The mind works in funny (strange) ways. I usually do the crossword puzzle that keeps appearing in my daily newspaper. Sometimes I even finish it. In any case, a funny "mind trick" happened to me this morning, and it's the reason why I have decided to write this little, hopefully interesting, but otherwise trivial essay.
I came across the clue "Dutch bloom" - and I immediately thought of the word "tulip." And it fit, and so it was the right word. But then my mind suddenly jumped to a scene in a charming Italian movie (and then to you all in Iran - more of this now as this is actually the reason for this little essay). The charming Italian movie is called Bread and Tulips in English (Pane e tulipani - in Italian). The scene involves the heroine in the story (a middle-aged woman who ends up in Venice where she decides to stay for a while); in the scene she is in the floral shop where she has found a job, having tea with her boss. The florist is an eccentric old man who suddenly tells her that although everyone associates tulips with Holland, they actually come from Persia.
So that's why I am writing this little essay now. Because Iran is the seat of ancient Persia - right? In any case, it's funny how one thing (or idea) suddenly leads to another in our minds. In fact, 20th century fiction (in the early parts of the century) began to use this idea, which then came to be called "stream of consciousness" - as if the mind were a river that keeps flowing and flooding, too, on occasion, while it just goes on about its own business.
In the works of fiction I am talking about here, the narrator seems to disappear, and the reader seems to be inside the mind of the hero or heroine. These books are not easy to read. But here are a couple of examples of them from English literature: James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
Just to give you a flavor of this kind of (difficult) writing, here is a quote from the Virginia Woolf novel:
"But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgments, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing she called life? Oh, it was very queer [strange]. Here was So-and-So in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and someone else, say, in Mayfair [these are places in and around London]. And she felt quite continuously a sense of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt what a pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together; so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine, to create; but to whom? / An offering for the sake of offering, perhaps. Anyhow, it was her gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write, even play the piano. She muddled [mixed up] Armenians and Turks; loved success; hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense; and to this day, ask her what the Equator was, and she did not know."
Well, there you have a moment from this beautiful novel. What you "see" is what Mrs. Dalloway is thinking. She is a middle-aged housewife who likes to throw (give) parties. And both her husband and her friends criticize her for this. So in this passage she is defending herself, to no one in particular. She is just thinking. And what we see as we (the readers) watch her think is why she is the way she is: she is a charming woman growing old who loves to bring people together so that they may enjoy themselves. That's why she is throwing parties. It's her gift to what she calls "life." It's what gives her joy, a purpose in life: to help bring people together that they may enjoy themselves. Quite beautiful and quite a wonderful ambition, don't you agree?
Well, these kinds of books were plentiful in English (and in European) literature more than 50+ years ago. William Faulkner wrote books like that in America. Is there anything in Iranian literature that's like this? Where the reader "sees" what's going on inside the mind of the hero or heroine? I'd be interested in learning about that myself.
11 comments:
Hello Steve,
Please accept my apologies for writing a little late to you. I and all my friends and students are always thirsty to receive new essays and letters from you. Please write to us whenever your valuable time allows.
Your writings and your character have long looked quite fascinating to me. You live in the world of words the way leaves breathe and dance in beautiful jungles. Your writings are never trivial to me. They are a mixture of knowledge and pleasure. Thank you for giving me the honor of joining this site and sharing the fruits of a long life and career dedicated to a profound study of literature.
How nice of you to remember us with flowers and the tulip. I must say that you have a very high perception or maybe a strong sixth sense because almost 90 percent of the Persian literature consists of flowers and bulbuls. To imagine our classical literature without flowers and bulbuls is like imagining a jungle without its trees. I am tempted to try to find the film Bread and Tulips. I myself am not sure about the origin of this flower, but then I am not that very knowledgeable in the world of botany.
Yes, the current Iran once formed the core of ancient Persian. You are using a very brief moment from your daily life to explain something very difficult from a complicated style in literature to us. I must say your method of explanation here has made the subject very tangible. And what a nice coincidence, for I have recently watched a movie called Mrs. Dalloway which is entirely based on Virgina Wolf’s novel with the same name. Maryl Streep is one of my favorite actresses, but I must confess that I have not understood much from the story. Tell me is the film a precise, faithful adaptation of the story? I’ll give myself a second chance and do my best this time. That is how it is, Steve. You always remind me and encourage me to follow the most beautiful endeavors in life.
I will read this post more carefully before I start watching the film again.
My students are all going to print this post for the next class. We want to read and enjoy every word of it.
Your old, loyal friend, Ali
Dear professor,
We saw a film about mountains on last Friday. It is very interesting for me, but it has many unknown words. We decide to read a vocabulary book for 10 minutes on Fridays. Sometimes I read a word for many times, but I forget that word when I need it. I read a sentence from Henry Ward Beecher, he told: ‘All words are pegs to hang ideas on’
I have a big hardship.
I like to write to you.
More letters,
Bahman
I took a course in graduate school at Tufts University about Advaita Vedanta an Indian philosophy where you meditate through the different stages towards Nirvana and when you reach the highest stage you are so out of it that you cannot come back without an assistant who wakes you from the meditation. In order to meditate you are supposed to focus on an object such as a rose or it could be a tulip or anything that you choose but to do it you must clear your mind of the stream of consciousness. I found out that I could not do it no matter how hard I tried I could not stop the endless flow of thoughts through my mind. In fact when my mind is hyperactive I have great trouble falling asleep but this is often accompanied by some troubling event in my life that my mind keeps turning over and over.
If you can even meditate on lower levels it helps you with your state of mind. Oriental students are able to study better than their compatriots from the West because they can sit in an environment that has many distractions and block out these distractions through meditation and focus on their studies.
I never got past the beginning of Ulysses but I did read a novel written in the stream of consciousness style that I thought was one of the greatest masterpieces of the Twentieth Century that I have ever read. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry. It took him 14 years to write this book and it is set in the time just before WWII in Mexico and the hero is drinking Mescal which is like Tequila but has a psychodelic affect on the mind. The thoughts stream through his mind about movies with Peter Lory and images of the impending political struggle leading up to war and his own personal struggles. It is so full of his thoughts that I could read it again as if I had never read it. I guess a painter at least this painter merges the thoughts and images that are taking place at the time he is painting such as I might be painting a blue table but thinking about the fly that is buzzing around the room or listening to the dog who is barking outside the window.
And someone emailed me that they had one of my art works from when I was in the Boston Museum School in the 1950's and she mentioned the names of some of the students in the class to try to get me to remember her mother who talked about those times and a stream of thoughts rushed through my head and I wrote her an email with these thoughts and I will share them because that is where my mind has led me and I was going to talk about it anyway.
Dear Mary,
Yes I was at the Museum school from 1951 till 1955 doing my fifth year in 1955 and going to Europe on a Traveling scholarship in 1957. I am trying to picture who your mother might be. Probably you would have to tell me her maiden name for me to try to figure out who she was. It is strange that just yesterday I was online reading part of a book about Boston art in those days the 50s because I have always felt that the Boston Expressionism of the 50s and 60s should have gotten more recognition with somewhere a major art museum devoting one or more rooms to the school because I feel that the artists were all every bit as good as the now famous NY School of Abstract Expressionism and though they were not as innovative as a colleague of mine said when I was teaching at Western Illinois University "innovation is overrated."
I you have digital image of the collage I would love to see it and also I would like to hear from you again.
Gene
Mary,
If your mother was behind me I did not know those people as well. The advanced painting rooms were located away from the first and second year painting rooms which we might have occasionally visited but not often enough to get to know the ones who were in them. There were occasional group critiques on exhibitions or lectures to the student body by Karl Zerbe which were attended by all but mostly due to schedules and the arrangement of the studios we knew our own class best.
I would guess that you might have a work of mine but the one you sent is not it judging from the style and imagery. And though your mother was very attractive from the picture I cannot say I remember her. To make certain whether you have a picture that could be mine why don't you send me images of the other two and I will tell you if I think either was done by me. You are correct I occasionally traded works with other students and even sold my first painting a qouache to a male student who was older than me and paid seven dollars for it which at the time was pretty exciting to me though it might not seem like much now. I am pretty certain I could recognize the piece if it were done by me because I remember the sort of thing I was doing and the style of painting and drawings and collages I did at the time.
Mary,
Okay the room you are describing is the painting II room I was accross the room next to Ian James who was a tall Canadian and even older than Lothar and also a vet from the Canadian military. He painted an amazing trompe loeil which was the first assignment in painting II. There was a girl next to loathar whom I did speak to who had a skin condition that made her allergic to oil paints and she painted with gloves on and was very good at trompe painting also because she had great technical facility but she had a little trouble painting the still life which was the next project because she treated it like another trompe. Lothar Wurslin had a marvelous sense of color and he could push the paint around creating wonderful paint qualities but he was never satisfied with the results and was always wiping off his works and starting over. I had trouble with the trompe but was very good with the Still Life and it still hangs in my hallway not a few feet from here in the computer room. Also in that room was Ruth Sweetzer who was a heavy blond who was not tremendously talented but was friendly and funny. Now if your mother was not the girl with the gloves then I cannot remember her but if I saw her still life or trompe I might remember that because I remember the girl with the gloves painted a painting with a wine glass or goblet which was beautifully painted. Ian's trompe had a cracked door with maroon cracked paint that took him the who semester to do but when he did it he painted it as well as any trompe has ever been painted. Down from me also was Buddy Blacklock who was a very gifted painter and I know he played jazz piano and I think he ended up being well known and playing with famous players. My future wife Mary McMahon painted in the next room next to Pat Sibert who married Dick Halsey and I just learned he died this past March. We visited the Halsey's when they were in Carbondale IL then when they moved to Cleaveland and then when they moved to Schenectedy where Dick became Dean of Library Science at New York State University in Albany and they finally got divorced after their two beautiful daughters, Rachel and Gabriella were grown up and did moved to Dallas where he remarried then got prostate cancer and survived a number of years against impossible odds but finally died peacefully. He was a talented pianist, a composer and wrote a number of books on the American protest movement. He studied music at the New England Conservatory and was in the same class as Correta Scott King. I lost track of Pat.
Also in the room where Mary and Pat Sibert were was Patricia Bean Clougher who became a good friend and when I won my traveling scholarship we lived in their Apartment on Harwich St. near Back Bay Station which was under rent control and we had a three room apartment bath making four rooms with heat and hot water for 30 dollars a month which eventually went up to 40 when rent controls were removed and we had just been married and at first lived with my folks for a few months until we got that place. The Clougher's were already in Paris and helped us find a hotel room when we arrived there and showed us where to study French where to paint, at the American center and where to change money on the other side of the Seine in a poorer Jewish section which was also near a prostiture section of town. They showe us the museums, the galleries, and where to listen to jazz concerts, the cinemateque Frencaise where we saw classic movies from all countries real cheap and without them life in Paris would not have been as good. Bill Eng from the Museum school in the class ahead of us came to visit there and I remained friends with him until he died a couple of years ago and Norman Gross from our class came but he was in commercial art so we saw him more in Paris than in Boston but since I have seen him on trips to Boston. He saw mean in the Louvre talking to two Tunisians and thought I spoke French like a native but I was pretty fluent with an American accent. Also in Paris we saw Irma Kushner from our painting class. I also kept in touch with Dodi Stewart another Canadian who lived with Pat Sibert before she married Halsey. They had a place together in Cambridge.
Mary painted some great paintings but died of breast cancer in 1977 a year after we moved into this house. She had been roommates with Sylvia Roberts who was a beautiful girl with full lips and long brown hair whom Lothar was in love with but she finally gave herself to the first black student from Texas to get into Harvard University. Lothar married Bunny a blond whom I kept in touch with after Lothar died of cancer which she neglegted to inform me about until I had been sending letters to both of them for five years. They had lived in a place in Mexico real cheaply which made a big spread with pictures in Life Magazine. He finally found his medium in sculpture and she had all his works in Vermont where they ended up. I had been talking to Mary McMahon but at the Christmas party in second year when I saw her in the downstairs printmaking area where the Christmas party had migrated to with music and jugs of cheap wine, kissing Bitsy I waited until he was gone and took over and did not let her go so we left together with Lothar, Ian James and Buddy Blacklock who all had an apartment together. I kissed her in the back of that car until we got there but it wasn't until the next year that we were going steady and finally got married and she decided not to finish school. I did not know Bitsy had died but at the Beaus Art Masquerade ball held at the school Bitzy was dressed like a mummy and had himself carried into the room in a coffin with only candles lit and rose from the coffin.
My friend Bill Dunn who went all the way to 4th year painting with me did a song and dance routine of Danny Kay's and he was very good. He had gone to Boston College and studied drama and met the girl he thought he was going to marry but he went into the Navy for WWII and commanded a landing ship which was at Dday and when he got out she was gone so he never dated thart I knew of since he was a very strict Catholic and also shy of women so he lived alone the rest of his life and I am not sure if he is dead or has dementia because he stopped answering my mail and phone calls. But the last I called the number was still good so I though he might have gotten Alzheimers but I guess I will never know. The closest to my style of art was the one you attribute to Mary which after you did that I would agree it was more likely her but I did a similar one for that project which I remember. I also remember Miss Barry whom we all thought was in love with Karl Zerbe. All the girls in the painting class had crushes on David Aaronson because he was very handsome with a real bedroom voice but very aloof. He walked into technical painting class one day and we had a twelve pack of beer and offered him one which he declined but never mentioned the beer again which I am sure was probably frowned upon.
Those were wonderful times and now faded memories like my poem.
The Fabric of my Time
by Eugene V. Solot
Was your presence just a memory
woven in the fabric of my time?
Or have the images of the past
taken a life of their own
Emerging in the silence of the night
Then fleeing in the morning light
Like the taste of wine sipped
so long ago, in the hazy past
yet mingled with life's ebb and flow.
Where do our fantasies and
realities meet?
At a distant point
somewhere on this lonely str
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