Lately #2: Place, Mind, Memory
Hi! Here to share some things I've been taking in this week. I've been thinking a lot about place-- the places we inhabit, and the places we make in our minds.
I nearly swallowed whole the book On Moving, by Louise DeSalvo. The author tells the stories of a number of writers' relationships with relocating themselves, claiming at the start that moving has effects that run the gamut from stimulating to crushing. Some of the moves she covered were of the negative variety, but it struck me that those writers were fleeing something that couldn't be fled--Elizabeth Bishop, whose poem One Art speaks of a series of losses, couldn't be healed by a new country, lover or architectural wonder of a home. Other moves, though, instigated creative growth (Henry Miller's move from NYC to Paris and his destitution there birthed Tropic of Cancer) or provided community in the face of loss and grief (Mark Doty's move to Provincetown served as a ballast in the years after his partner was diagnosed with AIDs). This was one of those books that was good in and of itself, but part of its appeal is that I now have a whole bunch of titles to add to my "to read" list.
The Whitney is currently hosting one half of a Jasper Johns retrospective, with the rest housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm not going to lie, even just the portion that I saw was overwhelming. There was just so. much. work. Ultimately it was heartening to see the evidence of a full life spent thinking and making creatively (Johns is now 91 and still working). One thing that really struck me was the series of preoccupations that showed up throughout the exhibit. There are a number of ideas that I can't let go of in my writing-- memory and the spaces we make our own, very broadly, are a couple of them-- and I liked seeing how Johns' ideas were spread out amongst different galleries; it was as if we were walking through the room of his mind as it took shape in different periods of his life. The flags were there, of course, but I found particularly interesting his most recent work, in which Johns addressed the specter of death directly (there were a handful of painted skeletons) and more subtly (through images that suggested suspension and absence).
I'll end today's note with a poem, with the idea of memory as a dark window, a place all its own. Here's "Luna Moth" by Jean Valentine.
Luna moth at the black window I hold you in my signal-memory but I can't get back to how to talk to you, silent as the black window. Silent as your body little book on which I in my hunger wrote.
Thank you for being here, truly. Always happy to hear your thoughts in return, if you ever feel so moved (but no pressure!).
Until next week,
S