WE HAD FINISHED reviewing the galley proofs. Jane Isay, our publisher, hugged us and sighed, “This is the stuff dreams are made of.” Mike Kahn and I, unknown authors, had written what we imagined would be a book read only by psychotherapists. Now we were about to embark upon a nationwide tour, sponsored by a house whose writers had won Pulitzer Prizes. The typesetter (in those pre-digital days type was set by hand) was born in Puerto Rico. He got so carried away with The Sibling Bond that he sent a copy to his older sister. He urged Jane to have it translated into Spanish. It was later reborn El Vinculo Fraterno. In German it became Geschwister-Bindung .
The Connecticut River cradles the city of Middletown (f. 1653), at a modest bend in its course, a place originally called Mattabesset, Algonquin for “end of the carrying place.” Tranquility now prevails over the city’s waterfront park, with its east-facing view of neighboring Portland (once called Chatham), and expansive southerly vista toward Haddam’s broad navigable channel.
The end of World War II signaled a vast new beginning. Life pulsed with hope as people eagerly embraced change. French couturier Christian Dior tossed aside the war’s strictures against using fabric for fashion and premiered his extravagent “New Look” in 1947–a retro salute to “radical femininity” that featured tight-fitting jackets, padded hips, and yards of flowing A-line skirts. Carmel Snow, editor of America’s HARPER’S BAZAAR, tagged Dior’s fashion by exclaiming “It’s quite a revolution…Your dresses have such a new look!”
It is a mistake to believe that the long nightmare is over. Over the last five years, Donald T**** has injected a slow-acting venom into the American consciousness, the effects of which will continue to manifest, even after he micro-manages his ’emperor has no clothes’ exit on the 20th of January. On this eve of a new administration, it is useful to remember some history, recognizing that while events may not repeat themselves, ithey often rhyme (thank you, Mark Twain). I’ve been recalling a Wesleyan University seminar I chaired in 2017, just months after the last election. Entitled: Rise of the Right: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and the Age of Extremism, the day- long event was intended to alert conference goers to the through-line betwween past and present and–at that particular time–our uncertain and perilous future with a known autocratic despot at the controls. I dug into my files, to find the attached handout, which I had prepared for that event (a scan of the original).
Left: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Roman Widow (1874)
WWWWD?
It’s the silly season again in American politics. Wide-ranging intolerable rants, invectives and urgent pleas are being aimed at the most vulnerable members of our community, marginalizing and vilifying many for simply for not being “one of us,” while seemingly animating others to demand accountability for the actions of the “one-percent.” This Age of Exclusion seems to strike a chord with alarmingly large numbers of people on both sides of the aisle—those fed up with the system, with died-in-the-wool politicians and with a feeling of powerlessness—who then, historically, act on a sense of disempowerment and disenfranchisement to take notice, rise up and agitate for change. This particular essay is not a call for some ill-defined new world order, or even for an upending of our historically-stable republican (small-‘r’) system. Yet, this current state of affairs is all too reminiscent of a passage by William Butler Yeats, who fretted in his 1919 post-apocalyptic poem, The Second Coming, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”
Freud believed that humor and artistic expression are really displaced anger. The New Yorker cover showing Trump wearing his face mask as a blindfold gives me a chuckle. COVID-19 has unleashed a deluge of internet humor offering a micro-blip of relief. For the cynically inclined, go to You Tube for “Social Distance” set to “Sound of Music,” or “We Must Fight the Virus,” to the tune of “The Sounds of Silence.” I send and receive them from family and friends. The other day, I noticed that my laughter had acquired a hollow undertone.
It’s the year of the big virus. We’ve had weeks of #StayTheFHome or sheltering in place, depending on where you live. And in some states, you’re not doing that. You’re going about your regular daily business, going to parties, bars and beaches and getting infected or infecting others.But enough with the happy talk. Let’s talk about death—or at least, about plagues.
THE MINUTE I SAW HIM IN THE WAITING ROOM I knew this wasn’t
going to be an easy case. Stefan was wearing sunglasses; he was slow to put
down his magazine. Trudging several paces behind me, he hesitated at the
threshold of my office, where he insisted that I choose which chair he should
sit in. He waited to be interviewed.
“Into the mystery of this heart which beats / So wild, so deep in us—to know/ Whence our lives come and where they go.” ~ Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life (1852)
“Of the last two lines, it is probably the last that is obscure to you. Life is as fugitive as dew upon the feet of men dancing in dew. Men do not either come from any direction or disappear in any direction. Life is as meaningless as dew. Now these ideas are not bad in a poem. But they are a frightful bore when converted as above.” ~Letter to L. W. Payne, March 31, 1928 [Stevens, H.: 250]
Édouard Manet, Young Woman in 1866 (1866). Met Museum, NY
It was not until the age of thirty-five that Wallace Stevens published his first body of poetry. The collection was entitled Harmonium (1923), and the inclusion of the poem ‘Sunday Morning’ (1915) by an otherwise cerebral, contemplative young Connecticut poet was, in retrospect, a watershed event. While initially panned by critics, it has gained traction over decades as a particularly luminous example of a nascent, itinerant poet’s work, and is often considered a classic example of the early modernist American genre. But, by undertaking an analysis of an early effort like Sunday Morning, the opportunity to benefit from a more comprehensive understanding of Stevens’s later, more mature poetical aesthetic is missed. In exchange, however, this exemplary work stands on the cusp of an emerging avant-garde style in American poetry—stripped down and clear-eyed in its narrative intent—and prepared, at least in spirit, to leave European literary traditions far behind. More
“Everything that deceives may be said to enchant.” ~Plato
Left: Pere Borrell del Caso: Escaping Criticism (1874), oil on linen. Banco de España, Madrid.
Artistic Wasteland: The Arts in America in the Age of Military Parades
On Monday, February 8th, 2016, candidate Donald Trump spoke at a Rotary Club gathering in Manchester, New Hampshire, where several Arts Action Fund members were present and attempted to ask Trump about his position on the arts. While he answered few questions, he did remark on his aesthetic goals for his proposed border wall with Mexico. To paraphrase Trump, he said “And I am going to have to add some designs to the wall because someday they might name it after me and I want it to look real nice”(Source: Americans for the Arts Action Fund).More
