Articles by Morgan Meis

I’ve been listening to Erik Satie’s symphonic work—yes, I think it is something we would call a symphonic work—a piece he called Socrate. It is sort of an opera, though not really an opera exactly. It is a hybrid piece that I think he actually called a symphonic drama. Anyway, it is about Socrates. Satie took some bits of dialogue from a number of different spots in the Platonic corpus and then strung them together into a kind of sung dialogue with a musical composition in the background.

Sometimes when people ask me what my favorite film is I say Alice in the Cities, which is a film that Wim Wenders made in 1973, shooting footage all over the US and then also, notoriously, at least to me, in the city of Wuppertal, Germany, which is sometimes described as being located in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region. That’s important to me because the greater Ruhr valley is the part of Germany that often reminds me of the Rust Belt regions of the US, including the area of southern Michigan and, importantly, at least to me, of Detroit, which happens to be the city in which I currently live.

In 1920, the Swiss artist and all around maniac of wandering lines, Paul Klee, painted a work that came to be known as the Angelus Novus. I’ll tell you a somewhat shameful story about the history of this painting and the history of me. I learned about the painting by reading Walter Benjamin, as have many. The Angelus Novus appears and plays an important role in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.

I’ve never actually seen Arnold Böcklin’s famous but now not really all that famous, let’s say once-famous and now fairly obscure painting known as Die Toteninsel, or The Isle of the Dead. I haven’t seen it in person. There is a version of the painting, I guess Böcklin painted a number of versions of the painting since they kept getting destroyed by wars and other annoying events, but there is a version of the painting at the art museum in Leipzig and I kick myself that I was in Leipzig not that long ago, a couple of years ago and completely and utterly failed to go see the painting.

I was watching “Vampyros Lesbos” the other day, which is, shall we say, very much less than a perfect movie. It is not even, by any reasonable standard for what makes a movie good, a good movie. It is a bad movie, and upon further reflection I’m not even sure if we should call it a movie at all, since it is constructed so sloppily.

I keep coming back to the color blue. Or maybe the color blue keeps coming back to me. Or I keep getting directed and redirected to the color blue. I spent a lot of time, over the last few years, with the paintings of Joan Mitchell. There wasn’t a tree out there she couldn’t paint blue. And before Mitchell, for me, was Franz Marc. He liked to paint animals blue, especially horses.

Wait, you might ask, what do Pessoa, the great Portuguese Modernist writer and Aleister Crowley, the notorious occultist, have to do with one another and, for that matter, with the Boca do Inferno? That’s a good question. The answer is surprising in all sorts of ways and also slightly crazy and definitely confusing and then maybe even verging into the territory of….

There is a famous story amongst Assyriologists. It concerns a man named George Smith, who was working at the British Museum in the mid-nineteenth century but who was by no means someone you’d expect to be working at the British Museum and studying and deciphering cuneiform tablets since he was, in fact, born in working class circumstances in London in 1840, and managed, somehow, to teach himself to read Akkadian and Sumerian, which anyone who has ever looked at a cuneiform tablet will realize is not such an easy thing to do.

I’ve become slightly obsessed with a writer named Alexander Trocchi. Trocchi was a Scottish writer born in Glasgow in 1925. He probably should have died of a heroin overdose, since he was addicted to the drug for much of his life and lived as an addict on the streets of NYC for many years. Alas, he died of cancer in London in 1984. The gods are, as ever, cruel and mischievous. The dedicated smack addict perished from smoking too many cigarettes.

El Greco once painted Martin of Tours. It is a giant painting, though El Greco also painted a smaller version, as he was wont to do. In the painting, Martin sits atop a steed in shining armor. The beggar/Christ stands nearby, so close, actually, as to almost merge with Martin and the horse. Martin has not cut the cloak, yet. It’s a green cloak that looks more like a banner that is wound round the nether parts of the beggar/Christ figure.

Hearing Marianne Faithfull sing “Don’t Forget Me” you realize that it could have been written by Kurt Weil and sung by Lotte Lenya. It’s an unknown B-Side from the Threepenny Opera. It’s a burnt out torch song from the last days of the Weimar Republic. Faithfull pronounces some of the lines, “Let me know you think about me too,” with a Deutsch-inflected lilt that sounds like maybe Lenya is singing them, or Marlene Dietrich. Faithfull knew what she was doing. She knew the ghosts she was summoning.

In the video recording of The Cure performing A Forest for Dutch television in 1980 one encounters a version of The Cure that doesn’t quite jibe with later versions of the band. Robert Smith, in particular, has short spiky hair and looks nothing like the fully-coiffed gothic prince that he would soon become. He also looks annoyed or indifferent.

There was a quite extensive exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings at the Albertinum, one of the art museums in Dresden. One has the feeling that there is always a Caspar David Friedrich exhibit at one of the art museums of Dresden. Nonetheless I was glad for it. I was glad to move slowly from one canvas to the next and to see more Friedrich paintings in one location than I had ever seen before.

What I’ve been reading is the account of many long and short conversations between Goethe and a person named Johann Peter Eckermann, who was a youngish literary-minded fellow who sent Goethe some of his writing, writing that was rather ass-kissy in its love of, and reliance on, a Goethian way of thinking, and so Eckermann sent Goethe some of this Goethe-worshiping writing and Goethe, unsurprisingly, lapped it up and invited Eckermann to come and visit him at his fancy house in Weimar.

I want to talk about seeing angels and about speaking with angels. I myself have not seen an angel. I have also not spoken with angels. I’m not even sure what an angel is. I’m not just saying that I doubt the existence of angels, I’m saying that the whole concept of an angel, even as a literary or biblical trope, is obscure to me. Nonetheless, I can’t stop thinking about angels.

I was meeting my mother at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother is both a great lover of art and completely unpretentious about it. Often, she simply stands in front of objects of art and smiles. We found ourselves in an exhibit entitled Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting. We were both suddenly astonished. I don’t know why exactly. I do know why un-exactly. The paintings are extraordinary.

Abelard and Heloise proceeded to fall in love. They came together ostensibly so that he could tutor her. But actually what happened was a torrid love affair. This affair was discovered and for various complicated reasons led to trouble, as can happen in the case of torrid love affairs. The trouble got so bad that Heloise’s family intervened, by hiring a bunch of thugs to waylay Abelard and castrate him.

It is hard to describe the works of Robert Irwin. A typical work by Robert Irwin is, for instance, a piece called Untitled (Acrylic Column). Basically it’s a free-standing column of see-through acrylic about fifteen feet high. The column is constructed in a kind of ‘V’ shape so that it doesn’t fall over. Also, stuff happens with the light and with the refractions of vision in that shape.

I actually don’t think there are words that properly convey what Sinéad conveyed with her music and this is precisely the point. The words mostly get in the way. They are too precise or not precise enough. The things that Sinéad was trying to say are not communicated as declarative sentences or explanations or anything like that. More than anything, what Sinéad did, I think, was to make sounds.

I had occasion recently to watch the 1986 film Gothic. It’s a Ken Russell film and if you have ever seen a Ken Russell film, you know already that it is going to be over-the-top to say the very least. The film purportedly tells the story of the night that Mary Shelley conceived her classic novel Frankenstein. Through most of the film, the actors roam around a house and its immediate environs behaving wildly and with increasing levels of insanity.