Why Caravaggio Painted Version II of Conversion on the Road to Damascus, by Em Guillaine

The Conversion on the Way to Damascus: Version II, by Caravaggio (Italy) 1600

Why Caravaggio Painted Version II of Conversion on the Road to Damascus
 
When this was painted, everyone knew the story, Saul’s before
              and after, whereas I had to look it up, but how puzzled they must have been--
 
the old familiar angels are gone, and the odd ribbons
              of heavenly light, all the shorthand for telling stories
 
to the illiterati. Instead, we get that muscled horse
              that dominates the scene. Is he there to show us how small we are,
 
or what? So first, Saul before: a man who doesn’t like leaving people
              to their own gods—though his God must leave him
 
bare corners that he senses at night—a canting man who doesn’t mind a squabble,
              as long as he has a weapon in his hand.
 
But now, look at the state of him: he’s flung off his horse,
              landed, all at odd angles, quiet for once,
 
and even the damn horse knows he needs the light. But really, 
              so foreshortened and cramped, how will he ever get up?
 
He’s warding off, but also reaching out, and would take the hand
              of his somehow pitying servant, or the hand of some new god,
 
if it would help him get out from under that heavy right hoof, 
              right his senses in that over-bright space. It’s one thing to be chosen
 
but another to be so overcome by light, new voices, feel your parts
              are not in their right places. He will though, after the light has gone,
 
get ungracefully up, thinking, this is grace—and become Saul, after: another tangled man
              to make another tangled world, maybe too far from where he began,
 
but now with a sure belief, as sure as the one that came before, to insist
              on another new way, to begin, and to interpret the meaning 
 
at the end, thinking it will be possible to lie in a heap again on that ground, possible
             to re-capture his time in the light, that, for a moment, lit his dark corners up.
 
Em Guillaine
 
Em Guillaine believes poetry creates another time and place, using a savage alchemy that transmutes language and meaning until only self and not-self remain. When not writing poems, you’ll probably find her at work on her bonsai or rereading Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion. She lives in San Francisco amid the rough grandeur of the Pacific coastline. 
 
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