The Buddah, by Odilon Redon. 1905
Odilon Redon was an amazing artist. Few have captured the Symbolist moment as well. Few artists portray mystery, the ambiguous, or the debris of nightmare and daydream with as fine a touch as Redon. You can get a good sense of his oeuvre from this online exhibit from MoMa.
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I was digging through some of my old writings from the 80s and found this poem. In a sense, it fits Redon, and it doesn’t:
Integration at Two
Horses in gallop-frenzy with poets in translation
Breach the walls of the money-men
Sink without a push from anyone extraordinary
… Climb back if you let them
You who cease for centuries and
Reappear like someone’s Prodigal
Like someone’s Nietzsche covered with dust
And choral-sounds
This echo this error is for you and yours
The troubles solved by fiction and bad fiction
The sounds recovered without any Master Tape
We who worship what you could be
Scream
Into its mike its depths
Tie urges and jokes to muscle and concrete … once
Walking around I am walking
Around a center that holds my eyes to the hard-wood
Floor
And she speaks to me of real things of cars
And office hours and red-tape flapping in the wind –
Brittle is a man who lies
About his motives
To her and for her because she
Has him and all answers break
– by Douglas Pinson
In your poem I actually see a line leading from Courbet’s “The Stone Breakers” (“Ties urges and jokes to muscle and concrete”) through Poe with the obsessive walking. That is to say, the poem has a little bit of that ghost you saw walking on the lawn at the University of Virginia. It also hints at one point at a pit and pendulum sort of continual revolving around a dead center. And finally on to Malte Laurids Brigge in terms of the uncomfortable physicality that I seem to recall is part of that character’s experience (and other aspects).
In other words, as you rummage in the past what you find suggests to me where you have been going with some of your recent contributions. Is it fair of me to read and comment on your poem this way? Not as a poem by itself, but as something you found here and now and put forward here and now?
Interesting, Robert. I didn’t see the connections, but can see them now. The unconscious. Who knew?
I’m always looking for links, ties, bridges. They are truer to their nature when they’re not, perhaps, prearranged.
I’ll be returning to Redon in the future here, and may rummage through old writings of my own again. Redon, BTW, was an interesting author in his won right. Thanks for your thoughts .…