Watched Fur last night, despite reservations that Nicole Kidman was entirely the wrong person to portray one of my favorite Jewish suiciders. Sylvia Plath was more famous because she was obsessed with Nazis and parental cruelty and chose to off herself by sticking her head in a metered oven and turning on the gas, but Diane Arbus was always more visceral to me.
Both Sylvia and Diane were cold and dispassionate, but Sylvia was also too academic, too precise, and too profound to convey the despair that recognizing your humanity ultimately leads to. I wrote a truly horrific poem about butt-fucking Sylvia in that English kitchen after she called my balls tiny Buddhas. She was so cool.
So why do I have a photo of Howard Nemerov, one of my favorite poets, to lead off this post instead of one of either Sylvia daddy you bastard you Plath or Diane walk on the wild side with a square format camera Arbus?
It's because I met Howard Nemerov the year Diane offed herself. He was 51. She stopped aging at 48. I was 38 years younger than I am today. All of these people are dead, including me, but that's another post.
There was only three years between Howie and Di, but my experience of Howard's poetry and Diane's photography is that they might been living in different centuries on different planets. I love the work of both of them. Neither of them ever offered me a sense of hope. They did offer a sense of justice and fairness that Americans only confess to when the cops aren't taking notes.
Somehow that idea comforts me, especially looking at a photo of young Diane about the time Howard was heading off to war as a fucking Canadian as part of the greatest generation, and realizing how much alike they look. Both of them could be either male or female at the time the pictures were taken.
Don't let the smile on the two-time poet laureate's face fool you. Read his poems, particularly The Blue Swallows from 1967, the year my world ended in a pile of body bags that accomplished nothing except providing Maya Lin with dozens of letters to be etched into a memorial I will never visit because it pisses me off that this shit-faced country thinks it's OK to absolve itself of a past insanity while engaging in new insanities simply by holding competitions to pay artists to honor those we threw under the bus on the way from nowhere to nowhere.
Fur is a very interesting movie in what it portrays and what it doesn't. There is little about the Nemerov family, although there is much about the division between the wealthy and those — most of us — who live on the edges of reality.We can take a step forward and throw our lives away for demagogues and shitheads or reserve the right to terminate when we decide we've had enough.
Howard's poetry shares much of his sister's visual obsession. The fact that Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr. led me to this bizarre connection between two disparate influences in my ludicrous life makes me suspect even more that life has no meaning and family is the ultimate accidental hand grenade.
I really love this movie, and I don't love much.