Dragonfly in amber

This week, I finally got around to revising an ekphrastic poem I wrote last year. Its subject is René Magritte’s 1928 painting, Les Amants, which I first came across at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I had posted the original draft here, but deleted it after a workshop brought out its serious problems. It took me awhile to figure out how to fix the clichéd and illogical parts, ending up with a completely rewritten poem. Later I’ll discuss the specifics of how I did it, since it also shows how my foray into literature and creative writing has overhauled my thinking process. (In short, I think I have a more naturally literary than philosophical mind. Maybe, as a friend had suggested, I was the caged bird in one of my earlier poems. Now the lock has broken and I am soaring in what feels like a limitless sky.)

I finally revived/revised the Les Amants poem—which had languished in my drawer for six months—for another poetry reading with Marjorie Evasco and two other women. It will be held on February 29, the second and last day of the Arts Congress on campus. Each of us will be reading three of our own ekphrastic poems, prefaced by a description of the creative process behind each one. A synthesis and panel discussion will cap the event. Here are the complete details. Admission is free, by the way:

Ut Pictura Poiesis: Four Poets on The Sister Arts
Poets/panelists: Marjorie Evasco, Dinah Roma, Noelle Leslie dela Cruz, and Ida del Mundo
Time: 1-2 pm
Venue: Teresa Yuchengco Auditorium, De La Salle University (Manila)

In his definitive book on this form, Museum of Words, James A.W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of a visual representation.” It comes from the Greek words ek (out) and phrazein (to tell, declare, or pronounce), and had originally meant “to tell in full.” In the literary tradition, it has come to designate written works, especially poems, that address artworks, usually paintings. A classic example is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” which is a haunting meditation on our indifference toward others’ suffering. It narrates different scenes depicted by the Old Masters, as one would encounter them on a tour of the museum. In particular it focuses on Pieter Bruegel’s 16^th-century painting, Landscape with The Fall of Icarus. The latter portrays a typical scene at a busy port; it takes awhile for the eye to notice a boy’s thrashing limbs in the water. “In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance, how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster,” Auden writes. “.... and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,/ Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

Dr. Marj has written a lyrical paper entitled “Restoration and Creation: The Work of the Ekphrastic Imagination,” published in Issue no. 4 (January-June 2005) of High Chair. Here she explains a crucial element of ekphrasis: the enlargement of the artistic canvas, or the frame of the story, to incorporate the writer’s own imaginative input. She also provides the text of several such poems she herself had written. My personal favorite is “La Condition Humaine,” after René Magritte’s painting of a painting whose frame appears to be contiguous with an open window. She introduces two characters—a man and a woman, momentarily lovers—and refers to two rooms. The literal room contains them, and is the one that is depicted in the painting; the figurative room is inside the woman, as in the room of her reverie, or the room of a relationship. It is a lovely elegy about the intrinsic fleetingness of love and our continual attempt to capture it, as an artist would try to petrify reality onto a canvas. This doomed attempt of both love and art is described in the third stanza, through the unforgettable image of dust motes:

... she understood how inside
And outside the rooms of love
The landscape was not always seamless;
How, every time she turned her heart
Into words to invent the true form
Of being, dustmotes were already trapped
In the light of images, like this morning
Vanished fast into another day.

* * * *

And that is why Dr. Marj is magic.

Last September, I delivered a lecture on ekphrasis that she had liked enough to ask me to present it again in her graduate class in literature. The paper is entitled “The Philosopher as Romantic Wanderer: An Ekphrastic Engagement with Caspar David Friedrich’s Paintings.” Dr. Marj also liked the creative piece that came with it, i.e. my pair of ekphrastic poems entitled “Two Letters to the Romantic.” These addressed the following works by Friedrich, a German landscape painter of the sublime: The Wanderer above The Sea of Mists (1817) and The Sailing Boat (1818). As I mentioned in a previous entry, my teacher observed that these poems refer to two opposite centers of gravity: that of the self (as in freedom or independence), and that of the other (as in a relationship). As all Romantics know, both of these constitute an abyss, i.e. the dangerous and even fatal depths of the heart. These were the first poems I had ever read in a truly public setting, at Mag:Net café in Katipunan, Quezon City, before an audience that included some of the foremost poets in the Philippines—previously mere names to me.

As I write poems now, after two terms of intensive work on this particular craft, I notice that I’ve learned to think differently. It’s my fifth term overall in the MFA program, and aside from poetry, I’ve studied or am studying fiction, non-fiction, various literature cognates, and—agh!—professional editing (thank God I’m past that one). My teacher once told me that thinking in terms of images is easier than thinking in terms of abstract ideas. I was very new into the program back then, so I didn’t really know what she was talking about. I understood it cognitively, but not really intuitively, until I started trying my hand at the different belletristic forms. It’s been an amazing year for me, in the sense of discovering new ways of seeing the world, processing my own emotions, even thinking about “God.” What makes writing a fine art (i.e. belles-lettres) is a particular way of sifting the aesthetic element from any existential experience—of transcending the personal devastation, for example, to imagine yourself writing about it even as you are going through it. For the first time, pain actually feels exquisite. I’ve never enjoyed more the journey that the mind takes over the contours of ideas. Maybe I have found my form(s), or they found me.

The first poem I attempted on Magritte’s Les Amants comprised two six-line stanzas with end rhymes, and included an epigraph from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. The quote was about how the lover desires to possess freedom as a freedom, a doomed project because of its paradoxical nature. You cannot possess what is free; you can only possess a thing, not another consciousness. Thus, I read the painting as a portrayal of love’s illusory intimacies, which can never penetrate the other’s unknowability—hence the allegory of the head cloths.

However, during a workshop I realized that my first draft didn’t have a single original line, even containing such cringe-inducing phrases as “the night of love” and “the magic moment of recognition.” Thank goodness for other discerning minds, especially Dr. Marj who pointed out these facile associations. I abandoned the poem and didn’t touch it for at least half a year.

Now that I’ve come back to the image of Magritte’s lovers against the backdrop of a different situation, the revised poem is no longer about Sartrean freedom. In fact, it’s not even a revised version; it’s a new poem altogether—this time about how words can be a hindrance and a burden. This actually builds upon a theme that recurs in my poetry, and in a way, I am repeating myself in this piece. But it’s what had come out—suggesting perhaps that the situation hasn’t changed or I haven’t changed, and I am full of the same festering ideas.

In any case, this is how I imagine a literary critic would close-read “Discourse,” assuming her omniscience about and preference for the author’s intentions. (However, the nice thing about readers who are not you is how they bring out what you never realized about yourself through your work. This is another high that workshops give me.)

Magritte’s painting is called The Lovers, while the title of the poem is “Discourse.” Their juxtaposition may bring to mind Roland Barthes’A Lover’s Discourse, an erudite literary meditation on eros. As a discourse, love has its own grammar, like the grammar of the polarity between attraction and antagonism. To survive or succeed in love, you have to know its rules.

The first stanza gives us a situation. The persona is addressing someone with whom she presumably has had many discussions: “After we had said so many things....” The nature of their conversations is labyrinthine. This is suggested by the allusion to the minotaur’s maze, which Theseus escapes by following Ariadne’s thread. In terms of the associations in the poem, this myth may represent the intellectual work that philosophers or logicians engage in. After all, they are ones who step over “the corpses of slain propositions/ along the path of valid argument.” However, what should have been a triumphant journey out of the labyrinth is belied by the persona’s thoughts. The stanza ends with a contrast between surface clarity (“sunlit exit”) and deep obfuscation (“our hidden darkness”). It seems that they are not yet outside the real maze. And as the next verses suggest, it is not the logical or rational maze, but the emotional or relational one.

The next stanza is the part that talks about the painting. There is no description of the otherwise bare background or the colors; the focus is on the enshrouded heads fused in a passionate kiss, one a man and the other a woman. The subsequent lines immediately relate the image to the predicament described by the persona in the first part of the poem, by means of a synecdoche: “What if we are just mouths....” The mouth is used both to kiss and to speak, actions that cannot be performed at the same time. It is the lovers in Magritte’s painting who are kissing, and the characters in the poem—who may or may not be lovers—who are speaking. Both activities, whose typical objective is to achieve a connection, fail in some crucial way in both stories. The kissing lovers are hindered by their masks, while the persona and her addressee are hindered by words.

This interpretation of words as futility and as hindrance is developed in the last two stanzas. Words “whirl down the drain of talk.” The idiom about something “going down the drain” means that something important is lost or wasted. Another waste is an unopened letter whose contents will not be read. These two metaphors suggest something about the nature of the characters’ conversations. When they talk, it is of useless things; what is important remains unsaid: “... we can only speak of ideas, never of stories.” The final stanza equates the obscuring cloth to the words of discourse. The reference to a medieval instrument of execution—the garrote—expresses what the persona feels, which is akin to strangulation (however, the poem is ultimately silent about the other’s state of mind). Incidentally, a person who is condemned to die by garrote usually dons a head cloth. The poem ends with the persona’s wish—“If only/ I could see your face”—which may be read as futile in light of the all obstacles described.