the girl with the furrowed brow

Upon careful consideration, I have reached an opinion about Vermeer’s The Milkmaid.

In general, this topic would not concern me at all, not because I have a problem with Vermeer, milkmaids, or Dutch Baroque art, but because I have little interest in them. But when I want a small, focused, educational visit to the Met, I always choose the special exhibits, and I had already seen the other ones.

The exhibition consisted of a small collection, and I chose to study the iconic painting last. It is curated focusing on two essential aspects of the piece: that the painting is a Vermeer, and that the woman is a milkmaid, and I started there.

Vermeer painted women. He painted women who were desirable. He painted women who were desirable in 17th century Hague. Standing in a small room with Vermeer's women encircling me, I was struck by their very appropriateness. This may seem odd, because he did not depict picture-perfect women with fancy hair and impeccable posture. He painted them doing things, looking eager, being tired, pouring milk, playing a lute, being women. He painted them being women. Vermeer knew his client base: wealthy men. These wealthy men wanted pictures of nice women doing nice, womanly things. There are few men present in his work, but the presence of men is overwhelming: A Maid Asleep (1656-7) is tired after entertaining a potential lover. The Woman With a Lute (1662-3) is preparing for a music-themed date. The Young Woman with a Water Pitcher (1662) is an ideal woman in an ideal home. Each painting glows with femininity, modesty, purity, grace, womanhood; gender stereotypes abound. The females he painted were perfect pictures of Woman, though he placed her in scenes unprecedented at that time. Everyone loves the girl with the pear earring. (And I must note: even this part of the exhibition was walled off, secluding these timeless women in a small, quaint, controlled environment.

Across the room, tucked in a little nook but spilling a bit into the larger area, were the milkmaids. Besides neck ruffs, dead fowl, and experiemental lighting, Dutch painters loved the milkmaid. Perhaps because bougeoise society was so chaste, this subject was a perfect sexual metaphor. The small collection of paintings huddled in the corner were rough, lewd, and boisterous. They depicted working women in kitchens and at the marketplace, most with silly faces and bulging busoms pointed toward the dirty delivery boy. They looked cheap and pop and a little bit easy, their appeal resting on a flirtation with and allusion to sex that was about as subtle as the Twilight series. And the captions pointed out symbolism I wouldn't even have conscidered: in just a few paintings, metaphors for sex include the act of milking ("a sinewey thing she has siezed with joy"--Lucas van Leyden's The Milkmaid, 1510), a mortar and pestle ("placed next to an errect candle"--Louis de Surugue's A Young Woman Chopping Onions, 1724), archery ("shooting your bolt"--Andries Stock's The Archer and the Milkmaid, 1610), and dangling birds and a chicken on a spit (for male and female reproductive parts, respectively--Peter Wtewael's Kitchen Scene, 1620s). It's clear: milkmaid is code for tart.

So the fusion of these two ideas is The Milkmaid. Shes is not one of Vermeer's waiting women. Her ruddy arms and thick middle, her contemplative downward glance, her dirty room--she was a woman at work. But she is not working on attracting every stable boy in town or experimenting with her sexuality or being a tease. Her surroundings are not heavy-handed metaphors or innuendos. The thoughts that lay beneath that furrowed brow could be of plans for the future or some new philosophy or her recipe for the pudding--or even a man. But we don't know. Her world is not revolving around a letter or visit from a lover. She does not care to tell us. The Milkmaid has desexualized herself by drawing inward, pulling her hair back, getting dirty--something uncommon in the context of her time period. She hits the in-between of Vermeer's bachelorettes and the milkmaid stereotypes wantonness. She can be seen as more a Person, less a Woman.

I, less a feminist than a humanist, rather like this.

what did you learn at school today?

although i feel uncomfortable with boxes with labels on them and don't know how to make lists, these boxes and lists and categories and compartmentalizations really interest me.
like maslow's hierarchy of needs. it's cool to see that, to look at it and figure out where you lay on the scale and which of your friend's needs are filled and use it for good arguements advocating financial stability before empowerment in third world countries. but then, like an itch you just can't help but scratch, come the what-and-why questions. why is sex in the bottom most basic level you need to fill first but sexual intimacy in the third? does that mean you can't have a need for intimacy until after you've had sex? and if you never have sex, can you never have self-esteem or be creative or feel safe? that seems pretty weighted, and also contrary to what most women's magazines tell us, at least: that sleeping with him won't make you feel better about yourself. according to maslow, it will. go figure.
here's another thing i like: gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. now we all (at this point in history) have heard since the kindergarten that there are different types of learning. but apparently our brain functions in the way to have high and low points, strong and weak bits that extend beyond just being smart and dumb. like you can have naturalistic intelligence, which makes a person have increased sensitivity to nature, the ability to grow things, and greater connectivity with animals. basically, being a tree-hugger is actually a type of intelligence. there is hope for nader, after all.
there's also specifically room for musical intelligence. that perfect pitch and sensitivity to rhythym and tone and aural sensations inhabit a real space in the mind and have merit there. i feel like it shows that there can be people who actually are tone deaf and some compositions are just...well...better than others (although frank and stravinsky and i have talked at length about this and it turns out that the only thing that makes music good is construction--this will be addressed at a later date). and you can get brain damage that makes you a musical sociopath (a strange and only-just-now-invented term for someone who has no feeling toward music, like regular sociopaths who have no feeling toward people--watch the film "badlands"). and being a musical genius is just as neurologically valid as being a math genius or something.
genius in any of these categories, even nature, means exceptional ability and creativity. i feel like geniuses are people who see the world working in different ways from most other people, who figure things out and consider things in a bigger way than other people can. they can go from a to c and skip be and go on to letters not even invented yet. stravinsky was a musical genius. picasso was a visual-spacial genius. those things are pretty obvious at this point. but what if we shake things up a bit...was kandinsky a musical genius? his pieces have very real musical quality to them, the motion and value and line and space and everything are more than just paint and images on a canvas. he said that "color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammer, the soul is the piano with the strings." keep that in mind the next time you're at the MOMA. and because he used music in a completely new and interesting way (by not using sounds at all, but color and picture) does his genius extend into the musical category? i think probably yes.

peter keating

[the way to kill greatness is to] kill a man’s sense of values. kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. you stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.

--ayn rand, the fountainhead

do we live in a world of mediocrity? is this the age of Everyman, where everyone is a winner? the Great American Dream seems to profess such, that if you work hard you can achieve whatever you want. anyone can grow up to be president. celebrities are every scandal-causing person that television can get their hands on, making people famous for being dumb and pretty and promiscuous. there’s a grade for citizenship and effort in many primary schoolrooms. rec soccer teams for young kids reward effort, failing to keep score and giving everyone trophies at the end of the season. everyone is special. which is another way of saying no one is.

by venerating the mediocre, what are we saying about it? simply that it’s ok, it’s acceptable, that average is good enough. if we look up to people who have no desirable qualities to speak of we become able to justify to ourselves that it’s ok if we have no qualities either. past the Real World culture (where everyone had to be a Something Guy—the sport guy, the funny girl, the protective mother, etc) of reducing our personalities to an adjective, we now are allowed to reduce them to something shocking, or to nothing.

but is greatness dead? there still are things we can see and aspire to, and even more than ever before. forerunners in music and art and literature and politics and philosophy still exist and are standing up for something to look toward. they still matter, at least to me, more than any falsely famous person or shocking situation. and amidst everything great that is being done by every amazing person, I can look at things and people who are living their lives (subjectively, of course) less successfully than I am, and feel better about that. but when we get to the dangerous stage where living large and reaching higher no longer holds any interest for an individual, that is where the cult of mediocrity has won its battle.

op, posth

my grandfather only liked to ski groomed runs, sought out the corduroy. he wore bogner suits and expensive old man goggles and loved lunchtime at deer valley. steaks and burgers and that great chili.

"bapa gave me diet pepsi," i would always say in the car on the way home when my parents wouldn't allow me to have soda or caffeine. he also never minded when i ate too much candy.

we would sit on the couch on the soft upholstery (before too many other grandkids were around and nana put plastic over them) and read. bapa called him bill, and read stories about lady macbeth and poor prince hamlet and queen mab. he told tales of da vinci's inventions and michelangelo and the poem that has the room where the women come and go.

i waterskied behind a wave runner when he was trying to teach me how, and once he got us through one of the biggest storms and highest waves i've ever seen. i was hiding under the hatch and he kept laughing and it made me feel safer.

his favorite exclamation was "holy mackerel" and i didn't get it for the longest time.

he liked me best. he always told me so. i could just tell, too.

i remember sitting on the floor of his old room that week, when my mother and grandmother were out, and i pulled my knees to my 9-year-old chest and kept thinking there was some type of mistake. or if i had been there it would feel different.

if he were here now would it be different?

today i keep an old photo on my bulletin board of him holding me when i was small. 

graveyards scare me, and i don't think he liked them either.

those first and last runs were for you.

and then i almost got hit by a train

if you go at the right pace-length, you can run down the railroad tracks skipping every other rail, hopping from one to the other really quick. it helps to look down so you don't trip or miss a step. i went running down some abandoned tracks on the outskirts today.
and then on the side was a big forbidding bit of grass and bush looking scarce with their non-existent winter foliage. i deviated, and ran through it, my destination the bridge on the other side. two steps in and my angle was bleeding and my shirt was stuck. i whipped around to untangle myself and poked my finger on a huge thorn, which were everywhere. it bled, a lot, huge red drops running down my hand and dropping onto the trees and dirt. just one little prick on my finger and suddenly there is blood everywhere and i feel as though i've been seriously wounded.
when i got home and washed my hands off, there was hardly a mark. how odd.

mix tape

i'm breathing a bit easier recently.
i broke things, shattered fragile pieces, wreaked havoc on a clean room. the best part is, i did it on purpose. i meant it. i methodically caused this destruction. effortlessly, even. lines have already been scored, and the white covering in the room is just old dust, asking to be blown away. a few swift movements and i smile in response to the sound of shattering.
when i say i smile, i mean my mouth moves in that direction. but there's nothing on the inside. could rip me open and find nothing there. you're too late. i've looted it myself already.

when i say let's keep in touch,
i really mean i wish that you'd grow up

yesterday

i lost my prism.
you'll know when i find it again.
tell then, i'll stay away.