"THE MOST DIFFICULT PUZZLE EVER"

Discovered at local swap shop: a rectangular box with the above title, referred to a puzzle based on an abstract painting by the late artist, Jackson Pollock. The work, Convergence, had been parsed into fragments of color and line with no apparent connection to surrounding pieces other than their shapes. Thus, the puzzle solver must focus on the individual pieces, their shapes only, not the picture provided, antithetical to many jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts.

"Convergence" by Jackson Pollock

This formidable challenge also elicited halcyon days with family as we tried to reassemble the same puzzle my mother purchased at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York City. Last week, I chose to bring home the puzzle, maybe to recollect those days, but I couldn't recall if we ever finished it. Subconsciously waxing nostalgic or acting on an uncontrollable need to complete what had been started?

Feeling the jigsaw pieces in one's hands provides tactile satisfaction which does not on the Internet. I have, from time to time, tackled The New Yorker's puzzles on their website: an iconic past cover is separated into pieces on the screen before your eyes. Then the solver has to finish the puzzle in the shortest time possible (and at different levels of difficulty). Fun, though not the same as putting the pieces together with my late parents or my brother, as we sat at a card table near the fireplace on a snowy winter's evening.

A puzzle, no matter how long it takes may not resolve personal differences or bring families together. It does, however, test one's focus (especially if have ADHD, spacial recognition issues), patience, self-will and/or teamwork. Many traits shared by successful creatives.

Strange how exploring Pollock's painting opens locked memories: nostalgic, wistful and difficult. When I look at the abstract expressionist's masterpiece today, I recollect a picture my mother's of back. An x-ray showed advanced osteoarthritis so pronounced that I couldn't resist turning away from the magnitude of what was or would be. That image had reminded me of an old-fashioned fuse box with every wire crossed in different directions. Now, I see my mother's spine in Pollock's painting.

As with any puzzle, the outline or edges are easier to complete than connecting the inner pieces. Problem-solving has its roots in seeing how disparate pieces fit together. Finding the key to any enigma helps decode the hidden secret, even one with seemingly no clear direction or relationship. And yet, how we approach the solution may vary depending on how we process the problem.

This reasoning hold true for Convergence. The colors stand out in the painting--orange, yellow and blue splatters, haphazard? To the artist, may be not, to the puzzle-solver a break from the black and white tedium. I see these eye-catching colors as bringing cohesion to the composition and providing more clues to assembling the controlled chaos.

Jackson Pollock worked from within, a method actor who kept his technique opaque. Whether Pollock worked lunging in various directions throwing sumptuous gobs of bright colors and basic black and white across the canvas with his stiff paint brushes, or if he used a turkey baster to spray the glossy enamel, Jackson Pollock had an underlying reason for his abstraction. Bi-polar, alcoholic, introspective and passionate, Picasso one step farther in my mind, the painter saw the world through a different lens.

To conclude, I have learned the following from Jackson Pollock's Convergence, the work and the puzzle: I may never understand our jumbled society with its speed-of-light changes often too many, too intense, to digest. Nevertheless if I can find peace within myself, then despite appearances, I am confident I can tackle "the most difficult puzzle ever."

I WONDER WHAT HE/SHE THINKS?

A wide swath of celebrities and pundits have been interviewed about American politics, here and abroad. My thoughts drift with authors from other countries, outsiders, whose works describe political chaos, many in their own countries, and social disillusionment through their fictional characters.

Milan Kundera (The Festival of Insignificance, his most popular work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Tom Stoppard (Rock 'N Roll; film fans will know him as the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Shakespeare in Love), Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) and Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid's Tale) are alive and kicking. How would they analyze the current American circus performers? I'd never presume to step in these author shoes and theorize their personal beliefs; however, I'd go so far as to posit what their characters might say.

In The Festival of Insignificance Milan Kundera offers his admiration and criticism of French cultural life and politics, and the bourgeoisie in all its incarnation. Political satire that cuts but doesn't burn. Kundera's prose (written in his second language, French) elicits laughs, smirks and daggers. He sees all the foibles of his adopted homeland and never embraces blind patriotism, a lesson his protagonist learned in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The Soviets marched in with tanks into Prague, Czechoslovakia; initially resistance was futile. Kundera, in his stories demonstrated he learned the power of the press. Nowhere, in The Festival of Insignificance, does he lampoon his characters to the level of our loud-mouthed, bombasts or apathetic dissonants who decry the horrors of American life yet refuse to participate in its democracy. In essence, Milan Kundera comes from the land of "The Velvet Revolution."

Tom Stoppard, another Czech ex-patriot, (his family left their country before the Nazi occupation) explores in his play. Rock 'N Roll, the dramatic swing between the Prague Spring (1968) and the "Velvet Revolution (1989), and how Western music served as a catalyst to the reformers. Stoppard alludes to dissident Václav Havel's future vision for his country, as seen in Havel's own plays and writings. Socialism supercedes repressive communism, allowing for freedom of expression and tolerance, The hero argues that social upheaval does not demand brutal resistance. Is this always true?

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran, returned to Iran to teach, as professor of Western Literature, at the University of Tehran during the calculated upheaval of Iran's revolution (1978-1981) in 1979. Idealistic that the end of the Shah's regime would bring political and social freedoms, Nafisi explains in her memoir how she rebelled, endured, then rebelled against the religious intolerance espoused by the Ayatollah Khomeini, e.g. refusing to wear a head scarf  in the classroom and later forming a private book club for students where they discussed forbidden works, e.g. Lolita. (SPOILER ALERT) Once in the U.S. Azar Nafisi acknowledged that blaming the Iranian government completely would then dismiss the peoples' part, enabling a fundamentalist regime to gain power. Interesting that Nafisi emigrated to a country where, in some places, selected fiction has been banned and history re-written to serve an intolerant elite.

In Margaret Atwood's book, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), leaders, albeit fictional, have also established a religious, fundamentalist, caste-driven state, the former United States of America. The heroine (Offred) is captured and made to serve as a concubine. Her reproductive rights in tatters, Offred is forced to help a childless couple conceive, the assumption being the statesman's wife is infertile. Yes, Atwood's dystopian, "speculative" (her word) fiction, has an outsider's perspective--unlike the above authors I've mentioned. But, Atwood touches on a more than topical premise: the direction the U.S. could be headed, because of narrow-minded anger, ignorance or apathy, if our people allow it. Moreover, at the end of  The Handmaid's Tale,(SPOILER ALERT) Offred appears to escape her captors. In the movie adaptation, Offred takes her exodus one step farther: she leaves for the land of the free, Canada.