Four Poems by Peter Cowlam

Assaying

Your singer whispers incantations

Like a monomaniac,

But tells you the supposition

Is of endless combinations.

What’s permitted

Is an evolution, nothing bounded

By the finite

Or the ephemeral. This is the theory

You need, to recompense

Those hours expended fruitlessly.

You sigh, relieved: ‘This thing

Is then infinite?’

Or perhaps it’s indiscriminate. 

Public Decrees

All is transparency,

rose red

in the black white

squares of dawn,

a pale electric

in an afternoon mizzle,

a pattern

of charcoal type

on glass,

then windows

vectored on an emptying

street,

where everything is velvet

night.

After Queneau

It was him, not me, clean-shaven, hatted,

Youthful (yes), scrawny like us, and wizened

At the neck. That fool in his belated

Queue for the bus waited with indecision.

Along came an S or a number ten,

Its grim interior crammed and heaving.

He squeezed his way inside, and coughed (a den

Of fag smoke), but what was he achieving?

Commuter alienation, through things

He’d refused to learn. This, for example:

A kicked shin is what cursing a strap-hanger brings.

When, eventually, he found a seat, and sat,

A woman stood up, and grazed his ankle,

Then calmly dumped her luggage in his lap.

The Need For Austerity

Malfeasance, misconstructions, depleting

Agonies revived. The ravages since

Left behind you tell me are worth repeating?

Voices best left fractured rise again, splints

On a breaking syntax. You test a crippled

Line of argument, assured I’ll be convinced.

In bovine accents on the air

Oppressors broadcast everywhere.

Since when this hebetude has doubled, tripled,

Gargantuanised itself, with dogged

Assertions pointlessly upheld.

Ravaged – as a prophet – I have logged

The very last word, and ask (again) how shall

We dissolve these politicising fogs?

Rogue censers swinging their potpourri

Stinking of secular popery.

Peter Cowlam’s latest collection of poems, Laurel, is published by CentreHouse Press. Its terrain is love, loss and lovers’ rivalries. 

For Purchase Laurel

Marginalia

By

Kathryn A. Kopple

Rabbit Riding a Hound with a Snail of Prey

When I was young and less cautious--and I was very careless when I was young--I took up with a great many books. One of the books I took up with was The Sun Also Rises, a book of no small literary importance--not some idle bit of flotsam and jetsam but a book writ large in minds of readers, who remember it for its blunt sentences; a book written in black and white, like a chessboard.

There are legions of colorful books, and The Sun Also Rises isn't one of them. It reads like Plato's theory of forms: one word, one idea, one idea, one word. Between a word and an idea, or a name and its ideal form, there's always a blank space, a caesura, that sets what is named apart from all the other elements in the series, and produces an impression of isolation; a world in which the word fails to connect to other words, an overall lack of interaction among words. Between any number of elements--a man, a café, a passerby, a cigarette, a drink--there's always this empty space, which the reader naturally experiences as emptiness. There's always a party going on, and it's the emptiest party in the world. There's always a crowd assembling, and it's the most disassembled crowd ever to congregate.

Paradox is everywhere, even in the title.

***

Paradox creates an impression of endlessness, or the opposite: a sense of endless confinement. No one wants to be forever stuck in the puzzle; it would drive any sane person mad.

Even playful madness may feel sinister. The March Hare's first words to Alice are, "Your hair wants cutting." Alice rebukes him for being rude. She doesn't understand that the March Hare can only speak in riddles. Without understanding his "language," she is at the mercy of perceived attacks on her dignity.

For the strictly literal reader, the March Hare has taught Alice a valuable lesson: abandon pride all ye who dare enter here. The puzzle of self surreptitiously comes into play, and Alice finds no answers to her questions--only hurt feelings.

She must learn not to ask questions if she wants to avoid yet more riddles. In her situation, escape is the only solution.

***

A reader recently pointed out that Gatsby's library strikes her as odd; there is an odd person there, a man who resembles an owl. Readers quickly find themselves sliding into nonsense when a character looks like a bird and speaks in riddles.

What are these riddles? The riddle of a library with so many books, the reader responds. Are there other riddles? The book's pages are stuck together, the reader answers. Anything else? The man. The one with the owl eyes.

The reader is asked whether the library, as described in the scene, isn't excessively grand. She can't quite make sense of the question because there is the man with the eyes of an owl, and he takes up all the space, as if the grandness of the space magnified what should have been diminished.

21 Short Poems for the Gun

By

Hezy Leskly

(trans. Lisa Katz)

*

There is a gun in the closet.
There are many things in the closet.


*

An extremely small man
may ride on a gun
like a horse,
a black horse.

*

If a monster with seven heads
stood at the gate,
I would shoot without hesitation,
but the open gate
scares me.

*

The judge always acquits the gun.
Naïve judge.

*

I had an unforgettable face
and a white gun.

*

A gun isn’t a metaphor.

*

My uncle has two guns
My uncle has a basement in Givatayim
My uncle has a life.

*

My gun
loves people.

*

The bullet sings its little song
in the air, a simple song.

*

The contours of the gun are imaginary.

*

The song of the gun
is
a wordless song.

*

This time the gun is aimed at us.
At our live flesh.
At our beating arteries.
At our ridiculous faith in what is called life.
We say: a gun is absurd.
And we’re sure that by saying this sentence,
composed of four words,
we have undone the threat.

*

I hand out (cheap) pens, guns
and towels.
All are useful.

*
The guns sell out quickly in the stores.
The saleswomen are horrified.
This city stinks.

*

This gun makes a hole in my head.

*

It is possible to give up carrying guns
and writing poems.

*
A gun without questions.
A gun without answers.

*

It’s a pretty lie.
If you shoot it,
you will wipe out the lie,
and memorialize its beauty.
Such beauty will be an eternal witness
to your cruelty and good taste.

*

The hand shakes.
The hand smiles.

*

Tonight is the mouth of a gun
we stare into
dully and stupidly
after we are shot.

*

Lovely gun.

Credits:  "21 Short Poems for the Gun" was originally published in Hebrew and English in 2013 in Poetry International Web

Poet of the Underworld

By

Peter Lennon

Jean-Pierre Melville said it himself: "I have a bloody awful character." In 1972, towards the end of his career, glowering at the world through smoked glasses under a Texan ten-gallon hat, the man whom some consider to be the "father of the nouvelle vague" listed the collaborators for whom he still felt gratitude after 25 years in the business. None of his stars stars got a mention; neither Belmondo, Delon, Lino Ventura nor François Perrier. Nor, outrageously, did his his great director of photography, Henri Decaë. Melville told the journalist Rui Nogueira, author of The Cinema According to Jean-Pierre Melville (1996) that he only felt gratitude to Pierre Charron and René Albouze. Charron chose the furniture for his films; Albouze was a prop man.

This is as good a clue as any to the character of this provocative, morose, secretive, private and perverse man, whose life was a running battle with collaborators, former admirers and critics. He once said he was "a solitary to the power of five - myself, my wife and three cats."

It was of course this sacré caractère which drove Melville to employ the independent methods of a "new wave" director well before the nouvelle vague. Melville made his first feature in 1947; the nouvelle vague proper did not appear until 1959. Frustrated by the film establishment, which regarded him as an amateur, and angered by what he saw as the "communist dictatorship" of the unions, he built his own Studio Jenner, in 1947, the only director to have one. It was destroyed by fire in 1967.

His first film, an adaptation of "Le Silence de la Mer by "Vercors" (pseudonym of Jean Bruller, a celebrated Resistance hero) was shot in Vercors's own home. It is the story of a German officer billeted with a French family who maintain a total silence throughout his cultured monologues. It was one of three Occupation stories Melville filmed.

Melville then had a quarrelsome relationship with Jean Cocteau making "Les Enfants Terribles" (1950), Cocteau's tale of covert incest, before getting to the film which gave him real nouvelle vague credentials, Bob le Flambeur (1955). Bob starred Roger Duchesne as a compulsive gambler who, in that stalwart cliche, plans a final heist intended to guarantee a comfortable retirement. He tries to clean out the Deauville casino, but in an ironic twist wins a fortune legally while his raid is in progress.

It was not the plot but the freshess of treatment which distinguished this work. Shooting on the streets of Pigalle, in the clubs and bars of pimps and lowlifes, Melville brought style and humanity to this grotty territory. But he wasn't starry-eyed about gangsters. He expressed this in a rather nicely chosen phrase: "The underworld is as rotten as the bourgeois world." Not that Melville was a lefty. A former member of the Gaullist resistance during the war, one of his problems for the Cahiers critics who first revered and then loathed him, was that politically he was unacceptably rightwing.

Melville has both a contradictory and complementary relationship with the philosophy behind the nouvelle vague. American cinema was its inspiration and when working as critics, Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, et al, were intolerant of the French approach to film-making. But when it came to making their own films they turned out work that was quintessentially French. Someone had to be left minding the store. Melville was the man. He became France's "American" director, noted for the lengths to which he went to model his gangster output on American classics.

The gangster's office in "Le Doulos" (The Finger Man), made in 1961, is an exact copy of the office in Mamoulian's City Streets (1931), reconstructed from an old photo in a film magazine. Melville liked to plant American two-piece phones in French cabaret scenes, and preferred Anglo-Saxon sash windows to the French shuttered variety. Even his name was borrowed from America - from Herman Melville. His real surname was Grumbach. Curiously, although he was a most notable producer of garlic gangsters he disapproved of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. "They killed the western," he complained.  

But Melville was certainly not acting in isolation. France already had its ersatz American thrillers, notably the creaky "Lemmy Caution" 1950s secret agent series featuring Eddie Constantine, France's tame American tough guy. Before the war, Jean Gabin holed up in Algiers in "Pépé le Moko" and in an attic room in "Le Jour se Lève." Jules Dassin, American-born but exiled to Europe, made the Paris-set heist movie Rififi in 1955. And, as London's French Institute demonstrates with a parallel season of French films noirs, when the nouvelle vague actually got going, Truffaut offered an adaption of David Goodis's downbeat novel, Shoot the Pianist, and Louis Malle affected noir stylistics in Lift to the Scaffold (1958).

But Melville's films at least had a personal style which soon went beyond simple imitation. It reached its most iconic resolution in 1967 with "Le Samourai." Following a quarrel - routine for Melville - he had to swap Belmondo for Alain Delon, and dress the pretty boy up in Melville's regulation trench coat and snap-brimmed hat. He would break out the gangster uniforms twice more, in "Le Cercle Rouge" (1970), and his last film, "Un Flic" (1972).

Melville's hardboiled world is really that of the film buff, but a skilled one. He involved himself in every aspect of film-making; set design, writing the script, running the camera, and designing his heroes' fetching gangster gear. Here we come to a puzzling contradiction. Alongside his seemingly obsessive gangster pastiches, Melville was perfectly capable of producing work that was restrained, precise and sensitive with no reaching for decorative symbolism.

A mid-period work, "Léon Morin, Priest" (1961) was the best example, notable for the risky but successful casting of Jean-Paul Belmondo (the vagabond charmer of A Bout de Souffle) as a priest. It is essentially a two hander with Belmondo, priest in a small town in occupied France, and a young communist (Emmanuelle Riva). He converts her to Catholicism, to which she submits with expectations of an erotic reward on earth rather than any gratification in heaven. There was plenty of scope for pretentiousness here but Melville made a perfectly straightforward, intelligent and quite moving film. "L'Armée des Ombres" (The Army in the Shadows) a Resistance story taken from a Joseph Kessel novel, was also thoroughly straightforward and effective.

Melville's films have not had a smooth ride critically. Ginette Vincendeau, professor of film studies at the University of Warwick, is the author of the first major study of Melville in English: Melville: An American in Paris. She sums up Melville's rollercoaster career. "In the 1950s, after Bob the Gambler, he was appreciated by Cahiers du Cinema. That changed dramatically in the late 1960s when he became an object of their hatred. The critical agenda had become very politicised. They thought Melville was rightwing and therefore abandonded him aesthetically. He himself said: 'I live like a rightwing person.'

"This was the point when Melville was making films that were very beautiful cinematographically. They saw him as Americanised and they were very anti-American in the 60s. But at the same time the quality press was still very pro-Melville. Also he turned against the 'new wave'. He became a member of the French censorship commission and he was against subsidies, having himself started purely independently. He was also an extremely provocative person. But what is often overlooked is that he became a hugely successful director. 'The Red Circle' (1970) had four million spectators in France, which is huge."

"The change," she continues, "dates from 1996 when the Cahiers du Cinéma had a change of heart - for the second time - and devoted an entire issue to Melville." Quentin Tarantino joined in the praise, naming "Le Samourai" and "Le Doulos" in his 1995 selection of favourites for a programme of screenings at the National Film Theatre in London. Recently John Woo, the Hong Kong director claimed he wanted to do a remake of "The Red Circle."

Melville died in 1973 of a heart attack while having lunch with the French journalist, Philippe Labro. The story goes that his father and grandfather both died of heart attacks aged 55 and that Melville approached that same age with increasing apprehension. So how old was he? You guessed it - he was 55.

Credits:  This article originally appeared in The Guardian in 2003.

Interview with Author Kim Adrian

TLY: We are delighted to have award-winning writer Kim Adrian with us today. Kim has published fiction and non-fiction, and she is the author of Sock (Bloomsbury, 2017) and The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet (U of Nebraska, Sept. 2018). She graduated from Barnard College with a degree in cultural anthropology. She holds a M.F.A. in literature and creative writing from Bennington College. Kim lives in the Boston area with her family.

Kim is also the editor of The Shell Game (U of Nebraska, April 2019), an anthology of essays that makes use of borrowed forms.

Again, Kim, thank you for speaking with us. We here at TLY are always interested in trips and experiences away from home. When did you first leave home?

KIM: I was sixteen when my parents sent me to France for the summer to live with a host family in Cadillac as part of a language-learning program. I spent six weeks there. Every day was quietly mind-blowing. In a weird way, France seemed more real to me than America. Maybe this was just the novelty factor, but I think it also had something to do with the way culture is so deeply rooted there. In ordinary, everyday contexts, you can see history stretching back for hundreds of years. It’s in the architecture, in the layout of the streets, in the food, it’s in everything. That trip opened my eyes and gave me new perspectives, just as they always say travel does. I remain a devoted Francophile.

TLY: Do you find yourself gravitating to certain cities? Regions?

KIM: As an adult I’ve lived in New York, San Francisco, and Boston. I sometimes wonder if I would have lived in other places if I hadn’t been with my husband from such an early age (we started living together when I was eighteen). The places I like aren’t always the same ones that pull him. But if all the logistics could be magically settled, and my husband were on board, I’d move to Sweden today. I’ve always been drawn to the Scandinavian countries, in part because my grandfather was Swedish, on my mother’s side, and so was my great-grandmother, on my father’s side. So Swedish is the biggest slice of my mutt pie chart.

TLY: What inspired you to major in cultural anthropology?

KIM: My husband, James. As I just mentioned, we got together when we were very young. He was at Columbia. I was at Barnard. I was kind of a lost puppy—I’d just come out of a crazy home life, with alcoholism, violence, drug addiction, psychological abuse. I had no bearings to speak of and hardly any boundaries. James was (and remains) very smart, very kind, very centered. I listened to him about practically everything. One great piece of advice he gave me back then was to take Introduction to Cultural Anthropology with a wonderful professor named Robert Murphy. That class was like France had been: totally mind-expanding. One day Murphy said that there are two kinds of anthropologists, two kinds of people: those that see and emphasize the differences between people and cultures, and those that see and emphasize the similarities. I immediately understood that I was in the latter camp. Murphy was great like that. He helped me understand that I couldn’t possibly hope to understand another culture—or anything at all—without also studying my own mind, my own cultural and intellectual biases. After that class, I was hooked.

TLY: In an interview, you said: “I love working in the essay form because of the way it allows for lateral movement of thought—a kind of wandering. Yet, at the center of every good essay is a still point, and there stands the essayist—or, rather, the essayist’s sensibility.” Would you share with us some more of your thoughts on the relation between the essay form and the writer's sensibility?

KIM: One of the reasons the essay appeals to me is that it can be both extremely personal—actually intimate—but at the same time almost clinical in its engagement with facts. The personal part of the equation has to do with the writer’s sensibility. The facts are largely what that sensibility engages with. More than any other prose form, the essay uses the author’s sensibility to shape and energize the work. It’s similar to poetry in this sense. A big part of what’s going on with both forms is simply a presentation of the writer’s mind at work. Part of the thrill of a good essay (as with a good poem) lies in watching that mind make connections between unexpected, sometimes wildly incongruent thoughts, images, feelings, and facts. This is how we all respond to the world around us, mentally and emotionally, but both the poem and the essay make it their business to track that process in an especially lucid way. Sometimes when I’m working on a complex piece, I feel like there’s something actually physical going on inside my head. It’s almost acrobatic: sensibility grappling with subject. So yes, in one sense, the writer’s sensibility is a still point, because it’s located inside the writer—but it’s also extremely dynamic.

TLY: In the lovely work, “I Wish I Could Write Like Russell Edson,” you finish in part with the following: “… I wish I could write the way Harpo Marx talked.” Can you describe Harpo’s manner of speaking and why it appeals to you?

KIM: Well, as you know, Harpo doesn’t talk at all. And yet he communicates more perfectly, with more subtlety and beauty than either of his brothers (and they’re pretty great communicators!). I guess what I meant by that line—what I meant by the whole piece—is that I wish I could write better, more clearly, more honestly, and in that way better reflect the complexities of the world around me. I suppose I also was talking about how language always falls a little short. It can only point at things. Never be them. Harpo got that, and bypassed it. I think that accounts for his Buddha-clown appeal.

TLY: You write with great passion about craft. What is the role, if any, of politics in craft-oriented work?

KIM: Ooh—good question! This is something I think about a lot, though I’ve never settled on a very clear answer. I’d say first of all that all work is craft-oriented in the sense that craft is required to create a finished piece of writing. But if you’re paying some kind of extra-special attention to craft, if, for instance, you’re looking very closely at the relationship of form to content, or rejecting conventional forms in favor of something more idiosyncratic or experimental, your work tends to bring craft to the forefront, where people notice it more readily. There’s an assumption that conventional work—work steeped in American Realism, for instance, or any of its offshoots—is less crafted, but this isn’t the case. It’s just harder to see, because realist modes of literature are so ingrained and so popular. Yet even conventional forms take tremendous efforts on the craft front. I know because I’ve tried to do them and I can’t. As much as I’ve wanted, in the past, to write more conventionally, at the same time something in me resists writing this way. It makes me feel very ill at ease. Not to sound dramatic, but it can make me feel physically sick. Yet for ages I bought into the idea that the conventionally structured novel, and the conventionally structured short story, and the conventionally structured memoir, et cetera, were all somehow natural formations: the right way to write. It took me years to accept that I’m simply not wired that way -- that the things I want to write about simply don’t fit into those forms. It’s strange it took me so long because the work I love most is almost always more formally inventive. Now, I understand realism to be a mirage. A materialist fantasy. A very seductive one, sometimes a very comforting one, but it’s important to recognize that it’s limited. I think it’s also important to recognize that conventional forms can only hold certain kinds of stories—stories that fit comfortably into that specific kind of container, stories that can accommodate those particular restrictions. But there are a lot of other stories out there that don’t fit those restrictions. And if you don’t struggle to find the right way to tell them—if you don’t work your ass off crafting something different—they just won’t get told. So yes, I think there really is a political element embedded in form—both conventional and unconventional forms.

TLY: Apart from writing, what is your favorite mode of expression?

KIM: Hm. Probably cooking. I love baking especially. I’ve always baked a lot—cookies, pies, cakes, bread. There was even a time in my twenties when I trained to be a professional baker, but I quickly realized I was happier as a home baker, which is a completely different animal. But actually I like to cook everything—not just baked goods. It’s creative and sensuous, but it’s also a way of expressing love, not only for those you cook for, but also for the ingredients. I’ve been practicing yoga for 20 years, daily for the last ten or so, and along the way I’ve studied a bit of Ayurveda, yoga’s “sister science.” One of Ayurveda’s basic tenants is that food should be prepared with great care, ideally with love, because when we eat we are not only imbibing nutrients and calories, we’re also taking in energy—the energy with which the food was grown, raised, harvested, and prepared. This principle holds true for everything, actually, because energy is in everything, is transferred through everything. I think that’s important to think about, as a writer.

TLY: Kim, we can’t thank you enough for the interview. Your work is something to be treasured. Before you go, would you mind telling us about any projects on which you are currently working?

KIM: Thank you! It’s been fun. And thank you for your kind words about my work. Right now I’m working on novel about the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. It’s a fictional biography, but of course it plays with form a little more than that.

More About the Author

Kim Adrian is the author of the forthcoming memoir The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet (University of Nebraska Press, October 2018) and Sock, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series. She the editor of The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms. Her award-winning stories and essays have appeared in O Magazine, Tin House, Agni, the Gettysburg Review, Brevity, and many other places. She has taught at Boston and Brown Universities.

She may be found at the following sites:

author site —— http://www.kimadrian.com

reading blog —— https://premiselit.blogspot.com/

twitter —— https://twitter.com/K_Adrian

For purchase Sock

For purchase The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms

Case Study

By 

Kathryn A. Kopple

            My ancestors come from the Lombard town of Mortara. The Romans called it Pulchra Silva. With the coming of Charlemagne, it became known as Mortara. Roughly translated, Mortara means “place of death."  These days, people go there for risotto and goose sausage.  In the late '70s, I made the trip with Sofia.  I put on so much weight that she teased me, saying I looked like a goose-stuffed sausage.  Now, my hair is white. There is hardly enough meat on my bones for the hyenas to make a decent meal of me. And yet, even in this decrepit state, I am fond of this body. I am not at all eager to part with it.              

Often I think of Edgardo. I wonder if I haven’t walked in his footsteps my entire life.  I don’t mean to say I have attained Edgardo’s transcendence. I mean only to say I have also suffered. 

 Edgardo was removed from his parents’ home as a young boy and adopted by Pope Pius IX.  I too was adopted as an infant. We share this early separation from our birth parents. At the time he was taken, Edgardo's parents fought to have him returned.  They pleaded with the authorities.  They contacted powerful leaders. The Rothschilds came to their aid. The French government tried to broker Edgardo’s release.  Across Europe, people took to the streets in protest. Steadfastly, Edgardo refused to return to his mother and father.

Edgardo possessed rare courage. In sermon after sermon, he spoke of his miraculous conversion.  He asserted under oath that demons tortured him day and night.  He blamed his mother, claiming that she was possessed.  Only his faith could protect him from her.   

I learned I was adopted when a group of boys spied on me in latrine at school one day.  Mortified, I vowed I would tell no one.  Noticing my pensive mood and poor appetite, my mother devised a simple scheme to get me to tell her my troubles.  She set out a bowl of cherry ice, handed me a spoon, and sat—smiling, patient—until I broke down. How I managed to communicate the details through my shame and blubbering I will never know.  Worse yet, by the time I had finished spilling the sordid details, she could scarcely look me in the eye.  She lived her faith so genuinely; the slightest stain on her spiritual life was a source of affliction.

            Her piety, humility—the twin pillars of her faith.  I did my best to follow her example, filling my hours with devotion and liturgy, the smell of chapel incense clinging to me wherever I went.  I reminded myself daily that I lived in a loving home.  My father was a simple but good man.  My mother was caring.  Of course, there were moments when I was plagued by curiosity. I considered confronting my mother.  On second thought, confront is too strong a word. I only wanted to hear the truth--told to me simply and directly.  The essence of who I was came from another place, in the history of another people.  What did I know of those people? 

When my mother passed away, I confess I felt liberated.  The time had come for me to leave home and pursue my studies.  I decided to become a history major, not an unusual choice for someone with an uncertain sense of his own past.  In the middle of a rather dull class on the Battle of Lepanto, a young woman sitting next to me passed me a note.  She wished to get to know me better.

Her name was Sofia.  She was the daughter of a prominent family, several of her kin high-standing members in business and politics.  Over coffee and  pastries, she told me that she was drawn to me because I had a kind face.  I returned the compliment, adding that I thought her very pretty.  When she reached for my hand across the table, the touch of her skin against mine reminded me of how little physical contact I had experienced.  I was a stranger to the most basic expressions of human affection.  For more years than I could count, I had held myself back, unable to touch or be touched, frozen inside. 

          We married and moved into a house with a sunny kitchen. Pots of marjoram decorated the windowsill. The extra bedroom became my study.  With Sofia at my side, I felt I could do anything.  I graduated from college and attended law school. I earned accolades and stellar grades, as well as some undeserved notoriety for a paper I published on Edgardo’s case.  What can I say?  The legality of the case intrigued me.  I remember spending a hot and muted summer in the library buried in scholarly tomes.  My article was accepted by a prestigious journal. I received reviews—not all of them flattering; some will always take pains to go that extra step. I was vilified by a prominent newsletter on religious affairs.  Looking back, I realize that it is not an easy thing to review the catalogue of human suffering and maintain one's objectivity.  I felt for the boy's family.  I suppose with a slight twist of the facts I might have argued in their favor.  And yet I never doubted that the authorities had scrupulously observed the law.

            I graduated and found myself out of work.  Many years would pass before I was able to set up my own firm.  Sofia never complained, although the same can't be said about her family.  They opposed our marriage from the start, and when their objections failed, they tried to use money to get what they wanted.  My poor wife.  The family pressured her mercilessly, and there came a point when she threatened to break with them entirely.  I tried to act as a mediator (after all, isn't that what lawyers do?) I believed she would regret turning her back on her mother and father because of me.  Never--no matter how much I cared for her--did I wish to be the person who came between Sofia and her family.  
          Regardless of my in-laws, ours was the happiest of partnerships.  Sofia was a wonderful mother to our children.  We had three of them.  I couldn't have imagined that our marriage would end as it did:  my lovely Sofia murdered and I, a condemned man.

             Wrongly condemned, I insist.  Although I can’t name the man who killed Sofia, he exists.  I would recognize him immediately; you can’t say that of everyone; that, a man you met once occupies your mind, not as mere memory, but as a fixture.

What do I recall?  I recall that, the night of the murder, I stayed past five at the office tying up this and that—the sorts of chores that keep us lawyers with our shoulder to the grindstone.  By the time I was able to get away, the streets were quiet. Such a gloomy evening, cold and damp, and as I walked home I recall in sharp detail the branches of the trees scraping in the wind and the spires of the Cathedral dark masts against the sky.  These sights added to my gloom.  A man hurrying in my direction asked me the time.  He was tall and gaunt, with a woolly black beard and long hair that gave him a prophetic air.  An odd bird if there ever was one. I glanced at my watch.  It read 11:00 pm. 

I made it home without further incident. Not wishing to disturb Sofia, I ate a ham sandwich for supper, got a fire started and settled in a chair with a good cognac for company.   I closed my eyes and drowsed.  A loud bang, a shot, woke me.  I ran up the stairs.  Immediately, I recognized him—the same man who stopped me in the street.  He dropped the gun and rushed for me.  Why he dropped the gun I can only guess.  I had the impression that he wanted to get his hands on me.  He was tall, tough as shoe leather, and his bony fingers dug into my neck.  My trachea buckled, the blackness of his eyes grew wider.   I was disappearing into that blackness when he lost his grip and the light rushed back in.  I grabbed at him and we stood, locked in each other's arms, imprisoned there. What a monster!  And then, he pulled back his head and spat at me, the saliva stinging my eyes.  I let out a cry of rage, broke loose and lunged for him.  We tumbled, first he over me, then I over him, our bodies landing hard at the bottom of the steps.  I never doubted that he wanted to kill me.

            The next thing I remember is the bright sunlight through the window.  I didn’t know it at the time but Sofia lay dead in the upstairs bedroom.  The intruder was nowhere to be seen.   

­­­­­­­­­            I have been convicted of killing my wife.  How is such a thing possible? I loved my wife.  No one believes me when I say that she was murdered. From start to finish, the case brought against me is preposterous. Men do not kill their wives on a whim.  If the police had done their job and searched the house for the murder weapon, they would know that I am telling the truth.  The beard was discovered; it achieved a certain mythic status, a prop in a drama staged for the jury's entertainment.  It was said that I had worn it the night of the murder to disguise my features.  Absurd!  Even if I had tried to disguise myself a beard is not the first thing that comes to mind. 

            To be wrongly accused is a terrible thing.  I suppose it is my innocence that causes me to think so often of Edgardo.  Few people take his side of the story—would defend him as I have, and not for purely legal reasons:  only love explains his refusal to return to the arms of his grieving mother—just as love proves that I could not have killed Sofia.  Edgardo and I differ simply in our devotion to God.  When I step into the execution chamber, I will die as Stefan Mortara. It is terrifying. I wish had Edgardo’s faith but I am human, made of skin and bones, in need of air to survive.  And yet, even at this dark hour, I have no taste for miracles.  I do not need the water to turn into wine.  Instead, I ask myself:  if man solved every mystery related to his physical reality, would he still yearn for transcendence?  If God is the ultimate mystery, he must be the solution to all mysteries.  Like most men, I am a mystery.  I would like to live in this condition of ignorance a bit longer.  Forever, if you must know the truth.

Xul Solar: Utopia, Unlimited

By

Jonathan Kandell

The museum dedicated to Argentina’s foremost painter, Xul Solar (1887–1963), evokes a cabinet of curiosities befitting the eccentricities of this talented artist and polymath. Besides his paintings, often whimsical and occultist, Xul Solar invented a language he called neo-criollo that he hoped would replace Spanish and Portuguese in Latin America; he concocted an elaborate chess game and a new deck of Tarot cards; and he built a three-keyboard piano that linked musical notes to colors. All these creations are on display at the museum that occupies his former home and studio.

The Museo Xul Solar is in the upper-middle class Palermo district of Buenos Aires, on a quiet street of multi-story dwellings mostly from the second half of the 20th century. The museum was inaugurated in 1993 after a thoroughly contemporary redesign. But its façade dates back to the early part of the century and preserves its lengthy wooden window shutters and balconies with wrought-iron railing that were typical of the French-Spanish hybrid architecture of the period.

Inside, I’m greeted by several watercolors from the early 1950s of half-human, half-animal faces of zodiac figures that remind me of characters created by Maurice Sendak 40 years later. At the suggestion of my guide, Teresa Tedin Uriburu, the museum’s communication director, we view the 84-work collection in chronological order. But first, she offers a brief summary of Xul Solar’s early years.

Xul Solar 

He was born Oscar Schulz Solari on December 14, 1887, in the small town of San Fernando, now a northwest suburb of Buenos Aires. His mother, a housewife, was Italian, and his father, an immigrant from Estonia, worked in an Argentine penitentiary giving technical job training to the inmates. Their son studied architecture, painting and classical music, but never received a degree. In 1912, he set off for Europe on what would prove to be a dozen-year sojourn in France, Italy and Germany during World War I and the bitter peace that followed.

It wasn’t until 1918, while living in Florence, that he changed his name to Xul Solar: Xul is the pronunciation of the father’s last name, minus the z, and spells “light” in Latin backwards; Solar is the mother’s last name, minus the i, and means “of the sun.” Already enamored of symbols and hidden meanings, the artist became “Light of the Sun.”

In Paris during wartime, he socialized with Picasso and other cubists and in Italy with futurists. But Xul Solar’s early postwar years in Germany proved to have the most lasting influence. He was spellbound by the German Expressionist group, Der Blaue Reiter, especially works from this period by Paul Klee. Like the Swiss-born artist, Xul Solar often included deceptively child-like figures along with letters, numbers and other symbols in his paintings.

The first room at the museum contains art works, many of them watercolors on cardboard, that Xul Solar painted during his time in Europe. A repeated motif is reincarnation. His 1915 El Entierro (The Burial) depicts a funeral procession in which the fetus-shaped soul of the deceased levitates and returns to a womb-like cave.

Many of his works contain snakes, representing forbidden knowledge. The sun appears frequently in his paintings, as might be expected from the artist’s assumed name. Humor is another element in Xul Solar’s repertoire. The 1922 watercolor Las Cuatro is a playful jab at Cubism—four cartoon-like faces, with eyes attached to nose and an orifice for the mouth, glance in different directions. Ña Diáfana (Lady Diaphanous, in the neo-criollo language invented by the artist) is a 1923 semi-abstract watercolor in the style of Klee. The woman, her organs exposed, grasps a serpent that encircles her.

In 1924, Xul Solar moved back to Argentina with a missionary zeal to shake up its sleepy art scene. He joined the Martín Fierro movement. Linked to an eponymous short-lived magazine (1924-27), the movement was named after a rebellious mythical gaucho and called for cultural change in a country still heavily influenced by formalistic 19th century European notions of art and literature. Martín Fierro members included Jorge Luís Borges, the phantasmagorical novelist, who became a close friend of Xul Solar.

Perhaps the most important Xul Solar work to come out of his involvement with the movement was the 1927 pencil and watercolor, Drago (neo-criollo for Dragon). It depicts a powerful, united Latin America transformed into a giant serpent swimming across the ocean to rescue a Europe impoverished by World War I. In the reptile’s wake are the flags of the former colonial powers—Spain and Portugal—as well as the Stars and Stripes of the neo-colonial pretender. But Drago was one of the few overtly political works among Xul Solar’s varied creations. More typical of the same period is the 1925 San Dansa (neo-criollo for Saint Dances), writhing stick-like figures that invite comparison to Keith Haring’s paintings from 60 years later.

By the 1930s, the Martín Fierro movement was a dim memory. Xul Solar’s works took on an increasingly narrative and mystic quality. In the 1936 Vuel Villa (Flying Village in neo-criollo), clumsy ships carrying exotic residences and other buildings are lifted by balloons high above an earthbound village of more conventional homes. Another notable work, Santos y Guardianes (Saints and Guardians, 1942), depicts holy men of Western and Eastern faiths climbing heavenwards on shaky columns and ladders.

Some of Xul Solar’s largest paintings are from the 1940s and ’50s. He became enthralled by the links between art and music. In the 1948 Barreras Melódicas, peaks and valleys represent high and low musical notes. And he returns to the theme with a similar landscape in Cinco Melodías (1959). In between, he created his famed three-keyboard piano, which is on display on the museum’s mezzanine.

Above the mezzanine, up a winding staircase, are the modest living quarters of Xul Solar and his wife, Lita Cadenas. The apartment opens into a library of 3,000 volumes, arranged eccentrically by size rather than subject; in a corner is a wood-and-wire skeleton fashioned by the artist. This was the room where Xul Solar and Borges met frequently for hours to discuss art, literature and astrology, and to play pan-ajedrez, an expanded chess game in which each opponent had 30 pieces that not only moved across the board, but also bore alphabet letters to be shaped into words.

Earning little income from art, Xul Solar made a living as a translator of books in English, French, German and Italian, and by renting out two apartments in his Buenos Aires residence. In his last decade, he spent much of his time in Tigre, the isle-dotted delta of the River Plate a few miles north of Buenos Aires. And in the years after his death in 1963, he became an almost forgotten figure.

There was a brief spike in interest in Xul Solar when the Buenos Aires Museum of Latin American Art, known as MALBA, staged a retrospective of 130 of his art works in 2005. The exhibition traveled to São Paulo and to Houston. But Xul Solar remains largely ignored even in Argentina. His museum has tried since 2010 to fund and publish a catalogue raisonnée of his works, but the project isn’t yet nearing completion.

Perhaps his friend Borges phrased the lack of interest most poignantly when he wrote a dozen years after the artist’s death: “Xul Solar’s utopias failed, but that failure is ours, not his. We have not known how to deserve them.”

Credits:  This article originally appeared in Arts and Antiques.