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Charles
Simic
Abelardo
Morell/Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York City Abelardo
Morell: Down the Rabbit Hole (From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland),
1998. A
retrospective of Morell's work, 'Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next
Door,' is
on view at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, February 23-May 18, 2014; a
catalog
of the exhibition was released by the Art Institute of Chicago and Yale
University Press last fall.
There is
nothing more mysterious and wonderful than the way in which some bit of
language—a clever quip, a pithy observation, a vivid figure of speech
found in
a book or heard in a conversation—remains fresh in our memory when so
many
other things we were at one time interested in are forgotten. These
days, I
look in disbelief at many of the books on my shelves, from thick novels
and
memoirs to works of great philosophers, wondering whether it’s really
possible
that I devoted weeks or even months reading them. I know that I did,
but only
because opening them, I find passages and phrases I’ve underlined,
which upon
rereading I recall better than the plots, characters, and ideas I
encountered
in these books; sometimes it looks to me that what has made the lasting
impression on my literary taste buds, to use culinary terms, are crumbs
strewn
on the table rather than the whole meal. I recall,
for example, Flaubert saying that it is splendid to be a writer, to put
men
into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like
chestnuts; St.
Augustine confessing that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in
creating flies; Beckett telling about a character in his early novel
Murphy
whom the cops took in for begging without singing, and who was jailed
for ten
days by the judge, Victor Shklovsky, recounting how he once heard the
great
Russian poet Mayakovski claim that black cats produce electricity while
being
stroked; Emily Dickinson saying in a letter, It is lonely without birds
today,
for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas; Flannery
O’Connor
describing a young woman as having a face as broad and as innocent as a
cabbage
and tied around with a green handkerchief that had two points on the
top like
rabbit ears; and many other such small and overlooked delights. Examples of
verbal art, of course, are not only to be found in books. One of the
most
original and entertaining story tellers I ever met was an old Sicilian
bricklayer whom I knew in New York more than forty years ago. He’d talk
in
images: “I came out of the crib gray-haired,” he’d say, or “Every four
years we
change the president’s diaper.” Writers and conversationalists with a
gift for
nailing a subject or someone’s character quickly know that a lengthy
description is not likely to be as effective as a single, striking
image. “What
the mind sees, when it grasps a connection, it sees forever,” Roberto
Calasso
says. “His wife looks like a stork,” I overheard someone say in a
restaurant
and my imagination swallowed the bait. She’s tall, long-legged, wears
short
skirts, holds her head high, and has a long thin nose, I said to
myself. And
that was just the beginning. The day after I heard a wife being
compared to a
stork, I saw her standing on one leg on top of a brick chimney and then
a bit
later perched on a gravestone in a small graveyard. That
gravestone reminded me of something crazy the poet Mark Strand thought
up many
years ago, when he was broke and thinking up ways to make money. He
told me
excitedly one day that he had invented a new kind of gravestone that he
hoped
would interest cemeteries and carvers of gravestone inscriptions. It
would
include, in addition to the usual name, date, and epitaph, a slot where
a coin
could be inserted, that would activate a tape machine built into it,
and play
the deceased’s favorite songs, jokes, passages from scriptures, quotes
by great
men and speeches addressed to their fellow citizens, and whatever else
they
find worthy of preserving for posterity. Visitors to the cemetery would
insert
as many coins as required to play the recording (credit cards not yet
being
widely used) and the accumulated earnings would be divided equally
between the
keepers of the cemetery and the family of the diseased. This being the
United
States of America, small billboards advertising the exciting programs
awaiting
visitors to various cemeteries would be allowed along the highway,
saying
things like: “Give Your Misery A Little Class, Listen to a Poet” or
“Die
Laughing Listening to Stories of a Famous Brain Surgeon.” One of the
benefits of this invention, as he saw it, is that it would transform
these
notoriously gloomy and desolate places by attracting big crowds—not
just of the
relatives and acquaintances of the diseased, but also complete
strangers
seeking entertainment and the pearls of wisdom and musical selections
of
hundreds and hundreds of unknown men and women. Not only that, but all
of us
who are their descendants would spend the later years of our lives
devouring
books and listening to records, while compiling our own little
anthologies of
favorites. While this
invention may strike one as frivolous and irreverent, in my view it
deals with
a serious problem. What happens to everything we kept in our heads and
hoped
others would find amusing after we pass away? No trace of them will be
left,
unless, of course, we write them down. Even that is not a guarantee.
Libraries,
both private and public, are full of books no one reads any more.
Anyone who
frequents town dumps has seen yellowed manuscripts and letters thrown
out with
the trash—papers that sadly, but unmistakably, not even the family of
their
author wants. Just imagine that, Strand’s dream had come true and your
dead
grandmother is a big hit in some large urban cemetery, passing on her
soup and
pie recipes to an admiring crowd of young housewives; while your
grandpa is
telling dirty jokes to boys playing hooky from school. Given their
immense
local fame, you, too, are regarded with interest by your friends and
neighbors,
who can’t help but wonder how your everlasting selection is coming
along and
what inspiring words and vile blasphemies they’ll be hearing from your
gravestone. February 22,
2014, 10:26 a.m.
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