The Intricate Room

I love sonnets. They are little and nifty and clever. When they are Donne’s, they are even Holy. Today I am doing the ho-hum job of scanning in all the academia I’ve done in the last 5 years so that I don’t have to hang on to the hard copies. It’s slow going. But I rediscovered an essay I wrote on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet sequence, and I still like it very much (unlike my sophomore essays, which were, well, sophomoric. Also I was in denial about the fact that I was incorrigibly an English major – a new historicist perhaps, but still, an English major, not some kind of History and English hybrid.) Here is the introductory paragraph:

There is something about a sonnet sequence that invites you into a sophisticated number game. Certainly one reason is that the sonnet is one of the most tightly defined forms in English poetry, one most easily described in terms of numbers: a sonnet has fourteen lines, five feet per line, spanning itself out in iambic pentameter; a sonnet has two parts, before and after that mysterious thing, “the turn”. A sonnet most often has a rhyme scheme, which gives us yet another set of numbers that interlock along it; a sonnet is a little, intricate problem: thus we often find it addressing love, one of the most intractable of human experiences. Add to all this mathematical sophistication an additional superstructure – the sonnet sequence – and the possibilities multiply exponentially. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s most famous line which begins her most famous sonnet, the second-to-last (43^rd) in her Sonnets from the Portuguese, is an explicit invitation to a number game:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

What is the nature of this number game? What sort of sequence is it: what are the secret rules that govern whether we read it as 1, 2, 3 or 1, 4, 9? Is this a game where numbers supersede each other, where even alternates with odd? If there were a blank at the end of the sequence, what would be the answer? To understand the nature of this sequence, we must ask: why does it end the way it does?

We can begin with this last question, by examining the very end of the sequence. Let us look again at the famous number 43: the mathematical allusions do not stop with the first line; the very next lines places us onto Cartesian plane axes (x,y and z) –

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

Indeed, what is so remarkable about this immortal poem, quoted so often unconsciously by generations of lovers, is how there is not a single solid object in the whole thing. Her imagery is entirely abstract: we get depth and breadth and height, but nothing more tactile than that. And yet this poem comes across as anything but ungraspable – it is deeply intimate, and clearly it has resonated. Perhaps she has achieved this feat by referring movingly to experiences so universal they take the place of solid objects – “my old grief’s … my childhood’s faith….the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life!” It is never too abstract; it is sublime. I think it is, in itself, quite perfect. But remember: the Sonnets from the Portuguese is a sequence, a number game, and we need to ask why Barrett Browning, who probably knew the power of this sonnet and its wonderful potential as a summary coming after 43 other sonnets, placed it second-to-last rather than last. For the answer, we need to look at 44.

Ah, but I won’t bore you with 12 pages of an academic essay. Here is the whole poem – the rest of it is just as good as the first immortal line:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

And here are my doodles on my favourite poems in Sonnets from the Portuguese:

Elephantine

The Leveler -

entry in The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley

Between 1840 and 1864, the Father of Light (who is also called the Inner Word) afforded the musician and pedagogue Jakob Lorber a series of protracted revelations concerning the humanity, the fauna and the flora of the celestial bodies that make up our solar system. One of the domestic animals that those revelations apprised us of is the Leveler, or Tamper-Downer (Bodendrucker), which renders incalculable services on the planet Miron (identified by the current editor of Lorber’s work as Neptune).

The Leveler is ten times larger than the elephant, which it greatly resembles. It has a shortist trunk, long straight tusks, and pale green skin. Its legs are very thick, and they are conical; the points of the cones seem to fit into its body. The Leveler is a plantigrade animal that labors for bricklayers and builders to level the ground: it is led to a plot of uneven ground, and with its legs, its trunk, and its tusks, it levels it.

The Leveler feeds upon grass and roots and has no enemies, save a few species of insects.

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Illustration of the Leveler by Peter Sis. Photo by Judith Huang.

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I have been fascinated by elephants for a long time. I am slowly amassing a collection of representations of the elephant. I’ve gotten up to four so far.

This fellow is from Ghana. It was given to me by my friend Lois who was a reporter there for a summer. It’s made of wood.

This little guy was blown out of glass by a third-generation glassblower in Murano, Venezia. I remember this guy because he is a True Artist. We had a long conversation and he showed me his best piece, which he doesn’t even bother displaying, which is of a little deer being carried off by an eagle while his mother watches on in panic – a scene from Bambi. He has loved Disney movies since he was a child, and so this fellow was modeled after Dumbo. He doesn’t like tourists, and literally ducked onto the floor when he saw a crowd pass by the store so he wouldn’t have to serve them, as he preferred to show me how he made the glass baubles he was working on. His brother, who makes jewelry a few doors down, is better at earning money than him, but he isn’t too bothered. He is very annoyed that crass little Disney figures made in China are displayed all along the storefronts that are closest to the main island. He has promised, if I’d like, to teach me glassblowing if I should ever return to Venice.

I can’t for the life of me remember how I got this elephant.

This colourful fellow was carved out of wood in San Martin Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico, a village that specializes in the craft. The little figures are called alebrijes.  The wood is extremely light. I also have a really big wooden tiger from one of the artisans there who looks like something out of Picasso. The state of Oaxaca is a puzzling and delightful demonstration of the goods and ills of specialization. You have one village specializing in red pottery, one village specializing in black pottery, one village specializing in a carpets, one in wooden animals, one in cochineal dyes. And you have to wonder if this is the secret to the preservation of craft. The problem is, when the economy is down, craftsmen’s livelihoods are precarious. They pour into Oaxaca City to sell their wares in the market, they turn up in D.F. – Mexico City, and just the word “Oaxaca” is enough to give them instant credibility, a kind of brand signifying quality. But can one rely entirely on tourism?

After all, the sadness of Venice is that there is almost nothing else.

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Treatise on the Prosepoem

by Judith Huang

But it was Baudelaire who launched the genre, giving it a local habitation and a name. Of course, we had to do that visionary work of appropriating that old and sagacious institution – the sentence, and make it our own: The New Sentence, like the New York or the New England. The New Sentence is the Liberated Sentence in prose that works like poetry. Not a unit of logic. But an Independent. Entity that relates. To the sentences before. And after. (In multiple, complex, and ambiguous ways.) But then, like all appropriated things, before long we had to set it loose. We had to let it stride in long strides across the continents. The sentences became a paragraph, and dwelt amongst us. It was akin to the elephant, that most sagacious of beasts, humble enough to be funny and princely enough to be beautiful. It now roams the earth upon its pillared legs, its huge heart spanning acres of cedars, falling in its mellifluous gallop.

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Basically one of my ambitions in life is to grow up to be an elephant. I’m working on it.

FALE

An art installation project with Darell Koh. Concept by Judith Huang. Photos by Darell Koh. Location: Bulldogs by the Big Muddy, St Louis, Missouri.

Warning: grotesque generalizations ahead, use your Discernment.

The Second Fish

Dollar Fish 774-WN. Violett Pelikan Ink, Fountain Pen, Watercolour. 17th July 2010.

2.5″ X 3.5 “(6.35 cm X 8.89 cm), Strathmore Cold Press Watercolor paper. (c) Judith Huang.

Small World

Achievement

Careful!

Work!

Pleasure.

Vanitas.

All from Little Dudes by JD Hancock, on Flickr. Thanks Janice!

The First Fish

Coral Fish 848-MN. Violett Pelikan Ink, Fountain Pen, Watercolour. 16th July 2010. 2.5″ X 3.5 “(6.35 cm X 8.89 cm), Strathmore Cold Press Watercolor paper. (c) Judith Huang.

So, by way of an attempt to make money, I am going to make little paintings of fish (and other objects) copied out of my Pictorial Webster’s: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities by John Carrera (though the colours are from my own imagination). This is Coral Fish 848-MN.

I am going to look into making prints of this on postcards and other saleable commodities – any suggestions would be very welcome. As for the painting itself, I may put it on ebay.

Let me know your thoughts on this and how much you would be willing to donate if I sent you a fishie!

An Analogy of War

Max Ernst, French, Born Germany, 1891- 1976.

Spanish Physician, 1940, Oil on Canvas.

Photographed by Judith Huang at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.

My interpretation:

The Horse of War, a sheet masking his true nature, looks curiously -

A woman, her face stricken with fear, her clothes half torn with starvation, runs off the frame, desperately tossing a token of peace – a blind bird -

The squat man stands, oblivious, on the left. On the hip of his horse is the face of death – the face of war and death.

The Fall of Man: Part 3

The Fall of Man: Part 1: The Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

The Fall of Man: Part 2: Truth Or Consquences

The Fall of Man: Part 3: Expelled with a Promise

Cast: Tony, Shelley, Judith, Paulie.

Venue: L’Abri, Rochester, Minnesota.

The Fall of Man: Part 4 – Redemption

This Is A Pipe

Art Institute of Chicago, Modern Wing. Painting by Rene Magritte. Text in French “This is not a pipe”.

Pipe courtesy of the Harvard Ichthus, for my 23rd birthday.

The Fall of Man: Part 2

Part One can be found here

shoot location: L’Abri, Rochester, Minnesota

personnel: Tony, Judith, Shelley