Analect 2.787x

27 September 2010. Another hot one.

Workmen across the way--their brown faces, brown arms--setting to some concrete work. While inside, Carolina, a wandering Italian with sweet eyes, pens a letter to her rental tenant. Spoons and chairs--contract details...

Yesterday: The Normandy, Oceanside, years ago. Fish tank in the lobby, stocked with piranhas, feeding on proffered bits of raw beef. Tremont Street, the train tracks. King's Men...

Analect 2.786x

24 September 2010. Big morning, Dr. Ho. Don't ask... Let's just say they drilled...

A quick hello to Jay Sordean following--with Diana at her desk, in the burrow. Smells of incense and herbs, small rattan matts tucked over back of file cabinet, blue curtains, hand sewn, draped across shelves at back of narrow room. An appealing clutter... Choir...

Earlier in the morning--revisiting Walters--the counter and register, with my father standing alongside. Varnished plywood tables with distinct piles of folded shirts--the white paper size tabs stapled on at lower left. S/M/LG. Behind, racks of jackets, also set in varnished wood, and a silk-screened banner, Lay Away--$5 a Pay Day.

A pay day--yes, that's the idea. Marine Corps salaries in a sometimes desolate beach town--Oceanside. Well, no, desolate isn't the word. More a sense of anomie. The gray beach light, heading down Third Street to the pier--clean swells, gray-green ocean beyond...

Analect 2.785x

23 September 2010. Sun-filled autumn morning. Standing in the succah, under a cover of palm fronds--white cloth on small table with scatter of rye and caraway seeds from the evening before. Full moon rising through heavy branches of the mimosa--a golden friend...

Later--a line from Derek Walcott, in Tiepolo's Hound. The sharing of something so personal amongst the very many...

As with Leadbelly--Caddo Lake, far northwest corner of Louisiana. Then Sugarland, Angola. A life of song...

Analect 2.784x

22 September 2010. James Wright, in the aftermath of a difficult evening. Anger in the air--at the raw blindness of violence--or simply frustration--at the great patience demanded when you take on something unknown. To put down a line, or a patch of color, following its life to conclusion--or to a new beginning. These kinds of things.

Hope...

* * *



James Wright

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Analect 2.783x

21 September 2010. Anna Jacoba--an old Hollandse seafarers' song--on the rowdy side, especially as recorded by Pekel, the Rotterdam group with boisterous voices, set to the clanking of mugs and glasses...

But who was Anna Jacoba? A quiet Dutch girl from a garden in de Haag. White collar with a bit of lace set against her gray dress. Wide-brimmed summer hat, discrete with flowers, the black ribbon tied under her chin....

Silk Road...

Analect 2.782x

20 September 2010. Voice of Scrapper Blackwell, on a scratchy disk, sometime long ago. Launching into each new phrase, that particular slide up, slide in, slide out, with a smooth return...

Guitar balanced effortlessly, oriented...

Last night: Napoleon on the banks of the Neman, looking east. Prince Andrei's last visit to Lysiye Gory. Princess Marya's parting words...

To forgive...

Analect 2.781x

17 September 2010. Gray morning...many songs...

Analect 2.780x

16 September 2010. Sun, on an early autumn day...

Voice of an Irish flute, begun slowly, notes elided, lyrical and plaintive, building into the rhythm of a dance--her foot tapping the wooden step, evening dark, playing to gathered friends, family from afar--the father, Adolfo, with his beautifully formal and somehow delicate words--"mi hijo..." and the others in turn, speaking of Maradona, on a small tv at 4am, the boatyard, "I am a sailor," in borrowed coat, waves breaking over the bow... A life in the making--Zamba de Mi Esperanza...

Stories, poems, songs--in all their immediacy, to re-enliven a being...

"Do not forget him..."

Analect 2.779x

14 September 2010. Chestolyubov'--the love of honor, Russian for ambition--a strange usage. But that would never describe our Pierre. Better Prince Andrei's words, "he has a good heart..."

Questions of forgiveness--Princess Marya, listening to the stories of the wanderers... Their lives of devotion. And Natasha, whose tears of grief become for a moment those of gratitude... Blagodarenie...

* * *

This morning, a living form emerging from the bushes at side of the house. Her sizeable gray presence--graceful back and narrow legs--Lydia's daughter--stopping now just in front of the house, on the street, ears up, nose twitching slightly--then moving on...

* * *

Pierre, in the very last words of of Book II, "...his softened and torn soul..."

Analect 2.778x

13 September 2010. "And they talked late into the night..."

Natasha Rostova, scene with Marya Bolkonskaya, their first encounter--and the sudden shuffling footsteps of her father, the old Prince--both unexpected and expected... His disdain for Natasha--and emphasis on the word God...

"Old and sick, but a good man...," Princess Marya's letter.

Anatol Kuragin, troika at the ready... "I will love you to the ends of the earth..."

Analect 2.777x

10 September 2010. The place of the church, or the church of place. Pala Asistencia, in the back country, as my mother used to say, San Diego. Mid-summer afternoon, hot, the dry grass of a small park, surrounded by eucalyptus and sycamore. Formerly--a single ruined bell tower, white plaster over river stone, or at least this is how you imagine it--the rough cast iron bells themselves, ringing out through the valley...

Analect 2.776x

9 September 2010. Gray clouds, sun pushing through.

A group of women in the doorway of a train, somewhere in Mexico, 100 years ago. To the day, perhaps. Their homemade dresses, algodón, shawls...

Films of Robert Bresson. A certain kind of quiet--no sound but for that in the scene itself. Footsteps on wooden stairs, creaking... A memory...

Just outside now--the Solano bus. Recorded announcement announces Solano. Whoosh of breaks, one figure emerging...

Analect 2.775x

8 September 2010. And where that shy star? The one in the Babel story, that bit of Jewish biscuit... "a Jewish glass of tea, and a piece of that retired God in the glass of tea...?"

Blustery clouds, chill wind. All possibility...

Analect 2.774x

7 September 2010. Cat apparition, early fall. Clouds and cool wind...

Two German women alonside, writing something together at the computer. Their soft voices, sylibants, rising, falling... "Er kommen..."

Yesterday--a quiet afternoon, warm, the streets empty. Sikh driver with carefully wrapped turban, earpiece tucked in on the right. His smile from afar...

Analect 2.773x

3 September 2010. Oceanside...

Analect 2.772x

1 September 2010. Still morning, warm day...

La China Poblana. Catarina de San Juan--remembered and forgotten, remembered again. An East Indian girl, Mirra by name, carried off on a merchant ship from the Philippines to be the personal servant of the Viceroy of New Spain, Diego Carrillo de Mendoza y Pimentel--but kidnapped en route by Portuguese pirates, who took brought her to Cochin--where she managed to escape (this is getting elaborate!) taking refuge in Jesuit convent, and baptised Catarina de San Juan, only to be re-kidnapped--by the same pirates--taken to Manila, where another merchant finally delivered her to the Mexican port of Acapulco--not to the Viceroy, but selling her as a slave (for ten times the price) to Miguel de Sosa, a private citizen from the city of Puebla (hence "Poblana"). De Sosa died within a few years, but provided in his will for Mirra's manumission. At which time she again took refuge in a convent--and was said to have had elaborate visions of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus...

Venereated as a saint until the time of the Inquisition...

* * *

(The word china in Hispanic cultures is commonly used to refer to all persons of Asian descent... Mirra's practice of wrapping herself in a sari is said to have led to the china dress.)

Analect 2.771x

31 August 2010. Gray valley mist--San Luis Rey. Stream from the mountains, cottonwoods and willows. That particular gray-green light--dry, but with morning moisture. Boulders on the hillsides above. Home...

Time in late fall, white disk of the sun, veiled...

Analect 2.770x

30 August 2010. Beautiful morning, cool air, sun... Otoño...

Chance meeting in the copy store with Flor, from thirty years ago--at a seder, in Oakland, by Noach and Rivka... Her two sons, then just young boys--and the extremely tender way she spoke to them... "Mi corazón...," pronounced with a lilt of endearment that could come only from a culture where love transcends idea...

I play for her (on the iPod) a bit of Cuco Sanchez--Cama de Piedra, with the question-- "Flor, how can this song, which is at once so personal, become the very emblem of something as broad as the Mexican Revolution?" She considers for a time, continuing with her xeroxes (long division problems for a mathematics class?)... "You know, there's never been a day that I haven't thought about just how personal an encounter can be there--people tell you what comes from the inside--while here there's often a certain distance..."

Later, just before leaving, smiling slightly-- "Maybe it's that in Mexico (where Flor was born) it's honorable for a man to die for a woman--much more so than to die for a political cause..."

Analect2.769x

27 August 2010. Late in the night. People are good. Alexi from El Salvador stops his janitorial cart to help, no jump cable--but kindhearted Altagracia (also with cart) has a portable charger, so we walk together down to Durant, where's she's parked off campus for economy's sake--listening to her life story--and head back to the Boalt lot, where my ancient Honda has died yet again. But her starter won't work--this time the battery is truly gone--and I wait in the dark for the truck from AAA--it's Gustavo, from Matzatlan, 23 years old and very heads up. His English almost unaccented, and he knows cars. "Me gustan los coches." At midnight, new battery in place, I'm on the road...

Congo Square. An image from New Orleans. And today the date of Katrina, five years back. Song from that odd-ball Chuck E. Weiss--and the photo of two men, sitting opposite at a small table somewhere in the LA basin. Yahya's response last night--to my question, "What are layers?" (We've just sung Down in the Valley.) He quotes Psalms--"I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...," adding, "It makes me think of an alley..."

Songs and Places. "If I get to heaven before you do, I'll cut a hole and pull you through..."

Analect 2.768x

26 August 2010. Foggy dawn, off the Oceanside pier. Black-green water, translucent, swirling around the pilings. Creosote and tar. Clumps of mussels at the waterline--breathing with the tide...

As in a song--voice of Cuco Sanchez, late in the night--La Cama de Piedra, guitar of Antonio Bribiesca leading us in, slow, beautiful, filled with evocation. Of a time and a place--hardly known--or not known at all, but somewhere a truth--in the only way a truth can be conveyed--as something brought together in the life, cherished (or feared)--and made whole...

Analect 2.766x

23 August 2010. Warm, even early in the morning... Yerushalayim...

Departures and arrivals. The fox, the wolf, the hare and the crow. Stretches of bright winter wheat on dark fields, stubble, wet with rain...

Tolstoy...

Analect 2.765x

20 August 2010. Ultimate regression. And a most beautiful song, from Mexico--Cuco Sánchez--La Cama de Piedra. "La mujer que a mi me quiera, me ha de querer de ha de veras..." Scene from a film--una cantina--with an abbreviated Greek chorus in the background--the bartender, towell in hand, polishing a glass, and two customers, turned in each other's direction... He's much younger here, seated at one of the tables, holding a guitar. Moody light. La servidora (something of Patsy Cline--how is this now not possible?) approaches, ample bouffant of dark hair, bending forward to place something at his side...

Or, much later, with an elaborate line of mariachis on the stage just behind him, now with a wider face, large sombrero over his chest, its brim embroidered with flowers...singing just the two verses...

Adoración...

Analect 2.764x

19 August 2010. Girl by a river, water without end...

Carter Family song, Little Moses...

Away by the river so clear,
The ladies were winding their way,
And Pharaoh's little daughter stepped down in the water
To bathe in the cool of the day.
Before it was dark she opened the ark
And found the sweet infant was there...

Analect 2.763x

28 August 2010. The mountains recede--mountains always receding...

Cities of red dust...

Analect 2.762x

17 August 2010. Chilly morning, almost fall...

The Sierras. A forest in the mountains--white pine, incense cedar, kellog oak--names of trees and birds--osprey, eagle, stellar's jay. (A healthy type, his prominent hop.) Gray squirrel, with narrow back and pointy ears, imagined in November. Or rumbling brown bear, touch of white on his nose.

Small cabin, from the 1930s. The Fir. Log walls, filled in with grout, plywood overlay in spots, appropriate wires. A lamp shade made from a pine star--five narrow branches, rough pentagram spanned with bark. Bed posts of tree logs, boards, handmade quilt--somehow intact. Full-throated salmon leap across cotton curtains, destination unknown. Maybe to the top of the pass--Lakes Basin, Sardine, Packer, Gold...

Analect 2.761x

(to be re-posted soon!)

Analect 2.760x

6 August 2010. Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans, after a painting by Nikolai Ge, Lev Nikolaevich's great friend. That's the figure on your left--the young woman with strangely long face and close-set eyes--or is it simply Ge's handling--a subtle shifting of tones, the blurred ears (quite large, in fact) and the way he revels in the full weight of the darks... (Renoir--"Black is the queen of colors...")

Like the beautiful woman at El Cerrito pool, whose matronly form belies a girlhood of impossible grace. The deep tones in the colors of her skin--Anatolia moving east, Cochin perhaps... She's back the next day, peering up out of the green water at pool's edge, and my curiosity wins out. "May I ask where you're from?" "Lebanon," she answers, smiling...

"You're very distinctive..."

Analect 2.759x

5 August 2010. Beautiful gray morning, fresh shirt... No immediate rips or tears in the collar, wavery lines. Dressed for success (!)

That's the kind of thing they say. But what if you're living in the Zen Center, waking each morning at five for a bowl of tea, buddhist chants--and then off to your gig downtown as an fledgling investment banker, zipping up to the 35th floor... View over the bay, Marin hills....fog pouring in through the Golden Gate. Or Natasha, out farther on the bluffs, where silent guns awaited enemy ships, Fort Point--drawing trees...

A delight, yesterday, with the Russians, and their companions, veering from song to story to poem. Brodsky's taut lines--in Viktor's voice--a nice insistent edge...

Andrea--grace.

Analect 2.758x

4 August 2010. Morning sounds, rumbling of cars outside, rumbling machines within. Vne i vnutri--as in the Brodsky poem, Naturmort--these opposites (or facings) always in balance... Not so much resolved as acknowledged...

"God or man, woman, I am yours..." You just don't get lines like this often in one lifetime...

And Norris, on the same page. His quiet hulk, bending over copy machine. The patient daily racing forms, clips and paste-ups, a dance of intelligent speculation. But today it's something else--a letter from the Library of Congress--paperwork on copyrights--their tardy recording of the authorship of his songs...

Yes, to sing. Evening room, yellow light, an old rose...

Analect 2.757x

3 August 2010. So, one day everything sails along--and the next it's a nose dive. Well, not exactly. Just that you can't do the same thing twice--which is to say, you shouldn't even dream of it. And yet, Tolstoy--repeating every other word--but that's not twice--that's emphasis, an altogether different matter.

Matter--as in shirt sleeves and lamb's wool collars--polyester, maybe, but still fluffy. A border man--crossing first to one side, then the other. This is done with bravado--and not a little hesitation--the tunnels, the payoffs, the close calls. But what can They do, finally, but send you back home.

Home, to set out again...

Analect 2.756x

2 August 2010. And why not...endless dance--a sense of what's on the inside. Brodsky's view--"Naturmort"--the brown-light dust, with overhead bulb, a bristling vast and static presence. But I can't be sure on this--the language is sinewy, and loaded--so that his shoe-store denial of the language of physics (my analogy) seems strangely accurate--but accurate to what?

Possibilities of redemption. A small Japanese hole-in the wall on Shattuck--beautiful vegetarian dishes--two distinct flan-like mounds of golden-yellow paste (eggplant tofu) and the brown fruit itself positioned in between. Also a kind of physics--in which the optic nerve--that is, the eye--does all the heavy lifting. Cooks behind counter, sound of accidental ladle gong--everyone turns. Sheepish, meat-free smiles...

Or Tolstoy, a bouquet of flowers, vsyegda...

Analect 3.8x

30 July 2010. Season of the reeds. A bird or two--coot and grebe. Image of return, or beginning. As with each evening--marking a new day.

Quiet waters, lapping.

Analect3.7x.jpg

29 July 2010. A little close to the edge (meant quite literally). David's violin--the Dvorak Slavonic Dance No. 2, he launches in, impromtu, as if the arching studio ceiling had been constructed for that very moment. Stories--Fritz Kreisler (advising Brahms), Mischa Elman (a bit too slow), and David Oistrach (just right). "A late 19th century French instrument," David's own violin--and stories of his mother, born in Tartu, during the War, the family somehow making its way to a DP camp in Germany, then by ship to America... His grandfather, lost en route...

"It needs to be played like a dance..."

Connections and impossibilities. We reach out, but the clarity, the clarity remains an insistent challenge. Allusion and resonance--as in he music--the dance section already referring to an earlier time. The Austro-Hungarian Empire--these kinds of longings for the past seem to have come built in...

David hands me his iPod--he's listening, miraculously and in parallel--to the same Ardis recording of Voina i Mir... Beautiful Russian voice of Evgeni Ternovsky...

War and Peace. To remake the world...

* * *

Dvorak's Slavonik Dance No. 2

Analect 3.6x

28 July 2010. The afternoon in Oceanside, on Fowles Street, the year 1991, Dad sitting on the low couch, opposite the television, which is showing the news. It's the precise moment when the Soviet flag iss being lowered for the last time from over the Kremlin. I remember watching his face--wondering at his thoughts, after more than seven decades... But his expression didn't tell me, it was impossible to know...

Ispitania...

* * *

(Note on the drawing--Perhaps inevitably, not entirely my father, but an overlapping of the shape of his head with that of my own, and with my brother Peter's. As if the finding--the discovery--must always involve the three of us.)

Analect 3.5x

27 July 2010. Attention on the big wave. Grandview, maybe--but not without a touch of Windansea (view down light-colored La Jolla street to first hump of wave out beyond pungent tide-pool rocks). Or even the pier (Oceanside, that is) where the middle swell allowed for left or right slide. Left being the most risky--in that a forest of pilings was never far off--mussel clumps on creosote logs, each fitted in at specific angle. It broke up once, in the middle of the night--a winter storm--huge combers rolling in from the north--roiling...

Always that way, at certain times of year--the wind-blown ocean, whitecaps, crazy waves this-way-and-that--the power of no order. Well, no order that we can fathom...

Tolstoy, all thoughout--first the event, and then it's meaning...made clear, but only at an infinite distance...

Analect 3.4x

27 July 2010. New world. Hotmail has changed the rules of the game--two small icon-sized images appear, needing a click--and reminiscent of the down-side of gmail--which means that my beautiful stack of drawings may be no more. Not entirely--let me be perfectly clear--I have no idea what's going on. But this represents change, big time...

So, one dives in. It was all a great experiment, in any case...

Two views of the mountain--a place known as Eagle Track. But known that way only to the hawks, the squirrels, and one daily guest, who makes her way up the path, greeting each tree. Some deer--a doe and her two fawns--appearing now by the side of the path...

I know not where...

Analect 3.3x

23 July 2010. So, is it worth it to save a tooth? Or join the masses with a hole in your mouth--an ancient tradition, yes--the toothless grin. (And Gram had lost all her teeth by the time she was 30...) One survives...

But still, but still, the delirious drugs--blocking all pain until just when one least expects it, and then (and then) that single tiny strand of nerve fiber...

Steve Martin, the film clip--predatory dentist on a motorcycle.... (Like Cecil's story of the polar bear--out there on the ice, you need a big gun...) Pretty much covers it...

In any case, there are deeper fears...

* * *

Better a nice walk with Chauncey and Odette...

Analect 3.2x

22 July 2010. Exigencies of the road, on a gray morning. In this instance, a PGE truck parked on the diagonal at intersection of Peralta and Solano--heavy metal disk pulled up onto the street, yellow ribbed ventilation tube, men in rumpled orange work clothes, rubber boots, leaning over, investigating.

Investigating, that's it--but with a less precise goal. (Can urban plumbing ever be precise?) A wandering, amidst the balance points--as with the various implements attached to the back of the truck--a yellow cannister, line of rope, state license plate mounted high, and one dull red stop reflector on off position. Traffic cones.

Voice of Tolstoy, over tiny 21st century ear-buds, another gathering at the salon of Anna Pavlovna. Ippolit returned from Vienna, his irrverant humor intact. "The King of Prussia...," pronounced in gravelly French. She takes umbrage, a royalist to the core...

Pierre Bezukhov, gone now, far to the south, to be with the land...

Analect 3.1x

22 July 2010. "The drawings are ahead of the painting," an old expression, but no less valuable for it. Meaning that the points reached in a drawing are clearer, more manifest, than what follows in the painting. (Of course, the situation can be reversed.)

And sometimes the drawing is right there in the painting, sneaked on, from the side, as if it were just an everyday kind of thing... A surprise, like the ringing of a phone...

Kusok Chleba, my love... A bite of bread...

Analect 2.755x

21 July 2010. Overcast morning...

Sergei and Tatiana Nikitin, mid-1990s--singing together in a casual but adept kind of harmony--at home in their own on-stage world. Camera turns to the hall--panning over a sea of once-Soviet faces...pausing here and there...

A couple in their middle years, the man in coat and tie, nicely heavy eyebrows over a thoughtful expression--his eyes blurred behind a prominent pair of glasses. Life of the mind, an analyst in some noticeable respect. His wife, equally alert, but with her own dreams...

Brich-Mulla... Words from a poem, set to music by Sergei Nikitin. A town in the mountains of Turkestan--the Tian Shan--and a child's own yearning, listening to his mother's story...


Golden Brich-Mulla...

* * *

Brich Mulla, their 1962 version

Brich Mulla, from the mid-1990s?

Analect 2.754x

20 July 2010. Tisha B'Av. Living room floor, yesterday evening--returning to the story of Kamtza and Bar-Kamtza... R. Yochanan ben Zakkai: "It was the excessive punctiliousness of R. Zechariah ben Avkulos..."


Late yesterday--Sergei Nikitin, singing Brich-Mullá, with companion musician on button accordion, Russian-style. Story of a life--a tarantas... Gogol's image for all of Russia, at the end of Dead Souls--a racing troika, but racing to where...?

Brich-Mullá, brich-mullí, brich-mullé, brich-mullú...brich-mulloyú...

Play-words, a grammar's cycle--and also a kind of pause, a post-station on the road of song...

* * *

Sergey Nikitin, 2009?

Analect 2.753x

19 July 2010. Following the Russians, a sunny morning, cool wind, the regulars up and down the avenue... Pogulyat'--to stroll.

Gulyal po Uralu Chapaev-Geroj--he strode out through the Urals, Chapaev the hero... On sokolom rvalsya s polkami na boj...

Whereas here, rather quiet this morning--the normal hubub, a phone call or two, sound of change from the register drawer, "how about a bag," or, "have a good day, Mr. Morris," called out from the back room, "do you have all your originals," that sort of thing... Mechanics of the everyday, a dependable hum of experience, applied in discrete touches, always forward...

Vpered vy tovarishchi...ne smeyte otpustat'... Forward, comrades...

A life lived and relived...

* * *

Meaning of giving--or is it also a taking? Terrible doubts, middle of the night, not so much failure as the impossibility of making a connection--as if the threads from such diverse ribbons (lugares sueltos) might be joined--and to what end? A pleasure in the fulfillment--yes--but more an impossible acknowledgement...of something more grand...

The other side of the river--the other shore of a single stream...

Analect 2.752x

16 July 2010. Summer, yes...

Kornei Chukovsky, surrounded by a group of Russian children. They've made a place for him on the stage--a large chair is brought forward, as he stands there, in his dark suit, smiling. The children gather round. He begins by saying he'll read one of his stories--and needs their help. That they supply the sounds of each of the animals--which, as children they freely do. But first a test. "Oh no, that's not it yet!" he says with a certain sternness. They try again--with much more energy. This time he beams, and the story follows...

Scene earlier, in a classroom, this time with an appealing young teacher, who points to a photograph of Chukovsky. He asks his class if they know Yuri Gagarin? Yes, the first comonaut. He then tells that when Gagarin was about to meet Kornej Chukovsky, in a public ceremony of some kind, his first gesture was to bend forward and kiss Chukovsky's hand.

An order in the universe...

* * *

Kornei Chukovsky

Analect 2.751x

15 July 2010. Warm sun, white produce truck alongside, briefly, young driver hops back in, holding one or another liquid...

Vlaga, as the Mason expounds to Pierre in the waiting room of a remote post station--a purifying moisture...

Temnaya Noch--Dark Is the Night, with Mark Bernes singing, just the guitar and a few deceptively simple notes, decisive and mournful... Frieze-like frames of his wartime companions, piecing out their letters home in an underground bunker, on the front, faces held against another kind of darkness...

For a few moments--sound of water, dripping from above, overflowing...

* * *

(Note: Image in the words of the song--"...I know that you're not asleep, and by the baby's crib, you secretly wipe away a tear...")

Temnaya Noch--Dark Is the Night

Analect 2.750x

14 July 2010. Sparkle sun, early...

Somewhere between a tree and a sword. Let's go for the tree, becoming a branch... Puteshestvie--on the road. Peredvizhnik--a traveller, long robe. Standing to the right, a choir of soldiers--the year is 1944--on a stage with banner in Hebrew script just above, Russian words as well. Bound as one...

Zhdi Menya... Wait for Me...

Analect2.749x

13 July 2010. A Tuesday, gray skies.

From a portrait of Prince A.A. Dolgorukov...of the long hands (that's how I always understood it), the original too everywhere present--a celebratory oil with hints of something untoward--the eyes and mouth in contradiction. Leave them out, just one Larry River's hot spot, around which a face--or a cat or a stallion--can form at will. As in the fourth grade, Horne Street School, up on the hill, where Mrs. Malone, recently arrived (is that possible?) from Iowa would pronounce La Jolla with a hard "J", to am roomfull of sly smiles. "Fingers Malone," our sobriquet--from where? Film Noire still on a distant horizon, Orson Welles unknown...

Grasses finding root, Cossacks circling the field...

Analect 2.748x

12 July 2010. Istomin, Vasily. From a portrait painted in 1799. Woman in a Blue Dress, sitter unknown, together with another painted in the same year-- a man in a dark blue kaftan--again, sitter unknown...

Analect 2.747x

9 July 2010. Gray.

Drawing as a form of murder. No, that's much too extreme--but the shape of this guy's head remains beyond me. Same elongation as Pasternak, but here, in a painting from 1925, by Victor Nikolaevich Perelman, the poet has disappeared, to be replaced by an acronymn--rabkor--rabochij korrespondent (worker-correspondent). Knowingness of the structure of the painting--masculine jaw, jutting but not too heavy, wide lips, cigarette in place, at an angle. Eyes cast to the side, thoughtful but clear-minded --"eyes on the ball", we might say...and then the ever so slightly beau brummell hair--Soviet cultural worker as incipient matinee idol. Which bothers me most--an inability to catch all this (congenital?)--or an ongoing impatience with a forced truth--also an impossibility...?

So, Pan Apolek appears alongside, as easy as butter on roll, paint box and cap and well-reinforced German boots...

With Gottfried, his blind garmoshka companion, singing together on the road...

Analect 2.746x

8 July 2010. Again, gray, cool...

Listening to reading of Pan Apolek. Я помню: между прямых и светлых стен стояла паутинная тишина летнего утра... (I remember: between straight and glowing walls stood the cob-webbed quiet of a summer morning...) Babel describing Novgorod-Volynsk, 1922.

But here, Leningrad, twenty years later. A painting from a summer's exhibition in the Tretyakov. Neo-Impressionism (for lack of a better term) brought to bear on the siege of a city in winter. Sloping piles of snow adorn each cornice (Apollo in the Snow), and a single figure stands to confront the pinkish neo-classical facade of a building unknown... Pale gray barrage balloons hover in a darker gray sky, over silent roofs. A single band of whitish crimson juts across flash of horizon...

Amsterdam, half a century later still, summer again. The street just outside Avraham Unger's flat, near the Javaplein. A songbird in a cage, placed there each morning by its owner to spend the day in open air...

Visitors...

Analect 2.745x

8 July 2010. Sea of reeds, or thereabouts. On a gray July morning. Sound of heavy yellow truck making its way down the street, men in orange vests of some immensely stiff material...

Bending reeds, cattails and sedge, tall stalks over gray waters. A bird or two, hidden in the shadows, Swamp wren and grebe, their unique song... 

Visiting...