We’re starting to get into the weeds here. I feel like I need to start this week’s newsletter with a disclaimer: I’m not a scholar. Ok, that’s done now I can start writing.
In the weeds among the dried out harvested cornstalks is a withered balloon that fell from the sky. It’s 1981 in Northwestern West Virginia. A farmer named Alonzo Pullins finds that dead balloon and picks it up to put it in the garbage. He notices a piece of paper folded into a tiny square and wrapped with clear tape. He brings it home and shows it to his wife. They open up the package and find a note from me. Weeks after I had let the balloon go in Southwestern Ohio it’s there in their kitchen and they sit down and write back.
All I ever wrote in those hundreds of balloon notes I let go over the years was hello my name is Jenny Perlin if you find this note please write me back at this address. After much practice I learned the tiniest note was the best for springing that balloon up and out of sight of my own small dead-dull corn-stalked town.
Now that we have Google I see the balloon went over 200 miles. Mr. and Mrs. Alonzo Pullins were the only ones who ever wrote back. They enclosed a polaroid of themselves standing like American Gothic in a brownish kitchen. We corresponded for some time and then I become a teenager and didn’t write more.
These are correspondences. This is what I mean when I’m talking about art and about you and about the productive foolishness of making things. Of writing these things.
***
I’ve gotten myself in a bit of a fix now because I want to turn to Baudelaire and I’m kind of nervous. But I need to write about his poem Correspondances from Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), from 1868. It’s one of those poems that makes you believe you can do anything, including translate French. Reading the translations of the poem make me want to curl up in a ball and wither away. And I am not fluent in French. But I too have tried translating it, to disastrous results.
Correspondances is one of those poems that makes my heart hum toward the page with a desire to know, to inhabit, to be surrounded by words and unfamiliar spaces Whether that surrounding is an embrace or a crushing anaconda I do not know. I guess the translation that’s acceptable to me is the familiar one, the most literal one.
***
I’ve seen the whole world as translation my whole life. What I saw with my eyes requested to go into words, what I said demanded to be honed and rehearsed so it came out right until language became automatic and appropriate; what I read translated into the bodily flows of internal organs shifting to their own music; what I heard felt like a breeze on the hairs on my cheek or subtle movements between eyes and mouth. But then there’s the concreteness of the page itself and its beautiful simple black ants on white sand jogging along to their own time.
Translation: an art, a house of cards, a class project made of toothpicks.
My knowledge of Emanuel Swedenborg—18th century inventor, scientist, mystic—comes from a hyperactive machete-swath through the internet. But I have to mention him because Baudelaire is referring to Swedenborg’s description of correspondences, where a thing on earth or a natural phenomenon corresponds directly to a spiritual space. Everything matches up. We can’t see it. But we know it. For Baudelaire, artists are especially adept at making these correspondences visible by using symbols and metaphors. But he could. That’s about it for Swedenborg for the moment, except to say that Swedenborg, like Jules Verne and I share a birthday. And he designed a flying machine in 1714. Which makes perfect sense to me.
More correspondents:
Rosmarie Waldrop. Keith Waldrop. Translators, poets, heroes. Bringing me into the world of sound and speech. Keith Waldrop was my teacher in a very beginning English survey class in college. Already when I got there I knew I wasn’t going to be an English major but since it had been my destiny in the four years prior and I didn’t know any better I took the class. I dutifully carted my huge Norton’s Anthology and typed illogical, noncommittal papers. Feeling very stupid in a class of those all very smart and very quick.
Then one day Waldrop brought in the tape recorder. He must have checked it out from the library or brought it from home. It was enormous, beige, with giant Play and Stop buttons. Sometimes I remember it as a record player instead. Out of the speaker came the crinkly old voice of Gertrude Stein reading from Tender Buttons. And my world came alive.
Correspondences, on the page and in the ear. Everything matched up: the translation of self to page and self to speech neither the same nor contradictory; both feeding each other and fulfilling themselves. My eyes widened; I nodded and smiled and floated out of class forever changed.
Over twenty years later I wrote a fan email to Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop. I asked if I could make a film about them and their lifetime of publishing with Burning Deck Press. Rosmarie politely refused. I then relayed the story about Keith and the tape recorder or record player and Stein and conveyed my thanks. She graciously accepted them and later contributed works by them both to my fledgling Hoosac project. That year I wrote a lot of thank you emails to teachers who had changed my life. They were pretty much all writers.
At the beginning of many teaching semesters I play a recording of Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop reading their collaborative poem Light Travels. The class and I follow along with the written text. I’m not sure if the students get it but it makes me happy every time. Click the image and it’ll take you to a recording of the authors reading it to you.
Another correspondence work that I play for students every term is Charles Bernstein and Amy Sillman’s Pinky’s Rule. I wax so enthusiastic about this piece that the students sometimes look a little alarmed. I justify my indulgences by explaining that art is contrapuntal and insists on being collaborative even if you do it all yourself. That the back and forth of language and image produces more than the sum of its parts.
Hearing Sillman’s down-to-earth voice articulating Bernstein’s words and following the bright pixelated images drawing themselves and transforming in real time you can’t tell which is from which plane of existence, which color appears out of the sound and which transformation rolls the words over into the next. Sillman’s voice hums in your ears as the color vibrations do that retinal neurological humming they’re so good at doing (and in her artwork which she is a genius at doing). The image below is linked so you can watch and hear the whole glorious thing.
An oar dips gently into the water. A skate blade wobbles and then finds its track. A balloon tugs its burdensome package up; buoyed by a gust just clears humming telephone wires. Neck craned hopefully you insist on staying just like that until it’s a speck and then you’re not sure even that: might be floater in your eye or grain of sky.
***
The start of Beethoven’s 9th is also a hum, an orchestra’s collective hum deciding if it’s going to obey the expectations of…of the conductor, of the composer, of the audience. I’ve always called that opener the ‘orchestra tuning’ section, where the line between preparation and performance blurs. The things outside the frame of offical performance, official framelines, sound binaural eyes faking three dimensions: the music hums its way into an explosion of repetitive relentless motion the swells of the waves growing larger and then calming again.
I think about Baudelaire’s last stanza of The Voyage. I wish I could fully embrace it but I hold back, like I wish I could charge full force into the thunder of Beethoven’s 9th blasting along without remorse and without acceptance. Baudelaire trips us here and we lose our balance, find ourselves leaping shrieking joyfully into this cataclysmic orgasmic end:
“Heaven or Hell, what does it matter? To the depths of the Unknown to find the new!”
***
Tentative attempts to begin humming again started at the old Whitney Museum in 2002 as the city I call home was staggering onward, pulling an overloaded cart of stamina and relentless fortitude toward inevitable new wars. (Those wars ending now like last lumps of a sand castle stubbornly resisting tide.)
The army tanks were still parked at Battery Park City; postcards of ravaged Twin Towers still offered for sale on Canal. Barricades we now take for granted blocked our paths and we kept finding ourselves disoriented, standing downtown not knowing which way to turn; landmarks and loved ones gone. Correspondences.
I don’t remember which Whitney floor it was on but I remember it was to the left as you came in to one of them. The sound gentle, lulling, faint, mesmerizing, a hum that you know, that you want to know more. Lorna Simpson’s video installation: Easy to Remember, from 2001.
Such a generosity and interiority and a wonderment. For my ears: a space I can’t ever fully know but stand in awe of. Stories held and known, recalled, restored, embraced and secreted away. That’s how I felt standing there in Simpson’s piece, my boat rocking in the aftermath of the storm. Waves shimmering just above the wreckage.
Here is an image linked to the video of Lorna Simpson’s Easy to Remember, for you.
Our hums make correspondences. Our hums are what we’ve got.