My Views on Elective Abortion

Below is a world map denoting the national policies regarding elective abortion. As can be seen from the map, abortion on demand is mostly a condition predominant in Western, "first world" countries. From this perspective, restriction on abortion is seen to be weighted primarily toward Third World nations, in which religious or cultural traditions are rooted in pre-scientific or pre-modern viewpoints regarding the inviolability ("sacredness") of life, or in which women (as members of a class) have traditionally been relegated to an inferior position of authority or power.  

 

   

Legend transcription     Legal on request     Legal for maternal life, health, mental health, rape, fetal defects, and/or socioeconomic factors     Legal for or illegal with exception for maternal life, health, mental health, rape, and/or fetal defects     Illegal with exception for maternal life, health, mental health and/or rape     Illegal with exception for maternal life, health, and/or mental health     Illegal with no exceptions 

 

Abortion is not a new procedure, though its means and effectiveness remained primitive and dangerous right up until the 20th Century, when more scientific means of application were developed. Abortions, of a kind, were known to have been practiced since ancient times. With the arrival of safe and efficient abortion procedures, it has become more widespread, and has increasingly come under scrutiny.  The public acknowledgment of the desirability of legal abortion has been gradually increasing over the last century. Attempts around the world to legalize the availability of abortion have come up against various religious and ethical barriers, based on concepts of the sacredness of life at conception--regarded as holy--or on suppression of a women's right to determine the outcomes of her own pregnancies. 

 

The Catholic Church has traditionally lobbied against the practice of abortion, regarding conception as a holy event, not to be traduced by human intervention. If conception is a moment of divine grace, it's argued, then anyone who subscribes to this doctrine must accept that all abortions constitute an act of murder, and a sin against god. 

 

Never having been much of a religious person myself--my parents forced me to attend the Presbyterian Church for four years, though they never attended any church, to my knowledge--the idea of all life being sacred and inviolable was never a concept I thought of except in purely profane, philosophical/ethical terms. I grew up during a period in which violent conflict, and the prosecution of "necessary wars" resulting in mass death(s), was regarded as a social and political good. Killing bad people, or people who fought for evil reasons, was a good thing. Evil was a real force in the world, and in order to defeat it, violence was occasionally the last resort in the eternal struggle between virtuous, and non-virtuous individuals or groups. There were those who might attempt to attach religious significance or meanings to such conflict, but these kinds of meanings were outmoded in the modern world. Death was a necessary consequence of the prosecution of moral righteousness, and could be shown to be a healthy process, on a case by case basis. Otherwise, terrible consequences would occur.

 

Despite attempts by religious zealots, or right-wing extremists, to convince me otherwise, I continue, in late middle-age, to regard the so-called "preciousness" of, or right to life as a morally indefensible absolute. 

 

Much of the suffering in the world is a consequence not only of over-crowding and mindless increase, but of the conflicts which develop over the scarcity of resource or land. In the 19th Century, it was still possible to regard the earth almost as an infinite resource, in which mankind, no matter how fast it increased and spread, would never challenge natural limits. We now know, to our despair, how false that assumption was. 

 

The raw value of life is roughly proportional to the likelihood of its prevalence. We think nothing of killing hundreds, thousands, even millions of animals at a time, our only probable remorse being that this may, precipitously or over time, end up driving a species into total extinction, its existence only a memory. Each year, millions of humankind worldwide die from hunger, disease, violent conflict. We think nothing of hearing, for instance, that a thousand people died miserably last week in Eastern Africa. Que sera, tough luck, we think to ourselves. 

 

Yet we argue endlessly over the sacredness of fetuses. Fetuses, after all, are "innocent" and "helpless" victims. The propagation of life is indeed a miraculous process, designed by nature to perpetuate the descent of species over time. Like all animals, however, reproduction is designed to overcome the inherent moderation of numbers which limit all living things. If a species is to survive, its method of replication must be many times more efficient than mere maintenance, since the balance of available sustenance is never unlimited. The reason that all the living things now on the earth exist, is that their reproductive success overcame the challenges set before them. And that prevalence was also facilitated by adaptation, both genetic and circumstantial. In other words, our ability to reproduce, and to reproduce with alternative models, are what enabled us to survive.  

 

But what happens when you begin to overcome natural limits through the artificial elimination of enemies--such as predators, disease--or by obtaining easy availability of food and materiel? You change the ground-rules of descent. Man's manipulation of the environment has meant that we've created an artificial condition in which the natural limits to our increase have been moderated. This has led to our current "population explosion." And this in turn has led to a whole host of new problems, few of which seem immediately soluble. Our science and technology has facilitated a rapid expansion, but has provided us with precious few ultimate answers about how we might prevent even these impressive parameters from curtailing our continued profligacy. We've postponed armageddon, but we can't delay it forever.

 

Unlike the rest of the natural kingdom, humans have large, complex brains. We can see and understand the consequences of our acts, and have some control over our destinies. We know from nature that life is only as precious as its possessors can make it. The substance and value of the individual may be paramount in ethical or political terms, but in the grand scheme of life on this planet, individuals are relatively trivial. Henry David Thoreau is often quoted as saying that he wished "to live deliberately"--that is, to live with purpose and direction, to a given end. Clearly, as members of a successful species, we no longer need to pretend that the mindless increase of our numbers, promoted through our sexual drives and moral concepts of our own sacred value, are sufficient as a guide to conduct. Man doesn't need to preserve the notion of sexual union as a sacred event leading to a holy, inviolable conception. That idea may have seemed viable once, when humankind was of manageable extent, and growth seemed like a natural good. But people are not ants.   

 

First trimester abortions should remain an option available to all women. Men and women aren't just dumb animals. We can prevent conception, or we can terminate it, with equal rationality. It is not a devaluation of life to want to manage our numbers, either on the grand scale, or on the individual level. If we can, with good conscience, punish and kill each other as adults, then we have the moral authority to determine whether we shall, or shall not, add to our numbers. 

  

I regard ethical arguments based on the presumed value of the immature fetus to be nonsensical. A "human" the size of a pea, or smaller, does not weigh on my conscience. In a theoretical sense, life begins at inception. But nature isn't interested in theories. It only demands, that as a species, we prevail. There really isn't much question about that, anymore. We need to "want" to bring life into being, into the fullness of potential and affection. Accidents and rapes and unwanted babies are not "acts of god." We have brains, if only we will use them.      

Editing Eigner's Collected Poems - Considerations [Part I]

The editing of the collected works of a prolific author--especially a poet--is a complex undertaking, involving as it does the sifting, sorting and organization of a large body of work. Authors may or may not leave their work to posterity in a state which makes the task of editing it convenient. Some think hard and carefully about their legacy, and do their best to pass it on in a finished state, in effect "self-editing" themselves, in such a way as to control how they wish it to be perceived and understood. Others are less concerned with such conclusiveness. In the case of Larry Eigner, we had an instance of an author who, because of physical disability, was prevented from making "perfected" texts, due to an inability to write neatly, or to manipulate the manual typewriter with sufficient ease. Despite this limitation, Eigner had clear ideas about how his poems were meant to be "set" typographically. It certainly is not clear that he ever envisioned a presentation of his holographic typewriter pages as final, finished works, like paintings or drawings.             

 

 

Luckily, however, Eigner was assisted to preserve his work through a process of progressive storage, in an arrangement with the University of Kansas Kenneth Spencer Research Library, begun decades ago, whereby periodic regular deposits of his emerging work were sent for inclusion in a growing archive, surprisingly accurate and complete given Eigner's own tricky system of classification and dating of his individual poems. After Eigner's death in 1996, his brother Richard presented the contents of Larry's files and correspondence to Stanford University Green Library. The Larry Eigner Papers archive comprises 19 boxes, and contains a wealth of biographical, historical, literary and textual information.     

 

   
 

Back in 1974, I was a struggling writer, recently graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, attempting to make some kind of living, while pursuing a career in writing. I had begun a small literary magazine called simply L, in which I published the work of poets whom I liked or emulated. I was also interested in publishing books, but lacked the funds required to pay the printing and binding costs. I applied for and received grants from the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines, as well as from the Small Publisher's Grants Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, to support the magazine, and to publish books by poets. In my first application for a publisher's grant from NEA, I listed, among others, a proposal for the publication of Larry Eigner's Collected Poems. Eigner still lived, at the time, in his parents' house in Swampscott, Massachusetts. My proposals were extravagant, given the obstacles to realization, but in those days I dreamed big dreams. 

  

I remember distinctly, at the time, mentioning this proposal to Barry Watten, who lived in similar circumstances, in San Francisco. He was more familiar with the exigencies of Eigner's situation, having published his work in this magazine, which he co-edited at that time, with Robert Grenier, a poet and teacher under whom we had both studied while at UC Berkeley in the late 1960's. "You have no idea what that would involve," he said, "the state of the manuscripts, the amount of material, you're not set up to accomplish anything like that." 

  

How right he was! As it turned out, NEA didn't grant me the huge sum I had requested, so my plans ended up being curtailed. But I did end up publishing a short pamphlet of Larry's poems, My God/The Proverbial, an experience which taught me a good deal about the state of his work desk, and how he went about filing and arranging for publication(s). Based on what I had known about the state of his work, circa 1975, I believed that a collected poems, representing all the published work up to that date, might occupy a volume of perhaps 400 pages. As it turns out, Larry had already, by that time, produced enough work easily to fill about 1000 pages, depending upon how the work was laid out. Oyez Press [Robert Hawley] had published the Selected Poems, Edited by Samuel Charters, in 1972, a modest collection of 125 pages, which included some prose writing in addition to the poetry. 

 

Nevertheless, the dream of a collected poems by Eigner remained in the back of my mind, but as the years passed, and I drifted away from the literary scene, the idea seemed more and more improbable. At Larry's funeral, in 1996, in Richmond, California, the idea re-occurred to me. Larry had been moved to the Bay Area by his brother Richard after their Mother had died, and had, for about a decade, lived in a communal household that included Robert Grenier. In due course, Bob revealed that he too had envisioned an eventual collected poems project, in preparation for which, he had collaborated with Larry over the years to produce perfected typescripts of over a thousand pages of Larry's best work. This was done on an IBM Selectric Typewriter, with its old bouncing font-ball and brisk automated carriage-return. It was clear that, whatever the eventual venue, this body of edited material would form the core of any consolidated collection of Larry's life-work.

 

Without either the two archives at Kansas and  Stanford, or Grenier's perfected/edited text file, editing Eigner's collected poems would probably have been a nearly impossible task.  

   

In 1996, the same year of Larry's funeral, my own son Randall Matthew died in an automobile accident in Hayward. For several years, this tragic event overshadowed our lives, and caused us to put thoughts about projects and plans aside. As I approached retirement, after 25 years working with the Federal Government, I realized that I would, for the first time in decades, be in a position to devote some serious attention to things that had lain dormant in memory. When I retired in August 2001, just 10 days before 9/11, I approached Robert Grenier with the suggestion that we explore the possibility of editing Eigner's Collected Poems for publication. I felt that, if this were not done pretty soon, it might never happen, not least because those who knew Larry's work, and who would be in a position to understand and facilitate it, were moving on, and growing old. Bob, who was living in Bolinas, was reluctant. Though he had always promised himself that if the occasion arose, he would certainly do this great task, he of all people knew of its enormity, having lived intimately with Larry (and his manuscripts) for many years. "Think of this as a collaboration," I told him, "in which I am the "facilitator"--i.e., the one who types and reconnoiters copies and serves as a sort of major domo. Tentatively, he agreed to the idea.  

  

At this point, one must understand, we had no idea where the book (or books) might be published. We inquired at several places. In due course, Bob prevailed upon his old Harvard modern literature professor Robert Gelpi, who had recently retired (emeritus) from Stanford University's Department of English. Gelpi proposed the project to Stanford University Press, and with the support of, among others, Robert Creeley, our application was approved. We signed the contract in 2004--though our work on it had been ongoing for at least a year previous to this.

 

End Part I

 

[In the next two subsequent parts of this narrative, I'll address the questions and problems we encountered in editing the text.]            

The Prince of Monaco Was Sick of English Ladies

The title of this blog post comprises the first two lines of a longish poem I want to appreciate here. A poem of 28 stanzas in five sections. A poem in a manner now considered out of fashion. A poem about royalty, which begins in flagrant insolence, but proceeds to submerge, like a bathyscaphe descending slowly into uncharted depths. 

 

    

  

The poem appears in Simpson's Pulitzer Prize winning collection At the End of the Open Road [Wesleyan University Press, 1963], and is in some respects rather unlike the other poems in that book, though typical of his earlier style. 

   

Simpson was interested in the tectonic migration of cultural feeling from East to West, from Europe to America, and beyond--as well as what that movement might suggest to us in our unfolding present. The title of the poem--Moving the Walls--does indeed suggest a transportation. It is full of exotic and diverting detail, as if the accretion of cultural privilege could be expressed as a kind of taxonomic accumulation of objects, vouchsafed from history. 

 

 

Moving the Walls

 

  

The Prince of Monaco 

Was sick of English ladies. 

 

The Prince had a yacht

And her name was Hirondelle.

She was cousin to the yacht of the Kaiser

And niece to the yacht of the Tsar.

 

And the Prince was interested in the sea--

That is, oceanography.

So he furnished the yacht with instruments

And with instruments of brass,

Burners and sinks and instruments

Of the most delicate glass.

 

There was also a whaleboat

And a whole crew of harpooners.

There was a helmet and suit of armor

For the wars of the ocean floor.

 

The Hirondelle trembled like a fern,

And the crew stood at attention,

And they piped the Captain aboard.

 

 

2

 

Cloud-sailed, the Hirondelle

Pursued the horizon.

At night she skimmed

The phosphorescent surges.

 

And now they are on the Pacific,

The bottomless sea.

 

And out of the deep they have drawn

The whale. Leviathan, with a hook.

They have captured the giant squid

That has ten arms, claws like a cat's, a beak like a parrot's,

And a large malevolent eye.

 

They stepped from the whaleboat into shoals,

The crests of sunken mountains.

In nets they gathered

Plankton and weeds and crabs that looked astonished.

 

And there were nights, O Prince,

When you stretched your hands and feet

In the leaves of the pomegranate tree!

 

And all went into the log.

The various sea trophies.

Were written down in the log.

The darkening sky, the storm,

And tranquil days--

All, all went into the log.

 

 

3

 

The Prince returned, a hero of sorts.

He returned to his former life,

To the lights of the Grand Hotel,

And the Russian ladies with their eternal cigarettes.

 

Then he built a museum.

The wheel of the Hirondelle is there,

And also the laboratory, the strange heart of the ship

Uprooted, leaving red holes

In the deck that vanished in smoke.

 

Here are the trophies:

A walking stick made from the backbone of a shark;

Tortoiseshell combs, and fans of mother-of-pearl,

Corals that faded,

Losing the changing hues of sea and sky;

Sea shells under glass

That are as dull as buttons

Sewn on garments by girls who have faded.

 

The Philippine Island are a box

And the smile of a lady in a mantilla.

 

A walrus stuffed with straw

Faces the diving helmet.

They remember Verdun and Passchendaele,

The mud-clouded wars of the ocean floor.

 

So all that oceanography, after all,

Was only a pawnshop.

For they brought home the tooth of the whale

And said "Look!

It is only a doorstop, after all."

 

For Leviathan does not exist,

And the sea is no mystery.

For a shark is a walking stick.

 

And this we call the life of reason.

 

 

4

 

Idiots!

We too are all for reducing

The universe to human dimensions.

As if we could know what is human!

 

Just a few dippers of sea water

And a fair wind home . . .

Then surely we won't be destroyed.

 

A strange idea, if you consider

The dust of those settlements--

The parlors where no one lives;

The splinter that wounds the foot-sole

On its way to the double bed;

And Leviathan over all,

The cloud shaped like a weasel or a whale,

Leviathan rising above the roof tops.

 

 

5

 

When men wanted the golden fleece

It was not wool they wanted.

They were the trophies that they sailed toward.

 

They were the sea and the wind

That hurled them over

Into the sea. They were the fishes

That stripped their thin bones. And they rose

In the night in new constellations.

 

They left no wreckage.

Nothing is floating on the surface.

For they yielded themselves

To the currents that moved from within.

 

They are mightily changed

In the corollas, the branched sea-heaven.

 

And you, my country,

These days your walls are moving,

These nights we are branching among the stars.

 

I say, but my mind is doubtful.

Are there any at sea?

If so, they have not whispered lately.

____________________

 

   

This is a period photograph of the Hirondelle, taken (I presume) at its berth in Monaco. And this is the accompanying description: 

 

Yacht name: Hirondelle II 
Length: 269 ft • 82 m 
Year: 1911 
Builder: FCM, La Seyne, Toulon 
Size: 1650 tonnes 
Photo location: Monaco 
Power: 2200 hp twin screw 
Speed: 15 knots 
Owner: Prince Albert I, Albert Grimaldi of Monaco (1848 - 1922) 

Hirondelle II was Albert's fourth and final explorer ship which he had built in 1911. 
His fastest, largest ship, it was even equipped with wireless telegraph. 
Whenever the Prince spent time in Monaco during WWI he stayed on board the yacht in the harbour! 
After the war the ship stayed in Monaco harbour to his death in 1922. 
A year later she sailed to England to be sold. She passed into American hands, spent many years berthed in New York, then Rhode Island. 
She ended her days ingloriously as a pontoon in the Panama canal! 

Prince Albert was something of a pioneer in deep-sea sonic measurements and also pulled up a great number of wierd animals from the depths. 
Many a ghostly specimen can still be found preserved in yellowing formaldehyde-filled specimen jars in the Oceanographic Museum, which he founded in 1906. 


Photo credit: By kind permission of NOAA Rice Library of the NOAA Centers for Coastal Ocean Science 
Image ID: ship4641, NOAA Ship Collection 
The HIRONDELLE II. Plate III, figure 13. In: "Results of the Scientific Campaigns of the Prince of Monaco." Vol. 84. 

 

Here is a slightly more flattering portrait of the yacht-- 

 

 

 

And here is her Captain, Albert I, Albert Grimaldi [1848-1922]--

 

 

  

--looking every bit as pompous and foppish as Simpson's poem about him would suggest.

19th Century royalty was swept up in the excitement of Victorian science, and occasionally availed itself of the opportunities for exploration, research and discovery. It was a noble calling, like yacht racing, or building monuments to celebrate the holy lineage, or chasing English ladies. Albert, of course, was the grandfather of Prince Rainier--yes, that Prince Rainier, the one who wooed and married the American actress Grace Kelly, and made her his Princess! Princess Grace died at age 52 in a tragic automobile accident. In the years since, their children have led lives of mischievous indulgence, marrying and divorcing repeatedly, and having many children, the majority out of wedlock. The privileges of nobility continue into the 21st Century.

  

The poem employs a style which I would describe as dramatic prose. It's deliberately stagey, in a way which suggests broad comedy, or burlesque. It satirizes the arrogance and presumption of old-fashioned royalty, which is made to seem overly precious, affected, and supercilious. If this was science, it was a science of recreation, a pretext for displaying wealth, of glorifying one's freedom and means, of enhancing one's official vanity. It is precisely this sort of complacent extravagance which Simpson associates with the worst of the "old world's" tradition, its hypocritical and ponderous airs. Nevertheless, it forms a dramatic backdrop, a kind of tapestry of excess, in itself an entertainment. In the modern world, we view such folly--however well-meaning and pious--as slightly ridiculous. We've lost the sense of pomp and splendour--the emperor's new clothes--which no one takes seriously any more.

 

The catalog of objects in the 2nd and 3rd sections comprise the stale artifacts, the trophies of privilege. These were not specimens of a scientific expedition, like Darwin's voyage on the Beagle, but talismans of fashion. 

 

"When men wanted the golden fleece/It was not wool they wanted." The sense of true adventure cannot be copied or faked. "They were the trophies that they sailed toward./They were the sea and the wind/That hurled them over/Into the sea. They were the fishes/That stripped their thin bones. And they rose/In the night in new constellations." Men dream of a life of heroic engagement, in which risk and enactment are unlimited by the cautions and anxieties of mere mortality. "They left no wreckage./Nothing is floating on the surface./For they yielded themselves/To the currents that moved from within." The dreams of ancient heroes were moved by their own currents, but they left no evidence of this ("wreckage"). We assigned men's names like deities to the heavens, but there are no material souvenirs of spiritual conquest from the age of mythical beings. They survive as "a murmur of serious life."  

  

Yet, Simpson demurs, "you, my country,/These days your walls are moving,/These nights we are branching among the stars.//I say, but my mind is doubtful./Are there any at sea?/If so, they have not whispered lately." Do we still hear the sea in the conch? The call of far-off adventure, across oceans, continents, the very stars? Can we tell which is the genuine, which the fraud? Are we like impotent princes on a sea of excelsior?           

 

 

Ruth Bernhard's Matchless Images

The work of Ruth Bernhard [1901-2006] presents the case of a commercial photographer whose vision and technique transcended the purposes and utility of the market-place to achieve a body of images which are among the most startlingly impressive, and sensually persuasive in the history of photography. 

 

A centenegenarian (!!!) who lived a complicated life, as a bi-sexual woman artist, in a profession dominated by men--and men's vision--and bravely explored the subject of the female nude, during an era in which such subject-matter was scorned or censored. 

 

   

I'm not privy to the commercial archives which must exist of her work, thus I am limited to the apprehension of her work which has been reproduced in the several monographs devoted to her black and white images; but, the first thing that jumps out at you is that she doesn't repeat herself. Unlike many contemporary serious photographic artists, she doesn't exploit one or two simple conceptual ideas ad infinitum. Each composition is uniquely seen and made (or allowed) to express a distinct visual point. 

 

  

Primarily a studio photographer, Bernhard was interested in controlling the circumstances--the lighting and exigencies of the moment--of each exposure, which allowed her to concentrate on the structure and tones of the image, without distraction. 

 

The image of the life-savers would undoubtedly have sufficed to highlight the shape and white purity of breath mints--but the cleverness and intensity of the image, its playfulness and delight transcend its obvious purpose. Commercial work at this level is so good it works on both levels with little sense of diffusion. She is in this respect quite like Irving Penn, whose many "magazine pictures" for Vogue over the years now can be seen as comprising a separate vision, which towers above its original commercial pretexts, to become a series of iconic symbols of a whole cultural period.

 

       

The photo of the movie theatre above suggest the symbolic "aperture" in front of the "lens" of the camera's eye, and by extension the photographer's, or viewer's eye. A movie theatre is therefore metaphorically the "inside" of the perceiving brain, in which the "movie" of sensory data is transmitted. 

  

Bernhard's nudes, which are the basis of her fame and reputation, are characteristically muted, with a kind of classic calm, an approach which expresses a respect for the body, while metaphorically caressing it with a humility and affection that is almost a-sexual in its regard. --which may be one reason why Bernhard's nudes, unlike those of many other photographers of the nude, were accepted--because of this very neutrality--an impartiality which may yield clues to Bernhard's aesthetic. 

 

      

Bernhard's nudes are satisfying, both as constructions of masses in space, as well as worshipful paeans to female beauty. They show how it is possible to perceive the human body simultaneously as both a sexual identity and a purely geometric wonder, without implying either prurience or vicarious possession. This distance, or objectivity, is a quality not always easy to achieve. 

 

     

Seen together, Bernhard's body images and her abstract still-lifes and studies compliment one another, demonstrating the same care and insight into meaning and structure. The study of two leaves (above) and the vertical opened shell (below) both exact the same derivation from nature--of complementarity through difference, or the graceful balance of bi-lateral cohesion (or fit). 

 

 

The portrait below ambiguates the emotional content: It may express calm, introspection, or thrall (dionysian passion), but our predominent impression is in the balancing of effects: The stretching of the neck from the vertical to the horizontal, the sleek planes of skin against the wispy tresses of hair, the sensual contours of shading and illumination. It both is and is not primarily a photograph of a young woman in a certain position. It's mostly a made thing, a reflexion of beauty controlled and organized, held in perfect, balanced tension. 

 

          

Bernhard's curiosity finds expression in unlikely objects and contrasts. The smashed pot below was an object she found, but placing it before the distorted light background creates a collage of contrasting textures which is mysterious, and intriguing. I can't take my eyes off it! 

 

   

The ability to "see" as a camera does takes experience. Most of us pass unwittingly each day beside fascinating visual compositions, which we don't notice because they meld into the vortex of data which assaults our senses continuously. The image below is an example of this. Translucent hoses in pale pastel hues are quite common, but who would think of making one the primary focus of a photographic image? 

 

   

Several of Bernhard's best nude compositions utilize the notion of containment. Bodies in boxes, in large basins, seen through veils of fabric, or fogged glass, etc. This is a framing device, but it also creates a structural tension between the sinuous flexibility of the body, and rigid geometric planes and angles: The body accommodates the volumes and curtailments of coordinated space, while softening and filling it with organic adaptations, like an octopus squeezing through a narrow tube. 

 

        

Clotheslines have been a traditional subject of photographers since the medium was born. Here, Bernhard turns the mode on its head by emphasizing the astonishing beauty of an old torn rag, illuminated from behind by mid-morning light. Several possible metaphors could be derived from the layering of the fabric, in front of the pole and arms behind. The best abstractions are those which suggest, but do not completely denote an image or programmatic signifier. 

 

     

Another aspect of her work, is her ability to make ordinary objects seem strange, or to make unusual objects or situations intriguing. I'm not sure what the two objects are in the photograph below, but my imagination is drawn to them. This strangeness is one of the strongest aspects of post-Modern art. Classic Surrealism was/is often preoccupied with making ordinary things seem peculiar or out-of-context. Post-Modernism often seems to be about making shapes and masses which suggest other things or objects, but don't actually quite look like something familiar. The more we look at them, the more they simply become self-contextual, non-referential content. 

 

  

The image below suggests to me the kind of approach Bernhard would have learned from her commercial practice in Los Angeles. Stage composition. The lighting seems very stagy, but dreamlike as well. The fact that these are puppets seems secondary, somehow, to the meaning of the relationships between the figures and the tilted window. It's obviously some kind of "Easter" story, but the "moment" of the exposure, the fixed positions, the tilt, gestural and filled with anticipation, is uncanny. 

      

The last image is my favorite of Bernhard's published oeuvre. It's troubling. Is the covered body (and head/face) meant to suggest death? Suppression of identity, of female submission or shame? And the decision to render it in a horizontal oval is equally suggestive. I've never been clear on why early photographers chose to frame images in oval. Facial oval portraits obviously had some kind of rational basis, but Bernhard's use of framing is a different matter entirely. I leave the reader with this conundrum. What does this image suggest, and what is the basis of its troubling suggestiveness?

 

      

Wright Morris - The Inhabitants - A Pioneer Work

Wright Morris's "photograph-and-text" book The Inhabitants [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons] was published 54 years ago, in 1946, at the tail end of the Depression Era ("WPA") period, and stands, after half a century, as a ground-breaking and unique approach to visual-verbal exploration of subject matter.   

Morris [1910-1998] had already published two full-length novels--My Uncle Dudley [1942] and The Man Who Was There [1945] when this book appeared. His interest in combining prose narratives with straight photographic images had never been tried before, and Morris would probably have continued producing works (what he called "photo-texts") in the genre he created, had his publisher not persuaded him to abandon it. The Home Place [1948] and The World in the Attic [1949] were both "photo-texts" but Morris removed the photos from the third book. He published one more book in this form--God's Country and My People in 1968. Having grown up in Nebraska, living for periods in flat rural farm country, as well in prairie cities, Morris absorbed the culture and landscape of the plains country, and saw in it a kind of poetry. 

       

In both his fiction and his photography, there's a clean, stark, "abandoned" quality very reminiscent of the Dust Bowl era work of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Marion  Post Wolcott, Jack Vachon. But whereas in the hands of these other artists, the worn-out, dispossessed landscape of the prairie was seen through the lens of a hand-wringing social conscience, Morris regarded it almost from a purely aesthetic position, largely emptied of its political partisanship. Indeed, Morris's love of the rural Nebraska farm towns and perspectives seems to idolize its loneliness, its spare, empty horizon, its desiccated wood, rusted corrugated sidings, its eroded, scrubby edges. 

 

   

Working with a 4x5 view camera--a more common tool in those days than the 35 millimeter which soon replaced it as the standard for documentary work--Morris focused on scenes nearly always devoid of human presence, which makes his title--The Inhabitants--seem slightly inapt, unless you realize that it's the evidence of human presence that's the real subject of his enterprise, of man erecting vertical structures on the flat plane of the earth, only to see them sag and crumble, slowly, picturesquely, back into the dust. This picturesque decay, unadorned, practical, seems the perfect stuff of black and white image-making. Abandoned farm buildings, blank town shopfronts, grain elevators, sad barber polls, street-light standards at the edges of empty lots, raw, unpainted wood facades, telephone poles, rusting farm implements--all bespeak a harsh, unforgiving landscape in which human subsistence is scratched out in a kind of desperate gambit with mere survival. 

          
 

When the Northern European immigrants--many Scandanavians--came west in the 19th Century, they were happy to discover an empty vastness--room to occupy, open countryside. But the land didn't give much back. This is unforgiving country, it will humble you, will make you value what little you can leverage out of the soil.       

 

 
  

These compositions by Morris almost suggest movie sets--fake Western movie sets--propped up from behind with wooden beams, made to be seen only from one side. And indeed they were undoubtedly among those images that inspired much of Hollywood's cliche'd stereotypical scenes and visions of the Olde West. 

   

 
 

Morris was a wonderful novelist. I read three of his best--The Huge Season [1954], The Field of Vision [1956], and Love Among the  Cannibals [1957], decades ago, and the imprint of his work remains vivid. Yet, despite winning two National Book Awards (1954, 1980), Morris never was a best-seller, and is today still under-appreciated by the general reading public. This is undoubtedly the result of his unsensational approach to his subject.

 

     
 

Born one generation after the high Modernists, and lacking an urban context for his subject-matter, he remained, and was satisfied with being described as, a regionalist, albeit one of our most sophisticated. In a tradition of writing that would include Willa Cather, Carl Sandburg, August Derleth, Hamlin Garland, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and Wallace Stegner, among others, he's not overly aesthetic, not a muckraker. In the world of his fiction, his characters have their feet firmly on the ground. 

 

         

Looking at places like this, I find it hard to imagine growing up in them and not becoming disillusioned with life. The sense of struggle, of the grim, inescapable facts of a lean place appear overwhelming. It's not to many people's taste. Those who come to appreciate it acquire a laconic, dry equanimity which may be expressed as resolute devotion, or rueful humor. The dignity of that effort may have an ennobling effect, or drive one to distraction. In Morris's case, he left to follow his inspiration(s), but spiritually he never left home. As a resident of the Bay Area for the last decades of his life, he saw his reputation come full circle, as the photographic community "rediscovered" his early photo-texts and restored his photographic accomplishments to their rightful place alongside the best work of the 20th Century.         

  

   
 

Rather than being lumped into the "Social Revolution" of the 1930's, Morris's images are now seen as belonging more to the purely aesthetic strain, which would include, for example, Morley Baer, Edward and Brett Weston, Laura Gilpin, Ansel Adams, Imogene Cunningham, Wynn Bullock, etc.--or, photographers whose vision was primarily abstract and/or pictorial, rather than having ulterior philosophical or political bases for their work.      

 

 

Several of Morris's images suggest other approaches, however, than mere documentation. The image above, for instance, has a clear surrealistic quality, as if the structurally shabby accommodation of slope made the wood framing appear almost "sluggish" or elastic--a rectangular jumble of skewed angles and dreamlike distortion. 

 

   
 

Another aspect is the high contrast between the prototypical Victorian architectural tropes set against the emptiness of the prairie, as in this dual portrait above. The structures are more or less structurally unremarkable (or would be in a different, urban setting), but seen in this way, with the strong dividing line of the telephone pole, and isolated against a backdrop devoid of any other context, they look positively weird!

 

   

Morris's narrative inventions invite us to enter imaginatively these drab residences and shops, seeking artifacts and vernacular footage for our casual archival memory-bank. Threadbare white curtains and rugs, comfortable rocking chairs, pellucid wall lamps, coat hangers, and gaudy silver sets from pulled drawers--like the heirlooms to a lost civilization. And in a sense it is lost--the decline of the American farm--the abandonment of the rural paradigm generally--who would be attracted to the empty prairie nowadays? It isn't merely drought and anxiety that killed it, but the memory of hard times is persistent in our culture. It's easy to be nostalgic about American values that once survived in an outback of back-breaking labor and modest ambitions. It's hard to imagine we'll ever revisit the pioneer spirit that inhabited these places. The Inhabitants left, and won't be returning.      

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Addendum: Library of America selections

 

I began to consider, after I'd written the above post, why it was that Wright Morris hadn't been selected for inclusion in the ongoing Library of America series of reprints. The Library of America has its own website, and sells its titles at a discount from retail, and makes announcements about forthcoming volumes in the series. With a few notable exceptions, most of the major American novelists, poets and essayists up to about 1950 have major selections from their works included in the series. But given the disagreements about taste and ranking, the selections made from more recent figures seems increasingly capricious and arbitrary. In some cases, this is a matter of copyrights and permissions: J.D. Salinger, for instance, whose whole work would fit very nicely into a single volume, would presumably not have granted permission for this. Yet there are a number of selections, not only of Morris's contemporaries, but of recent hyper-modern figures, which defy comprehension, some of whom are still living. I.e., Ashbery, Roth, Carver. I certainly have no objection to the inclusion of such writers, but I wonder why we have Baldwin, Bellow, Bowles, Cheever, Kerouac, Maxwell, McCullers, Nabokov, O'Connor, and Welty, but no Wright Morris. Morris won two National Book Awards for fiction. He was proficient not only as a creator of fictions, but a recognized master photographer (and author of "photo-text" documents), and even wrote important autobiographies and important non-fiction essays. If Wright Morris isn't a major American writer of mid-Century America, then no one is. 

 

I have other beefs with LOA choices. How is it that Ezra Pound, whose work is among the most uneven in quality and purpose of any American poet, living or dead, gets a whole volume of poetry and scattered prose works and translations, while William Carlos Williams rates only a relatively tiny selection in the American Poets Project series? Why does Louis Zukofsky, whose collected shorter poems, long poem A (1-24), and amazing sound-translations of Catullus rate only an APP volume, while volumes of similar size are accorded to such admittedly minor figures as Samuel Menashe, A.R. Ammons, Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Koch, Karl Shapiro, and Yvor Winters? 

 

There are no volumes for T.S. Eliot, Robert Sherwood, Robert Lowell, Hilda Doolittle, Marianne Moore, Bernard Malamud, Nelson Algren, Wallace Stegner, Paul Horgan, etc.? Such exclusions baffle me, when we have already been given Agee, Chandler & Hammett, Hart Crane, Manny Farber (Manny Farber?), Liebling and Edmund Wilson, Dawn Powell, Muriel Rukeyser, Stevens, Singer, Thurber and Nathaniel West.  

 

How can you include Thurber, and leave out E.B. White? Why Koch and not O'Hara? No Ring Lardner, no Dorothy Parker, no Oppen, no Olson, no Snyder, no Wilbur! I feel like a demonstrator outside the statehouse chanting slogans....  "No Snyder, no Oppen, no Parker, no Wright Morris!"