LXXV

 

“The parson’s horse is beautiful, the curate’s horse is picturesque.” Said Sydney Smith, ca. 1810. An English cleric, writer and crafter of bons mots, he had been a curate before eventually securing a vicarage, and with it a “living” drawn from tithes, and an inheritance that, as the saying went, “put him out of the reach of poverty.”

 

Jane Austen reports, in Northanger Abbey, that Catherine Moreland, after hearing a lecture from Henry Tilney on the picturesque, “voluntarily rejected the whole city of Bath, as unworthy to make part of a landscape.”

 

“I have talked of the picturesque all my life; now, at last… I see it!” Said Henry James on visiting the ruin-strewn Italian town of Albano in the 1870s.

 

Picturesque: adjective of 17th century origins, denoting something resembling or worthy of a picture or painting. Or possessing the qualities associated with a (scenic) picture or painting. Living a double life as a noun from ca. 1750.

 

And then there is terribilità – a sense of the sublime mixed with terror and awe, as initially applied by contemporaries to the “frightening power” of Michelangelo and his works.

 

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails

Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales…

            Comes a vapor from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,

Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.

            Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;

For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.

            Anyone for Tennyson?

 

From a summit overlooking the Tappan Zee:

The Indian. And there’s one comfort. I heard the wise Iachim, looking down when the railroad cut was fresh, and the bleeding earth offended us. There is nothing made, he said, and will be nothing made by these new men, high tower, or cut, or buildings by a lake that will not make good ruins.

Judith. Ruins? This?

The Indian. Why, when the race is gone, or looks aside only a little while, the white stone darkens, the wounds close, and the roofs fall, and the walls give way to rains. Nothing is made by men but makes, in the end, good ruins.

Van. Well, that’s something. But I can hardly wait.

Wrote Maxwell Anderson in High Tor, a piece of ’36.

 

Or looks aside only a little while…

 

Or Milton:

Tower’d cities please us then…

 

 

And the busy hum of men…

Milton, L’Allegro, again.

 

 

In July 1802, an Englishman, Thomas Girtin, a friend and rival of Turner, and a major proponent of watercolor, created a panorama of London: composite views drawn from a high point on the South Bank of the Thames measuring eighteen feet high and a hundred and eight feet in circumference. Girtin, who died later that year at the age of 27, called his panorama, a great popular success, The Eidometropolis.

 

Or looks aside only a little while…

 

In Brooklyn as in Manhattan, a fast generation of super-tall condominiums, more shaft than tower. Half Eagle’s Nest, half vertical Führer-bunker: all Dresdened up mit keinen Platz to go.

 

And hipsters, like the Jordan, will roll.

 

Wrench and wrenchability.

 

The nude. A rubber chicken. Separated at birth?

 

Raunch and raunchability.

 

A rubber nude and a chicken go into a bar…

 

Two nudes, a latex chicken and a Methodist go into a Presbyterian bar…

 

Ah, the proverbial rubber chicken…

 

Six Methodists, a transsexual, four chimpanzees and Zsa Zsa Gabor go into…

 

Cicero and Catullus – no, Cicero, Catullus and Leibniz – no Cicero, Catullus, Leibniz and Spinoza and a semi-defrosted-yet-Kosher chicken go into a Bar-uch…

 

The Guide for the Multiplex’d.

 

Plotinus, the elder Pliny and Pedro Páramo walk into a cantina…

 

Clodia, Cicero, Juan Rulfo and Henny Youngman…

 

Why the long face?

 

And he thought I asked for a twelve-inch pianist!

 

Three capons, Danton and Robespierre bumrush the stage…

 

Everybody wants to get into the act…

 

And I said: what about breakfast, Antigone?

 

A lens-grinder, an organ grinder, a pre-Socratic, a Neo-Platonist and a chimpanzee order a submarine…

 

Six theories, five postulates, four hypotheses and three French hens walk into…

 

And he thought I asked for world peace!

 

And he thought I said three French horns.

 

Four colick’d birds, free something-something, twa’ turtle doves and a curate up a bear’s tree.

 

A defrocked priest, an orgone-grinder, Nikola Tesla and the Angry Birds walk into a Führer-bunker…

 

Eva Braun, Eva Hesse, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Eva Destruction walk into Lady Mondo’s Stepney Green…

 

Halt – we must put a shtup to this!

            Aha, she shtups to conquer…

 

Three Goldsmiths, Dr. Moreau and an Olive order ti martoonis and a Singapore Sling…

 

Over.

 

Two doves stage a bloodless coo