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Rivers and Rivulets.By Simon Huynh, graduate student- - - - Lawrence Weschler is a curator of resemblance and pattern. His new book, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, works, basically, on this formula: take two vastly different yet similarly patterned photographs and contemplate them side by side. For instance, the dendritic branches of a neuron viewed alongside the veiny fingerlings of the Mississippi Delta; or, say, the actual branches of a leafless oak tree in wintertime next to a magnified cross section of an oak leaf (springtime now!), the rivers and rivulets of its vascular system make for an aerial view of leaf-sap irrigation. What comes next is an insistent and probing identification of treelike structures in all things, in all places, regardless of temporal or spatial scale. Galaxies and genetics, genomes and grammar. Everywhere, tree systems upon synaptic networks upon lightning fissures superimposed, on the page and in the mind (more neurons firing!). Veins and branches, trunks and nexuses. A mosaic of anastomosis. What you feel upon viewing these images, presumably, is a shock, a tingle, a pleasurable mental tic, as though your gaze could palpably thumb that picture of a nerve-cell axon and cause the palm fronds in your own brain to rustle, briefly, with an electric frisk. It's a rare sensation, and a precious one. If heightened by a degree of familiarity, a sense that these likenesses somehow affirm the private likenesses that you yourself have always harbored but never made explicit, that delightful frisson can approach vertigo, déjà vu, or even nostalgia. Falling short of that, the simple aw-shucks-that's-neat sort of pleasure one feels is nothing to snub one's nose at. It refreshes. It's the pleasure of learning again how to see as a child sees. Which is, in a way, the mode of seeing before we were ever taught how to see. Weschler, it turns out, is a master aw-shuckster and a compiler of such surprisingly symmetric images. And that frisson, the pleasure of "unlikely alignments and beguiling resonances," is the subject of Everything That Rises. By "subject," I mean subject in the sense that a lion or elephant is the subject of big-game hunting. Over the years, Weschler has been compiling a private menagerie of odd and unexpected resemblances. Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic. Mona Lisa and Monica Lewinsky. A black-and-white photo of a lunar night sky over a creamy moonscape and a black-and-white canvas by Rothko, the latter evocative of a glass of Guinness stout turned upside down. Some of these convergences are haunting and mystical. Some hilarious. Some tenuous. What binds the whole is Weschler's ability to connect them all. He draws from art history, politico-social journalism, astronomic imaging, and his capacity for relating them is an even more impressive spectacle than his parade of unlikely likenesses. That's because Weschler's writing moves fast; his art-history associations, in particular, are punched out in rapid-fire succession. For instance, one short chapter called "Gazing Out Toward" covers four artists in 10 paragraphs. Some simple math tells us that, if we subtract a paragraph for introduction and resolution each, the chapter averages two paragraphs of coverage for each artist mentioned. It's actually much less than that since thematic discussion and leapfrog philosophizing also take up a good deal of space. Weschler connects themes like Pollock connects colors; it's unclear which thread comes first or on top (they all run atop each other in intersecting layers), so you're better off paying attention to the constellated whole. Within this one chapter, some of those themes include: Bolshevik naval symbology and the Soviet Dream; that dream's failure and its revision in late-'80s graffiti art; the act of revision, per se, and its sister process, the act of prospective hope; the conceptual incest that occurs when you combine the two—that is, the sickening vertigo of looking back on an image of the past that is itself looking forward to a future we now occupy; related to that vertigo, the simultaneous delusion—one part nausea, one part nostalgia—of Communist optimism and bourgeois malaise, simultaneous not because they occur at the same time but because Time (like mirrors, paintings, and the eye of the beholder) has its own capacity for creating sameness, for ignoring the different and competing politico-economic contexts of socialism and capitalism and finding between them the sublime commonality of a sailor slouching in Poland and a Santa Monica woman slumped in her cocktail dress; and the experiential character of the sublime in the natural world. If this all sounds very abstract, that's OK, because it should—abstraction is also a major issue here. Oh, and four pictures of people whose backs are turned to the viewer are thrown in to boot. So, like I said, rapid-fire. Each brief section is a short burst of abstract, thematic pattern-making that—if you want to push the gun analogy—sometimes hits the mark, sometimes doesn't, but always at least sparks a thought. At times, I found it hard to tell whether I was convinced by the individual relationships Weschler contrives—he moves too fast to disagree with, really—but that's OK, I think, since evaluation is maybe beside the point. Weschler isn't about arguments and theories. He's a performer, a verbal plate-spinner who balances Rothko and NASA on one pole, Velázquez and the 9/11 aftermath of Ground Zero on the other. Like if you saw a man on the street who was simultaneously juggling a cat, a katana, a chainsaw, and, say, a floppy disk, you wouldn't criticize him for choosing to include the floppy disk. Yet there's something more profound than just rhetorical juggling going on here. Weschler's compilation is, at its heart, a jubilant reminder of mankind's instinctive capacity to transform the inchoate visual world into a personal, connected one. It speaks to our urge for finding—and applying—connections in the world around us. Because we're not just making patterns, we're making meaning.
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