A Convergence Of Birds (19 page)

The boy kept walking. Faster now. The aging magician was sure he was walking faster than the boy, but the distance between them never shortened. Their strides seemed perfectly timed, no matter how the magician pushed himself, so that the boy was never within, nor out of, his reach. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, he whispered, and began to run, but they remained evenly spaced, as if the boy were pulling the magician by a string, or the magician were pushing the boy with a pole. But I am no threat to you. You could level me with one hand. I have no weapons. I don’t want to hurt you, or scare you. Please. I just want to look at you. Please. See me in you. See you in me. Help.

If the aging magician’s hands should begin to shake more vigorously now, summoning the illusion of life and reality of death, trying to encourage his own belief in himself,

then he is dying.

I don’t want to die,

you say, but the hungry gondolier pushes on, propelling the boat faster through the narrow channel.

I’m so afraid of dying.

Nothing can make up for a life without belief, says a voice from the back of your head. The gondolier?

But I don’t believe there are things to believe in. Everything is some sort of trick.

Of course.

Then what could I have ever believed? you plead, anxiously fingering your ribs.

That’s not my business, he says.

Help me. I’m afraid. Once you die you are dead forever.

This is true, he says.

I don’t want to be dead forever.

Because you haven’t had time to do what you wanted to do with your time?

Yes, you say. I need more time.

You know that I love you, but what you might not know

is that I’ve always loved you, even before we met. The love between us was contained entirely within me, and always will be if you say that you don’t love me. I will be like a man in an airport, carrying the luggage of a lover he can’t find.

Who are you?

What do you mean, Who am I?

I’m sorry, but I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.

Don’t you recognize me?

Are you OK?

Why are you doing this?

Doing what?

Recognize me!

I don’t know you.

I love you, and you love me.

No. I’m sorry.

Recognize me!

If the aging magician should know that he is about to die—he was always about to die; we are all, always, about to die!—

he will surround himself with children: the rambunctious five-year-old who ate so much frosting while helping his mother bake his birthday cake that he vomited blue on one of the aging magicians birds; the sweet baby sister of a birthday girl, with wet eyes and thin hair; the eight-year-old girl, who did or didn’t exist, who kissed him on the cheek after his show and said, I don’t believe in magic, but I do believe in you; the son of the famous playwright, in his thick black frames and braces; that girl he fell in love with, who came upon him weeping after a show and offered a thimble of coconut sherbet, saying, Maybe you’ll feel a little better if you made this disappear; the babies, the toddlers, the five-, six-and seven-year-olds; the children too old to have a magician at a birthday party, and too old to have a birthday party, and too young not to believe in magic, and too young not to have a birthday party; the children he didn’t father, the children he wasn’t, the infinity of possible lives that slipped through the mesh of the universe’s net. They will come to his side as he dies on that hard hospital bed—hundreds of children, like birds to bread, thousands of them, ready to take him to the slit in the sky, hundreds of thousands of them.

Joseph Cornell

HABITAT GROUP FOR A SHOOTING GALLERY

1943

15.5 x 11.125 x 4.25 in.

wood, paper, glass

AMERICAN ASSEMBLAGIST, collage-and toy-maker, film pastiche artist, correspondent, and connoisseur of trinkets Joseph Cornell was born on Christmas Eve, 1903, in South Nyack, New York. The blissful childhood that would become the inspiration for much of his recollecting and work ended when his father died of leukemia in 1917, leaving the family with tremendous financial burdens as well as the task of caring for Cornell’s younger brother, Robert, who suffered from cerebral palsy. Thanks to his mother’s insistence on education and belief in the arts, and to her numerous part-time jobs, Cornell was able to attend Phillips Academy in Andover from 1917 to 1919, where he studied, with no particular success, sciences and Romance languages.

Between 1921 and 1931, Cornell hawked fabric samples in Manhattan’s manufacturing district. It was during this period that he had his first contacts with the New York art world, attending ballet and opera performances, frequenting gallery exhibitions, and avidly reading literature, poetry, and art history. This was also when he began rummaging through dime stores and rare book and junk shops. He amassed a prodigious archive of objects and images that would later become the source material for his boxes and collages. Perhaps in the spirit of this exploration and transformation, Cornell converted to Christian Science.

Through a fortuitous meeting in 1931, Cornell became acquainted with gallery owner Julian Levy, and within a year several of his two-dimensional collages appeared in an exhibition of Surrealist art at the Julian Levy Gallery. Over the next several years, Cornell experimented with, refined, and perfected his medium of box construction, first using boxes that he found or bought, and later making his own. He did all of his work in the basement of the house he shared with his mother and Robert on Utopia Parkway, in Flushing, Queens. As his reputation spread, his boxes began to appear in galleries all over New York. At the same time, he wrote and created several films. He also became a kind of reclusive vertex of the art world, hosting Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Matta, and several other important Surrealist and non-Surrealist painters, writers, poets, and—his favorite—ballet dancers.

In the late 1930’s, inspired by the bird cages hanging in the window display of a local pet store, Cornell began his aviary series, one he would work on until his death. The boxes, which at first featured only parakeets (cutouts from natural history books and children’s shooting gallery sets, mounted on conforming pieces of jigsawed wood), would soon include owls, cockatoos, canaries, and finally, about a decade later, an absent bird: an empty perch in a barren cage. Cornell’s birds were often world travelers who pasted collage remnants of their exploits on the walls of their cages: hotel paraphernalia, foreign newspaper clippings, European advertisements, theater and dance programs. They were alter-egos of Cornell himself, who, because of his need to care for Robert and help support the family, didn’t venture outside of the New York City area after his Andover years. The birds left traces; Cornell gathered traces together.

Cornell continued making and exhibiting his poetic theaters, concentrating on such themes as ballet, astrology, mathematics, soap bubbles, Medici prince and princesses, hotels, and children. Even though he eventually achieved international acclaim, the inability of art critics to group him with any of the prevailing movements that developed in the art world during the period of his long career—Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism—made his place in the canon precarious and unique. (Compared to an artist like Warhol, Cornell acquired relatively little fame, and a tremendously adamant following.)

His brother Robert died in 1965. His mother the following year. While his work output then declined, he hired assistants to help scavenge for and construct his boxes, and he still corresponded with a large number of people—including his deceased brother and mother, for whom he would continue to buy gifts. Cornell’s final musem show was, at his request, given for children. His boxes were displayed at an appropriately low eye-level, and chocolate cake and cherry soda were served in place of canapes and champagne. He died in his home, December 20, 1972, of heart failure.

Joseph Cornell

COLUMBIER {JULIE DE LESPINASSE}

1959

15 x 9.375 x 3.375 in.

box construction

DIANE ACKERMAN is the author of seventeen works of nonfiction and poetry, including, most recently, Deep Play (prose) and I Praise My Destroyer (poetry). In honor of her work as a naturalist, she has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her (dianeackerone).

MARTINE BELLEN is the author of Places People Dare Not Enter, Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, which won the National Poetry Series, 1997, and The Vulnerability of Order.

JOHN BURGHARDT is a poet and short-story writer. He teaches high school English and lives in Bethesda, Maryland. The winner of the Rome Prize in Literature, MARY CAPONEGRO is the author of Tales from the Next Village, The Star Cafe, Five Doubts, and the forthcoming The Complexities of Intimacy. She teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University.

ROBERT COOVER is the author, most recently, of Ghost Town, John’s Wife, and Briar Rose. He teaches electronic and experimental fiction writing at Brown University.

LYDIA DAVIS’S books are Break it Down, The End of the Story and Almost no Memory. She is currently working on a new translation of Prousts’s Swann’s Way.

SIRI HUSTVEDT is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her books include Reading to You, The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and Yonder.

Poet, art critic, and MacArthur Fellow ANN LAUTERBACH is the author of numerous books, including On a Stair, Before Recollection, And for Example, and Clamor. She teaches in the MFA program at Bard College.

BARRY LOPEZ is the American Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams. Among his many other books of fiction and essays are About This Life and Light Action in the Caribbean.

RICK MOODY is the author of the novels The Ice Storm and Purple America and a collection of stories, Demonology, among other books.

BRADFORD MORROW received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998. Author of the novels Come Sunday, The Almanac Branch, Trinity Fields, Giovanni’s Gift, and the forthcoming Nambe Crossing, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions. He teaches at Bard College.

HOWARD NORMAN is the author of the short-story collection Kiss at the Hotel Joseph Conrad and the novels The Northern Lights, The Bird Artist, and, most recently, The Museum Guard. He lives with his family in Vermont and Washington, D.C.

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of a number of works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, including, most recently, Blonde. She has been the recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN Malamudp>

Joseph Cornell

UNTITLED {GRAND}

summer 1965

19.5625 x 12.0625 x 4.3125 in.

box construction

Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and is Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

DALE PECK lives and works in New York. He is the author of Martin and John, The Law of Enclosures, and Now It’s Time To Say Goodbye.

ROBERT PINSKY, United States Poet Laureate 1997-2000, is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Jersey Rain, five books of criticism, and numerous translations. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University and is the poetry editor of Slate magazine.

ERIK ANDERSON REECE is the author of My Muse Was Supposed to Meet Me Here (poems) and A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport (criticism). He lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

JOANNA SCOTT is the author of five novels, including Make Believe, Arrogance, and The Manikin, and a collection of short fiction, Various Antidotes.

ROSMARIE WALDROP is a poet, translator, and novelist, whose most recent books include Reluctant Gravities and Split Infinites.

PAUL WEST is the author of twenty novels, most recently OK, about Doc Holliday, and The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery. The government of France recently made him a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

DIANE WILLIAMS’S most recent book of fiction is Excitability: Selected Stories. She is the founder and editor of the new literary annual NOON.

JOHN YAU is a poet, fiction writer and critic. He also writes extensively on contemporary art. His works include My Symptoms, Edificio Sayonara, and Hawaiian Cowboys.

All works are by Joseph Cornell

p. x: UNTITLED {HOTEL DE LA MER}, c. 1950-53, private collection. Photograph: Hickey-Robertson, Houston. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 18: DESERTED PERCH, 1949, private collection, Japan. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 28: THE HOTEL EDEN, 1945, Collection of National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 1973. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 32: VARIETES APOLLINAIRES, 1953, Collection of Robert Lehrman, Washington, D.C. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 40: ISABELLE {DIEN BIEN PHU}, 1954, Collection the Saint Louis Art Museum, purchase: funds given by the Shoenberg Foundation, Inc. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p.50: GRAND HOTEL DES ILES D’OR, 1952, private collection. Photograph by Ellen Page Wilson, courtesy of PaceWildenstein. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 54: UNTITLED {OWL WITH MOON}, c.945, Collection of Robert Lehrman, Washington, D.C. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 62: A SWAN LAKE FOR TAMARA TOUMANOVA {HOMAGE TO THE ROMANTIC BALLET}, 1946, The Menil Collection. Photograph by Hickey-Robertson, Houston. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 64: UNTITLED {COCKATOO FOR HOLDERLIN}, c. 1954, private collection. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006

p. 78: THE CALIPH OF BAGDAD, c. 1954, Collection of Mrs. Lindy Bergman, Chicago. (c) The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation VAGA, New York DACS, London 2006