Library Daze

Every so often I find it necessary to fall into a stupor.

Without any warning, my mind goes out for a stroll, leaving me wandering around in public looking slack-jawed and dopey.

7:10 PM: I enter a grocery store naked--that is, without my usual list.
8:55 PM: Jostled by a careless cart-pusher, I wake from a reverie to discover that instead of moving briskly through the aisles as I usually do, efficiently collecting items on my list--green beans, salmon, toilet paper--I have apparently spent over an hour and half staring glassy-eyed at a shelf displaying 19 varieties of salsa.

Something similar happened just the other night when I was at the Highland Park Public Library.

My usual library visits are like my routine grocery errands: I go in with a list of what I'm looking for and I come out 20 minutes later, my recycled cloth bag filled with a week's worth of nourishment.

This time, dangerously, I had no list. I merely stopped in to return the books I had finished reading--Pompei [fiction, Robert Harris], Loving Frank [fiction, Nancy Horan], Jane Austen [biography, Claire Tomalin], and Thirst [poetry, Mary Oliver]. Since my bedroom nightstand, living room "library basket," and the backseat of our Subaru Forester were already loaded up with additional reading, I was determined not to be seduced into bringing home any additional texts. No harm in browsing, though. Or so I thought.

Over TWO AND A HALF hours later, I emerged from the library blinking like a groundhog, having wandered up and down the stacks fingering and skimming books on everything from WWII ciphers to piecrust recipes. What is it about tiny blacks marks on paper that is so mesmerizing? They are like miniature revolving doors that whoosh you unexpectedly onto the sidewalk of a topic you did not expect to explore.

It's not that it truly bothers me to misplace my mind for awhile. I think that disappearing into books is a form of meditation for me. The wild monkey chatter in my head seems to abate as my eyes slide along the surface of page after page of books I will never read from cover to cover.

When I am in this dopey state, I forget that books are not animate. I actually feel sorry for some of them--the ones have not been removed from the shelf, held, opened, and carried outside into the sunshine for many years. I worry briefly that they are lonely or sad or feel rejected. I mean, I literally catch myself thinking stuff like that. I feel guilty if I walk away from a book that didn't interest me enough to make me want to check it out. I slink away and don't look back, like a young girl who has flirted thoughtlessly and realizes too late that her attention meant more to the boy than it did to her. How weird is that?

The library is partly treasure cave of wonders, partly a graveyard of forgotten ideas and bad sentences.

Spelunking and grave-robbing. I guess it's worth a couple of lost hours to have such adventures.

Her Immoderate Heat

Men shoveling chairs. The curious drawing for which this blog is named made me laugh out loud when I first saw it at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a few years ago. I mean, chair-shoveling? Who does that? I was charmed by the image of people engaged in an activity so illogical, so ridiculous, so completely absurd--who nevertheless are going about it in a very earnest, determined fashion. Look at their faces, the energy in their bodies. It's as if they believe shoveling chairs is work worth doing.

The image has lingered in my mind over the years as a metaphor, rich and flexible in its meaning, as all great art should be. At times, when I have felt frustrated in my work, boxed into a job description that did not allow for the fullest use of my best talents, I have let off steam by laughing, thinking to myself, "Well, it's better than chair-shoveling!" Other times, when I have felt compelled to take a risk, a memory of the drawing has silenced the scared voice inside me warning me to beware of looking foolish. If you believe this is important, the chair-shovelers whisper, who cares if you look foolish? Just start shoveling.

Humpty Dumpty famously said, "A word means what I want it to mean." I realize I have done the same with this artwork, adding layers of meaning surely not intended by the artist, a medieval Netherlandish painter named Rogier van der Weyden [1399-1464]. So I set out to try to uncover what he was "trying to say" with this particular sketch, which in Dutch is titled "Scupstoel" [literally, shovel chair]. It turns out the drawing, done in pen over a chalk sketch, was created in 1447 as the plan for a sculptured relief around the top of a pillar in the town hall of Brussels, where van der Weyden was, at the time, the official City Painter. He did a number of paintings with themes related to justice for the interior of the town hall, works which Albrecht Durer later admired. Van der Weyden is, in fact, best known as a painter, primarily of religious themes. He traveled to Italy in 1450 and did a number of commissions for the Medici before he died in 1464. This work sticks out among his oeuvre as an oddity.

Why, you may ask--as I did--would an artist choose the motif of men shoveling a jumbled pile of chairs to decorate a structural column of the town hall? I found the answer in a reference to Van der Weyden's design in Brussels: A Cultural and Literary History [Andre De Vries and Jacques de Decker, p. 34]: "A house that stood on the site of the Town Hall, the Scupstoel, or Ducking Stool, is commemorated in . . . [the] ingenious design."

So: Van der Weyden celebrated the symbolic significance of the town hall's location with a literal interpretation of the place-name. But why was the torn-down house called Scupstoel? What's a Ducking Stool?

According to Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, a ducking stool was a form of public punishment, an alternative to being placed in the stocks. In the simplest design, a wooden chair was attached to a long beam that rested on a shorter post placed in the ground next to a pond or riverbank. The transgressor was strapped into the chair, the beam was swiveled on the post so that it extended out over the water, and, in a see-saw motion, the person in the chair was repeatedly dunked under water. The ducking stool seems to have been used primarily to punish those who were seen as being "quarrelsome" or "too out-spoken" -- perhaps a troublesome vagrant caught inciting a crowd in the public square, a brewer who falsely claimed a competitor's ale would make people sick, or a married couple who argued loudly in public. Most often, however, it was an outspoken woman. A Frenchman visiting England in 1700 made this observation:

The way of punishing scolding women is pleasant enough. They fasten an armchair to the ends of two beams twelve or fifteen feet long and parallel to each other, so that these two ends embrace the chair, which hangs between them by a sort of axle . . . They place the woman in this chair and so plunge her into the water as often as the sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate heat.

To cool her immoderate heat. Women who were subjected to this "pleasant enough" torture were those who were too "hot" in their passions--prostitutes and sharp-tongued wives, to be sure--but also heretics and witches, or rather, women who spoke their minds or demonstrated a healing, creative power that others lacked.

Unlike many women throughout history and some women in parts of the world today, I have the opportunity to speak my mind, explore my interests, and make foolish mistakes without fear of being subjected to medieval forms of water-boarding. I have tremendous respect for women who, despite knowledge of such consequences, have had the courage to be themselves, to look crazy in the eyes of other people. Women who have dared to shovel chairs.

This blog is dedicated to them.