Debriefing

Journal notes from Sunday, 27 December 2009
MOMA, musings and impressions
My love, Orozco with his network of circular forms, a diagram designed "to explain how things work, how objects behave."

***
I still smell the perfume on my own wrist
but it only reminds me of you
(Is it the perfume from her dress that makes me so digress?)

***
I managed to blog - that was a good thing
----- the songs I'm singing -----

***
the little boy in the wheelchair in
the elevator at MOMA -
he was so exquisite, so lovely, so sweet,
so innocent - but already so exposed
to something terrible -
as well to high beauty, and devotion, his
sister, or mother, or au pair, or some lovely
young woman wheeling him into the lift -
the lovely quiet boy, all smiles, self-possessed
keenly alive, and aware, modest,
charisma, modest loving sweet young boy.

***
the Tim Burton exhibit (mandala, star bursting, worms, snakes - Jung)
okay




really impressive - gallery
of fantôme images from the
19th century, esp. Paris
"photography was invented 1839"
I thought it was later -
those images are timeless -
yet everyone within them is deceased -
here I am -

***
Earlier that day I also visited the American Museum of Folk Art, next door to MOMA, which featured a small exhibit by Henry Darger, a (so-called) "outsider" artist whose work I've seen earlier at a large retrospective there years ago and whose images have stayed with me



What if Henry Darger had grown up in Burbank [like Tim Burton]? His visions are Blake-ian, cinematic. Why is he marginalized as an "outsider" artist?

And somehow, I suspect, or just feel, that R. Crumb - from what I've read (e.g., H. Bloom, in NYRB) is overestimated. I don't trust Crumb (or his vision)
Why are the women so resolutely ugly?
this is not a deeply felt vision


***
What do these people make of
E. Dickinson
It's a wonder she's not marginalized as "outsider"
A. Rich gets her wrong
E.D. was wronged (misunderstood) -
felt herself split -
It is very hard.




(And still the perfume on my wrist lingers -
I'm grateful.)









***
... I can't imagine what I'm going to blog about tomorrow.