Mary Ann Caws, "Walking (Even Now) With Carolyn"
(page 4 of 5)

Then it's about what we all do - lecturing:

When I look back now, my life seems made up of conferences and meetings of "learned" societies, of these tedious lecture stands, tables draped with cloth, voices droning or impassioned. All these talks, these times, these places, from Melbourne to Manchester, Washington to Winnipeg - I love the travel itself, more than the talks. You have to look interested in all the subjects, I know, so scribble this or that on a notepad to keep from falling asleep.

(laughter)

BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA

We are all giving lectures on Surrealism.

Oxymoron. (laughter) It's true.

My neighbor at the table is J.H. Matthews, a Welshman well known for his vitriolic reviews and attitudes, who once said in public to my then husband, "and how does it feel being her wife? (Pause). Oh, sorry." His pale blue eyes just manage to reach over the handlebar moustache he has grown lately, beneath which is what is, I think, intended to be a faint smile. I read it as very faint indeed. As ironic, in fact. He asks if he can see the text I am about to talk from: it is a jumble of crossed-out lines, which I show him, after a slight hesitation. Perhaps that is a twinkle in his eyes as he says, with a sort of grimace, "It makes me sick." He, of course, reads his lectures from sheets perfectly typed by his wife. Right after his talk, and directly before mine, Jan Kott, the Shakespearean and a former surrealist, rises to protest at the general torpor of the meeting. Quite right, I am thinking, when suddenly the filmmaker Arrabal, to my left at the speaker's table, gets up, removes all his clothes, and streaks down the aisle. I can't remember anything else about that meeting. (168-9)

(laughter)

I am teaching To the Lighthouse. In my more idealistic moments, I think of gathering all my friends around, like Mrs. Ramsay. doing her boeuf en daube, knitting people together by candlelight, at some table, with the lighthouse beams coming in, or whatever the New York equivalent might be. I love its having been Roger Fry's recipe . . .. (190)

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I have decided to go down to the Barnes Collection, just to remember how it was when I went there from Bryn Mawr. It is like old times. I take the Paoli local from the train station in Philadelphia to Merion. My heart is pounding.

And that's what it does. I go to a museum and my heart goes clunk, clunk, clunk. So of course, I'm not in the history of art, right? That's sort of a typical story. I love it.

All the pictures I remembered were there, The Cézannes and Matisses and Picassos crowding each other, on top of each other, every one calling for attention. Today they seem to be full of moral lessons about sharpness, slope, certainty, clarity . . ..

A tiny Seurat, with four sailboats and a high horizon. Matisse, Braque: a lemon, a spoon, a glass of water by a white plate. It is enough. Another Matisse, its yellow frame protruding into the room: sharp, certain. Clear shapes: I think my outlines are sometimes muddy.

Clarity of outline . . ..

The thick brightness of Van Gogh's roofs: red, green, yellow. You don't need sadness in things.

In the Giorgione, two men are looking down. I think of a poetry that would look away. (190-1)

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How things vanish when you don't write them down. The tiniest things: the good places to lean over to tie your shoelaces on the old sneakers that are constantly untying themselves. The way some people smile at you in the street when you walk by.

On Park Avenue, in the center of the traffic lanes, some green shoots are pushing up through the snow. My fingers are freezing on my bike handles, but I stop to take from a pole the blank part of an announcement about someone willing to move for you, someone willing to paint for you. I don't have anything to paint or to move, but I love simply to scribble on the paper, in that exaltation of the early morning, that excitement of having too much to do. (194-5)

I still have that excitement. We all have too much to do. It's wonderful. Wonderful.