I’ve spent weeks listening to Roy Hargrove’s “Starmaker” track from his Earfood album, and no matter if I’m chopping carrots or fiddling paperwork, it calls me back and scoops all my attention, as if it wants me, desires me. Music is a medium for desire that sets, tracks, or addresses our moods, but the notion that desire actually originates in the music mystifies me, though I experience it with certain poems, too, and images. As for “Starmaker,” part of the allure is the cavernous, wraparound voice of Hargrove’s flugelhorn: it flirts with joy, or tipsy ecstasy, but doesn’t quite get there. Sumptuous arrest at peak arousal (as in Keats) is everything. The melody of drawn-out, flat-toned arpeggios rises toward what he says his music aspires to, “transcendence,” but the tune doesn’t elevate me beyond our thumping, juicy, embodied world—the breath, razzing through the armature of the lips, creates physical sensations so ardently realized out of thin air that they makes me laugh or weep or get the allover willies. Freddie Hubbard’s “Blue Moon” (on the Jazz Messengers’ Three Blind Mice and yet another number that can’t get enough of me) turns the act of breathing into rippled, ribbed channels of feeling: measure to measure, the vibrato dilates and tightens, the time races, clips, drags, the phrasing passes from lyric, tender languor to crackling jailbreak runs, the heart going through its changes, and the heart is full of yearning. Like “Starmaker,” same track, same performance, surprise and fibrillating intimacy every time. It’s not that whenever I hear the sound I’m hearing it as if for the first time. I don’t believe that’s possible except maybe as a trick of the ear or neural circuitry. But I am hearing it anew, which is different, because it means I carry into the repeat a memory of past experience composed of an identical set of musical facts. The repeat, the return or replay, makes for a circular coming-into-consciousness that may be the closest I’ll ever come to a vision of round time. I don’t understand the process, obviously, but it has to do with a quality of music and any art that’s memorable: it reawakens us to the intensities of existence, and it’s saying I want you. The mystery element in all this is freshness.
Certain art gets fresh with us. It stings with what it offers because it says, on any given repeat, something we’re not prepared to hear, though we think we know it so well that it can’t turn on us. We can feel a little insulted by the impudence of renewal. For many years I’ve revisited Robert Frank’s close-up, from his San Gennaro Festival urban nocturnes, of a hand holding a doll in a plastic bag. Somewhere in my life my attention must have dulled. I paid less attention to it, maybe because it kept being circumscribed in its complex, muffled, ambiguous glamour by bunches of other Frank photos that prowl my consciousness. It cooled on me, it didn’t want me anymore. Then I saw it again a few months ago, again surrounded by scriptural Frank pictures, and it was fresher than ever. This time I could define why I was seeing anew (with scary clarity). The creases on the bag that hangs so heavily, stretched by the doll’s weight, are sharp tented metallic white radiants, and we have to see past them, as if they were bars or trellises, to the smeared features of the perfect, affectless doll inside. “Look at that,” I said to my imaginary companion beside me. “Never saw that before, not like that!” Vagueness, inarticulateness, and incoherence are essential to most aesthetic experience, at least at first look. To re-experience all that before an image you’ve seen untold times over many years, to be spanked into a keener attentiveness—that, too, is freshness. The wiggle in the weave keeps shifting. Frank’s picture stunned me because, while it’s always been there, I was now seeing how the tented arcs of light redeem the bag’s gravity, and how the gravity of the doll mocks human astonishment and returns my own glassy-eyed stupefaction.
In Six Memos for the End of the Millennium, Calvino writes about lightness, “the sudden, agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he has the spirit of lightness.” Frost liked to talk about surprise—“No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader”—and syntax was its medium. Freshness isn’t a quality, like lightness, or an action, like surprise. A maker can craft lightness or surprise. If we make art we can hope for freshness but not shape or instill it: if we think we can, we’re contriving and conniving, and the work will turn mechanical and stamp itself with an expiration date. In his prison cell, Richard II reflects with ineffectual grandeur on the frustration of creating freshness with metaphor: “I have been studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world; / And, for because the world is populous / And here is not a creature but myself, / I cannot do it.” He tries anyway but is condemned to a staleness unto death. Freshness is an aura or perfume: it’s a condition, a state where we’re unaware preservation is or has been even taking place. And it can only be possessed by things we’ve experienced, frequently, for a long time. Something provokes astonishment the first time we know it, then ten months or ten years later it does the same, and we don’t even remember the first astonishment. Freshness is a faint narcissism that the work itself possesses. It’s easier to exemplify than explain. I catch my breath every time I arrive at the famous simile in Iliad 5: Homer transports us from Troy’s killing fields to a farm harvest when chaff threshed from winnowed grain falls to the ground in small white piles…and that’s how white the Achaeans are as they kick up dust in battle. They’re nearer the order of disposable chaff than to restorative grain. The large and small explosive actions of Keats’s “the deer’s swift leap / Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell” never slow down or get calmer. In a more lunar mood, his lines from “Ode on Melancholy”—“For shade to shade will come too drowsily, / And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul”—refine and, in their contrary way, brighten the painful sensation of lacking sensation. When I read pieces of poetry like these I don’t feel hugged or consoled, I don’t sigh, I feel a rush made over again along my nerves, a little strange to me, pleasurable and unsettling as someone’s fingernail idly stroking my pulse. Freshness doesn’t hold content captive, it liberates a poem, sentence, image, musical phrase into time past when the initial “exposure” that’s now stunningly present indefinitely occurred: we greet it again, it greets us for what feels like the first time though it’s really a time-release greeting to consciousness. A work of art has its own subjectivity, as we do, and subjectivity doesn’t pay itself out as a line. It loops.
I didn’t know until a friend told me that if you squeeze a dried bunch of lavender the tickly sharp scent is released all over again. Pips that fall away can be gathered and bundled into sachets, squeezed again months later, and your head aches with memories you’ve not even recalled till now, the scent as piercingly fine as at the beginning. Certain pictures release the same kind of charge. The soft, glowing languor of Watteau’s group of watchmen in The Portal of Valenciennes in the Frick; the gusting dread in the Met’s picture by Millet (untypical for him) of wild turkeys in an autumn windstorm; the Manet in the Barnes of sailors tarring a boat: the paint doesn’t look like torch-fire, it is torch-fire, and the boat under repair is the picture we’re looking at right now being painted and repainted. But one I’ve lived with longest, the one that has watched me over the arc of many years, is a small self-portrait Tintoretto made at the age of twenty-three that hangs in Philadelphia. I saw it when I was twenty years old, and I only recently realized how I’ve clung to its presence as I’ve gone about the work of making my life. It’s always the same but keeps changing up on me. I never could resist the picture’s brash daring—his over-the-shoulder stare says: Just watch what I can do. I forget the first astonishment until the second, which may not occur till ten years later. Sometimes I’m looking at or for something else, or, as I change, the object wants different things from me. Years pass, I sometimes visit my home town, always I go straight to the Tintoretto, and some degree of freshness waits: See what has become of me? I’ve never stopped desiring your attention. When I saw it again in the Boston show of Venetian painting last spring, it greeted and astonished me anew. Now it was the agitated reflection of a young artist trying to see into what he will, in fact, achieve. It restored my spirit to itself. But, too, I saw old man Master Tintoretto in the same picture: in that youthful, insolent head I saw a far-along life that never gave up exploration, process, promise, renewal.
W. S. Di Piero’s latest books are Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems and City Dog. He lives in San Francisco.
