Command the poises

History is art, because story is art. Able writers interest us in world events by framing them in story.  And by the way, you and I are world events. 

The Harding Affair: Love and Espionage During the Great War tells the story of Warren G. Harding’s 15 year affair with Caroline F. Phillips.  Of their fiery correspondence, many of his letters remain. The book is a fascinating juxtaposition of personal revelations and global political events. In the heightened patriotism of World War I, Phillips’ German sympathies threatened her personal safety and Harding's political solvency. When she was suspected by the nascent FBI of spying for the enemy, Senator and future President Harding sent her this cautionary plea:

‘You have the intellect, the soul and personality, please command the poises befitting your superiority.’
Warren G. Harding

Sometimes lives of the past can dwarf our ordinary lives, but it’s worth remembering that we know these people through story. Boringness has been edited out. Even primary sources, letters in Harding’s own hand, were sculpted by the author. Ordinary and extraordinary lives, framed and pondered, reverberate through story craft.

This week, Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio asked me to represent myself and 60 artist colleagues for a television interview. Grappling with how best to explain my storytelling work in schools, I wanted to ‘command the poises’ - an artist mantra so aptly penned by Harding. A kind friend sent me these words just before the interview:

‘You are smart, sharp and a role model. You'll be terrific.’

Thus bolstered, I stepped before the cameras. I had a hunch my audience would glaze its eyes at concepts like ‘arts/curriculum integration,’ so I looked my interviewer in the eye and reenacted an Ohio & Erie Canal digger of Harding’s era. I became humble Italian-American Tony, one of my fourth graders’ favorite immigrant entrepreneurs, plying his enthusiasms with twinkling grace. What better way for students to frame, absorb and remember the past?

When story happens, large or small, nerves give way to art, preparation matures into performance, boringness vanishes and the rest, they say, is history.

Photo of Warren G. Harding and Carrie F. Phillips

Be the air

Critics have dismissed Paul Gauguin as an artist who could not draw well, and knew it, who therefore turned to a more primitive style of expression. Noa Noa: The Tahiti Journal of Paul Gauguin was the never published companion catalogue to Gauguin’s French exhibition of 60 paintings and block prints completed in Tahiti. The public of Gauguin’s day judged his work harshly, the same work that later left Pablo Picasso in Gauguin’s thrall and fetches millions in today’s market.

These strains of a master’s tortured past were the stuff of two mini-lectures last night in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Ingalls Library. As I listened, I remembered Stephen Colbert pointedly asking Tom Campbell of the Metropolitan Museum of Art what makes art “art.” Who decides what’s worthy? Campbell explained that trained experts determine the authenticity and significance of older works, but he had no words for what makes art good, or bad.

Last night, surrounded by a tacto-visual repast the librarians had laid out for us - clippings, postcards, prints and the like - we heard muffled cheers erupting from adjoining offices. Who knew, the CMA staff watches Wednesday night football?

Our hosts explained later that the museum had just learned of a much hoped for acquisition for its collection. “What is it?” we asked. “Can’t tell you,” they answered, beamingly mysterious. We’d have to wait, like everyone else, for the morning paper.

My mother would have loved this story. Then again, she most likely listened in, her beneficent ghost haunting us calmly in that still space. Jane Sylvia Hewes Weber was painter, librarian and mother. She plied shelves at home with art books and dragged her kids and grandkids to museums, including this very Cleveland museum. Thanks to the librarians and Gauguin’s fragrant works, I now know where to find my mother when I miss her too much to ponder. There, on the walls, in the spaces of art she found worthy even as she found her own efforts wanting. Undaunted as the wild Gauguin, she painted on canvas and upon her progeny’s lives with a certain brave innocence. She let us be seers and seekers; she bade us be air.

Her ghost, with a nod to Monsieur Gauguin, inspired these lyrics once:

Watercolor on my shoulder. Watercolor in my hair.
Watercolor on the border, water in the air.
Promise me to be the water. Promise me to be the air.
Susan Weber, Air

Public Domain painting, Paul Gauguin, In the Waves 1898

Dylan agape

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

Public domain photo, Bob Dylan 1963