graph paper, magnifies each detail before finished execution.
The Greater Decoration Is the Less
In much the same process of sketching to restore Chalkley Hall I woke to this art in her mother’s attic at the age of four. The attic was an unfinished A with windows at either end, smelled of sycamore, rock wool, bare beams. It was the exile of her still life oranges and apples piled in green bowls in the shadows at the tops of wardrobes. Reflections of the canvas in the attic light made a hunger for more. Persistent questions, whose art is this, got no reply, but there were four levels to that house, implicit allegories, levels of meaning.
If it is accepted there actually were paintings, hiding a profound intellectual life, another contested reality, was a sign of humility. In a few more years the observer overheard another aunt, Florence M. Reiff, had written a master’s thesis. “What about?" was the inquiry. "Pleasure Boating in Florida!" came the facetious reply, entirely believed, but in the real world that title, five decades removed, appeared with the remains of the art in that same attic (c. 2004), “A Comparison of Outcomes Based on the Use of Certain Teaching Techniques…” (1952). Home making, home economics, interior design are the applied essence of Pennsylvania German philosophy and art, in brief, the effort to find the home within. This thesis was the basis of her later groundbreaking book, Steps In Home Living (Peoria, Illinois: Chas. A. Bennett, Co.) which occurred in three editions with multiple printings (1966, '71, '84). Notes discovered from a speech the author had given said, “because I was convinced that how we teach is just as important as what we teach I decided to do a study based on the use of certain teaching techniques and devices in various units of homemaking." As an effort to break from traditional authoritative to "democratic" methods where "the pupils helped to plan cooperatively with the teacher and participatory devices were used," it
was also an early instance in racial diversity of application and illustration, teaching home making, home economics for slow learners. A review in the Journal of Home Economics said, "the author’s broad experience in teaching such students and as home economics education supervisor in a large city is reflected in her warm understanding of the problems of disadvantaged students and their teachers.” Her editor said later in a letter that appropriate materials were not obvious. Another writer for his company "can’t get pictures of Negro children, and no matter how they try they can’t seem to keep from discussing projects that are suitable only for middle-class whites of suburbia." It later became obvious how central this proposition was to the unheralded democratic Pennsylvania Dutch way and to the teachings of their mother Anna (1880-1970) on the rights of women.That artist could have said, “Oils! dear boy, I’m a watercolorist,” meaning a soloist of the lyric. The drawings could be called elevations and she could be called architect if these sheets 20x30, unearthed fifty years after with her notebooks in that attic, had so written between the lines of her character. It was a path not taken.
If she is an idea, symbols may translate. Instance the furniture of her home, for the Pennsylvania German turned flowers into bookmarks and bookmarks into fraktur to bring paradise indoors. But decoration greater than tulips, hearts, stars and crowns, Mennonite linens, furniture and pottery of communal tulips migrate from paper to linen to wood, and even letters that swirl with stipples of signatures in descending spirals have as much to do with it as the absence of these things, the plain board, cut of lapel, cap, hat or bonnet. Christmas cookies at play and glee thus conjoined a life of belief in inner spiritual form from which the outward surfaces of reality proceeded. The greater decoration was also the less.
This reluctance to call austerity a virtue occurs among the austere, who hardly exist at all after 1890-1990 and the various body politic obesity bubbles, the Savings and Loan bubbles, tech bubbles, mortgage loan bubbles, all with inflation, monetization and biggie size ornaments to cloy the overstimulated response. Around the edges of these bubbles unsavory characters we'd like to ignore remark, “are there also men who are not conscious of possessing a higher spirit than brutes, and yet maintain, that they can keep their minds in a good state of rest in this life?”
Plainfolk black suits, what are they hiding? Invisible or covered rough brown cabinets, wood handled tools, trunks on metal rollers, wardrobes and pottery in the unsigned, eponymous paradox of china and hand made dress.
Surrounded with custom and biography, generations that join the personal ask where the desire for the beautiful begins, whether with Grandfather Henry coming in from the fields too exhausted to eat or Uncle Andrew who came in at noon and studied for an hour. Her mother fled the barefoot life, the cows, accent, suspicion upon the education of the world to become a tailor of "the high boned collar, the leg mutton sleeve, the tiny waist, the wide lined skirt." Cousin Jesse, dead at 26, his impasto watercolors labeled "valuable" in a folder in her desk, roosters and weather vanes coming apart, symbolized what it would be like in her going to art school as she did at 16. So, as all people desire it, the joy of their desiring is something like what Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel, that there is "a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty" that it would save the world.
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