Responsible viewing: Charles Simic's Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell

Papers on Language and Literature, Fall 1998 by Morris, Daniel

Simic's account of Cornell's dependence on art to survive alienation from a community of artists and intellectuals who might have understood him is comparable to how Ashbery imagines Cornell's life in a 1967 essay: "One imagines that his day-to-day existence in Queens must be as outwardly routine and as inwardly fabulous as Kant's in Koenigsberg" ( 15) . Like Ashbery, Simic represents Cornell as an artist who, "lost in complicated deliberation," adjusts minute aspects of a structured environment of internal significance. In "Chessboard of the Soul," Simic compares Cornell to a chess master during an endgame when few pieces remain on the board, and, therefore, when the value of each movement of each piece accrues. In Simic's metaphor we might ask who is supposed to face Cornell on the other side of the chessboard? From the Bakhtinian perspective Dime-Store Alchemy illustrates, Cornell projects as opponent a reader such as Simic, whose image of Cornell visualizes his own reflections in poems and memoirs of playing games as a boy to ward off the trauma of World War Two.

Simic begins a poem entitled "Prodigy" ( 1977) by stating: "I grew up bent over / a chessboard. / I loved the word endgame" (Selected Poems 1-3) . In "Prodigy," Simic reports how in Belgrade in 1944, he learned to play chess from a retired professor of astronomy when "Planes and tanks / shook [the] windowpanes" (7-8). Simic also recalls playing chess with an incomplete set of broken pieces: "the paint had almost chipped off / the black pieces" and "The white King was missing / and had to be substituted for" (13-16). At the end of the poem, Simic extends the memory of playing chess amidst the war bombings into a narrative about traumatic displacement. He combines the image of the blind chess player with a story about his mother shielding his eyes as a man is hanged from a telephone pole:

I remember my mother

blindfolding me a lot.

She had a way of tucking my head

suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,

the masters play blindfolded,

the great ones on several boards

at the same time. (20-27)

Simic represents chess as a metaphor for metaphor, a scene of instruction in how creativity may enable the child to resist trauma through displacement. Describing chess as his initiation into poetic vision, Simic suggests how the writer, by interpreting art as a theater of play, may, indirectly, act out and work through experiences that were beyond his control as a child. By remembering how he learned chess from the blind master, Simic claims that poetic insight is contingent upon experiential deprivation. Shielded by his mother from directly witnessing terrible events such as a hanging, Simic imagines the past in his mind's eye. In the poet Alan Shapiro's terms, he "transform [s] into pleasure experiences that otherwise would terrify or repel" ( 184) . Playing chess while blindfolded in "Prodigy" is comparable to the classic image of the blind singer found in Homer, Sophocles, and Milton, as well as in the African-American blues tradition, much admired by Simic, in the figures of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Ray Charles, and Stevie Wonder.