Blue Arabesque

by Patricia Hampl

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Cell

  Window

  Divan

  Camera Obscura

  Les Bains Turcs

  Balcony

  Chapel

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2006 by Patricia Hampl

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  A portion of “Divan” originally appeared under the title “Pilgrim” in Granta magazine, and later in Best Spiritual Writing 2004; the section of “Camera Obscura” about Jerome Hill first appeared as “Memory’s Movies” in Beyond Document, an anthology of essays about nonfiction film; part of “Balcony” was published first in The American Scholar where it appeared as “Relics of St. Katherine,” and later in the anthology Re-readings.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Blue arabesque: a search for the sublime/Patricia Hampl.

  p. cm.

  1. Hampl, Patricia, Aesthetics. 2. Hampl, Patricia, Travel—Mediterranean Region. 3. Matisse, Henri, 1869— 1954—Appreciation. 4. Poets, American—20th century—Biography.

  I. Title.

  PS3558.A4575Z46 2006

  818'.5409—dc22 2006004788

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101506-1 ISBN-10: 0-15-101506-6

  eISBN 978-0-547-35083-7

  v2.1017

  For Terrence

  I am made of all that I have seen.

  —Henri Matisse

  ONE

  Cell

  A spring day, 1972, best I can remember. I had taken the train from St. Paul, along the Mississippi, across green Wisconsin, to Chicago. And now, just checked into my crummy hotel, I was hurrying to meet a friend at the Chicago Art Institute, a place I didn’t know. We had agreed on the museum cafeteria, and I was directed by a guard through a series of connected galleries to a staircase. I was late—of course. Rushing—of course—paying no attention to the paintings on the walls as I hurried to get where I was supposed to have been five minutes earlier.

  Then, unexpectedly, several galleries shy of my destination, I came to a halt before a large, rather muddy painting in a heavy gold-colored frame, a Matisse labeled Femme et poissons rouges, rendered in English, Woman Before an Aquarium. But that’s wrong: I didn’t halt, didn’t stop. I was stopped. Apprehended, even. That’s how it felt. I stood before the painting a long minute. I couldn’t move away. I couldn’t have said why. I was simply fastened there.

  I wasn’t in the habit of being moved by art. I wasn’t much of a museum goer. I’d never even taken an art history class, and I thought of myself as a person almost uniquely ungifted in the visual arts. “Patricia, dear,” Sister Antoinette had said as she swished between the desks of the second graders at St. Luke’s School to see what we had drawn on the construction paper she had passed out for the class frieze, “you don’t need to tape yours on the blackboard with the others. You can do the lettering underneath.”

  I took it as a life assignment—doing the lettering underneath. Let the others not only make the drawings but look at the drawings. Fingerpaints, I remember dimly, had been delicious. I excelled at slinging raw color on big sheets, rubbing spirals with my fists, scraping squiggles with my nails. But I couldn’t draw, couldn’t see how to lure images from eye to hand to paper. I could only get things by writing them, reading them. In the beginning, truly for me, was the Word.

  Maybe only someone so innocent of art history could be riveted by a picture as I was that day by Matisse’s gazing woman. I had grown up in the magical realism of pre—Vatican II Catholicism, and the possibility of an ordinary person being visited by apparitions was packed into the dark kit of my mind. Bernadette in her wooden clogs picking up kindling; the Virgin appearing out of nowhere in the cleft of a rock—why not? Being spoken to by a picture? I couldn’t deny it.

  One way or another, ever since that uncanny moment in the Chicago Art Institute when I was searching not for art but for the cafeteria, I’ve been staring inwardly at that painting of the thoughtful woman who stares, in turn, at a goldfish bowl. She—it, the entire wordless logic of Matisse’s deftly composed rectangle—became in an instant, and remained, an icon. I would have worn it around my neck like a holy scapular if the museum shop had sold such a thing.

  Of course I did buy a postcard of the picture. It is propped still on my desk, as it has followed me around to all my rooms, all my desks, over the years: the woman with her no-nonsense post—Great War bob, chin resting on crossed hands, elbows propped on the peachy table where, slightly to the left, a pedestal fishbowl stands, surrounded by pinecones and a few needly branches strewn with artful carelessness. A small white rectangle rests on the table as well—a notepad. Of course: she’s a writer. Eventually she will say something about the goldfish. Behind the woman a blue screen—Moroccan, I later learned—a prop Matisse brought back to his Nice studio from one of his North African trips. It hints at a mysterious aqua beyond.

  The woman’s head is about the size of the fishbowl and is on its level. Her eyes, though dark, are also fish, a sly parallelism Matisse has imposed. Her steady eyes are the same fish shape, fish size, as the orange strokes she regards from beneath the serene line of her plucked brows. The woman looks at the fish with fixed concentration or somnolent fascination or—what is the nature of her fishy gaze that holds in exquisite balance the paradox of passion and detachment, of intimacy and distance? I wonder still.

  I absorbed the painting as something religious, but the fascination was entirely secular. Here was body-and-soul revealed in an undivided paradise of being. An adult congruence, not the cloudy unity of childhood memory. A madonna, but a modern one, “liberated,” as we were saying without irony in 1972. Free, even, of eros. Not a woman being looked at. This woman was doing the looking.

  But for once I wasn’t thinking in words; I was hammered by the image. I couldn’t explain what the picture expressed, what I intuited from it. But that it spoke, I had no doubt. I was just starting my life, fresh from university, dumb job, no “skills,” outfitted only with a vexed boyfriend life, various predictable dreamy dreams, plenty of attitude. An English major on the loose at last.

  I knew that the woman in the painting, whoever, whatever she was, held in the quality of her gaze the clairvoyant image of a future I wanted, a way of being in the world that it would be very good to achieve—if it could be achieved.

  And what was that? What was she? A woman regarding a glass globe: in the fishbowl, several aloof residents, glinting dimly from their distorting medium, hypnotic but of no particular use. This modern woman looks, unblinking, at the impersonal floating world. Detached, private, her integrity steeped not in declarative authority but in an ancient lyric relation to the world. Something of eternity touched her. She was effortless. Or, as the deep language of my old faith would have said, she was blessed. That was it. Like the English major I was, I had my metaphor. Or at least I had my icon. She existed timelessly, this gazer at the golden fish suspended in their transparent medium. Who she was and what she regarded existed in the same transcendent realm.

  Apparently I was already feeli
ng the crush of time as an injury, an assault. So young, so ambitious (I was), but already squeezed and breathless, hating the just demands of schedules and duties. I worked for a radio station, editing copy, a deadline-beset existence. But I seemed to possess a memory trace, something imprinted not from my own experience but from instinct, of how life should be. It should be filled with the clean light of that gaze, uninterrupted. Looking and musing were the job description I sought.

  Isn’t that why I’d majored in English to begin with, without knowing it? Not to teach, not to be a librarian, not for a job. To be left alone to read an endless novel, looking up from time to time for whole minutes out the window, letting the story impress itself not only on my mind, but on the world out there, letting the words and world get all mixed up together. To gaze at the world and make sentences from its passing images. That was eternity, it was time as it should be, moving like clouds, the forms changing into story.

  But I was beginning to see, now that I was out of school, that the world was not set up for sitting and staring, that time was no friendly giant lofting me gently into the imagination. Maybe somewhere “back there” in human history time had been, like these uncaring fish, effortlessly buoyant. That was my odd youthful nostalgia—a yearning for a state of being I’d only experienced while reading long nineteenth-century novels as a girl. It was an existence composed entirely of the mind floating unimpeded over experience. Thoughts of this sort, no doubt, are what gave rise to the belief the ancients held of the Golden Age. And goldfish, I had read somewhere, were for the ancients the emblem of that ineffable lost Golden Age. The ancients hadn’t experienced their Golden Age, either—it was their moony dream, their nostalgia.

  But just when did time, that diaphanous material, fray into rush? The way I imagined it, woolly minutes had once streamed across an eternity of spun-silk nanoseconds, piling up into hours that wove themselves into the voluminous yard goods of days that, in turn, got stitched into weeks and months. Wasn’t that how it once was—the heavily embroidered yesteryears folded away in the scented armoires of the seasons, and consigned to the vast linen closet of the ages where the first tensile thread of our story on the planet emerged from the bobbin of history? But just when in all this warping and woofing—or maybe how—did time cease to be a treasure and turn, instead, into the fret of the drive time commute?

  For moderns—for us—there is something illicit, it seems, about wasted time, the empty hours of contemplation when a thought unfurls, figures of speech budding and blossoming, articulation drifting like spent petals onto the dark table we all once gathered around to talk and talk, letting time get the better of us. Just taking our time, as we say. That is, letting time take us.

  “Can you say,” I once inquired of a sixty-year-old cloistered nun who had lived (vibrantly, it seemed) from the age of nineteen in her monastery cell, “what the core of contemplative life is?”

  “Leisure,” she said, without hesitation, her china blue eyes cheerfully steady on me. I suppose I expected her to say, “Prayer.” Or maybe “The search for God.” Or “Inner peace.” Inner peace would have been good. One of the big-ticket items of spirituality.

  She saw I didn’t see.

  “It takes time to do this,” she said finally.

  Her “this” being the kind of work that requires abdication from time’s industrial purpose (doing things, getting things). By choosing leisure she had bid farewell to the fevered enterprise of getting-and-spending whereby, as the poet said, we lay waste our powers.

  Wordsworth was wringing his Romantic hands as the Industrial Revolution revved its engines to stoke the dark Satanic mills, which Blake also regarded with Luddite despair. The English landscape—the world’s—was changing forever, they knew (they grieved). So now, two centuries after Blake stood on England’s green and pleasant land and Wordsworth wandered amid his daffodils, here we are writing checks to the Sierra Club, trying to bind up the wounds of modern (now postmodern) velocity, the insignia of greed.

  But the raid on ease was to be more invasive, more intimate: speed attacking the very pulse of life. The eye has taken the most direct blow—and gladly. After the dark Satanic mills and the getting-and-spending, came the thrilling speed-linked frames—“the movies” we still call them. The word trails clouds of the first audience’s naive wonder at sitting in the dark and watching pictures radiate not only image but rhythm. Movies.

  Add automobiles, jets, the you-name-it-you-get-it of the latest technology, the high-speed this, and cable that, the steamy proximity of the ever-interrupting world (You’ve got mail!). And so it’s been smashed—the long reign of slowness (and let’s admit, of boredom, of tedium, of brute labor), reaching back to antiquity and forward to living memory. What’s amazing—how every modern generation registers this speed with fresh dismay, as if it were the first to take the hit.

  We aren’t shocked, as Blake was, by the ruin of the pastoral world. We’re born into a landscape that we expect to be scarred. We seem to understand we’re fighting now over what’s left.

  The contemporary shock is more insidious, the low-grade Sturm und Drang of what is now called stress. Gone, the birthright of the uninterrupted gaze. Gone, perception’s voluptuous stretch. But the body, apparently, never accustoms itself to time’s stampede. It gets the jitters, the mind cracks experience into jagged pieces. We become postmodern, which is to say, speedy. Maybe all that languor of yesteryear is still out there somewhere in a slag heap of antimacassars and long sentences with dependent clauses, along with all the discarded decorative stuff that junks up art and clear communication.

  Or maybe that has been the point, even the project, of modernity: to abandon the gaze, to give over to the glimpse. Accept that truth is relative, authenticity is personal, and art is the business of broken bits. Admit that the fragment is our totem. And that catching things on the fly, no matter how exhausting, is more real and right than any fullness of classic form.

  Even Proust, whose novel lays claim to the twentieth century’s memory project more than any other, displayed a consciousness splintered and faceted. For all the page-long sentences he was still writing when Matisse painted his gazing girl, for all the invocation of “lost time,” Proust’s book is really a postmodern project, grasping fragments and gestures, fastening each flitting butterfly of experience to the pinboard of the page.

  Anyway, gone: the long looking of slow days, the world ordered inwardly by seeing, the act of unbroken private attention that was an expression of integrity clasping imagination, making sense, making “vision.” What happened to this heritage of perception? When did our autobahn existence subvert the inner rhythm beating along the pulse and risk the loss of sensation? When did we forfeit leisure? Even our food is fast.

  It takes time to do this. The nun was smiling at me. Not unkindly. In fact, she looked amused. I had been shown her little cell, the cotlike bed, the child’s homework table, the straight chair, the row of library books tilted against the wall. Poems by Rumi. A biography of Glenn Gould. A nun’s cell. Another archaic profession, going the way, no doubt, of leech gathering and blacksmithing and the compound sentence.

  I told her earlier that I was fascinated by nuns and monks. Then I said I could never be a nun. Her smile deepened, as if I’d made a little joke. At my own expense, apparently.

  THAT DAY IN THE ART Institute I finally found the cafeteria, and after lunch I dragged my friend back to the picture. She didn’t seem impressed. She mentioned “more important Matisses.” She leaned forward to read the painting’s label, nodded at the date: 1921. He had begun his odalisques by then, she said. Those were the important Matisse pictures of the period—the odalisques.

  Odalisque—a word I didn’t know, but I caught the sexy onomatopoetic charge radiating the languor of the seraglio. These were the exotic women—models Matisse conscripted and perhaps, rarely, loved—but above all, women he painted in rich, languid colors for ten years of the interwar period in one apartment or another above
the Mediterranean.

  I wanted to defer to my friend—she had a background in art history; she knew how to look at pictures. She knew “the more important Matisses.” But it was impossible to defer to anything but the painting itself. It claimed authority. I had my metaphor, but my metaphor also had me.

  This one, my friend said, pointing at my madonna, doesn’t show his genius as a colorist the way the odalisques do.

  It was true, I later realized: no striped Turkish jammies, no lounging body, no window open to the Mediterranean light, no radical palette of the south gleaming with African memories. This woman was all thoughtful northern face, a head so weighty it was propped on her arms, which were crossed upon the plain table.

  The odalisques, my friend was saying, they’re the mysterious ones.

  “Of course,” she added, “they’re all a male fantasy—the harem.” She said this last word with the rueful feminist smirk we had recently adopted like new spectacles that wondrously corrected our worldview.

  Was it then, when she said “the harem,” or only much later, looking at the postcard I brought back to St. Paul from the Chicago museum shop, that my eye began to move away from the woman’s face and her fish eyes? Past the contemplative face, past the bottled world of her gaze, my eye went to the Moroccan screen and stayed there.

  I suppose it was the first time I saw the elements of a painting, took in, without knowing the word, the composition, in other words, the thought, of a painting. Not simply the thought as of some object, but the thinking of the painting, the galvanizing sense of an act of cognition occurring, unfinished but decisive, right there on the canvas. The painting—maybe any painting—was only apparently static, just as, paradoxically, contemplation (the real source of this painting) is only seemingly timeless. It takes time to do this, the cloistered nun had said, smiling from her lockbox of inner treasures.