Patti Smith, “Piss Factory”

From Dan Chiasson Fast Company: The World of Frank O’Hara, April 7, 2008:

‘And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!’  

That primal cry “Here I am!” is what every O’Hara poem implies—the long, art-starved past now behind him, the beauty of representation having replaced the stultifying air of actual life. When O’Hara includes, in his poems, urine and sequins, aspirins and Strega, it’s not because he is addicted to reality—on the contrary, he is addicted to artistic transformation, and is distressed by the fact that bits of the world haven’t been subjected to mimesis, and preserved by it. 

[…] 

Hara’s two opposed wishes—to keep time and to stop time—share a source: both are methods for banishing “the mounting panic” of boredom, which O’Hara linked with his childhood. Imagine the person who begins a poem, “I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy.” Now imagine that same person subsisting, only a few years earlier, on the gruel of middle-class rural New England life: the Church, some dogs, some aunts, the Kiwanis club, a piano. O’Hara, destined to be at the center of the arts in nineteen-fifties New York, lived his childhood inside a needlepoint. By 1935, when he was nine, Grafton was already a depiction of itself a generation earlier; it was chosen that year as the location for the film version of O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!,” which was set in a turn-of-the-century New England town…Grafton was so “authentic” that it became indistinguishable from a fake town, its townspeople so “real” that they could be cast as fictional characters. And yet the experiences that O’Hara had as a child and as a young man seemed to him anything but fictional: his father dying while he was at Harvard, his mother descending into an alcoholic spiral, his own sexual and artistic awakening stranding him without a past to which he could comfortably return. You can see O’Hara’s entire oeuvre as an attempt, therefore, to remake identity on terms more durable than the ones to which he had been consigned. It is a giant counter-biography, full of alternative facts: films and paintings and music he loved, friends, lovers, idols. There were half a dozen Francis O’Haras growing up in Massachusetts around 1935; twenty years later, in New York, Frank O’Hara had become one of a kind”

Most of us living in New York dwell more in invention than in facts. Frank O’Hara’s poetry, like Woody Allen’s best films, serves as explanation of the peculiar process by which people come to New York City, and how they manage to stay here. Chiasson, in his 2008 piece on O’Hara, posits O’Hara’s work as an act of transformation; O’Hara transforms himself from scared kid into poetic legend and at the same transforms the pedestrian details of the city around him into poetry. This kind of transformation is also the essential action of life in New York, and the reason O’Hara can be read as definitive of the city in which he lived and about which he wrote. 

EB White said that to live in New York one must be willing to be lucky. But perhaps that luck is a kind of aesthetic and sentimental promiscuity—the willingness to find beauty in every sight and romance in every situation. People committing to New York agree to participate in the perpetuation of its myths. There is simply no way the city would be worth it otherwise. The things New York asks of its participants, the sacrifices and circumstances it sets up as normal are justified only by a mythology greater than that attached to any other place in America (except for that of the country as a whole). Cities generate myth because cities are horrible and impossible; they demand entirely too much, they’re too small for their populations, they force everyone except the very, very rich into some level of taken-for-granted squalor, they make each day a series of challenges, they’re dirty and loud and illogical. Suburban and rural areas are soft and compliant, cities are hard and bratty and unforgiving. Creating beauty is therefore a means of survival. We have to construct a romance of New York in which to live in order to have any tolerable place to live at all. O’Hara gathers New York to him through the collection of its details. The details become meaningful rather than incidental, beauty is forced on the city and living in the city becomes therefore an experience saturated with beauty. There’s now a reward for the city’s difficulties; dirty is translated to beautiful, difficult to epic.  

O’Hara’s works are blatantly, self-consciously autobiographical, stuffed with as many identifying details as he can get into them. Autobiography is always an act of transformation, a way of taking aggressive ownership of one’s own identity. If you’re your own subject, you can turn yourself into anything you choose. When Chiasson describes O’Hara as “addicted to artistic transformation,” he is talking about a process that, if not exclusive to New York, is certainly characteristic of the city. New York is a place in which “the beauty of representation” necessarily “[replaces] the stultifying air of real life.”  

A few decades later in a piece as gritty as O’Hara’s work is sparkling, Patti Smith, leaving once and for all the “piss factory” for which the b-side to her first single is named, articulates the same process: And I’m gonna get on that train and I’m gonna go to new york city and I’m gonna be so big and I will never return. The words “so big” spread out impossibly wide and in that articulated exhale one can hear all the promises of the city waiting to transform its new inhabitants. It’s not just that both Smith and O’Hara write about the city, but that they both demand from it that it transform them, and in return perpetuate the myth of its unique ability to do so.  

Leonard Cohen, “Chelsea Hotel #2” (1974)

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which has lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world—a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring—this lover can be a man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth.

Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else—but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself.

It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being loved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip barer his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

[pp. 26-27 Carson McCullers, “The Ballad of the Sad Café”]

Hard Life, Bonnie “Prince” Billy

“I remember just being real impatient with [country music]. Until I’d been living here about a year. And all of a sudden I realized that, what if you just imagined that this absent lover they’re singing to is just a metaphor? And what they’re really singing is to themselves, or to God, you know? ‘Since you left I’m so empty I can’t live, my life has no meaning.’ That in a weird way, I mean they’re incredibly existentialist songs. That have the patina of the absent, of the romantic shit on it just to make it salable. But that all the pathos and heart that comes out of them, is they’re singing about something much more elemental being missing, and their being incomplete without it. Than just, you know, some girl in tight jeans or something.”

- David Foster Wallace on country music. (via Hannah Might)

“The Red Shoes,” (1845) by Hans Christian Anderson as allegory for the artistic compulsion.

She danced out into the open churchyard; but the dead there did not dance. They had something better to do than that. She wanted to sit down on the pauper’s grave where the bitter fern grows; but for her there was neither peace nor rest. And as she danced past the open church door she saw an angel there in long white robes, with wings reaching from his shoulders down to the earth; his face was stern and grave, and in his hand he held a broad shining sword.

“Dance you shall,” said he, “dance in your red shoes till you are pale and cold, till your skin shrivels up and you are a skeleton! Dance you shall, from door to door, and where proud and wicked children live you shall knock, so that they may hear you and fear you! Dance you shall, dance—!”

Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. Mrs. Henry H. B. Paull, translator. London: Warne & Co., [1875]

More than any other film, The Red Shoes deals with the dangerous, magical process by which art is distilled from preparation and effort. And, not content with creating and showing at full length “The Red Shoes” ballet which links all the characters’ destinies, it dares to take us into the inner world of fantasies which art can unleash.

-“The Red Shoes” by Ian Christie, The Criterion Collection (1999)

Watch Moria Shearer’s astonishing 15 minute ballet sequence from Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes (1948):

Dennis Dutton of Arts & Letters Daily, for the first time makes available online a 1976 Interview with Jorge Luis Borges.

What’s more: he has posted the audio.

(via)

MP-R: Would you call your work a search for a system?

Borges: No, I wouldn’t be as ambitious as all that. I would call it, well, not science fiction, but rather the fiction of philosophy, or the fiction of dreams.

“Sweet Thing,” Van Morrison (1968)

Lester Bangs writes in his famous 1979 review of Van Morrison’s magnum opus, Astral Weeks:

Fact: Van Morrison was twenty-two - or twenty-three - years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it. What Astral Weeks deals in are not facts but truths. Astral Weeks, insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boiled down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt.

…

[I]t might also be pointed out that desolation, hurt, and anguish are hardly the only things in life, or in Astral Weeks. They’re just the things, perhaps, that we can most easily grasp and explicate, which I suppose shows about what level our souls have evolved to. I said I wouldn’t reduce the other songs on this album by trying to explain them, and I won’t. But that doesn’t mean that, all thing considered, a juxtaposition of poets might not be in order.

If I ventured in the slipstream
Between the viaducts of your dreams
Where the mobile steel rims crack
And the ditch and the backroads stop
Could you find me
Would you kiss my eyes
And lay me down
In silence easy
To be born again

-Van Morrison

My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells,
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give back the soul I had
of old, when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.

-Federico Garcia Lorca