INDEPENDECE DAY – Thomas Simmons

Flag, 1954-55 by Jasper Johns

INDEPENDENCE DAY
 
July 4, 2018
 
“Such a restructuring of space and the objects in it, unaccompanied by any reconversion,
must in the first instance be considered an impoverishment.”

 –Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects
 
“The introduction of actual objects, often with direct popular connotations such as
the Coke bottles, was interpreted as a riposte to the high-flown discourse of the older
abstract expressionists. Rauschenberg specifically rejected the idealistic aspirations they
represented. . .To paint, he said, is no more important than anything else in life.”

 –Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning
 

The B train. The people from Edward Hopper who do not look at one another.
The ads for things that will be forgotten in another generation. The station.
Petals on a wet black bough. The cracked pavement. Bright sunlight. Taxi horns.
The walk to 53rd Street and right turn, slow, because the physical object
Of my body in this space is in hypertensive crisis. My swollen feet, shortness
Of breath. The elegant lobby, spare, atmospheric. Against all advice I take
The stairs, because they are the system of ascent. Fourth floor.  These words.
It is of course not July Fourth when I am there. The MOMA is closed
For Independence Day. Here are the Pollocks, the Warhols, the Rothkos--
I could step inside a Rothko and be safe for eternity, though dead, but that
Is not how objects work, and thus another story—the Rauschenbergs, and there
Is Jasper Johns’ “Flag.” It is two years older than I. It is an American flag. It is not
An American flag. It is the object of the object of an American flag, which
Though not a specific reference in Baudrillard’s first book will lead directly
To Simulacra and Simulation. But this is also, technically, neither simulacra
Nor simulation. It is “The American Flag.” 


                                                                        For that reason it has an origin,
Although the origin is not what we might surmise, not the flags flying everywhere
Today. The origin was a dream Johns had 64 years ago. The next morning
He began to assemble three plywood panels, 42 1/” by 60 5/8”—call it
Three-and-a-half x five feet--and then the resined newspapers, McCarthy era,
That fear, that American fear of America, not an object, though present
Once again. The object of newspapers, their fragments of communities,
Their warning. The thick oil paint over the resin, the red and white stripes
And so on. The thick white of the stars over the thick blue, stars held 
In place in this place on earth by paint, of all things. Rauschenberg was right
Up to a point and then he was wrong. These words.The disaffection
Of millennials, their caustic irony, their objectified performance of despair.
You will die, Siddhartha. Then I will die. Hesse. We must see the scintillation
And its impoverishment for what it is. Then we must descend the system of assent.

​
_____________________________________
Thomas Simmons
July 4, 2018

BRING YOUR NIGHTS WITH YOU ~ New & Selected Poems 1975-2015, in two volumes by author Thomas Simmons, will be released on July 6, 2018 by Saint Julian Press.

Thomas Simmons taught for 24 years in the Department of English at the University of Iowa; in the spring of 2016 he started something new and has been writing ever since. Before that, he was an assistant and associate professor in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; before that, he was a doctoral student in English at the University of California, Berkeley, a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford, and a Stanford University undergraduate. His seven previous books, one of which (The Unseen Shore: Memories of a Christian Science Childhood, Beacon Press, 1991) caused some offense in Boston, may be viewed at amazon.com site listed below. He lives in Grinnell, Iowa.