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So I take my good fortune and I fantasize of our leaving
I am very tired. I am sitting on the couch with a little cat on my shoulder. I left the house at six-thirty this morning and got back about twelve hours later. I had a really good day.
I did not expect to: I got up on two hours of sleep for audiometry at Kenmore and then a consult with an ENT and I was terrified that something was going to have gone wrong with my hearing in the year since my last exam. It was instead an immensely reassuring visit. My results are identical to the results of last year's exam are identical to the results of my previous exam ten years ago. Despite all the noise and physical stress, my hearing has not been damaged; it remains substantially better than average, especially for my age. Given how much time I spend wearing earplugs, it's nice to know the damn things are working. I have also been informed that the white noise and tinnitus generated by the TMJ are neither mechanical nor neural problems; they can annoy me, they can interfere with my ability to enjoy a quiet afternoon, but they cannot cause hearing loss. I was sent home with a copy of the audiogram and some non-prescription advice on the reasons I'd been told to make the appointment in the first place.
So that was all over and done with by eight-thirty in the morning. I was at loose ends in the land of the Citgo sign and a call to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel quickly confirmed that neither of the restaurants we'd been talking about were actually open at this hour. We agreed to meet for brunch at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, which given the disparity between the time it took me to walk there and the time it took Rob to negotiate the MBTA meant that I killed an hour walking up and down Newbury Street in the bright cool sunlight, which made me think of summers with my grandparents in Maine. Text messages from this time include "Dammit, the Roman-style pizza place does not open until 11, either." Eventually I settled at a table at the bookstore, drank herbal chai and read Nicole Kornher-Stace's marvelous post-apocalyptic katabasis Archivist Wasp (2015), which I had bought at Readercon and completely—this appears to be a recurring theme this year—failed to get signed by the author. Presently Rob arrived, wearing his green roller coaster T-shirt with the logo upside-down. He got the French challah toast, which came stuffed with lemon ricotta and covered with blueberries. I regret nothing about ordering a sandwich called the "Turvocado" except slightly the name and the fact that focaccia is still denser than I can really chew. It was the first thing I'd had to eat all day.
We had talked about walking to a museum, because we had an early enough start for a full day rather than an hour before closing or a late night; we ended up at the Boston Public Library, because it was right there and we so rarely are. We found dioramas, marionettes, how to request access to the archive of Fred Allen's papers; we walked through galleries with empty shelves and rooms where the architecture was as interesting as the books. There are split-tailed mermaids painted in a niche on the first floor. And simply by following a stairwell, we found the Sargent murals, which I had never seen before. The way the morning sun slanted in from the skylight, I had to shade my eyes to make out some of the details of the paintings in the vault. Rob took pictures.
So the entire thing is called The Triumph of Religion, it is unfinished because Sargent died before he could complete the keystone image of the Sermon on the Mount, and I am not sure how I feel about it. One end of the hall shows the Crucifixion and other scenes of Christianity; I mostly ignored those. The other end contains Sargent's ideas of the Old Testament, including a frieze of Jewish prophets and an elaborate depiction of Israel in bondage to Egypt and Babylon. That's specifically what I am staring at here. The composition takes its tone from Psalm 106, quoted in a black-and-gold banner of densely calligraphed King James text:
They forgat God their Saviour, which had done great things in Egypt and they served idols which were a snare unto them. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and their daughters unto the idols of Canaan. Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against his people and he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that hated them ruled over them. Their enemies also oppressed them and they were brought into subjection under their hand. Nevertheless he regarded their affliction when he heard their cry and he remembered for them his covenant.
The "devils" and "idols of Canaan" are Egyptian and Assyrian deities. It's plain enough in the lunette, where royal representatives of their respective nations face off over the form of a young Israelite with arms outstretched to heaven, calling on the storm of fiery seraph-wings that must be Sargent's conception of the god of the whirlwind, parting seas, pillars of fire. The pharoah is flanked by winged Sekhmet and a double-crowned, doglike creature I honestly could not identify, the Assyrian king by a lion and a bird-headed apkallu. The vault is even more explict. A bull-headed, four-armed figure—Moloch, if you think Flaubert is archaeology—is crowned with the sun disk of Aten, the characteristic golden orb reaching out with rayed hands; its brightness rains over the shadowy, statue-like forms of Isis, Osiris, Horus, the pharoah's sarcophagus with hovering bird-soul at their feet. His own hands hold human sacrifices and weapons of war. A seductive, archaically smiling Ištar stands opposite him, the crescent moon under her feet where a cobra hoods itself and a little gold hamsa shines, male and female figures caught in the net of her smoke-blue veils. There are human bodies entangled in the coils of the serpent that writhes about the throat of sky-bodied Nut, her night-starred breast circled by the signs of the zodiac. Visually, it's stunning. Also it turns out I have a knee-jerk reaction to seeing gods that aren't even mine misleadingly syncretized and characterized as demons. I mean, say what you like about Akhenaten, but human sacrifice was not his thing.
(I don't actually have anything bad to say about Akhenaten. Derek Jerman was going to make a film about him starring David Bowie. I still support this project.)
I am also obviously ambivalent about depicting Judaism in Biblical defeat, in which I am not alone—even at the time, there were protests over Sargent's personification of Synagogue as a broken sibyl in the ruins of the Second Temple, blindfolded, her scepter in two pieces, cradling the Ten Commandments to her breast. He seems to have missed the point that historical precedent and allegorical resonance do not negate the possibility of reinforcing images of anti-Semitism, especially when contrasted with the calm young attractive Church on the other side. (Alert readers, or readers who have not been living under rocks for the last several years, will note that variations of this same controversy persist in popular culture today. Constantly.) I recognize that Sargent also showed the Jewish God as the teacher of an attentive small child in Israel and the Law and that his Messianic Era is full of pomegranates and placed under the medallion of a seven-branched menorah. I'm not sure that cancels, if nothing else, his tone-deafness in thinking that no one could possibly have a problem with the reproduction of religiously loaded medieval iconography in 1919.
(Sargent's Hell is fantastic, by the way: a turquoise-skinned demon of which almost nothing can be seen but its clawed arms greedily sweeping in sinners and the white-fanged maw into which it is stuffing the souls of the damned, gorging itself; hellmouth and nothing more. Bestial figures of similar color and musculature crouch behind the scales of Judgment, like the Devourer at the Weighing of the Heart. Heaven is elegantly composed, with white robes, gilt-stringed harps, and gold-touched faces lifted wonderingly to the out-of-frame glory of God, but it can't compete. Sargent is underrated as a horror artist. His Orestes at the MFA is one of the most uncanny versions of that scene I know—it doesn't come through in photography. When it hangs over your head, its reds are Pompeiian, smoldering as blood; the corpse-green Furies with their handfuls of snakes are toxic. Hercules and the Hydra is my other favorite of that set.)
I spent the most time with the Frieze of Prophets, trying to identify all eighteen of them from the captions of their names in Hebrew—only slightly hampered by not being able to recall the full list of them in English, so I had to keep asking Rob for help. I believe that's what I'm doing in the second picture here. Moses is the only mythologized one, tablets in his arms, a seraph's flaming wings again folded protectively about him. The rest are done naturalistically, like portraits, as apparently some of them were. All look like positive portrayals to me, even unapproachable Moses. I still side-eye that some of them are looking significantly toward the blank space that should have been Sargent's Sermon on the Mount. That's more than I intended to write about these murals. They are terrific art, three-dimensionally sculpted and decorated as well as painted; for myth on a vaulted ceiling, I think I prefer Sargent's murals at the MFA, where at least I don't argue with his retellings so much. I am not unhappy to have seen these.
Also, I like how Rob's pictures came out.
I am not sure how much time we spent in the reading room after that, because I was reading first Helen Berry's The Castrato and His Wife (2012)—an exploration of the marriage and separation of eighteenth-century operatic celebrity Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and Dorothea Maunsell; among other things, it's a study of a gender identity which is much less high-profile today—and then the rest of Archivist Wasp. I recommend both highly.
And the rest of the day we just wandered around Boston. We walked into the Pucker Gallery because I saw that one of their currently featured artists is Samuel Bak. (If you have a copy ofstrange_selkie's A Verse from Babylon (2005), you'll recognize his style. If you don't have a copy of A Verse from Babylon, you're really missing out.) We got iced tea and chocolate mice at the other Burdick's. We saw ducks and geese and swanboats in the Boston Public Garden. We bought the best pork buns (and one lotus paste bun with preserved egg) from Eldo Cake House. We never quite got to the North End. We came home by Green Line from Haymarket and the 88 from Lechmere. I promptly made dinner and collapsed on the couch and should have finished this post hours ago, but I got distracted by analyzing the murals. And being extremely tired, since as previously stated I did this entire peripatetic day on near-zero sleep.
It was like having a vacation.
I did not expect to: I got up on two hours of sleep for audiometry at Kenmore and then a consult with an ENT and I was terrified that something was going to have gone wrong with my hearing in the year since my last exam. It was instead an immensely reassuring visit. My results are identical to the results of last year's exam are identical to the results of my previous exam ten years ago. Despite all the noise and physical stress, my hearing has not been damaged; it remains substantially better than average, especially for my age. Given how much time I spend wearing earplugs, it's nice to know the damn things are working. I have also been informed that the white noise and tinnitus generated by the TMJ are neither mechanical nor neural problems; they can annoy me, they can interfere with my ability to enjoy a quiet afternoon, but they cannot cause hearing loss. I was sent home with a copy of the audiogram and some non-prescription advice on the reasons I'd been told to make the appointment in the first place.
So that was all over and done with by eight-thirty in the morning. I was at loose ends in the land of the Citgo sign and a call to
derspatchel quickly confirmed that neither of the restaurants we'd been talking about were actually open at this hour. We agreed to meet for brunch at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, which given the disparity between the time it took me to walk there and the time it took Rob to negotiate the MBTA meant that I killed an hour walking up and down Newbury Street in the bright cool sunlight, which made me think of summers with my grandparents in Maine. Text messages from this time include "Dammit, the Roman-style pizza place does not open until 11, either." Eventually I settled at a table at the bookstore, drank herbal chai and read Nicole Kornher-Stace's marvelous post-apocalyptic katabasis Archivist Wasp (2015), which I had bought at Readercon and completely—this appears to be a recurring theme this year—failed to get signed by the author. Presently Rob arrived, wearing his green roller coaster T-shirt with the logo upside-down. He got the French challah toast, which came stuffed with lemon ricotta and covered with blueberries. I regret nothing about ordering a sandwich called the "Turvocado" except slightly the name and the fact that focaccia is still denser than I can really chew. It was the first thing I'd had to eat all day.We had talked about walking to a museum, because we had an early enough start for a full day rather than an hour before closing or a late night; we ended up at the Boston Public Library, because it was right there and we so rarely are. We found dioramas, marionettes, how to request access to the archive of Fred Allen's papers; we walked through galleries with empty shelves and rooms where the architecture was as interesting as the books. There are split-tailed mermaids painted in a niche on the first floor. And simply by following a stairwell, we found the Sargent murals, which I had never seen before. The way the morning sun slanted in from the skylight, I had to shade my eyes to make out some of the details of the paintings in the vault. Rob took pictures.
So the entire thing is called The Triumph of Religion, it is unfinished because Sargent died before he could complete the keystone image of the Sermon on the Mount, and I am not sure how I feel about it. One end of the hall shows the Crucifixion and other scenes of Christianity; I mostly ignored those. The other end contains Sargent's ideas of the Old Testament, including a frieze of Jewish prophets and an elaborate depiction of Israel in bondage to Egypt and Babylon. That's specifically what I am staring at here. The composition takes its tone from Psalm 106, quoted in a black-and-gold banner of densely calligraphed King James text:
They forgat God their Saviour, which had done great things in Egypt and they served idols which were a snare unto them. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils and shed innocent blood, even the blood of their sons and their daughters unto the idols of Canaan. Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against his people and he gave them into the hand of the heathen; and they that hated them ruled over them. Their enemies also oppressed them and they were brought into subjection under their hand. Nevertheless he regarded their affliction when he heard their cry and he remembered for them his covenant.
The "devils" and "idols of Canaan" are Egyptian and Assyrian deities. It's plain enough in the lunette, where royal representatives of their respective nations face off over the form of a young Israelite with arms outstretched to heaven, calling on the storm of fiery seraph-wings that must be Sargent's conception of the god of the whirlwind, parting seas, pillars of fire. The pharoah is flanked by winged Sekhmet and a double-crowned, doglike creature I honestly could not identify, the Assyrian king by a lion and a bird-headed apkallu. The vault is even more explict. A bull-headed, four-armed figure—Moloch, if you think Flaubert is archaeology—is crowned with the sun disk of Aten, the characteristic golden orb reaching out with rayed hands; its brightness rains over the shadowy, statue-like forms of Isis, Osiris, Horus, the pharoah's sarcophagus with hovering bird-soul at their feet. His own hands hold human sacrifices and weapons of war. A seductive, archaically smiling Ištar stands opposite him, the crescent moon under her feet where a cobra hoods itself and a little gold hamsa shines, male and female figures caught in the net of her smoke-blue veils. There are human bodies entangled in the coils of the serpent that writhes about the throat of sky-bodied Nut, her night-starred breast circled by the signs of the zodiac. Visually, it's stunning. Also it turns out I have a knee-jerk reaction to seeing gods that aren't even mine misleadingly syncretized and characterized as demons. I mean, say what you like about Akhenaten, but human sacrifice was not his thing.
(I don't actually have anything bad to say about Akhenaten. Derek Jerman was going to make a film about him starring David Bowie. I still support this project.)
I am also obviously ambivalent about depicting Judaism in Biblical defeat, in which I am not alone—even at the time, there were protests over Sargent's personification of Synagogue as a broken sibyl in the ruins of the Second Temple, blindfolded, her scepter in two pieces, cradling the Ten Commandments to her breast. He seems to have missed the point that historical precedent and allegorical resonance do not negate the possibility of reinforcing images of anti-Semitism, especially when contrasted with the calm young attractive Church on the other side. (Alert readers, or readers who have not been living under rocks for the last several years, will note that variations of this same controversy persist in popular culture today. Constantly.) I recognize that Sargent also showed the Jewish God as the teacher of an attentive small child in Israel and the Law and that his Messianic Era is full of pomegranates and placed under the medallion of a seven-branched menorah. I'm not sure that cancels, if nothing else, his tone-deafness in thinking that no one could possibly have a problem with the reproduction of religiously loaded medieval iconography in 1919.
(Sargent's Hell is fantastic, by the way: a turquoise-skinned demon of which almost nothing can be seen but its clawed arms greedily sweeping in sinners and the white-fanged maw into which it is stuffing the souls of the damned, gorging itself; hellmouth and nothing more. Bestial figures of similar color and musculature crouch behind the scales of Judgment, like the Devourer at the Weighing of the Heart. Heaven is elegantly composed, with white robes, gilt-stringed harps, and gold-touched faces lifted wonderingly to the out-of-frame glory of God, but it can't compete. Sargent is underrated as a horror artist. His Orestes at the MFA is one of the most uncanny versions of that scene I know—it doesn't come through in photography. When it hangs over your head, its reds are Pompeiian, smoldering as blood; the corpse-green Furies with their handfuls of snakes are toxic. Hercules and the Hydra is my other favorite of that set.)
I spent the most time with the Frieze of Prophets, trying to identify all eighteen of them from the captions of their names in Hebrew—only slightly hampered by not being able to recall the full list of them in English, so I had to keep asking Rob for help. I believe that's what I'm doing in the second picture here. Moses is the only mythologized one, tablets in his arms, a seraph's flaming wings again folded protectively about him. The rest are done naturalistically, like portraits, as apparently some of them were. All look like positive portrayals to me, even unapproachable Moses. I still side-eye that some of them are looking significantly toward the blank space that should have been Sargent's Sermon on the Mount. That's more than I intended to write about these murals. They are terrific art, three-dimensionally sculpted and decorated as well as painted; for myth on a vaulted ceiling, I think I prefer Sargent's murals at the MFA, where at least I don't argue with his retellings so much. I am not unhappy to have seen these.
Also, I like how Rob's pictures came out.
I am not sure how much time we spent in the reading room after that, because I was reading first Helen Berry's The Castrato and His Wife (2012)—an exploration of the marriage and separation of eighteenth-century operatic celebrity Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci and Dorothea Maunsell; among other things, it's a study of a gender identity which is much less high-profile today—and then the rest of Archivist Wasp. I recommend both highly.
And the rest of the day we just wandered around Boston. We walked into the Pucker Gallery because I saw that one of their currently featured artists is Samuel Bak. (If you have a copy of
strange_selkie's A Verse from Babylon (2005), you'll recognize his style. If you don't have a copy of A Verse from Babylon, you're really missing out.) We got iced tea and chocolate mice at the other Burdick's. We saw ducks and geese and swanboats in the Boston Public Garden. We bought the best pork buns (and one lotus paste bun with preserved egg) from Eldo Cake House. We never quite got to the North End. We came home by Green Line from Haymarket and the 88 from Lechmere. I promptly made dinner and collapsed on the couch and should have finished this post hours ago, but I got distracted by analyzing the murals. And being extremely tired, since as previously stated I did this entire peripatetic day on near-zero sleep.It was like having a vacation.
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oh, FFS *smites former dentist*
Glad of the medical report (no hearing loss).
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In our peregrinations, we actually avoided the portion of Government Center which contains his office because I didn't want to risk running into him: I don't want to have to be polite.
Glad of the medical report (no hearing loss).
Thank you! I had really been anxious.
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Thank you!
And all in all, it sounds like a really lovely day.
It really was. And the kind of day I haven't had at all recently. I need more like it.
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I'm sorry, it's the icon: "WHAT A LOVELY DAY!"
And those photographs are beautiful, they really capture you well.
Thank you. I've had even more trouble than usual with pictures of myself since the start of this year, with the new braces and the changes they made to the shape of my face and my smile, so it's nice to have a few I actually enjoy looking at.
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*tiny rusty encouraging thumbs-up*
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I checked the BPL website to see if they said, and they didn't; what they did say was that Flaubert was explicitly Sargent's source for the Carthaginian stuff, so nice eye.
From divagations into obscure portions of the net, I can say with some certainty that castrato is indeed a gender identity that exists today, and also that you probably do not want to know the details.
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Yeah. I thought at first it was a weird version of Taweret because it was faience-blue and not exactly like a dog, but that really didn't seem right. I just realized it might also be the Set animal—which is not usually human-headed, but the odd tufted tail at an angle would be correct. Given how Sargent handled the Near Eastern gods in general, he might have mashed more than one of these options together.
The pharoah's retinue also contains a perfectly ordinary vulture. Not a cobra, so far as I could tell; that was for Ištar.
I checked the BPL website to see if they said, and they didn't; what they did say was that Flaubert was explicitly Sargent's source for the Carthaginian stuff, so nice eye.
Oh, cool. Thank you for letting me know. I may have once read Salammbô just to see what happened. (What happened: I hurt myself slightly.)
From divagations into obscure portions of the net, I can say with some certainty that castrato is indeed a gender identity that exists today, and also that you probably do not want to know the details.
Edited to reflect. Thank you!
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I'm glad you enjoyed it!
I do like your city...
I do, too. I didn't for years: I was trapped here. Then it began to feel like somewhere I could live. Right now I feel terribly trapped, and I don't know what I'm going to do about it, but at least it isn't by the city. Yesterday proves that, I think. I wish I had more freedom to explore Boston.
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God, yes.
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The script survives.
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Yes! That sketch is quite possibly my favorite thing bySargent. I discovered it on the internet in 2007 and it delighted me. I hadn't seen the second image in that post, however, so thank you very much for the link. He looks almost like Robert Helpmann.
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Yay, Archivist Wasp! I just received my copy by post yesterday.
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Thank you. (I am not responsible for the photography or the light.)
Yay, Archivist Wasp! I just received my copy by post yesterday.
It's so good! It reminded me of both Cloud & Ashes and Hexwood while remaining its own distinctive story. I can't tell if I want there to be a sequel or not.
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One is in the works! She read from it at Readercon.
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Huh! How did it sound?
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Have you ever seen or heard the Glass opera? It's really quite amazing. IU did a wonderful production when I was there. The countertenor singing Akhnaten, Nicholas Tamagna, had a voice so beautiful that I started crying when he first sang (which is about twenty minutes after you first see him on stage).
Here is a clip:
https://youtu.be/MWdIzA1SuC0
And another one:
https://youtu.be/0ouiyjJ9LVU
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No! I was vaguely aware of its existence, but no more. Thanks for the links!
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