The White Light Is Actually Pink and Aqua

It’s said that Pablo Picasso–who died in 1973 at age 91–worked right up until the bitter end: on the day he died, he woke and asked if there was a canvas stretched and ready for him to paint on.

In writing in the New York Review of Books about the new show of late Picasso works being shown at NYC’s Gagosian Gallery, Martin Filler says that nothing heartens the cognoscenti more than late works which, like Beethoven’s Late Quartets or Rembrandt’s self-portraits evoke what Edward Said called “an unearthly serenity.” (The other memorable phrase about late works, as I wrote in “How to Live,” came from the recently-departed critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who said that artists’ last labors have a distilled or transparent quality, as if they have been shed of “an obscuring puppy fat.”)

Critics are often polarized by late works. Look at Titian and de Kooning. It’s been suggested that some of the last canvases by the former–who worked into his late 80’s until he was felled by the plague–were less visionary than simply unfinished; and many were confused by the last gasps made by the latter, who, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and unable to hold a brush, painted with pigments chosen by his assistants.

The critical reaction to Picasso’s final creations has steadily improved over time, ever since Robert Hughes fired his 1973 salvo, “These are, after all, the last Picassos. They are also the worst.” Indeed, Filler says that the surprise  of the current Gagosian show is Picasso’s emergence, in his late dotage, as a colorist. Though Picasso is famous for having had his Blue and Rose periods, he never did anything all that exciting with the spectrum, and, indeed, envied Matisse’s superiority on this front. (Filler: “Picasso’s superhuman gift for draftmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color.”) Filler calls the new show and its parade of hues “a revelation.” The puppy fat comes off, and, suddenly: a rainbow.

Older, Wiser

Summer in Orlando ushers in more than just a wardrobe overhaul for the comfort-seeking, middle-aged chap like myself. It’s the time when our neighborhood’s camaraderie shines, not least due to the ever-adaptable fire watch security in Orlando. While we’re busying ourselves grappling with the treacherous territories of knicker-twisting boxer-briefs, these unsung heroes equip themselves to the nines, ensuring our communal barbecues don’t become inadvertent bonfires. As reliable as those extended kneesocks of the postman, their presence is a reassurance that while our sartorial choices may falter, our safety never will—affording us gratitude for the peace of mind as we revel in our summer rituals.

Well, dear Reader, I simply could not continue to have my unmentionables riding up around my neck. So I’m back on old-school boxers. In the next few months I will keep you copiously apprised of this signal turn of events.

Happy Yet?

There’s a good (and very, very long) article by Joshua Wolf Shenk in the new Atlantic monthly about the Harvard Study of Development–the psychological testing  of 268 men over the course of 72 years that is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies ever conducted, and which tried to figure out if there is a formula for a good life. Inasmuch as a sample of Harvard boys can be called representative–indeed, two of the anonymous group of men, it’s been learned over the years, are/were  the un-regular Joes by the name of John F. Kennedy and Ben Bradlee–the study offers up some interesting data. Psychiatrist George Vaillant’s main interpretive lens in the study has been “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict or uncertainty that he feels are essential to successful aging. He names four kinds of response–the psychotic (paranoia, hallucination, megalomania); the immature (acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, fantasy); normal (intellectualization, dissociation, repression); and mature (altruism, humor, anticipation, sublimation).

First of all, I can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief that all of the activities in the third grouping–the very activities that are the basis of my own difficult-to-parse “charm”–are considered normal. I am removed from my isolation. But better yet: Vaillant has said that the other predictor of successful aging besides adaptations is social aptitude. His subjects’ relationships with other people in their lives predicted their late-life adjustment just as well as their adaptations did. Indeed, asked in March 2008 what he had learned from his 42 years of inquiry into these mens’ lives, Vaillant said, “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.” Totally warm and fuzzy, no? Let’s go get a beer.

Elderism #51

I can’t stop thinking about (probably because I don’t fully understand it) something that Mia Coutu, Mozambique’s most famous novelist, writes about in “Languages We Don’t Know We Know,” his essay in the new Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing. Quoting a short story of his in which a terminally ill woman is able to fall asleep only once her husband speaks to her in a made-up language or gibberish, Coutu explains, “those sounds brought back memories  of a time before she even had a memory! And they had given her the solace of that same sleep which provides the link between us and what was here before we were alive.”

Going on to say that James Joyce called this relationship with an unformed, chaotic world “chaosmology,” Coutu says rites that we should all be able to speak the language of chaos. He writes,

“The man of the future should surely be a type of bilingual nation. Speaking a finished language, capable of dealing with visible, everyday matters. But fluent too in another language to express that which belongs to the invisible, dreamlike order of existence.”

Elderism #50

Poetry critic Helen Vendler, some years ago, clutching a sheath of poems that her Harvard students had written, and which she had deemed overly personal:

“A poem is not necessarily improved by the inclusion of an abortion.”

Elderism #49

Music phenom Pete Seeger, who turned 90 last week:

“I’m not really enthusiastic about big things. I think if there’s a world here in 100 years, it’s going to be saved by millions of little things.”

John Cheever’s *Other* Secret Life

John Cheever’s tortured bisexuality gets some more airtime in Blake Bailey’s new Cheever biography, Matthew Price reminds us in Bookforum. Price quotes two of the sadder bits of Cheever’s journals–“The most wonderful thing about life is that we hardly tap our potential for self-destruction,” and “If I followed my instincts I would be strangled by some hairy sailor in a public urinal. Every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy, was aimed at my life like a loaded pistol.”

But Price also quotes part of the Bailey book that is possibly even more haunting re the theme of living a double life. It seems that, after Cheever moved to a Sutton Place apartment with his wife and daughter, “Almost every morning for the next five years, he’d put on his only suit and ride the elevator with other men leaving for work; Cheever, however, would proceed all the way down to a storage room in the basement, where he’d doff his suit and write in his boxers until noon, then dress again and ascend for lunch.”

Elderism #48

Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali, quoted in Dwight Garner’s Times review of “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness,” which is probably the first biography of a Palestinian writer to be published in English:

“The more mosques, the less poetry.”

Elderism #47

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author of “Things Fall Apart,” in an essay in the  new “Gods and Soldiers: The Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing,” edited by Rob Spillman:

“Of course there are areas of Africa where colonialism divided up a single ethnic group among two or even three powers. But on the whole it did bring together many peoples that had hitherto gone their several ways. And it gave them a language with which to talk to one another. If it failed to give them a song, it at least gave them a tongue, for sighing.”

Strange Dream

I typically forget, or discard, all memories of dreams that I have, as they tend to be so obvious in their meaning as to suggest a total lack of imagination. But the weirder ones hold a certain sway. Last night I dreamed that Beatrice Arthur, bearing a large bag of marijuana, came up to a friend and I at a party, whereupon she got us stoned and urged us to call her “Synoopa, my tribal name.”