Rebecca Nemser

Fram does rise up from the frozen world, uncrushed. The ship, the play, the “craft,” which is both the ship and poetry, sails on, forward, into the sacred space, where inspi­ration and despair — the song and the scream — can come together, and embrace.

Thackeray endows Rebecca Sharp — “that artful little minx — with all the qual­ities which make his own writing so delightful. He portrays Rebecca as an artist — the lost, bril­liant child of a singer and a painter, singing and dancing, scheming and dreaming her way though life.

“The sea is a metaphor for trans­for­mation, the possi­bility of crossing over, for becoming someone else, for change,” says FLORENCE LADD. “Every time Sarah crosses the sea, it changes her. I believe in the uncon­scious and the way the uncon­scious enriches our inter­pre­ta­tions of life.”

“Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their out-reaching compre­hen­siveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the gener­a­tions of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe.”

“I suppose I read so many biogra­phies because I was trying to under­stand how people stumbled through their days and their failures and spun their miseries and despair into great art or path­breaking science or profound enlightenment.”

Dante’s vision of Hell is filled with terri­fying images of trans­for­mation, yet its ultimate horror is its change­lessness — the unre­pentant sinners whose punishment is to embody, forever, their sins. Centuries after its obscure Florentine villains have been forgotten, the poem still rings true as a drama of the inner life, because the heart of the poem is the hope that we can still be changed.

Ten years ago, I spent a very happy summer working at Exper­i­mental Etching Studio, so I was delighted when the Boston Public Library invited me to help shape a conver­sation among a group of artists from this extra­or­dinary print­making cooperative.

“Moment by moment, night flickers in the imag­i­nation, in eroticism, subverting our strivings for virtue and order, giving an uncanny aura to objects and persons, revealed to us by artists.” “The sea, Dionysian liquid nature, is the master image in Shakespeare’s plays. It is the wave-motion within Shake­spearean speech which trans­fixes the audience even when we don’t under­stand a word of it.”

From the window of the studio ED RUSCHA had in the 1960’s, he could see a sign reading HOLLYWOOD. The big white letters are as flat an fake as an old, aban­doned movie set, crumpled and peeling, with some of the letters falling down. But Ruscha’s many images of that sign make it a real sign, luminous and charged with light.

CITIZENS, Simon Schama’s wonderful new book about the French Revo­lution, is espe­cially fasci­nating to people who care about Art, because it is in many ways a book about the power of images to transform the world.

“His hands were terribly deformed. Rheumatism had cracked the joints, bending the thumb toward the palm and the other fingers toward the wrist. Visitors who weren’t used to it couldn’t take their eyes off this muti­lation. Their reaction, which they didn’t dare express, was: ‘It’s not possible. With those hands, he can’t paint these pictures. There’s a mystery!’ The mystery was Renoir himself.”