The Master Speed

(Couple Dancing by Eadweard Muybridge, 1830-
1904, English pioneer in photographing motion;
his work influenced the art of Marcel Duchamp)

Robert Frost wrote this sonnet on the occasion of his daughter’s wedding.

It captures “the togetherness of the married couple empowered to resist the flux of wind and water. Frost is not the first to use the language of speed or quickness to show how love may quicken the life of a couple into a vitality that far exceeds what each partner might attain alone. But Frost also plays on the archaic meaning of ‘speed,’ ‘prosperity or success in an undertaking,’ as well as on its Latin root, spes, meaning ‘hope,’ to point to the possibility of rest within motion, permanence within change, the eternal within the perishable.”

~ Amy A. Kass and Leon R. Kass, from Wing to Wing, Oar to Oar: Readings on Courting and Marriage

THE MASTER SPEED

No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste,
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still —
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.

~ Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet

Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

(Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2
by Marcel Duchamp, 1887-1968, French
artist)

This painting by the French avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp created a great scandal the first two times it was exhibited.

The image violated the classical Greek ideal of the nude. “A nude never descends the stairs — a nude reclines,” declared Duchamp’s two brothers, who then removed the painting from a Paris show in 1912. The New York Times art critic, writing about its presence in a New York show in 1913, ridiculed it as “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

One American art magazine even offered a prize to the first person who could point out the nude.

Times do change.

The painting is of a nude indeed, taking five steps down the stairs, but it is composed of cones, cubes, and cylinders layered on top of each other to produce an image of kinetic cubism, of time entering space. In this work, Duchamp was influenced by the stop-motion work of photographers like the French Étienne-Jules Marey and the English Earweard Muybridge.


(Motion by Étienne-Jules Marey, 1830-1904, French
scientist and chronophotographer)

The poet X. J. Kennedy took up the challenge of that art magazine — he has found the nude in this painting.

NUDE DESCENDING A STAIRCASE

Toe after toe, a snowing flesh,
a gold of lemon, root and rind,
she sifts in sunlight down the stairs
with nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
a constant thresh of thigh on thigh;
her lips imprint the swinging air
that parts to let her parts go by.

One-woman waterfall, she wears
her slow descent like a long cape
and pausing on the final stair,
collects her motions into shape.

~ X. J. Kennedy, born 1929, American poet, translator, and editor