Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

WHO OWNS WHAT AND WHICH AND WHY

A Not So Trivial Pursuit

Who owns the month of July?

Who is the landlord of all October?

Who best paints the Royal Family of Old Spain?

Who is the Proprietor of The Woman through History?

Who created young Manhood for all to witness?

Whose Mary is the Mother of All Mothers in oil or marble?

Who, in sum, owns what and which and why?

And by owning, I mean writing or painting or sculpting or symphonically noting life on earth best. In all the territories of Art, inspired maniacs take over as the centuries pass. They stand tall, each in his own meadow, each in his own castle tower, each wondrously framed on the walls of crammed galleries or in the cool cathedral tombs, daring us to displace them.

Who owns what and which and why?

These are the questions that our Arts pose again and again, to be answered by critics, historians and your plain field-beast observer like myself. It is a grand shuttlecock exchange.

Join me.

Van Gogh owns all the sunflowers that ever sprouted from seed and ran their juices to turn their clock faces to follow noon.

Which means he owns the sun and a portion of summer, which he must share with some few Impressionists.

Valasquez and Goya with or above him, own the Royal Spanish faces; the gimlet eye and the toy-bulldog jaw, the smiling clenched terrier teeth, the crab-claw hands and the razor bones smothered in velvet and spider-draped with lace.

Who has best mapped and blueprinted the touch and temperature of women with palettes like warm seasons and fair breaths?

Botticelli.

But then do I hear a soft cry of “Yes, but—!”

Let us inspect the various aspects of women as revealed by men in a warm season.

The napes of women’s necks? Best painted by—?

Degas? Somewhat.

Renoir? Perhaps.

But most certainly Manet, who sighed on the soft hairs behind their ears, watched them stir, and seized his brushes.

Moving on, who has best glorified, gently etched, the Mother of all Mothers?

Da Vinci. His many cartoons and portraits of The Virgin of the Rocks.

More than portraits, these are women and mothers that summon our love temperately and unreservedly.

The sculpted Virgin?

Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s.

Who has charted nightmare?

Goya, again, who flew night skies to charcoal witches and land with firing-squads to slay innocents.

Or Bosch’s hell? We visit and revisit it, do we not, with delight?

Why not Callot’s Temptations of St. Anthony?

The choice is hard.

The social/political/cultural hell is easier.

Hogarth! His surgeon’s scalpel and etching knife pricks the pomps, pox and poisons of London life to drench his plates in acid and trap his grotesques in their terrible pantomimes forever.

Who has created the Eternal Young Man?

Michelangelo. Who knocked David out of the Italian quarries to stand against the sky.

Who owns Dr. Johnson?

Boswell.

Don Quixote?

Cervantes. Yes, but…

Even more, Gustave Dore.

Think of the Mad Don’s windmills. Dore’s etchings rise and stay.

Gargantua and Pantaguel?

Dore.

The Fables of La Fontaine?

Dore.

Others may have written them, but each of these literary works has been taken over, devoured, and delivered back to us by this extraordinary artist/illustrator.

Only think on these childhood books and Dore’s bright heroes and dark frights jump forth. No one in history has so completely dominated a literature with an all-seeing eye and unerring hand. He is The Ancient Mariner, Poe’s Raven, Puss in Boots, Daniel in The Lion’s Den, Hell’s Lost Souls Sunk in Slime and Gargantua watering down Paris in a dry season.

Like Shakespeare’s Caesar, Dore stands astride the Universe.

London, the entire city, is his. Every rooftop, dockside, coal bin, lamplit-lost child, ghost-beggar view? Yes!

Who has flowered the best jungles and peopled them with named beasts and finest wild men? Who has seen Mars clearly and ridden us there under the double moons with eight-legged thoats? Edgar Rice Burroughs. Tarzan. John Carter.

I have a second lease on Mars because of them.

Who serves Death best in drama?

Shakespeare.

Hamlet plays in an endless graveyard of tombs with funeral pageants that start in ghosts to end in suicides and murders. From darkness, vast quantities of light!

A breather here.

It’s not, for God’s sake, that any of these creators sets out to purposely own things! To give births so large they might outlast an age.

But a man with fevers, or a woman in love, is a man or woman furiously dedicated, isolated, concentrated. They don’t even know they are making the metaphor to represent all ranunculuses or some girl’s toes or some sun-god’s pillared neck to survive forty thousand days. Love simplifies and casts out impurities. The end effect is The Take Over. By this forging, firing, and purifying, old ingots are re-cast as fresh and sometimes immoral beauties. Finally, the artist, the writer, the poet-dramatist owns not only what he has done but all the things it represents.

Let’s list women.

In literature, who’s got their number best?

Jane Austen, whose diminutive shadow thrown across Europe might upstage Tolstoy and his Anna Karenina? Then, the feminine spirit, in poetry, seems woven forever in the fragile warp and woof of Emily Dickinson.

Then here’s Virginia Woolf, with novel and notebook, like Ophelia downstream, lost but to return in the library tides.

More quickly now.

Who created Henry VIII out of whole canvas?

Holbein, His Henry fattens our brain and cracks our mind. Here’s truly a King to wrestle Francis I two falls out of three.

Where would Napoleon be without David?

Where would bullfights be minus Goya, and his stableboy, Picasso?

Who has given us the weather of wind, sand and stars?

Saint Exupéry. Those high rivers of storm are his, to share with birds, to rip-cord a cloud and kite a romance.

Who owns all lands, soils and caves, with bones in the caves and dreams in the bones?

Loren Eiseley.

Who rebuilt the 39 cities of Troy, town on town, deep down into the dusts?

Schliemann.

The Libraries of the world may have been Carnegie built, but their landlord is Thomas Wolfe, who leaps through them in bull stampedes, climbing the stacks, prowling the literary fjords, crazed to think that life might end and ten thousand books go unread!

Who invented the first Time Machine?

H.G. Wells.

Whose Invisible Man is seen all year?

Need I say?

Whose submarine is our Nautilus today?

Verne, with Nemo, near a Mysterious Isle.

There will be none greater in the time of man.

Who smashes-and-grabs boys’ souls?

Twain: And if his Tom’s too clean, Huck’s just their poison.

But Burroughs is best. So we list Tarzan again. Up to his hips in elephant dung, crowned with blood but no thorns, he chimpanzees our souls, tigers our nights and bares his fangs in all boys’ smiles.

Shaw lifts a curtain and cries: “Here’s my St. Joan!” And, burning, Joan gives her answer: “Yes!”

Shakespeare shadows forth a Richard III, who, shapes his hump, shouts “Much Thanks!”

Lawrence of Arabia, buried for some while beneath Arabian sands, is summoned forth on film by David Lean and runs before the wind to flaunt his robes.

October is chiseled from graveyard stones by Edgar Allen Poe. I and others have helped make the wreaths.

Who is highway commissioner to the roads, orchards, theaters and towns of France?

Why, Julius Caesar, marching north with his crocodile mascot at his ankle, along with his planters, seeders, architects, stone masons and actors with sun colors painting their cheeks.

Who has best husbanded eternity?

The Egyptians, yes? Who raised pyramids and buried golden forms and promised eternal life to boy kings and handsome queens?

All of this is stuff for lifetime arguments. You will have your favorites. Name the names.

Who owns that empty highway at sunset down which a lone tramp figure goes?

Do I hear Charlie?

Who owns the beach at dawn, deserted but for one odd tourist lurching forth with a cocky summer hat and a jaunty pipe?

Hulot/Tatti on his forever Holiday, his wondrous form leaving footprints on the sand near the taffy machine as the tide goes out, and we weep for its sad return.

And so on and so forth, God bless us all, in all our arts, through all our days.