A word can hold a thousand pictures

I have finally acquired a copy of Elisabetta Benassi’s book, All I Remember, which documents her project to collect from both public and private archives press photographs spanning the 20th century – not for the images themselves, but for the texts on the reverse, the description of what we’d be seeing if the photographs were revealed to us. The title comes from one of the photos, which depicts (so the caption tells us) the author Gertrude Stein, meeting the mayor of a French village, on the occasion of the completion of ‘a new book, dealing with the human race entitled All I Remember.’ The book was never published. And so, the absence of this book, the absence of Stein herself from our view becomes a statement for what is missing, what remains. A statement about the power of words to evoke images. We have only these lean texts to give us the narrative, and in their brevity, they act as prose poems, the shortest of stories. Here’s one from 1928, taken in Chicago:

GANG LORD PAYS ON GALLOWS
This is the fourth of five unusual pictures depicting step by step, the hanging of Charles Birger, Illinois gang lord, who was hanged in the Franklin County Jail at Benton, Ill. His hanging also marks the passing of the gallows in Illinois, which is supplanted by the electric chair. Birger is shown as the last strap is being fixed, smiling his last farewell to friends in the crowd. This picture was made just before the hood was slipped over Bergers head and shows Phil Hanna, professional executioner, standing behind him with the noose in his hand. Sheriff Pritchard asked if he was ready and the hood was slipped on just after this photo was made

or this from 1963:

BUDDHIST SUICIDE
Hue, South Vietnam: In its final moments, The blazing body of Thich Tieu Dieu writhes on the ground of the local market place as flames consume it. The 71-years-old monk was dead before this stage but contortions caused by the heat continued in the body.

I find the description of that incident even more horrific than the picture (although I’m not sure if I have seen that particular photo, there are other photos of similar self-immolations gruesomely lodged in my mind), perhaps because it is detached, unflinching (the only word that suggests the pain and terror of the scene is the verb ‘writhes’). Also, whoever wrote the description has interestingly said ‘its’ instead of ‘his’, suggesting that the body of Thich Tieu Dieu has already become an object – the subject of the photo – no longer human. ‘The body’ is dispassionate, slightly scientific. Horrible.

To return to the project as a whole, the irony of course is that the photo archive itself is also disappearing, an antique in the age of digital cataloguing. The texts on the photos are written by hand or typed (with the particular uneven look of old-fashioned manual typewriter lettering) and pasted to the reverse. Some of the texts are illegible with age, or the paper on which they’ve been typed is crumbling. So, Benassi has created an archive of an archive.

I don’t know why the back of a photo should be so moving, but it is. I think of the shopping bags full of photos my mother has, never properly organised into albums (although for years I’ve promised her I would), but all inscribed on the reverse in her own hand with the place, the date, and sometimes (helpfully) the subject – a way of retrieving the names of distant relatives who’ve become lost in the mists. Benassi’s project suggests that a photo is sometimes not enough on its own; it needs to be placed into a context, an occasion, an age.

Virginal, but no virgin

In his marvellous book, Home: A Short History of an Idea, the architectural critic Witold Rybczynski, provides this analysis of a 1660 painting by Emanuel de Witte, Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals:

On the surface this is an idyllic, peaceful scene … But all is not what it appears to be. Closer inspection of the painting reveals that the woman is not playing for herself alone; on the bed, behind the curtains, someone is listening to the music. It is unquestionably a man – the figure wears a moustache – and, although he is hidden, his clothing is fully visible on the chair in the foreground. The hilt of a sword that is barely within the picture and the casual fashion in which the clothes have been thrown on the chair – instead of being hung neatly on the hooks behind the door – hint, in a delicate way, that this man may not be the woman’s husband … Part of the delight of this genre is the painter’s ambiguity towards his subject. Is the woman properly penitent? If so, why is she playing and not weeping? She has her back turned, as if in shame, but in the mirror hanging on the wall over the virginals, her face is tantalizingly not quite reflected. Maybe she is smiling; we will never know.

I was reminded of the ambiguities of the genre at the recent Fitzwilliam Vermeer show, already mentioned in a previous post. The Dutch painters of the period wanted to give a truthful picture of interiors and courtyards, in a celebration of bourgeois domestic values. But it is the way that people, or their material objects, occupy these spaces that is still of interest to us now. Never in this history of painting has there been a genre so invested with secrets and intrigue.

At the Fitzwilliam, I was struck by this painting by Jacobus Vrel, Woman at a Window, Waving at a Girl. It was painted ten years before the de Witte, but shares in common the idea of a narrative only partially revealed. Who is the woman with her back to us, practically going through the window, she is leaning so far forward? And who is the child she is greeting (or at the very least, trying to see in the darkness of night)? She is ghostly white, perhaps she is an apparition? It was not typical to portray what wasn’t there, as these domestic scenes are so much about the material items of living. But the woman seems startled, surprised, anxious; we cannot see her face, but this is what we surmise from her posture, the fact that the back legs of her chair have left the floor in her effort to see out the window. The room is very plain, which means the eye is particularly drawn to the nail on the wall in the upper right hand corner, and the crumpled piece of paper on the floor. Was there something hanging from the nail? And what is on the paper? The painting leaves us with more questions than answers. And that makes it endlessly interesting.

Back to the de Witte. I wanted to write a poem which provided a narrative, or at least gave voice to the clues de Witte has already given us. So this is in the voice of the woman at the virginal, but slightly later, after the man in the bedchamber has departed, and she is finally alone:

Interior with a Woman Playing the Virginals
Emanuel de Witte (c. 1660)

I played all morning, my fingers
light on the keys like birds. I wanted him
to love the full song I offered:

my husband was in the low countries
on business, this would never happen again,
I told myself, to have him so.

The maid kept busy in the hall, he stayed
behind the curtain while I played, but
I could smell him — frankincense, candlewax, sweat

and I swear it made my song dearer.
I played for him to keep him sweet,
I gave myself, like a sweetmeat on a plate.

He said words no man has said before,
and I was in love with him that moment
and for the hour he spent inside my chamber.

But a man like that is hard to hold, a bird
in the hand, so I let him go. He tipped his hat,
strolled into the afternoon. Now I am alone —

My chamber is as I’d left it,
the pitcher on the table full of daylight,
the mirror empty of a face,

and through the door,
the mop and pail wait patiently
to absolve the remnants of my folly.

Formerly

This month marks the end of a project I started with Vici MacDonald (whose new blog is here: http://artorbit.me/ ) last spring. Vici has been taking photos of unloved parts of London for many years now. You could say we are both connoisseurs of urban blight; we’ve been known to go on expeditions to look at far-flung pumping stations and railway sidings. The grottier, the better. But these are the bits of the city which are being rediscovered, celebrated, especially when it seems they might be lost forever, to huge building projects like the Olympic Village or any number of sprawling developments of luxury flats. A lot of the places captured in Vici’s photos are already gone.

Our project ‘Formerly’ charts those urban sightings. My goal was to write 14 “loose” sonnets to accompany 14 of her photographs. This is the first poem from the series. Vici collects signage, and something about the chunky 70s certainty of Capacity House obviously appealed to her. My poem developed from a play on the name, a place that looks like less than its moniker suggests. Oh, and the last word I confess is a pretty obvious nod to the end of Berryman’s Dream Song number 14.

There will be more of these to come. Watch this space.

Capacity

Fat chance you’ll ever break out of here,
this depository for great mistakes
you’ve made your home. Just enough room
for a bed and a stool, a cell of sorts,
for a man of thin means. Lean times.
But I’m a girl who’s capable
and culpable, who knows the value
of a pound. You can’t resist the give
of my carapace, my caterpillar lips,
my capacious thighs. I’ll never sell you
short. You’ll never let me down.
For the first time, you are full
to the very brim with the milk
of human kindness. Moo.

The slush pile

At the moment, I find myself in that strange neutral space “between projects”. It seems that I hardly ever write the odd stand-alone poem anymore; these days my poems are part of a larger scheme, a sequence or a collaboration. I have found that manner of working keeps me lively; there is always something on the go. Until there isn’t, of course. Two collaborations have just come to an end, and nothing has fired my imagination to start something new. It is in times like this that I turn to my “slush pile”, the place I have dumped poems that have never really come to anything; abandoned drafts, failed attempts, false starts. I never bin any of my drafts, and so, by necessity, the “slush pile” folder is thick (there is a similar electronic version of this, perhaps more charitably called “misc poems”). I know that most writers have an equivalent folder lurking somewhere, usually under a similar name. A poet friend (who is perhaps greener than I am) calls hers “the compost heap” (although most of the stuff she digs out is wonderful – nothing like the garbage I’ve hidden away in mine – so the name is apt, as great poems grow in it). I am always telling my students never to throw anything away, and so I ought to set a good example.

The slush pile also acts as a stroll down memory lane. I used to assiduously date my drafts (a habit that I have fallen out of and really must adopt again), and so a trawl through the slush archive is also a way of recalling how I felt and what I wrote about it in a previous period in my life. Inevitably, some things make me cringe, and I have to fight the desire to chuck away drafts that represent my younger, more self-conscious, self-indulgent self. But occasionally, I find a way of completing a thought, of seeing the end of a journey I started some years ago. Time is a great thing, especially in the germination of a poem. CK Williams once gave a talk on the drafting process where he revealed that many of his poems go through a couple of hundred drafts, and that there was one he’d been working on for twenty-five years which still wasn’t finished (that was five years ago now – I wonder if he’s still working on it?). My record is nine years, for a poem called The Saints: http://www.tamaryoseloff.com/poems/poem_saints.php . I had the first couple of stanzas from the first draft or so, and could never find a way to move on from them. The next two came a few years after that. I can’t remember how I eventually came up with the final two stanzas – it may have been something as simple as sitting on the bus (which would tally with the image) and suddenly having a eureka moment. I carried that poem in my head for years, knowing somehow I would find a way of finishing what I’d started.

This is a poem from the last collection, retrieved from the slush pile. I must have started it in the late eighties, so I hadn’t been living in London for very long. It is a poem about foreignness, of the romantic version of London that tourists have, and how that view shifts once you become a resident. I haven’t changed much by way of sentiment, but the older poet in me has learned to trim excess, and so the poem is leaner, more streamlined than its younger cousin. The poem has always started with that opening image of workmen unearthing the ancient layers of the city; a phenomenon that fascinated me when I first moved here, and has never ceased to fascinate me. When I first arrived here, you could buy postcards of women’s breasts with beady eyes drawn over the nipples and whiskers, like little mice, and ‘Welcome to London’ beneath; they halted me in my tracks the first time I saw them, but if they are still around I haven’t noticed. A lot of the references are lost to me now, but I do remember the genus of one image: I was in Chelsea, near the river, one afternoon in the summer, and a film crew were shooting a scene that called for rain. It wasn’t raining, so they brought in these huge machines with hoses on the end, and created a weird localised downpour (hence, “drenched in their own storm”). The city was still a place of surreal mystery to me then; I have a very different view of it now, all these years later. Revisiting the poem made me see London anew.

Wish you were

Men are tearing up the pavement.
They unearth Roman bones, sometimes treasure,

sometimes just the dirt
on which all of this is built.

We pick our way through debris. I show you scars,
bombsites and brownfields.

You buy a postcard of boobs
disguised as cartoon mice, send it to yourself;

you were never sentimental.
You stare at skinny girls, with their mascara

and period clothes, their chignons swept into nets,
drenched in their own storm.

I know how they feel. You want to see
Cockneys, a coat of whitewash.

You have monuments of your own.

Young Woman Seated at a Virginal

I am standing in front of a painting of a woman playing the virginal. The instrument is decorated with what appears to be a motif or scene painted onto the dark wood, but the scene is blurred; the artist, Johannes Vermeer, wants to position us at eye level with the woman, so that we might focus on her. There is nothing else in the painting to draw our attention. She is wearing a satin gown, off-white, with a gold shawl enveloping her shoulders and arms; only her lower arms are visible, reaching towards the keyboard. The gown and shawl are not ostentatious, although the satin is opulent, draped in rich folds around her figure. Her body is reduced to two ovals of fabric; Vermeer wants to hide her figure from the viewer, to draw the eye up to her face, her flushed cheeks. She wears a red ribbon in her hair, a shock of colour against the neutral tones. We can see just two pearls from her necklace visible beneath her shawl. They are two perfect rounds of pure white against the darker white of the bare wall. In her novel, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier describes Vermeer’s pearls as ‘cool and smooth to the touch … and in their grey and white curve a world was reflected’. That’s why Vermeer liked them; they conducted light, acted as a sphere to reflect what was beyond the scene. A little white eye that held multitudes, that bent and refracted what was in front of it, like his camera obscura.

The upper left hand corner of the painting is lighter, suggesting a window we can’t see, illuminating the subject. She looks at us, as we look at her, but her gaze is modest, her eyes slightly lowered. Her gaze is not overtly sexual, as in Vermeer’s other depiction of a girl seated at a virginal.

In that picture, the subject is younger, her expression is more direct, more inviting, and on the wall behind her, there is a painting (a painting within a painting) of a brothel scene. Beside her virginal, there is a double bass waiting to be played. The meaning is clear. But here, it is difficult to say what the woman with the red ribbon in her hair is thinking, if she is comfortable as the subject of the painting. Vermeer allows her privacy; even in our confrontation with her, she gives nothing away, in her dress, in her manner, in her expression. She remains a mystery.

This is the first post based on the recent poetry workshop, The Interior Life, held in conjunction with the Fitzwilliam, as part of their exhibition, Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence. The exhibition ends this weekend: http://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/article.html?2793