the notes for the poem are the poem
At the Cézanne exhibit in Chicago last week, there were paintings — many, many paintings. There was also a case of the pivotal artist’s supplies — watercolor tins, palettes with dried oils, and two of his notebooks. These are the items that stay with me. The seemingly ordinary objects that helped someone make what they made. The tools. The small detritus that, when added together, make the whole.
I’ve written a few books about journals, so I always appreciate it when they are displayed. Even better is when a curator finds a way to get beyond the issue of displaying more than a single page spread. In this exhibit, they had digitized the entire notebook and it was all right there. I stood flipping from page to page. The galleries were packed, but few others seemed interested in this display, everyone there for the major works. In between pencil sketches of landscapes and self-portraits were the kinds of notes one might make on the back of a piece of scratch paper. I squinted at some tallying, trying to make out the French script of an earlier era (their numbers are so much lovelier than ours) and wondering at the tallying—groceries? art supplies? paintings sold?
The page that stopped me was one of letters in a child’s hand, likely his son Paul’s. There was something interesting about the letters themselves—different approaches on how to form the twenty-six figures. More so was the way they helped me imagine scenes. Cézanne painting and trying to keep the boy busy by handing him his notebook. Or father and son at a cafe and the boy taking his father’s notebook and showing off his new skill.
Just as the trove of Frida Kahlo’s personal snapshots that we saw on display at the National Museum of Mexican Art the next day did, this so-called ephemera touched me as much, perhaps more, than paintings that are considered essential to the evolution of art. The labels provided information on who had previously owned the art on display, and it was a Who’s Who : Picasso, Matisse, Monet, Jasper Johns, Henry Moore, David Hockney. The notebooks, on the other hand, had likely remained in family custody and gone to whatever museum or archive eventually took the bulk of Cézanne’s material presence.
When I wrote the book about visual journals, Drawing from Life, it was such a pleasure to spend time on the backroads. The doodles, the jots, the figuring, the half-completed sketches, the grocery lists next to color swatches. All of this, for me, is more telling, more personal, more full of the juice of what makes a person whole, than the completed object put on display, built up, produced, performed, finalized with gloss.
“The notes for the poem are the poem,” wrote Adrienne Rich. I come back to this quote a lot. Similar to Dan Eldon’s favorite saying, “The journey is the destination,” it’s a reminder to cease reaching for outcome. To be less concerned with some kind of There and be amazed by the Here.
We think we want this, but we are so conditioned toward the end goal — even if it’s vague as hell — that we can’t get over ourselves. A friend who started a private elementary school that is focused on whole-child learning, nature, process over product, no standard testing, place-based curriculum (ETC!) said that parents love the idea of it but they still want to be sure their kid can get into Harvard. They want the beautiful meandering roads AND they want what they perceive to be The Goal to Which Education Leads. The idea that their kid might skip college and move to Alaska to be a backcountry guide, or go to community college while doing some kind of community organization are not what they signed up for.
When I asked parents awhile back what they might want from a program that offered learning experiences to kids after school and in the summer — experiences not found at regular school, experiences that would fill them out as humans in the ways that our structured, siloed schools do not — the answers I got were things like “Mandarin” and “Advanced Physics.” No one said sewing, bird watching, or welding. The answers all suggested getting an upper hand, not preparing our hearts and everyday skills for the work of real life.
My son recently made the decision to transfer to our local, hometown university from an elite school. He succeeded at that sprawling, richly-awarded campus, if success is registered by grades. He was not, however, happy. He has figured out that he wants to figure things out. That the grail of a top school to which every level of his K-12 experience pointed, was not what he actually needed or wanted. Rather, he wants to make music with an old friend. To go hunting with another—something he’s never done. To volunteer with a beloved mentor. In other words, he wants space and time to take the backroads, to get lost and revel in it rather than feel anxious that he’s not “on track.”
In his journal, Dan Eldon, who never went to a single college, but rather spent his too-brief post-high school days at various schools, inter-mixed with travel and art making, created a sort of mission statement with various instructions. Among them: “The most important part of vehicle maintenance is clear windows, so if you are broken down, you will enjoy the view.”
Sage advice. And advice that most of us never consider or quickly forget, our heads down, working toward the grand “thing.” Few of us are creating final things as lasting or impactful as Cézanne’s paintings, and yet we’re all going going toward whatever our seeming thing may be. We throw away the notes. We forget the moment in the cafe with the alphabet scrawled on a napkin. We don’t take our friend up on the offer to go hunting. We put our instrument in the back of the closet and tell ourselves we’ll get to it later.
What are the notes of your poem? Is your metaphorical windshield prepared to take in the view? When the great exhibit of your career is displayed, what will be displayed over in the corners, the parts that show how you lived your daily life, what comprised the hours and days. I hope they’re filled with curiosity and wonder. That’s where I’m headed.
