Article
Museum as Muse: Vanitas
VANITAS
Last week, finding his house full of flies--his teenaged son having left the porch door open as he & his friends shuffled back & forth to the grill-- my cousin, with the bearing of a priest about to perform an exorcism, emerged from the garage armed with the swatter. And now, this morning, here's a fly in my kitchen. Soon, though, it will land at a window, & I'll just toss up the screen & shoo it away. In the meantime, its wings go on praying in a language I cannot understand-presumably praising four firm Jersey tomatoes, the freckled skin of an overripe banana, chicken legs thawing into a pan of cold blood. No one likes to be reminded of rotting things.
Or that this is a part of the composition, that we can only go on this way, consuming what we're not. In Michiko Kon's Self-portrait #4-- a black & white photograph whose meaning, like all meaning, is the thing we cannot carry in our arms-the failed necks of the immaculate white geese droop like narrow double-jointed wrists. Their beaks, still seeming to smile, point into the shadow, which, like all shadow, suggests that darkness which threatens to swarm over everything & erase it. Though it cannot
erase itself. And the one bird, strung up, splayed, wears across its breast & span & down its spine the heads of fifty fish-whose lidless eyes give it, from a distance, the plumage of a peacock. But, they speak, too, for themselves, for their having been the flakey flesh that kept the bird alive. Yet when it flipped upside down into the water to feed & came up with a pocket of silver, the lovers watching distractedly from their benches-a knuckle brushing a bare shoulder, a foot hooked around a calf-thought only of abundance. And the table of the lake reflected the abundant sky as the mirror in the picture gives back what falls upon it: the entwined throats & nestled heads of geese
doubled & resting on the nestled, entwined throats of geese. There is so little to recommend the fly & an epidemic of evidence against it, just as it is ugly business to hold the dead, despite the fact that, here, the artist pulls them close & peers out from under a wing's scalloped sleeve. The designer. The design. Aquinas set the argument in motion , but we would like to look away. The split bellies of pomegranates too much like the palmfuls of seed we also contain. A shoe can be sewn from the scales of a cuttlefish; a hat made
from feathers & fins. We devour the world, but it remains outside. We put it on. We want to make amends. We offer it more & more of itself: the cut calla lily, the baby's breath. Diirer painted a fly onto each of his canvases: not humility but pride. His skill so great he thought it would fool us all. The fly pauses as I scrape the last breakfast dish clean, its enameling the blue-green-gold of a steeple's verdigris. Its digestive enzymes tuned to toll refuse, to regurgitate it, re-eat it, to turn it, somehow, into flight. A tiny cathedral-of course, it's silly to think so, but it's a violence to think it's not. Per se notum, the Saint wrote, meaning self-evident, meaning that which can be known through itself.
He wasn't thinking of musca domestica. He was thinking of something else. And as for us, what can we say? We never take root. We neither swim nor soar.
--Kathleen Graber
Last week, finding his house full of flies--his teenaged son having left the porch door open as he & his friends shuffled back & forth to the grill-- my cousin, with the bearing of a priest about to perform an exorcism, emerged from the garage armed with the swatter. And now, this morning, here's a fly in my kitchen. Soon, though, it will land at a window, & I'll just toss up the screen & shoo it away. In the meantime, its wings go on praying in a language I cannot understand-presumably praising four firm Jersey tomatoes, the freckled skin of an overripe banana, chicken legs thawing into a pan of cold blood. No one likes to be reminded of rotting things.
Or that this is a part of the composition, that we can only go on this way, consuming what we're not. In Michiko Kon's Self-portrait #4-- a black & white photograph whose meaning, like all meaning, is the thing we cannot carry in our arms-the failed necks of the immaculate white geese droop like narrow double-jointed wrists. Their beaks, still seeming to smile, point into the shadow, which, like all shadow, suggests that darkness which threatens to swarm over everything & erase it. Though it cannot
erase itself. And the one bird, strung up, splayed, wears across its breast & span & down its spine the heads of fifty fish-whose lidless eyes give it, from a distance, the plumage of a peacock. But, they speak, too, for themselves, for their having been the flakey flesh that kept the bird alive. Yet when it flipped upside down into the water to feed & came up with a pocket of silver, the lovers watching distractedly from their benches-a knuckle brushing a bare shoulder, a foot hooked around a calf-thought only of abundance. And the table of the lake reflected the abundant sky as the mirror in the picture gives back what falls upon it: the entwined throats & nestled heads of geese
doubled & resting on the nestled, entwined throats of geese. There is so little to recommend the fly & an epidemic of evidence against it, just as it is ugly business to hold the dead, despite the fact that, here, the artist pulls them close & peers out from under a wing's scalloped sleeve. The designer. The design. Aquinas set the argument in motion , but we would like to look away. The split bellies of pomegranates too much like the palmfuls of seed we also contain. A shoe can be sewn from the scales of a cuttlefish; a hat made
from feathers & fins. We devour the world, but it remains outside. We put it on. We want to make amends. We offer it more & more of itself: the cut calla lily, the baby's breath. Diirer painted a fly onto each of his canvases: not humility but pride. His skill so great he thought it would fool us all. The fly pauses as I scrape the last breakfast dish clean, its enameling the blue-green-gold of a steeple's verdigris. Its digestive enzymes tuned to toll refuse, to regurgitate it, re-eat it, to turn it, somehow, into flight. A tiny cathedral-of course, it's silly to think so, but it's a violence to think it's not. Per se notum, the Saint wrote, meaning self-evident, meaning that which can be known through itself.
He wasn't thinking of musca domestica. He was thinking of something else. And as for us, what can we say? We never take root. We neither swim nor soar.
--Kathleen Graber
