Sentences on a Glass House and Other Sentences

1. This is the his­to­ry of a woman and her glass house. It is as true an account as I can devise.

2. Bet­ter known for the glass house that bears her name and the rumor that she was the jilt­ed lover of Mies van der Rohe, Dr. Edith B. Farnsworth was also a poet and a trans­la­tor of poetry.

3. Her last work was pub­lished in 1976, a year before her death. A final proof of this book-length Eng­lish trans­la­tion of works by Ital­ian poet Albi­no Pier­ro is held in her archive at the New­ber­ry Library. Farnsworth’s strikes and edits of the text are evi­dent in blue pen, her stut­ter­ing lines in each poem an indi­ca­tion of her advanced age and declin­ing health. On the cov­er page the title, OCCHIEL­LO, is crossed through and in all cap­i­tal let­ters NU BELLE FAT­TE is writ­ten — a last minute edit per­haps direct­ed by Farnsworth, but writ­ten in a younger and stronger hand. For rea­sons lost in his­to­ry, the title of this col­lec­tion was changed from occhiel­lo—the Ital­ian word for eye­let, a small hole or per­fo­ra­tion — to nu belle fat­te, Lucan­ian dialect for the Ital­ian una bel­la sto­ria, a beau­ti­ful sto­ry.

4. The col­lec­tion opens with this poem:
Per­haps you want me
and already you dream of me at night.
I too
begin to trem­ble with thirst
and I am afraid

I’d fling myself upon you
and every bit of you I’d suck;
your blood in one long gulp I’d drink
with­out ever draw­ing breath,
like a drunk­en man who latch­es on
a cracked and leak­ing cask,
long­ing to swim in the red flood,
to drown therein.

5. How does one make a his­to­ry from this?

6. The his­to­ry of the Farnsworth House, as told by his­to­ri­ans, ignores these poems, but reads like the plot of a nov­el. A pow­er­ful woman — a sin­gle, wealthy Chica­go-area physi­cian — meets an inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned mod­ern archi­tect at a din­ner par­ty, a man who has left his wife and daugh­ters to immi­grate to McCarthy-era Amer­i­ca from his native Ger­many. By the time dessert is served, she has hired him to design a week­end house in rur­al Illinois.

7. Some of this his­to­ry is drawn from her unpub­lished mem­oirs. I fill out all of the nec­es­sary forms to make an appoint­ment with each document.

You write about your life only if you are will­ing to show your­self while doing the liv­ing, she wrote.

set down syl­la­ble by syllable

whis­pers as real
as a hun­dred shouts
rad­i­cal, trau­mat­ic, high­ly orga­nized.

8. The sto­ry fol­lows that dur­ing the three-year design process, Mies and Farnsworth social­ized fre­quent­ly in Chica­go with mutu­al friends and acquain­tances. On week­ends, they made trips to the coun­try to sur­vey the idyl­lic strip of land she had pur­chased in the flood­plain of the Fox Riv­er just out­side of Plano, Illi­nois, pic­nick­ing with his employ­ees and stu­dents, mutu­al friends, archi­tects vis­it­ing from oth­er coun­tries. She became enam­ored of the archi­tect — indeed, the two are rumored by many sources to have been lovers, although there is no evi­dence of this in her memoirs. 

9. I myself have held pho­tographs that show them sit­ting togeth­er on a pic­nic blan­ket, sur­round­ed by friends. With­out a suit jack­et, the architect’s waist­line is expan­sive. Sit­ting on the ground in a skirt, her knees are scalpel sharp.

10. ​“It shouldn’t be this way, but I’m afraid that this sto­ry is going to end bad­ly,” a friend warns her. I mark up a Xerox form and paper­clip this let­ter to it to remind myself of this fact.

11. The house that he promis­es to build her is ele­gant and entire­ly trans­par­ent and held above the ground on thin steel columns. It is unlike any oth­er. House Beau­ti­ful labels it a threat to democ­ra­cy. She sim­ply com­plains that she has nowhere to store her belong­ings. He tells her this is because it is ​‘beina­he nichts,’ almost noth­ing.

12. A lit­tle known fact of their rela­tion­ship is that while he was her archi­tect, she was his physi­cian. Stop read­ing for a moment. Imag­ine being the physi­cian of a man who fears death.

13. ​“I want to know what I have to expect after death,” he once demand­ed of her. ​“A man will always want to know about his hopes for immor­tal­i­ty. He won’t want to know that his fate is the same as the snowflakes on the win­dow, the salt crys­tals on the din­ner table.”
What sto­ry do you want? I ask out loud in the silence of the read­ing room.

14. Life pro­gress­es, inevitably, toward an end. And yet, it has super­nat­ur­al moments. One spring after­noon in 1950, they are joined by a British archi­tect on a vis­it to the house dur­ing construction.

The trees and mead­ows, as we saw them from our stone shelf, fad­ed into a vision and in the sky there float­ed a blush-pink celes­tial body like a pale pink moon, supreme­ly large. We stared at one anoth­er and at the big pink heav­en­ly body and at our altered world. ​“You don’t imag­ine that we might have slipped out of orbit, do you, after so many years in the same one?” sug­gest­ed Mr. Dark, now quite sub­dued. The two hor­i­zon­tal planes of the unfin­ished build­ing float­ing over the mead­ow were uncan­ni­ly beautiful.

15. She records this event in a mat­ter-of-fact tone in her mem­oir: an unknown plan­et hov­ers so close to them that they begin to ques­tion the orbital align­ment of Earth’s tra­jec­to­ry. They find them­selves in a glass house at the begin­ning of what seems to be an unrav­el­ing of the order of all things in the uni­verse. A chain of events per­haps put in place by an unusu­al house.

16. Once the phe­nom­e­non is traced back to wild­fires in Cana­da (an expla­na­tion that, in truth, I do not ful­ly under­stand), she returns to her com­plaints about the house emerg­ing from the ground. There is already the local rumor that it is a tuber­cu­lo­sis sanitarium.

17. Things fall apart in the usu­al way. They sim­ply slip out of orbit.

18. She believes the archi­tect is cheat­ing her on the price of the house. She receives phone calls from the interns let­ting her know that the fur­ni­ture she nev­er request­ed, fur­ni­ture of the architect’s design, is going to be deliv­ered. She refus­es to accept it. She sends a let­ter to the architect’s office stat­ing that no fur­ther expens­es are to be approved on the con­struc­tion of the house.

19. Per­haps, as a man, he is not the clair­voy­ant prim­i­tive that I thought he was, but sim­ply cold­er and more cru­el an indi­vid­ual than any­body I have ever known. Per­haps it was nev­er a friend and a col­lab­o­ra­tor, so to speak, that he want­ed, but a dupe and a vic­tim. These are her last words on the subject.

20. His­tor­i­cal­ly, the cause of their rup­ture will be record­ed as heart­break. So to speak.

21. His­tor­i­cal­ly, she will be record­ed as ugly. ​“Edith was no beau­ty.” But she was bril­liant, they will admit. Indeed, she had cul­ti­vat­ed her men­tal pow­ers in order to com­pen­sate for this unfor­tu­nate appear­ance. (It is said.)

22. His­to­ry, of course, is the process of con­struct­ing and interpreting.

23. Her first evening in the glass house unfold­ed like the still echo of a tem­ple. She had just one light bulb to drown out the moon. The phone rang: ​“Are you down there alone in those cold mead­ows?” It was an uneasy night, she writes, with lit­tle expla­na­tion.

24. When I write this his­to­ry, why do I want to dis­miss the pos­si­bil­i­ty that these two fucked?

25. When I read this his­to­ry, why does every­one else enter­tain the pos­si­bil­i­ty that they did?

26. I won­der if, pri­vate­ly, she con­tin­ued to dwell on the super­nat­ur­al. Not in her mem­oirs — in which she records her com­plaints about the house and the archi­tect with needling pre­ci­sion, and the details of the rather bor­ing tri­al in which they sued each oth­er — but in her poet­ry. There are vol­umes and vol­umes of it, most of it labeled ​“Uniden­ti­fied” in her archive, though her ini­tials appear at the top cor­ner of near­ly every type­script. In these poems, most of them nev­er pub­lished, she writes about space.

27. What is more super­nat­ur­al than space?
Set­tle the lit­tle slide upon the mov­ing stage
and light the sub­stage lamp.
(Space is dark, wind­less, leaf­less and unbloom­ing
in the micro-uni­verse,
where incan­des­cence is in hostage.)
Move the pre­ci­sion screws, adjust the planes,
open the shut­ter wide.
(The star­less infi­nite dark of micro-space
breaks into sun­less day,
and now you move beside
the radi­ant pro­to­plas­mic shore
of an unknown cobalt place).

28. –per­haps you saw all this, you too, she concludes.

29. When poets address you, they are (usu­al­ly) address­ing some amal­ga­ma­tion of for­mer loves. It is unknown to whom Dr. Farnsworth refers. It could be the archi­tect. She also kept black poo­dles, and was close with a man named Hugo. There was a Kather­ine in her 20s and a broth­er dis­owned by the fam­i­ly. There are many lost yous in a life. To move for­ward we must choose to sus­pend know­ing the mean­ing of you.

30. She fur­ther con­fus­es us by writ­ing that, some­times, you may become I.

31. Space is a strange word, pre­ced­ed chrono­log­i­cal­ly in archi­tec­tur­al dis­course by vol­ume and void. Space is a prop­er­ty of the mind, Adri­an Forty warns any­one who is try­ing to undress its ambi­gu­i­ties. To untan­gle its mean­ing would be to untan­gle some part of our­selves, some navel long since healed over. It is the appa­ra­tus through which we per­ceive the world.

32. Blame it on the Ger­man lan­guage. Space, raum, is mate­r­i­al enclo­sure, room, and philo­soph­i­cal con­cept. By mat­ter of fact, and with­out much work, Peter Collins tells us, a Ger­man speak­ing per­son under­stands room as a small por­tion of lim­it­less space.

33. Farnsworth sought to put limbs to this lim­it­less­ness, this slip­ping of room into space, out of orbit.
I looked about me
it seemed to me that a long hand
would stretch out from the ceil­ing
and draw me up into the dark
like a feath­er snatched by the wind.

By morn­ing
I had for­got­ten everything.

34. What if their dis­pute wasn’t sex­u­al, but philo­soph­i­cal? That she kept putting limbs on his vision of the infi­nite — in a world of eter­nal life beyond salt crys­tals, beyond snowflakes, she was shak­ing her night­gown at him, ask­ing for a draw­er in which to hide it.

35. What do you do with an archi­tect who fears death and draws floor plans from close read­ings of Thomas Aquinas?

36. Men who are reli­gious — about god, or space, or the infi­nite or some unholy hybrid of the three (which are maybe sim­ply one thing) — are also deeply con­flict­ed. Every­day, they spill beyond the perime­ters of their own bod­ies. We all do.

37. Try to hold space in your cupped hands. Close them and hold them up to the light. Peer into the navel that your thumbs have locked togeth­er to form. There, in the flesh col­ored light you can see space seep­ing out. It’s alright. We can’t talk about the infi­nite with­out drag­ging our bod­ies into it. And yet, it’s a place (?) where bod­ies do not belong.

38. The infi­nite is a being with­out con­straint. The archi­tect did not talk to the doc­tor about God direct­ly. Instead, he would sim­ply pose this ques­tion: ​“Why tie one’s hands voluntarily?”

39. ​“Who still feels any­thing of a wall, an open­ing?” Much is con­tained in a question.

40. I won­der if they weren’t just look­ing for two dif­fer­ent scales of the infi­nite — his expand­ing ever out­ward through a glass wall, toward the edge of the hori­zon and the lim­its of human per­cep­tion, hers expand­ing ever inward through the glass lens of a microscope. 

41. Con­struct­ing some rela­tion­ship between the two of them is dif­fi­cult. They were inti­mates, and as inti­mates the space between them was short, a shal­low chasm and like all shal­low chasms it con­tains a dearth of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If only thou­sands of miles had sep­a­rat­ed them, per­haps they’d have nar­rat­ed it for us.

42. Or per­haps not. 

43. And so we are giv­en infi­nite possibilities. 

44. We must make mean­ing out of things. (Thomas Aquinas, 13^th century)

45. An absence of nar­ra­tive is an absence of mean­ing. (Roland Barthes, 20^th century)

46. Some days, the infi­nite sound­ed good. She could envi­sion end­less space beyond, and super­hu­man silences. She could hear the wind rustling among the leaves. The infi­nite per­vades me, she wrote in some fever­ish moment that you don’t read about in any books.

47. And yet, night drifts. Burn­ing in fall­en sen­tences.

48. And day­light is wave-like, shiv­er­ing and sin­u­ous on lumi­nous glass walls.

49. And my reflec­tion in the glass is poor com­pa­ny.

50. The infi­nite finds relief, she writes, in a wrist’s light turn­ing: the every­day and brief event is all things.

51. For every mea­sure of the infi­nite that we can see, there is more buried behind it. A com­put­er pro­gram­mer appears on my lap­top screen and sug­gests that the Inter­net you can view is like the tip of an ice­berg vis­i­ble above the sur­face of the ocean. Beneath that is most of the mass of that glacial body — the deep Inter­net — to which few have access.

52. When she says this I am remind­ed of the van­ish­ing point in Renais­sance paint­ings that would be con­cealed, often, by a paint­ed pan­el and a gold­en lock, because to look at the van­ish­ing point — even the human­ly con­struct­ed one — would be to try to look God square­ly in the eye.

53. Wikipedia is less shy about it and offers a few help­ful mind exer­cis­es to imag­ine the infi­nite—how deep is the sky?

54. This, of course, is just the tip of the ice­berg.

55. To the doc­tor, the man we see is only the man who is vis­i­ble.

56. Vis­i­bil­i­ty,
that exceed­ing­ly small seg­ment of the spec­trum
which lies between the ultra-vio­let and the infra-red.
The rest of his being, she writes, recedes infi­nite­ly into the short­er
rays of
his deep
his uncon­scious
his past life
his predecessors

longer and longer waves of seed.

57. Per­haps there is an age at which one becomes invis­i­ble to men. Per­haps she crossed this hori­zon while they were work­ing on the house. I exper­i­ment with invis­i­bil­i­ty myself by walk­ing around my neigh­bor­hood in sweat­pants on Thurs­days. I do not mind reced­ing in this way. I return to myself.

58. Even an invis­i­ble woman is vis­i­ble behind glass. To a glass house, the world is endowed with eyes.

Did the riv­er see the house

the house where this body lives?

Who bet­ter than you knows
what I want?

The few small words which I address to you
seek to be new, but they are ancient.

59. Align­ing these poems with the his­to­ry of the house, with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of some rela­tion­ship between the client and the archi­tect, is dif­fi­cult to do. Poems have lit­tle incen­tive to be straightforward. 

60. Pla­to believed that poet­ry was dan­ger­ous because it was too easy to com­pose with­out knowl­edge of the truth.

61. But ​“the true cor­rupt­ing pow­er of poet­ry resides in its charm,” Susan Stew­art writes, ​“and the most dan­ger­ous aspect of charm is that it is unthought” — just a bright instinct with­in us.

62. It is unknown whether Dr. Farnsworth wrote her poems dur­ing her dialogs with the archi­tect, or after it all broke off. It is unknown whether allu­sions to ​“you” are an indi­ca­tion of the archi­tect, or not, or oth­er lovers, or not. The con­nec­tion of these words to the his­to­ry of the house is ten­u­ous, though not entire­ly absent. It sim­ply recedes.

63. Reced­ing behind his­to­ry is poet­ry. First we were mute, then we stam­mered sound and song. This is long before we could thread togeth­er a story. 

64. In her work­ing files of the trans­la­tion of Pierro’s poems, Farnsworth makes a change to ​“Per­haps You Want Me.” Above the title of the poem was typed ​“Love Songs,” through which she makes two strikes. 

65. These are not love songs, there is no eye­let or open­ing to truth, this is sim­ply a story.

66. The fourth poem in her trans­la­tion of Pier­ro, OCCHIEL­LO NU BEL­LA FAT­TE, opens:
Come quick­ly.
You’ll find no splin­ters of glass
in the air
as you run to meet me.

67. Any love affair is a nar­ra­to­log­i­cal construction. 

68. And writ­ing archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ry is an inex­act art, a prob­lem of evidence. 

69. We could make mean­ing out of one of the few hand­writ­ten poems in Farnsworth’s archive, this one dat­ed two months after Mies’ death. It is evi­dent­ly a love poem.

It opens with

— — - you are my native tongue.
You are the trees among
whose leaves my eyes first opened are comforted.

It clos­es with

You are my land and sea, my language.

70. ​“What wish is enact­ed, what desire is grat­i­fied,” asks Hay­den White, ​“by the fan­ta­sy that real events are prop­er­ly rep­re­sent­ed when they can be shown to dis­play the for­mal coher­ence of a story?”

71. Desire for full­ness, con­ti­nu­ity, causal connections.

72. If any­thing resists the nar­ra­tive cloy of love and of his­to­ry, it is poet­ry. Poet­ry is made as much of lan­guage as of the absence of lan­guage. Poet­ry con­tains space: the gaps and paus­es that the nar­ra­tive struc­ture of his­to­ry can­not accommodate.

73. The fol­low­ing words can be lift­ed out of one of the last unpub­lished poems that she translated:

Weave, plot with your threads the stuff
that sound­ly in its weft is history

I could have made you so, I too.

ATTRI­BU­TIONS

Sen­tence #4: Albi­no Pier­ro, ​“Per­haps you want me,” in Nu Belle Fat­te. Una Bel­la Sto­ria. A Beau­ti­ful Sto­ry, trans. Edith Farnsworth (Milano: All’Insgna del Pesce d’Oro, 1976), 43.

Sen­tences #7, 10, 13, 14, 16, 19, 23: Edith Farnsworth, ​“Mem­oirs,” unpub­lished ms. in three note­books, Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag.

Sen­tence #21: Franz Schulze, Mies van der Rohe: A Crit­i­cal Biog­ra­phy (Chica­go: The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press, 1985), 258.

Sen­tences #27, 28: Edith Farnsworth, ​“Arse­nio,” 1969, unpub­lished poem, Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go. Excerpts.

Sen­tences #31, 32: Ref­er­ences are made to the chap­ter ​“Space” in Adri­an Forty, Words and Build­ings (New York: Thames & Hud­son, Inc., 2000), 256 – 275.

Sen­tence #33: Albi­no Pier­ro, ​“U Mamone,” trans. Edith Farnsworth, unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #38: Attrib­uted to Mies van der Rohe.

Sen­tence #39: From the note­book of Mies, page 61, 62 (col­lec­tion of loose pages pre­served at the Mies van der Rohe Archive of the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York), 1927 – 1928. Excerpt appears in Fritz Neumey­er, The Art­less Word, trans. Mark Jar­zombek (Cam­bridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991), 289.

Sen­tence #46: Gia­co­mo Leop­ar­di, ​“The Infi­nite,” 1819, trans. Edith Farnsworth, unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #47: Edith Farnsworth, ​“Night Drifts,” unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #48: Edith Farnsworth, ​“The Qual­i­ty is Lent,” unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #50: Clemente Reb­o­ra, ​“The Infi­nite Finds Relief,” trans. Edith Farnsworth, unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #55, 56: Edith Farnsworth, ​“The Poet and the Leop­ards,” in North­west­ern Tri­quar­ter­ly, Fall 1960, 7. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #58: Pier­ro Metapon­to, ​“If in Par­adise You Would,” trans. Edith Farnsworth, unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

Sen­tence #61: Susan Stew­art, Poet­ry and the Fate of the Sens­es (Chica­go: Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Press, 2002), 112.

Sen­tence #66: Albi­no Pier­ro, ​“Come Quick­ly,” in Nu Belle Fat­te. Una Bel­la Sto­ria. A Beau­ti­ful Sto­ry, trans. Edith Farnsworth (Milano: All’Insgna del Pesce d’Oro, 1976), 49.

Sen­tence #69: Edith Farnsworth, ​“Arse­nio,” 1969, unpub­lished poem, Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go. Excerpts.

Sen­tence #70: Hay­den White, ​“The Val­ue of Nar­ra­tiv­i­ty in the Rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Real­i­ty,” Crit­i­cal Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Nar­ra­tive (Autumn, 1980), 8.

Sen­tence #73: Clemente Reb­o­ra, ​“Dis­persed Days,” trans. Edith Farnsworth, unpub­lished, no date. Farnsworth Col­lec­tion, New­ber­ry Library, Chica­go, unpag. Excerpt.

All images by Nora Wendl, orig­i­nal hand-draw­ing on Xerox­ed archival mate­r­i­al, 8.5 x 11 in. Archival mate­r­i­al repro­duced with per­mis­sion of The New­ber­ry Library and Mr. Fair­bank Carpenter.