Gray Chair

Gray Chair. Have I gone mad? Or have my friends abandoned me? Misunderstood me after all these years? Or perhaps understood me better than I knew?

I sent these posts to my old friend Lars (at Berkeley for the first 20 years, then head of Architecture at Rice (another 20), now resurfaced in Florida, teaching a bit, and swimming every day, just like me.) Lars has always been very honest--after his own lights, of course. "Your blog is strangely Polish…Zebulsky and Knife in the Water…you and the DubowPeople…funny bunch."  He's right about the sensibility, of course--that recurrent Polish existentialism--and maybe early Polanski, too--although I'd hope for better endings (and encourage them as a teacher). The Zebulsky (Cybulski) is one of Lars' wild cards--the much-idolized Polish hero in Wajda's Popiół i Diamont (Ashes and Diamonds), who leaps onto running trains--or the scene at the end, where he's taken bullets for his passions (his independence, his beliefs),  a bloody swirling amidst the fresh white sheets of new laundry in a Polish courtyard...

The place did have a huge effect (living in Warszawa as I did in 1968-69) and the strangeness is part of it (estrangement, better, or Victor Shklovsky's ostranienie, making strange)--but the inwardness is also a means to an end. Part of things, or part of a way of seeing things, when we demand that each trace of meaning remain intact, be acknowledged (the Poles' adamant connection with the travails of their own glorious history). It shows in a certain off-ness, too--which is the opposite of modernism. (Lars once also called me a modernist!) That is, an acceptance of change at its most concrete--most necessarily concrete (the T'ang poems, again) and a unease with theoretical over-pinnings.

The Poles--they also love Bonnard!
_____

But what matters here is the chair. Yes, it's dark--but the hour was late, and that's how I saw it. Never mind all the beautiful conversations with Berkeley kids, over decades (Cassie, for example, or Annette Kim. Hannah. Or Christophe, much earlier. Alice Jurow, too.) This is where I'd have them sit.

But the tonality, the way the gray naugahyde takes the light, the blurred line of the shadow--I knew it was a risk--but at the same time, indelible...


.