The Brooklyn Rail

In late November I met a friend in Battery Park City’s Winter Garden, where we shared a table beneath a pair of tall, displaced palm trees. In that bright, artificial room, we watched as crowds crossed the glassy atrium towards the shopping mall. My friend, usually so preternaturally cheerful, was silent. She pawed at the denim of her jeans, scratching anxiously up her thighs. We exchanged nervous smiles.

In half an hour we were due to visit Robert’s family. I wasn’t yet sure what to say. Robert had been my friend and mentor, one of the most decent people I’d ever met. A consummate enthusiast, he’d taught me to relish the mechanical details of the everyday, extolling the intricate machinery of cameras and watches. He’d driven his son and me to county racetracks at the crack of dawn, where we’d tiptoed to watch sports cars screaming past; there he’d explained carburetors at eight, camshafts at noon, and control arms at nine, chuckling all the while in his clipped, throaty way. Now Robert, in his unceasing vitality, was gone.

I looked hard at the people around us. We agreed how strange it felt, how unnerving, that these feelings which consumed us, and which seemed as though they should consume the world, existed for no one else here. These people didn’t care that Robert was dead. They were lost in their dull routines, nursing their coffees and nibbling their pastries. I hated that everyone was so unbothered. I hated that an event so significant in my life could seem so small in the world.

But I grew grateful, in time, for this harsh sense of scale. It showed me that these feelings would pass: that what was immense would shrink to size, and life would take its shape again. The proof, in all of its banality, walked among us. I felt a little disloyal when I thought this, as though I had shirked my duty to grieve. But then I knew that Robert, practical to his core, would have said the same. I looked over at my friend; by now it was time to go. When her eyes met mine, we rose. The light was wintry and white, and we squinted when we faced the sun.

I suppose this, for me, has always been the point of Daylight (1975), Joan Mitchell and James Schuyler’s remarkable poem-pastel from the mid-seventies. Daylight, a quiet collaboration between one of the New York School’s finest poets and finest painters, takes its name from Schuyler’s brief, typeset poem printed about two-thirds of the way down the page. Like much of Schuyler’s work, “Daylight” is precise and unadorned, yet touching in its plaintive prose. Its straightforward words dance on the barbed fence of cliché, but they’re never nicked.

Daylight reflects a moment of mourning—not a death, in this case, but a romance, during the period of incomprehension which marks a relationship’s demise. The poem’s stunned narrator confronts the reality that “Our love might end,” as an infinite, infallible love reveals itself to be fallible and finite. This realization, shocking to its core, overwhelms everything else in the lover’s world.

Our lives are strange this way. Day-to-day life can proceed admirably—we can be safe and fed and employed, surrounded by family and friends; we can be comfortable, in every quantifiable sense—yet one oscillation in the realm of the personal (a break-up, a rejection, a loss—even the memory of a loss) is enough to leave us doomed and disconsolate. With every tangible need satisfied, an intangible crisis of feeling will still shake us for days on end.

But this gravity is an illusion. Our emotions’ totality is only a trick of the light, and their permanence is a false impression. The love ends, and yet, Schuyler writes—and it matters that his poem begins with “And,” setting the tense of an admission, locating us after the fact—“the sun / went right on shining.” That final line breaks the poem’s meter: two stresses are pitched in a row, upsetting the tetrameter of the first two (and partial third) lines. In those six words, Daylight is interrupted and resolved at once, as the lover recognizes that what seems forever and all-consuming is, in truth, localized and ephemeral. The world turns, and its residents walk with it. They stand beneath palm trees, and they stun us with their nonchalance. It’s a good thing, Schuyler says.

Schuyler’s poem is poignant and precise, but Daylight wouldn’t resonate so powerfully as prose alone. It’s Mitchell’s striking pastel atop and around the text which, in the realm of the visual, so complements Schuyler’s words. This genre of composition, a doubling of cognition by pairing image and language together, is always a risky endeavor. Success isn’t guaranteed: the list of artworks graffitied by insubstantial prose is long, and both painting and poem can suffer in such unhappy marriages.

But Mitchell deftly evades this trap. It helps that her pastel is neither orthogonal to Schuyler’s work, some dissonant decoration, nor is it a direct translation. The pastel can be read literally: some critics follow it bottom to top, such that the yellow-orange of a muted sun is interrupted by flickers of blue and green (a broken love), before resolving into a sunlight brighter and stronger than that which preceded it. This might be right—yet the image can also be read impressionistically, with Mitchell gesturing to a feeling alone, shirking the constraints of transcription. What’s inarguable is that arresting color: the yellow hue of morning light, the orange of a sunrise endlessly indifferent to our worldly affairs.

Daylight may seem a unique joining of forms, but for the poets and painters of the New York School, such collaboration was only natural. There was no greater influence for the “New York poets,” admitted Schuyler in 1959, than “the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.” No writer (“except I suppose the color blind”) went untouched by the energetic, endlessly shifting artistic scene of downtown New York. Inspiration, where it could be found, assumed a predominantly visual form. “Writers and musicians are in the boat,” Schuyler wrote, “but they don’t steer.”

Frank O’Hara concurred, though he struck a more pragmatic tone. “The only people who were interested in our poetry,” he told a television crew in 1966, “were painters.” The literary establishment looked askance at the vernacular, associative poems of O’Hara and his cohort, far more enamored of Eliot, Auden, and an earlier generation of British and American poets. Painters, O’Hara remarked, “had no partis pris about academic standards.” The painters said the same about the poets: Alex Katz liked that writers were less “institutionalized” in their aesthetic tastes, while Jane Freilicher appreciated the “sympathetic vibration, [and] natural syntax” of poets. Each camp found a breath of fresh air in the other, and so grew the fecund collaborations between painters and poets which characterized much of the New York School (as thoughtfully catalogued in Jenni Quilter’s 2014 New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight). In this era of artistic pollination, poets mingled with sculptors, critics danced with cartoonists, and musicians flittered amongst them all.

Their alliances were more than just social. There existed a real formal alignment in the painters’ and poets’ methods and ambitions. Schuyler’s process, he explained in an interview with Carl Little, was “exactly” like the painter Freilicher’s. Freilicher began “with an apprehension or a feeling about something, an inner impulse that wants to be expressed.” She then carried to her canvas this faint “tug” of sensation, allowing her subject to coalesce from without. Schuyler’s poems similarly arose “out of the unconscious,” as hazy moods and emotions gradually progressed into language.

Bored by “symbol,” Schuyler famously preferred “the real.” Two lines in his poem “Joint” give voice to a modest artistic philosophy: “It is not what carrots are like, / it is the carrots.” The poet’s job, then, was to render the meal. Schuyler’s corpus bridges the rocky divide between language and consciousness, making real the intangible experience of emotion. His poems exhibit sensation at a distance, just far enough away to reveal the contours of life which remain inscrutable up close. His work, his friend Fairfield Porter wrote lovingly, offers “transparent windows on a complex view.”

Mitchell’s aesthetic ambitions dovetailed neatly. She endeavored to capture “the feeling of an idea” in her paintings, aiming for what she termed “accuracy” in expression. A work would succeed only if it kept its fidelity to a certain feeling—even if the feeling itself was broad and indistinct. With their radiant colors and ardent brushstrokes, Mitchell’s paintings affirm this commitment to vitality and its whims. “Painting,” she told Yves Michaud in 1986, “is a means of feeling ‘living.’” It’s a testament, perhaps, to the overlap of Mitchell’s and Schuyler’s creative ambitions, that the collaboration which produced “Daylight” was essentially one-sided: Mitchell “just took the poems” and went to work without Schuyler’s visual input.

At times the power of Daylight is linguistic; then, the light shifts, and the magic is all Mitchell’s. Of course it’s both—and it helps that the poet thought visually (Porter assured Schuyler he was “much more visual than I am”), and that the painter thought linguistically (Mitchell, a devoted reader of poetry, wanted her works to embody “the qualities which differentiate a line of poetry from a line of prose”). Harmonious between forms, each portion of the poem-pastel strengthens the other. Mitchell renders precisely what Schuyler conjures: it is not what daylight is like, it is daylight.

Schuyler, in a late villanelle, left his readers with a thorny epitaph: “Art, like death, is brief: life and friendship long.” For a poet, these were downcast words; for everyone else, they’re rather hopeful. I think it was just before noon, on that cold November day, that we walked together along the river to Robert’s apartment. We joined his family in a circle on the floor; somehow it was the only place that made sense. I still didn’t know what to say, but I itched with a question. Robert was a trained photographer, and over fifty years he’d taken thousands of striking images; most, however, had gone straight into newspaper circulation, never seeing exhibition. I asked then whether there was the possibility of a show. Alison, Robert’s wife, unflappable until now, began to cry. I turned bright red. My friend looked over at me: now you’ve really done it, she seemed to say.

A few months later, the show went up. The opening was a great success, but it was bittersweet, for we stood shoulder to shoulder in the audience of an absence. It was chilling, too, to see Robert’s images of a dust and ash-covered downtown, and to know these photographs were inextricable from the cancer which killed him. Everyone in the room shared these thoughts: our feelings were communal, and the total congruence between internal feeling and external event reassured me. But I knew this comfort was only temporary. Such a public, collective gathering was an aberration in the order of things: soon we’d leave, and our feelings would be made private again. The canyon between inner and outer life would open anew. The thought exhausted me, but I tried not to worry about it. There seemed no other way it could be. It was a perfectly sunny afternoon, and my friend and I stayed until the early evening. We left after the others, and in the golden light, we carried two pots of tulips back to Robert’s apartment.

Daylight returns to me often, a candid account of the emotional distortions which comprise daily life. Feelings, like rubber bands, always snap back to size; it’s just that they sting upon skin when they do. Perhaps all we can do is recognize the vicissitudes of feeling when they thrash us, recording these experiences as faithfully as possible. Then they might hold some use, and then our aches might be exchanged for a dime. For Schuyler, who suffered gravely in years spent between hospital beds, one of language’s great powers was to make sense of a life which so often hurt. “Silver day,” he wondered, “how shall I polish you?”