The Dance by Henri Matisse ¹

Plagued at age 61 by paralyzing doldrums, Henri Matisse questioned his direction. Unexpectedly, he received a commission to paint a mural for his friend Dr. Albert Barnes. It was a huge mural—seemingly acres of blank space—over forty feet wide, on a high wall above doors, dominated by three arched windows. All of this complicated his composition. His previous knowledge and strategies, honed by smaller projects—the color theoretics, geometric proportions, techniques of material—failed to work. It was proving to be a fist fight of epic scale between Matisse and his canvas. Finally, he had a breakthrough. In his words:

Then, at a certain point, there came a flash of inspiration. I took my big charcoal, attached it to the end of a big bamboo, and began drawing the circle of my dancers, from one end to the other of my thirteen-meter surface. I’d got off the mark, taken possession of my surface.... That’s how I made my painting: entirely from feeling, without a model.²

Matisse with bamboo stick (1931)³

In order to work with the odd framing, he had to improvise. The successful resolution of the challenge involved turning to his feelings and body, prompting Matisse to grow into what would prove to be a new aesthetic fundamental to the work of his later years. It renewed his spirit and shaped his mastery of form, composition, simple lines, bold color, and movement—foundational to the later work for which he is now best known.

Reframing the Fight

One way we heal is to understand. To frame things—whether paintings, memories, ideas—we place them within a context, which provides a structure of expectations. This aids our understanding. How we frame things shapes how we see them, helps us know what to expect, and determines what we consider their possibilities. When we pull from our past experiences, they come with their own baggage of expectations. When we frame them differently, we can understand them in a new light. Only when Matisse was forced by circumstance to put away his old habits, guiding lights he had followed for decades when composing smaller, less complex fields of aesthetic problem-solving, was he able to deal with the seemingly aircraft carrier deck-sized canvas and its unique setting.

Reframing shifts understanding. A classical painting doesn’t work raised out from the gallery wall, nor does a piece of sculpture set behind glass. A story of a child’s fright loses poignancy when buried somewhere on page 803. Some songs are better sung with a madrigal choir, some in a gruff chant. Context and presentation are part of the framing and meaning of the piece. Not only is this true in the visual arts, but it’s also true in our writing.

Seeing things in old ways, with old expectations, can scare us away from looking more closely. Even the mere association with ideas and meanings associated with painful memories, can bedevil us with stress reactions. (Part II of this series explored ways to manage those stress reactions, should they arise.) In the process of writing, reframing with new forms can enable us to go places we haven’t been able to go before, in our recall, perspective, and understanding. Which can open us to fresh inner material. In this way, reframing can work not only to enhance writing, but also to allow us freer access to the self-imposed limits of our own point of view. We can turn emotional distancing into a managed tool to energize our writing.

What Works for Me

As I described in Part I of this series, my work related to 9/11 jarred loose difficult memories of both firefighting in California and combat service on a gunboat in Vietnam. I suddenly could see what my abstract art had been about, and I began to keep an artist’s journal regarding the bits and pieces I was reclaiming from the fog of amnesia. Over time my writing came to reflect the greater nuance and discovery. I’ve found ekphrasis, epistolary, and hybrid poetry to be helpful reframing strategies to open me up to new perspectives. How I see my memories influences how I feel about them, and that in turn lets me dig deeper.

1. Ekphrasis:

Ekphrasis is writing in response to art work. Confronting my own earlier paintings with new experiences gained during 9/11 forced direct encounter with the meaning of the work, and the process became reciprocal: the more I wrote, the more I could accept what I remembered. Eventually, I found the ekphrastic approach helpful in getting greater depth of meaning from the thirty or so paintings I came to realize were really about combat in Vietnam. Once seen in that light, texture, color choice, composition, and implied meaning all came to make more sense. I’d been speaking to myself in a private code, holding memories for when I was ready.

Ekphrastic writing doesn’t have to be simply descriptive. Further, it can respond to drama, music, film, dance, and other forms of art. Such writing can use the artwork as an imaginative jumping off point, allowing the work to serve as an opening. A window or a portal within, depending upon where you, the writer, wish to take it. In an introduction to an abstract art exhibit catalog I’m pulling together for a museum, I write:

Don’t forget Hamlet. The great message of tragedy, more than the bad things that happen to us—the losses, mistakes, hurts—is our own complicity. Hamlet, when events careened around him, exacerbated them all through hesitation and overreaction. Most of us need relationship, transcendence, rootedness, identity, and a consistent view of the world. Bad things happening challenge us on those very points of vulnerability. There’s a wide discrepancy between our wants and our needs. It’s when we confuse them that we sell ourselves short. Our aesthetics require a dash of wild, a bit of unpredictability that tweaks our presumptions and sends us off on journeys into our own deeper interiors. This is one reason we look at, make, and soak in art. One difference between art and simply pretty things is that art sends us deep in there.

—From the Introduction to Beyond All These Pretty Things (Sasse Museum of Art; in press)

During my post 9/11 period, I explored the art of others as well. Vincent van Gogh, long a personal favorite, served to reconnect me with my sense of newfound freedom and joy that I first experienced in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam when I was eighteen. The result was a book for the Inland Empire Museum of Art, titled Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020).

2. Epistolary:

Dear Vincent included more than discursive writing. It was a hybrid project, mixing historical introduction and comment, quotes from Vincent’s own writings, and letters that I myself penned to Vincent. Epistolary is writing directly to someone. Writing directly to Van Gogh allowed me a sense of contemporaneity, and also closeness. By addressing letters directly to the artist, whether or not he was still alive, I could deal with social comment, aesthetic critique, and also personal matters, as if he were in the same room. Further, because I could control the distance I could directly address broader issues that at times could be very personal. I could talk about the struggles we shared, our fears of remaining unrecognized, our obsession with trying to articulate something we feel remains just out of reach, our personal vision of the everyday divine.

Dear Vincent,

I’m taking the liberty of writing you directly because I’m troubled about something and don’t feel I have the time to wait for answers, if there are any, to find their way to me. The more I learn of your life the more it seems that you might help. Like you, I burn with the need to paint and to write. Yet while you were a meteor, entering the earth’s atmosphere suddenly and brightly and disappearing just as quickly, my trajectory seems to have been more gradual. How can I make that jump to where I, too, might someday be?

Soon I’ll too be gone.
Maybe we’ll some day meet
some timeless moment,
strolling the darkened Rhone’s stars
talking of what it all meant.⁴

3. Hybrid Poetry:

Another tactic I find useful in maintaining distance between myself and troubling thoughts, feelings, and past events, is hybrid poetry such as haibun, tanka prose, and cheribun. Because each of these forms employs both prose—a descriptive paragraph (usually a block of print)—and a short, several-line verse, they can be used to explore a subject both didactically (often discursively or descriptively), and at the same time more lyrically and immediately. This combination allowed me to voice my loss of a buddy, Bob. The book chronicles my search for Bob, and how he drifted away through his inability to re-engage with his home after returning from Vietnam. As it did from many others, the war stole an essential part of him.

I thought of friend Bob, how Vietnam had shaped him and all the rest of us. How he was slow to settle down and ended up working carnivals from Sacramento south to Indio, always looking for home. He ran a food booth—hot dogs on a stick. I’d visited him several times. He’d tell me stories of the colorful people he’d met. Then he’d move on again.

transfigurations
particle boogie
dust to mountain to sand

—From Johnson’s poem “Moab” in The Stardust Mirage (Cholla Needles Press, 2022), with B&W photograph by Johnson, of landscape off I-70 near Moab, Utah

These three forms (haibun, tanka prose, and cheribun) have allowed me to approach troubling personal experiences constructively enough to eventually allow me to explore my intense past events such as war, rescue work, and large-scale disaster in my memoir collections Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020), Black Box Poetics (Bamboo Dart Press, 2021), and The Stardust Mirage: A Desert Poetic (Cholla Needles Press, 2022). All three approaches allowed me to regulate my emotional distance sufficiently to write more deeply. The point is not to avoid the feeling and truth wrapped up in the memory, but to regulate emotional distance in such a way as to allow broader access to it.

For me, past experiences open up lessons that extend beyond myself, perspectives that I want to share. I believe them to be truths about all of us, and our separate but similar journeys through this world—however beautiful and broken—toward wherever we each are destined to be. To get at those lessons, my way has been to paint and write, no matter the initial discomfort. Regulating the distance between myself and difficult memories through the form in which I write and paint, is simply an extension of my own natural process of dissociation in the face of trauma. Learning to manage that distance has allowed me to get closer to those lessons I’d hidden deeply. Like Matisse breaking loose from his “small painting” rules, my “reframing my writing approaches” shifted my point of view from self-protection to exploration.

Three other writers utilize form effectively to get at the truths they find important: John Brantingham, Tony Barnstone, and Joy Ladin. Each makes similar moves, but in instructively different ways.

John Brantingham and Tony Barnstone:
Strategic Uses of Form

In his craft book The Gift of Form, John Brantingham tells how he turns to sonnets and other forms to draw out ideas and perspective that are unavailable to him as he works on a difficult subject. In that book he writes:

When I have an idea about a theme or an idea that I want to express, I generally write it in free verse. When I don’t have any idea about what I want to write, I follow a form. ...Formal poetry draws out ideas I never knew that I had.⁵

Beyond his numerous published books, some on many difficult subjects including love, death, illness, and violence, Brantingham served for several years as Poet Laureate of Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park.

Poet Tony Barnstone related to me his own experience of attempting to put into poetic form his intense feelings following an evening encounter with Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the Atomic Bomb on the city of Hiroshima that resulted in the destruction of the entire city, and the deaths of over 100,000 human beings that day and in the days afterward. Tony was dismayed by Tibbets’ callous attitude: “They deserved to die.” Tony tried to put the meeting into words, finding the free form inadequate to channel his feelings. He recounts finally attempting a structured form, and found that the words ultimately came. By writing from the position of the other person (Tibbets), and using the safety of a familiar form, Tony set the approach and pace that resulted in his book Tongue of War, accounts of ground-level participants, both military and civilian, on both sides of the Pacific Theater from Pearl Harbor through to the detonation of the bomb. Tongue of War accomplishes what Tony never dreamed possible, both in scope and intensity.⁶

Joy Ladin and Voicing Parts

In her book The Story of Anna (winner of the 2022 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry), author Joy Ladin portrays a young woman who had survived the Nazi death camps during her adolescence. The story begins a decade later, as she lives in Prague and works for the secret police. Adolescence is normally a time of identity formation, and trauma during those years interrupts that process. Ladin’s character is trying to overcome the effects of such trauma and reclaim her life. How can a character such as Anna be written?

As a trauma therapist I ache for Anna and her daunting struggle. Trauma plays out developmentally, disrupting subsequent stages of growth. We see the lists of trauma symptoms in articles and books, but what does it mean to live those things? To say that the experience of degradation, abuse, and confrontation with death in the camps was traumatizing would be a triumph of understatement. Complex trauma is closer, the loss of a sense of value, self, and the collapse of meaning and will to live. Even more complicating is the fact that Anna was thrust by experience into a pre-mature adulthood. She was too old, too soon. Her identity wasn’t shattered, it was malformed. She was unequipped to deal with the uncertainty of living. Conditioned to expect the worst, the unknown could never be trusted.

Part of the difficulty I wrestled with in attempting a similar process with my—mostly hidden—Vietnam memories was less a matter of recording the intensity of the experience, and more the implications of their meaning. My deep conflicts over my participation in the war, my lingering sense of guilt, my unresolved gender-based issues that blocked my ability to say “No” to going, were churned up each time a specific memory arose. It was as if my accepting even the most innocuous image into consciousness was yet another slide down the slippery slope toward utter complicity and moral self-condemnation.

Ladin’s solution to her issue of handling the difficulties of balancing the granularity of Anna’s experience with the confounding issues of complicity, survivors guilt, and meaninglessness, found partial solution in form. By containing the most searing parts in verse form, and only later trying to integrate them into narrative arc, Ladin was able to write them truly without having to explain them or work them directly—artificially—into story. Form provided her the necessary emotional insulation and distance to complete this difficult writing.

In a unique, hybrid writing approach, Ladin weaves narrative (diary entries) with sections of verse. The diary sections show Anna’s glacial pace in constructing meaning in her life and reason to invest in others around her. The poetic verses in the book serve different functions. Some are flashbacks, some therapy verbatims, and some are incidents related to her existential struggles.

In a diary entry, Anna recounts a confrontation with another survivor who accuses her of now working for the secret police and betraying the memory of her mother and a friend who protected Anna in the camps. Here, Anna shouts back:

Diary Entry, 1 June, 195-

Don’t think you know me because you knew her. Don’t think you know my Maker, just because you were in the camps. I’ve never run away from God, old man. If God wants me, He knows where I live.

It’s not rheum, it’s tears. Hayim is weeping, tarnishing the silver of his beard. Sobs garble his Yiddish. I can make out enough to know it’s not a prayer. But not enough to understand what a word that sounds like “mother” occurs again and again.⁷

Verse conveys a timeless sense, related but as counterpoint to the narrative. Through poetic verse Ladin gives voice to the traumatic flashbacks, to memories, and to the staggering implications of the camps that sabotage Anna’s attempts to move on. Even contacts with other survivors make hope seem unattainable. In her poem “Song of Songs: Eight Sessions with Dr. Solomon,” Anna throws the following memory, recalled during a therapy session, back at the therapist:

From Sixth Session:

i.e. I was liberated
there, in the valley
by American soldiers

when all my Beloveds were dead.⁸

Progressing Through the Belly of the Beast

Poetic expression can be searing. Many of Joy Ladin’s lines in Anna are just that, too hot to touch. Beyond that, her story is soul wrenching. Conditioned as we are to expect the fast fix of completion, redemption, and closure by the end of our stories, Anna’s suffering seems unending. She sees no reason for having lived, no purpose in going on. Anna survived the camps, but now finds herself alone in the belly of the existential whale. She tries to find sense, seeking it in her childhood and Judaic tradition:

Diary Entry, 30 May, 195-

My mother used to play this little Chopin piece at the start of every practice—45 seconds of halting dissonance. I asked her why she bothered? She told me that the piece was beauty’s opposite, its absolute contradiction. And that nothing she could play, nothing could mean anything, until she made her way through it.⁹

How did Ladin write these lines? During the early stages of writing the book, she looked at the scattered fragments she had written in her early attempts to put voice to Anna, the lyric bits of experience that resisted expansion into coherency. In particular, the fragments stood in rejection of Anna’s (and Ladin’s) Judaic heritage. They challenged the idea that all was endurable and that the suffering was worth it. How can such thoughts be expressed, and can the way in which they are expressed be less damaging to the writer?

Ladin’s turn toward hybrid construction of The Story of Anna allowed her both to tell the story and to contain it as well. She could dip into her own experience and extrapolate from her own sense of “otherness” to bridge and inform her characterization of Anna’s experience. Literary imagination allowed a leap into history. Ladin’s personal history positioned her perfectly for this task. As a transgender writer, Ladin pulled from her own experience of the brutality and erasure by physical abuse and rejection (for inhabiting a wrong body), and transitioning between worlds (her process of redefining gender identity within a traditional family and work culture). By exploring flashbacks Ladin could voice the self-contained worlds of trauma stuck in time, where verisimilitude is reinforced by detail, granularity, and the emotional truth of the moment. Through the distancing allowed her by the juxtaposition of competing forms, Ladin could relate to Anna’s experience, voice the complicating pain of memory, and envision her character’s process and dilemmas.

The most intense moments of Anna’s story, the flashback memories that haunt Anna with their timelessness and feeling of ultimacy, are portrayed in the verse sections where she wrestles with memory images that subvert the promise of sacred text. In “Song of Songs: Eight Sessions with Dr. Solomon,” Anna recounts the moment her friend and protector, the Whore, tried to protect Anna from being set upon by dogs. The Whore was shot in the back and fell upon Anna while the dog chewed on Anna:

From Seventh Session:

belly gleaming like a heap of wheat,
bullets emerging between her breasts—
...

The dog’s jaws opened.
I woke up alive again.¹⁰

Her choice to use verse to voice intensity was wise. Brevity strips away artifice and allows the integrity of the moment without the complications of addressing implications or the larger questions the moments raise. Similarly, speaking from my own experience, healing for writers can be facilitated by getting to the inherent meaning of the event, which is in part articulating its personal and social truth. Writing those sketchy moments can work to pull out further granularity, further truth. It can pull us toward home.

Traumatic experience subverts the answering—and living the answers—of questions such as, “Who am I?” “Am I a good person, or bad?” “Can I trust the world?” and “Do these things even matter?” Whether we are writing incidents, or characters living those incidents, we need to find ways to do so that help our readers, and ourselves, find ways through the questions. Form may channel some of the answers.

Forming Good Writing

To read Brantingham, Barnstone, and Ladin is to be schooled in the constructive, innovative use of form. It is to appreciate the complexity of each human life, the contradictory, layered, and historically informed voices we bring to our unfolding situations. That is what good literature does. You don’t write like this to make cheap TV, quick commercials, nor spectacle polemic. Good writing requires hard work and inspired care. Writing like Barnstone’s Tongue of War and Ladin’s The Story of Anna delves into the pain and uncertainty of life, requiring the tempering effect of personal distance, not just between author and subject, but also between the convolutions of the subjects themselves. We need, at times, to employ Matisse’s trick of standing back, approaching our work differently, and selecting new tools to gain fresh perspective.

—Part 1 of this Writing to Heal series, Tapping Hidden Gifts of Experience, was published in Issue 16 of MacQ on New Year’s Day, 2023. And Part 2, Diving Deep, appeared in Issue 17 at the end of January.

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Reference Notes:

Links below were retrieved on 31 March 2023.

1. The Dance (oil on canvas, three panels; 1931-33) by Henri Matisse (1869-1954) is on view on the south wall of the main gallery at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. See details at:
   https://collection.barnesfoundation.org/objects/6967/The-Dance/
   
   
2. Quotation by Henri Matisse is from “Matisse in the Barnes Foundation” by Yve-Alain Bois in The Institute Letter (Spring 2016); Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey:
   https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2016/bois-matisse-barnes
   
   
3. Photograph, Henri Matisse using a bamboo stick to sketch The Dance in his studio in Nice (1931), detail, is by an unidentified photographer and is held in the Photograph Collection at the Barnes Foundation Archives.
   
   Image above is reproduced from “Matisse in the Barnes Foundation” by Yve-Alain Bois in The Institute Letter (Spring 2016); Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey:
   https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2016/bois-matisse-barnes
   
   
4. Johnson, Kendall. Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (Sasse Museum of Art, 2020), page 18:
   https://view.publitas.com/inland-empire-museum-of-art/dear-vincent/page/20-21
   
   
5. Brantingham, John. The Gift of Form: A Pocket Guide to Formal Poetry (Spout Hill Press, 2015), from the Introduction (page 10).
   
   
6. Johnson, Kendall. “A Conversation with Tony Barnstone: Writing Difficult Material (Part I)” in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 17; 29 January 2023):
   http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ17/Johnson-Interview-Barnstone.aspx
   
   Part II of their conversation appears here in Issue 18:
   http://www.macqueensquinterly.com/MacQ18/Johnson-Interview-Barnstone-Part-2.aspx
   
   
7. Ladin, Joy. The Book of Anna, revised second edition (EOAGH Books, 2021), page 120.
   
   
8. Ibid, page 78.
   
   
9. Ibid, page 118.
   
   
10. Ibid, page 80.
    
    

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescent to young adults.

Recently, Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history. His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020; his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021; The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022; and his Fireflies Against Darkness and More Fireflies series from Arroyo Seco Press in 2021 and 2022.

His shorter work has appeared in Literary Hub, Chiron Review, Shark Reef, Cultural Weekly, and Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire by Kendall Johnson at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from his memoir collection Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)