Robert P. Moses is much on my mind these days. He was a fearless and unrelenting civil rights organizer in rural Mississippi in the early 1960s when this was extremely hazardous duty, and he subsequently served as the lead organizer of Freedom Summer which brought hundreds of northern college students to Mississippi in the Summer of 1964 to help register disenfranchised Blacks. Many years later, he became famous again as the creator of the Algebra Project, a nation-wide program to teach math to students of color so that they might pursue careers in engineering, technical and a variety of scientific fields. He has, in fact, called access to algebra and higher mathematics the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
He is much on my mind, because he is emblematic of the quiet, humble, bottom-up leadership I have been studying over the last few years. And he is coming to Wagner College in February! Where he will be our second Black History Month Scholar in Residence.
Interestingly, Bob Moses grew up in New York City, as a resident of the Harlem River Projects at 151st Street and Harlem River Drive, where he attended public school and periodically worshipped at St. Marks Church on 138th Street before being admitted to one of New York's most selective public secondary schools - Stuyvesant High.
He was not a particularly outstanding student at Stuyvesant, but he did well enough to earn a scholarship to Hamilton College in Upstate New York where he studied analytic philosophy and developed a taste for mathematics. He graduated from Hamilton in 1956 and then completed an M.A. in philosophy at Harvard in 1957. Although he wanted to go on to pursue his Ph.D., this dream was interrupted when his mother tragically succumbed to cancer and his father also took ill. He left Harvard and accepted a position teaching math at the Horace Mann school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx to care for his Dad.
In the spring of 1960, the student sit-in movement was spreading rapidly, and as Moses himself has said, these demonstrations "hit me powerfully, both in the soul and the brain." What especially appealed to him was the courageous leadership shown by thousands of young people who were willing, despite considerable danger, to challenge white supremacy head-on. He signed up initially with Dr. King's organization - the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - and for a few weeks spent most of his time stuffing envelopes in SCLC's Harlem office. But when one of Dr. King's top advisors, Bayard Rustin, learned about Moses's background, he was sent to Atlanta where he spent long afternoons talking philosophy with Jane Stembridge and got to know the legendary leader Ella Baker, then the outgoing Executive Director of SCLC and "Founding Mother" of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Sensing that SCLC did not have much of a program, he conferred with Ella Baker about working with SNCC, and on her advice went to see a local NAACP organizer named Amzie Moore who had been combatting discrimination and prejudice in rural Mississippi for decades. Moore introduced Moses to the ins and outs of racial politics in Mississippi and eventually recommended him to another local organizer, C.C. Bryant in McComb, Mississippi, who got Moses started in his campaign to register Black voters.
Moses was in Mississippi in June 1963 when the KKK shot NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers in the back while he was standing in his own driveway, and Moses was right there again when the discarded bodies of three civil rights workers were found just outside Philadelphia, Mississippi in early August of the same year. These were only the most celebrated deaths. The toll of casualties, infamous and forgotten, was much higher. Through it all, Bob Moses maintained his composure and his courage, despite many close calls, and pushed on to organize 1964's Freedom Summer, which in many ways was the beginning of the end for the cruelest forms of white supremacy in Mississippi.
In the wake of these successes, Moses worked with Fannie Lou Hamer to create the Mississippi Free Democratic Party and attempted to have those representing the MFDP supplant the regulars of the Democratic party at the 1964 convention. This maneuver met with failure and its lack of success contributed to Moses's increasing disillusionment. Not long afterwards, he would leave for Africa for a time, and then later left the United States to escape the military draft during the Vietnam War. He not return to the U.S. again until 1977 when Jimmy Carter issued a general amnesty.
In 1982, Moses received a large MacArthur Foundation "Genius Grant" and used it to create the Algebra Project, which he oversees to this day. It represents the second stage in his civil rights work and is, by far, his most sustained and focused effort to promote equal opportunity for all Americans.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Friday, January 3, 2014
Today was very cold in New York. Wind chills well below 0 degrees Fahrenheit and as a consequence, reduced bus service, especially on Staten Island. We had to wait over 20 minutes for a bus in the wind and cold as we headed once again for the ferry and Manhattan. Karen's feet were so chilled by this long delay, she couldn't confirm that her toes were still connected to her feet for a good ten minutes afterwards. This experience induced her finally to shop online for proper boots that will not only keep her feet warm, but will also be steady enough to allow her to navigate the snow drifts and the urban slush that make walking in the city after a big storm such a challenge
New York is funny when it comes to harsh winter weather. We can easily go a whole winter without much snow or cold, making you think that good winter boots and layered clothing are unnecessary. But a mild winter is often followed by a pretty brutal one, and that seems to be holding true again this year. As we recall, last year's winter was pretty easy. This one is proving to be both cold and snowy, a tough combination for a city as congested as New York. Yet, in some ways New York is the best city in which to experience snowy conditions, as the subway can be counted on to get you to your destination with almost no hassle. Again, this turned out to be true during our travels today. Plus, what a blessing to wait for a subway in the relatively warm conditions of a subterranean platform. Staten Island's lack of a decent public transportation system, including its own but still far too limited subway line, definitely adds to its unattractiveness as a permanent place to live.
We leave Staten Island, especially the North Shore, with some regret that we did not get to know it better or come to appreciate more fully its many wonderful strengths as a community of diverse cultures. But Manhattan beckons, regardless of the weather conditions. We are very glad once again to call it our one and only home.
New York is funny when it comes to harsh winter weather. We can easily go a whole winter without much snow or cold, making you think that good winter boots and layered clothing are unnecessary. But a mild winter is often followed by a pretty brutal one, and that seems to be holding true again this year. As we recall, last year's winter was pretty easy. This one is proving to be both cold and snowy, a tough combination for a city as congested as New York. Yet, in some ways New York is the best city in which to experience snowy conditions, as the subway can be counted on to get you to your destination with almost no hassle. Again, this turned out to be true during our travels today. Plus, what a blessing to wait for a subway in the relatively warm conditions of a subterranean platform. Staten Island's lack of a decent public transportation system, including its own but still far too limited subway line, definitely adds to its unattractiveness as a permanent place to live.
We leave Staten Island, especially the North Shore, with some regret that we did not get to know it better or come to appreciate more fully its many wonderful strengths as a community of diverse cultures. But Manhattan beckons, regardless of the weather conditions. We are very glad once again to call it our one and only home.
Thursday, January 2, 2014
Embracing Manhattan
For the past year and a half, we have been living a divided existence, the workweek on Staten Island, the weekend in Manhattan. This about to end, as we are in the process of moving back to Manhattan full-time. This decision is, in part, a result of my choosing to retire, or, as we like to say, "move on." It is also in keeping with our shared sense that we are better suited for Manhattan than Staten Island. In Manhattan we feel at home. On Staten Island, we are forever visitors. But what, you might ask, makes Manhattan such an ideal location for our permanent home? There are any number of things we could say about this, that, undoubtedly, would include Manhattan's proximity to the most remarkable set of cultural institutions in the world. We are not only thinking here of the museums, the music venues, the unparalleled variety of theatrical options, and some of America's finest repertory movie houses. But also the remarkable library system from which virtually any book is available, if you're willing to wait, and the fact that we live within two blocks of two of the world's most impressive and commodious public spaces - Central Park and Riverside Park.
Yet our affinity for Manhattan has more to do with its special energy, its historic eagerness to welcome and absorb a dizzying diversity of lifestyles and cultures that most obviously embraces a multiplicity of fashions, races, colors, creeds, classes, and sexual orientations, but extends as well to such a rich variety of interests, hobbies, forms of amusement, and passions that every day seems to offer something new.
To walk out onto the street and to witness this unending stream of humanity is a joy. It may present difficulties at rush hour or at other times when you're in an hurry, but for the most part it is a bottomless source of fascination and delight. Manhattan's unique combination of density and variety, of affording you the opportunity to do almost anything you can imagine, makes it our ideal home.
Wednesday, January 1, 2014
Rejecting Humiliation
With this post, I return after a three year absence to the Third New York, my first blog, to kick off the New Year. This piece is only peripherally related to New York, but a guy has to start somewhere.
In the New Yorker this week, Adam Gopnik writes the lead Talk of the Town piece about two alternate futures for the United States and the world, one leading to disaster, the other an uneventful but deeply satisfying voyage to peace and well being. Comparing the fate of two great and identical ocean liners from 1912, the Titanic and the Olympic, one destroyed on its maiden voyage, the other entirely successful, Gopnik wonders which ship we are traveling on today, conceding unhappily that there is not only no way to know for sure; there is little that can be done to ensure passage on one over the other.
Yet he does offer one ray of hope, one thin sliver on which to build a more humane future. It is simply to reject honor and fear of humiliation as the motivation for our actions. As he says, trying to retrieve lessons from the burgeoning literature on the causes of World War I, "the relentless emphasis on shame and face, on position and credibility, on the dread of being perceived as weak" echoes through the decades and has led again and again to the deepening of conflicts without clear purpose or a basis in common sense.
I, for one, find this advice, however tentative and uncertain, to be a good message for 2014. It will be extremely difficult to practice it, but it will be made easier by a citizenry that insists on decision making that is free of hubris and quests for domination.
We probably can't make much progress on this goal, however, without committing to a society whose internal, everyday institutions are free of humiliation as well, the kind that Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit talks about in his 1996 book "The Decent Society." What Professor Margalit has in mind is captured early on in this work when he says that "a society is decent if its institutions do not act in ways that give the people under their authority sound reasons to consider themselves humiliated," or, as he says elsewhere, giving them sound reasons to believe that their self-respect has been injured.
In at least one example employed by Margalit, even someone whose rights are honored, may be suffering from humiliation if he lacks the conviction that he is entitled to those rights, that there is a rational basis for demanding them or actively working for their full and uncompromised application. Here Margalit is referring to any person whose self-respect has been so relentlessly and systematically undermined that he develops a sense of internalized inferiority in which he feels he is not deserving of key rights. He calls this example "Uncle Tom," but it would refer to anyone who has been persuaded that he is less worthy than others, for entirely irrelevant reasons such as race, gender or even social class.
At the heart of Margalit's claims is the idea that a person who is shown respect, who is free of humiliation, sees himself as enjoying an open future, who has the capacity to change his life at any time for the better "through action or a reevaluation of the past." Or to put it another way, that the institutions governing this person's life operate in such a way as to give each person the freest and least oppressive path toward an open and unrestricted future.
Note here that when these institutional conditions are in effect the need for people to dominate others, to demonstrate that they are better than others, more worthy than others, etc., is greatly diminished for they are enjoying the sort of recognition, respect, and dignity that makes such demonstrations unnecessary, even redundant.
Which is why I invoked Margalit to begin with. We cannot hope for a society or a world in which nations eschew honor and credit in favor of compromise and common sense unless the people who inhabit those countries also have experiences which show them full respect and are largely free of humiliating circumstances.
It occurs to me, as it might anyone, that schools are a particularly hopeful site in which to begin such a change in social practices, and, appropriately enough, that the new call to curb bullying is largely an attempt to denounce and proscribe behaviors that humiliate children. But, of course, campaigns against bullying are only a small part of this larger effort to create a decent society. All of us must consciously and diligently work to eliminate humiliating behaviors from our lives, and to develop much greater sensitivity toward those actions which tend to diminish people, robbing them of the dignity and self-respect that are so central to a decent society.
In the New Yorker this week, Adam Gopnik writes the lead Talk of the Town piece about two alternate futures for the United States and the world, one leading to disaster, the other an uneventful but deeply satisfying voyage to peace and well being. Comparing the fate of two great and identical ocean liners from 1912, the Titanic and the Olympic, one destroyed on its maiden voyage, the other entirely successful, Gopnik wonders which ship we are traveling on today, conceding unhappily that there is not only no way to know for sure; there is little that can be done to ensure passage on one over the other.
Yet he does offer one ray of hope, one thin sliver on which to build a more humane future. It is simply to reject honor and fear of humiliation as the motivation for our actions. As he says, trying to retrieve lessons from the burgeoning literature on the causes of World War I, "the relentless emphasis on shame and face, on position and credibility, on the dread of being perceived as weak" echoes through the decades and has led again and again to the deepening of conflicts without clear purpose or a basis in common sense.
I, for one, find this advice, however tentative and uncertain, to be a good message for 2014. It will be extremely difficult to practice it, but it will be made easier by a citizenry that insists on decision making that is free of hubris and quests for domination.
We probably can't make much progress on this goal, however, without committing to a society whose internal, everyday institutions are free of humiliation as well, the kind that Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit talks about in his 1996 book "The Decent Society." What Professor Margalit has in mind is captured early on in this work when he says that "a society is decent if its institutions do not act in ways that give the people under their authority sound reasons to consider themselves humiliated," or, as he says elsewhere, giving them sound reasons to believe that their self-respect has been injured.
In at least one example employed by Margalit, even someone whose rights are honored, may be suffering from humiliation if he lacks the conviction that he is entitled to those rights, that there is a rational basis for demanding them or actively working for their full and uncompromised application. Here Margalit is referring to any person whose self-respect has been so relentlessly and systematically undermined that he develops a sense of internalized inferiority in which he feels he is not deserving of key rights. He calls this example "Uncle Tom," but it would refer to anyone who has been persuaded that he is less worthy than others, for entirely irrelevant reasons such as race, gender or even social class.
At the heart of Margalit's claims is the idea that a person who is shown respect, who is free of humiliation, sees himself as enjoying an open future, who has the capacity to change his life at any time for the better "through action or a reevaluation of the past." Or to put it another way, that the institutions governing this person's life operate in such a way as to give each person the freest and least oppressive path toward an open and unrestricted future.
Note here that when these institutional conditions are in effect the need for people to dominate others, to demonstrate that they are better than others, more worthy than others, etc., is greatly diminished for they are enjoying the sort of recognition, respect, and dignity that makes such demonstrations unnecessary, even redundant.
Which is why I invoked Margalit to begin with. We cannot hope for a society or a world in which nations eschew honor and credit in favor of compromise and common sense unless the people who inhabit those countries also have experiences which show them full respect and are largely free of humiliating circumstances.
It occurs to me, as it might anyone, that schools are a particularly hopeful site in which to begin such a change in social practices, and, appropriately enough, that the new call to curb bullying is largely an attempt to denounce and proscribe behaviors that humiliate children. But, of course, campaigns against bullying are only a small part of this larger effort to create a decent society. All of us must consciously and diligently work to eliminate humiliating behaviors from our lives, and to develop much greater sensitivity toward those actions which tend to diminish people, robbing them of the dignity and self-respect that are so central to a decent society.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Social Security
I am amazed and appalled that conservatives continue to get mileage out of the idea that we need to change the way Social Security is funded, either by partially privatizing it or by extending the retirement age and minimizing benefits. Social Security is one of the triumphs of the modern, industrial state. As Paul Krugman points out today in the New York Times, it funds itself quite efficiently and is in no danger, either immediately or in the foreseeable future, of running out of money.
So why the hysteria? Krugman says it's all about ideology, that conservatives simply can't countenance the idea that this government program works so well and will consequently have to continue to be funded at a fairly high rate in perpetuity. Somehow, I can't believe this is the whole story. There is a missing piece, something else that the right can't stand that isn't being talked about.
Let me suggest that what they are really afraid of is the thing that probably should, in fact, be done to ensure Social Security's long-term stability, but which they have been very successful at keeping out of the conversation altogether. It is simply this. Tax everyone at a 6.2% rate, regardless of income. Right now, Social Security taxes only come out of the first $106,800 of income. After that, for those making more than $106,800, there is no tax at all. Which means, of course, that this is one of the most regressive of taxes in which those most able to pay actually give a surprisingly small percentage of their income. Someone, for instance, bringing in $500,000 a year, is paying a net percentage of just a little over 1%. Even someone making, say, $200,000, is paying only about 3% of income. This is ridiculous, in any case, but especially when so much hot air is being expended about the Social Security crisis when it would be so easy to make this change, with little or no discomfort for those making more than $106,800.
So why isn't this discussed or seriously considered? I can think of only one reason. Greed. The rich control the conversation about taxes and about funding government programs. They have kept the rest of us poor schmoes in the dark. We should be outraged about this. There should be marches in the street. But because of the hegemony that the privileged hold over the poor and middle classes, hardly a word is breathed about this. It is a reminder to me that the rich had better watch out. A revolution is coming and unless more is done to support the needs of the less well off, there will eventually be a backlash like nothing this country has ever seen.
In the meantime, think of the good that can be done to ensure that Social Security is paid out to all those who both need it and deserve it. That's virtually everyone. A simple and relatively painless change in the way this program is funded would absolutely ensure its long-term solvency. We just have to muster the will to make it happen.
So why the hysteria? Krugman says it's all about ideology, that conservatives simply can't countenance the idea that this government program works so well and will consequently have to continue to be funded at a fairly high rate in perpetuity. Somehow, I can't believe this is the whole story. There is a missing piece, something else that the right can't stand that isn't being talked about.
Let me suggest that what they are really afraid of is the thing that probably should, in fact, be done to ensure Social Security's long-term stability, but which they have been very successful at keeping out of the conversation altogether. It is simply this. Tax everyone at a 6.2% rate, regardless of income. Right now, Social Security taxes only come out of the first $106,800 of income. After that, for those making more than $106,800, there is no tax at all. Which means, of course, that this is one of the most regressive of taxes in which those most able to pay actually give a surprisingly small percentage of their income. Someone, for instance, bringing in $500,000 a year, is paying a net percentage of just a little over 1%. Even someone making, say, $200,000, is paying only about 3% of income. This is ridiculous, in any case, but especially when so much hot air is being expended about the Social Security crisis when it would be so easy to make this change, with little or no discomfort for those making more than $106,800.
So why isn't this discussed or seriously considered? I can think of only one reason. Greed. The rich control the conversation about taxes and about funding government programs. They have kept the rest of us poor schmoes in the dark. We should be outraged about this. There should be marches in the street. But because of the hegemony that the privileged hold over the poor and middle classes, hardly a word is breathed about this. It is a reminder to me that the rich had better watch out. A revolution is coming and unless more is done to support the needs of the less well off, there will eventually be a backlash like nothing this country has ever seen.
In the meantime, think of the good that can be done to ensure that Social Security is paid out to all those who both need it and deserve it. That's virtually everyone. A simple and relatively painless change in the way this program is funded would absolutely ensure its long-term solvency. We just have to muster the will to make it happen.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
James Fowler Endargo
He ended his own life at age 52 while suffering from crippling despair. But in the years between his all-American upbringing in Appleton, Wisconsin in the post-World War II era and his descent into a deep and incurable depression in the early-1990s, James Fowler Endargo lived fully and creatively, producing one of the most influential bodies of poetical work in the 20th century.
Poets rarely achieve great fame, but Endargo's particular circumstances - his complete mastery of the short lyrical form, his movie-star looks, his four marriages to beautiful and powerful women, and his knack for self-promotion - resulted in talk show appearances and wide advertising exposure that turned him into a household name and launched him as one of the most recognizable faces of the 1960s. Endargo was a great writer, but even more so he was a winning personality whom the general public found irresistible. His simple, often stark poems appealed to a surprisingly broad swath of the reading public and his face, plastered on buses and billboards everywhere, promoting everything from cigarettes to trench coats, never lost its allure. For many people in the 1960s, he was THE face of poetry and his brief, even abrupt lines spoke for a generation. His hyphenated phrases, declaring war the inseparable companion of peace, hate the necessary concomitant of love, deceit the partner of truth, echoed and reinforced the growing cynicism and hopelessness of his time. No one seemed to understand more clearly than Endargo that the great reforming spirit of the mid-1960s could not be sustained and that it must lead to an angry and selfish backlash. In this sense, he foretold the disorienting tragedies of My Lai, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis, and even as he captured the growing despair of this era in his own poetry fell victim to it as well, never fully recovering from a devastating drug habit and a disabling depression that shattered him when he was still only in his early 40s. But even as his creative imagination went dry, his dark, craggy, handsome face continued to bring him wealth, and his poetry readings, often treated like rock concerts, offered him the attention he always craved. Only when things had turned for the worst and he was no longer able to appear in public did his fans finally lose interest in their comely troubadour.
Following a kind of idyllic upbringing in Appleton, Wisconsin from 1939 to 1957, Endargo attended nearby Lawrence University for two years. He studied literature with legendary professor Yando Cling during this period, who in that short time introduced him to most of the important poetry produced in America, beginning with Whitman and Dickinson and continuing to Lowell and Bishop. Even then, Endargo began experimenting with the short lyric poem that became his trademark, writing a few of the poems that would be collected in his first volume of poetry called "A Blue Landmark," published in 1960. In 1959, Endargo moved to New York City and began to write reviews for Commonweal and Dissent. Declaring himself a socialist and then an anarchist, he participated in a series of civil rights demonstrations and appeared on television for the first time as a spokesperson for the beat-inspired group Americans for Holistic Liberation (AHL). His glib, charming manner and physical attractiveness drew interest and support and for many years to come he could be seen on public media promoting a wide range of causes. These early appearances led to an encounter with the fashion model Brook Tamarkin, soon thereafter his first marriage, and not long after that a bitter and very public break-up.
In 1965, when he was 26 years old, Endargo published his second volume of poetry to much acclaim, landing him on the cover of Time. This book entitled "Birding" was a strange and exotic mixture of nature poetry, presumably influenced by his Midwest experiences as a youth and the urban verse that made him famous. "Homing Pigeon" became the best known poem from this collection, with the final lines "rootless, homeless, free" perhaps the most famous he ever wrote, and still often emblazoned on T-shirts and greeting cards.
Endargo's next and most famous collection of poetry published in 1971 was "The Darkness Within." This, too, was showered with critical praise and led to his receiving his only Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Endargo's work, which was both accessible and topical, directly criticized US involvement in Vietnam, while at the same time attacking many of the youth protest movements of the time as a manifestation of spoiled privilege. Now at the peak of his fame, his marriage to the Hollywood starlet Sheila Blaine, widely covered in the popular press, quickly dissolved into another bitterly contested divorce, leading to a terrible bout with depression from which Endargo never fully recovered. (To be Continued)
Poets rarely achieve great fame, but Endargo's particular circumstances - his complete mastery of the short lyrical form, his movie-star looks, his four marriages to beautiful and powerful women, and his knack for self-promotion - resulted in talk show appearances and wide advertising exposure that turned him into a household name and launched him as one of the most recognizable faces of the 1960s. Endargo was a great writer, but even more so he was a winning personality whom the general public found irresistible. His simple, often stark poems appealed to a surprisingly broad swath of the reading public and his face, plastered on buses and billboards everywhere, promoting everything from cigarettes to trench coats, never lost its allure. For many people in the 1960s, he was THE face of poetry and his brief, even abrupt lines spoke for a generation. His hyphenated phrases, declaring war the inseparable companion of peace, hate the necessary concomitant of love, deceit the partner of truth, echoed and reinforced the growing cynicism and hopelessness of his time. No one seemed to understand more clearly than Endargo that the great reforming spirit of the mid-1960s could not be sustained and that it must lead to an angry and selfish backlash. In this sense, he foretold the disorienting tragedies of My Lai, Watergate, and the Iran hostage crisis, and even as he captured the growing despair of this era in his own poetry fell victim to it as well, never fully recovering from a devastating drug habit and a disabling depression that shattered him when he was still only in his early 40s. But even as his creative imagination went dry, his dark, craggy, handsome face continued to bring him wealth, and his poetry readings, often treated like rock concerts, offered him the attention he always craved. Only when things had turned for the worst and he was no longer able to appear in public did his fans finally lose interest in their comely troubadour.
Following a kind of idyllic upbringing in Appleton, Wisconsin from 1939 to 1957, Endargo attended nearby Lawrence University for two years. He studied literature with legendary professor Yando Cling during this period, who in that short time introduced him to most of the important poetry produced in America, beginning with Whitman and Dickinson and continuing to Lowell and Bishop. Even then, Endargo began experimenting with the short lyric poem that became his trademark, writing a few of the poems that would be collected in his first volume of poetry called "A Blue Landmark," published in 1960. In 1959, Endargo moved to New York City and began to write reviews for Commonweal and Dissent. Declaring himself a socialist and then an anarchist, he participated in a series of civil rights demonstrations and appeared on television for the first time as a spokesperson for the beat-inspired group Americans for Holistic Liberation (AHL). His glib, charming manner and physical attractiveness drew interest and support and for many years to come he could be seen on public media promoting a wide range of causes. These early appearances led to an encounter with the fashion model Brook Tamarkin, soon thereafter his first marriage, and not long after that a bitter and very public break-up.
In 1965, when he was 26 years old, Endargo published his second volume of poetry to much acclaim, landing him on the cover of Time. This book entitled "Birding" was a strange and exotic mixture of nature poetry, presumably influenced by his Midwest experiences as a youth and the urban verse that made him famous. "Homing Pigeon" became the best known poem from this collection, with the final lines "rootless, homeless, free" perhaps the most famous he ever wrote, and still often emblazoned on T-shirts and greeting cards.
Endargo's next and most famous collection of poetry published in 1971 was "The Darkness Within." This, too, was showered with critical praise and led to his receiving his only Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Endargo's work, which was both accessible and topical, directly criticized US involvement in Vietnam, while at the same time attacking many of the youth protest movements of the time as a manifestation of spoiled privilege. Now at the peak of his fame, his marriage to the Hollywood starlet Sheila Blaine, widely covered in the popular press, quickly dissolved into another bitterly contested divorce, leading to a terrible bout with depression from which Endargo never fully recovered. (To be Continued)
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Why I like Modern Art
The new Matisse exhibit at MoMA, the one called "Radical Invention, 1913-1917," has me thinking once again about why I find modern and contemporary art so satisfying and invigorating. In a way, all art is energizing, as the act of viewing artistic work demands that we focus our attention on the elements that make art so arresting. Those elements include line, color, and shape, but also such things as the arabesque design, which along with line, Matisse believed gave a special vitality to art. These are the things that catch our eye, that wake us up in a sense and that bring to vivid consciousness our craving for aesthetic satisfaction.
But Matisse, more than most artists, brings these feelings to a new height of excitement and creative delight. For me, anyway, this is in part because he was such a master of the line. Karen and I are the proud owners of a Matisse line drawing of a female face that seems incredibly simple, and yet because of Matisse's mastery conveys a sense of humanity that is striking. Hardly a masterpiece, this modest drawing is nevertheless a reminder that Matisse could accomplish a great deal with just a few strong lines. My absolutely favorite example of this ability is the painting that Matisse finished in 1905 that was a portrait of his wife but is often called "The Green Line" because it is marked by a strange green line that cuts across the middle of her face. This line, which seems bizarre and yet works as part of this portrait, divides his subject's face into two sections, one dark, one light; one calm and the other just a bit ominous.
This same painting also demonstrates Matisse's remarkable and famous use of color. At the time he finished this painting, he was regarded as the leader of the Fauve movement, which was marked by a brilliant and unnatural use of color. In the Green line, the very use of the color green to separate the two parts of his wife's face is startling, but I also think the background colors - the purples, the reds, the sea greens - are both beautiful and an outstanding example of how background color can be used to present a subject more arrestingly. This is only a small example, however, as Matisse's amazing color sense can be experienced repeatedly in so many of his greatest works.
The painting, though, that is part of this special exhibit currently at MoMA and that haunts me relentlessly is "The Piano Lesson," completed in 1916. Others have commented on it extensively and I can't begin to add to what they have said, but this picture of Matisse's son Pierre sitting unhappily at the piano, under the apparent tutelage of a stern teacher and with the late afternoon sun fading rapidly, offers a study in light, mood, color, and line that stops me in my tracks every time I see it. The most shocking thing about it is the way in which Matisse has arranged the room in which Pierre sits at the piano and the manner in which the sun casts shadows, especially on Pierre's face, so that his right eye and much of the right side of his face seems to disappear. That shadowy triangle that effaces Pierre's eye and cheek matches neatly the window opening that receives the lowering sun and the outside greenery and which emphasizes and introduces a series of angled lines echoed by the piano, the metronome and the window's thrown-open shutter. Despite Matisse's great mastery of color, this work is dominated by gray, which establishes the depressing mood of the painting (consider Emily Dickinson's lines "There's a certain Slant of Light,/Winter Afternoons/That oppresses like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes -) and that causes the green of the window and the pink of the piano to stand out that much more. While never a cubist, Matisse brilliantly combines his love of line and color with a cubist sensibility that shakes us out of our complacency and makes us want to look and look again with wonder and surprise.
I think exhibits like the one on Matisse at MoMA give us an opportunity to look in penetrating and absorbing ways. Really, they offer us practice at putting our own lives on hold for just a little while and to devote ourselves without thoughts of anything else to the mystery and the magic of the most masterful of human-made creations.
But Matisse, more than most artists, brings these feelings to a new height of excitement and creative delight. For me, anyway, this is in part because he was such a master of the line. Karen and I are the proud owners of a Matisse line drawing of a female face that seems incredibly simple, and yet because of Matisse's mastery conveys a sense of humanity that is striking. Hardly a masterpiece, this modest drawing is nevertheless a reminder that Matisse could accomplish a great deal with just a few strong lines. My absolutely favorite example of this ability is the painting that Matisse finished in 1905 that was a portrait of his wife but is often called "The Green Line" because it is marked by a strange green line that cuts across the middle of her face. This line, which seems bizarre and yet works as part of this portrait, divides his subject's face into two sections, one dark, one light; one calm and the other just a bit ominous.
This same painting also demonstrates Matisse's remarkable and famous use of color. At the time he finished this painting, he was regarded as the leader of the Fauve movement, which was marked by a brilliant and unnatural use of color. In the Green line, the very use of the color green to separate the two parts of his wife's face is startling, but I also think the background colors - the purples, the reds, the sea greens - are both beautiful and an outstanding example of how background color can be used to present a subject more arrestingly. This is only a small example, however, as Matisse's amazing color sense can be experienced repeatedly in so many of his greatest works.
The painting, though, that is part of this special exhibit currently at MoMA and that haunts me relentlessly is "The Piano Lesson," completed in 1916. Others have commented on it extensively and I can't begin to add to what they have said, but this picture of Matisse's son Pierre sitting unhappily at the piano, under the apparent tutelage of a stern teacher and with the late afternoon sun fading rapidly, offers a study in light, mood, color, and line that stops me in my tracks every time I see it. The most shocking thing about it is the way in which Matisse has arranged the room in which Pierre sits at the piano and the manner in which the sun casts shadows, especially on Pierre's face, so that his right eye and much of the right side of his face seems to disappear. That shadowy triangle that effaces Pierre's eye and cheek matches neatly the window opening that receives the lowering sun and the outside greenery and which emphasizes and introduces a series of angled lines echoed by the piano, the metronome and the window's thrown-open shutter. Despite Matisse's great mastery of color, this work is dominated by gray, which establishes the depressing mood of the painting (consider Emily Dickinson's lines "There's a certain Slant of Light,/Winter Afternoons/That oppresses like the Heft/Of Cathedral Tunes -) and that causes the green of the window and the pink of the piano to stand out that much more. While never a cubist, Matisse brilliantly combines his love of line and color with a cubist sensibility that shakes us out of our complacency and makes us want to look and look again with wonder and surprise.
I think exhibits like the one on Matisse at MoMA give us an opportunity to look in penetrating and absorbing ways. Really, they offer us practice at putting our own lives on hold for just a little while and to devote ourselves without thoughts of anything else to the mystery and the magic of the most masterful of human-made creations.
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