Louis Pasteur: Scissors Sharpened

Walking with writer and friend Mark Axelrod along a street in Paris, he stopped, fished a pad from his shoulder bag and quickly transcribed a sign that had caught his eye. I can’t remember what it was; perhaps it was Robespierre Dry Cleaners or Descartes Fine Chocolates or Picasso Pet Grooming, but it made us both laugh when he pointed it out. I’m writing a series, Mark said, of short stories based on these signs. Great idea. L. Pasteur: Scissors Sharpened While You Wait. Literature for me was still literary. For Mark it seemed so much fresher, a state of alertness in which, at any moment, a restless platoon of words might erupt and fix itself in antic nodes on the wrinkles of the world.   

Green Pastures, Quiet Waters

A cross, by sculptor Ted Prescott, is created by means of an unorthodox collaboration.  Diary cows require supplemental salt in their diets, provided in the form of bricks or blocks of salt, known to farmers as salt licks. Ted has fitted these uniform bricks of salt, available at any Agway store, onto a cruciform steel armature and placed them in a friend’s pasture where the cows, as they are accustomed to do, have licked and eroded the salt, giving the cross the appearance of ancient, corroded marble.

Cherry Hung With Snow

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.  A. E. Housman

A friend awaits, with acute eagerness, the appearance each spring of cherry blossoms. The Japanese architect Kenzo Tange observed that the cherry blossom lies at the heart of Japanese aesthetics. Whether Tange was simply making the beauty of nature analogous to the wood, silk, mulberry, clay, ink, iron and dyes of Japanese arts and crafts, or whether, as an architect, he was thinking of a more mathematical transposition from the fractal organization of a flower to the geometries of architecture and design, well, on that he did not elaborate. 

Then again, he might have been thinking of origami. To see a master’s chart of the successive folds used to achieve a model in physics or architecture, or just a geometric abstraction for its own sake, all from one sheet of paper, is to marvel at the miracle (as in the case of Chris Palmer’s origami abstraction) of its symmetrical complexity and snow-crystal beauty.

Degrees of Abstraction

Three pictures, three degrees of geometric abstraction. In the first, by Sonia Delaunay (Scene d’Interior), what might be a Cote d'Azur painting by Matisse is reduced to an arrangement of squares, circles, rectangles. Some simple patterns are achieved by repeating shapes like the triangles in the carpet, but the geometry is still very much at the expressive service of a recognizable tableau of two figures in a room.  

In the Frank Lloyd Wright window, the abstraction intensifies, though it still evokes a recognizable pattern from nature; the foliage of a tree or a sheaf of wheat. But you see the condensation. Half way between evoking natural forms and becoming a purely geometric ladder of chevrons, such pattern, clarified and reduced, is a central and eloquent means of abstraction. It recalls baroque music with its repeating variations on a theme that in turn would become a distinguishing trait of Minimalism, the repeating image, shape or note in clear, almost lapidary succession. 

In the Joseph Albers painting (Homage to the Square: Spring Tide), geometry prevails and all trace of other connotation disappears. Albers emphasizes the dynamic quality of succession that is so lyrical in Wright’s window, clarifiying it even beyond any sense of pattern into three diminishing squares that appear to come closer to the viewer as they get smaller.    

Samuel Beckett

And then another night fall and another man come and Watt go, Watt who is now come, for the coming is in the shadow of the going and the going is in the shadow of the coming, that is the annoying part about it. And yet there is one who neither comes nor goes, I refer I need hardly say to my late employer, but seems to abide in his place, for the time being at any rate, like an oak, an elm, a beech or an ash, to mention only the oak, the elm, the beech and the ash, and we nest a little while in his branches.

— Samuel Beckett, Watt

Turning, Yearning

For several years I described myself as a turner. I screwed pieces of wood to a flat steel faceplate, then attached the faceplate to a lathe which revolved the wood the way a potter’s wheel spins clay or a tire spins on a car. Tricky work as scale and ambition enlarged. Not a few rough chunks of lumber tore loose from their screws and came flying straight at me like caveman cannonballs. You learned to duck.

A friend just calls it turning, spinning around and around on an imaginary point in that ecstatic Sufi dance of the dervishes. It starts with a long initiation in which pain and exhaustion become the mystical earth into which you slowly inter your willfulness and pride. The hat you wear resembles a tombstone. The body breaks down. At first, you spin around a nail, fitted in the inlet between your large toe and the next. When the skin has worn away, salt is added to augment your pain. But gradually, "the body opens up again in a completely new way." As proficiency increases, an ease and equilibrium transforms the turning into a kind of effortless swoon, lifting the spirit, as our friend describes it, upward into a union with all things. "It's a dance of yearning that connects you to God." “Turning,” our friend paused as she recounted this, then she was weeping, “was the purest emotion I have ever felt, and that emotion was love.”

This bowl is not mine, but is made by a German turner named Ernst Gamperl. In an work of dramatic syncretism, Gampril staged a performance in an old church in Zurich where he placed his wooden vessels in a circle on a slightly raised circular plinth, leaving a space in the center where two dervishes performed their dance, spinning like wood on a lathe, like a planet on its axis.

The drawing by Cy Twombly is called Suma, an allusion to this sufi dance. 

I. M. Pei Cubed

Among the several I.M.Pei buildings I have visited (the pyramid at the Louvre and the National Gallery being the largest) I like best the small Johnson Art Museum at Cornell. It’s a minuet by a composer best known for symphonies and operas. All of his buildings are studies in serialism; in some, it’s too much, the geometry becomes too formulaic and the building looks dull--like the Javits Center or the Kennedy Library.  On the other hand, the pyramid, which is nothing but diamond-shaped panes of glass is not. First, it fits the semantics of France--the French love Egypt and the pyramid stands in view of the obelisk on the Place de la Concorde. Second, the transparency of the glass evokes the charm of crystal palaces, butterfly pavilions and chateau orangeries in a way that the ponderous Javits Center, alas, does not.

Rather than a multiplication of a single shape, lego-like, into an aggregate structure, the Johnson is a simple cube, a lyrical rebuke of brutalism, demonstrating just how silky and elegant concrete can be. The linear impressions made by the concrete forms during construction, the parallel beams in the ceiling, the windows and stairs etc., act as serial leitmotifs within the composition rather than a relentless times table governing the whole.