Poetic Image
We converse with ourselves all day. Our body language speaks to us, even about something as specialized as our responses to art. Whatever it says is heard and acted upon.
Mine spoke to me recently as I was on my way to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was another agendaless summer afternoon, the museum serving, yet again, as a source of distraction and potential inspiration. On the approach to the entrance, I passed the vendors along the allees of London plane trees on Fifth Avenue, each booth a kind of shady room. I’m rarely, if ever, taken with the goods displayed—magnets and reproductions of Andy Warhol Marilyns, machine-painted New York cityscapes and Russian nesting dolls—but one man’s booth revealed a neat grid of small painted canvases.
The artist—I assumed he had painted them—sat reading a book, legs crossed. Among his works was one showing a portion of a young man’s muscled shoulder and upper arm, a fragment of his head and face, but so little of the figure as to not reveal what he looked like. Yet, there was just enough of the shaded eye and jaw, ear and dark hair to know that the male was beautiful and young. The late poet and New Yorker poetry editor, Howard Moss, wrote about how “whatever is barely glimpsed”, “the half seen”, is often a source for a poem—that a fleeting, partial encounter with something moving “in a small compass” often leads to a fuller picture drawn by the imagination. I knew Howard for a few years when I was a young man, newly arrived in New York, and even though I didn’t get to know him very well, that brief, fleeting acquaintance with him before he died in 1987 has resulted in an ongoing remembrance of him. I was intimidated by his fame, though he had me to dinners at his Village townhouse and we swam together at his pool in East Hampton.
Silently ordered to do so by my body language, I slowed the moment I saw the artwork, one of many canvases, but I continued on. The artist didn’t look up, though he likely sensed my presence and hesitation. Most of the vendors evince a passionless, indifferent nature, so used are they to tourists stopping and staring at the goods before ambling on without a purchase. I walked several feet onward, then stopped and backed up. I walked forward again and paused in front of the work. The artist looked up, but, again, with little enthusiasm. He inserted a finger in the the book he was reading and didn’t uncross his knees.
When I asked the price of his works, “each forty dollars”, he told me, I then asked about the one I now own.
“I call that one Catullus,” the artist, Robert Dandarov, said. “The ancient Roman poet.”
Whenever I’m undecided about reading a new book or purchasing a painting or listening to a piece of unfamiliar music, tell me that it relates somehow to poetry or a poet and I’ll buy it, hear it, pay attention to it.
Dandarov pointed to a small blue oval at the top of the eight-inch-square canvas. “That represents the color of the Mediterranean,” he told me, adding that he was born and raised in Macedonia, “former Yugoslavia,” his accent and diction indicating a foreign birth. “The title came to me at the beginning of making the painting,” he explained. “I always liked Catullus’s poetry and felt the figure will nicely symbolize his sensuous writing.”
Later, on his website, I saw that he has painted, too, a larger 44-inch-square version of the work, with that sea-blue orifice to the Mediterranean big enough to dive through.
The some 116 surviving poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (84 BCE-54 BCE) were accidentally rediscovered in Verona, Italy, around 1300—copies of copies of copies. Catullus (pronounced ka TULL us) was born in Verona, though he lived most of his life in Rome, just as Caesar was gaining power on his way to becoming emperor. Among Catullus’s works are twenty-five love poems to a married, older woman with whom he became (tortuously) involved and whose real identity he disguised by naming her Lesbia. There are also other highly erotic poems he wrote to a young male lover named Juventius. So blatant and coarse are these poems to the young man that it’s revealing to see how their translations have morphed over time—from euphemistic Victorian-era suggestions of male-to-male friendship to present-day four-letter pronouncements of various sexual acts.
Though the translations of his works from the Latin vary widely, when writing about love and desire, Catullus, it seems, was fixated on the act of kissing (among others). He writes about wanting to indulge Lesbia with as many kisses as there are “sands in the desert,” according to one translation, and in another poem the number of stars that light the night sky. In what is simply referred to as Catullus 48, the poet writes of wishing to kiss Juventius’s “honeyed eyes” 300,000 times, with that still not being sufficient, he adds. He then likens the actual kisses to fields of ripe corn, with the ears pressing hard against one another.
Catullus was a provocateur of his time, not only in writing poems of love and sex and spite and jealousy to and about his various lovers, but also poems decrying the politics of Caesar (even though Catullus’s father was a close friend). He reacted to and wrote about people, politics, and bodily orifices that were sources for him of both revulsion and desire.
Dandarov placed my purchase in a Zip-loc bag and ran a finger along the seam to seal it with a burp. When I walked into the Met, I was stopped by a guard, who said with a calm weariness, “Sir, you can’t bring a work of art into a museum of works of art,” which I thought was a witty way of stating the problem.
I went to another entrance of the museum, where I was confronted with the same objection (though said less poetically). That guard, however, allowed me to put the artwork behind the security desk where I could pick it up after my visit. I dictated to him the Post-It note to afix—my first name joined with Catullus, a temporary link to the ancient Classical world.
As I walked home with the purchase, I was aware of people on the sidewalks trying to see the depicted image through the clear plastic, nearly hypnotizing some with its pendulous swings in my hand. On my long amble, forty blocks south to my apartment, I kept considering places to hang it. While the walls of my bedroom are still relatively blank, I decided I wanted the work in the living room where I could see it all the time—that fraction of a face, glistening arm, folds of the ear, portal of Mediterranean blue.
Why did I buy this work and why did it stop me on the street? Because it represents perfectly the kind of young, masculine beauty that still stuns me, to the point of actually not moving. And while I see so much young beauty on the streets, in the galleries of the Met, tourists and New Yorkers alike, these are people seen in transit, moving from one position to another, into view, then out of view. I stop because it keeps them in my view longer. And in that momentary pause, I try to understand their appeal, reason why it exists and why I should not be troubled by it, but, rather, engaged. “I had once what they have,” I tell myself.
The figure of a young man in a painting is one that does not move out of view. Not only is the depiction circumscribed by the size of the canvas or by the frame, but the image is forever stilled. You can possess it, hang it in your home, life with that presence. He or she does not leave.
That desire for beauty, whether it’s simply to see it, or, better, to interact with it intimately, is insatiable. When I was younger and it was far easier to get some of the other young men I would see on the streets to stop for me—how we would pause for one another, if not go off somewhere together—the pursuit of desire was a constant. I don’t know who this figure is in the painting, but perhaps it’s the artist’s reference to Juventius, or it embodies Catullus’s desire for desire.
Maybe, too, I stopped before the painting because I have been seeing lately daily images of the present-day classical world. Someone I used to know in New York, a once-young interior designer who had a penchant for reclining on my couch and encouraging me to sybaritically massage his bare feet, has been traveling in Greece for weeks. He has been posting images and mini videos of his Ionian Sea idylls and dinners of crustaceans at tavernas, along with seemingly coy selfies on pebble-strewn isle beaches or within the courtyards of white-washed dwellings accented with blue shutters. Predictable posted comments from his friends relate how he looks like “a Greek god,” punctuated with ellipses of smiley-face emoticons.
When he still lived in New York, I took him once to a movie on a hot summer afternoon, but throughout the film he kept taking out his phone and texting messages in the dark, the people in adjacent seats annoyed by the wand-like glow from his screen. It was a foreign movie, and he was missing the subtitles spelling out the plot in favor of the messages lighting on his phone.
He whispered to me at one point in the dark theater, “I think I’m in love.”
And for that fleeting moment, lasting probably no longer than a few frames of the movie, I thought he meant me, and I felt an infusion of momentary joy. A sudden plot twist to the day.
But once he resumed thumbing out another missive, I knew I was not the object of that declaration. He leaned into my ear to clarify. “There’s this guy I’ve met.”
After the movie, I was supposed to take him to a friend’s rooftop gathering nearby, but I pretended to opt out of that. He went off, out of the picture, but I to my friend’s, where I related the story of what happened as if it had meant nothing to me, as if I hadn’t felt a sting, only the humor of the situation.
The morning after I had bought the painting from the artist, I hammered in a nail and hook next to the intercom phone, positioned on a short stretch of hallway by my door. The work is now the first thing a person sees upon entering the apartment, and whenever someone visits and I have to answer the intercom, there he is, Catullus, or a reference to him, eager to meet whoever is coming. Catullus, ever catty and passionate, would have had something to say about everyone who passes him, including me, and I now imagine his responses and, perhaps, his kisses.