Month: August 2026

Seams

One of my teachers described a novel as a long piece of writing with a flaw in it. I’m not sure whether she meant us to examine our favorite novels for their flaws, or to pre-exonerate us from the inevitable mistakes we would make. Either way the thought stuck. I get a bit obsessed with perfection—thinking that is the armor against failure. It isn’t.

One of the reasons I frequent art museums is because I am constantly reminded that there isn’t one perfect work of art, or rather, that there are thousands of works that are perfect. My Sunday strolls take me from Kandinsky’s Succession to Raphael’s Alba Madonna. I need that reminder because I have a horrible time making peace with the imperfections—the flaws—in my work.

They are As Time Goes By (red) and As Time Goes By (blue), each is 8 x 20 feet.

Right now I am taking particular delight in two painting/prints at the Phillips Collection. The two monumental works—each takes up the better part of a wall—are by the British artist, Howard Hodgkin. They are As Time Goes By (red) and As Time Goes By (blue). Each is a print made across five panels of handmade paper with substantial over-painting. They echo each other and diverge in some wonderful ways (the primary being their predominant colors). I pointed out to one of the docents that these works give the neurodivergent mind quite a lot to play with with. The docent kindly, and as a kindred spirit, agreed.

These are the first (of five) panels of the prints hanging on opposite sides of the room. How do you know they are “prints”? You can see that many of the color patches are not just similar, their placement and shapes are the same. The colors differ to be sure, and there is more than a fair amount of hand painting as well that distinguishes the two. I spent more than a bit of time between the two enjoying the interplay of same and different.

Looking closer at the work, specifically, the shadows the blue painting cast on the wall behind it, I noticed that the seams between the panels are not perfectly aligned. Putting these large pieces together must have been a challenge. When asked about them, Hodgkin said, “They’re big to show that I can do it, despite everything. It’s not a very noble reason, but having been ill with this extremely sinister illness, I felt challenged…It’s the last time I’ll do anything like this…it’s hard work.”

Any work should be a challenge. Sometimes we chalk excellence up to genius, and while I never want to diminish the role of an artist’s peculiar talent—their genius—what distinguishes most work, even beyond the perfection, is the challenge of making—and then seeing—a particular work. As Time Goes By embodies this, because what looks haphazard—like water balloons of paint burst onto paper—is the culmination of precise tactical effort. The artist even made these huge sheets (each sheet is 8’ x 4’) of paper.

What stands out is that in some places Hodgkin painted across the seam, and in others the painting or printing took place on each sheet separately. Do I think the imperfection—the two sheets in the blue not quite matching up—was intentional? A friend once looked at one of Jackson Pollock’s paintings and noticed a daub of brownish paint. “He left it in.” Maybe. Well, he did, but what would removing it have done to the painting. I don’t know why Hodgkin left an uneven seam in his work, and whether it was intentional or not seems to miss the point. The work was hard to make, so much to manage, and the mild misalignment may—may—point to the difficulty of making the piece.

Personally, I love this rough seam, and these two companioned works. But I also love that they are a combination of printing and painting. There are distinct repetitions and distinctly different additions. One might go so far as to say that all his work—all any artist’s work—bears this hallmark. Yes, there are changes. In another gallery at the Phillips there are three works by Picasso—all distinctly “Picasso” and yet and different.

I am aware that I write the same things over and over again. Yes, there are variations and the variations matter, but I do this to show (to myself, to the world) that I can do it, and to express the varieties of experience. The work takes time—no one wrote a novel in a night—and the effort is central to the writing (and the reading). I do it to show myself—and the world—I can. Hodgkin’s work buoys my spirit; it is a challenge worth the effort.

Confluences: John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey

“This is the west. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

John Wayne as Tom Doniphon and Jimmy Stewart as Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I finally saw John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I saw it in a theater, with a fairly full house. I saw it two days after watching Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, and I was surprised by the similarities in the two movies. Either Ford was making a modern myth, or Nolan was making a mythological Western. I think I’m leaning toward the latter.

Both films center on the personal conflicts of their protagonists: Tom Doniphon and Odysseus. The heroes burn down their homes (literally and figuratively). After what they have done, they can’t go back home. What did they do?

Tom Doniphon lives Shinbone, and life in this frontier outpost is definitely not romantic. Cattle barons hire men to terrorize the townspeople. Tom describes one of these hired guns, Liberty Valance, as “the toughest man south of the Picketwire—next to me.” Except, tough as Tom might be, he does not act to stop Liberty Valance. Only when Ransom Stoddard appears and insists on law (an idea he brings in a satchel full of law books from the somewhere back east), does Tom take action. He kills Valance and lets Ransom take credit, which marks the end of a West governed by rough justice of gunfights, and the beginning of a time of law.

This doesn’t mean that the characters will not pine for that time. The movie begins with Ransom and his wife, Hallie, returning to Shinbone to attend Doniphon’s funeral. Has passed without notice; his body is in a plain pine box and he is remembered by only a handful of the town’s populace. Ransom’s return is news because he has gone onto serve as the unnamed state’s governor and senator, as well as the United States ambassador to Great Britain. When Hallie praises her husband, “It was a wilderness. Now it’s a garden. Aren’t you proud?” She means it. This is an achievement. But she also shows a heavy nostalgia—for Tom and the time that was. I suspect that we feel the same way.

Doniphon’s sacrifice—killing Liberty and giving Ransom the credit—erases him from the movie. He leaves Shinbone, the incipient state, and Hallie (the woman he loves) to Ransom because he knows that Ransom can provide something worth reading and writing about. Except, in the end, what we want to read and write about is heroes like him. His presence looms over all the characters who remember him.Their lives have been diminished by his erasure, even if their lives are better. Tom Doniphon understood the trade.

Matt Damon as Odysseus in The Odyssey

In Nolan’s The Odyssey, a law already exists. Zeus’s law—xenia, the rule of hospitality—declares that “suppliants are sacred” (as Nausicaa reminds her father in the poem). This is an extension of the Homer provides in the poem. “Strangers” and “suppliants” are sacred; Penelope and Telemachus endure the suitors because they are bound by a dictum that all guests be fed. In the poem there are limits. Athena advises Telemachus that if Odysseus returned, “a blood wedding, a quick death would take the lot!” Guests have obligations as well.

Other than Zeus’s law, the gods are mostly absent from the film. Athena appears, but not as the wily trickster-warrior of the poem. Nolan’s film is particularly human-focused, in spite of the presence of the Cyclops, Circe, Charybdis, the sirens, and the armor-clad giant Laestrygonians. These are obstacles mortals must overcome by fight, flight, or sacrifice. Gods do not intercede. Hermes does not provide Odysseus with an herb that protects him from Circe’s potions. Leucothea does not tie her magic scarf around Odysseus’s waist. Athena does not send the salvo of the suitors spears wide of the mark during the slaughter in the hall.

Odysseus and his men are human. They may follow Zeus’s law and they may be aware that Poseidon will punish them for blinding Polyphemus, but they live and suffer in human terms—drowning as they wait inside the horse and needing to forage for food on the way home. On Ithaca rumors of “people from the sea”—not rumors of displeased gods—threaten the peace. And when Tiresias counsels that only the “gods say only you make it home,” Odysseus answers, “Then I defy the gods.”

By limiting the role of the gods, Nolan focuses on human experience. Odysseus bears the costs of war. He questions Agamemnon’s motivation for going to war on Troy, suggesting that is as much for trade as to reclaim the wife (Helen) and honor of Menelaus (Agamemnon’s brother). Calypso drugs Odysseus, first to help heal him, then as a way of keeping him, but also as a kindness. Odysseus’s memories of the sacking of Troy are more of a wound than the physical ones he suffered on the sea.

Anne Hathaway as Penelope and Tom Holland as Telemachus in The Odyssey

He is much like Tom Doniphon, but unlike Doniphon, he is not preparing the world for a garden. In Nolan’s film Odysseus leaves Ithaca because he feels that he has broken Zeus’s law and not because Telemachus is a better, wiser king. In the poem Odysseus is also charged with an exile/exodus, but this is not a journey toward the west, but inland, to a people who mistake his well-planed oar for a fan to aid in the harvest. Odysseus must make this pilgrimage not to make amends for tricking the Trojans in a way that transgressed Zeus’s law, but because he has failed, repeatedly, to bring the men under his charge back home to Ithaca.

Maybe Telemachus will feel an irrevocable nostalgia for the days when his father could kill the suitors, the same way Hallie, Ransom, and a few others feel nostalgia for Doniphon and the erstwhile wilderness. However, Doniphon and Nolan’s Odysseus both recognize what they have done, and willingly pay the price that their actions demand. Let me note that unlike Ford’s Doniphon, Nolan’s Odysseus is accompanied by Penelope when he leaves his home. Nolan can’t quite make his hero suffer alone.

Comparing these works, Ford’s seems more honest and prescient. We (Americans) still harbor a romanticism about the Wild West, and a predilection for savage displays of strength. He acknowledges the trade Doniphon makes in allowing Ransom to don the mantle of the hero while he leaves the story. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus trades the slaughter of the suitors to give his son a fresh start. However, Telemachus is not ushering in a new law to Ithaca. He is neither visionary nor heroic. Nolan shows him to be a middling fighter at best—well beneath his father’s ability. How will he distinguish himself as king? What has Odysseus’s sacrifice and exile left behind?

Maybe the comparison is unfair, after all these are different films separated by almost 65 years. But they are both movies about legends, law, and sacrifice. Ford shows that after the sacrifices, we can build something new and recognizably better, even if we ache for what was. We have to learn to live with the ache. Nolan’s film shows that there is only loss, that memory is undefeatable. Odysseus and Penelope sail away much as Frodo did at the end of Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, the world saved, but not for him. But what has Odysseus saved in Nolan’s epic? Is there anything worth saving?