Yield (3 and Final)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Yield by Anne Truitt.

Anne Truitt, Twining Court II, 2002, acrylic on wood, source

Welcome to the third installment of Asynchronous Studio Book Club for Yield by Anne Truitt. Notes that follow pertain to the last sections of the book starting with “Autumn” (p. 130). Kindly respond to them or anything germane in the comments.

The last third of the book flew. Much of it took place at Yaddo, the residency in Saratoga Springs where Truitt enjoyed honorary status and could attend any time, though she was conscientious of not taking undue advantage of it. She also spent several pages of consideration about what she would say at a scheduled talk at Yale. (A casual search doesn’t turn up a recording or transcript of said talk.) There is less discussion of family, which has been endearing throughout the book so long as I don’t bother too much trying to remember who’s who. I’m blessed with talents, but that’s not one of them.

The forgotten institute

On page 132 Truitt mentions the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington, D.C. Her nine months spent there is her “only formal training.” The “Robert” mentioned is the poet Robert Richman, who founded the school in 1947. It ran for twenty years. What little information I can find on it is available at an online catalog entry at the Smithsonian archives. Twenty years is a hell of a run for an art school and Truitt is one hell of a student; you would think, incorrectly, that there would at least be a Wikipedia article about it. The Smithsonian has 36 linear feet of documents waiting to turn into someone’s dissertation. Richman was, like yours truly, a contributor to The New Criterion.

Existing

On page 133 she drops this:

It was Marcel Duchamp who, in a night of conversation, suggested to me that I might not exist - as I am finding out now that I indeed do not.

This embrace of nonexistence, even while in life, seems salutary. She notes her friends “flickering out,” which is sad, but on some level they hardly flickered in to begin with, which is an equanimity-inducing contemplation. She records yesterday’s flight of the heron with appreciation. Basho:

Lightning flashes
outward to the darkness
night heron’s screech

Later on page 161: “What I should have said at Yale was that I have gradually taken in the fact that I am not my body.”

Art after 9/11

Page 134:

A young artist questioned his life. What did art matter now? But I am staying my mind on Tolstoy’s Resurrection. On Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas. On Rembrandt’s indomitable eyes…. Like all attentive lives, the life of an artist is worth living.

I believe that visual art is in a uniquely bad time, with corrupt, decayed institutions and hardly any purchase in the minds of the cultured. But attending to life is incorruptible and its value is permanent. Likewise art that attends to life; truly, not in the way that the art of The Monoculture pretends to attend to it.

Bombing Afghanistan

God help me, page 136:

President Bush and his advisors have missed, and do not seem to recognize that hey have missed, the best opportunity in this century to declare sovereignty of international law on our planet.

While this is coming from a place of screwball Teilhardianism, Bush in fact carried out Afghan operations in ostensible enforcement of international peace. Truitt would have remembered better than me the speech in which Bush’s father, a dozen years earlier, described his vision of the New World Order:

We stand today at a unique and extraordinary moment. The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation. Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective - a new world order - can emerge: a new era - freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony. A hundred generations have searched for this elusive path to peace, while a thousand wars raged across the span of human endeavor. Today that new world is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we've known. A world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle. A world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak.

The result of that vaunted pursuit of justice was a Himalayan pile of bodies. We spent more than two trillion dollars to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. President Biden, who authored the last chapter of that story in a manner that brought no honor to himself, just authorized the Pentagon to deploy 3,000 reserves to Europe in response to the conflict in Ukraine, as if our efforts to form a world “where the strong respect the rights of the weak” are going to go right this time. It’s sickening madness.

It was an old saw even when Barry Goldwater cited it in 1964: A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take away everything that you have. Imagine, then, a government big enough to cover the earth. There is no version of it, progressive or conservative, that will not devolve into a dictatorship. The spiritual revolution that would realize the unified planetary order without violence is obviously not forthcoming, save for one lonely soul at a time, working on himself.

Decentralization is the way.

Tears

On page 144 Truitt awakens in tears remembering her former husband. I was not sufficiently appreciative of her feelings for James Truitt until I read in the chronology at the end of the book that he finally committed suicide in Mexico. I can attest from experience that suicide inflicts the survivors of the deceased with complicated emotions that never entirely subside. Please, whatever you do, live.

Life is bestowed

Page 150:

I learned at my mother’s knee that a life is bestowed so that it may be lived as much as possible in goodness, may grow in wisdom, and when the time comes may be given back in honesty.

Quoted for truth.

Understanding is earned

This is noted in reference to the then-recent passing of E.H. Gombrich on page 153. “…in order to grasp the reality the artist aims to convey, the viewer must bring to the work of art a process Gombrich called ‘making and matching…’”

But Gombrich was dealing with masterpieces. The rest of us artists, we have to earn the earning.

Rhizome

In the space of one page, 157, Truitt cites Proust, Hermes Trismegistus, and Deleuze and Guattari. This last item references their idea of the rhizome. Are you reading enough?

The studio

Page 179:

While I waited for my coffee… to drip this morning, I found myself looking out the kitchen down at the studio, and suddenly realized that right there in that rectangle I am most at home on the face of the earth.

This prompted me to look upon my studio with new, additional fondness.

Carlyle: “Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness.”

Singular animating force

Page 187:

When rested, as I am this early spring morning, I feel balanced in this point of view, poised on my own pivot because all and everything is one in a singular animating force.

Thus begins the last entry in the journal.

Hasids, I have learned over the last year, regard Deuteronomy 4:35 - “You have been shown to know that יהוה alone is God; there is none else” - as saying that there is nothing else. Everything, in other words, is one in a singular animating force.

In this entry she describes working on a particular piece. The chronology notes that she died two years later, leaving a single unfinished sculpture. I call that perfection.

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The profundity of the aging artist’s mind is captured in Yield unlike any volume I can think of save the collected correspondence of Matisse and Bonnard, which has become a rare find. As valuable as is the latter, Yield is more intimate and closer to our time. It is a reminder to do right, as artists, by the hours we have left. This is what’s so precious about the book - we can garner Truitt’s octogenarian insights in advance. Ars longa, vita brevis is hardly a new observation, but it’s one thing to hear the aphorism and another to taste of the knowledge.

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