`A Deficit of Precise Data'

Last week my brother shipped me an assemblage he made last spring after reading The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, by Zbigniew Herbert. I had sent him an uncorrected proof of the book after reviewing it for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he read the great Pole’s work avidly and created “Ten Things Made After Reading Herbert.” Several included poems or parts of poems by Herbert, and I finally saw them in August while visiting him in Cleveland. He asked which one I most liked, and gave it to me. Now it hangs above the couch in our den, where I do a lot of reading.

The picture, which makes no overt allusion to Herbert, is titled “Kontrolliert und Eingepackt,” from a headline clipped from Der Spiegel and glued to the center of the assemblage. We think it means “controlled and prepackaged.” Framed, the whole thing measures 24 by 25 inches. The outer matting in off-white, the narrow inner matting is gray, and the picture itself is on light brown ragboard matting that measures 16 by 17 inches. Near the top is a horizontal line, three-quarters of an inch thick, made by placing 33 washers in a row, applying tape to the edges and spray-painting them. The result resembles a belt made of linked rings. With a Sharpie, he bisected the line of rings with 32 short vertical lines, brushed lightly with water to give them a slightly blurred appearance.

Below the belt are two more horizontal lines, a blank space, then another two very fine lines, part of a grid of verticals and horizontals that fill the bottom of the picture. At the center is “Kontrolliert und Eingepackt” on white magazine stock, below which, at the center of the grid, are two overlapping circles, each five inches in diameter. Using watercolors, Ken painted the left circle a pale pink, the color of juice from a watermelon. The right circle is not colored and not completed, and reminds me of the broken circles I’ve seen in paintings by Zen practitioners. All that remains are four small red rectangles integrated into the grid, and the signature centered at the bottom: “KURP 2007.”

The German phrase seems to comment on the graphic tension between openness and closure. The belt above and grid below demarcate space. The circles, variously flesh-colored, are part of the grid but seem to defy it. I won’t presume to fix a single interpretation, but it implies a squaring off between a German draftsman and a softer, fleshier, kindlier, perhaps more Slavic spirit. The picture is not pinned to any specific Herbert poem, but was part of the cycle of pictures inspired by my brother’s first reading of Herbert. I see correspondances in the poem, especially “Mr Cogito on the Need for Precision,” which is five pages long and contains these lines:

“particles of matter are measured
the heavenly body is weighed
and only in human affairs
a criminal neglect runs rampant
a deficit of precise data”

And this from “Mr Cogito and the Imagination”:

“he loves
a flat horizon
a straight line
earth’s gravity”

And finally, an early prose poem, “Objects”:

“Inanimate objects are always correct and cannot, unfortunately, be reproached with anything. I have never observed a chair shift from one foot to another, or a bed rear on its hind legs. And tables, even when they are tired, will not dare to bend their knees. I suspect that objects do this from pedagogical considerations, to reprove us constantly for our instability.”

I don’t want to freight my brother’s picture with a lot of gratuitous meaning. Principally, it’s beautiful, a pleasure to contemplate, like Herbert’s poems. Thanks, Ken.

ADDENDUM: In answer to one of today's comments, I don't have a digital camera and wouldn't know how to use it or how to post an image anyway. Sorry, but we're stuck with words.