The Biscuit Joint: Poems

What’s the Plan, Artists?

12 WHAT’S THE PLAN, ARTISTS? Freeman Dyson said Paul Dirac’s papers on quantum mechanics were like “exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another.” People yawn in picture galleries the way they do nowhere else, and I’m not talking about some old bastard with an enlarged prostate gland but a pretty girl, one whose mother surely taught her to cover her mouth, yet now that same orifice is open so wide and for so long that you wonder why an entire tribe of cave people hasn’t set up camp in it, started cooking fires, daubed the walls with likenesses of bison and tiger, and just when you think she can’t get it open any wider, she does, her chops racheting like the jaws of an adjustable wrench, and for a second you fear that she’ll inhale and that all the art in that gallery, that city, the whole world will disappear into her maw, which she’ll close with an audible click and then look around as though to say, What just happened? What if there were no art in the world, no books, no people smarter or more accomplished than our unworthy selves? Why, we’d have to start again, but how? “Either plagiarism or revolution.”—Gauguin. Easy for you to say, Paul! Most of us do what we do because it seems like the right thing to do, as when Karl Marx observed that “Milton produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.” And when I read that music critic Ben Ratliff wrote that “the future belongs to those who can work slight variations on fixed roles,” immediately I think of Giotto: in the Uffizi, you leave 13 Cimabue’s Madonna and Child Enthroned, which is beautiful and majestic yet flat as all get-out, the central figures and the saints and angels stacked on one another like place mats at a roadside diner devoted more to the Church’s dramatis personae than to three-alarm chili and tuna melts, and you move on to Giotto’s work of the same name, and each of his subjects seems to stand in a separate space, that is, to have a fully dimensional humanity, even though they aren’t human. As any nursing mother would, Giotto’s Madonna has a full bosom, but mainly there’s that right knee that all but pops out of the canvas, signaling bodily fullness, the first in Western portraiture; the angels at her feet look at her admiringly, and the one on the right especially seems to be thinking, That’s some knee. Poor Giotto: no doubt his patrons praised him for his ability to render the likenesses of creatures they had never seen, whereas all he wanted them to say was, “Great knee, Giotto!” and “Now that’s what I call a knee.” A few blocks away, a Michelangelo statue of a prisoner in the Accademia convinces you that people are really like that, but then you look at the ones around you—the greasy-haired kid in the FUBAR t-shirt, the bearded guy whacking his gum as though he’s getting paid for every spitty crackle, even the big-hipped Spanish woman in tight jeans you imagine yawning and coming to wakefulness, her breasts spilling to the side as she raises her hand against the day’s first light—and you think, No, people aren’t that beautiful at all, not that well-proportioned, that tragic in the way they push against the flesh they’re trapped in, and for a moment you’re angry at the lady who reminds you of someone you knew in high school, at the serious 14 fellow who looks as though he just thought of something amusing, at yourself. What’s real here, and what just looks that way? When I talk to composer Carlisle Floyd about Peter Grimes, Carlisle says Britten’s storm music does the best job of evoking a storm without relying on musical illustration, and when I ask what that is, Carlisle says, “Music that sounds like a storm!” just as Seamus Heaney warns that if you shoehorn something into a poem, sometimes you end up more aware of the shoehorn than the heel. So what’s the plan, artists? First, follow “the mighty dead,” as Keats...