What an extraordinary Winter Solstice: a total lunar eclipse! It all happened behind a cloud over my house and I take it on faith. For me the moon is this golden poppy, speaking of the dreamscapes of warmth and light that keep us constant in winter.
One of the great pleasures of the gray days is coffee combined with the New York Times Book Review. I look forward to this moment for the way the newsprint reflects the color of the winter sky, the endlessly inventive illustrations and for the writing: often the reviewers leave me with as much to linger over and absorb as the books themselves. This week carried a particularly beautiful review by Leon Wieseltier of the letters of Saul Bellow. I am a letterkeeper. I belong to the vanishing lineage of those who dwelled in garrets and drawing rooms and “prewar flats” and lived to transcribe the moments of their lives for people they would never see but nonetheless carried with them as vital witness. To look back on letters from this century of the instant-message and the tweet has a special poignance.
What spoke to me most in this review were Bellow’s insights on metaphor, symbol, ideology and creative resilience. As a visual artist, narrative and symbol are my guiding frames of reference. But both can be hazardous to successful art. I take to heart these excerpts, as wisdom to work and live by.
“…the poetry of his prose, its force of consciousness, lay always in its fidelity to the concrete. In the appearances of things and circumstances and psyches, he discerned the revelatory details…“American books, including my own…pant so after meaning. They are earnestly moral, didactic; they build them ever more stately mansions, and they exhort and plead and refine…. A work of art should rest on perception.”
“Ideology is of no use to us in refurnishing the empty house….” What is of use, by contrast, is humanism. Humanism is “the most subversive of all — and I am a Humanist.” The absence of irony from that avowal is like a cool breeze. Trotsky, Rich, Steiner: Bellow was forever chasing the answer, but his disappointment in belief never dissuaded him from the chase. “The best of me was formed in the jumps.”
Metaphor is the juxtaposition of disparate elements of the world in which an unsuspected commonality, an illuminating partial likeness, has been discovered, and the more unlikely the juxtaposition, the greater the consequent sensation of the unifying of the world; and so the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition.”
Read the complete review.
Photo collage from a series in progress called “Werkspace” about the physical and emotional space of creativity. Original photos by Iskra Johnson taken at Pratt print studios in Seattle.
The robins have been ice skating on the pond. Every morning just as I am finishing my tea they confer en masse, and compete with the starling, the bold jay and the infinite supply of juncos for stage time. I have been thinking about the idea of village at this time of year, so focused as it is on connection and on gathering together. I went out to get my mail, and the mailbox startled me with its beauty. As I walked back through the snow ideas of human friendship, of nature’s dumb and lovely company and the ways we stay in touch when far away swirled in my mind.
I started collaging with a juxtaposition of the robin and the mailbox, and then realized that the robin properly belonged on his own card, “in” the box. I found an ancient postcard from a dear friend who wrote to me from Germany the day she met her true love. If ever I considered throwing out the archives of a lifetime’s correspondence today I thought better– to have nothing but email in ones’ drawer and to have to buy emotional ephemera from Ebay……!
I can’t decide which of these two versions works better. I tried about a million layer effects and sizes of the postmark. I laboriously changed the date to today (now hidden.) I finally knocked it back to almost invisible. I rarely put human faces in my work as I am more interested in asking the audience to see the view rather than to notice the viewer. But I think I like this woman of the German stamp. She has a winter face.
On the other hand, the pure nature narrative, the robin trading me his bright color for a few sunflower seeds. Tell me what you think.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson
I took a walk to get basics, praying that on this snowbound day before Thanksgiving the multitudes would leave me bagels. (They did, and I can love them for this as the Pilgrims would.) On the way I saw a man on a bicycle smiling on sheet ice. He shouted as he pedaled past, “This is the best kind of weather!” Next up a white dog, looking fine and pretty and knowing white on white works. I felt like I was looking at the new York Times fashion issue and it hurt. I had miss-matched mittens and one hand, the leather driving glove hand, seemed to have gone green with frostbite. I stopped at Sears. Give me the Lands End special, a pedigreed 30 below warm fisted mitten, please.
On the way home I walked by the car where in July a woman leaned against hot blue metal in a floor length fur coat and smoked a cigarette. Today, surrounded by frozen mud and snow and ice, her car was covered with beachtowels, floral tablecloths from the old country, and lurid afghans in red and orange and green. I noted especially the striped cords binding the afghan to the windshield. There was no snow on the car itself and so perhaps this is some kind of magic, the application of beachtowels thus warding off the chill. There are things I do not understand, and for this I am also thankful, even a day earlier than necessary.
How Many Minutes from Yesterday: Garden, Early November © Iskra Johnson