Michael Blim

Tears work in American politics, as events in New Hampshire last week show. But they didn’t always work, as a 1972 presidential contender Edmund Muskie learned in New Hampshire 36 years ago. They cost him his presidential bid, even as they propped up Senator Clinton’s.

What has happened in America politics and public life that tears have become so acceptable, even gratifying? Rather than considered mawkish, a sign of instability, a feint or worse, crying now signifies something good about the character of someone who does.

Americans generally need have no fear of suffering from blocked tear ducts. Turn the camera on, and we turn the tears on. Happy people cry, and sad people cry. Soldiers cry, police and fire fighters cry, criminals and victims cry, and game contestants cry. Celebrities cry. Politicians cry. We cry with them.

Sports figures positively blubber. Jemele Hill, an ESPN writer, reacts to sports tears without pity and with a little spice in her May 15, 2007 commentary “Crying Etiquette of the Sports World.” Here are some of her rules:

1. Don’t cry at a news conference where you’re announcing to the world you’ve cheated on you wife (I would add or used steroids).
2. Don’t cry when you’ve been traded.
3. Don’t cry at practice.
4. Don’t cry before the game is over.
5. Don’t cry on camera if hurt; wait until you hit the trainer’s room.

Tears of joy, tears of defeat, tears of pain, and just plain tears. Some tears say, “I am one of you.” Others say, “I feel your pain, or joy, or loss” …or whatever. Some ask for pity; some are pitiable.

Whence all this crying in America, especially in politics? In Italy where I have spent a lot of time, politicians don’t cry, and would be considered addled or a bit ridiculous if they did. Contrary to the weepy Italian stereotypes of movies, women in black throwing themselves on biers and Neapolitans male or female caught in sweaty, tearful embraces, and so on, Italians don’t expect politicians to cry. They chalked it up to senility when one of their favorite Presidents, the octogenarian Sandro Pertini, wept every time he touched the Italian flag. As Machiavellian as Italian politicians are, crying is not part of their playbook. It is a sign of weakness, of fecklessness, and given that there is so much “feck” in Italian politics, better not to show it, as Mark Twain said, and remove all doubt.

In our neck of the woods where politicians are fecking up big time — let’s let two wars and the lust for another stand in as a placeholder here – crying sometimes helps them get over rather than get sown under.

Why? Perhaps like many “68ers,” for me, it all begins with Nixon, the Republican cloth coat, and the blessed dog Checkers. Nixon while Eisenhower’s running mate in 1952 was caught using money from a slush fund his supporters had created to defray expenses not covered by his Senatorial allowance. To prevent Ike from tossing him off the ticket, Nixon gave the first of his many bathos-soaked self-disclosures for which he is justly famous. One scholar considered the so-called “Checkers” speech one of the top 100 speeches in modern American rhetoric.

Well…most speeches in American politics today come down to comments such as “I did not have sex with that woman.” Let’s just say the barrier has been lowered a bit, so that even Nixon’s vicious rambles outclass the mumbles of the current bunch.

To recall, Nixon had not only received the slush money, but some kindly Texas dog owner had sent so opportunely a cocker spaniel along for his kids:

“One other thing I probably should tell you because if we don’t they’ll probably be saying this about me too, we did get something – a gift – after the election. A man down in Texas heard Pat on the radio mention the fact that our two youngsters would like to have a dog. And, believe it or not, the day before we left on this campaign trip we got a message from Union Station in Baltimore saying they had a package for us. We went down to get it. You know what it was? It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he’d sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl Tricia, the six year old, named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we’re gonna keep it.”

Nixon’s mouth quivered, his eyes wetted, – and yes, as usual, he perspired. Afterwards, he broke down in sobs. But Americans had begun to get a taste for exhibitionism and self-pity. Even Ike, the great general, “welled up” when he saw Nixon’s speech in Cleveland that night. “Dick, you are my boy,” Ike announced with Nixon at his side the next day in Wheeling, West Virginia, and Nixon broke down again in the weep seen round the world.

It was not always thus. Who would want to ruin a rhetorical high point with a weep? Would William Jennings Bryan, taking a Democratic convention by storm in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech have stopped for a good cry? Teddy Roosevelt and the boys after San Juan Hill? Woodrow Wilson after the Fourteen Points? It’s said that Cal Coolidge could barely stay awake, let alone cry.

Even dogs didn’t make politicians cry before Nixon. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was all in a day’s work of skewering Republicans in 1944 when they came after “his little dog Fala:”

“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers in Congress and out had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him – at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three, or eight or twenty million dollars – his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since. I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself – such as the old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent, to object to libelous statements about my dog.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house – from laughing.

Thanks to Dick Nixon (alas, poor Dick, we knew thee well), his bathos is now our own. He showed us how to ignore politics and enjoy the spectacle of personal abasement – something the former President Clinton practiced rather ham-handedly, and only just in time to save himself from an impeachment conviction.

Now, Senator Clinton. Does it run in the family, the bitten lip, the wetting eyes, or was it simply a Monday morning desperation Hail Mary? Well, tears for fears — and it worked.

Permit me to recall that famous line of the Army lawyer James Welch responding to a red-baiting attack on a soldier by Senator Joseph McCarthy in April, 1954:

“You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency … at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

In 1938, there was a world’s fair in Glasgow—called the Empire Exhibition—that attracted over 13 million attendants. Modernists from Basel Spence to Jack Coia built dozens of pavilions, most of which have since been demolished. Last month, the Glasgow School of Art’s Digital Design Studio (DDS) launched a digital recreation of the festival, bringing to life many of the buildings from archival film footage, photographs, the memories of surviving participants, and architectural drawings. You can look at a map of the site and click on specific buildings for more detailed perspectives.

I’ve been preoccupied about the implications of such an endeavor since going to Scotland for a walkthrough of the project by the head of the DDS and the researchers involved a few months ago, and it seems to have found a curious counterpart in another recent fixation. Quite by accident, I was revisiting a rather insipid New York blog that I used to read years ago when the author made some mention of a guy called Ben Chappel, a New York-based illustrator and web-whiz who died two years ago.

The post had a link to his website (which still exists), and I clicked on it. The site and his work resonated, for whatever reason, and I Googled him. I’m by no means one of those people who search everyone they know or any stranger’s name they come across, so this in itself was unusual.

Cut to three hours later: I’ve read countless posthumous descriptions of his life and accomplishments. I’ve read email exchanges, instant messenger conversations, and a typed dialogue between him and a friend from an evening spent together during which, rather than talk, they communicated only on a shared computer. I found countless pictures from every angle, of every face, of many locations. I discovered a phenomenon whereby when someone dies, friends and strangers leave them messages on social networking pages (for him, myspace)—wishing them well, missing them, loving them. He seemed a swell guy and a great person with whom to have a romantic entanglement.

I started to realize how limiting traditional obituaries are, how unidimensional and incomplete. The internet, magical place it is, allows for something far more holistic. In its democratic arrangement, it lets anyone join in the grief process and, more importantly, the process of contributing to the story of the deceased.

I hardly need to point out the parallel between this and the aims of the DDS in recreating Glasgow’s Empire Exhibition. The only analogy I can posit is to look back to analytical cubism, where painters like Braque, Picasso, and later Duchamp attempted to create time and space through a style of painting that simultaneously revealed various facets and dimensions of a subject.

Here, the process is curiously Baudriallardian—the result a digital simulation of reality that, despite its verisimilitude, remains set apart from its original subject. But the two things, this young man and this fair, are to a certain degree recast by digital means and through a process that involves third-party participation. Just as with the DDS’s interface, whereby users have the agency to explore the fair grounds and take detailed tours of the various buildings, so too can a web surfer navigate the waters of a life lost and create a multidimensional portrait of that person based on selective research. It’s a terrifying process in certain ways, as though history is almost too elastic and becomes itself a subjective exploration rather than something with a singular definition. Gone are the days of a tombstone with a single epitaph, now not only do we have a person’s life and accomplishments at our fingertips, but also the dynamics of their relationships and intimate correspondences.

In the case of the Glasgow exhibition, there is a shift from the telling of history through gritty black and white photographs to an interactive and experiential portrait mediated, of course, by its very nature as a virtual environment.

And that’s where things get a bit slippery for me. With the rise of phenomena like Second Life, suddenly the creation of digital personae and places begins to blur my understanding of reality and historical occurrences that are retold through the internet. This Ben (who I am exploiting so despicably here, but only because I am truly fascinated by, and may go so far as to say may actually like), just as this Empire Exhibition, are ultimately going to survive in the annals of the internet, sharing a place with Lara Croft as easily as those pets for whom adoring (and perverted, in my opinion) owners make myspace and friendster pages. Their digitization is, rather than bringing them to life, making them ultimately less real, if not more complex, than people and places sitting in an encyclopedia.

Ultimately I grieve for Ben as much as I stand in awe of the remnants of Glasgow’s fair. I am able to understand them as things once tangible, but it’s taken a lot of imagination and a refutation of the source of information by which I’ve come to know them. It’s an active process, but one that brings them to life beyond the confines of the same digital world through which I came to know them. It’s all a bit twisted, I guess.

Australian poet and author Peter Nicholson writes 3QD’s Poetry and Culture column (see other columns here). There is an introduction to his work at peternicholson.com.au and at the NLA.

The subject of Prometheus has appealed to poets from the Greeks onwards. Though Shelley’s ‘Prometheus Unbound’ is probably the best known poem on the subject, many poets have been drawn to the figure of the trapped and suffering Titan—Byron, Goethe, Ted Hughes (Prometheus on his Crag) and Robert Lowell (translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).   

Australia’s vast continental landscapes and devastating seasonal bushfires provide both the scenic and metaphysical songlines from which the adjective Promethean could draw a particular music and imagery. 

Here is the opening of my poem ‘Prometheus’. Three voices are dramatised. Prometheus’ speaking voice is caught between a blank verse narrative and lyrics that explore the fire imagery inherent in the subject matter.

                Prometheus

Leaving the past,
Its histories and mutterings,
Now our pitch
Rears from feral backblocks.
So, here in limbo,
At adequate height,
Fate abandons you, leaving
Hollow triumphs
And the dreck of a century,
Freeways ringing oceans
While see-saw skin
Sexes the packed minutes.

Look at the harbour unreeling—
Its cloud wedding cake on a cracked mirror sheen,
Oxygen feeding furnaces,
Strengthening iron,
Industrial shift work stretching
Towers from tired limbs.
We stare at the brilliant sky
Hoping for something large,
A handle to grip
Each failure
Summoning bad grace.
Then at one zone of light,
Near opalescent sea,
On a bare rock, in a hard place,
Prometheus is faxed,
Myth amid technology,
Linkages of lyric,
Monologues and fragments,
Vague beginnings, endings,
Not old certainties.

A superhero skimming heights
Made marvellous by NASA,
Limbs carved to silhouette,
Olympian gesturing?—
Prometheus has dropped
Poses meant for dominance,
Though trapped,
Still glorying in a mood
Named euphoric,
Data banks in stacks.
But there is too much pain
To be contained by formulae
Or measured with an ECG,
Too much inexplicable,
Not defined by chemistry,
Unpaginated nerves
Rippling near texts.

   If I speak, it’s clear
   that I must speak
   with the voice of nations
   and bestiaries—
   I’ve seen the end result
   of evolution’s tramp
   and known cruelty,
   that rational excess
   when species felt the needle plunge.
   Politicians shouted slogans
   too long with no end
   except their re-election,
   true democrats
   left high and dry,
   justice dumped,
   speculators salting
   loot on harbour shelves.

      Lightning highlights clouds,
      Thunder rattles stairs,
      In the bedroom shadows crowd
      Round a loving pair.

      A bolt descends theatrically,
      Attracted to their heat,
      Severs bodies open
      Under ruined sheets.

      Then rain pours through the tiles,
      On this crumpled couple—
      Morning sky is spread
      With cloud-limbs reassembled.

Here is our astrology—
Using words to sew up faults,
Coming to strength
When the shining ends
Of dreaming have sprung up.
There lies within us nature coiled
Which we can bring with splendour
Or quickly finish off;
Waiting at our end
Are a million crackling stars.

      Fire on hills, wheels of light exploding,
      Sheet flame folding valleys and bright birds
      Caught in flying ashes, brought to the bronze moulding
      Of these channels surging through the grass.
      Snake writhing on a log, cattle scorched and sculpted,
      Flickering as a furrow where the steel is poured,
      Hunter trapping fauna in a glowing comer,
      Branch and tree trunk splitting in the branding heat.

      Then the flapping wall of flame perishes with windfall,
      Leaving grey abstractions after purgatorio,
      Stink of soot and stripped design, black predominating.
      Through the haze a form escapes into midnight tremor;
      Madman with a box of matches, grinning at the night,
      Weird with all that reddening he runs to start new fires.

   My charity must search
   beyond failed intent.
   Of course, if you’re content
   with defeat and are smug
   with your own self-hate,
   you’ll never know
   more than curiosity
   for suffering, or sympathy
   for disgrace.
   After disillusion
   I take the world in tow,
   sparking hope again.
   To some I’m naive,
   a philosophe
   who’s lost the drift of things.
   Still, I’ve this to give:
   passion, not knowledge,
   feeling, not incision.

      Bars that turn blue
      In the cooling tank room
      Menace the chocolate box snow.

      Are you excited
      Or just plain frightened
      By this victorious show?

      Yellow cake loads
      Will flatten the roads
      In a manner that’s rather gung ho.

      One flash and you’re ash,
      Done your whole dash,
      Buried alike friend and foe.

      Just transfer the lot
      To the stars you clot
      And the problem will soon disappear.

      A war up in space
      Will not cinder the race—
      It’s goodbye to your out-of-date fears!

Alternative dazzle
As jumbos knife the sky,
Land distanced by the roar
Of engines burning fuel,
Your wanderlust soon gutted,
Lying on a foreign bed, thinking
Of that prize: thunder on the skin;
In that noise the turbulence
That shadowed every pastoral,
Rippling motel rooms,
Ribbing beachtime games.
You wonder then
If beauty lasts;
Its harness sometimes drags
To seaweed in a trench
Or flags stuck on a peak,
Laundering politely,
Only gathering in
When loving is the cause—
Orchids hanging in glass shed stacks,
A stretch of muscle pushing at your own,
An um whose figures freeze up rushing time.

Cont. . . .

Written 1985–1987 Published Such Sweet Thunder 1994 49-64

Elatia Harris

Around last Newton’s Day, I began considering what to write about in this space once 2008 got underway. It was only natural to think of upcoming holidays that might also be headed for revaluation in the clear light of reason; if Newton had supplanted the Christ Child, then surely Marie Curie ought to elbow Mom, but I didn’t want to wait until May.  Riffling through a sexual Psy-Ops manual featuring leaflets distributed to combat soldiers during the wars of the 20th century — the image above is one such, a tasteful Japanese effort from WWII — I could not help recalling we had on the horizon a veritable festival of unreason: Valentine’s Day. 

Now what could that mean to us? Sure, pooh-pooh Valentine’s Day if you like, as nothing more than a tree-killing bonanza for greeting card manufacturers – but its roots go very deep. In 1969, St. Valentine, possibly a martyr of the 3rd Century, C.E., was let go by the Catholic Church as being just that little bit too nebulous for enforced feast day-keeping. But by then, the engraining in Western culture of this apocryphal saint as the patron of affianced couples was done, having been begun, many scholars argue, by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Parliament of Foules.

Twenty years after Chaucer, on Valentine’s Day, 1400, a High Court of Love was convened by noblewomen in Paris.  Nan Seuffert, writing about — among other things — women who kill, tells us in “Domestic Violence, Discourses of Romantic Love, and Complex Personhood in the Law,” an article for the Melbourne University Law Review, that this court was to have jurisdiction “over the rules of love, to hear disputes between lovers, and to hear appeals from other Courts of Love.” Organized in a non-hierarchical manner, the judges were chosen by women after reciting poetry, and judgments were made collectively. The Court of Love addressed “contracts of love, remedies for amorous betrayal, deceit and slander of lovers, responsibilities of separated lovers and punishment of violence against women. Further…the courts often considered disputes between women lovers and between male lovers. What we might today call transgendered identifications may also have been common.”

My, my, I was thinking: what a lot of fascinating stuff — eloquent relics of love gone sour enough to beg for the chat of well placed women — must have been produced in that High Court of Love, those 700 years ago in Paris.  But no such relic has come down to us, for these courts were more like salons or discussion groups than legal entities whose official evidence would survive to go on display as records of actual medieval jurisprudence.

The Museum of Broken Relationships

What about the present, then?  If one of us strode into a non-hierarchical High Court of Love, relics of our acute romantic distress in a special box tucked under an arm, what would those relics be? I found that two Croatian artists – former romantic partners – were on the very same wavelength, with their Museum of Broken Relationships, initiated in Zagreb in 2006.  As Kate Connolly, writing in The Guardian on October 29, 2007, observes, “Cutting the arms off his designer suits, putting her prized wine collection out on the street for passers-by, or burning the collection of love letters are just some of the ways in which jilted lovers are known to have exacted revenge at the end of relationships. But now there is another outlet for their pain – The Museum of Broken Relationships.” The MBR spent the fall and early winter of 2007 in Berlin, and has traveled to Skopje for a Macedonian spring. Plans for future travel include Stockholm, New York, L.A. and Buenos Aires.

There was no lack of media about the MBR, last fall especially, but it passed us by on 3QD, I’m afraid — are we too rational?  Some of us — still incomplete rationalists — are trying awfully hard to swear off the woo, and we may in that push be repressing altogether too enthusiastically even our vicariously Dionysian natures.

See that wedding dress in the photo above – and that hatchet? These are relics with fancy explanations, displayed in Tacheles, a 1930’s department store that’s since become an artists’ squat, where the MBR had its Berlin run.  At present, only a big roomful of the growing collection of artifacts can be installed at any one time, although the initiators of the project, Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic, hope that the MBR may one day find a permanent – and vast – home. Artifacts keep arriving, each with its story: the bike on which a wretched boy simply pedaled away from his unendurable love one hot summer day; the pricey coffeemaker that reminded its donor of too many attempts at a cozy connubial breakfast that somehow never took place; a pair of pink fur handcuffs, with keys; an evening gown which, its donor writes, “one New Year’s Eve was neglected to be put on.”

Boy/Girl, Boy/Boy and Girl/Girl Ruptures – and Their Traces

Since the MBR focuses on physical artifacts of failed romantic relationships, couples out for winter entertainment in Berlin found it a popular destination – fingers crossed inside their mittens, I presume.  Everyone reading this – and the very one writing it – has had some form of romantic disappointment of which there exists a relic — if only a memory artifact — of such symbolic power that it matters not at all that it no longer takes up three-dimensional space, if it ever did.  Perhaps the couple in the painting above left, A Difference of Opinion, by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, will be stepping decorously wide of birdbaths forever after their kitschy tiff.   If I were one of the two unconscious women in Courbet’s Le Sommeil, top right, I might wake up mad, battling an urge to hurl that flower vase against a wall.  The scene here depicted has always appeared to me as one of those “it just happened” episodes, not a thing the principals made a habit of. The vase shards would do for a relic, as would the intact vase, if I ran off into the day with it.  Or just recalled it as a container of memories, without needing to own or destroy it. A musical instrument or a dried laurel wreath could be a manageable relic if things went South between the Greeks – one of whom is already pushing the other away — in the 6th century B.C.E. tomb painting, bottom right.  In either the virtual or the veridical Museum of Broken Relationships, literally anything in the surround of coupling can be the highly charged artifact of a failed romance.

But why be so literal-minded? A romance that fails need not be with a human. No, I’m not making an off-color observation, just stating a fact: some of our most torrid and keenly regretted romances are with ideas.

Cerebrally on Fire, to Crash More Cruelly Still

Taking care not to get too distracted by his Dominican garb, consider Fr. Dominique Lacordaire, painted in 1840 by Theodore Chasseriau.  The painting hangs in the Louvre, where it leaps out at you even among depictions of rabid 19th century fanaticism of many kinds. It is perhaps the most ardent face ever painted, as befits the personal history of Fr. Lacordaire, which I won’t go into here. When I first came upon it, I was not actually a grown-up, and it looked like every boy I’d ever seen in a University library who was so turned on by his reading that he could no longer stand it, and had to leave off to walk the aisles and stare lasciviously into carels full of girls.  This was a face that made me understand the willingness of Signor Settembrini and Fr. Naphta to duel to the death over an idea, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, in The Magic Mountain. It is still the face I see when I think of momentous first encounters with philosophy – the kind that truly carry you away, so that no one can bear you for upwards of a week.

Ideas of this sort have in common with romantic love the potential to let anyone beguiled by them down, most cruelly down. How horrible it was, when Nietzsche turned out not to be enough.  Being let down by Fritz is a torment even Fritz would have ranked high – Fritz, who was himself let down by Wagner. There is a twin quality of both religious and sexual dismay to it. And don’t try to tell me different, even if Nietzsche was not the one who did it to you. Because, if you’re reading this, you know what I mean — although you might choose to put it some other way.

It struck me that this kind of disappointment could be entirely characteristic of many 3QD readers. Not just those we know who are professors or grad students in math or philosophy, but readers and writers who are capable of being inspired to the limits of their being, and thrilled utterly, by the purely intellectual. Whoever has undergone this knows there are many possible aftermaths to it, some of them with artifacts worthy of inclusion in the Museum of Broken Relationships.

In Sorrow an Iron Door

As Tosca sings, I have lived for art, I have lived for love… What about those who have lived not just for but largely through art?  Whether as creators, or as non-artists compellingly subject to the experience of art who have, like artists, put art at the center of their lives?  I once knew the owner of a riding stable in Mid-coastal California who followed Dr. Boehm around the world, to wherever he was conducting Beethoven – Fidelio especially. Without attempting to meet him or to draw attention to herself in any way, she was in his audience as often as she could manage to be, and that was very often.  She had found the ideal interpreter, she felt, of the music that most ravished her – nothing could be allowed to come between her and the experience of it. Whether it ever let her down and broke her heart I never knew.  If it did, Rilke had words for the phenomenon, for the devastating failure of art at just the time one most needs to be borne up by it.  Words that sound even better in German: Das Kunst ist im Gluck eine Zier, im Ungluck ein eiserne Tur. (In happiness art is a jewel, in sorrow an iron door.)

When this happens, if you are an artist, you may have barely survived a horrendous rupture with your own source of inspiration. When, on the other hand, things are going well between you and your muse, it is as if all forces had joined for an inevitable work of art to occur, and you had channeled those forces so that the work bears your imprint yet came from someplace far beyond yourself. Poussin paints it in The Inspiration of the Poet, below. Eyes gazing upward, the poet is thronged with divine aid he does not see, an unearthly golden light shining from low on the left.  Apollo and the muse, their intent faces in shadow, look steadily not at the poet but at his notebook, to which the god also points.  In the moment of creation – not later, when the work may have found an audience, but in the moment of creation itself, when it really matters – putti are present with laurel crowns for the poet.  If, as an artist, you have had so much as one hour when you simply showed up for work and, lo… nobody could beat you, then you recognize what’s going on here.

But it’s not always like that, is it? Since I would very much like not to contribute to all the heartfelt prose there is about the failure of artistic inspiration, I won’t.  A related matter, however, is the plain parallel between the presence of the muse and the enchantment of sexual love, between the departure of the muse and the cold eye cast upon sexual love. And this is where the Museum of Broken Relationships might be justified in soliciting a few artifacts from poets, painters, architects and musicians, for the frequent overlap of muse and romantic partner suggests worlds within worlds of fairly glittering dismay.

Giorgio de Chirico has left us his own version of The Poet and His Muse, c. 1925.  And in it, so much is amiss. The poet slouches head down in an armchair, his materials nowhere in sight, an icon of giving up.  The muse at first glance appears to comfort rather than inspire, but her torso is filled with knobby, pointy objects, including a right triangle – there will be no crying at her breast. And her right arm, the one that would direct the poet’s efforts, is altogether missing. The featureless faces of both poet and muse encrypt forever the secrets of their disastrous union. They are but two messengers, come together to share their awful news – and there cannot be an artist who fails to recognize the impasse.

The Ukrainian academic painter Anna Bilinksa-Bohdanowicz must have understood the problem intimately, as she reveals in her Self-Portrait with Apron and Brushes, painted in 1887. Her tools at hand, leaning forward into the mirror, she seems to be showing us that inspiration isn’t strictly necessary, only uncompromising will and the readiness to work. Like many very well known Western European women artists of the same era who left self-portraits, Bilinksa-Bohdanowicz has painted herself tiny-waisted, in stays, entirely girded for the business of the day. She appears exhausted, though, anticipating only the kind of work that need not bring extraordinary rewards. Within several years of completing this self-portrait, she was dead at 36.

All Threads Lead to Rilke

The artists, writers, thinkers and lovers on the cusp of Modernism speak urgently to us now, all in their graves for three quarters of a century.  Like ourselves, they tended to think love and sex should coincide, although many of them lost decades trying to effect that coincidence. Our subject being the Valentine’s Day one month from now, and how we might — as a community — mark it, I believe it is more delicate to write of heroic longing, and the exigencies it brings, than of the other thing.  That special pre-Modern longing has no finer exemplar than Lou Andreas-Salome, a virgin – and enraged about it, too – until she was more than 30.  Today, reading Lou is rather difficult; for a horribly intelligent Russian girl who kept all the best company in Europe, she furnishes us with too little that is readable. One achingly lonely day in her late 20’s, however, she surpassed herself – just not in writing.  So great that day was her longing for Rilke, with whom she was in love, and corresponded, that she actually ate his letters.

Reading Rilke’s letters makes one quite see why.  Knowing, certainly, how astonishing they were, he was often traveling, making camp at a correspondence-necessitating remove from the people who most interested him. The great poet, the first to write of going barefoot, the first to look at the exposed interior walls of a bombed building as if they had a story to tell, was married for exactly one year to a German sculptor, and died at 51, from an infection contracted when, already ill with leukemia, he pricked his finger on the thorn of a rose.

The Love of Animals – Not Afterthought but Aftermath

Animal lovers might send in pet snapshots to the Museum of Broken Relationships, not because animals can make you deeply, deeply unhappy by doing anything but getting sick or lost, or by dying, but because some animal lovers have abandoned romantic hopes of other humans, so that the sheer relief and sweetness of having an animal companion instead of a boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse is, itself, an artifact of at least one failed human/human relationship, and the pet snapshot is the document of the artifact. On Valentine’s Day, I may come clean about this or I may not – but her name is Lucy, and she is a 12-lb. poodle.

My friend, neighbor and fellow animal lover Prof. David Mitten, who teaches classical archeology at Harvard, converted to Islam in Turkey in the 1960’s.  He tells me about a tradition I’ve not heard of elsewhere – that Muslims he knew in Turkey believed the love of animals prepared young children for the love of God. That is, through animals, a child learns of love entailing both duties to perform and perfect trust, which is how God means to be loved.

Who can quarrel with that wordless love which is yet a passionate and soulful attachment, which mingles tender care and emotional abandon?  The real nature of a beloved animal, including its sense of itself, is – like God – unknowable, so we project, imagine and endow it with power.  We are allowed to love our animals beyond reason because it’s “trivial, but not ungratifying,” as Nancy Mitford shrewdly remarked.

Frida Kahlo, in Me and My Parrots, 1941, paints herself amid birds that defend and counsel her, perching on her shoulders like Minerva’s owl, crowding her lap like toddlers.  Can they break her heart?   Probably not, but we know that Diego Rivera did – many, many times. La vida es un gran relajo, she used to say – life is a carnival.

Take the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge

Some readers, whose e-mail addresses I have been able to obtain, have already heard from me about the 3QD Valentine’s Day Challenge.  Put simply, it is thus: if you were asked to donate an artifact to the Museum of Broken Relationships, what would that artifact be? 

In today’s post, I wanted to amplify on the rather narrow meaning of romantic love hewed to by the founders of the MBR and its donors.  A poem, a puppy, a film, a painting, a building, a song, and perhaps above all an idea have the potential to incite us to soul-pounding love, to carry us literally away, and examining what is left after feelings of that kind have fallen away will, I believe, reveal the community of writers and readers here in all its creativity and diversity.  Some readers have written back that their emotional life is not a train wreck, and they cannot therefore imagine what to contribute; I hope today’s post may point them towards another reading of the challenge.

On Monday, February 11, when I post the material I shall have gathered, we shall see what there is to see. I’ve already got hold of some great stuff, but 3QD has many more readers than commenters, and I want to cast my net wide.

Please write to me – elatiaharris AT gmail DOT com. If you send visuals, lower their resolution and otherwise scale them to facilitate uploading, no wider than 600 pixels. If you prefer to anonymize yourself via a yahoo account, I promise I won’t analyze your prose style for identity clues, although my mother showed me how to do that, many years ago.  I hope to receive your contribution by February 8, the better to orchestrate it into a real conversation with all the others instead of merely listing contributions in the order they arrive.

Happy bittersweet musing, and — thanks for sending in those thoughts!