Everyday People

The carpet cleaner came yesterday morning, 10 minutes early, so I had to flee my office for the front room and its hardwood floors. I grabbed a magazine and a book of poems off my desk almost randomly – the April 6 issue of The New York Review of Books and Kay Ryan’s Say Uncle – for something to read while the cleaner tried to remove the stains my kids leave behind like carbon dioxide.

In the Review, Robert Hughes writes about Rembrandt van Rijn, a subject I would think daunting because of over-familiarity. But Hughes is a writer who, thanks to immense learning and a disciplined eye, ever unfazed by mere fashion, always brings something unexpected to and out of his ostensible subject. We can say of Hughes what Guy Davenport once said of his own reasons for writing: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” In this case, Hughes concerns himself with the most notoriously slippery of aesthetic categories, realism:

“Certainly Rembrandt van Rijn did not feel an obligation to make his human subjects noble, let alone perfect. That is why, though not always a realist, he is the first god of realism after Caravaggio. And why so many people love him, since he was so seldom rivaled as a topographer of the human clay.”

The language is quintessential Hughes, simple, straightforward and vigorous, free of artspeak, unafraid of metaphor or informed generalization. I like the unforced linkage, separated by more than a sentence, of “god” and “human clay.” Hughes is also generous, for aren’t we among those who love Rembrandt, and for such a good reason?

Now we come to my favorite sentence in an article liberally sprinkled with good ones: “He was a singular connoisseur of ordinariness, and some of his self-portraits are eloquent proof of this.” And a little later: “Nor did he ever treat the human form as a means of escape from the disorder and episodic ugliness of the real world. Reality was always breaking into celestial events.” William Blake might have written the latter sentence, had he been sane.

Without putting words in Hughes’ mouth, I would like to propose a generalization of my own: Much of the art that most moves us is rooted in ordinariness, in the recognizably quotidian lives of human beings. The is true even of the seemingly fantastic world of Dante. The more attenuated the human connection, the more likely abstraction will dilute the emotional and moral impact of the work. It may remain formally admirable, even beautiful, but only in the most clinical sense. What I propose is not a schematic for simple-minded “social realism,” nor is it the only useful way to enjoy and assess art. Rather, art that jettisons the human risks emotional aridity and often betrays its worthiest purposes.

In Kay Ryan’s book of poems, Say Uncle, I found some substantiation for these thoughts. Ryan’s poems are brief, even laconic, but never ostentatiously oracular, like Robert Creeley’s anorexic offerings. Ryan is funny and smart. Her wit is Metaphysical and her subjects, invariably, are you and me. Here’s a poem about the most human of subjects, “Failure,” that uses what we might call scientific observation:

“Like slime
inside a
stagnant tank

its green
deepening
from lime
to emerald

a dank
but less
ephemeral
efflorescence

than success
is in general.”

Even better, three pages later, is “Failure 2”:

“There could be nutrients
in failure –
deep amendments
to the shallow soil
of wishes.
Think of the
dark and bitter
flavors of
black ales
and peasant loaves.
Think of licorices.
Think about
the tales of how
Indians put fishes
under corn plants.
Next time hope
relinquishes a form,
think about that.”

Here, the “disorder and episodic ugliness of the real world” – that is to say, our world, the human world – is turned by Ryan quite modestly into a celestial -- that is to say, everyday – event. And now my carpet is clean.