Falling Through Space

by Gilchrist, Ellen

  “It is literally true that the demon to the student is technique. And it really is evil. Pay no attention to it, either in dancing or in painting.”

  “The evil to the beginning painter is confusion. Too many details. As he learns technique he forgets his demon and thinks he has defeated him with technique, but he has just given him a hiding place.”

  “True art consists of spreading wide the intervals so that the imagination may fill the spaces between the trees.”

  “The normal or even fairly normal man has to be almost knocked down physically to be anything but sublime. Why this is done I don’t know. What reason is there against man realizing his sublimity I don’t know.”

  “It is strange that the artist should have no standards and be constantly trying to live up to other people’s standards.”

  “This is the supposition. I live and have my being in a world of space and forms which have color and shape. Consciousness of this means being alive.”

  “The first poetry is always written against the wind by sailors and farmers who sing with the wind in their teeth. The second poetry is written by scholars and wine drinkers who know a good thing when they see it. The third poetry is sometimes never written but when it is, it’s by those who have brought nature and art together into one thing.”

  Tomorrow I will visit the house where the genius Walter Anderson slept while he was among us. As he wrote:

  “If my ears were functioning properly I would hear, not just the wind in the grass, the two or three different rhythms of insects, the piping of a frog, the call of a nightjar, but an orderly and recognizable harmony, which might or might not have been written.”

  “A divine symphony. Wind, wave, wing … wing, wave, wind.”

  THIS IS part of a speech I wrote to celebrate Founder’s Day at Scripps College in Claremont, California. I liked writing this speech because it gave me a chance to talk about something that is much on my mind right now. How wonderful men and women are and how long we have been wonderful. I wrote the speech four times. It ended up being more like a play in four acts than a speech. Here is Act Four.

  I want to leave you with the idea that no theory is too wild to entertain for a while. You can entertain all the ideas you can think up or imagine. Later, in winter, you can decide which ones to keep and which to throw away. All of us are doing the same thing all the time anyway, all probing the same mystery, asking the same questions. Who am I? Where did I come from? What am I doing here? Is this right?

  At the moment I have decided that for all practical purposes I can go on and assume that mankind, our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, is the only thing in the universe that is aware of itself. Our species, Man, on this beautiful watery planet, in this little piece of space and time, may be the only thing in the universe that ever was or ever will be aware of itself.

  I have been reading a book by the scientist and philosopher René Dubos, called Celebrations of Life. Dr. Dubos writes about Neanderthal man, who was here on the earth one hundred thousand years ago. It used to be thought that these people were brutish and primitive, but they walked erect just like us and had brains as large or maybe larger. They had a full kit of tools, and, strangest of all, every fifth person in their bands has been identified as being over fifty years of age. This is amazing for a primitive hunting society.

  Two of the old Neanderthal people found in the caves at Shandar in Iraq were so severely crippled that they must have been completely dependent on the members of their group for a long time. Also, these people buried their dead in graves lined with flowers. Clearly, we have been human for a long time. Clearly the first thing we did was probe the mystery and the last thing we will ever do is probe that same mystery.

  I TAUGHT MYSELF to read poetry. Long before I could read prose I could piece together the words of nursery rhymes and poems. Long before I went to school I knew passages of Wordsworth by heart and the lyrics of many songs and would make up my own and write them down.

  I am very happy now

  Dooley is dead and in his grave

  All his stuff belongs to me

  It’s not my fault he drank poison tea

  Sometimes I would leave sibling rivalry as a subject for verse and branch out into metaphysics.

  Oh, I love rain so much

  I love the skies and everything God made

  I hope he likes me too. If he doesn’t, too bad for him

  I was mad at God. He had created a world full of bugs to bite me. Why did he make them? It made no sense to me. Later, when I was really angry with him about death, I thought back on his invention of bugs and knew that I had every right to be furious. If God made the world he wasn’t good enough for me.

  I think I knew early on that poets were as angry with God as I was. Certainly they were angry about death. Humpty Dumpty, what cynicism, what irony. All the King’s horses and all the King’s men. Thee and thou, the language of the Bible. A lot of sound and fury to cover up what God had done to us. I hated him. I sat up in a magnolia tree getting black from the bark and dared him to make me fall. I threw myself into rivers and dared him to make me forget how to swim. I filled my mouth with water and spat at the sun. Nothing happened. If he existed he was powerless. God reminded me too much of my father to be in good with me.

  So poetry took the place of God. The wild cries of a thousand minds saying, Why did you do this, God? Who are you and why have you done this and since you did it, at least I’m going to call you on it. At least I’m going to make you stand up and face what you have done. My Last Duchess, the sphinx in the desert, oh, what are patterns for, Not one deserted dying, on whose forbidden ear, Go, Go, Go, human kind cannot bear very much reality.

  On and on and on. Of course, there were also cries of lyricism and of love. I wandered lonely as a cloud, All I could see from where I stood, Oh, world, world, I cannot hold thee close enough. I also emitted great cries of praise, but not of God. It was man I was praising and the beauty of the earth.

  Later, thinking over that poem about daffodils, I decided the main word in the poem was lonely. God makes us lonely and makes us die and the earth consoles us and gives suck, gives beauty beyond description and we go on another day.

  How could men go into churches and praise the thing they call God? I asked myself. How could they praise something that has control over them, that rules them. What a bunch of bullshit. That’s a poetic word I learned that came in handy when I was forced to sit in starched dresses and listen to preachers droning on in their sonorous and boring voices with that glazed look that comes over the faces of panderers and inveterate liars. I would squirm around on the seat. I would count the number of letters in the program, not counting punctuation marks; if the sum was an odd number, it meant Dick Lockwood loved me. If it was an even number, he did not. If it was an even number, I would do a recount including the punctuation marks. If it still came out even, I tore the program up and counted the words in a hymn.

  That’s what came next: after the panderer had put us all to sleep he would bring out a piece of music written by Bach and give God credit for that. The service would brighten up with the first chord of music from the organ. We would lift up our eyes unto the hills where the real world would hopefully still be going on when we got out of church. What was that all about? A poet knew.

  ah Galexea Galexea

  to think it was your own little whim

  to invent him this man

  What was it?

  that you couldn’t look with your own eyes at your armpit?

  you couldn’t see your own beautiful back

  graceful as a beach

  and you wanted someone to walk

  its lovely loneliness a while?

  a while only?

  That is part of a long poem by Alvaro Cordona-Hine, and I have kept it with me for years and read it to thousands of people and once read it on National Public Radio and once read it late at night to a room full of people at a Book and Author dinner who probably had something
else in mind besides hearing me read a long philosophical poem by a real writer. I read the poem and then I got up and left so I wouldn’t have to hear the speeches made by the romance novel writer and the country-and-western writer wearing the hat and smoking the big cigar while we ate dinner. After that night my publisher decided it would be best to keep me home and sell the books the best they could without me.

  But I was talking about poetry. There weren’t any poets at the Book and Author dinner. There aren’t many poets anywhere anymore because the poetry isn’t lyrical or much good or memorable and besides no one wants to read it but the same bunch of teacher-poets who write it and they are too cornered to allow anything wonderful to happen in poetry. If a good poet begins to raise his or her voice, they kill him with criticism. “Lyrical wheel-spinning,” that’s the kind of thing they say to young poets who are letting their hearts sing. So no one loves poetry anymore and no one wants to publish it and no one wants to buy it and all of that has taken the heart out of young poets. If a young poet showed up today with a poem that began, “It was my thirtieth year to heaven,” he would be laughed off the block.

  Here are some of the poets it is no longer fashionable to emulate. Edna St. Vincent Millay, who at nineteen could write, “All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood; / I turned and looked another way, / And saw three islands in a bay.… Over these things I could not see; / These were the things that bounded me.”

  Anne Sexton is another poet the Academy would like to forget if possible or at least send to the back of the class. Anthologies never do her work justice and she is being passed over as a subject for serious study. Still, while she was writing she spoke to us with a voice as real and lyrical as the sea and my generation of women learned about ourselves from her. “I am torn in two but I will conquer myself,” she wrote. “I will take scissors and cut out the beggar. I will take a crowbar and pry out the broken pieces of God in me.”

  “The sea is very old,” she wrote. “The sea is the face of Mary, / without miracles or rage / or unusual hope.” And

  I am surprised to see

  that the ocean is still going on.

  Now I am going back

  and I have ripped my hand

  from your hand as I said I would

  and I have made it this far

  as I said I would

  and I am on the top deck now

  holding my wallet, my cigarettes

  and my car keys

  at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday

  in August of 1960.

  How I love the wild lyrical language of the poets. I knew a poet once and spent many days and nights with him and took walks with him and went into shops with him and watched the world with him and learned to adore the beauty of the world and despise its sadness. I must write of him someday and tell the world what it was like to know a great poet and be his friend. When he killed himself over some long-buried sadness, I could not bear to remember him and threw away all his books and all his letters and everything that had anything to do with him except an unpublished manuscript that was dedicated to me. It’s still around. Even in my sadness and rage I couldn’t throw that away.

  What else? The Arabs believe there are three causes for celebration. The birth of a son, the foaling of a stallion, and the emergence of a poet. One is emerging somewhere now who will write the poem that will solace and teach me in my old age. I raise a glass to that poet and dedicate my song to him.

  FIFTEEN YEARS AGO I bought my first real painting. I remember the strange quality of that week, while the painting sat in my living room, and while I pondered the possibility of actually spending three hundred and fifty dollars for something to hang on a wall.

  On the side of buying the painting was a line I had read somewhere by Gertrude Stein. She had said you can either have great paintings or you can have great clothes, and that she had chosen to have paintings. Also, I kept remembering once when I was nineteen years old and was in Birmingham, Alabama, with fifty dollars to spend. It was a bright January day at the end of Christmas vacation and I was standing on a sidewalk halfway in between a clothing store, where a pair of gold cocktail shoes with three-inch heels was begging me to buy them, and an antique store, where an old handmade cobbler’s bench was on sale for exactly the cost of the shoes. I kept going back into the antique store and marveling at the patina on the wood of the bench, sitting on it, as a real cobbler once sat, and rubbing my hands along the smooth dark sides.

  In the end I went into the clothing store and bought the tight uncomfortable golden shoes and left the bench. I had cast my lot with vanity and I knew it. That bench haunted me for years. Every time I wanted a table to go beside a sofa or a place for a child to sit and color I would think about the wide purpose of the bench, the intelligence of its design.

  Meanwhile the golden shoes had carried me to a lot of drunken fraternity parties and disappeared into the destiny of cocktail clothes.

  Now, some years later, I walked in and out of my living room past the beautiful painting that I was trying to make up my mind to buy. It was the first work I had seen by the American realist Ginny Crouch Stanford, who later would become my friend and paint the brilliant paintings which would become my book covers, and the story of that damn cobbler’s bench kept pounding in my head, a moral tale if there ever was one.

  Finally I gave in. I wrote a check and mailed it off and the painting was mine. I think I should note that I was properly appalled that I could so easily become the proprietor of another person’s work and ran out and wrote a will leaving the painting to the painter at my death.

  It is still my favorite painting. It keeps getting closer to me. It hung for many years above a fireplace. Then above a baby grand piano. Now it is beside my bed, on a wall that looks out upon a lake. “Those eyes,” people say when they look at it, meaning the beautiful, haunting face of the young black-haired girl who leans in the painting against a marble statue of an angel. “My God, those eyes.”

  “I know,” I answer. How long that painted look has lasted and never lost its power to charm and amaze.

  Once I made that initial plunge into buying art, the rest was easy. I didn’t buy another pair of high-heeled shoes for years. I didn’t buy cocktail clothes or new placemats or recover the sofa. My money was spent on paintings and pieces of sculpture and pottery and photographs. By the time I left New Orleans and went to live in a simple light-filled house in the Ozark Mountains, the only things I cared enough about to pack up and take with me were these beautiful individual products of other minds and hands. For seven years I lived alone in a small frame house on a mountain and hardly ever bothered to lock the door. Anybody that wanted to steal the things in that house would have been someone I wanted to meet. I don’t think I ever lost sight of how fortunate I was to spend my days and nights surrounded by the best moments of some of the best minds of my culture.

  Finally, I had accumulated too much wonder. I was in danger of becoming a museum curator, which is a fine occupation but not a good thing for a writer, who needs to travel light and stay flexible.

  So I have gone into phase two of my fascination with art. I have started giving it away. I am fortunate in having three sons who also love beautiful things, and among them I am able to keep many walls and flat surfaces covered with art in various cities in the southeastern part of the United States. I lend them paintings and photographs and they lend them back to me. I will turn a corner in one of my children’s houses and there is a painting I bought one snowy January day in Boulder, Colorado, or, I’ll enter a room in an apartment and there is a piece of pottery from the day I discovered the famous Calabash potters of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

  Life will not give us everything we want. It will not give us happiness, or “the seven Visigoth crowns in the Cluny Museum,” as Elinor Wylie once wrote. But it may give us “a very small purse, made of a mouse’s hide. Put it in your pocket and never look inside.”

  Art civilizes and makes clear
. Living with art is charming, in the old sense of the word. The art object draws you into it, does a little dance for you, calls up, praises, sings. God Love Artists, my daughter-in-law once wrote to me on a postcard from the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit of Picasso. They Make It Right.

  THE NEW ORLEANS PHOTOGRAPHER Clarence Laughlin was a friend of mine. He was a genius. Genius can not be dissected or understood. It can only be loved and celebrated and wondered at.

  Clarence was a New Orleanian and proud of that fact, but in his heart I think he was always a child of the bayou country. He drank its sugary wines and honored its legends until his death this January at eighty. He gave up its sugary tongue, however, and taught himself to speak in such a way that almost no trace of his Cajun accent remained. More about this later. First I want to talk about his magic.

  Everything about Clarence was magical. In his presence you could believe in magic or destiny or kismet. He thought it was kismet that we came to know each other. He felt this way about many of his friends.

  I had heard of Clarence. One day another photographer came tearing into the offices of The Courier, where we both worked, showing us photographs and copy for a story about Clarence. “You won’t believe this man,” he was saying, or words to that effect. “He’s incredible. He knows everything.” I looked at the photographs. There was this smooth-cheeked white-haired man with piercing eyes already demanding something from me. Some answer. Some return. There were also pages of quotations. I read them with great interest and attention.

  About a month later a friend took me, on a cold rainy Sunday afternoon, down to the Faubourg-Marigny to see an exhibition of Clarence’s work and hear him speak. It was a new gallery with tall freshly painted walls and high ceilings. People were milling around drinking wine and talking in quiet voices. There was violin music on the stereo. And on the walls were the most incredible photographs I had ever seen. Absolutely original, as was their maker. He came into the gallery, wearing a coat thrown over his shoulder like a cape, and took the podium and began to talk about art in a way I had never heard. About the relationship between art and the subconscious mind, about the forms art takes in its insistence on telling us what we’re thinking. About how art takes us past the veils of illusion and returns us to ourselves. About what a photograph means and why light and shadow fascinate us, about how unique we are and how alike, how mysterious we are and how predictable. I was dazzled.