march

Have you got a brook in your little heart,
Where bashful flowers blow,
And blushing birds go down to drink,
And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows,
That any brook is there;
And yet your little draught of life
Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March,
When the rivers overflow,
And the snows come hurrying from the hills,
And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be,
When the meadows parching lie,
Beware, lest this little brook of life
Some burning noon go dry!

Read, sweet, how others strove,
Till we are stouter;
What they renounced,
Till we are less afraid;
How many times they bore
The faithful witness,
Till we are helped,
As if a kingdom cared!

Read then of faith
That shone above the fagot;
Clear strains of hymn
The river could not drown;
Brave names of men
And celestial women,
Passed out of record
Into renown!

And who doesn’t love a good martyr tale? I’ve had a little experience of Catholicism, the sine qua non of martyrdom legends, but it’s a trope certainly not limited to Rome: what Protestant soul is not stirred by the story of Jan Hus, or of Latimer and Ridley? (. . . we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.) Not to mention Mary Dyer and the various Quaker martyrs. Or the secular martyrdoms of the Alamo and Little Big Horn and the whole Southern end of the War of Northern Aggression.

I can’t help but suspect that Dickinson had a bit of a smirk on her lips over this pornography of martyrdom; we, the non-martyrs, are made “stout” and “less afraid” by reading of their courage, but perhaps only while we’re engrossed in their tales. And if one passes “out of record / Into renown”, does this perhaps suggest that the record–the historical facts–fall away into legend?

Personally, I’m of the opinion that an ironic stance toward one’s valiant ancestors is the safest stance to maintain: to quote Hawthorne, “Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.”

Armed with a colorimeter, Spencer Finch recorded the quality of color and light in Emily Dickinson’s garden on August 28, 2004. Using this data, he built a cloud out of crumpled plastic and a light panel that recreates the color and light he recorded. The piece, currently on display at the Massachussetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is called “Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).” (See this New York Times article for a good picture of the work.)

Another interesting, and certainly tangentially related, installation a representation of the breeze that blew off Walden Pond one March afternoon in 2007. It’s achieved with an array of fans mounted in columns and controlled by a computer, switching them off and on to reproduce the speed and direction of that wind from the past.

Finch plays with light and color, and occasionally other senses, to reproduce pieces of memory. Some of his pieces, like “Eos” and the Dickinson cloud, toy with literature and history; others are more mundane: they recreate the light in a hotel room, for example, or the color of the sky over Coney Island. They are playful and strange in their mix of exact measurement and poetics; Ken Johnson captures the sense of these pieces well in his Boston Globe review:

It helps to imagine Finch as a kind of nutty scientist played by Christopher Lloyd trying to distill and exactly measure the essence of poetry.

What is one to make of Finch’s projects? I’m certainly no art critic, so my opinion comes completely uninformed. But what strikes me as interesting about it is how radically decontextualized it is. Homer describes the “rosy-fingered dawn” above Troy, and Finch reproduces the exact spectrum of colors that comprise those rosy fingers with flourescent tubes. Has he distilled the essence of Homer’s poetry, or has he made even more clear how incredibly contingent poetry, and memory, and experience, really are?

I’m sometimes disappointed by the photographs that I bring back from an event; they’re so often flat and inexpressive, at least compared to the experience that they were meant to record. No camera is able to record the complex web of sensation, emotion, and memory that comprise an experience: the film may accurately record the spectrum of reflected light that fell on it while the shutter was open, but it cannot record the sounds and smells and tastes and feelings and fears and joys. The mind may record some of it, and a poet’s words might be able to communicate parts of it, but there is always that essential part that is somehow inexpressible. Finch expresses the expressible in minute detail, leaving us to grasp for what is left out.

See more fascinating Finch pieces at his web site, Spencer Finch (.com).