Ubi sunt and the snows of yesteryear

from the vanitas series (2007) by Guido Mocafico (b. 1962),
an Italian-Swiss photographer living in France.

Song of Love, Giorgio de Chirico, 1914

Pennsylvania Station

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818 

“Where are the snows of yesteryear?” is a line taken from the Ballade des dames du temps jadis ("Ballad of the Ladies of Times Past") by the medieval French poet François Villon. It expresses the sentiment of ubi sunt, a term I came across the other day and was surprised that I hadnt learned years ago. Latin, meaning “Where are....[they]?", it comes from a longer phrase, "Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?" [Where are those who went before us?]*.

The phrase is used as a literary term: a meditation on the transience of life, youth, beauty, and human achievement. A common motif throughout literature and song**, Hamlet's soliloquy in the graveyard is an example:

"Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kiss'd I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?..."

Shelley's Ozymandias is, I think, an ubi sunt once removed.

In its emphasis on the brevity and ephemeral quality of existence, ubi sunt is on a spectrum between carpe diem's almost jocular parry against the implied futility of existence and memento mori's blatant corpse waving. Unlike carpe diem, there is no exhortation to embrace the now. Yet ubi sunt, I believe, stops short of the grim rumination and extravagant, hand-wringing denial of life of memento mori. It is a softer rueful awareness.

In this way it is like mono no aware, a Japanese term for the mindfulness of the transience of things. Mono no aware incorporates both an immediate wistfulness at their passing as well as a more prolonged and resonant sadness about the reality of life. Significantly, in mono no aware, as wikipedia notes, “awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty.” I think this engagement with and affirmation of the world as it is is also true with ubi sunt and further distances it from memento mori.

I find myself falling into an ubi sunt frame of mind all too often, which then leads to a bad case of sehnsucht, but that is for another post...

* I cannot track its source, if anyone out there knows.
** Wikipedia gives two interesting examples of 20th century popular music which incorporate the ubi sunt motif: the 1960s folk song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" by Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson and the final verse of the Simon and Garfunkle song "Mrs. Robinson" which asks, "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" 

Charles Burchfield and Bruno Schulz

“Came the yellow days of winter, filled with boredom. The rust-colored earth was covered with a threadbare, meager tablecloth of snow full of holes There was not enough of it for some of the roofs and so they stood there, black and brown, shingle and thatch, arks containing the sooty expanses of attics—coal black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, beams, and spars—the dark lungs of winter winds. Each dawn revealed new chimney stacks and chimney pots which had emerged during the hours of darkness, blown up by the night winds: the black pipes of a devil’s organ. The chimney sweeps could not get rid of the crows which in the evening covered the branches of the trees around the church with living black leaves, then took off, fluttering, and came back, each clinging to its own place on its own branch only to fly away at dawn in large flocks, like gusts of soot, flakes of dirt undulating and fantastic, blackening with their insistent cawing the musty yellow streaks of light. The days hardened with cold and boredom like last years loaves of bread. One began to cut them with blunt knives without appetite, with lazy indifference.”

—Bruno Schulz, Street of Crocodiles

Some aspects of Burchfield's work remind me of outsider art, some remind me of visual aberrations, specifically, scintillating scotoma, which I've experienced. This is a "visual migraine" in which a vibrating zig-zagged circle of light superimposes the field of vision for a few minutes.

“Afterward the gardens filled the air with enormous sighs and grew their leaves hastily, doing overtime by day and by night. All flags hung down heavy and darkened, helplessly pouring out the last streaks of color into the dense aura. Sometimes at the opening of a street someone turned to the sky half a face, like a dark cutout with one frightened and shining eye, and listened to the rumble of space, to the electric silence of the passing clouds while the air was cut by the flight of trembling, pointed, arrow-sharp black-and-white swallows.” —Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“Paint the feeling, regardless of drawing. At dusk there is an ominous feeling of something huge and black about to descend upon the earth; this should be painted, not sky or clouds.”
—Charles Burchfield

I recently discovered the painter Charles Burchfield (April 9, 1893 - January 10, 1967). His work is singular though it evinces references to many — Van Gogh, the Fauves, Eric Ravilious, Thomas Hart Benton, Caspar David Friedrich. In his anomalous American Regionalist middle period in the 1920s and 30s, he was even like an Edward Hopper with more rain. But mostly Burchfield immersed himself in landscapes— and painted hundreds of them in watercolor sometimes so saturated it resembles oil.

Burchfield painted the everyday in an extraordinary way. The mundane landscapes and streetscapes of the Ohio and upstate New York towns where he lived are transformed into pulsing hallucinatory visions.  A cryptic interpreter of nature, Burchfield created landscapes sometimes dark and brooding, other times manically aflame, often palpably dense with psychological weight. Common things become strange, and the invisible is brought into focus. Flowers and stars give off acidic halos, and the sound of cicadas or power emanating from telegraph wires is transcribed as thickets of shuddering line. It is anxiety made manifest. Evidently Burchfield never was fully at ease and suffered from anxiety and depression. As a teenager, he endured nervous exhaustion and later, astounding bouts of mania-- producing half his entire output of painting in the years 1915-1917 alone. His heightened psychological response and susceptibility is plainly visible and, I believe, informs his whole aesthetic. 

Interestingly, Burchfield was assigned to the camouflage unit during the First World War. At the time the Army was practicing a particular camouflage variant called "dazzle" where large Cubistic shards and stripes of light and dark would obscure the outlines of the structures being covered. Burchfield, I am sure, found a particularly sympathetic outlet for his nervous striations in this unit.

Dazzle camouflage, 1918

About the same time I came across Burchfield I rediscovered Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942), the Polish writer and graphic artist. I realized there were sympathetic ties between Schulz's intense mesmerizing verbal cascades and Burchfields hectic visions. Both artists' worlds are animate, mystical and heavily psychological. Both kept somewhat insular lives, Burchfield painting his immediate surroundings in Ohio and upstate New York, Schulz, describing familiar sites in Drohobych, the town he lived in his entire life. Each artist drew from a store of personal mythologies and preoccupations, and seemed to be able to train his eye on that which others overlooked or could not see.

Hartsdale Pet Cemetery

 

 

photo by keridiana chez 

 

2 photos above by keridiana chez

A few friends and I made a trip up to the Hartsdale Pet Cemetery near White Plains. The first cemetery of its kind in the US, Hartsdale, also called The Peaceable Kingdom, was established in 1896 by a New York City veterinarian. Its five acres are home to 80,000 pets (rabbits, guinea pigs, birds, and a lion cub among the vast numbers of cats and dogs) and quite a few humans as well. The rambling, hilly terrain is packed with so many tiny stories: laconic grave markers, floridly effusive epitaphs, bronze and granite bombast, the kitschy pathos of makeshift memorials, the discomfit of shared graves—owner and beloved friends. What really impressed itself upon me was how fervent and true the sentiments were. Unlike human cemeteries, where the epitaphs are often stilted and tradition-bound, laced with religious boilerplate, Hartsdale was filled with colorful outpourings of love, of yearning and grief, of disbelief and the hope that “gone” was not forever.

The Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks, 1826

a journey through cloudland*

Note: Even more to bring to this encore post; a friend alerted me to Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov who is following in Wilson Bentley's path— fashioning a DIY attachment to his camera and capturing stunning images of snowflakes. See images at bottom. Yet another Russian, Andrew Osokin, has done the same just with a macro lens, documenting snowflakes as they touch the ground, moments before they disappear.

Kljatov is most in the spirit of Bentley with his personal intensity for the project and home made mechanical ingenuity. He also, like Bentley, photographs the snowflakes against a homemade black backdrop. Kljatov's specimens have a crystalline sharpness. Otherworldy, they look alien and almost unsettling. They are, for me, too clinical to have the same resonance as Bentley's soft, idiosyncratic and sometimes humorous work.
Also of note: A couple years ago this Talk of the Town (All Alike by Adam Gopnik) mentioning "Snowflake" Bentley was a beautiful adjunct to this post.

Wilson Alwyn Bentley (February 9, 1865 - December 23, 1931) was born in Jericho, Vermont, in a farmhouse that remained his lifelong home. He was home-schooled and never ventured far from Jericho. At 19, after he combined two treasured presents– a microscope and a bellows camera–Bentley succeeded in capturing the world's first photomicrograph of a snow crystal or snowflake. Working outside, of course, he caught each crystal on a black board and transferred it rapidly to a microscope slide. Doing this he was able to create about 5000 images over the course of his life.

In town, Bentley was considered odd and was known to many neighbors as the "Snowflake Man" because of his quiet demeanor and unusual preoccupation. Although he was a gifted musician– he played piano, organ, clarinet, coronet, and violin, as well as composed music –he devoted himself to his photography and study of snow.

In 1931 Bentley worked with William J. Humphreys of the U.S. Weather Bureau to publish Snow Crystals, a monograph illustrated with 2,500 photographs. After picking up his copies of the newly published book he walked home in a snowstorm. He died of pneumonia at his farm on December 23.

. . . . .
"The rare delight of seeing for the first time this exquisite lineaments under a microscope, the practical certainty that never again will one be found just like this one... To perpetuate each masterpiece the image of each of each rare gem in the photograph, before its matchless beauty is forever lost (to us) is an experience is so rare so truly delightful that once undergone is never forgotten...Was ever life history written in more dainty hieroglyphics!"– Wilson Alwyn Bentley

. . . . .
Bentley donated his collection of original glass-plate photomicrographs of snow crystals to the Buffalo Museum of Science
*Bentley's description of a snow crystal's trajectory

Thanks to Herbert Pfostl/Blindpony for alerting me to Bentley.

Snowflakes by Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov. Read more about his technique on his blog

 

the pathos of a library card

An encore post, with updates:
I have a small unintentional collection of library cards.
Each card, long after its obsolescence, remained tucked like a little secret note in a book I borrowed or bought. But they're far from billets doux— rather they give off a blustery officiousness with their "do not remove"-s and their all-caps penalties.
 
They document a nice range of data-recording technology--from hand-written to type-written, rubber stamp to various arcane punch card configurations. That seems kind of interesting as a tiny piece of Historical Record. But mostly I just like them formally, graphically. The red-edged card at top right is positively bristling with overly involved methodology and procedure. The "Alluring Problem" with its red accent and bold star has an obvious beauty but I think my favorite is the small printed and punched ticket at lower left. The holes give a delicate visual syncopation to the printed statements which, although they are emphatically not, remind me of a haiku.

Library cards are extremely mundane but have a subtle intricacy that's poignant. There's something quietly affecting about the card on the bottom, right. Each month and year stamped and noted, each entry a remnant of a long-ago reader whose path crossed at that exact point with that very book. Had that card lain dormant in the back of Fashions in American Typography, in the basement of the Brooklyn Library, since June 29 or so, 1950—the last date recorded? Had it not seen the light of day until I requested it be retrieved after 60 years?

Am I waxing too precious to think of each of these little pieces of paper as superannuated governesses, each as an attempt to safeguard their charge when released out in the world?

documenting the light

light patterns filtered through distorted old glass panes in my apartment.
This looks slightly diseased in a still image. See video below

 
I find the light effects kind of mesmerizing.
Music: Brooklyn musician Jonas Asher aka Grasslung– Too Tired to Remember

the slightly watery view through 125+ year old glass.

particularly hectic light effect on a mirror frame
Music: Yo La Tengo —Dont Have to be So Sad

I've always thought the light in my apartment pretty special. It's not wildly bright but rather has a progressive luminosity that makes its way around the (small) space from NE to SW over the course of the day. Its varied intensities from indirect sunrise glow to full late afternoon radiance are something I've never tired of. The apartment is the front of a corner brownstone so I have 2-1/2 exposures: front, side, and the projecting bay window giving me a partial additional angle East. The windows are all original, c.1885, and the glass is noticeably distorted. Ripples, slumps and tiny pinhead bubbles in the panes subtly alter the view so that everything appears slightly underwater. These imperfections also goad the light coming in into sporadic dancing fits on the walls and ceiling. I decided, after 17 years in the space, to finally document the light. So indulge me.

Addendum: I noticed someone linked to me from an Old House forum. Homeowners and renovators: I *love* my old windows. The side panes on the bay window are curved glass; the center panel is extra wide. The frames are unpainted, original finished wood– in bad shape. But even though they're literally crumbling in places, they work incredibly smoothly on weighted chains. Bottom and top panes can literally be lifted and lowered with 2 fingers.

"Please write me real soon"

photograph of book from BooksLoveLiza

Click images for larger, readable sizes

New York City Museum of Complaint, in its incarnations as tabloid-sized newsprint giveaway in 2006 and beautifully produced full-fledged book, has made the rounds in the press (Times, NPR) but I only just recently heard about it. (Thanks Sam!) The book is a collection of about 132 letters written to the Mayor of New York City between the (seemingly arbitrary) dates of 1751 and 1969, compiled by artist/curator Matthew Bakkom from the larger stores deep within the Municipal Archives. Shockingly naive, sarcastic, baroquely formal, or barely sentient, they address the city's mayor as part personal savior, part  janitor.

In the days before the public forums of Facebook, twitter, and email petitions, the fine citizens and everyday wackos of this city had to get out the quill, ballpoint and typewriter and rant on paper in quiet seclusion. (Some drama queens even sent telegrams.) The letters chronicle issues real, imagined, laughable, or foreboding, from dead horses in the streets to lost dry cleaning, police brutality to matrimonial inquiries. Each missive is reproduced as full-sized facsimile — you can see the the uneven swells of ink and grain of the paper—with some tiny, quiet transcription text. Beautiful.

What a great idea for a book; so how in the world did someone agree to publish something like this? The key thing appears to be that Museum of Complaint was conceived as an "art project" rather than quirky non-fiction book. And Bakkom seems to be adept at getting artist's grants. He likely had to wade through each mayor's term archives looking for the letters: I'm envisioning far-flung boxes exhaling dust, all sorts of unfamiliar feathery paper weights and cottony textures, perhaps an antiquated paper fastener, crinkley onion skin documents unfolded for the first time in a century. That's purely conjectural archival porn, however, because the book's missing a proper essay or even some anecdotal tidbits. (And I find the author's statement very unsatisfying). Set the scene, tell me how we got here and how difficult it was to put this together. Perhaps I'm jealous because this is, to me, an ideal project: excavating obscure bits of historical material culture and giving them renewed life and relevance.