For the Angels

A detail from a work in progress - with a borrowed element from
Sandro Botticelli's (1489) Cestello Annunciation - © 2016, DS

It's the beginning of a new year... and one that is particularly welcome; especially after 2016, the year when, for many people (including myself), everything went to hell. We lost a lot people last year - the death of David Bowie was the first bad omen - and, all in all, it was a little creepy; you'd think they all were "abandoning ship" or something.

"For the Angels" was to be my last post of that year - as opposed to the first of 2017 - wherein I expressed my gratitude to certain friends of mine - the true angels - who helped me out in the past 6 months, literally saving me from an eviction, and figuratively saving me from the wolves howling at my door.

Actual poverty is almost like a disease; it's debilitating in more ways than a comfortably-placed person can conceive of. Society, for instance, treats poverty as if it were a crime; taking the self-righteous position that the impoverished are at fault for their own failure. Very often, those whom we refer to as friends take the same position; they see you drowning and advise you to swim. Your true friends, however, are those who throw you a line at the crucial moment, and it is to these friends - and they know who they are - this post is dedicated.

Artists, of course, are traditionally poor... "the starving artist" is so cliche that even some artists are under the impression they really can live on air alone. The "mad artist" in the garret is another cliche. And, as it was, I blogged about artists and mental institutions quite a lot in the second half of last year, most likely because the idea of residing in one became more understandable as the days moved on.

But, it is a new year... and, thus far, the worse that can be said about it is the surrealistic coronation of multi-millionaire billionaire King Donald in the coming week. As I mentioned in the previous version of this post, a man in Canada has predicted Trump will be behind bars before the end of the year... which would be the best-case scenario, had VP Pence  - known in Twitter circles as the "Man from Glad" - not been waiting in the wings. So, for most Americans - and most people in the free world - it looks like a lose/lose situation. Although I have little more to say about the matter, our friend Hawkwood over Shadows in Eden has written rather extensively (and accurately) about Agent Orange, and so I direct you here (and here).*

The Book Surgeon: Brian Dettmer

A book sculpture by Brian Dettmer. Click to enlarge.

"New York-based Artist Brian Dettmer creates impressively intricate multi-layered sculptures from books. The artist calls himself the Book Surgeon because he uses knives, tweezers, and surgical tools to carve the art works out of old medical journals, illustration books, dictionaries, map books and encyclopedias. The bigger the book, the better – The Surgeon doesn’t add anything additional to the sculptures, he only folds, bends, rolls, stacks, and, of course, removes."

- Both the (above) quote and the photos of Brian Dettmer's book sculptures found in this post were sourced from this 2015 "DeMilked" article.


"So I think one of the reasons people are disturbed by destroying books, people don't want to rip books and nobody really wants to throw away a book, is that we think about books as living things, we think about them as a body, and they're created to relate to our body, as far as scale, but they also have the potential to continue to grow and to continue to become new things. So books really are alive.

... And I think of my work as almost an archaeology. I'm excavating and I'm trying to maximize the potential and discover as much as I possibly can and exposing it within my own work. But at the same time, I'm thinking about this idea of erasure, and what's happening now that most of our information is intangible, and this idea of loss, and this idea that not only is the format constantly shifting within computers, but the information itself, now that we don't have a physical backup, has to be constantly updated in order to not lose it. And I have several dictionaries in my own studio, and I do use a computer every day, and if I need to look up a word, I'll go on the computer, because I can go directly and instantly to what I'm looking up. I think that the book was never really the right format for nonlinear information, which is why we're seeing reference books becoming the first to be endangered or extinct."

- Two quotes from sculptor Brian Dettmer from the (translatable) TED transcript for the TED video below.

***

Considering all the book-related posts I've been inspired to write for the past few months, it only stands to reason that when I recently discovered the work of Brian Dettmer, I'd be compelled to feature his sculptures here. Considering that his re-purposed books are not, in fact, assemblages, but carefully carved from the pre-existing content of the old books themselves... well, words like "astonishing" are understatements.

And, I love stories like this... about artists doing unimaginable things... totally unprecedented "out of the box" things... not because they intend to start a trendy movement, but because their muses call upon them to do such things, and in doing so - following their muses - we are allowed to see ordinary objects - in this case, encyclopedias and the like - in a totally new, non-linear, and extraordinary way.

For those interested, an interview with Dettmer can be found here...

And, if art from re-cycled material turns you on, here's a nice Make magazine article about the Ancient Futuristic work of artist Theo Kamecke: Old Circuit Boards Are Reimagined as Sarcophagi and Ancient Monuments.

For the Love of Old Books (Part 3): Wuthering Heights (updated September 16, 2016)

Title page of Wuthering Heights, (1847) by Emily Brontë - 1943 American Edition with woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg. (All images can be clicked on to enlarge.)

Wuthering Heights

"At noon, Emily was worse; she could only whisper in gasps. With her last audible words she said to Charlotte, "If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now" but it was too late. She died that same day at about two in the afternoon while sitting on the sofa at Haworth Parsonage. It was less than three months since Branwell's death, which led a housemaid to declare that "Miss Emily died of a broken heart for love of her brother". Emily had grown so thin that her coffin measured only 16 inches wide. The carpenter said he had never made a narrower one for an adult. She was interred in the Church of St Michael and All Angels family capsule, Haworth, West Yorkshire, England. Emily Brontë never knew the extent of fame she achieved with her one and only novel, Wuthering Heights, as she died a year after its publication, aged 30."

- Quote found in the Wiki entry for Emily Brontë, (July 31, 1818 - December 19, 1848).  

"The first reviewers were mystified and puzzled by the strangeness and savagery of Wuthering Heights, although nearly all recognized the seductive power of the novel and the original vision of its author...  However, the critic who perhaps most perceptively synthesized the poetic and fictional halves of Emily's creative aptitude wrote at the end of the nineteenth century. A fellow poet, Algernon Swinburne, referred to Wuthering Heights in a 16 June 1883 article as "essentially and definitely a poem in the fullest and most positive sense of the term."

- From the Poetry Foundation's Emily Brontë page.

"An overwhelming sense of the presence of a larger reality moved Rudolph Otto to call Wutheirng Heights a supreme example of "the daemonic" in literature. Otto was concerned with identifying the non-rational mystery behind all religion and all religious experiences; he called this basic element or mystery the numinous. The numinous grips or stirs the mind so powerfully that one of the responses it produces is numinous dread, which consists of awe or awe-fullness. Numinous dread implies three qualities of the numinous: its absolute unapproachability, its power, and. its urgency or energy.

... It has been suggested that Gothic fiction originated primarily as a quest for numinous dread, which Otto also calls the mysterium tremendum."

- Excerpt from a CUNY (City University of New York) article about Wuthering Heights.

(Note: Mysterium tremendum et fascinans is a metaphysical mystery which is regarded with both fear and fascination.)

"The love which devours life itself, which devastates the present and desolates the future with unquenchable and raging fire, has nothing less pure in it than flame or sunlight... As was the author's life, so is her book in all things; troubled and taintless, with little of rest in it, and nothing of reproach. It may be true that not many will ever take it to their hearts; it is certain that those who do like it will like nothing very much better in the whole world of poetry or prose."

- Algernon Charles Swinburne in reference to Wuthering Heights, from his essay "Emily Brontë" (1883). A link to Swinburne's poetry.

"Emily Brontë died in 1848, aged 30, leaving only one published book and some poems. That book, of course, is "Wuthering Heights" (recently issued in new editions, by Penguin and HarperCollins), a novel so strange and powerful that it sinks into the reader's DNA."

- Quote from Richard Raynor, found here.

***

For my last "interlude" post (featuring bits of my book collection), I couldn't resist posting an edition of one of my favorite novels of all time: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I think the first time I read it was around the age of 13, an age when the mind is most open to new experiences, and when experience itself has its most indelible impact. I've forgotten a lot of novels I've read in the intervening years, but the effect of Wuthering Heights stayed with me, and as Swineburne so wisely predicted: I never once met its match.

He was wrong about one thing though; it seems that a very great many people took it to their hearts and continue to do so. If you google it, or Emily Brontë, you'll find masses of people still have something to say about the young woman's singular novel written over 150 years ago. As recently as 2007, in a British (UKTV Drama) poll, it was voted the number 1 love story of all time. Imagine that. Or, maybe this article: Copy of Wuthering Heights sells for six figures.

So, just exactly what is it about the novel that moves men and women to such a degree? To this very day, critics and academics still discuss it as if it only recently hit the best seller list. You would think that somewhere along the line someone would've finally solved the mystery of the novel's tremendous popularity, its symbolism, and its peculiar author's life. Happily, for Emily Brontë at least, the particulars of her private life will never be revealed. She left no diaries or records... and what little survives of her memory amounts to no more than the second-hand recollections of those who professed to know her, up to and including those accounts offered by her older sister Charlotte...

For the Love of Old Books (Part 2) - The Poètes Maudits & an Artiste Maudit

(From left to right) Das törichte Herz - Vier Erzählungen (The Foolish Heart - A Collection of Essays) by Paul Zech, paperback,1925; Une Saison en Enfer  (A Season in Hell) by Arthur Rimbaud - galley proof (uncut), 1944; Les Fleurs Du Mal - Les Épaves (The Flowers of Evil - The Scraps) by Charles Baudelaire - galley proof (uncut), illustrated by Maurice Mixi-Bérel, 1945.
(All images in this post can be clicked-on for enlarged views.)

"Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The name "symbolist" itself was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadents of literature and of art.

Distinct from, but related to, the style of literature, symbolism of art is related to the gothic component of Romanticism."

- Introduction for the Wiki entry regarding the Symbolists.

"If there is one central tenet held by Symbolist artists, it is that life is fundamentally mysterious, and the artist must respect and preserve this mystery. Thus they insisted on suggestion rather than explicitness, symbols or equivalents rather than description, in both painting and poetry. Choosing music as their model, Symbolists found the creation of a mood to be as important as the transmission of information, and sought to engage the entire mind and personality of the viewer by appealing to the viewer's emotions and unconscious mind as well as intellect. The recognition that there was a major portion of mental activity that is closed to the conscious mind confirmed the Symbolists conviction that there was more to life than could be explained through positivist science."

- Excerpt from the New World Encyclopedia regarding the Symbolist philosophy.


"In terms of specific subject matter, the Symbolists combined religious mysticism, the perverse, the erotic, and the decadent. Symbolist subject matter is typically characterized by an interest in the occult, the morbid, the dream world, melancholy, evil, and death."

- Excerpt found on the following Art Story "Symbolist" page. For information about Symbolist literature in Spain, Germany and America try here (in English only).


"My originality consists in bringing to life, in a human way, improbable beings and making them live according to the laws of probability, by putting - as far as possible - the logic of the visible world at the service of the invisible."

- Quote attributed to French Symbolist painter, Odilon Redon.

Coquille - pastel - 1912, Odilon Redon (Musée d'Orsay)

***

It's been hot and humid in New Mexico for over a week now, but without a drop of rain in my general vicinity. While there may have been flooding elsewhere on the planet in recent months (including the States), in the American southwest the threat is fire - uncontrollable fires. Happily, my neighborhood has not had to evacuate, but if the dryness continues... well.

But, I can clearly remember the summer's day I bought the three paperbacks shown above. It was a sunny day, possibly in June, but much cooler. I was, after all, still living in New England at the time, and had just been bitten by the antiquated-book-collecting bug. So, when I heard about a book sale being sponsored by a nearby retirement community, well, it was a no-brainer; off I went. 

The books were sitting in a small box on the ground under a tent with other books in foreign languages... dejectedly, as if they were considered less desirable than the American titles lined up on the folding tables above them. I think the first title I saw was Les Fleurs Du Mal, and my heart skipped a beat; Baudelaire (inset, right), Godfather of the Symbolist poètes maudits! And, lying right beside the work of the master, was an inconspicuous (and fragile) little paperback by Rimbaud - the younger of the "accursed" poets - who would have been honored to have his Une Saison en Enfer side by side with Les Fleurs Du Mal. It was too magical; I couldn't believe my luck.  Because, as it was, my first, and most sacred influences as a young artist (and, secretly, a poet) were the Symbolist artists and writers of the turn of the (last) century.

I was yet to realize the books were galley proofs; I just grabbed them, along with a few others - including a German paperback with a bold red and black graphic on the jacket - paid for my treasures, and left. Cradling the books in my arms as I walked to my car was an almost religious experience. Imagine finding such foreign treasures under a tent in Connecticut on a summer day! I drove home in a daze...

For the Love of Old Books (Part 1) (with text correction 1/10/18)

(Left to right) A Window in Thrums by J.M. Barrie, no date; The Origin of Freemasonry: The 1717 Theory Exploded by Brother Chalmers Izett Paton, 1871; La Sœur De Gribouille by La Comtesse De Ségur, Illustrated by H. Castelli, 1914 (French); The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1906.
(All photographs can be clicked for enlarged views)

"When the English publishers read "A Window in Thrums" in manuscript they thought it unbearably sad and begged me to alter the end. They warned me that the public do not like sad books. Well, the older I grow and the sadder the things I see, the more do I wish my books to be bright and hopeful, but an author may not always interfere with his story, and if I had altered the end of "A Window in Thrums" I think I should never have had any more respect for myself..."
- Excerpt from the introduction to A Window in Thrums, by J.M. Barrie (included in the photo above).

***

It's already summer here in New Mexico; most days are dry and dusty, the others oppressively humid. But, I'm not complaining really. Considering all the recent flooding in Europe and all the freak meteorological occurrences elsewhere - and all the misfortune and mayhem "natural disasters" entail -  the weather here is the least of my concerns. (Blessed Be, however, to those of you who have struggled and are still struggling with the effects of Mother Nature. Try to remember that our Mother is sick now; she can't help it.)

And, so it's summer... I've yet to see any (beloved) hummingbirds, but, every now and then I see a lizard darting across the wall out back. I've also recently detected a certain singular high-pitched, drill-like sound in the air outside my window: one lone cicada calling out in its weird, mysterious language; like some tiny ambassador from another planet attempting to arouse its extraterrestrial brethren who still lie submerged underground... as they have been for many years! Now, there's a seed for a science fiction story in search of an author.

Well, okay, it's probably already been written... as have so very many other things; written down and published, in some way or another, only to be irretrievably lost or discarded, burnt or buried... left rotting in some basement... or (even) sunken and dissolving at the bottom of a salty sea. Those are the less fortunate fates of many of the world's books. But, there are happier tales; that is, there are some unsung humans who passionately strive to save them. No, we're not bona fide Book Collectors with a regiment of criteria regarding what is deemed "valuable" or not-so-valuable... we're just people who love the look, feel, and smell of an old book between our paws... love the magic of an antiquated embellishment or illustration... and the history inherent in each and every printed word, regardless of its foreign origin.

(Left to right) Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by "Mrs. Shelley" (in one volume), 
no dates apart from the October 15,1831 preface; Gartenlaube Kalender (Garden Arbor Calendar) 1910, illustrated with graphics, engravings & photographs, (German);
Little Folks Astray by Sophie May, illustrated,1871. 

As it happens - and the reason this post appears here - I've spent the last week or so reacquainting myself with my own humble collection; a collection which has spent the last few years secreted away in stacks of boxes. In reality, I have nowhere else to put them. And, finally, It occurred to me - and, no, this was not a pleasant realization - I may never have a place to put them. Moreover, they are presently my only "assets." All (misfortunate) things considered - and, trust me, I will spare you all of that - it likewise occurred to me that the time has come, perhaps, to "liquidate."

No, I've not, as of yet, made any decisions. But, as I haven't had the presence of mind to mentally do much else these days - apart from ruminate (i.e., worry) - I decided I might fill the gap with another "interlude" post, which, at the same time, might serve as a visual - and personal - record...