{"id":127001,"date":"2018-06-27T12:51:46","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T16:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=127001"},"modified":"2018-06-27T17:20:42","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T21:20:42","slug":"the-act-of-spooning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/27\/the-act-of-spooning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of Spooning"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was paying a visit to the studio of\u00a0Jessica Anne Schwartz<\/a>, a promising young San Francisco artist recently transplanted to New York, and over in the corner, on the floor, off to the side\u2014she hadn\u2019t particularly been intending to show them to me\u2014she had ranged a series of small painted studies on board from several months back. She\u2019d pulled them out earlier for the first time since she\u2019d made them, across the last several months of 2017, and was trying to figure out what, if anything, to do with them. All images of a single spoon, from a wide range of vantages\u2014\u201cI\u2019d first found the spoon abandoned out in a garbage pile on the street,\u201d she explained\u2014and in a tumbling array of alignments.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

She and I gazed upon the assembled panels for a while, she leaning over, assaying a few other arrangements, sighing. \u201cSingle Serving\u201d was the name she\u2019d assigned the entire set. Back then, she explained, she\u2019d only just recently broken off from a long-term relationship, really only the second serious relationship in her life. Fresh out of high school, she\u2019d married. The marriage had lasted eighteen years, and then she\u2019d almost immediately taken up with this second guy, and that had lasted another eight. This new period, in the middle of 2017, had really been the first time in her life she\u2019d found herself living alone. She\u2019d gone into fierce mourning, this business of being all alone being all she could think about\u2014that and, of course, how she was no longer with the boyfriend.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Somehow, she said, she identified with the spoon (a particularly poignant bit of projection, it occurred to me, given how the very essence of a certain kind of togetherness is the act of spooning, and in that sense, of course, of what possible use is a single spoon, lying there all alone?). So she painted the thing once, and then again, and then a third time, with an ever-growing sense of elation. She decided she\u2019d paint twenty-four variations, ever more convinced that once she\u2019d accomplished that, however long it took, she would be free of all this grieving once and for all.<\/p>\n

And at first, she said, it seemed to work. She\u2019d stayed up all night with the last few, painting away, and come morning, twenty-four panels filled, she\u2019d walked out onto a transfigured street, as if entirely cured. The world outside looked as if she were seeing it again for the first time: clean and clear, all limpid and glistening.<\/p>\n

As if: so it seemed. For, of course (she went on to recount), the next day, the grieving came surging back once again. So much for the transformative power of art.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know what they say,\u201d I commented. \u201cYou may be through with grieving, but grieving is not through with you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d she agreed.<\/p>\n

For some reason, I was put in mind of that marvelous old poem of Vikram Seth\u2019s, \u201cAll You Who Sleep Tonight.\u201d I took out my cell phone, googled it, and read her the simple verse:<\/p>\n

All you who sleep tonight
\nFar from the ones you love,
\nNo hands to left or right,
\nAnd emptiness above \u2013
\nKnow that you aren\u2019t alone
\nThe whole world shares your tears,
\nSome for two nights or one,
\nAnd some for all their years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She rocked herself as she listened, thrumming concurrence. She\u2019d never heard that poem before. Where did it come from?<\/p>\n

I continued to scroll down through the poem\u2019s entry, to an image of the cover of the original eponymous 1990 collection in which the poem had been included, featuring a graphic that I imagined (clearly falsely, as things turned out) that I\u2019d completely forgotten:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lawrence Weschler<\/a>, late of <\/em>The New Yorker and director emeritus of the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU, is the author of more than twenty books on myriad subjects. He is currently completing work on a memoir of the years, during the early eighties, when he was serving as a beanpole Sancho to Oliver Sacks\u2019s capacious Quixote, due out in 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was paying a visit to the studio of\u00a0Jessica Anne Schwartz, a promising young San Francisco artist recently transplanted to New York, and over in the corner, on the floor, off to the side\u2014she hadn\u2019t particularly been intending to show them to me\u2014she had ranged a series of small painted studies on board from several […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1456,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34538,7011,34537,34394],"class_list":["post-127001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-jessica-anne-schwartz","tag-loneliness","tag-spoons","tag-vikram-seth"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Art of Spooning<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On spoons, Vikram Seth, and loneliness.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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