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| Phantom Cart by Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, 1933 |
Our plan had been to been to visit the Dallas World Aquarium next; Cheryl Vogel at Valley House Gallery convinced us that our time would be better spent viewing the exhibit that just opened at SMU's Meadows Museum:
Dali: Poetics of the Small, 1929-1936. As she put it, "The aquarium will always be there, but this--
this is a once in a lifetime opportunity". I had my heart set on the aquarium. I love any place that lets me laser-focus in on nature, even if it is in an artificially constructed environment. When my dad came to visit us when I was a child, he often took us to Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, and I've loved zoos ever since. My small band of friends in Dallas and I spent many hours at the Dallas Zoo and the Fort Worth Zoo, as well as the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. Marci and I took our honeymoon to Monterrey, California because I wanted to see Cannery Row, the setting of my favorite Steinbeck novel, but I was actually more captivated by the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. There is something so serene seeing the world from under that thin glassy lip that separates the aquatic world from the world of air. As a child, my father took us to a small pond in the Sierras called Sand Pond, and I'd spend as much time as I could under that clear cold water watching ripples of light drift languidly across the sandy bottom. It was glorious. In short, that day in Dallas I had my heart set on the aquarium, and my mind was trying to justify skipping the Dali exhibit.
However, looking at Marci, it was clear she preferred to go to the Meadows Museum. As the trip was already tilted in my favor enjoyment-wise--this was my memory lane, not hers--I decided I should fold up my selfish self, put him in my pocket, and do the right thing. So, with all the courage I had, I did. Sometimes the ego is such an incredible foe to overcome.
Razzle-dazzle, rip, roar, funk! I just thought of that as I got up from typing this page and went to get three sugar-free wafer cookies and a glass of milk. Writing can be such a tedious process. Reading can be too. Especially the expository parts, like this. Perhaps, like me, you need a break. So, here are some details to ground you in the moment:
Just after crossing Lovers Lane, while headed south on Hillcrest Avenue, you enter a commercial area of low, one- and two-story 1950s glass-front street shops that are on the right-hand side of the road. All have there own parking right off the street, all are individually built, and most have cloth awnings of various colors, making the neighborhood bright and festive. There are some very mundane establishments like Nu-Care Cleaners and Sarkis Oriental Rug Repair and Cleaning (We buy and sell!), but there are also zippy places like Burger House Hamburgers with its flashy pink neon sign, bright yellow early-modernist canopy covering a couple benches and single trash can.
On the corner of Hillcrest and Ashby, we found a place to park in front of Digg's Taco Shop. This shopping center was clearly newer, but designed to fit in. Besides the sign at Digg's looked cool, and the place had big windows facing the street, so I thought,
Why not get something to eat before heading over to the museum? They weren't the best street tacos I've ever had, but they weren't bad. Most importantly, it was crowded, alive with college students, and it had high bar stools along a lunch counter that looked out towards the street. We had cool drinks, ate our tacos, and life was good--as it so often is when your only obligation is to
be. We had no demands other than the agenda we set together, which we could quickly scrap anytime we decided we didn't give a damn.
We did give a damn though, so we ate quickly and headed across the street to the thick greenery and oppressively coordinated old-style university buildings of SMU, where every edifice screams
We are oh so rich and educated here. I wanted to grab a bat and smash out all of the windows of the BMW's, but of course I didn't because that would disappoint my mother, and Marci would give me such a glare that I'd be seeking to slither into some storm drain into the sewer, which, of course, because we were in the Park Cities, would be as clean as a polished granite fountain and smell like roses because everyone knows the uppity people only poop out fragrant flower petals.
Alright, Steve. Don't veer off into a left-wing diatribe against the rich here. How many vagrants do you observe buying books? Think of your audience, think of your audience.
I actually have always had a fascination and respect for the upper-middle class. I was even briefly one of them. However, I was never drawn to them as much as when I was poor. I'd drive down from Lloyd's and my apartment in north Dallas to Turtle Creek, park, and spend hours walking shaded lanes, looking at the great stone and brick houses. At night, I'd dream I was dating one of those wealthy man's daughters. It often went like this: she'd be in her pink sweater and gray plaid skirt, outside a gorgeous home, ready to hop into a sleek, black convertible to head off to a SMU sorority gig. Then, I'd pull up in the old 74 Mustang, as was so often the case, and convince her to hop in with me instead.
What's not to respect? Nice homes, nice cars, good education, people interested in and supportive of the arts. Usually very nice people. But I was also keenly aware of how unfair the system is. There is a myth in America that prosperity is based on ambition and work ethic. It's not. Working minimum wage jobs, I saw grandmothers put in 10 hour shifts at fast food joints, not because they liked being on their feet all day at the age of sixty-five, but because they had no other choice. They had worked hard all their lives and had nothing but experience to show for it. No, most wealth in America is not a result of hard work--although that may clearly be involved. Rather, it is a result of having wealth, education, and connections to begin with. That is what fraternities and sororities are really about. College drinking buddies become business associates. It's a closed world by design, where the rich associate with the rich and the poor associate with the poor, and the two worlds are kept safely separate by design. So, part of me dreamed of entering that world of refined tastes and beautiful things, and part of me wanted to blow the whole damn system apart. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't partly because of personal jealousy. It was. But it had much more to do with seeing that grandmother working behind the fast-food counter. What a way to be rewarded for a lifetime of ambition
Much later, after becoming a teacher, and feeling I'd achieved some sort of success in this life, I found myself in a situation that brought back all the anger and shame of being stuck in minimum wage jobs:
Oh that Rococo Life
Slowly breaking apart
a cranberry muffin,
sucking down the sweet morsels
with over-creamed coffee.
Palm trees sway beyond
the marble-floored lobby
and empty sunken bar
through great Venetian windows,
beyond a great red-tiled patio
and heavy white balustrade.
I read
Pictures of the Gone World
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Says here, poem 25 (quote)
The world is a beautiful place
To be born into
If you don't mind happiness
Not always being
So much fun.
What the hell, I'll try it.
The kids are with Grandma.
Marci's in class.
The room is paid for
with one week's salary.
Nothing to do
but hang out at the pool
and read Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
look at beautiful
lotion-glowing bodies
from ages 5 to 70,
weighing between 40
and 250 pounds.
Yes, this world is a beautiful place
to be born into.
Though yesterday
when we got lost
in that neighborhood
of duplexes
and run-down apartment complexes
that didn't quite qualify for a slum
but was part of the working poor world
that I knew for so long,
and I went in that 7-11
to find some way out
of the hell-mood
I'd sank into
but instead saw myself behind the counter
in a stupid dehumanizing uniform
with a damn name tag on it,
smiling back at me,
knowing I'd always be here,
behind some convenience store counter
working eight hours a day
to get nowhere,
I got to tell you
I thought again
the world
is nothing
but a great big shit ball
with all of us swarming over it,
pushing and shoving
for the chance
to bite right in.
Today there are palms outside the window.
rich girls in bikinis,
rich daddies in loafers,
and it's true--
The world is a beautiful place
To be born into
If you don't mind happiness
Not always being
So much fun.
As Marci and I walked across Hilcrest to SMU and the Meadows Museum, I was conflicted as I always am around the good things in life--Oh so drawn to the refinement while simultaneously ready to pull out the picket signs and go to battle. I have love-hate emotions towards the well-to-do. I know they are responsible for so many good things we enjoy as a general public--museums, symphony halls, the opera houses, zoos, not to mention colleges and universities. I also know most wealthy people are really good people--not just some uppity people looking down on the rest of us with disdain as we so often like to think they are doing. That is generally as inaccurate a perception as is the "welfare queen" stereotype. However, I also know they do quietly accept the system that has tilted everything in their favor. I don't blame them. I would probably do the same. Yet, I lived in and worked in the minimum wage world long enough to know what it does to people, and so there is a part of me that is
Oh so ready for revolution.
Being lost and having no clue where the Meadows Museum was while the day started to heat up and make the walk uncomfortable helped get me out of my power-to-the-people funk, and it really is a funk if you're not prepared to do something about it. So, we searched desperately among the many red-brick and stone (or concrete) columned buildings looking for the Meadows Museum. With the aid of Google maps on Marci's phone, we eventually found it, and entered again that the cool, sacred space called
museum where one's only obligation is to truly see what is before you. I love that feeling.
I'd always liked the work of Salvador Dali, although I'd only known it from books. Still, Dali would not have been among my first pick of exhibits. That is, until I saw this show. You see, I'd always assumed the great sense of space and atmosphere in his dream-like landscapes came with scale--which, when a painting is big enough, is not that hard of a thing to accomplish. However, works that I had assumed from reproductions in books to be quite large, are in fact, very small. And the amazing thing is they hold up at great distances away from the museum wall despite their tiny size. That he can get such a sense of space on such a tiny picture plane is pure magic. I think most people are drawn to Dali for his surreal imagery. I was drawn to his work because he was also a fine landscape painter. His technique and success are undeniable. Take
Phantom Cart (pictured above), which is 7.4 inches by 9.4 inches, smaller than a sheet of notebook paper. And yet the sense of space, distance, and blurred detail on the sun-drenched city in the background, is astoundingly accurate to this world.
Perhaps even more shockingly accurate is
Geological Justice (pictured below),
which is only 4 inches by 7 inches. Here an entire ocean scene, complete with moisture heavy coastal clouds, bight sunny cliff and a couple sail boats are interrupted by what appears to be a giant tire track flattening what once was an artificial sea wall. At least that's my read on it. What's important is not the actual image but the sense of space created on such a minuscule scale. Utterly amazing.
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| Geological Justice by Fundacio Gala-Salvador Dali, 1936 |
And so we spent the mid-afternoon wandering around the Meadows Museum lost in the expansive spaces of Dali' little-bitty paintings. And then, as you always do on vacation--we left that magic world behind for the next experience, heaping loss upon loss.
