Diego Rivera monostich (resartus)

Two    great             elongated  ellipses

crosseEd AC otHher

in the center of the wall

[--Bertram Wolfe,  A Life in Two Centuries (1981), p. 600.

Describing the mural “Man at the Crossroads”, painted 1934 in the foyer of the RCA building, then destroyed by order of Nelson Rockefeller.]

Note:  Rocky is invariably cast as the bad-guy here;  but as with most of the leftie causes-célèbres of the period (Sacco & Vanzetti; the Rosenbergs; Alger Hiss), their perspective is blinkered.   Wolfe himself -- Rivera’s primary supporter and biographer -- gently admonished the Mexican painter, who had been content to take Rockefeller gold, then was indignant when his patron objected at Rivera’s sneaking in Lenin at the last minute, as the centerpiece of the whole mural, at the intersection of those two ellipses.  “Have I not the right, as painters have always done, to paint into my mural  people I know?  To use any model which seems suitable?”

Wolfe observed:  “Yes, Diego, but the great painters of the Renaissance painted either the patron or somebody related to him… Do you think that if Pope Alexander VI or Lorenzo di Medici had commissioned a painting, he would expect the central figure to be Girolamo Savonarola?”

Crossing the Pyrenees during the Spanish Civil War

a road that ran

          up                                        up

first        ,   then                   then           again

                                down,

as all foothill roads do.

 

[ -- Bertram Wolfe,  A Life in Two Centuries (1981), p. 661]

~

~  Posthumous Endorsement ~

"If I were alive today, and in the mood for a mystery,

this is what I'd be reading: "

I Don't Do Divorce Cases

Murphy on the Mount.

(My name is Bert Wolfe,

and I approved this message.)

~         ~

~

Día de los Muertos, ca. 1934

   When twilight comes,

   they take their leave of the deceased,

   dragging sleepy children after them.

[ -- Bertram Wolfe,  A Life in Two Centuries (1981), p. 633]

An Equation

Workers need One Big Union, much the way sinners need a universal (catholic) Church:

both protecting our collective welfare, and curbing our individual faults.

The analogy is, I believe, passably exact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owbBzPzTxz0

~ ~ ~

A curious analogy, just encountered.

In his autobiography, Bertram Wolfe relates how, in 1917, the antiwar Socialist Party tasked him with mounting a soapbox to address a hostile Irish crowd.   As a Jewish schoolboy, Wolfe had often been the target of their fists, and had learned in time how to deal with these folks.   He simply looked sternly out over the crowd, until curiosity got the better of them, and they quietened  to see what he would say.

“His Holiness the Pope  and the international Socialist movement,” he began, “are the only ones who are concerning themselves with the problems of an early and decent peace  in the middle of this terrible, bloody, endless war.” 

He was allowed to continue and have his say.

For more on this improbable conjunction:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/07/wisconsin-and-vatican.html