Long Ago in a Place Very, Very Close By

After six and a half years of activity, this is the final transmission from the observatory here at Waves of Guide. Energy is being redistributed to alternative projects of poetry, love, and livelihood. Thank you to all receivers for your receptive attentions. May they guide you now along the waves of this river-bound life.

- G.D.B.

New website: http://www.dawnzerlylight.wordpress.com

*****

"Every force evolves a form"

- an old Shaker saying

Is it not astounding to have, hold or witness the evidence that in many parts of the ancient world there are drawings that were made on stone, designs placed into architecture or songs composed with music & dance which are the preserved teachings of peoples both dead and everlasting? If a message was so worthy of the time and effort spent to express it by its creators in any of the above media, at special times and with the right methods that fulfill and transcend the challenge of the medium's substance, it must either have been a steadfast representation of the craft and artisanal work in its point in history - or something more valuable than the material itself.

Regarding song, if its message isn't a real piece of mettle to outlast linguistic change, the knowledge it contains through the chosen medium will most certainly perish due to its partiality to history. Let us call such works of art or architecture of the highest value, those creations which are a representation for all current and future free members of humanity to appreciate, embodiments of "universal perception." Universal, because even in different places of the world, with different peoples from different cultures, they were works made not by a machine pressing plastic together but by human hands enacting the fullness of their knowledge and attention upon the work. As a part of the mass of unknown descendants now ready to receive and appreciate these forms, we could see beyond our subjective interpretations, try and match the research upon the museum plaque and truly place the context of the site within our experience of their transmission. If we could, we might not hurry to solve our secret despair at the meaninglessness of dumbfounding wonder.

*****

The above two paragraphs would be at home in an introductory study of one of a small number of scholars that are no longer at work today, and may never be again. Writers who claimed and supported by their research the notion that art & architecture are both meant to convey something to an observer. I'm thinking of A. Coomaraswamy, Otto von Simson, E. H. Gombrich: 20th-century writers on the intrinsic value of art - value that does not lie in the observer but in the expression of the thing itself.

The great and ennobling tone of the above uses terminology that we now associate with the media theory of Marshall McLuhan. Understanding my point revolves around a hinged ontology, like that old parabolic question: which came first, the chicken or the egg? If we affirm the egg, we say that the chicken which hatches from it must've had its parent. If we say the chicken, then we can't go very far before denying that this Adamic chicken could've sprung of itself without first having come from its very own egg - and then we're back to the beginning. When it comes to the medium and the message, McLuhan affirms that the chicken is the egg: A postulate we can't accept when it comes to those creatures, nor to any living thing. If art cannot be described as alive, at least not sentient, it does participate alongside life. Art has done so in our species' history for over 30,000+ years, as the most recent find of drawings & prints in 1994 in the Ardeche's Chauvet Cave.

We can watch Werner Herzog's 2010 film Cave of Forgotten Dreams to receive an opportunity to appreciate the most ancient art there is at Chauvet, but there will always be a tight and translucent scrim over their creators' past(s), not much unlike the original dioramas of Daguerre. View the film anyhow - there is something remarkable about the way the animals were applied to the prepared cave walls. It gives something to the observer - the impression of the very mass and activity of long-extinct cave bears or European lions. The image can still speak to us in the medium by which it was made, though the message is any scholar's guess - which is usually an informed and well-researched return to the first hypotheses: hunting and/or shamanic ritual. Add this late 20th-century find to the dolmens of the Caucasus, the salvaged Antikythera, and many other "mysteries" - mysteries because the culture and the language which contained them are no longer and we only give these objects our clinical gaze when they end up behind glass.

It might not be for us to despair over any of this. The grief over such loss of meaning (if there was some) may have already been suffered by the immediate descendants of any of these works. No need to shed crocodile tears. Perhaps for as much as has been uncovered, there will be much more that remains hidden or lost. But I do find that in great poetry, even in pastorals or lyric poetry, the formal structures (meter, rhyme, etc.) are designed to accommodate both the medium (the composed words of a spoken language) and the message (the poet's craft). By this interaction of the written and the spoken, there can be a third thing or a relationship, accordance with what is represented in the poem of reality with what can be observed in reality. Because both the medium and the message have been enriched by its own history within and without literature, readers' knowledge & understanding of these histories will afford the opportunity for them to be present in the poetic relationship between sound & light. "Unintelligible" poetry may find at its root the lack of such a principle relationship.

But what of it? What if the poet, living in your own time, gives you an uneven solution to the problem of poetry and its composition - a message and a medium? It may surprise you, shock even, to get you out of your head and back into your body via the heart, the hand, any parts of you that were cold. When you stop feeling alone for a moment and know that someone else also hates this or loves that, the memory of it all lapses just as easily as it arose. It is very difficult, increasingly so, to remember even just one whole day, when one is absolutely awake and can recall everything about it, without this ready-made judgment of 'liked' or 'disliked'. It may be possible that by spending time with great poetry, ancient and modern, this attention and awareness can be aided, wherewith poorer poetry it cannot. The poorer poet only accomplishes the shock and not the sustain, whereas the greater one stays with the readers as a guide or a teacher. Below is a photo of Robert Duncan, a recent teacher of mine through his posthumous work The H.D. Book. Here are a few of his words:

"In sound and sense it is the music of inner relationships that moves me." 

RD

And in turn, one is moved and can move, as Orpheus did so with his lyre.

The Folly of St. Ann's

Between the walk from my apartment to my workplace lies a piece of architecture in front of an NYU dormitory building that strikes my sense of perspective every time I walk past it. I have taken multiple photographs of this remnant of what was once the 12th Street Baptist Church, the Congregation Emanu-el and for over a century, St. Ann's Church. The section that remains of the original 1847 construction without its 1870 French Gothic sanctuary, is a stark sight in front of the 26-story dorm. 

Apart from the odd vacancy of a cross above the nude steel spire, it is the strangeness that I experience when coming around the side of the folly (the architectural term for a freestanding facade) which sends me into a pensive mood. There is nothing really between the dorms and the Citi bike racks off the sidewalk. 

There is the bracing of brick crossing a few stained-glass windows from the '20s, boarded up entryways to the inaccessible tower and the most peculiar thing of all, the backside of the front doors which cannot be approached through the black iron fence of the gateway. Behind me, a building attendant behind an NYU decal on the glass door to the dormitory building known as "Founders Hall."

Two other articles have a more thorough write up than I could produce of the history behind the place of worship that did exist here and the story of its demise at Bedford and Bowery & Daytonian in Manhattan. What I would like to highlight from them both though is an affinity with the underdog (The Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation, former churchgoers, forlorn art appreciators) and a distaste for the outcome at the hands of the multiple parties involved in St. Ann's fate (New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, NYU, the developer Alan Bell).

Many factors are cited: dwindling outreach and attendance; shifting demographics; debt incurred from multiple parish loans; the tide of progress lapping on the shores of all neighborhoods in Manhattan, especially the Village. Who can say which and in what measure or combination of the above created this particular result, the folly of St. Ann's? It is not so eerie to me, the observer, or melancholy, or maddening. 

My concern I believe is aesthetic, which is also in its own way, moral. My aesthetic experience as I pass this facade every time is as if the sanctuary continued to extend through the dormitory building, all the way back to 11th Street as it once did. This structural impression, the effect of the remnant on the observer creating a disproportionate sense of continuity in regards to the folly, must have escaped the consideration of the developers and their architect that NYU hired entirely - or it wasn't even given a thought, credence or weight.

Both links above include pictures of the church around 1914 when supremely crafted Gothic spire work topped the tower. The cross of symbolic power and its crown of ornament are no longer present. What is present is a memory of something else, of a different school, a religious school. Founders Hall may house current students or future scholars of religious study in an ethnographically or theoretically interested "focus." The place that was St. Ann's provided space for the religious experience to occur for, to, or with a person in the sanctuary. The study became practice, the worship an exercise in scale between immensity and the infinitesimal.

In Catholicism by the taking of communion, the transcendent God becomes accessible through the immanence of the human being. However, this is also represented in the architecture of a church itself. The facade and its tower have a verticality that is counterposed by the horizontal stretch of the sanctuary. They meet together (as in the cross) and as this is also true from a point of view of looking down on the floor plan from above, it is just as true from a side view of the chapel. The idea is old: Heaven and earth meet in the house of the Lord. The development and raising up of these structural forms during the medieval period is thoroughly investigated by Otto von Simson in his Bollingen Series book The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Concept of Order if it is of any interest to the reader.

No Easter confirmations were given after 2003 at St. Ann's Church. The neighborhood is not without its examples from the 19th and 20th centuries when it comes to churches continuing service and even offering organ recitals at midday, such as Grace Church still does only a block away.

The continual recurrence of the experience that the folly of St. Ann's gives me keeps me shooting pictures and contemplating over and again. Sometimes I have to walk/run to work and with my face forward, feet shooting out sidewalk behind them, my attention isn't taken by the folly because I couldn't care less - I'm going to work now, I'll be late, so what? But on the slow walk back home, when these same legs are tired, I cannot help but be a witness to the affront of the folly. Was this really a show of "compromise" in answer to the appeals of the neighborhood? Why leave the vertical without its horizontal, half-disassembling the place's dignity and history?

We see now that purpose is plainly writ in the brick and the steel of any building we encounter. It is a moral and an aesthetic choice - but under the rule of what William Morris called "anarchic plutocracy," the true divinity of the sky is the half-symbol stiffened, straight, lit up and beaming in its sheer and utter verticality. And my God is it beautiful every time I walk uptown and see the Chrysler Building from afar! Forgoing the Earth for the sky. And so, craning my neck forgoes I.