Chicago, early notes revisited

In the spring of 2007, I spent a weekend in Chicago deciding if I could live in the city for a year or more. It just so happened that during that weekend, I was able to catch the Vollard exhibition at the Art Institute. I typically hate Impressionism and Post-Impressionism (I'm a Classical girl, you know, and a bit of a Romantic) but I developed an odd fascination with Cézanne's "View of the Domaine Saint-Joseph" and wrote an essay about (or sort of rather on, at, around, etc.) the painting later that spring.

I won't bore you with all of this, but having lived in San Francisco again for a month and a half, this early description of Chicago seems mildly-to-moderately pertinent. Or maybe not.
(from On Context: Cézanne's 'View of Domaine Saint-Joseph')

It’s so good and so terrible to attack a blank canvas.

- Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)

I must tell you about this painting.

You must know first that sometimes in Chicago in April, it is still very cold. Cold is subjective, but sometimes wind can be described as nothing less than cold. Later this day, the sun will come out, and it will rain.

Impressionist painting is very sentimental, don’t you think? With those blotchy brush dabs and imprecise-seeming strokes and no definitive edges on anything? Monet is maudlin, even when his canvas is dark, even when the light shown down on it is subtle but ample, highlighting the blurred starlight, lowlighting the reflections on water. Even when the pair of strangers in front of me is quiet, short, and therefore unobtrusive.

Yes, Impressionism is maudlin, and I dare say a little gaudy, though maybe I’m thinking too much of the mass-produced, blotchy, pastel prints that hung over made-to-match duvets in economy hotel rooms in the 1990s. The beds were too hard, the comforters scratchy like fiberglass insulation, the prints amateur and base. Or maybe I’m thinking simply of reproductions—take, for example, the water lilies, and how they were stuck with Sticky Tak to one wall in the dorm room of almost every girl in college who kept and would eventually marry her boyfriend from high school. Just beneath in the white margin, in a flippant font, the title scrawled for those who didn’t know, though by sophomore year, when the posters moved to apartments, we all knew.

I didn’t keep my boyfriend from high school, but from those years I kept my favorite poem:

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

-From Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation” (1-11)

Despite my distaste for Monet and his weepy, wet landscapes, I like that Mueller is able to write a logic to him, a system of reasoning. Ah…gas lamps—as angels. There’s a value to the rereading of poetry that is absent in the experience of reproduced art. When I read this poem, at fifteen, I underlined the word aberration, wrote deviation from truth in the white space beside it.

It was sentimentality that drew me to the poem, but it is the articulation of the logic behind indefinite shapes that kept me its reader for all of these years. Paul Cézanne is a Post-Impressionist; he picked up where Monet left off, though in fact, Monet outlived Cézanne by two decades. It might be said that Cézanne was more anxious than sentimental. Most of his work happened at the tail end of the Impressionist era, after 1880, and his most youthful and enlivened painting was done at the tail end of his half-century-spanning career. Here, however, I’m already getting ahead of myself.

---

For the decorative painter whose main object is the organization of his design upon the surface, this is no difficulty, rather an advantage. But for painters to whom the plastic construction is all-important it becomes serious. For them, the contour becomes at once a fascination and a dread. - Roger Fry, From Cézanne: A Study of His Development

In 1871, for just less than three days, the city of Chicago burned. Four square miles were razed to ash, give or take a few buildings—a pair of churches and a couple of lucky houses—left standing in the sooty mire, with resignation and burdened stoicism.

Chicago was resurrected swiftly and with perfect geometry—with the exception of a fistful of curves to accommodate the river, the city’s streets are straighter than any average Midwest horizon, each intersection a quartet of immaculate right angles. This makes it easy to find your way around, though don’t hesitate to ask directions—the people generally don’t mind.

Downtown the gray-bricks and weary columns resonate with a solemnity I want to call American Gothic because it reminds me simultaneously of Poe’s solitary ravens and The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark, but Chicago School architecture is informed by both the classicists and the modernists. I have to look up to see the whole of the skyline, and remind myself there are no earthquakes here to shake those giants. The order and the precision and calculation and height of it all might lend the city a sort of arrogance—this bravado of pre-apocalyptic perfection, a brick and concrete masterpiece that would look lovely in ruins—but remember this: Chicago has already once been demolished by fire.

happen in passing

On New Year's Eve day, I flew back to Chicago. I got off the plane and onto the Blue Line and off at the Addison stop, from which I walked to Target, hauling my overweight suitcase behind me. I heaved the bag into the cart and plucked thigh-high gray knit stockings, nail polish, and other things I knew I needed off the shelves and dropped them into the child's seat. I cabbed home, dyed my hair black, put on the olive green embroidered silk dress I'd recently purchased at a vintage shop in the Mission, and went to an ultra-trendy gallery warehouse sort of party, the kind you never know if you'll enjoy or not until you get there, but the kind you know well in advance you'll enjoy reporting to others of having attended.

At 3 a.m., we were walking up Ashland Avenue, waiting, hoping, calling for cabs. There's never a shortage of cabs in this city except half the time you want one. Instead we found a 24-hour Dunkin Donuts and, because it was late and cold and we were drunk and needed no other reason, we went in, flirted with a few cops, and left with hot chocolate (because it was freezing, just bitterly cold) which I promptly spilled all over my new old dress, slipping in chunky heels on invisible ice while stepping into an about-time-finally cab. I should've known it would be a bad year for writing, but I was all sorts of forward-looking and if you're the sort of person who makes resolutions on every night but New Years Eve, then it's easy to believe that on any unparticular day, things are going to be different, completely and noticeably.

It's hard to write outside of cliches when the day-to-day is so explicitly laden, like spilled hot cocoa at 3 a.m. on a now-tragic favorite dress. I used to write a lot in and about cliches. I used them like metaphors, though I never referred to them as such, all those bridges, windows, letters, and earthquakes I was genuinely enamored with. When I stopped writing in and about them, I started theorizing at them. Mediation, I'd say over drinks sometimes, mediated and mediating. There's something in the instability, in the dependency, and it reads like biography if you're inclined to overly close reading. Perhaps that something in the mediation metaphors is why I can never remember the term for what they do to bridges to prevent them from collapsing or the word for the kind of solid ground that's safest for building near fault lines.

I've been reading quite a bit of poetry lately, at least a lot for me. I'm inclined to think it's because I'm too lazy, too busy, too distracted--like I was when I was 14 and had just started to learn to love to read most things. Poems came first because they seemed flexible. A spacious and forgiving poem fascinates me as much as contemporary architecture in California--six-story water tanks and the obscene symmetry of any thing such that if the world decides to shake it, it can still be a thing. Then short stories, then essays, and finally, maybe sometime in college, I started loving novels, and not for the plots, like I did when I was in junior high.

Reading poems now feels like packing the essentials a month before a move. I'm the sort of person who boxes up the flatware and the silverware first, has to dig through her luggage for her toothbrush several hours before heading to the airport. Lines like "i like my body when it's with your / body. It is so quite a new thing. Muscles better and nerves more." and "I literally don't know your middle name. does that / matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small / disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth." and "You are not beautiful, exactly. / You are beautiful, inexactly." aren't staying put away, will be out on the table again long before I finish the Russian novels, which I'll do this time around, with the patience to keep track of all of the names, I promise.

And some thoughts thought lately in words used such as I could never hope to be able

(why I leave this one) Untitled

That lake is not
an ocean. Even still

May happens even in Chicago.
Even in April

(it’s not) my pacific
seasons will and do (you still?)

happen in passing. Last June
almost at least (that’s what you said) once
a week

the sky at two a m
brilliant. Don’t talk at me
weather.

This lake is not. Trust
in time love is

not
an ocean.

I leave I’ll leave out
this time. Send my things and don’t
look back.

I want to tell you this
lack this miss this gone
is real.

Somehow is not
pacific. Enough.

- Kristin Lueke