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Where the Wild Things Are


Costumes from an installation at CMA


A few days ago, Rett and I took the twins to the Columbus Museum of Art where we experienced several exhibitions, but perhaps the most interesting was Wild Things are Happening: The Art of Maurice Sendak. The exhibition is comprised of more than 150 sketches, storyboards, and paintings by Sendak drawn from the collection of The Maurice Sendak Foundation. Highlights include original work for Sendak’s most famous books: Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There.



Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is a story about a boy named Max who, after dressing in his wolf costume, wreaks such havoc through his household that he is sent to bed without his supper. Max’s bedroom undergoes a mysterious transformation into a jungle environment, and he winds up sailing to an island inhabited by malicious beasts known as the “Wild Things.” After successfully intimidating the creatures, Max is hailed as the king of the Wild Things and enjoys a playful romp with his subjects; however, smelling the food that his mother has delivered for him, he decides to return home. The Wild Things are dismayed.

https://www.slaphappylarry.com/the-enduring-appeal-of-maurice-sendak/


Following our visit to CMA, we pulled Sendak’s book off the shelf at Merry Mount and reread it to the twins. Later, I seriously asked myself, “Where are the wild things?" and, "How might I become king for a day?" I deduced that “Wild Things” might be described as those things that are not under human control. Writer Cybele Knowles calls them, “All that is not domesticated by us, regulated by us, understood by us.” Perhaps the wildest things abide in the human subconscious or like Maurice Sendak’s “Max” are found in our imaginations. So I turned to celebrated poets and consequently offer you three poems.


I Hear an Army


I hear an army charging upon the land,

And the thunder of horses plunging, foam about their knees:

Arrogant, in black armour, behind them stand,

Disdaining the reins, with fluttering whips, the charioteers.


They cry unto the night their battle-name:

I moan in sleep when I hear afar their whirling laughter.

They cleave the gloom of dreams, a blinding flame,

Clanging, clanging upon the heart as upon an anvil.


They come shaking in triumph their long, green hair:

They come out of the sea and run shouting by the shore.

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?

My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?

-James Joyce


green hills


Their green flanks and swells are not flesh in any sense matching ours, we tell ourselves. Nor their green breast nor their green shoulder nor the languor of their rolling over.


-Kay Ryan


The Peace of Wild Things


When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


-Wendell Berry


I conclude with a statement from Professor Liam Heneghan: “The overarching thought is an old one: a human engages with Wild Things and in so doing comes into accord with the world and gains a measure of self-mastery."



CPW, self-anointed king

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