Rebecca Nemser

Fram does rise up from the frozen world, uncrushed. The ship, the play, the “craft,” which is both the ship and poet­ry, sails on, for­ward, into the sacred space, where inspi­ra­tion and despair—the song and the scream—can come togeth­er, and embrace.

Thack­er­ay endows Rebec­ca Sharp — “that art­ful lit­tle minx — with all the qual­i­ties which make his own writ­ing so delight­ful. He por­trays Rebec­ca as an artist — the lost, bril­liant child of a singer and a painter, singing and danc­ing, schem­ing and dream­ing her way though life.

“The sea is a metaphor for trans­for­ma­tion, the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cross­ing over, for becom­ing some­one else, for change,” says FLORENCE LADD. “Every time Sarah cross­es the sea, it changes her. I believe in the uncon­scious and the way the uncon­scious enrich­es our inter­pre­ta­tions of life.”

“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesu­vius’ crater for an ink­stand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of pen­ning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reach­ing com­pre­hen­sive­ness of sweep, as if to include the whole cir­cle of the sci­ences, and all the gen­er­a­tions of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolv­ing panora­mas of empire on earth, and through­out the whole universe.”

“I sup­pose I read so many biogra­phies because I was try­ing to under­stand how peo­ple stum­bled through their days and their fail­ures and spun their mis­eries and despair into great art or path­break­ing sci­ence or pro­found enlightenment.”

Dan­te’s vision of Hell is filled with ter­ri­fy­ing images of trans­for­ma­tion, yet its ulti­mate hor­ror is its change­less­ness — the unre­pen­tant sin­ners whose pun­ish­ment is to embody, for­ev­er, their sins. Cen­turies after its obscure Flo­ren­tine vil­lains have been for­got­ten, the poem still rings true as a dra­ma of the inner life, because the heart of the poem is the hope that we can still be changed.

Ten years ago, I spent a very hap­py sum­mer work­ing at Exper­i­men­tal Etch­ing Stu­dio, so I was delight­ed when the Boston Pub­lic Library invit­ed me to help shape a con­ver­sa­tion among a group of artists from this extra­or­di­nary print­mak­ing cooperative. 

“Moment by moment, night flick­ers in the imag­i­na­tion, in eroti­cism, sub­vert­ing our striv­ings for virtue and order, giv­ing an uncan­ny aura to objects and per­sons, revealed to us by artists.” “The sea, Dionysian liq­uid nature, is the mas­ter image in Shake­speare’s plays. It is the wave-motion with­in Shake­speare­an speech which trans­fix­es the audi­ence even when we don’t under­stand a word of it.”

From the win­dow of the stu­dio ED RUSCHA had in the 1960’s, he could see a sign read­ing HOLLYWOOD. The big white let­ters are as flat an fake as an old, aban­doned movie set, crum­pled and peel­ing, with some of the let­ters falling down. But Ruscha’s many images of that sign make it a real sign, lumi­nous and charged with light. 

CITIZENS, Simon Schama’s won­der­ful new book about the French Rev­o­lu­tion, is espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to peo­ple who care about Art, because it is in many ways a book about the pow­er of images to trans­form the world. 

“His hands were ter­ri­bly deformed. Rheuma­tism had cracked the joints, bend­ing the thumb toward the palm and the oth­er fin­gers toward the wrist. Vis­i­tors who weren’t used to it couldn’t take their eyes off this muti­la­tion. Their reac­tion, which they didn’t dare express, was: ‘It’s not pos­si­ble. With those hands, he can’t paint these pic­tures. There’s a mystery!’ The mys­tery was Renoir himself.”