On Drawing Poetry

 

The Lent Project is more reflection than penance, but continually faces me with my limitations. My messy desk. Blots on paper. The wrong brushes. Measurements, and how not to take them. Mixing styles: a bad idea. Finding out this is a bad idea. Not waiting for the paint to dry: so impatient. Ink and watercolours in a book so any mistakes stay around to be regretted. Just gotta live with it.  A lot like life.

Do I have the time to do this today? Where can I make the time? Am I pushing time? Should I have done this yesterday? Sure. What thing has to go elsewhere, even out, so I can find the time? Is time not it, but he, as the Mad Hatter proposes? Where is he? Hiding? Asleep? In another reality? Is Time but a feckless child?

The moment you engage with poetry you are faced with its intellectual quality. Poetry is one language, drawing another. Words and images have to speak to one another. Some lines, even the most descriptive, are abstract. Faced with the abstraction of all words. What’s beneath, behind, within words? Searching the words of poets to find the image beyond all words.

On Chorus Call

 

Fake facts are not new. The Greek tragedies hinge on them. The gods are by no means predisposed to overlook them. Confronted by catastrophe, Chorus knows that every one shall be afflicted by the resulting fall.

Who believed history tucked safely into the past? Catastrophe overturns the existing order; fatal reversal. Chorus hears it in the death of Agamemnon: “Anyone can see it, by these first steps they have taken, they purpose to be tyrants here upon our city.”[i]  Chorus foresees, inquires, fears, recounts, witnesses, prophecies. “Where shall I turn the brain’s activity in speed when the house is falling?”

Jesus, also, faces his followers as prophet. In Wycliff’s translation: “Moreover when ye se the abominable desolacion, whereof is spoken by Daniel the prophet, stond where it ought nott, let hym that readeth it, understonde it.” (Mark 13:14) What is standing in the wrong place now?  Your role is Chorus: stay awake.  Meanwhile the disciples are absorbed by the problem of who is worthy.

You still have a spiritual life. What is the state of your soul? The great and troubling mysteries of Lent and Holy Week are before us. (Let whoever reads understand).

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[i]Aeschylus, Agamemnon, tr. Richard Lattimore.