Quixotic

American Values, Lessons I Learned From My Family, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 2018

I was raised in a Kennedy household, shaped by the death of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and then again, by the loss of his brother in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy, "So-Long Bobby." What did I learn from my read of American Values, Lessons I Learned From My Family, a great many things, as the Irish and Italians share close-knit history, I recalled the hard-scrabble gumption required by immigrants, and that resistance makes one stronger. I learned that the brown-shoed Brahmins called the Irish "Protestant Swamp Yankees." And how Queen Victoria donated five pounds to the starving Irish, and that NINA = No Irish Need Apply. 

I was given an insider's seat on twenty-nine Kennedy cousins summering on Cape Cod, at Hyannis, sailing the 26' wooden day-sailor, "Victura." and that Jack Kennedy's favorite song was "The Boys of Wessex." 

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Rose Kennedy's father, John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, paraded naked on the beach before wrapping himself in seaweed for the beneficial benefits gathered from the sea. And Rose, well, she swam in the coldest weather into her nineties, reaching the ripe old age of 104. She possessed some precise rules to live well by, including a twenty-minute stroll following dinner, both in the scorching sun or pouring rain, with a poem to memorize pinned to her sweater. Like Queen Victoria, she walked many hours a day. Mandatory, in the Kennedy household, one must finish one's shower with a direct blast of cold water to reinvigorate an otherwise, god-forbid, sluggish system. I am following her lead, not straight cold, but as cold as I can take.

Or how Jack Kennedy read a book a day. And that his favorite author was Ernest Hemingway. 

Grampa, Joseph Kennedy, kept the original tight ship, frequently uttering to his hoard of grandchildren, accompanied by rhythmic clapping—"I don't want any sour-pusses around here." And —"There will be no crying in this house."

And if you want the in's and outs on the CIA during both presidencies you'll find them, alongside the families trials through the horrors of two assassinations, all thoughtfully, historically, presented. 

As to our very own beloved RFK, Jr., who I have had the pleasure of meeting, well, he was a hellion in his youth, who remains a naturalist, and has attained acclaim as the top environmental lawyer for the nation. Bobby and his mother Ethel spent many years throwing stones as cats and dogs. Her practice of "tough love" was hard on him. I understand those were turbulent times, and many, myself included, met trouble head-on. RFK, Jr. is a falconer, and so always since his boyhood and love of Arthurian legends. And though he faulted his mother for being mercurial and arbitrary, over many years, he came to appreciate the gifts she gave him, and her eleven children following his father's death.

He describes his father, Joseph Kennedy, as practically a teetotaler, a straight arrow, with a personal, life beyond reproach. How disparate their lives, RFK Jr. was at Woodstock for his "generations constitutional convention," listening to rock and roll, the national anthem, FM, marching in Earth Day protests in New York, and reading underground newspapers and Mr. Natural comics, accepting "drugs were the fuel of the insurrection." Busted for marijuana possession with his cousin Bobby Shriver in 1970, he had dragged the family name through the mud. His second arrest was at seventeen in 1971 for loitering in Hyannis, and with his fate sealed at home, he lit out for the territories with a backpack and two friends spending the summer hopping freight trains across the American West.  Fast forward to 1983, and Bobby at twenty-nine faced arrest in South Dakota for possession of a small amount of heroin. "Addiction bewildered me," he writes, "The inability to keep contracts with myself was the most demoralizing feature of my addiction. Addiction is a world of isolation, and although I was surrounded by people, over time my word, along with my ambitions, grew smaller and smaller." He then began to attend Twelve Step meetings. He writes that insight doesn't cure addiction any more than it would cure diabetes, but that the act of unity with others in service proved self-evident. Service to others, he found, gives the power to emancipate ourselves from the destructive compulsion. As a friend told him, "If there's a nagging problem in your life, it's probably you."

I forgot to mention his love and admiration for his nanny, Ena Bernard, who was for 44 years,  "a serene island in a tempestuous sea." 

Today he is criticized as the "vaccine skeptic," power to him. Accolades accompany his environmental victories.  RFK, Jr.'s many varied accomplishments include:

President of the board of Waterkeeper Alliances, which he helped found in 1999. 

Chairman of the  Children's Health Defense

Acting Senior Attorney at the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC). 

Co-host of Ring of Fire, a nationally syndicated radio program.

Author or editor of ten books, two New York Times bestsellers.

Lucan portrait of Leonardo da Vinci

The Lady in Gray, 2018, and the Lucan portrait, tempera grassa on panel, 60 x 40 cm. (24 x 16") 1459 - 1523

And how delightfully crazy life is—you become the one you love. Against all the odds, beyond reason—the divine has a playful side. The divine loves beauty, but humor even more. And so, I trespassed into the realm of "selfie," and this is what I brought back — the spittin' image of one Lucan portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. Two Tuscans, we carry the unique Etruscan gene, not yet erased by the ravages of time. Blue-eyed, lovers of birds, both possessed by art. I snapped it like many of us are apt, the silly-coy selfie, excused, or so I thought, by my 60th winter, something along the lines of silver hair and silver linings. 

The Lucan portrait is late 15th, early 16th century. Discovered where it rested in the cupboard of a private aristocratic home in Acerenza, Italy, the owners believed it was Galileo. After reaching the media, in 2011, a self-portrait was ruled out. From 2011 - 2018 though it remains the focus of heated debate over attribution to Leonardo. There exists a citation from 1815, held in Parma, professing it is indeed, the work of Leonardo da Vinci, in possession of "the noble family" Russo, at the Palazzo Baranello nella strada Cedronia of the Duke of Baranello.  The white feather bears touches of titanium white, but otherwise, it dates true. 

"PINXIT MEA" is painted on the backside in capitalized "mirror writing" running down the left side, not across the center. PINXIT MEA from Latin: "one painted," was added to the signature depiction of the artist's name, Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Raphael sometimes abbreviated it P, PIN, or PINX.

The portrait depicts Leonardo as a blue-eyed, middle-aged man. Testing supports the Renaissance date; carbon dating placed it  1459 - 1523, contemporary with Leonardo, who lived from 1452 - 1519. The script is in "iron gall" an ink of Leonardo's, matching that used in his Atlantic Codex. And gloriously, they found three fingerprints, and one left index fingerprint on the Lucan portrait is indubitably the same index fingerprint on the ebony beads of Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine.

As Obama said, after the election in 2016, "When the going gets weird, the weird go pro." Bring it on. 

Kieślowski on Kieślowski, edited by Danusia Stok, 1993

Regrettably, another great artistic life was cut short, Poland's best-known film director, Krzysztof Kieślowski was born, in June 1941, Warsaw, Poland, and died in 1996. Where to begin, I admire his work, his eye, his sensitivity — the films he so masterly crafted to evolve through ideas, not actions. He lived a nomadic childhood, traveling from one sanitorium to another, with his sister and mother, looking in vain to cure his father's tuberculosis. Reticent and wary by nature, the constant drifting made him more so. He told of how Poland is home to romantics, captured by the Odyssian theme of going back home, in history and culture, lured by the family home, where successive generations pass unbroken. (Italy in my world casts the spell.) He described his youth, spent climbing roofs with friends: "I'd climb with him, too, and we'd always drink the wine somewhere high above the town." The director, even as a child, searched for his bird's eye view.  

"You make a film to give people something, to transport them somewhere else and it doesn't matter if you transport them to a world of intuition or a world of the intellect."—Kieślowski

He repeatedly spoke of the realm of perception, intuition, superstition, dreams, constituting our inner sanctum of living, and how it is the hardest thing to craft in art. What we know and what we feel. 

He wrote of being convinced that when we give of ourselves, to others, we do so from our perspective, the only way we have of interpreting things. And then, he asks, are we not indeed expecting to garner a better opinion of ourselves. Our projections cast onto another, even in giving, says he, taint the act. And the question remains unanswered by philosophers 2,000 years later. 

He asks, are some people born at the wrong time? I don't agree with that but perceive what he alluded to. I see the world as far, far, too finely exquisite by design to have even a grain of sand misplaced, let alone a soul. Do we love the previous epoque more than the present, at times why not, and are we capable of manifesting memory from ages past, most certainly, it is one of life's finest guilty pleasures. I would debate with our featured director, the importance of recognizing the sublime alignments over the misfires, everything unto heaven.   In the Double Life of Veronique, 1991, Veronique recognizes a twin, sensing she is not alone in the world. She has the visceral feeling of losing someone who is very dear to her, but she has no idea who. It is a story about feelings, certain sensibilities, raw emotions and nothing else — no action. The haunting soundtrack to the film sold 50k copies in France. Composed by self-taught musician,  Zbigniew Preisner aka Van der Budenmajer, an invented 19th c. Dutch composer, (pure artistic play between director and musician) the score uses Dante's poetry as lyrics set to music, sung in Old Italian. Old Italian is so unearthly in its beauty that even the Italians often can't interpret it. There is no need to. 

"If you haven't got your own compass within yourself which clearly points you in a certain direction then you won't find it."—Kieślowski

In the famous trilogy, Blue, White, and Red, he deals with three distinct experiences.

Blue: speaks to LIBERTY, the prison of emotions and memory.

White: speaks to EQUALITY, through the lens of a compassionate man, addressed by the Polish saying—"There are those who are equal and then those who are more equal."

Red: speaks to FRATERNITY, and about whether by chance, people sometimes are born at the wrong time.  

Please see all you can of Kieślowski's work, and carry it tenderly with you. To succeed in art is to manifest something the viewer interprets instantly as an intimate experience they've alone encountered, to which they've been gifted a new iteration, made even more beautiful than the first through the artist's skill. And that is why we love and gravitate toward art.

Swept From The Sea a film by Beeban Kidran, 1997

Swept From The Sea is based on Joseph Conrad's, 1901, short story Amy Foster. It tells the tale of Russian emigree and sole shipwreck survivor, Yanko Goorall, (Vincent Perez), who finds himself sick and hungry on the doorstep of a farm on the Cornish shore. All fear him, and his foreign tongue, except Amy (Rachel Weisz), a simple servant deemed a "queer sort" by her cruel family, who befriends him. Shot on location in Cornwall and West Yorkshire, Yanko performs breathtaking Russian dance steps on a landscape of cliffs by the sea.  Gravity runs away when Russian men start dancing; they defy physics. Amy has a love affair with the sea, where she collects things that wash ashore, and displays them in her sea cave.  Yanko becomes like a son to Dr. Kennedy, from whom he learns English, and in return, teaches chess.  It is an ethereal star-struck love story with hints at Homer, and destiny.  
"I would change nothing, my love, my gold, we are the lucky ones."—Yanko  
"I will love him until the end of the world."—Amy 

Phoenix Pictures, 1997, copyright

Slowly, Slowly

SLOWLY, SLOWLY

When we made love,
Every hour of the day,
Birds set upon that white cloud,
On the flagship of surrender.

When each sentence began with,
I feel hunger, and I feel thirst,
Measured by metaphor, wit, and pun,
And ending with sexual innuendo.

Then we stood naked,
In the bright light of day,
Doing some very heavy sledding,
Unable to look away.


—G. B. Congdon

4th December 2018

Some things need no explanation. But there is almost always one. Love begets greater love and welcomes all frailty. One must disturb the universe to find true love, which wears many guises.  If the songbird sang, to hear himself sing, I love him still.  

Madonna

Jumping in on December's imminent arrival, I was in full-moon pregnancy mode for three November's, awaiting babes born on either side of the winter solstice... and one by osmosis, as Ming was born in China, a late November child.  I wrote this by moonlight, awoken, rightly so, by November's full moon.

PAUSED FOR JUST A MOMENT

I am the Madonna and the Vestal Virgin, 
The Black Madonna, Gaia, and Sophia, too. 
Everything uttered by the force of creation—
Into pitch black darkness.

To the soil once fallow, now fruitful,
To the loss of self, to benefit another,
To the ox at the anvil, to the ritual of the moon—
And sleeping wonder.

My womb is fertile,
I am earthen, all-knowing, gentle, and wise,
Purveyor of secrets, I roll like a tempest,
Both profound and startling—
Let nothing stand in my way.

—G. B. Congdon
29th November 2018

Juno by Moonlight, 2018

Juno by Moonlight, 2018, oil on canvas, 24" x 20."

The first in a series on wildlife conservation, possibly titled, 'One Earth.' Juno, like her consort Jupiter, was prepared to throw a lightning bolt to protect those she loved and did so often.  Regally positioned as one of the Capitoline Triad, she sat on the hill above Rome, Italy, besides Jupiter and Minerva. The threesome made the Latin equivalent of the Greek, Hera, Zeus, and Athena.  Juno wears her goatskin cloak, the favored garment of Roman soldiers on campaign, observed by two, guarded by one. She stands at the ready, able to wage a little battle, out under the wild figs, to save the planet. Only Apollo's worship was more solemn or extensive. 

Please visit Lek Chailert's "Save Elephant Foundation" and watch the movie of her life's work told by the LA director Ashley Bell, Love & Bananas, an elephant story. 

BALZAC—"Love needs tranquility."

Honoré de Balzac, (1799 —1850)

French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac is etched in my heart. Reading Balzac, I want to rescue him from a disenfranchised childhood and stroll arm in arm confessing my foibles and despair because he so readily has exposed his own. Balzac is a confidant I recognize at once. Praised for his orchestration of sequential short stories, La Comédie Humaine, set in the years following 1815 and the fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, he remains one of France's great literary figures.

Balzac's father, Bernard Francois Balssa, was one of eleven children from a poor family. He left for Paris in 1776 with one Louis coin to change his fortune, becoming Secretary to King's Council, and a Freemason. Bernard then changed the family surname to Balzac, adding the nobiliary particle 'de' later.

Born the 20th May 1799, in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France, Balzac was shipped away to a wet nurse as a baby living apart from his family the first four years of his life. Arriving home, he was greeted by distanced and cold parents. In 1814, at the age of fifteen, he attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge on the Loire River. His life was brief, plagued by both emotional and by financial difficulty. Balzac liked to wander through Parisian streets incognito to people watch, gathering research for his manuscripts. He died in Paris on the 18th August 1850, at fifty-one years old, just five months shy of marrying the love of his life, Éwelina Hánska. She wrote to Balzac anonymously in 1832 under the pen name "L'Étrangèr," The Foreigner from Odessa, commenting on his use of sadness, cynicism, atheism, and in general a negative portrayal of women in La Peu de Chagrin. She had attached no return address. Balzac placed a classified add in the Gazette de France seeking the anonymous author of the critique. Thus began his fifteen-year correspondence with "the object of sweetest dreams." Éwelina had married a wealthy landowner twenty years her senior to save the family fortune. After his death, Balzac traveled in 1843 to St. Petersburg where they met for the first time, and with some difficulty, obtained permission from the Tsar to marry.

Balzac caricature by Nadar in 1850.

 
"a desk, a riding- school hack, eating and drinking and sleeping at fixed hours, I should be like everyone else. And that's what they call living, that life at the grindstone, doing the same thing over and over again... I am hungry and nothing is different to appease my appetite."

—Honoré de Balzac

 

Balzac drank 14 - 16 cups of strong black coffee a day, shunning the normalcy of regimented life leaving that for everybody else. He had to be unique and had to write. Balzac would fail at everything but his writing. His writing habits consisted of a small meal at 5 -6 followed by sleep until midnight, rising to write for a 15-hour stretch.

      Oscar Wilde and Proust revered Balzac. Zola, Dickens, Poe, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Faulkner, Kerouac, and Italo Calvino were each influenced by his work. Victor Hugo was the last to visit with him at his bedside and delivered his eulogy.

      My favorite, so far: THE WILD ASS'S SKIN.   A young man finds a piece of shagreen which magically grants his wishes, but at a cost, with each wish granted, the skin shrinks diminishing his energy.  I had a mystical experience reminiscent of the plot touring Florence, Italy.

 

PÉRE GORIOT

"Eugéne had been entirely too quick to take this woman's word for her own kindness. Like all those who cannot help themselves, he had signed on the dotted line, accepting the delightful contract binding both benefactor and recipient, the very first clause of which makes clear that, as between noble souls, perfect equality must be forever maintained. Beneficence, which ties people together, is a heavenly passion, but a thoroughly misunderstood one, and quite as scarce as true love. Both stem from the lavish nature of great souls."

 

THE LILY OF THE VALLEY

The storied love affair between the elder married Henriette de Montsauf and young devoted Felix de Vandenesse, the 'triple seduction of pride, devotion, and beauty.'

 

—"Love needs tranquility."

 

—"Be not too confiding, too frivolous, nor over enthusiastic. Too confiding a nature loses respect, frivolity brings contempt, and others take advantage of excessive enthusiasm."

 

—"You will never have more than two or three friends in the course of your life."

 

—"If you want to gather respect and fondness and be spoken of as amiable and witty, and a true friend; then talk to others of themselves, find a way to bring them forward and brows will clear, lips will smile and after you leave the room all present will praise you." -—Henriette's letter to Felix

 

—"Silence within our souls allows us to hear the faintest sound; the habit of taking refuge within ourselves develops a perception which discerns every quality of the affection about us."

 

—"Let my woman's eye see for you sometimes." —Henriette

 

—"My affection is involuntary and yet deliberate."— Felix de Vandenesse

Graham Robb's biography BALZAC  writes of the love affair between Honoré and Éwelina Hanska, "it reads like an experimental novel in which the female protagonist is always trying to pull in extraneous realities but which the hero is always determined to keep on course, whatever tricks he has to use."

On Quartered Wing

On Quartered Wing

I know him by his plaintive cry,
It splits the dappled heaven,
Here live the Gray Ghost and me,
From my window I watch,
The Northern Harrier write upon the sky.

Like one who welds past and present,
I tend the meadow with hound by my side.
It's a sober world,
Of pregnant peals, and parted bramble,
The hawk lords over.

The Gray Ghost needs no cover,
His shoulders are broad quartering wide.
The hour has grown dark November unveils her tempest,
Fields shudder beneath a blanket of gold,
And the quiet wanderer flames the fire.

When once we lived in summer's glory,
The bee, hawk, and I,
He dips his wing to the fruitless tree,
And on the pewter dawn,
Bids farewell to raging weather.

I am not captive,
A hundred words walk with me over the boundary.
Beneath clouded moons,
I am rapt,
We are headed to distant skies together. 

—G. B. Congdon
13th November 2018

 

Counterpoint

COUNTERPOINT

Pondering has to do with perspective,
In my better fluid moments
I question the hell out of everything,
the 'why' the world is prosperous
And 'how' it is ringed by poverty.

Destruction, avarice, and lies
And yet, time finds me busy—
Some days indifferent and idle.
I have to get command of my narrative,
Roam the dark areas and illumine the wild.

I'll check the dictionary, Webster knows,
But from Archimedes to Zweig—
I meet definitions of beauty
And symptoms of general malaise,
Striding the gravel crown my footsteps halted.

Back in bed, I don't have an answer,
My lovely darling one,
A conspiracy of ravens beats at my door.
Maybe we've forgotten the marginalized.
Maybe, just maybe, we need houses, not bombs.

—G. B. Congdon

5th October 2017



I dedicate this poem to Buckminster Fuller, and each newly elected official who strives to bridge divides, embrace tolerance and deliver the truth. May we row steady to the other side, with the wind in our face. The birchbark canoe was made by ancestors of my mother's French Canadian family landing on new frontiers in the 17th century. Among them explorers, trappers, and interpreters sailing alongside Samuel de Champlain, forging friendships, adoptions, and more than likely marriages with the Native Americans. I see the Montagnais skirting through forests with their wolf head capes on their heads...