chased by Diego Rivera | a spider disguised as a fly

Above Amedeo Modigliani, Portrait of Diego Rivera (1916). Oil on cardboard. Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo, Brazil. Public domain.

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Ilya Ehrenburg, People and Life: Memoirs of 1891-1917. Anna Bostock and Yvonne Kapp, trans. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1961, p. 190—

I was sitting in Diego Rivera’s unheated studio; we were talking of the clever way in which the authorities had learned to camouflage tanks and “war aims” alike. Suddenly Diego shut his eyes. He seemed to be asleep. But a moment later he got to his feet and started saying something about a spider that he hated. He kept repeating that in a moment he would find the spider and crush it. He advanced toward me and I realized that the spider was myself. I ran into a corner of the studio. Diego stopped, turned and came towards me again. I had already seen Diego during fits of somnambulism; he always fought with somebody; but this time he was out to destroy me. To wake him was inhuman: it gave him an unbearable headache. I darted about the studio, not like a spider but like a fly. He always found me, although his eyes were closed. I only just managed to escape on to the Ianding.

Diego’s skin was yellow; sometimes he would turn up the sleeve of his shirt and tell one of his friends to draw or write something on his arm with the end of a matchstick; the lines or letters stood out in relief at once [called dermatographia]. (At the Calcutta botantical gardens I have seen a tropical tree on the leaves of which you can also write with the end or a matchstick; the writing gradually stands out.) Diego told me that the sleepwalking, the yellow skin and the letters were all the result of a tropical fever he had had in Mexico. I speak. of this because l am thinking of Diego Rivera’s life and art: he often went for his enemies with his eyes shut.
 

the face of dread / when deception is too much to bear

Above Agricultural Instruments of Human Sustenance [a visual pun]. Historic engraving detail.

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Maurice Browne, Too Late to Lament: An Autobiography. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956, p. 30—

Mr. Pickford was one of the finest Sanskrit scholars of his day. He was very poor; he had sacrificed his life to Sanskrit and his sister. His sister kept house for him in a little village where he was rector, a few miles outside Ipswich; a dour, bitter, selfish woman whom no one liked. So, for his sister's sake, he had put aside marriage, advancement, happiness, and had taken that obscure living in a poky village in a backward county, to make her a home where were few to hate her.

One day a letter came addressed to Mr. Pickford. Through several weeks he had been hoping for it; if it came, it might offer him an academic position where he could carry to fruition his life's work in Sanskrit. Every morning his sister went downstairs to meet the postman and see whether the letter had come: “No, John, it has not come today; perhaps it will come tomorrow.”

Long afterwards the Vice-Chancellor in whose gift that position lay, meeting Mr. Pickford accidentally in the streets of Ipswich, greeted him coldly: “I considered it discourteous of you not even to have acknowledged the offer which I made you.” Mr. Pickford made no comment. But, when he got back to the ugly, lonely, village rectory, he spoke to his sister. “Yes,” she said defiantly, “of course the letter  came; I read and burned it. I’m very happy where I am, and you’re much better off in a place suited to you.”

A little later Horrid Old Pickford killed himself. My father preached his funeral sermon. There was no mention of, no hint of reference to, that story in it; but the Stoic view of self-murder was upheld by the Anglican preacher.

NOTE There is a short video that pertains to visual puns as embedded figures at this online link.

a yankee doodle dante—we crave your condescension

camouflaged figures

Louis Untermeyer, Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1965. Excerpts from various pages as noted—

[Untermeyer’s father] was a trouble-evader and a peacemaker; it was easy to take advantage of him, which everyone did, especially his children. He was not a talker; he relied on the stereotypes of conversation, and even there he fell into malapropisms. Something cheap was not worth “a hell of beans” and a pitiful occurrence was “heartrendering.” He was never sure whether the first line of his favorite Harrigan and Hart [musical comedy writing team] song was “We crave your kind attention” or “We crave your condescension” (p. 7).

Influenced by the sprightly British journalist-essayist-novelist-poet G.K. Chesterton, I was much given to a style that employed epigrammatic checks and balances, appositions, paradoxes, and puns. I remember dismissing a rather commonplace collection of Gaelic poetry as “A Child’s Garden of Erse” and characterizing the author of an abortive American epic as “A Yankee Doodle Dante.” I referred to a Dowson-Beardsley pastiche as being “less erotic than Pierrotic.” I inquired, since much of the Restoration comedy took place in elegant country houses, was it not a comedy of manors? (p. 44).

It is as a poet that I most resent those resentful of puns, for the pun is, per se, a poetic device. Poetry is essentially a form of play, a play of metaphor, a play of rhyme. The pun is another form of syllabic playfulness, a matching of sounds that, like rhyme, are similar yet not quite the same—a matchng and shifting of vowels and consonants, an adroit assonance sometimes derided as jackassonance. Whatever form it takes, searching or silly, the pun springs spontaneously from the same combination of wit and imagination which speeds the poetic impulse (p. 45).

“T.S. Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences,” he [poet Robert Frost] wrote to me, “We are both poets and we both like to play. That’s the similarity. The difference in this: I like to play euchre; he likes to play Eurcharist” (p. 46).

When an interviewer, pointing to a world constantly at war, asked [G.K.] Chesterton whether Christianity had failed, Chesterton replied, “No, it has not failed. Christianity has not yet been tried” (p. 72). 

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NOTE  Embedded figures are discussed in this posted short video.