1000 Words: Jackson Pollock's "Autumn Rhythm #30"

Prose to the Painting

Autumn Rhythm #30 by Jackson Pollock

Modernity. It is now that we contend with this so-called modernity. And what to make of all this modernity? Should we be accepting of it? Greet it as a friend, surround ourselves in its comfort, embrace it as the new world unfolds in its shiny materialistic agony?

We now have blenders for your convenience! The Lady Shaver! The Beer Warmer!
Soon, just very soon we will witness the Coronation! Live on television broadcast, Queen Elizabeth II!

Should we allow ourselves a morsel of this modern excitement when we board the new jet airliner, streamlined and rocket-like, blasting off into the sky, testing limits of gravity, sanity, logic, and human capacity? Where do we let the rocket take us? Are we guiding the rocket in its infinite screech, with processors and motherboards, cutting across the sky like a razor ribbons slices of Chinese silk, watching from curved windows as the metropolis grows taller, altering its columned silhouette? Or are they in charge, these jets, their hollering passengers an afterthought? I think not! You can have a martini brought to you, practically while zipping through space!

You will hear it repeated over and over: I see nothing here. Nothing to be seen. Mad! Fraud! Insane!

The calligraphic blacks attach themselves to ochre and a smattering of teal. White weaves itself from the fore to the background. Interlaced, interwoven, locked in like spider’s prey. Childlike! Insect ridden! Cigarette ashes are falling from the mouth of a commie!

Goodnight, Irene! Irene, Goodnight! Will I see you in my dreams? Are there dreams in the modern world? Do they come in the dull, dead grey and white hues, or are they destined to fulfill their very own time and space in pastel pinks, hot futurama chrome, shiny jet blacks, fast food reds?

My eyes dart back and forth, I am becoming either transfixed or nauseated. My sense of self is getting lost in the puny puddles of a mad man!

And we should declare him—his drunken self, he is committed to an asylum, surely—as a genius? Has not our real genius, Einstein, already warned of our mutual destruction? Is this what they want? Inside the borders of Korea? In the fuming madhouses of Wall Street or the advertisement men in midtown? They begin drinking in the AM, those crooks! Have we even begun to understand hydrogen, that we should then suit it up and put it into a bomb? Is this what they mean by having a blast?

I am merely looking for sleep. But my mind is stuck in the jade jukebox, the transistor radio with all its tubes, the electric guitar! My god, they have plugged everything into the wall! What is behind that wall!? Everything is louder, speedier, shinier, newer. Everything must have a tail! An electric tail that whips around every studded object it can find. I can see my reflection in every modern vessel. Every invention is deemed to make my life a breeze. But I want sleep.

Thank Modernity for barbiturates, benzodiazepines!
My little yellow dolls! My little helpers!

And now, I and everybody else are blasted into the future! Whether we like it or not. Everything is speeding up. Andromeda! She is speeding up, too! And our universe, yes, expanding at an increasing rate, unfathomable, intangible, unbelievable! In these webs, Mr. Pollock, Mr. Action, is this what you have in mind? Is this the slamming of the Andromeda galaxy into our own Milky Way? Can you not see it with the naked eye in the right moment, here, from the grounded soil of our very own Earth?

And so, if we declare that there exist problems in our world, are there also solutions that exist? And if we run out of problems, what shall we do with our precious solutions?! Can we go on atomizing, automizing, vape-o-rizing, vacuumizing now and forever!

I know you say you see nothing, but the polished silver has stolen your eye! The brushed nickel and stainless steel have glimmered your modern brain, dazzled it and robbed it of all profundity!

We have been led to control anything and everything! I have eaten from a microwave, I have heard pills control human birth, I have had lunch while in my automobile! I paid simply by plastic charge card!

And now with the highway, America, all tangled up in the strands of its own hair, a road map to the Great Falls, to on and off ramps of exploding minds with cat eyed shades and immaculate curled locks!

Are we set in motion now? Are we in some golden age? Or the Twilight Zone! I can hardly sit still. Has my world been described? Has it been invented in this picture of spaghetti entanglements? Is all this abstract jazz hot or cold? And if we say this age is modern––with modern music and modern appliances, with a modern politic and a modern cinema, surely, we should say that our art has become modern, too.

And if we look beyond ourselves, we should also say that what is modern shall soon be ancient. For the speed at which we are hurling into the future cannot be measured by wrist watch or wall clock, but by the frigid cosmos, filled with the infinite patterns of comets, meteors, flaming falling stars, rushing gusts of celestial energy, exploding supernovas, frozen white dwarves.

I won’t stand for much of it, you say. It’s rotten to its very core because it looks of nothing. If this so-called art is any good then down with it, you say. But is our world, not a jumbled mass!
Is it not flinging the modern man in every direction? Is the modern human capable of being still? Are the eyes of all of us not red from anger or fear, from trembling or substance?

Could we say that madness is only greeted by madness, tangled, interweaved, enmeshed, intertwined thoroughly? Is this not how one might feel in the very Autumn of 1950?

JSV
2024

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