I’ve laid low all week long, trying to get caught up after our trip to Mexico. And since the only notebook entry I have to offer is political, not poetical, I’ll resurrect an old unpublished poem for your a(be)musement. First, the politics—on the uprisings in Tunis, Egypt, and Libya:
When Capitalism faces revolution, it forgets all about “creative destruction” and begins stammering about “stability” and the dangers of democracy in the hands of The Other.
Second, this poem from 1984 (uncharacteristically undated in my notebook, but found among others written in the autumn of that year):
Escheresque
after “Relativity, 1953” *My desire is like a leafy birch
outside an arched window.
The frame shows only a tangleof green, a nest, the broken
paper body of a child’s
lost kite. But the crown’shidden; the trunk, hidden.
I must leave the house
to see my desire whole.I’m scribbling this to prove
to myself I’m on the way,
racing through the stone house,hunting for a door to the world
(where it is I’ve forgotten,
though I built this place myself).Am I closer than the last time
I dropped some crumbs of language
in the hall? Or is my trust in a doornothing more than some distraction
for my longing as I wander
an endless labyrinth of stairs?
________________
*
M.C. Escher: “Relativity, 1953” |
Joseph, yes, the Escher painting at the web address you gave is in fact the one I was thinking of.
Thanks for passing on the info, Lynne. All visitors are welcome!
Hi Joseph, just found your blog (via a link to your review of Ce Rosenow's book, Pacific) and delighted I have : ) I'm going to recommend it to a friend of mine, Tamar Yoseloff, an americain writer living in London, who blogs on poetry and art at <br />http://invectiveagainstswans.tumblr.com/<br /><br />Look forward to reading more of your posts.
I wonder if this is the one you're remembering, Lyle:<br /><br />http://www.mcescher.com/Gallery/recogn-bmp/LW435.jpg<br /><br />Regardless, Escher is truly marvelous—like Minneapolis, I guess!
I've seen this Escher painting many times over the years, and have always enjoyed losing myself in it for a few minutes.<br /><br />There's another Escher painting, the title of which I don't recall, in which people are walking up and down staircases that run along all four walls of a square building.<br /><br />It's drawn in such a way that none of the staircases appears to go
Conrad, I forgot say thanks for linking to this. It tickles me every time you place me among the "<a href="http://word-dreamerblognoscentisources.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">blognoscenti</a>". Always an honor….
Since we live in a pocket of space-time, Vassilis, I see no reason why that particular vector couldn't light up for a moment, firefly-like. I love it when that happens!<br /><br />And thanks for the kind words, Conrad. I <i>am</i> a water sign, hence more often earthbound than not. Though I do drift off as mist now and then….
The Escher painting looks (remarkably) like the inside of a NASA space craft, especially the ones designed for long voyages.<br /><br />A verse like "I’m scribbling this to prove/ to myself I’m on the way,/racing through the stone house" conveys that sense of disorientation earth-centric persepctives are bound to produce.<br /><br />Well done!
Joe—<br /><br />Just how relative can relativity be? Last night, my wife and I were reading a newspaper which had a review of the Greek edition of R. Mark Sainsbury’s <i>Paradoxes</i> and—lo and behold—there was Escher’s “Relativity, 1953” leading us up and down impossible stairs and through paradoxical doors; this morning, your fine ekphrastic poem arrived—a wonderful, bizarre coincidence!