Pict Grooving: Poetry, Flash Fiction, Rants.

Traveling Sitting Still

Robert Woerheide — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:29:00 +0000

(From "Traveling Sitting Still," the title story of an unpublished collection.)

The old woman has skin like dough, floured white and smooth. Stacy imagines she is a fixture of the bus, like a tobacco store Indian. In the mornings the driver carries her onto the bus and places her on the bench, smoothing her skirt so it covers her bony knees. Each evening he carries her away from the cold, black, staring glass and metal. He carries her to a storage shed or an oversized closet where an embroidered chair and an age-yellowed lamp wait dustless, a humidifier humming in the corner. The driver grooms her hair with an antique ivory brush and pats her doughy face while she stares at the wall, anticipating sleep. He wipes the spittle from the edges of her mouth, says nothing.

Like something petrified, she needs no water, no food. She has become a living artifact to be moved wordlessly from place to place, and in the morning he will return her to the bus where she will once again travel sitting still.

(Coming in 2007)

Black Widow

Robert Woerheide — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 18:18:00 +0000

All day long I've been thinking of you,
kissed red on your belly,

of how I should have moved you—
black exoskeleton and slender legs,
spinning your web and trapezing
above the seam of stucco
and concrete.

Nothing you'd done,
but beauty
and simple purpose
and the legacy of your ancestors,

made me kill you—

made indignant
your innocent form.

To move you,
dead branch in hand,
carefully amidst the moonlight,
past the toddler carried by sleepy parents,

that should have been my design:

To trust you to behave
as you at first trusted me.

So What's a Pict Anyway?

Robert Woerheide — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 23:51:00 +0000

If you live in the UK, or have recently moved from there, you already know. For the rest of us ...

The Picts were a confederation of tribes in central and northern Scotland from Roman times until the 10th century. They lived to the north of the Forth and Clyde. They were the descendants of the Caledonii and other tribes named by Roman historians or found on the map of Ptolemy. Pictland, also known as Pictavia, became the kingdom of Alba during the 10th century and the Picts became the Albannach or Scots.

All of this and more can be discovered by clicking here, if you are further interested.

The Floydians among you will recognize the title of this literary blog—and particularly its subtitle—as the modification of a rather innovative and interesting Pink Floyd song from their 1969 Ummagumma album. If you know me, then you've never met a bigger Pink Floyd fan—whether you realize it or not. Call it homage to my heroes, call it inspiration, call it whatever you want. I call it logical. I call it creativity.

The Pictish images included along the sidebar of this blog are etchings created by John White and published in Thomas Harriot's exploration narrative in the late 1500s. Special thanks to Lance Newman for pointing me in their direction.

John White Pictish

Robert Woerheide — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 05:28:00 +0000

John White was sent by Sir Walter Raleigh to be Sir Richard Grenville's artist-illustrator, on Grenville's first voyage to the New World (1585-6). White was responsible for producing sketches of the landscape and any inhabitants they encountered. The images produced seem to be as much propaganda as fact—but that's nothing new. There's a lot to be learned by examining the imagery here.

White was encapsulated in history. Just like everyone else and all of us.

Eventually White became governor of the newly established Roanoke Colony and welcomed its first baby, his granddaughter, Virginia Dare. It is generally recognized that the colonists never fully accepted an artist as a governor. After leaving the colony to gather provisions from England, White returned in 1590 to a ghost town: No one was left in Roanoke and the colony was long abandoned. He relocated to Plymouth on October 24 of the same year—the same month and day this blog was established.

The images appearing on the sidebar of this blog are those among many, published by Thomas Harriot.

(So What's a Pict Anyway?)

Auschwitz Artist Told "Arbeit Macht Frei!"

Robert Woerheide — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 19:35:00 +0000

Work will make you free—the haunting placation above the entrance of Auschwitz, the Germans' largest extermination camp outside Krakow, Poland—is taking on a sickening new light. How many of the incinerated Jews believed those words? Auschwitz survivors like Dina Babbitt might be the best ones to ask.

Babbitt and her mother were spared the gas chamber thanks to her training as an artist. Babbitt spent her days painting portraits of Auschwitz's Gypsy prisoners—a population which Nazi ideology considered inferior—for the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele. She traded her craft for survival. Now, in an effort to keep her paintings from her, the terrible situation she faced as a prisoner is being treated as an employment contract.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum is refusing to relinquish Babbitt's paintings to the 83 year old artist—who has been requesting their return since learning of their existence more than 30 years ago, in 1973. "A museum official wrote me saying that legally the only one who might have a claim on the paintings was Dr. Mengele, and he wasn't likely to excercise it," Babbitt recently told Ron Grossman of the Chicago Tribune. Mengele died in February of 1979.

Work for hire is the legal principle being invoked by the museum: the concept that the patron, not the artist, holds the rights to a commissioned work of art.

Commissioned? Patron? Let's be honest here. We're talking about a "patron" who illegally imprisoned non-combatants based on race, religion, and sexual orientation, participated in their torture and extermination, violated any reasonable sense of humanity, and "commissioned" work under the threat (obvious even if unstated) of death.

A fifth grader could see the insanity in this argument.

Should the artists at Auschwitz have refused? Would they even have been permitted to refuse? Certainly these issues come into play if Babbitt's paintings are to be considered part of the historical domain, accessible only by the imprisoner and never the imprisoned.

Questions of legality aside—duress, for example, which invalidates contractual ownership—the museum's willingness to cloak the issue in the guise of public or historical service is nauseating: As if returning these works to their rightful owners would open a Pandora's box of holocaust deniers; As if history is better served by legitimizing an activity at Auschwitz in a legal sense; As if placing the rights of war criminals above those of their victims does anything other than honor the legacy of the Third Reich.

It seems to me, even considering that such items should be preserved and made available to future generations, that if an Auschwitz survivor—who created the work—wants it back, it must be given. That's just the right thing to do. And it's only a start: a beginning toward reconciliation, a way of acknowledging the individual over the state.