A Sudden Hush

A Sudden Hush

     Bare of greenery, Munich’s art museum, the Alte Pinakothek, fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t need to rouge.

     As long as I can remember, my mother, sister and I have worshiped at museums. My father, on the other hand, preferred religious and historical sites, but my mother made sure we girls poked into major U.S. museums from New York’s Metropolitan Museum to Washington’s National Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago.

     Bare of greenery, the Alte Pinakothek fronted an empty field, its ground-floor entrance a simple door cut in tan-yellow stone. Inside, a double staircase rose, free of ornament. Compared, say, to the Art Institute of Chicago whose interior was draped, festooned, and monumentalized with caryatids, the Alte Pinakothek proceeded as if she knew her worth and didn’t need to rouge.

     It was the sudden hush that impressed me most. On the curb, we’d say good-bye to my father and his dithers about cleanliness and proper attire. Climbing what seemed like hundreds of steps, we entered a quiet that descended like the stroke of a bell. Nobody bothered us. All was reserved and anonymous. Nobody cared what we wore or how clean we were as long as we didn’t touch anything. Even my sister, who usually whined and had to go to the bathroom, followed without a peep.

     Our mother wore a distant, peaceful look that I recognized from the beach when she walked into the wind. Later I would call this her “Blue-Twilight” look from her stories of skating in North Dakota. Shadows deepened, and she spun in tighter and tighter circles on a frozen pond. Ice-skating was unheard of in Charleston, and my father didn’t dance. But you could pretend you were skating over slick museum floors. The light that shone from paintings was strange and compelling in its own right, blue as the twilight snow in my mother’s stories.

     My tastes like hers ran to the Impressionists. I was hypnotized by light flickering over a young woman reading on the grass. Or color breaking like waves, splattering a boating party. Small figures on a Greek vase called me to attention. Once I slipped into a vase beside oxen pulling a wagon, their right feet raised for the next step. A dancer with rippling skirt shook her tambourine. Listening to that silent music, I fell into a trance that carried me around the belly of the vase

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

Margotlog: Stunned by Race and History

It's no surprise that I'm often dazzled or stunned by the role that race places in U.S. history. As a child, I'd clench my fists as my father, the history professor, rammed over the loud, metal connectors and onto the roller-coaster bridge, crossing the Cooper River into Charleston, where he taught at The Citadel.

My father, the fulminating racist with an Italian last name, would turn to yell at me and my sister in the back seat. As if it was his job to terrify us with the history that didn't belong to us at all. I was terrified, all right, but not by the likes of Andrew Jackson or John C. Calhoun. I had every belief that within seconds, the car would plummet through the narrow metal bands protecting us from the Cooper River below, and down we'd fall to be obliterated in our casket of metal.


It's no surprise that, years later, living as far north as I can get before hitting Canada, I'm still deeply agitated by U.S. racism and the history that extends from it.

Item 1: Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm one of thousands, maybe millions who find this novel of an Alabama family without a mother, but with a stalwart though often tired father Aticus, to be deeply familiar. For me the familiarity and the differences come in the threads that bind white people to black people, and more well-off whites to poor white trash.

Down the street in Mt. Pleasant (which was a new town being foisted on a much older village) a friend in my class would meet me to walk toward General William Moultrie High School. She was thin and beautiful, with pale yellow curls and a shashay that brought the boys to a dead halt as she passed. My North Dakota/librarian mother was the doer in our family. She had altered the plans for our two-story new house with the help of the contractor. My sister and I each had a second floor bedroom to herself, a luxury to my friend, whose slanty-roofed, "dog-trot" house was so weathered its boards had turned gray. She never asked me in to visit in a bedroom that belonged to her. It didn't take me long to decide that she had no such bedroom. Her family was poor, and we? Well, with "Papa Max's money" from North Dakota, my mother had built a modern home, taking advantage of the beautiful half-acre lot with THREE giant magnolia trees she'd bought. We even had a huge window airconditioner in the dining room that also cooled my father's sliver of a den.

The fact that he taught at The Citadel: The Military College of South Carolina may well have helped fuel his racism. After all, anyone who was introduced to him, heard "Leonard Henry Fortunato." The "Leonard Henry" weren't so outlandish in South Carolina in those pre-civil rights days, but FORTUNATO? Whoever heard of such a name or how to pronouce it? With a few more years under my belt, I learned to say to those meetng me for the first time, "It's FORTUNATO like FORTUNATE." This seemed to quiet most of them.

Was I fortunate? Let's say I was confused, during those years. Confused and desperate to fit in. I didn't have the kind of pedigree that Scout and her brother had in To Kill a Mockingbird, growing up without a mother (who'd died when they were little), but with a father respected as an admirable lawyer. They also had Calpernia, a wonderfully tart and efficient and caring African-American woman, who in many many ways took the place of their mother. I say that with all due respect to the racism of Alabama and South Carolina. But even with my rather myopic Northern/Southern eyes, I saw that the friends I'd acquired during my early school years at the private girls' school Ashley Hall, even these girls whose families lived "South of Broad" in Charleston proper, even they had African-American women in their kitchens, cooking and no doube, like Calpernia, standing in for their mothers, never to spank then as my North Dakota mother did my sister and me. But to "set them straight."

It was my father who suffered the most, I think now. He somehow had to produce the right racist attitudes to fit in as a white man during this truly problematic period of change in Charleston (and most of the south). Thus, he became a rabid racist, lifting his hands off the wheel as he drove way too fast over the Cooper River Bridge, until I had to protest: "Daddy, keep your hands on the wheel! You'll kill us!" But he was in the middle of a rant: "I want you girls to understand. You cannot trust any of these darkies." Yes, that was his word: "darkies."

"You never know when they might come after you!" It took me more than a few years to understand he intended us to be terrified that black men might rape us.

If my mother was in the car with him, she'd talk back: "Leonard, keep your hands on the wheel, and stop that ridiculous talk." She'd glance at my sister and me in the back seat. "We don't know any Negro men like that," she would sometimes conclude. It did nothing but turn his wrath on her. And for the next twenty minutes, he'd yell, and rant, and lift his hands off the wheel, until my sister and I were yelling at him: "Daddy, keep your hands on the wheel. The car's going right over the railing and into the river."

Margotlog: More Than Ever, We Need "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Margotlog: More than ever, we white folks, north and south, need Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. I've been listening to the disks for the past few weeks, or maybe as long as a month, as I lie on the bathroom floor before going to bed, and soak my eyes with warm cloths. I listen to a wonderful reading of Scout and Jim, and Aticus, the family in Alabama, and their wonderfully tart-talking household helper (she's brown-skinned, but an absolutely integral part of the family, and in a moment I'll remember her name!), all of whom take me back to the South Carolina of my youth.

We had no brown-skinned household helper. My mother Maxine from North Dakota couldn't imagine needing help. And my father, the sometimes warm-hearted and other times fulminating racist,  Leonard from Pittsburgh via Italy, kept up a running display of "northern" attitudes. I did not yearn for a black woman in the house, though many of the girls in my all-white school had a brown-skinned helpers. Yes, they were paid, as was Calpurnia, Scout and Jim's "mother-substitute."

I say that with all sincerity. Their mother had died before the book begins, and Cal as they call her, is more than a presence in the kitchen. She is part of the family as were the brown-skinned women who worked for the families of friends I made at the fancy all-girls' private schools where my mother insisted my sister and I attend. Sometimes when I visited these privileged girls (my mother's father, Papa Max, sent money from North Dakota to pay for our private school education) I felt uncomfortable at the way the grown-up white women talked down to these women who cooked, helped raise the children, kept the house clean, and no doubt, like Calpernia, sometimes verbally disciplined my friends.

To Kill a Mocking Bird is extraordinarily in the way Harper Lee characterizes the family and neighbors, and even the mad dog that for a long, trying afternoon stumbles around in the dust until Mr. Heck Tate, the sheriff, brings a loaded shot-gun and insists that Aticus shoot the stumbling animal. This and other hints tell us that Aticus is more than competent. He is the hero of the story, and the children are his chorus, as they struggle to grow up (their mother has died), begin to discern the layers of society, including the disgusting white father (years ago we would have called him"white trash") who brings charges against a black man for "having carnel knowledge" of his pathetic daughter. Turns out, the father, a slovening, n'er-do-well has been raping her, and now tries to pass off the horror on an honest, kind "colored man."

This trial is in many ways the culmination of the racist society, but for me, the book's heart and soul reside with Aticus and the children and Calpernia--with the day-to-day functioning of their household, and of the mysterious family next door, with its aging pathetic son. And also the white woman who's lived alone for decades, drinking herself into a fury, so we learn as the children come to hate her and Jim ruins her peony bushes in a fury at her tormenting. Yet, there is redemption: just before she dies, she with the doctor's help weans herself off the alcohol that has soothed her deformities. 

There is no stereotyping of black people versus white people. Each character is absolutely and continuously made individual and present to us. In my opinion, To Kill a Mocking Bird is one of the finest pieces of literature written by an American, in company with Melville's Moby Dick, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and hundreds of others (usually only a single work among an author's output).

We need To Kill a Mocking Bird not for the horribly sad ending, but for the daily interaction of people in the south, mostly white people, but in one memorable chapter, when Calpernia takes Scout and Jim to "her" African-American church, in a rendition of different ways of redeeming what can't be helped, and offering a welcome to all who come in good faith.

This is open-hearted book, true-to-diverse kinds of talking and living, as it offers a hand even to the most isolated. Truly, an American original that belongs with the very best of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and so on.

Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

Margotlog: Getting to Know a Venetian Church: Santa Maria Assunta

John Ruskin, the 19th-century British art critic and historian, is said to have complained that most American and English tourists to Venice will "dash through the  Basilica di S. Maria della Salute,"  paying no more heed to the gems by Tintoretto and Titian than they would to clothes on a line.

Determined not to be such a dolt, I spent hours a few days after arriving, getting into a slow moving vaporetto (rapid only in comparison to a row boat), and making my way with others crammed on board to the Campo della Salute. Another visitor, a well-dressed woman who spoke with a Southern accent (she was African-American) admitted as we paused in the huge campo that she had not much idea what we were supposed to see. In another minute, a friend stepped from a nearby building that announced itself as the "Peggy Gugghenheim Collection." The woman waiting suggested that I join them, but when I explained that I had promised mysef to see the Salute, she nodded and disappeared.

The church was dim and lofty. Chapels held huge paintings, some so high up that I had to crane my neck and shift about to find the right angle for discerning their subject matter. After several turns around the church, with careful study of the art and the artists' names, I became comvinced that I had seen only one Titian.(Maybe modern scholarship had changed the attribution of others?) So many paintings depicted figures in flowing robes ascending into the heavens that the message seemed to be: we all should be full of bliss or awe. But I'm afriad the paintings struck me as old, difficult to see, and repetitive.

The next day's "misty, moisty weather" kept me much closer to Hotel Boccassini. The wind off the lagoon which stretched a far distance, was brutally cold. I held tight to my hood, and to the railings as I forced my way up one steep bridge after another.

It had occurred to me that when I'd visited Venice years before, I had entered a church not far from were I was staying now. It was the Church of Santa Maria Assunta dei Gesuiti. Reaching it again, I was reminded that its imposing marble facade faced a rather narrow strip of open space--nothing like the Salute's command of an enormous espanse of the Canale de San Marco and from there onwards to the Adriate.

Carefully ascending the wet steps, I forced myself against the wind and through a heavy iron door. A few other visitors moved in the vast church, yet I felt as if the dim church belonged only to myself.

"Founded in the 12th century and reconstructed in its current configuration in the 18th century, the church of Santa Maria Assunta has the typical plan of the Jesuit order, and an imposing Baroque facade. The interior decorated with white and green marble inlays on walls and gilded stucco work is absolutely unique in Venice." So described a brochure.

Titians and Tinterettos seemed to be everywhere. The first, "The Martydom of San Lorenzo," by Tiziano Vecello (Titian's true name) pushed the martyr being burned alive over glowing coals, into the lower third of the painting. High in the darkness, like dying coals, came a hint of the divine.This, I told myself, was what Ruskin's adulation of the Salute church had promised. Here, was that sudden adulation confirmed.

Baroque art is perhaps harder to appreciate from our contemporary perspective than, say, Impressionism which has its feet on the ground, and the charm of children rolling hoops in a park. Trying my best to be elevated with the truly magnificant figures--some simple, others in long flowing gowns with cherubs and angels circling on high--soon in the semi-darkness, I began floating, the cherubs and angels almost guiding me into another realm of flying, and adoring. 

Margotlog: Horrific Degradation Looks So Appealing

Margotlog: Horrific Degredation Looks So Appealing

This past weekend, I stood in front of two large photographs in the Weinstein Hammons Gallery, 908 West 46th Street, Minneapolis. For a few moments, I thought I was seeing rather benign, large-scale but odd images of the Earth. Not the entire earth, but segments: one looked like a huge mountain with blocks cut out of it. The other was of a bulldozer, creating long connected ribons of sand. The ribs took the shape of a fan, except that in the midst of them sat a bulldozer in bright yellow, casting a tiny shadow of itself. At the edge of the sand that hadn't yet been disturbed sloshed a liquid element of vibrant green. I could see little wavelets at the right edge of this watery element.

Turning to the young assistant at the museum, I requested what information existed about these two photographs by Edward Burtnysky, an artist unknown to me before. She brought me a three-fold explanatary card, titled "Anthropocene," with information that the term signifies our current geological epoch. The previous one, the Holocene, "started 11,700 years ago as the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded." Now geologists believe that we as the Earth's inhabitants have left that era for the "Anthropocene," which refers to the "indellible marks left by humankind on the planet."

The photographer, Burtynsky, also writes, that he is concerned "to show how we affect the Earth in a big way. To this end, I seek out and photograph large-scale systems that leave lasting marks."

Finally I began to understand. Yes, it is a beautiful image, this fan of shadows and sun-streaked ribs, with puffs of sand at its edge. I could almost imagine Madame Karenina, deploying her fan as she flirted with Vronsky on a dance floor. But this was "near Lakeland, Florida," USA, in 2012. Note: Madame Karenina threw herself under a train. The tailings from phosphorous mining poison the water into which they slosh.

The other image hung beside the one from Lakeland, Florida, captured an enormous mountain from which blocks of marble were being excavated. Centuries ago, marble was mined by slaves. Michaelangelo carved his "David" from a single block of marble. Later slaves used metal chisels and wooden wedges "inflated by water." It took me a few moments to understand why the wood wedges needed to be inflated. Then I imagined that if the wood was water-soaked, it would be more maleable, less liable to crack and break.

Next, in the 18th century came explosives which left huge piles of waste called "raventi." Yes, probably an Italian word that means refuse, so much amazing marble sculpture originating in Italy. Now, since the 1960s, trucks and excavators cut helical slabs, eliminating the waste caused by using explosives.

The owner of the quary, at 63 years old, says what has been taken "is as if I plucked a hair from a pig." The mountain has been worked for 3000 years, but its capacity still seems limitless.

Both of these "excavations" can be seen from space. This impressed me, suggesting just how vast they are. "Life in the Anthropocene" prompts us to consider how profound and lasting have been human changes in Earth's systems.   

Egg Rolls on Sunday or I Had to Leave the House!

Egg Rolls on Sunday

I had to leave the house, and so I drove to Vina (about three miles away from home to a shopping area near Ford Parkway) where I ordered two, then another egg roll, making three, and ate them all in one fell swoop.  I had to leave the house, and not be overcome, as I'd been for some weeks by the insulin treatments for Julia, our adorable black and white (no not Julia the Terrible or Julia the Magnificent but Julia the Purr-Queen). My only other acquaintance with diabetes, if memory serves, wafted toward me as a girl when my mother took me and my sister on the train, from South Carolina to North Dakota to visit her father.

Twice a day, a nurse appeared in a starched white uniform with little crown on her head and took him into one of the two downstairs bedrooms where, my mother said, "She gave him a shot." He was old and square, with wisps of white hair across his reddish head. My mother adored him, or so it seemed, from the amount of time she spend cooking "from scratch" oatmeal he liked, frying bacon and eggs, and dousing his dessert coffee with cream and sugar.

Julia is an adorable cat, pliant, warm-hearted toward us, and now almost willing to be subjected to twice daily syringes of tiny amonts of insulin. I sit with her in "Fran's chair," a large recliner, while he gives her the shot in the loose furry skin at the back of her neck. Now that we've been doing it so long, it seems almost routine. But there's the weekly "test day" when in four-hour increments, a drop of her blood has to be extracted by a poke to her ear (which makes her flinch from surprise and pain, and poor Fran, my husband, flinch at the horror of hurting her).

I had to leave the house. I had to get away from the inexpressible desire for all this to end, even though my part in it is rather minor--my hands not sufficiently strong enough to extract a drop of blood. Oh, poor darling cat! She seems to have learned that we don't want to hurt her, that hurting her is hard for us (but of course harder for her).

When I returned, she came to the back door to greet me. She was so willing to be patted and have me fluff her fur "the wrong way" from tail to neck, that I almost broke down. She held no grudges that the day before, we'd held her down on a towel while Fran pierced the edge of her soft black ear as we whooped for a drop of blood. It was not fun, perhaps worse for us since we knew it was coming, or maybe because we are not as loving and joyful as she is, has always been. She is the best cat ever, among the dozens of cats (dozens? Well at least a dozen.) whom we have loved, and cherished, until it was time.

We dread that time. And have no idea when it will come. Maybe that's the worst of all. No, the worst of all is perhaps this: that I had to leave the house for the surcease of three egg rolls.

Margotlog: Brightness Falls from the Air

"Brightness Falls from the air," wrote Thomas Nashe, ages ago. Yet, he might have been staring out our windows at the extraordinarily bright blue sky threaded with branches licked with white. With every motion of wind, "Brightness falls from the air."

A few hours ago, I stood enthralled at the kitchen door, dolled up to go shovel, but unable to move, the beauty was so breath-taking--the brilliance of light, the high, brilliant blue of sky, and this tracery of branches that have been dark and drear for so many months. It is a panorama of bliss--flowers of snow waiting for the wind to pluck, showers of silver dissolving before anyone could spend them.

It has been one of the longest winters I can remember, here in the cold and dark heartland. Certain things have been fearsome: numero uno: our dear and only cat Julia has declined. Black and white, friendly as a chirrupping grasshopper, yet losing fur on two legs, and slowly subsiding--into what? Not death, not that, when we two humans who love her as our child, need her warmth, her friendly licks, her occasional sillyness. High in that category: the love-affair with the red holiday ribbon, somehow left to its own devices from some holiday package, and soon adopted as Julia's maybe kitten. She's been carrying that ribbon in her mouth up hills and down dales for weeks.

When we first knew her, she was recovering from the loss of a baby (she only a teenager), and a somewhat botched hysterectomy. Yet she recovered and seemed primed for a long and happy life.
Yesterday after blood work at the vet's, we discovered she has feline diabetes. She's lost weight, so say the vets, which we didn't notice, dropping a pound and a half in nine months. She pees enough to water the garden at Como Conservatory. She eats enough to foster a small horse. These are not good signs.

Of course we will give her insulin--but that passage has yet to be maneuvered. Come tomorrow and the next few days, we all three will be initiated into the use of needles, the necessity of regularity, the hope against hope that our darling pal can remain with us for months, years, the rest of a lifetime.

*** Here is Thomas Nashe's poem:

 

Brightness falls from the air?

"Brightness falls from the air" is a line from A Litany in Time of Plague, a death-themed Elizabethan poem by Thomas Nashe: 

 

Adieu, farewell, earth's bliss;

This world uncertain is;

Fond are life's lustful joys;

Death proves them all but toys;

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade.

All things to end are made,

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen's eye.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,

Worms feed on Hector brave;

Swords may not fight with fate,

Earth still holds open her gate.

"Come, come!" the bells do cry.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death's bitterness;

Hell's executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste, therefore, each degree,

To welcome destiny;

Heaven is our heritage,

Earth but a player's stage;

Mount we unto the sky.

I am sick, I must die.

Lord, have mercy on us!