Presence

Route 2, 2 p.m.,
Williamstown, MA

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Hello darling, back from my jaunt across state lines. Wish the photo had come out better, I was coming over a hill when the pretty steepled church and behind it the handsome stone bell tower swung into view, and as I drove I frantically patted the passenger seat next to me fishing for my camera which I managed to find and took the picture with one hand while still driving. Well - at least I wasn't on a cell phone.

I enjoyed the drive, about an hour and ten minutes each way, flying along back country roads alongside and through the Berkshire mountains. It was great quality time mentally communing with you, and a lipreader in any vehicle behind me might have thought that I have Tourettes for all the obscene scenarios I imagined freely aloud, in the privacy of the sealed car, of you and me together. My utterances were punctuated with Anglo-Saxon monosyllables that - as I traveled the front and then, flipping you over, the backside of you, covering both sides of you, every inch - get right down to it. Ah, nice release for me, in a fashion, it really was. Not even close to being with you, or to the next best thing (maybe I can drive and snap a picture, but that's the extent of my ambidextrousness while operating heavy machinery), but it was balm to imagine you, the sensation of you, and to keep using, with guttural relish, dirty words over and over again, hard.

Oh, and in between I stopped at an art museum. I just wrote a note to My Friend in Finland about it, so since I'm tired after all that driving and what-not, I'll just include it here.

I'm back from a trip to an art museum this afternoon, in Williamstown, MA, where I saw an exhibit entitled, 'The Strange World of Albrecht Dürer'. Actually, that seems like a silly title for an exhibit, but the exhibit itself was fascinating, about 75 of his engravings, woodcuts, and an etching or two (he only made 6 in all, didn't like the form for some reason) from the museum's collection. Of course I was aware of Dürer in a cursory 'Art 101' kind of way, but had never taken time to look at a number of his works in person. My God! He reminds me of Blake, his visionary scenes, woodcuts of scenes, as he re-imagines them, from Revelations, for example. And the level of extremely fine-grained detail was truly astounding. I mean, whole tiny villages in a distant landscape rendered in perfect perspective, and in fine detail - in a space of size no larger than my little finger. Or an image of, say, a swan in a pond - and the reflection of the swan beneath it! - as just the tiniest naturalistic detail - rendered tinier I think than an infant's tiny fingernail! It really was quite astounding. There was also an informative short film showing how woodcuts, engravings, and etchings are made. Which made me marvel at his work all the more - it would be hard enough to create such images with the finest pen-and-ink, let alone carving it out of a block of wood or copper plate. Anyway, I think you would have enjoyed the exhibit too. He even had a number of abstract designs of "knots," complex, ornate, labyrinthine, intertwining lines, merging into hexagonal stars - kaleidescopic.

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Also, in a separate exhibit entitled Eye to Eye, there was a beautiful collection of about thirty portraits, mostly paintings, of distinct individual characters, each one at whom we could gaze, and who, depending on the work, gazed back with various attitudes.

Along with this was a nice quote on the wall, by Frida Kahlo:

And there was a Bonnard.

And there was this lovely portrait too, which caught my fancy.

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And so darling, I leave you this post so that you might have my presence.

Very many kisses.