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“From War” by C.K. Williams

Fall’s first freshnesss, strange: the season’s ceaseless wheel,

starlings starting south, the annealed leaves ready to release,

yet still those columns of nothingness rise from their own ruins,

their twisted carcasses of steel and rise still fume, and still,

one by one, tacked up on walls by hopeful lovers, husbands, wives,

the absent faces wait, already tattering, fading, going out.

These things that happen in the particle of time we have to be alive,

these violations which almost more than altar, ark, or mosque embody sanctity by

enacting sanctity so precisely sanctity’s desecration.

These voices of bereavement asking of us what isn’t to be given.

These suddenly smudged images of consonance and peace.

These fearful burdens to borne: complicity, contrition, grief.

Oversized Art: Blog Post 4

Reading the article “Oversized Art – Is Bigger Really Better” by Natalie P.  made me wonder: could New York City be seen as a piece of oversized art? Like a piece of oversized installation artwork, New York immerses people in an alternate world like nowhere else in the country.

New York is so crowded and overwhelming that it is hard to appreciate its beauty in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of the street. Walking on the High Line this Friday, elevated above the loud and congested sidewalk, allowed me to see New York in a different way.

From the High Line, New York City looked like a living mosaic. The ever-changing landscape of New York was put on display. Looking at the view from the High Line convinced me that New York itself is a work of art.

Miró and New Characters

I want you to think about a time when you felt guilty for your privilege- something you owned, accomplished, etc. Thats what our character Claire experiences. She lives in a penthouse on the Upper East Side and her house is much nicer than any of her female friends’. She feels uncomfortable or guilty about having the best house and neighborhood out of all of them, because it feels show-offy or pretentious. Claire says “Miró, Miró, on the wall, who’s the deadest of them all?”, thinking about her son who passed away. It is a play on words of the Snow White fairy tale in which the Queen in Disney’s version asks “magic mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest one of all?” A word on this line: it was in the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales as “mirror, mirror, on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?” so it is both “Magic Mirror” and “Mirror Mirror.”Miró means Joan Miró, a Spanish, Surrealist artist. The significance of his painting Claire has is that Claire looks at the painting when she is informed about the death of her son at war. The new characters we meet in this portion of the story are Claire, the other mothers such as Jacqueline, Marcia, especially Gloria, Soloman, Joshua, Lara, Blaine, Philippe, Fernando Marcano, computer hackers. An interesting intersection is Gloria herself. She was there in the aftermath of the car accident with Corrigan and Jazzlyn. Gloria went as far as to take care of Jazzlyn’s children. When I first read about Gloria as the mother who lives in the project at the Bronx, I knew she was going to be an important intersection.

Miró Miró

  1. Miró is a reference to the Spanish painter Joan Miró, who was active in the late 19th century. He was known for his works which fused abstract art and Surreal fantasy. His style changed from as his view on modern life evolved. The chapter title Miró, Miró, on the Wall, alludes to the famous line from Snow White, “Mirror, mirror on the wall”. Claire Soderberg, the main character of this chapter, references this with “Miró, Miró on the wall, who is the deadest of them all?” This is a reference to her upper-class status and her the sadness she is in over the passing of her son, Joshua. 
  2. The primary characters that we’ve been introduced to so far are Claire, Ciaran, Corrigan, Adelita, Blaine, Fernando, Jazzlyn, Lara, Philipe, Sam Peters (The Kid) and the other programmers, Solomon, Tillie, Gloria and the other grieving mothers. I have counted about 70 connections in the book alone.Lara and her husband Blaine were predominant painters in New York. They decide to move to the outskirts of town to gather themselves and practice art styles from the 20s and 30s. Lara and Blaine are the passengers in the car that hit Corrigan’s van on the parkway, which resulted in the death of Jazzlyn and Corrigan. This relationship is interesting because she took the blame for the accident even though Blaine was driving. Ciaran forgives her for this and they soon develop a relationship.I think it’s worth noting that Lara and Blaine both study the same art that Joan Miro became so popular for in his time. I also think the connection between Marcia and the tightrope walker was interesting too. She was sure that the man on the wire was her son coming to say hello. Claire only asked the question as to why a man would risk his life such a task as walking a tightrope above 110 stories.

 

Miro, Character Intersections, and Gloria

I) The title of the chapter of Let the Great World Spin about Claire is “Miró, Miró, on the Wall.” This is a reference Joan Miró (1893-1983) the modern Spanish surrealist painter, and the famous line: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” from the fairy tale Snow White. Later, Claire references this line again on page 112 saying: “Miró, Miró, on the wall, who is the deadest of them all?” The title of the chapter is a reference to Claire’s status as a well-off modern woman with a house full of exquisite art, who is grieving over her dead son to the point of feeling dead herself.

II) The Major Characters in Let the Great World Spin:

  • Corrigan
  • Ciaran
  • Tillie
  • Jazzlyn
  • Lara
  • Blaine
  • Solomon
  • Claire
  • Gloria, and other bereaved mothers
  • Fernando
  • Sam, and other computer hackers
  • Philippe
  • Adelita

Here is a diagram of all the connections between named characters in Let the Great World Spin so far. I counted 74 connections total.

Gloria is a quiet character in the first half of Let the Great World Spin. She interacts with many major characters, but has yet to come to the forefront.

Diagram of all the intersections between Gloria and other characters in Let the Great World Spin.

When Tillie is in jail, Gloria brings Tillie’s grandchildren, Janice and little Jazzlyn to visit her. Tillie recognizes Gloria from the projects, but she doesn’t even know her name.

Despite not knowing Tillie and Jazzlyn well, Gloria took Janice and little Jazzlyn in after their mother’s death and lives with them in a house in Poughkeepsie.

Why did Gloria take in Jazzlyn’s children? Why did she take them to visit Tillie? She was uninvolved with Tillie and Jazzlyn before the car accident. She could have stayed uninvolved.

Gloria is a powerful character. She steps in to help Janice and little Jazzlyn when they were forgotten. Yet, all we really know about her is that she lost three sons to the war, and that she wears flowered dresses. Who is Gloria?

Sources: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/artist/joan-miro

 

Ordinary lives become extraordinary

The prologue of the book begins with a man on the twin towers and everyone gathering to watch what he was going to do: “if he slipped, or got arrested or dove.” This part made me laugh at little, because it is very New Yorker to only think of the bad that was going to happen and how no one was expecting him to walk on a tightrope or do something amazing. How we have a habit of stopping when someone on the train is being arrested and screaming, but not often for someone on Union Square singing. I became like the watchers, ignoring everything around them to focus on the man; I even tried to skip through the long descriptions of New York in the book to see what would happen to the man, even though I knew. It also made me think of the extraordinary things I have missed because I was too “busy” and couldn’t be bothered.

The scene then changes to Ireland, specifically Dublin Bay. The narrator starts to talk about his family, focusing more on his brother, Corrigan. His brother is described as someone who even in the darkest of days can see the light. After their mother dies, he moved around a bit and then goes to Brussels and becomes a monk. Corrigan has a desire for real “rough plot” and after being in Naples, he is sent to the Bronx (YAY!). Corrigan is a character I want to be like, someone who puts others above themselves. I can relate to his idea of put it all out there and helping even if you get hurt, and not ending up another cynic. I sometimes dream of being that selfless. However, I also agree that being selfish is sometimes required, because his selflessness gets him hurt. I really love his character and of course as always, every character I love has something tragic happen to him.

Let the Great World Spin Chapter One

From the Dublin Bay in Ireland to the projects in Bronx, New York, Let the Great World Spin has taken me from one end of the Atlantic to the other. The prologue of the book sets you up almost above the World Trade Center in 1974, around the time the novel takes place. You are watching Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the two towers. To me, this represents the bridging of two worlds and two brothers, Carian and Corrigan. These two brothers grew distant at one point and lived two different lives. One joined a monastery and moved to the Bronx where he thought he could help the “lost souls”, while another took up a normal life. The prologue can also represent the joining of the two brothers and those in the Bronx projects (prostitutes, the pimps, drug addicts).

This chapter took me on an emotional rollercoaster. From when Corrigan was young and helping the homeless and addicts in Dublin, to when we learn he leaves his door open for the women to use between clients in the Bronx left me in awe. Corrigan takes beatings from pimps and continues to leave his door open for the women knowing the consequences. For this, he is the most interesting character to me. He is a man with a history of helping others, but for also getting mixed up in what they to do.

The most baffling part of the chapter to me was the car accident. After Corrigan went to pick her up from jail, he got rear ended and Jazzlyn went flying out of the car and died on impact. Corrigan is taken to the hospital and when Adelita (his love affair with her took me by surprise) visits him, announces that he sees something beautiful. Could this be heaven?

“[an] elegiac glimpse of hope.” – USA Today

Feelings

The first chapter shows how fast a lifetime goes by in the eyes of an outsider. I understand Corrigan’s desire to help others that need whatever he has more than he does, but his prolonged exposure, in his apartment in the Bronx, to the underbelly of the city is doing more harm to him then is worth it for the meager offerings he can dish out to those he has elected himself to serve. His brother attempts to rescue him, but doesn’t understand any reason to endure the smog of lust, greed, and literal living to simply survive however possible, when his own survival thought is screaming at him to leave. The two brothers resemble the two tear drops from the yin yang symbol, one of which is shed in response to an event seemingly unrelated.

Geography

The prologue begins with a man taking the attention of passerby in Manhattan by walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers. The chapter begins in the hometown of two brothers in Dublin who live with their mother. After her death, the charitable brother joins an organization he refers to as the order, and is sent on a mission to Naples, then rerouted to New York City, settling in an apartment in the Bronx. The first brother, also the narrator, stays in Dublin, leaving only after a bomb went off near him, and soon after he lands in JFK airport to meet his brother. Corrigan takes him back to his apartment. The apartment is not a home, it is a vessel through which Corrigan tries to, as non-invasively as possible, take on the haze of the world threatening to smother those that work at street corners late at night by providing, but what seems like an afterthought makes all the difference to those treated like the merchandise they sell themselves as. Corrigan takes his brother to the hospital at which his duty is to bring a few of the elderly outside to sunshine and open air. Here the narrator meets the woman his brother is smitten by, also the woman who caused him to drive to Long Island while contemplating his feeling for her, and the conflict potentially arising from the strict rules, including celibacy, in the order he has aligned himself with.

Mediate

 

When one mediates a situation or chain of events, they are overseeing the route to a desired outcome or inserting themselves into a confrontation such that both sides may be resolved peacefully in agreement. In my elementary school, there was a branch of student government called peer mediators in which designated students were vested with the power to resolve playground squabbles. At first glance, I had understood the word in this definition, but the sentence does not mediate this definition. Keats with an agenda or not, which may not be negative, is pushing his belief of beauty and truth being synonymous and equivalent. The author, Stanley Diamond, however, refutes this statement, believing beauty and truth to be two separate identities that in some cases may overlap, but are not entirely interchangeable; As something can be truly beautiful or beautifully true, the words are used as a mere description of perception. Diamond believes this to be the only use of the words, while Keats recognizes and is ultimately trying to perpetuate an understanding of the far reaching true meaning of truth and its relation to beauty; As when something is a truth, or the truest form, it invokes a type of true beauty not found in the aesthetic opinionated description, for when something is true it is beautiful in its willingness not to deceive and to nurture the dissemination of its truth as a mediator of its pursuit. Diamond calls the equation of truth to beauty an assimilation. In Diamond’s opinion, any equation is a mediation of this assimilation. This opinion then mediates his agenda of discounting Keats’ “agenda,” so in execution Diamond is guilty of the same mediation he accuses Keats of.

Contact Info

How to reach me: professorpurves@gmail.com

In my mailbox, outside the English Office, CA 302

Call me at home if emergency  718 601 3741

How to reach Jack Norton, ITF: jnorton@gradcenter.cuny.edu

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