Pentamerous Man Ray
by Ron Smith
“The streets are full of admirable craftsmen, but so few practical dreamers.”
“The tricks of today are the truths of tomorrow.”
I. “Ernest Hemingway” (1928)
Mr. Macho’s yanking your chain if he tells you
this is a war wound. One Rum St. James
too many and you can bring down heaven’s wrath
instead of having a healthy flush. St. James
of the Skylight, let’s say, bestowing something like
a chandelier on the young fictionist who had not
yet said his farewell to arms. In ’28 he was still
a good sport, laughing with Ray’s party guests
at his bleeding then bandaged brow. He hadn’t
yet become The Legend who would prohibit
Max Perkins from editing his work and in
A Moveable Feast bite every friend who’d helped
his career, bulling his way into bathos after 1929,
and all his life accident-prone, like every self-destroyer.
Here, we’re pleased to see a calm man, gazing off
into the distance as probably instructed but not
posing exactly, yes, maybe smiling, just a little,
and at his own expense. You can hear him say,
“OK, Man, I’ll wear that silly hat,” thinking,
perhaps, it would obscure the bandage his later
self would have hidden or simply lied about.
II. “Still-Life with Sleeping Woman” (1935)
1
Any way you cut it, Man Ray’s killed her,
Nature Morte his neighbors would say.
I say this one’s a “stilled-life”—yes, domain
of the inanimate, including animals
hunted down and rendered so. Here, one
head and one headlike—what? a ball? meant
to slapback lovely features—pitted skull,
a shadow blooming from the blond, darkness
we’ve been trained by film to see as a pool
of blood, a spill here serrated, tousled, unlike
the sharpedged circle smooth beyond, circle
of skullshadow . . . slashing darkness angling in,
hiding the rest of the curves below her collarbones,
a spindle upper left, a spindle lower left, the latter
pointing . . . and that fallen spindle crossed by
the upper one’s shadow, knobby vertical just
beyond a—what? a curb? We’re outside?
So: Knobby shadow, a top knob and a lower one,
the spindle lying on what now seems sand,
the dark, erect one jabbed in what could be clay.
Mysterious tools (or toys) taking on
the Hollywood glamour of murder weapons.
I am drawn up toward the blackest black of the far
reaches of Man Ray space, top right, where a wedge
of darkness pushes down, angling chasm of “Eteignez
tout!” “There!” cries the fallen spindle, Shakespeare’s
hapless Laertes, realizing more in 1935 than he
ever managed in Queen Bess’s waning days: “There!
Look! A Death’s Head!” And in its ontological eye,
through it, beyond it, spreading, coming down
like a blade: the deepest dye of nothing.
2
If you’ve read Breton and Minotaure, seen Rogi Andre’s
image of her in Le Coliseum’s aquarium, you know
Man Ray’s flipped her, blacked out her breasts and all
her “scandalously beautiful” body, her shining, liquid,
tapering away . . . but that time leaving darkness in her
invisible loveliness wake. We learn Ray didn’t hide a full
nakedness, only a bikini top and Capri pants, only all
of her but the severed head, strip of upper torso, one
ambiguous shoulder. Does it help that Paul Hammond
guesses the skull, like the spindles, are from a game,
similar to cup-and-ball, though more obviously Freudian,
something a Paris surrealist would find naughty enough
to leave lying around in a work of art? Items much in
evidence about the time of the French Revolution, perhaps
literally in the shadow of the guillotine, in a child’s hand,
this ball to be impaled on a stick through a kind of mouth
or eye, rather than cradled in a cup. It’s only a game.
How many times have you heard that?
III. “Valentine Hugo” (1935)
And here she is, her Surrealist Constellation
discharged like smoke above her head,
Eluard, Breton, Tzara, adorned with their own
fantasies of nudes and flames, gazing in the same
direction as this one who’s rendered them, this
Hugo born a Gross, delivered of a Mod Rushmore,
her so serious eyebeams aimed right, our left,
beyond the mere camera, folded scarf fanning
leftright, like her luminous hands, left hand
pointing right, right pointing left against the black
void that is her once much acknowledged body, this
woman who punched Breton on 9/9/32 and ended—
something. Slightly off-center, she sits in the Man Ray
gaze, that is to say (today) mine, which scrutiny
you’ll forgive, I hope, for its default rationality. I think
she’s contemplating not only that punch in the past,
but her heroes she doesn’t have to turn to see
boiling softly in her world, her work, firmament she’ll
finish thirteen years from now, a year before I’m born.
The Spring before The Punch she downed “a vial
of Gardenal . . ., then some perfume”—what could be
more romantic? This mere moment in a life, second
shuttersnapped, this painter, writer, costume and set
designer, messy muse proclaiming “the collective
attainment” of the guys. Now, I think I see nearly-
concealed pain in those patrician eyes. She will add
Peret, Crevel, Char, though broken with and maybe by
Surrealism. Did you know you had to join? Oh, less
than a movement, let’s say, but still more than a club . . .
IV. “Noire et blanche” (1926)
Rotate the mask, don’t ask whether
she sleeps or feigns, contrast reigns
in this black and white space, face
and not-face. Take in (yang and yin?)
all you can: the hand, the standing
gloss, reclining lady lost in dream
or thought, shady creation, delineation
of repose, as everybody knows, is art—
apart from the money wrangle, advert
(insert banking angle) consideration,
obligation, shadow on the table
able to echo a logo of the Dark
(second largest) Continent, mark
imperial of those who spend and sell
this Kiki, European ambiguity, this
cool jewel tool, Man Ray has parked
there where mystery meets history,
this beauty, slicked hair, and the unseen
camera’s economic duty . . .
V. “L’Ange Heurtebise” (1925)
OK, why not? It’s an angel, cerated, levitated
angeldemon, floating a bit off-kilter because of
the opium, a gerblegarble of an angel, a teddybear
thingy, anti-cuddly, ultimate un-toy, and, where
legs and feet should be, there’s a ginkgo leaf—over-all
indeterminacy enough to render null the risible,
OK, . . . Scary, like Chucky the Slasher Doll, Cocteau’s
guiltgrief, his friendlover dead/neverdead from
tuberculosis/gnosis—must we ignore the cone, the
ribbons, the scratches or threads? O, please, let’s.
Edgar Poe, Conan Doyle, creators of Supreme Rational-
Empiricist Heroes, like Superscientist Theological-
Alchemist Newton before them, might well have
loved this one. Ergo, Ego: elementary.
Dalí Wins Wild Eyes Competition Against Ray
16 June 1934
by Ron Smith
They do it for Van Vechten, five years after the crash.
Of course, it’s no contest. Ray looks focused, sure,
maybe a little angry. But Dalí has stepped out of Plato’s Cave,
is the Ding an sich, Wildness Incarnate, something
from a Dream—both men necktied, though Ray’s
in shirtsleeves (as they used to say), Dalí sporting
a sport coat or suit coat with lapels huge to us,
though the Spaniard himself’s thin as a fantasy,
mustached, hair slicked back, coat hanging a bit off
Poe-ish sloped shoulders. Man Ray is all there, tangible,
more man than ray, could be a stock trader on the floor
in his white dress shirt, nose a little crooked, a boxer’s,
or American kid’s with a history of wholesome
schoolyard scraps. Dalí’s shirt is garish for the day,
even if the day dawns in Paris—aggressively striped
behind the hatched tie. And he’s taller, so much so
it’s a shock to notice Ray’s right shoulder’s obscured by
Dalí’s left—but, isn’t bigger-headed Ray closer to the camera?
He leans pugnaciously forward, into our twenty-first century,
espresso and Rum St. James, let’s say, on his breath.
Erect Dalí’s an Egyptian shape, abstracted into the
extravagant, behind and not behind this Man Ray gent,
a guy mugging with a celebrity friend he could never
out-oddball. So what are you looking at? Have these boys
just now laid eyes on Adrienne Fidelin? Settle in. Open up.
It’s Bloomsday in the city Joyce decamped to in order
to glare back at his hometown, to frolic in the great wide world,
to stay alive as long as he could.
(This poem is dedicated to Michael Taylor and Madeleine Dugan.)