Miro’s Notebook

I.

Dusk, thus:
a shirt drops,

the bellybutton rune
showing.

Clouds are soaked,
the sea now

iron, muscle-heavy.
The pond begins

reflecting on astronomy.
The fruit wait.

The furniture
call back their atoms.

The tree asks for
its leaves.

II.

Winter brought into the room
is the whisk of holly.

The purse is a hare limp
on the table, its eye
gone amber.

The birdcage is the work
I am after: bold-barred,
so no bird leaves.

The celadon throat, the iceberg
teeth, the matted grass
of an armpit . . .

A pear, or maybe a stone,
the chilled shoulder shifts under
cover, not persuaded
into similitude.

III.

In the snail-tracked sky,
the mineral grains, a dozen eyes.

You tell me thread
is for seam and hem, not the mica
bead-stitched on the dark.

You refuse to have the shards
the broom gathered
be the moon, seen as aftermath.

But like the thimble, I have no guile.

So let your window
open to the rain coming down,
drumming on the hidden shells.

IV.

Black cherries.
Glass of milk on a tablecloth.
An arm of bread.

The coins.
Green scarab beetle.
The compact’s sleeping mirror.

The fig branch.
The sundial.
The harlequin leaves.

V.

Votive-light evening,
cipher ridden.

The marsh air, and my finger
in places.

Among the lesser constellations,
the fractured

kite, the anemone.
The geese thread-pulled

into the hard sleep.
The clothespin, the gold

in your hair.
The seeds spread

are a flung field.
I sleep on stone, you on moss.

VI.

The red-haired figure
in the station, the man selling
carnations. The scarecrow

landscape, the suitcases
getting heavier with every stop.
Those served as props.

I dreamed we each played a part.

One of us was given to say:
I wanted your distance whispered down
small enough for this room.

And one to say:
I saw you always just a little
out of reach, with white hair.

VII.

A fish-scale moon:
who doesn’t want

to be left used
windsock-hollow?

Now for morning:
the lit wick

of each grass-blade,
the saplings

like legs of deer,
the four walls

verifying the house,
and the slip

of last night’s chive
in your teeth.

 
by Rick Barot


from The Darker Fall, 2002, Sarabande Books, reprinted with permission of the author.

 
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines, raised in San Francisco, and teaches in Washington at the Pacific Lutheran University. His third poetry collection with Sarabonde Books is due out this year. Barot’s poetry has also been published widely in journals including Poetry,  Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and The Threepenny Review. It has appeared in anthologies like Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, Language for a New Century, and The Best American Poetry 2012. He is also the poetry editor of the New England Review. http://www.nereview.com

Visit him at www.rickbarot.com.

 

This stunning painting of Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom is by Russian academician Ilya Repin.

From the Russian medieval epic Bylina, Sadko was a merchant, musician and adventurer who gained the favour of the Sea Tsar, who helped make him rich in a bet with some fishermen. Tragedy ensued when he used his gain without offering his respects to the tsar, and some sailors threw him into the sea to save their imperiled boat.

Street in Venice
      after a painting by John Singer Sargent

This woman walks along the street
with care, eyes downcast,
black shawl gripped tight
demure demeanor well portrayed.

One of the men 
           - the one propped casually against the wall –
looks askance at her passing form.
Is she an improper sort of woman or
the right sort at the wrong place, the wrong time? 
Out too early or too late, no fitting escort in sight?

Is her face too fresh,
the flower in her hair too brash?
Does the flounce of her white gown
ride high as she walks, promising
a glimpse of slender ankle?

Is it simply in the nature of men,
some men, to look askance?

by W.M. Herring

W.M. Herring graduated from UBC (Vancouver, BC) with degree in Honours Computer Science. She now runs a B&B on rural property near Prince George in north-central BC.  Her work has appeared in several publications including ARC Poetry, Literary Review Canada (LRC), The Nashwaak Review, Christian Century and Queen’s Quarterly.

What is the Artist Trying to Say? Nothing, Magritte Claims

Magritte’s paintings are overflowing with recurring images and eerie objects that we naturally grasp at as symbols. But the artist rejected symbolic interpretation of his work and asked us to avoid deciphering them in this way.

"To equate my painting with symbolism, conscious or unconscious, is to ignore its true nature,” he said famously, thus thwarting professional and armchair critics alike from claiming any expertise on what the artist was trying to say.

Magritte’s painting, Pandora’s Box, is just begging viewers to try puzzling out what he intended to convey with a blood red sky and a stark white rose. And there’s that man in the bowler hat again, bearing a striking resemblance to the artist himself, even without a face What is this man always looking at, or looking for?

One commenter online, oblivious to Magritte’s muzzle against meaning, read the sky as war and the man facing the empty streets as the isolation and loss that haunted the world after WW2. The white rose represented the hope for peace.

The rose, the lamppost, the balustrade, the bowler hat. We see particular objects again and again throughout Magritte’s paintings. “…Magritte created enigmatic pictures of flying boulders, burning tubas, giant apples trapped in rooms, or rainstorms of stolid businessmen falling on towns,” writes art historian Camille Paglia. “Typical Magritte paintings show a water glass precariously perched atop an airborne stone balcony.”

Magritte plucked the ordinary markers of existence, everyday objects, the humdrum and banal, out of reality and twisted them into scenarios from The Twilight Zone. But he ties our hands behind our backs, refusing to give us an escape route in “figuring it out.” If only we can decode something, if only it’s meaning can be revealed, then we would no longer be snared by our surreal confusion. This of course, is the conundrum of life itself- man’s search for meaning, as they say- but even in saying so, I veer perilously close to symbolism again.

Magritte said, “People are quite willing to use objects without looking for any symbolic intention in them, but when they look at paintings, they can't find any use for them. So they hunt around for a meaning to get themselves out of the quandary… They want something secure to hang on to… By asking ‘what does this mean?’ they express a wish that everything be understandable.”

Magritte said that viewers “who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image.” He felt that, “No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it.”

I stand forever enchanted in the evocative corridors of Magritte’s imagination, with no need to nail down a particular code. But I do think Magritte’s insistence against interpretation is, like his paintings, something of a mind game.

After all, the infamous pipe that wasn’t a pipe was not a pipe because it was a representation of a pipe. You couldn’t smoke it, of course, but nor could you deny that it showed the aesthetic, visual properties of a pipe. It was, therefore, a symbol of a pipe.

Literal symbolism in painting traditions often meant stand in signifiers- a dove represented the holy spirit, the snake represented Satan, a rose represented romantic Eros, and so on. So it is understandable that we might wonder whether the painted pipe symbolized  an actual pipe, or something else. A particular colleague who smoked a pipe, perhaps, or a penis, if Freud is our guide. Even so, I don’t think most Magritte viewers are looking for literal translations.

Magritte may have felt that “reducing” his work to symbols was missing the point, but his continued harping on the viewer’s weakness in longing for meaning was no doubt part of his strategy. His paintings are conundrums, even if they don’t have a specific, correct key to a-ha. When considering his “anti-symbolism,” one must also take into account that Magritte did not like to be called an artist. He was, rather, a thinker who painted. These kinds of curious philosophical mind games reflect Magritte’s droll humour and imaginative genius. His interest in chess and cinematography also make sense in light of the peculiar visual staging and seeming puzzles of his work.

Magritte was concerned with mystery and poetry and sought to evoke these through juxtaposition of quotidian objects and scenes. Still, to reject entirely the historical and social context of his artwork would be foolish. He painted through the decades of the ‘20s to the ‘50s, a time where the unconscious played a starring role. Freud’s impact was profound; then, his ideas about dreams, subconscious drives, sexuality, and human nature were tempered (or tampered) by his student, Carl Jung. Both of these brilliant men asked questions and uncovered truths about the human psyche, from the sinister to the sublime. Their approaches differed but ultimately we owe an enormous debt of what we understand about the mind to both of them.

These radical shifts in understanding human nature and relating to the world prevailed in the very essence of Surrealism, the ism to which Magritte belonged. And although he was always reluctant to be labeled in any way, the intellectual and social climate of his era and his associations make it impossible that these ideas played no role in his work.

Thomas Moore, psychotherapist and philosopher, perhaps expresses the “meaning of Magritte” in his therapeutic worldview that life is not a problem to be solved or fixed. We must live with the paradoxes, for they are integral to our soul.

Magritte, he says, “understood more than most that our way of connecting things is not as rational and linear as we imagine.”

It is a further irony that Surrealism, the art movement to which Magritte was most closely affiliated, was also in part an heir to the Symbolist movement the century before. Symbolists and Surrealists shared the objective of looking beyond the rational and material for meaning. While recognizing Magritte’s genius for freethinking, I believe it’s also safe to conclude that the painter’s stance against symbolism was a little game of its own, a semantic hustle to make us think and respond more carefully to art by considering our confusion.

The best way I can approach Magritte’s art is this: Magritte’s rejection of stand in signifiers- of fixed symbols- cannot mean his audience will not find connection, sublimation, or meaning in his work.

A dream dictionary is useless, despite dedicated devotees, and in this way, decoding Magritte according to fixed interpretation is futile. Freud saw a dream about teeth falling out (or a dream about anything else, for that matter) as representing sexual repression. Jung saw anxiety or loss. The theatre of our unconscious is necessarily dependent on our own set of experiences, not just our animal nature.  A tooth in one man’s dream is not the same as a tooth in another’s. It could mean pain to a particular person, but even if it recurred, it might now reference instead a memory of a stranger’s smile.  The dream dictionary approach to both symbols and to dreams is facile. Meanings are not fixed. Symbols are fluid. Magritte is right that trying to pin these things down is a ludicrous attempt at chipping away from mystery with lousy, primitive, tools and very little in way of imagination or context.

But imagery’s very power is the narrative it inspires and the resonance it meets with in its viewer.  Magritte’s apple or egg or train or clock may not substitute for particular, intentional alternatives (like “original sin”, “birth,” “speed,” and “time”)-but they will evoke intense and unique associations for different people.

“'My images are not substitutes for either sleeping or waking dreams. They do not give us the illusion of escaping from reality. They do not replace the habit of degrading what we see into conventional symbols, old or new…”

Be that as it may, only a dead man can approach a Magritte without a whole cascade of illogical, beautiful, eerie, nostalgic, provocative narratives spilling from one’s interior world. Without this effect, there would be no power in the paintings at all. They are compelling precisely because they take us deeper into the profoundly symbolic space of our unconscious.

But of course, Magritte knew all of this very well.

"The mind loves the unknown," he stated. "It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."

Lorette C. Luzajic

Camille, at the end

I am too weak to stir, my love
but I can hear the whisper of your brush stroking the canvas.
I can't bear to think what I've become, what you are seeing.
What light is left in me that you can illuminate further with your hand?
But I am what I've always been to you, a muse. A body, a face, to contemplate.
In our short history we've been many things. Shared many kinds of love.
Not all bliss, yet no other life would be better.

Remember that time, mon amour,  when you and Auguste stood
strong shoulder to strong shoulder
breathing in the scent of grass and youth?
Studying the sky? The blues and greens.
The shape of my hands clutching a bouquet of wildflowers.
Remember how safe we felt, in the afternoon heat?
How we talked about our thirst, all the way back through the field?
How we dreamed of water and chilled wine and the wet cool on our lips?
Remember how you laughed when Auguste stumbled and nearly dropped his canvas?
His gaze trapped, skyward, watching the birds.
We were so free to love and live.

Yet, wouldn't I still be here, withering from my womb,
passing into a realm without you?
Wouldn't I still be a mistress? A mother?
A form for you to build and rebuild with colour?
My eyes have goaded you into creation. Into repute. Into sorrow.
I know you will mourn me.
 Know you will remember my face in all our histories.
You will not wear this grief long.
Will find new radiance in the sun on calm water
or the fog through the trees at quiet grey dawn.
I know you will teach our sons how to seize what is beautiful in this life.
How to see what's beyond the eyes.
How to love with every sense.
I am ready to leave, my love.
Young, but not untested.
I have been la dame dans la robe verte.
I have been au coeur de ma famille.
I have been. With you.

by Kim Mannix

Kim Mannix is a poet, journalist, wanna-be horror writer, mom, wife, hypochondriac, music nerd, TV snob and feminist who has lived in seven Canadian cities and has decided to stay for awhile in Sherwood Park, Alberta.

www.makesmesodigress.com

 




 

Art

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

Herman Melville