One Friday evening at BAM this past summer, roughly twelve minutes into Philip Glass and Robert Wilson’s four-and-a-half-hour-long avant-garde Gesamtkunstwerk, “Einstein on the Beach,” a man sitting a row ahead of me stole a glance at his watch. It seemed an eloquent gesture. Not as a verdict on the show—which has been rightly hailed and heralded across the world—but as a vignette of our contemporary busyness. Nowadays, encounters of the spirit must be scheduled long in advance, and even then the endless tide of deferred chores and anticipated engagements never ceases to break on our attention. There is always something else that needs doing.
John Ashbery, whose twenty-sixth book of poems was published two weeks ago, is very good on attention deficit in an age of cultural surfeit, or what he calls,> the dread of not getting out
These lines are from “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery’s long poem about the painting by Parmigianino. For many years Ashbery made his living as an art critic, and his description of the canvas is on one level a virtuoso piece of critical explication, a meticulous record of attention paid. At the same time, the poet’s mind is always being tugged away from pure aesthetic contemplation toward the evanescent filler of his own private experience, “the friends / Who came to see me, of what yesterday / Was like.” This tension, which is everywhere in Ashbery, is central to his appeal, for it mirrors what must be the ambivalence many readers feel toward great works of art, including those by Ashbery himself. We all know what it is like to be insufficiently ravished by a masterpiece of world culture—to stare at a canvas by Poussin and find ourselves wondering what we’re going to make for dinner, or whether there wasn’t something ever so slightly double-edged in that e-mail our colleague sent us this morning. Even if we are arrested and moved by what we see, there always eventually comes a moment when, “The balloon pops, the attention / Turns dully away.”
Geoff Dyer’s most recent book, “Zona,” published last February, and which I previously wrote on here, is “about” Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” in the same way that Ashbery’s poem is “about” the Parmigianino painting. Tarkovsky, like Parmigianino, is less the subject of the book than the occasion for a series of digressions. Dyer is eager to do justice not simply to Tarkovsky (though his passion for the director’s work is clear enough) but to the way Tarkovsky makes him feel—to the richly associative mood that arises from the effort of concentrating very hard on a single intricate and demanding object. As he treats us to a whistle-stop tour of his cluttered mind, Dyer’s book becomes a kind of covert autobiography, in which “Stalker”—the various occasions on which he’s seen it, what was going on in his life at the time, the other films and books and paintings the film reminds him of—is the central unifying theme.
Sunk in my seat at BAM, eating honey-roasted peanuts from a Ziploc bag—I had come straight from work, and hadn’t had time to get dinner—I myself was already swatting away thoughts about all the things (laundry, cleaning, shopping, bill-paying, party-going, exercise, perhaps a page or two of reading) I hoped to accomplish that weekend; about the long, long overdue e-mails and phone calls, to say nothing of in-person visits, I owed to friends and family; about all the other things I had passed up (playing ping pong, checking Nate Silver’s blog) in order to be here; about the following workweek that, even on a Friday evening, had already begun to set out its stall of nagging anxieties. Meanwhile, the keyboardists in the orchestra pit continued to hammer out Glass’s blipping arpeggios.
Ashbery is troubled both by what seems to be his anti-intellectual preference for “the strewn evidence” of life, “the small accidents and pleasures / Of the day as it moved gracelessly on,” and by the fact that such ephemera never seem to make it into works of art (art, whose goal is, as Ashbery has it, “to perfect and rule out the extraneous / Forever”). Perhaps some poems and paintings have a go at capturing this “strewn evidence,” but their “way of telling” ends up twisting
Just as Ashbery, or any poet, inevitably fails to realize his intentions, so too his reader—or any reader, reading any poem—will always inevitably fail to comprehend his meaning entirely. From the poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons”:
Like Glass, Ashbery at once resists and accommodates our over-full lives. His poems demand a great deal from the reader (in the way of attention, patience, alertness, suggestibility), even as they cheerfully acknowledge that they are not the only pebble on the reader’s beach. They are always describing what Ashbery knows will be our imperfect attention to his work. He knows that, like him, we are always thinking about “what yesterday / Was like.”
Like Ashbery, Dyer is of two minds—is of many minds—about his incorrigible distractibility. His oeuvre—which encompasses books on photography, jazz, the First World War, travel, and D. H. Lawrence, among other subjects—is both a celebration of and a quarrel with dilettantism. Tarkovsky’s immense cinematic mindscapes seem to represent, for Dyer, a level of aesthetic discipline and single-mindedness that he admires deeply but could never hope to achieve himself. In “Zona,” he quotes Tarkovsky describing his infamously glacial panning shots: “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.” Dyer then comments: “At first there can be a friction between our expectations of time and Tarkovsky-time and this friction is increasing in the twenty-first century as we move further and further away from Tarkovsky-time towards moron-time in which nothing can last—and no one can concentrate on anything—for longer than about two seconds.”
Chekhov once wrote to a correspondent: “Odd, I have now a mania for shortness. Whenever I read my own or other people’s works it all seems to me not short enough.”
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that in the future, as technology increased efficiency and production, a fifteen-hour work week would become the norm: “Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”
It hasn’t panned out. Americans (those who have a job, at least) work more hours than citizens of any other advanced industrialized nation, even though we don’t want to; according to surveys, many people would gladly take a pay cut if it meant they didn’t have to spend so much time at work. Part of this state of affairs clearly stems from chronic job insecurity. Not to do all that you could possibly be doing, all the time, is to risk making yourself expendable.
I am talking about more than work, however. These days, out-of-office time (that melting ice cap) is subject to the same time-maximizing imperative that dominates our work lives. Speaking with colleagues and friends about the assault course of culture that our weekends have become, I am often filled with a sense of weariness (as, it seems, are many of them). Perhaps it is because we feel we have so little free time remaining that we are eager to get as much out of it—to pack as much in to it—as humanly possible.
One of the striking things about “Einstein on the Beach” is the way that the audience’s distraction seems to be anticipated by the work itself. It is not simply the frequent watch-checking performed by the characters onstage, or the fact, though there are no scheduled intermissions, that audience members are free to come and go as they please throughout the show. Glass’s music itself, with its famed relentlessness (“Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass, etc.”) seems to invite us to switch off. Or rather, Glass’s music feels like both an invitation to switch off and a promise, or a threat, that at any moment something incredible will occur. (If you take advantage of the come-and-go-as-you-please policy and slip out, as I did, for a sandwich—the peanuts were never going to be enough—who knows what you might miss?)
The title of Ashbery’s latest volume, “Quick Question,” wryly acknowledges the way in which a new book of poems, especially from someone who has written so much and received such acclaim, might strike certain people as a slightly bothersome interruption, to be apologized for and gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. “This won’t take a minute,” he seems to be saying, brightly.
Of course, the joke is on us as much as it is on Ashbery. Quick questions, and short answers, are exactly not what we are going to get from these poems. (The title also reminds me of Wallace Stevens’s aphorism, “The man who asks questions seeks only to reach a point where it will no longer be necessary for him to ask questions.” These poems have no interest in reaching such a point.) In Ashbery, pleasure precedes comprehension, and comprehension is always imperfect and incomplete. (In a way, never quite knowing what Ashbery is talking about, realizing the futility of attempting to “translate” his words into something more lucid and transparently intelligible, is part of the pleasure.) His poems—like all poems—slow us down, remind us that many of the most singular and important things in life cannot be readily assimilated. To call them a momentary stay against confusion (Frost’s phrase for the end of poetry) might be going a bit far, but they are a momentary stay against thoughtless consumption.
In “Like Any Leaves,” one of the shortest poems in the new book, and thus the one I read before any of the others—
—the first thing we’re confronted by is our own confusion, our own ignorance. (Wallace Stevens, to quote him again—compulsive quotation seems a symptom of the distracted, overloaded mind—said both that “one’s ignorance is one’s chief asset” and that “the poem reveals itself only to the ignorant man.”) Who are “they” in the first line? What does “mosquito by mosquito” mean? What was a “different tower”? What won’t “fold or digress”? Is a slap on the arm “confusing”? Which runners, and why are they looping back to a confessional?
That last line, whatever its “meaning,” makes me think of the opening of an earlier poem, “What Is Poetry,” in which Ashbery offers a number of tentative answers: “The medieval town, with frieze / Of boy scouts from Nagoya?” My crude translation of this line would be, “A hitherto undreamed of marriage of incongruities, that exists nowhere but within this poem?”
I know how Chekhov feels. These days, the shorter a book is, the more likely I am to read it. The prospect of being finished with something, soon, is enticing. I am always eager to be moving on to what’s next—the next book, the next film, the next performance. I feel “the dread of not getting out / Before having seen the whole collection.” The thought of spending a month, or several months, with a single work—a “The Magic Mountain” or an “In Search of Lost Time”—is somehow enervating.
Of course, there is a pernicious logic at work here. Why read a long novel when you can read a short one? Why read a short novel when you can watch a movie? Why watch a movie when you can watch a TV show? Why watch a TV when you catch a minute-long video of a kitten and a puppy cuddling on YouTube? As soon as we start to think of art simply as something to be consumed, discarded, and replaced, we rob it of one of its greatest powers: its capacity to free us from the grip of easier but shallower pleasures.
It is this, in the end, that makes Ashbery and Glass the profound, and the profoundly contemporary, artists that they are—not their modesty, not their bashful acknowledgment of their own marginality, but their boldness, their grandiose ambition. They ask a lot of us, to be sure, but the payback is handsome. I saw “Einstein on the Beach” over three months ago, but I have hardly stopped thinking about it since; the manically even “Night Train” duet plays on an almost endless loop inside my head. Ashbery, whose work I have known for longer, has infected my consciousness even more profoundly. Hardly a day goes by in which I don’t overhear a bit of conversation (recently, on the subway: “In terms of winter, this is pretty scary”) or read something on a billboard or the side of a bus that doesn’t sound like it comes from, or belongs in, an Ashbery poem.
I currently have thirteen tabs open on my Internet browser: aspirational current-events literacy, aspirational e-mail responding. My desk is strewn with to-do lists, scribbled on outsized Post-its. I dream of one day compiling them into a master to-do list—a list of lists. Then there is Christmas shopping, and Christmas socializing, to think about. It can sometimes seem as though modern life has no room for four-and-a-half-hour-long experimental operas or difficult poetry; but this is a mistake. In a world of speed and distraction, the slow, demanding art work is more indispensable than ever, for it holds out the possibility of those elusive commodities: stillness, clarity, and peace.
Illustration by Hannah K. Lee.
