It’s Jackson Pollock’s birthday today. His paintings from his “drip period” are riots of disorganized organization. Small areas hang together, but seem completely unrelated to other sections. But then you see grand, galactic designs in there somewhere…somehow…tying things together. Connections appear and vanish, coincidences arise, and then as you move a few steps to the right or left, you wonder where they went. They were so obvious; right there. And yet now they’re not. But there’s another one, and another.
I’ve always been drawn to Pollock’s work, particularly from his drip period. Did you know that he only used that approach for about three years, from 1947 to 1950? His earlier was different, and so was his later work. Still compelling, but to me lacking something that the drip period paintings tap into. When I write these “book of days” pieces I try to grab some connections out of the grand brownian unpredictability of everything. You can see a coincidence that seems fascinating in the moment, but the moment always passes. You’re left with the sense that the work you’re looking at is just a minor detail, a fractal of something bigger and more pervasive that you can’t quite perceive. It may be beyond capturing entirely.
January 28, besides being Pollock’s anniversary, has something to do with words. I don’t know just what it is, but here are some drips that seem to suggest something. Horatio (Horace) Walpole was a writer back in the 1700s. He was also a politician, and as the son of a wealthy family, he had the leisure and means to indulge his other interest. Those tended to be academic. He was appointed to several government positions that gave him a comfortable income without requiring much, if any, actual work. It was January 28, 1754 when he wrote a letter to his friend Horace Mann (not the Horace Mann who was an American educator). He referred to the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip and coined the word “serendipity.” He was talking about how the princes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” Since then, “serendipity” has meant an unexpected, fortunate discovery. Like noticing some detail in a drip painting — or a historical note — that leads you to something else.
The something else in this case, on a later January 28, happened in 1813 when Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen was first published. If you haven’t read it, the story is about Elizabeth Bannet and her gradual discovery — serendipitous, if you will — that superficial benevolence is not at all the same thing as heartfelt goodness. It’s the book that features the somewhat infamous “Mr. Darcy,” who…well, read the book. It’s worth your time. One of the things you’ll notice is that a fair portion of it consists of letters written back and forth among the characters.
What is a letter, really? It can be a report; a story portraying the events and exigencies of one life, conveyed through language to another. In the hands of a writer like Austen, an epistolary novel (Pride and Prejudice isn’t entirely that) is a set of reports from a student of others, or at least of an author’s characters. Another kind of reports from students was begun on January 28, 1878 when the Yale Daily News debuted as the first independent student newspaper in the US. It’s published by Yale students in New Haven, Connecticut, and the “independent” in its description means that it doesn’t depend on Yale University for funding, nor does the school exert any control over it, editorial or otherwise. The reporters are mostly first- and second-year students at Yale, and the newspaper covers sports, arts and living, culture, and science and technology. The very first editorial staff pointed out that “The innovation which we begin by this morning’s issue is justified by the dullness of the times, and the demand for news among us.” It’s published daily, which probably makes it the oldest daily college newspaper — at least the oldest independent one — in the country.
The Yale Daily News survives on advertising revenue, since it’s distributed for free. As such it doesn’t pay its reporters, but they instead get experience. In later life they have the opportunity to brag about having worked for the paper. And that’s not an empty claim; Supreme Court Justices, US Senators and Representatives, UN Ambassadors, and well-known writers and editors have started out reporting for the paper. Among the things they learned was how to write under pressure when a deadline loomed. One approach, of course, is to increase your speed.
On January 28, 2896, Walter Arnold, who lived in East Peckham in Kent, part of the United Kingdom, was the first to realize that speed itself, in the upcoming 20th Century, was going to be associated with a penalty. Arnold was the first person to receive a speeding ticket for driving his automobile too fast. The speed limit, for some reason, was two miles per hour — which means most people were speeding when walking. Arnold was fined 1 shilling for motoring at the blistering speed of 8 mph. While that’s faster than a jogging gait, it’s not hard at all to find people who can run faster than that. Nevertheless, there was evidently some fear about speed associated with the new-fangled horseless carriages when they began to appear.
But at the same time some people were focused on controlling the speed of these motorized conveyances, others were dedicating time and attention to producing as much speed as possible. It was another January 28, this time in 1938, that Rudolf Caracciola set a World Land Speed Record on a public road by driving his Mercedes-Benz W125 on the Autobahn at 268.9 miles per hour. That record still stands today. And don’t go driving around on public roads at over 250mph, either. There are speed limits, after all.
“Speed limit,” like “serendipity,” is a pretty modern word. There were times, not in living memory, but certainly historically recent, that you wouldn’t have found them anywhere. The same is true of a name you’ve heard in various contexts. You probably didn’t think about how old it might be, or where it came from, but I’ll bet if you’d been asked, your assumption would have been that the name had been around for countless years. That’s what I would have though, if I’d thought about it at all. Which I didn’t. But in any case, the name I’m talking about is “Pakistan.” It hasn’t been around for countless years at all. It was coined on January 28, 1933 by Choudhry Rahmat Ali, one of the first to espouse the creation of a separate Muslim homeland in South Asia. He’s the one who thought it ought to be called “Pakistan.” He was a student at the University of Cambridge at the time, studying law, and he wrote a pamphlet titled “Now or Never; Are we to Live or Perish Forever?” It was a pretty expansive title (the editors of the Yale Daily News would have insisted on a rewrite), but he was writing — almost as if he was writing a personal letter — to the delegates to the Third Round Table Conference in London. It was a peace conference convened to discuss what to do about a constitution in India. Rahmat Ali’s proposal about forming a new nation as a Muslim homeland wasn’t taken seriously at the conference (“a student’s idea,” was how they referred to it), but just seven years later the political leaders in the area endorsed the “Lahore Resolution” that formally proposed exactly what Rahmat Ali had suggested in his pamphlet. The creation of Pakistan.
So you see, if you follow the fluid, fractal patterns of the drip-period painting of history, you can find patterns that fit together to form bigger constructions. It’s just like building something out of Lego bricks. Which, just by the way, were first patented on January 28, 1958.
