1.
It was 20 years ago when my partner remodeled the corner office in my law firm. A rather cantankerous senior lawyer had been ousted after years of drawing his full share of firm profits without accounting for much in the way of billable time. (I think that in his last two years, he wrote down a total of eight or nine hours time for billing in that interval.) The attorney who had engineered, as it were, the ouster of the senior partner took over his office located on the sunny side of the building. This corner office was spacious with two windows opening onto different aspects of sidewalk and parking lot. Beige-yellow wallpaper brightened the big square room.
The office’s new occupant was an ambitious fellow in his mid-forties, gregarious, with many friends who were highly paid executives at the local Fortune 500 firm. He determined that the new regime, as it were, required a complete remodel of the corner office. Wallpaper was stripped and replaced with a less gaudy color, still blonde to exploit the light gracing the room at midday and late afternoon. New carpet was installed and, remarkably enough, a contractor was hired to create a slight, but perceptible, tilt in the room’s ceiling – I never understood why this was desirable. Several tasteful Piranesi engravings, architectural fantasies of Roman ruins, were hung on the wall next to my partner’s desk, flanking an elaborate tinted etching of a parsimonious-looking Victorian widow in a purplish bonnet glaring at an attorney who was himself poring over a large manorial map. A scrivener in a bright green waistcoat was scribbling some notes and a coy-looking, half-naked cherub or goddess fashioned from plaster was set atop a glass-fronted bookcase. The name of this delicately colored engraving was “The Right of Way” and the picture referred to the fact that my partner was a prominent real estate lawyer.
These appurtenances were purchased from a local interior decorator. This woman was the stylish wife of a local physician of excellent repute. She operated a studio in an old mansion a couple blocks off Main Street. Once the mansion had been a wealthy man’s home, but later it had been converted to a funeral parlor, and, then, a photography studio. The place had big windows and, when I strolled by, I could see the work tables heavily burdened with scraps of wallpaper, samples of carpet, and big catalogues. The interior decorator had beautified many office suites in the headquarters of the Fortune 500 company and she had exquisite taste. She was also quite expensive, a factor that caused the other lawyers in my firm to grumble at the exorbitance of the remodel in the corner office. I think it was the ostentatious slanted ceiling that most earned our sotto voce derision.
A large, colorful artwork adorned the wall next to my partner’s desk. This was the piece de resistance in the room’s decorative scheme. I don’t know how to exactly describe this big framed image – it was not exactly a painting, not really a print nor a collage, but some kind of mixture of these forms. The art work was comprised of a number of lozenge-shaped cells each colored brightly blue or purple or turquoise. These modules of color were separated from one another by raised gilded strips, somewhat the way leaded bars hold panes of stained glass in a church window. Some calligraphic curlicues decorated the edges of the picture. The thing was big and square, four feet by three, and expensively framed. Everyone admired the picture. It was the sort of abstract art enjoyed even by those skeptical of modern paintings.
The picture had been in place for almost half a year when someone noticed that the decorative scribbles around the bottom edge of the cells of bright color were, in fact, musical notes arrayed on staves faced by a treble clef. These notes and the clef governing them were upside-down. At first, we wondered whether the artist had intentionally inverted the musical notes, as if, perhaps, to render a familiar form unfamiliar and abstract – a little like the way that the artist Georg Baselitz painted his figures to be hung upside-down. But my partner called the interior decorator and she rushed over to the office with the catalogue from which the picture had been purchased. In fact, it was upside-down. A little embarrassed, the interior decorator supervised the efforts necessary to rotate the big and heavy picture until it was properly oriented. As we admired the picture now hanging right side up, everyone agreed that the art object was even more resplendent and forceful than it had seemed before. But, in fact, there didn’t seem to be much difference between the picture inverted or displayed properly upright.
The notion that modernist, abstract art has no clearly defined up or down begins with apocrypha. Critics asserted that one (or several) of J.M.W. Turner’s pictures had been displayed upside down for some period of time without anyone noticing the mistake. There’s no evidence that this was true and some writers think that the tale was suggested as a pun on the artist’s name (“Turner”). It is true that many of Turner’s paintings represent glowing voids with only a few clues as to where sky and sea are to be found. Paul Klee and Matisse both painted images that were displayed upside-down. Klee’s image, “Ludus Martis,” is wholly abstract and one can readily understand how this picture could have been inadvertently rotated into the wrong orientation. The Matisse painting schematically represents a boat and its reflection in water – the image is, in fact, devised so as to create confusion between up and down. At the University of Minnesota art gallery, a showy painting of red flowers with black stamen by Georgia O’Keefe hung rotated ninety degrees from the image’s intended orientation for more than 40 years. (I attended the University when the painting was hung with its long axis sideways as opposed to vertically oriented – I gazed at the picture many times and didn’t notice anything unusual about it.) When the mistake was discovered, the curator observed that the painting “looks terrific” either way. Since the image of the blossom is circular, it’s easy to see how the error was made.
The Tate Gallery owns a painting by Mark Rothko called “Black on Maroon”. No one knows how this painting is supposed to be displayed. (Rothko isn’t talking; he’s been dead since 1970). Viewed in one orientation, the canvas shows two glowing maroon voids, one atop the other, outlined in heavy black brush strokes. Turned on its side, painting looks like slots in a black field, a bit like the plug-in for an electrical appliances. The Tate displays the picture in one orientation for a couple of years and, then, turns it on its side to be viewed from that perspective as well.
There is a 1933 Paramount film called Girl without a Room. A subplot in the movie involves a young Bohemian painter who wins first prize in a Parisian art competition, discovering only after the award that his picture was hung upside down. The film’s catch-line is “She had no bed of her own” and the movie’s poster shows a naked girl clutching a pillow in front of her body. It’s pretty clear that the picture’s concerns were remote from the aesthetics of modern art.
2.
There’s an anecdote about the eccentric polymath Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit priest who claimed, among other things, to have decoded Egyptian hieroglyphs. Kircher, who lived in the 17th century, was also an expert on Chinese culture and calligraphy. According to the story, Kircher produced a beautiful translation of Chinese characters crudely scribbled on a piece of parchment. The writing, it seemed, had an occult and mystical meaning. Someone noticed, however, that the handwriting on the page was inverted and, in fact, just a short-hand form of Italian. The text was something like a grocery list.
Something similar is visible in two versions of a lyric poem by the German, Peter Huchel. This poet is one of Germany’s greatest 20th century Dichter but he spent much of his career behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin and, so, is not as well-known as other writers of his generation. Huchel’s early poems are formally conservative – they are cast in strongly metric patterns and rhyme. Although the subjects of his lyrics are familiar to students of German poetry (rural life and nature, often refracted through intense pathetic fallacy), he uses innovative and bold metaphors and there is always something surprising in his verse. In his later poems, Huchel’s imagery darkens and he specializes in landscapes disfigured and made grotesque by war. Despite conservative elements in his early verse, Huchel is heir to the surrealists and the nightmare visions of German-speaking lyricists like Georg Trakl, a poet that he resembles in some respect. Surprising features in his diction, accordingly, can sometimes seem arbitrary, even capricious, that is, an avant-garde extravagance.
A poem illustrating these factors is Huchel’s lyric, Die Schilfige Nymphe, first published in 1931, but later appearing in the poet’s first volume of collected verse after the war in 1948. (Huchel opposed the Hitler regime and refused to allow any of his poems to be published between 1933 and 1948. He was conscripted into the army and ended the conflict in a Soviet prisoner of war camp.) The poem is five short stanzas rhymed ABAB with three pulses or accents per line. I won’t attempt to capture the sound or form of the poem in the translation below:
The Marshy Nymph
1 : The marshy nymph / The water continues to wither / The bellies of frogs in the swamp / wither – note: the water welk fort (continues to wilt) in the second line; verdoerrt – withers in the fourth line.
2 : On the midday wall / The shadows plunge / The breath dances out of fire / On the lizard’s stone.
3 : In the candles of midday / In the hollow reeds, that are silent / The heart is sad / The music of dragonflies.
4 : The dark dragonflies / Of the lakes fall silent. / What sounds is only the shrill / heart-bitter shrilling.
Note: Es toent nur das grelle / Herzboese Geschrill – literally “There sounds only the shrill (or glaring) / Evil to the heart shrilling.
5 : The luminary (or luminous one) / Inclines into the reeds / The wind that is scared toward desolation / Giggles alone.
Secondary sources advise me that that “marshy nymph” refers to the Havel River. “Nymph” may also have something to do with the imagery of dragonflies – the dragonflies are nymphs as well. The poem presents an image of the Havel River and its adjacent wetlands suffering under the onslaught of the midday sun. The water evaporates and the frogs die as the wetlands are consumed by the sun. It’s hot at midday and the sun casts shadows on walls. A lizard basks in the “fire” blazing from above. The reed, used for flutes and blowpipes by the shepherds of ancient poetry, seem to be candles standing upright and mute. Everything is blazing. Instead of pan-pipes, the air is full of the buzz of dragonflies that somehow embody the midday heat and desolation in the wetland. Then, the heat is too much even for the dragonflies. They also fall silent amidst the marshes. Something sounds, perhaps, crickets and there is a sense that the landscape is screaming with pain that embitters the heart. The sun, like a great lamp, is now setting, descending into the reedy landscape. A giggling manic wind blows toward desolation.
The Havel River described by the poem is a 202 mile tributary to the Elbe that flows near Berlin. Although Huchel often affects the bucolic pose of a humble plow-boy, he was, in fact, raised in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin. And, it’s true that the Havel River expands into a series of big lakes between Potsdam and Berlin. These include the Grosse Wansee, probably the chain of lakes referenced in the fourth stanza.
So how was this particular word-painting hung upside down?
Let’s look closely at the fourth stanza that I will quote in German:
Die dunkle Libelle / der Seen wird still. / Es toent nur das grelle / Herzboese Geschrille.
“The dark dragonflies / of the lakes become silent. / There sounds only the shrill / evil-to-the-heart shrilling.”
This is the central inflection point in the poem. In the midday heat and silence, it seems that the Great God Pan makes an appearance. Instead of the domestic agrarian melodies of pan-pipe and flute, the silence is infected with a sort of shrieking. I think this scream, which is shrill and evil, signifies “panic” – that is, the sense of the malevolence and indifference intrinsic to nature and, when perceived with full force, terrifying to human beings.
In several versions of this poem, the second line in this stanza is printed with a typographic error, or, perhaps, simply the poet’s variant: Die dunkle Libelle / der Seele wird still – that is, “The dark dragonflies / Of the soul become silent.” Seele means “soul”; the version printed in Huchel’s authorized “collected works” uses the word Seen – that is, “lakes.”
If the two-line sentence is read as “The dark dragonflies of the soul become still,” the fourth stanza (and, indeed, the whole poem) has a different tenor. The poet’s spirit is vibrating in accord with what he beholds: the musical dragonflies hovering over the marsh are now within the poet. They have become an inward phenomenon on the basis of pathetic fallacy. The poet’s drowsiness in the midday heat makes numb the soul – and, the soul’s vacancy, as it were, sets the stage for the invasive “shrilling” that signifies “panic,” the arrival of the Great God Pan. In other words, as with much modernist verse, a word or words can be substituted arbitrarily and some sense retained. The notion that the poem is an organic unity from which nothing can be added or subtracted is evidently not entirely true. Here the soul can be substituted for lakes without demolishing the poem’s broader meanings. In German, the soul is ordinarily imagined as a winged being, something like a butterfly (Schmetterling) – in this context, figuring the soul as a dragonfly is somewhat transgressive but not incoherent.
How would we choose between “lake” and “soul” if we didn’t have Huchel’s ultimate approval of the reading “Seen” (“lakes”)? We would have to assess the totality of Huchel’s poems and develop a notion as to his sensibility. In other words, we would need to read the text in the larger context or Gestalt of Huchel’s writing. At least as a young poet, Huchel is materialist, rooted closely in the realities of soil and vegetation. He has an affinity for boggy, marshy, reedy landscapes. He doesn’t have much time for abstractions. To read “soul” in this setting would be to implant in the poem a Victorian aesthetic that doesn’t seem exactly fitting. Huchel’s poetry seems to me to be affiliated with the Neue Sachlichkeit, the “new objectivity”, that was the banner under which the arts in Germany advanced after Expressionism. On this basis, it would seem to me correct, if not self-evident, to prefer the word “lake” to “soul.” But there’s no doubt that this picture can be hung askew.
3.
What about Zelda Fitzgerald or Antonin Artaud: are their more extreme utterances evidence of genius or insanity?
4.
Several years ago, my wife and I took the car-ferry from Wood’s Hole to Martha’s Vineyard. I had printed maps that showed the way from the ferry docks to the motel where I was staying in Edgartown. The crossing from Cape Cod to the island takes about 45 minutes. It was a fine cool, and clear evening in mid-summer and the sea was smooth. The great mansions on the island’s headland were half-concealed in groves of wind-sculpted trees. On some of the heights, big old houses stood, grey, with their sides eroded by the gales.
The big boat glided into the harbor a little before dusk. The village was crowded with cars and pedestrians. When I drove my rented car from the belly of the barge, the map told me to turn right on the first reasonably large thoroughfare, a two-lane county highway running from the village out of town and over the spine of the island to my destination. But there was no road at all to the right of the lanes leading up from the harbor to the village. I drove for a half-mile without finding the highway out of town and so I retraced my way back to the ferry docks and tried again, hoping that, perhaps, a road had materialized in the intervening minutes. But the highway promised by the map simply wasn’t there. I thought I could identify other landmarks on the map, but the road that I needed to leave the village was missing.
The sun began to set. I decided that the map was a picture hung upside-down. Features on the map appeared to be reversed. Perhaps, right meant left. And, so, I returned to the dock, the ferry long since departed, and turned around, taking the first left. This route led me onto streets that became increasingly narrow and residential, after a few blocks I found myself at a small park surrounded by little cottages closely packed around a meeting house that was built like a large, burly barn. This seemed to me completely wrong – it was as if I had found my way to some kind of elaborate summer camp where people sat on porches in the gloaming and an orchestra on a bandshell was playing a hymn in the green twilight. It seemed that I had lost my way not only in space but time. I inspected my map again and thought I saw marks showing where the park was located and so I drove slowly to the edge of town and, then, zigzagged back and forth inland, following roads that were marked on the paper. The roads didn’t seem to be where they were supposed to be, but enough of them lined-up that I gradually made my way into the island. At last, I came to an intersection with the highway that I was supposed to follow for twenty minutes to Edgartown.
The next day I discovered the source of the problem. My ferry itinerary said that the boat would land at place called Vine Haven and the map instructions were designed with that assumption. But, in fact, the car ferry had docked at Oak Haven on the other side of the harbor. The reason that my map was inaccurate was that I was in the wrong town entirely.
The map wasn’t reversed or upside-down, its reader was.
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