In Yet Another Language, and: The Tragedy of Fallingwater

Abstract

In yet another language Gustave Courbet: L'origine du monde (1866) In yet another language, a common euphemism for giving birth quite literally means to bring forth or give up to the light. Not to hand over, as a gift, but to surrender as the defeated may have done in a medieval game – giving up something sacred. Modernism having done away with the sacred, the Middle Ages must suffice. Not euphemistically or as a safe allegory, but as the only way left to illustrate the point. And this is, if nothing else, where we make an image of the unseen, the primed canvas on which we see ourselves a priori. Modernism having been condemned by the Church in 1907, it seems even more appropriate to bring up these knights in their impractical armor. Courbet said that an abstract object has no place in the domain of painting. I want to hold him responsible for every papal edict since 1907, but history gets in the way. Cunt is in itself [End Page 38] a euphemism to keep us from pointing to the body as we see it, a brief abstraction to divert us until nothing real seems possible. There are laws of physics to prevent this. Modern thought has defied them all, and slipped into the vortex of its own murmur. The hell of it is not being in or coming out of the spin; it's resisting the temptation to slip again. Which implies a willingness – like so much of what often passes for accident or coincidence. In 1866, Gustave Courbet – an anarchist who held his time hostage with realism – called it quite simply the origin of the universe. [End Page 39] The tragedy of Fallingwater Frank Lloyd-Wright: Fallingwater (1936–39) for Danielle Shrader-Frechette The tragedy of Fallingwater is not instability by any means. Just look at the Tower of Pisa: even after repairs, it leans. How brazen, how typical of us to think we can undo in little more than a decade the labor of eight hundred years. The best one can (realistically) hope for is that the apple comes from Eve and not from Newton. The real tragedy of Fallingwater is not that it wasn't built on the moon, where we abandoned a flying variation of the original – a fact we're still not honest enough to own up to. (There was fire in place of rocks, in place of water on the run.) If there is indeed a tragedy, it isn't that we used to build – in that improbable lapse between wars – with a sense of permanence that kept us from seeing how hope always falls short of our modest expectations. We didn't picture ourselves up against the very thing without which no revolution is possible. If there were flaws in the system, our eyes were ill equipped to keep track. But isn't that the nature of language – to speak for the [End Page 40] eyes? It says as much as it can before it turns into geometry, before we start to measure our words like the last precious grains of sustenance in the desert. All land lives on memories of rain, almost exclusively harsh and volatile rain. Downpour. Squall. Precipitation vs. precipice. If this is not the fortunate tragedy that marks the flesh of Fallingwater, it explains tangentially how we live with the consequences of not forgetting enough.