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Jehanne Dubrow

Small Cups of Shadow

February 9, 2022

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, 1942.

I

n the diner, no one is eating. Three customers lean on their tall stools, none of them speaking. And behind the counter, a soda jerk bends to retrieve something we can’t see. Like a bartender, his job is to serve lonely people late at night, to pour them drinks, because that’s all they want in front of them: sturdy cups of coffee, cooling and forgotten. 

This is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, one of the best-known American images of the twentieth century. As with many of Hopper’s paintings, the canvas asks us to gaze through a window—the diner seems made almost entirely of glass—to watch people who do not know they’re being watched. A window contradicts itself. Both a barrier and an act of transparency, it keeps us out and lets us in. “No one is there to share what we see,” explains the poet Mark Strand in an essay about Nighthawks, “and no one has come before us. The scene of the picture belongs only to us. And what we experience will be entirely ours.” We stare at the four people in the restaurant as if we are the first ones to discover this sad tableau, and we wonder about the patrons, “What are they thinking?” their faces reduced to the simple shapes of eyes, nose, and mouth. 

There’s a woman at the lunch counter. She was modeled by Hopper’s wife, Jo. But, still, she could be a sex worker, we think, her dress the red of desire, her hair a small, controlled flame. She holds what looks like a matchbook in her hands and studies it. A man in a slick, blue suit sits beside her. He could be her john. They are close enough to touch but don’t, his hand curled around a cigarette. They are together. They are apart. We can’t help trying to read a narrative in their bodies. 

Around the corner of the counter, a few seats away, a man sits with his back to us. His suit is made of darkness, his film noir fedora casting more dusk across the side of his face. He is the mood of America in early 1942, Pearl Harbor having been bombed only a month and a half before the completion of the painting. It’s possible to see menace in him, the posture of a threat. He might be a man about to trade his suit in for another kind of uniform. Or, perhaps, he’s old enough to remember the last war, the acrid swirl of mustard gas, the instant coffee he drank from a tin cup at the front. 

The diner cuts a hard angle into the street; other buildings positioned behind it appear flattened and two-dimensional, like a set for a play. As is often the way with Hopper’s work, even the lighting here is theatrical. Inside the restaurant, on this night of solitude, no fluorescent lighting has ever been this sallow, has ever cast such a queasy, green glow across the floor. And the only door visible in the diner leads to the kitchen, not to the world outside. If these people wish to go, they will have to leave by an exit out of view, off stage. 

When I was a young woman, I worked as a barista in a tiny coffee shop. And, although I poured many shots of espresso, steamed gallons of milk over the years, most of my days were spent brewing vats of coffee. I learned to expect the burn of hot liquid spilled on my hands, the coffee slopping over the rim of the paper cup as I covered it with a plastic lid. I learned to expect the smell of stale beans in the seams of my clothes. Still that initial sip of bitterness each morning never stopped surprising me, even when I came to like it. 

Coffee is what we drink to wake up or to stay awake. It’s the drink of early risers and workaholics. Also insomniacs. As adults, many of us come to crave this brown sludge, surely the very definition of an acquired taste. When I was a barista, my first customers of the day always ordered their coffee black, no milk or sugar to soften its sharp edge. The customers who came in just before I closed the store for the evening took theirs straight as well, often on their way to the late shift at the hospital down the street.

The shop where I worked was nothing like the diner in Nighthawks. It had brief, smudged windows and a straightforward exit to the outside. But I served many people who resembled the ones in the painting. I watched them ruminate over their small cups of shadow, alone even in their togetherness. “What is it about Hopper?” asks Olivia Lang in The Lonely City. “He never much liked the idea that his paintings could be pinned down, or that loneliness was his métier, his central theme.”

Haven’t we all hunched over our coffees like this, Hopper’s theme equally our own? At some late hour, we have all felt utterly by ourselves in rooms where the light seemed suddenly strange, so green, as if rendered with meticulous brushstrokes. How still we have sat in the sickly, bitter light.


Jehanne Dubrow is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Wild Kingdom (LSU Press, 2021), as well as a book of creative nonfiction, Throughsmoke: an essay in notes (New Rivers Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in NER as well as in Poetry, Southern Review, and Colorado Review, among others. “Small Cups of Shadow” is part of her second book of creative nonfiction, Taste: A Book of Small Bites, which will be published by Columbia University Press in 2022.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or architecture.

Filed Under: Confluences, Featured, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Edward Hopper, Jehanne Dubrow, Nighthawks

Dave Griffith & Kyle Peets

Station XI

November 17, 2021

Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966. Photos by Barnett Newman on WikiArt.

T

his text/sound collaboration between Dave Griffith and Kyle Peets is an excerpt from Days Between Stations, their fourteen-part audio project set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The text reflects on Griffith’s experience viewing for the first time Barnett Newman’s fourteen-painting series Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1958–1966). The viewing was not in person but online at Griffith’s dining room table.

The project takes as its inspiration the Stations of the Cross or Way of the Cross, a religious ritual carried out during the Christian season of Lent in which participants memorialize the Passion of Jesus by praying, singing, and processing before special icons depicting his journey to his crucifixion.

While not intended to be explicitly religious, Days Between Stations does borrow the narrative structure and the narrative device of tableaux from the ritual. It also draws on the rich literary tradition of walking as an aid to personal reflection and as a means of exploring the isolation, longing, and grief experienced by many during the pandemic.

The text and accompanying ambient music were composed independently of one another during the pandemic at a distance of over 2,000 miles—Griffith in Indiana and Peets in Oregon. They did not have access to each other’s work during the composition. This was to ensure that any synchronicities would be accidental, though in the sound mixing stage, some musical choices were made to accentuate textual decisions.

An e-book version of the original MoMA exhibition of Newman’s paintings can be viewed here.


Dave Griffith is an essayist and educator and the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in print and online at the Paris Review, the Normal School, the Utne Reader, Killing the Buddha, and Image, among others.

Kyle Peets is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who has exhibited his work nationally and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO), as well as various group exhibitions, including Character Profile at Root Division gallery (San Francisco, CA), Art Is Our Last Hope at the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). He received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, as well as a graduate certificate in book arts from the Iowa Center for the Book.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings.

Filed Under: Confluences, Featured, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Barnett Newman, Dave Griffith, Kyle Peets

Leath Tonino

Beach Reading

November 19, 2019

Mind, text, wilderness—I’ve long been fascinated by their interactions. Specifically, I’ve been fascinated by what happens when we lug books into nature, when we situate our reading within a context of more-than-human energies, when we rest the butt on a barnacled rock or driftwood bench and fill the brain to brimming: sentences, crying birds, definitions, slanting light.

My inquiries into this realm have ranged from spiritual bike tours with Basho and Thomas Merton to arduous ski expeditions with Sir Ernest Shackleton and Gretel Ehrlich. To desert rambles with dusty anthropological monographs. To marshy paddles with iambic pentameter. Hmm, what should I bring this time, I find myself wondering, staring at the bookshelf in my basement, the bookshelf that is literally three steps from a rack of camping equipment.

Occasionally, the answer is obvious—think of Muir’s My First Summer In The Sierra for a Yosemite pack trip, Powell’s The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons for a Grand Canyon float. More often than not, though, the possibilities overwhelm a nerd like me. The Tetons with Mardy Murie are not the Tetons with Isaac Asimov, and the Owens Valley with Mary Austin is not the Owens Valley with Roger Tory Peterson, Kurt Vonnegut, or Geoffrey Chaucer. Sometimes, confused to the point of paralysis—Henry Beston’s The Outermost House is about Cape Cod, but I’m planning to kayak the Maine shore!—there’s only biting the bullet and hoping for the best.

Cut to the Olympic Peninsula’s foggy gray beaches, a thin strip of sand bordered by nearly impenetrable rainforest on one side and wholly impenetrable ocean—ranks of tiered breakers—on the other. Twenty-two and tromping solo, I assumed that a week at the intense edge could make me—well, honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted from the outing. Perhaps it was visceral contact, the tang of salt in my soup? Perhaps it was an elemental scouring, a cleansing of too many months spent indoors, worrying about fame, glory, power, and how to pay the rent, how to afford pinto beans? Whatever the case, I figured Kerouac’s Big Sur, with its Pacific coast reference in the title, ought to make for suitable bedtime snuggling.

Snuggling? Did the fool really say snuggling? Turns out I was wrong, very wrong indeed. Lying in my damp, gritty tent a mere dozen paces from the thrashing water, I discovered that Big Sur documents Kerouac’s descent into alcoholic insanity, what his pal Ginsberg described as “paranoiac confusion.” Furthermore, the story culminates with a dissonant aural hallucination, a poem that is essentially the author’s inebriated ear submerged in surf, fishing for lyrics.

            “Josh——coof——patra—— / Aye ee mo powsh——”

            Um, beg pardon?

        “Ssst——Cum here read me—— / Dirty postcard——Urchin sea—— / Karash your name——?”

For five days I stumbled through frothing foam and mazes of mist, encountering only seals and crabs, and for five nights I listened to shrieking schoolchildren, bellowing monsters, eerie techno-symphonies, the incessant rush and rip of tides. To my dismay, the Kerouac forced consciousness into an inhuman chaos of waves, sans wetsuit.  I heard voices: fluid voices, crazy voices, inner voices blending with outer voices. Voices nonstop.

I suppose that Big Sur was, in a sense, the ideal book, an echo of the ocean’s severe strangeness. But “ideal” is after-the-fact talk, armchair-philosopher talk. During the actual hike—gulp—I was immersed, in over my head, frantically swimming. Come 3 AM, tossing and turning, dreaming that I was drowning, I would have given anything for the dry, soothing logic of a toaster oven manual or the buoyant minutiae of a treatise on Florentine jurisprudence.

Which leads to questions. You were after a raw vivid encounter with place, right? So why flee? Why seek the safety blanket of distracting prose, that soft fabric woven of familiar syntax? Why not embrace the sloshy weirdness of Kerouac’s scribbling or, better yet, eschew language entirely? Why not skinny-dip? Why not bare yourself?

Simple answer: easier said than done. I’m a human, a social animal, and language is my home. What’s a tent but a portable domicile, an attempt at carving from the rugged backcountry the skimpiest of hospitable alcoves, a means of getting close but—aye, there’s the rub—not too close to the capital-O Other? Maybe a book is just a different form of shelter, a paper-and-ink tent, a balancing act, half retreat and half forward march?

For all its magnetic attraction, for all its ancient mysterious allure, the ocean is simultaneously hostile, horrible, repellent. I love it. I hate it. I want more of it. I want less of it. Sure, we may have crawled from the primordial soup untold millennia ago, but that doesn’t mean the gargantuan surging thing is Mommy. Nope, the great untamed and untameable Other is not a parent, at least not in my experience. It doesn’t tell stories that begin Once upon a time and conclude Happily ever after.

Mind, text, wilderness—odd, odd, odd. At the continent’s margin, there are only those scraps of literature we import. Those scraps that a part of us wishes will be washed away, taken out to sea. Those scraps that another part of us clings to with a fierce, grateful, terrestrial grip.


Leath Tonino is the author of two essay collections, both published by Trinity University Press. The Animal One Thousand Miles Long was published in 2018, and The West Will Swallow, from which this piece has been adapted, will be published in November 2019.
http://tupress.org/books/the-west-will-swallow-you

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital, News & Notes

Kristin Keane

Paintings for the Future

October 30, 2019

Installation view Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

It has been a dark winter: my mother’s cancer has spread rapidly. I come across Hilma af Klint: The Paintings for the Future exhibit at the Guggenheim when I visit a friend after months of bad news. The Ten Largest burst at their canvases’ edges. Shapes bump against sides suggestive of mortality, the afterlife. Forms escape their boundaries, go on unseen outside the frame—a circle begins, breaks at a corner, returns elsewhere.

It is spring and the flowers have arrived—patches of wet color, scraps of grass bursting green in sidewalk boxes. The park is verdant and pregnant with bloom, already tipping or about to tip into violet, azure. In af Klint’s art, color also works as energy: circles are blue as robins’ eggs, white becomes yellow and then orange and then—a color I cannot name. Like the lines, they too pour over the edges as if they could be caught in cupped hands.

The question of color and lines plagues me—what is the difference really between yellow and orange, purple or blue? Where is the border where one becomes the other? I am terrified of how quickly things shift shape. Things are alive and then—they are not. We’ve stopped tracking the edges my mother’s cancer has crossed. Of the spaces it takes up.

She loves flowers and presses them between pages of photo albums. I’m noticing more, she says. She means sky and color. She means things there are not words for.

Af Klint (1862–1944) was a spiritualist curious about the unseen world and reincarnation before her sister died during childhood, but the event marked a deepening interest in the realms beyond life. Many of spirituality’s adherents were also searching for deceased loved ones. The advent of x-ray and other technologies cracked open new possibilities then: what had been before invisible, could now very suddenly be seen. Energy transmitted. Af Klint began pushing her boundaries, she began stretching off the page.

It was during a séance with “The Five”—a group of women she founded to channel and record dispatches from mystics referred to as “High Masters”—when a message came over the medium. She was to make paintings on a transcendent plane representing immortality—a project which would span nine years and 193 works. The Ten Largest is the fourth group in the Paintings for the Temple collection which represent the stages of life: childhood, youth, adulthood, old age. Inside the museum over one hundred years after she painted them, they are sequenced, a varicolored wall tapestry each over three meters in length.

My mother communes with spirits—she too believes in what cannot be seen. She has her aura read, seeks counsel from telepaths. I do not practice these same beliefs, but the fear of losing her has turned everything upside down, it has strangled me with uncertainty. All my colors have begun running. How will I find her in death? Where will the line be between me here, and her on the other side of it?

It is during oncology visits with her tumors projected fat and white on screens when I begin imagining them filled with flower petals instead of disease. Congratulations, I want the doctors to say about each new growth, their stems stretching into nearby organs. You are so full of exquisite life.

Adulthood, Number 7, the signature painting of The Ten Largest, is a bulb opened to blooming. Biomorphic play typical of af Klint surrounds the form—a beetle could be a bird; a stamen perhaps a vine. The shapes are alive and tensile, unworldly and concrete.

The Ten Largest, Childhood, No. 1, 1907, Hilma af Klint, courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation.

But it is Childhood, Number 1 that unfastens me. It vibrates with a blue as bold and dark as the sea. A mandala-like figure takes the center, two organic rings entwined like daisy chains hover above—the kind my mother showed me how to braid as a child using the rim of my thumbnail. It has a large message written in a conjured alphabet, at its center two ovum-like forms encased in a floral hoop reminiscent of lichen.

The painting is alive but it is also lifeless. Somber spheres in the shapes of coins line the bottom of the canvas surrounding a withered tree-like figure as if marking a grave. Is this meant to depict labor? A last gasp before the final push into life?

In birth, the thing a mother creates is put outside her, the burden and fear of death now everywhere: she understands the life she produced will now come to know of endings too. The other nine paintings extend across the gallery wall but I get stuck in this image. I think of my mother’s cells stretching the two of us into different dimensions, divided in half by a traverse-less sea. I am desperate to know how I will cross it.

When I tell my husband I’ve visited the exhibit I say “Paintings of the Future” by mistake. Perhaps that moment in the room with the canvases lined up, it comforted me to see it that way—not as an expectation of time, but as a certainty within it.

For my mother I want our future to be filled with af Klint’s colors, to burst with a different kind of life. I have imagined many times that the indecipherable script at the bottom of Childhood, Number 1 is a note written just for me.

You will find her again, it says. I tell myself it insists.


Kristin Keane lives in San Francisco where she is a doctoral fellow at Stanford University. Her fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the Normal School, Electric Literature, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital, News & Notes

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“That’s the appeal of writing: you treat the world like a potential text, using it as material, setting yourself apart, stepping out.”

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