Debths

by Susan Howe

  Debths

  Books by Susan Howe

  Available from New Directions

  The Birth-Mark

  The Europe of Trusts

  Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979

  The Midnight

  My Emily Dickinson

  The Nonconformist’s Memorial

  Pierce-Arrow

  The Quarry

  Sorting Facts: or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker

  Souls of the Labadie Tract

  Spontaneous Particulars

  That This

  Debths

  Susan Howe

  A New Directions Ebook Original

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Titian Air Vent

  Tom Tit Tot

  Periscope

  Debths

  childlinen scarf to encourage his obsequies where he’d check their debths in that mormon’s thames, be questing and handsetl, hop, step and a deepend, with his berths in their toiling moil,

  Finnegans Wake

  FOREWORD

  Going back! Going back!

  “Little Sir Echo, how do you do? / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Little Sir Echo, we’ll answer you / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Hello! (Hello!) Hello! (Hello!) / Won’t you come over and play? (and play) / You’re a nice little fellow / I know by your voice / But you’re always so far away (away).”

  Bing Crosby and the Music Maids (1939)

  When I was eight my parents packed me off to Little Sir Echo Camp for Girls on Lake Armington in the foothills of New Hampshire co-founded and owned by Mary Hoisington and Margaret Conoboy ten years earlier. Apparently the women chose the name because of an echo that bounces off the surrounding White Mountains. An actual child may or may not fit parental fantasies. I hated the place. Most of all I dreaded riding classes and spent many nights praying I would be assigned the tired elderly horse with a creaking stomach for the next day’s obligatory ride around the ring. On the one visiting day allowed per summer we rowed across the lake and picnicked on a secluded beach at the edge of a pine forest. I begged them to ransom me. But no. Around 4 pm they left for Boston, leaving me alone with my dread of being lost in the past; absent.

  Show me affection as a small nonunderstanding person. Two people with covered lanterns stand on the brow of adjacent foothills. Watch them walking forward from folklore carrying tilted umbrellas. Faint whispers. Galaxy clusters. Telescopes also need to be tilted a little so that light traveling down an optical tube will come into play. Calendar songs, family trees, broken branches, love songs, songs of captives, songs of robbers, songs around the campfire. “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, // A tune upon the blue guitar.” Chocorua is the highest mountain peak in New Hampshire. When Chief Chocorua leapt from its rocky summit to his death on the rocks below, war was in his heart. He put a curse on the land. “Last night at the end of night his starry head, / Like the head of fate, looked out in darkness.” “Chocorua to Its Neighbor” is one of my favorite Wallace Stevens poems. Let’s face things exactly as they are. He led a double life as a successful Surety and Fidelity Claims lawyer.

  Speaking of the practice of law in relation to writing and second sight, Peter Rugg, The Missing Man is the first of “two tall tales” written by William Austin (1778–1841), a Massachusetts attorney. Austin presents its source as an old New England legend. An absent husband responsible for his own mysterious ruin is condemned to wander with his small daughter in a one-horse chair perpetually searching for Boston. In one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lesser stories, “A Virtuoso’s Collection,” Rugg crops up with Peter Schlemilh’s lost shadow and a famed New Hampshire gemstone. The precious jewel, said to sparkle (like a meteor) called for another Hawthorne story, “The Great Carbuncle of the White Mountains,” this time inspired by an Amerindian fable from Saco, Maine: a manic Ruggian seeker wanders among mountains searching for the marvelous stone until the end of time. Some scholars say Austin’s tall tale also foreshadows “Wakefield,” which in its turn triggers Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” There are names under things and names inside names. “Poor [Rugg]! Little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world!”

  Long ago people were afraid of mountains. The how and the why reflected in mystery plays and troll mythologies. Only art works are capable of transmitting chthonic echo-signals.

  “Full many a glorious morning have I seen / Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye.”

  In the fall of 1889 Leonora Piper, the famous Boston medium, spent a week with William James and his wife at their house at Chocorua for discussions concerning various aspects of trance-phenomena including her trance-talk with “Phinuit” “a former native of this world.” One afternoon they took a break from work and went fishing. Mrs. Piper caught the largest bass ever recorded in the lake.

  There. Messages flow through clear lake water and yes, gravity pulls matter together to form a cosmic web. Even if this looks like the end of my Picnic at Lake Armington story the three of us are strung together like beads on a neckIace. My fingers are too arthritic to work the little clasp.

  “It’s for the others”

  The work in Debths was originally inspired by Paul Thek’s retro­spective called Diver in 2011. I have always been interested in folktales, magic, lost languages, riddles, coincidence, and missed connections. What struck me most was the way his later works, often painted swatches of color spread across sheets of newspaper with single words, phrases, or letters scribbled over the already doubled surface, transformed these so-called “art objects,” into the epiphanies, riddles, spells and magical thinking I experienced one afternoon in the old Whitney Marcel Breuer building. I particularly loved the small bronze sculptures titled “The Personal Effects of the Pied Piper” scattered here and there. Shortly afterwards I spent a month as artist-in-residence at the Gardner Museum in Boston.

  In 1903 Isabella Stewart Gardner personally installed her collection of over 2,500 objects (paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, drawings, tapestries, silver, ceramics, glassware, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, photographs, and letters from Europe, Asia, the Islamic world, and America) in a building modeled on the Pa­lazzo Barbaro in Venice. (A view of the same palace from the Iron Bridge in Venice served as the model for Milly Theale’s palazzo in The Wings of the Dove). When she died in 1924, Gardner endowed both building and grounds as a museum “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever” on the condition that her original arrangement of the objects in each gallery (or named room) would be kept just as she left them. Nothing was to be added, shifted, or sold. If her arrangements were disturbed, the property on what was once saltwater marshland in the Fenway Kenmore area—which she liked to call “Venice on the Fens”—including the art objects inside would be auctioned and the proceeds would go to Harvard University. The document was drafted and drawn up by her friend Professor John Chipman Gray, a member of the Harvard Law faculty and the author of Restraints on the Alienation of Property, The Rule Against Perpetuities, and The Nature and Sources of the Law.

  Restraints (currently known as RAP) is encountered, often dreaded, by contemporary American law students. “Soon soon you will find the clue.”

  In 1999, the Museum directors felt it was time to “embark on a strategic planning process to plan for the future.” They decided to build an addition to the original structure in order to relieve pressure on the aging interior spaces. In 2012 the added wing, designed by Renzo Piano—a soaring glass, steel, and copper-clad structure “crisp, light, and transparent, reminiscent of nautical design, and thus a deliberate foil to the closed ‘plain brown wrapper’ of the palace,” opened to the public. Visitors now enter the original Willard T. Sea
rs damp dimly lit late-Victorian faux-Venetian structure by passing through a minimalist glass and steel corridor.

  At 10:15 one November morning a beam of sun slipped across the threshold. An echoing plash of water issuing from the mouths of stone dolphins blended with the scent of fresh red poinsettias, jade plants, and pyrocanthia in the atrium, while light flickering across ceramic floor tiles in the adjoining Spanish Cloister made them seem blue as the blue in Paul Thek’s untitled synthetic polymer and gesso on newspaper (Diver) paintings.

  Wandering through the inner rooms before and after visiting hours when whimsical combinations and odd analogies assume a second life, I began to think of Gardner as a pioneer American installation artist.

  In the dimly lit Titian room Titian’s The Rape of Europa (1561–1562) is displayed directly above a long swatch of pale green silk cut from her wedding gown designed by Charles Frederick Worth in 1860. “I am drinking myself drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours . . . ,” she told her friend Bernard Berenson after he acquired it for her collection. I wonder if she was a drinker like my mother.

  Isabella’s little chair with its light blue slipcover is placed directly in front of Christ carrying the Cross (1505–1510), Circle of Giovanni Bellini. She has hung the portrait so that his tear-streaked face half shadowed by the angle of the wooden cross is aimed directly at Jupiter’s savage eye in Europa. The Savior will not give up and be silent in true righteousness as a painted image.

  The pages of A. B. Kempe’s “Note to a Memoir on the Theory of Mathematical Form” are shattered to pieces. The filing cases are old, some of them shaky with loose covers and broken corners and sides. Mrs. Gardner didn’t live to learn that in String Theory matter falls in. So the less said here concerning the ultimate nature of possible worlds and supermassive black holes in this our Godforsaken twenty-first century, the better.

  Long, thinly transparent, slightly jaded gray window shades in the Raphael Room serve as a scrim or screen memory sheltering the goods in her faux-Venetian vessel from moving traffic and pedestrians. The walls are covered with elegant maroon fabric. Today a beam from the nuclear-hearted sun lights on a PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH sign before mercurially settling on The Annunciation by Piermatteo d’Amelia (1450–1503), oil on wood, and then on Carlo Crivelli’s Saint George (1470). Crivelli has depicted the saint as a thin teenager on a rearing horse with his sword joyfully lifted to slay the dragon. The horse’s head jerks the other way. Its eye is distorted with terror.

  Life / soul. Color, bearing, shape, size, magnitudo, figura, habitus corporis, anima

  Stanza the sea. Earth the sea, Fishman in Excelsis Table (1970–71). Mixed media: wood, latex, wax, metal, paint, fabric, string, and Styrofoam, 29 1/2 x 35 7/16 x 94 1/8 in. (75 x 90 x 239 cm). My body is made of bones. In times of trouble and perplexity I am able to bend my limbs and stretch myself into a Forsaken Merman but Oh, little school chair with Manhattan cityscape hung at child’s-eye level I wish I were young again. If I had only known earlier that indeterminacy involves all of life I might fathom the luminous story surrounding all things noumenal.

  The Portrait of a Lady in Black (1590s), once attributed to Jacobo Tintoretto (1518–1594) and later to his son Domenico, is at the top of the third floor landing just to the right of the Veronese Room entrance. According to the guidebook, Tintoretto’s portrait of a Venetian woman is a glorification of wealth and station rather than a character study. More care is focused on the contrast between decorative details of jewels, lace, and curtain than on the roughly defined yet vividly lit landscape seen to the upper right. The sitter remains a cipher, her personality as much as her identity a mystery. How do you match people as they seem on the surface with who they are actually are? I assume she is a widow because her clothes are black.

  We have so little time in the distant present. Echo cannot stop reflecting the original enchantment of the good mother beyond representation, her eye of nature absorbed in surface azure of poise and balance, rhythmic rise and fall of words, their deep ecology and threads of Divinity. Hush be quiet deep-green pagan marvels. You see the double evidence—as the place, the time, the fashion of other lives determined by grounds outside our power which leaves the good mother absorbed in you here on the landing in peace and plenty. I try as hard as I can to wish myself into your presence through art foreshadowing life after death for some notes of promise that the aesthetic holds out or holds on to an idea of the formal rigors of poetry as light and impulse. Then the free cause of expression may return to the morality of things I want to remember as first things last. Gardner has placed the painting high on the east wall in the center of an older tapestry resembling a wishing carpet, all swirls of plants and people gesturing. The embroidered damask serves as a double frame. Our Lady of the Labyrinth, captured in oscillating memory folds of simple household affections exhibits, her glistening necklace armor.

  Standing here in early evening when the viewers are leaving and the lights are dimmed I remember Mary (Minny) Temple’s personal letters to John Chipman Gray, and Henry James’ splendidly written passages in The Wings of the Dove when Milly Theale, Minny’s fictional double, wandering through one of the great gilded chambers of Matcham, sees herself mirrored in Bronzino’s Portrait of a Woman. “The lady in question, at all events, with her slightly Michael-angelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds, was a very great personage—only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead.”

  It’s late November. Fallen oak and maple leaves on the sidewalk outside are bound to childhood landscape memories filtered through my mother who never stopped harping on the cruel ugliness of Boston as compared to Dublin’s fair city. For me there are two alternatives: either swallow or break free

  The Rule Against Perpetuities resembles a postmodern labyrinth in need of a golden thread. Some poets and lawyers keep trying, some groping through intricate passages half-paralyzed, never do. John Gray stands in for my father. As life rushes by we do our best with the nerves we inherit. The guards at the entrance are watching so we won’t get away with anything.

  Epistolary Correspondences.

  Before I was sent to Little Sir Echo I had an imaginary friend who lived in our Buffalo mailbox. His name was Mr. Bickle. When we moved to Cambridge he vanished as transitional objects tend to do although his name lives on as a family anecdote.

  Strange that one half-suffocated picnic in the course of life can disappear into Lake Armington’s hanging rock echo portals. Until the replication of love prevails in art and Periscope—one of Paul Thek’s late “picture-light” paintings, bubbles up from puddle blue depths

  So many things happen by bringing to light what has long been hidden. Lilting betwixt and between. Between what? Oh everything. Take your microphone. Cross your voice with the ocean.

  I’m here, I’m still American

  Control

  Those months beside Lake Armington may have influenced an adult obsession with early American Captivity Narratives. Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty & Goodness of God, Together, with the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed . . . was published in Boston in 1682. She was taken captive in an Amerindian raid on Lancaster, Massachusetts during what came to be known as King Philip’s (Metacomet) War and went missing with three of her children. “If God be gone our Guard is gone.” She wasn’t frozen like a twig in an ice storm. She didn’t snap.

  If the shoe pinches take it off. Twenty “Removes” from “civilization” in another space of inclusion or non inclusion you may think you slip from time but on second sight the rules are more stringent in terms of giving yourself up and crossing back. This Mary was ransomed home to her family and sheets of parchment open to skeleton clauses. Paper is stationary, unlike a wandering ghost it survives being rag or bark. Oh—I’ve forgotten about eating. Spitting things out there has to be some bleed-through. Think of coming to second life
but only in waves

  Whispering red herrings

  “Can we walk together without the table?” Probably not. When writing personal letters I have sometimes gone too far. Maybe belief and trust in another’s love is an obsessional desire to control a wayward eyewitness. I could go on and on about the origins of transference via H. D. and The Sword Went Out to Sea but a foreword is a like a fish tank so there isn’t room here for leaping dolphins, solo séances, hallucinatory visions, dead pilots, the atomic bomb, nervous breakdowns, the Küsnacht clinic March–November 1946.

  Sigh sough rough wind world war.

  Philological wilderness encounters.

  “Secret Paintings / the / object of which is not / to be seen // He made a secret out / of what no one / wanted anyway” is a motto found in one of Thek’s diaries.

  Goodbye goodbye Portrait of a Lady in Black sheltering sound eye of Europe my imagination of Europe in your everlastingly dim spot on the third floor landing. The last time I looked you seemed to be hoping for something. Stormy landscape out the window to your left.

  The soul appears or occurs as something we feel compelled to live into or to move toward as if it were there floating a little apart and at an angle or

  Rattling the door with a sound of wailing and lamentation

  We can shift attention from here to there during the course of a singular ocular fixation.

  “Milly spoke with her eyes again on her painted sister’s”

  All the eyes in all the paintings

  Alberti’s winged-eye emblem

  Hyperacute part of the retina. the fovea