| |
From “The Via Dolorosa of Art”
MANY moods—apathy tagged to the end of most— | |
| Had gone into the carving of his masterpiece: | |
| Lady with a three-cornered smile. | |
| He groveled when a critic spoke of his | |
| “Ironical incision, and sensitive cognition of inner essence.” | 5 |
| God!—he could not so facilely | |
| Plumb for himself the dolorous enigma of his art. | |
| Her obese countenance | |
| Proclaimed his contempt for most of mankind— | |
| At their best making an art of adaptation, | 10 |
| And at their worst … | |
| Words signify nothing when silence is permissible. | |
| |
| Three times he had destroyed beginnings of his last work, | |
| Fearing that they were not authentic expressions | |
| Of impulses indigenous of his own contacts. | 15 |
| Given the alien substance of some trifling annoyance, | |
| His nature could furnish nacre | |
| For finer pearls of concept and of execution than these. | |
| |
| Some things of his, completed— | |
| Minor things, not a discredit to him—but … | 20 |
| He shrugged an intellectual shoulder inwardly | |
| When they were praised. | |
| Certainly he knew | |
| He’d caught the tigerish amative spirit | |
| Of the over-pure in his Satyre Religieux; | 25 |
| But its blazing orbs, lecherous with lust-light, | |
| Treacherously savage with repression, | |
| Were too flamboyant a repetition of satire well done before. | |
| The plastic suavity of his Enigmatic Nun, | |
| With a smile of invitation upon her saintly lips, | 30 |
| Gratified his sense of attainment but slightly. | |
| |
| “Realism and truth be damned!” he was often heard to say— | |
| “They are trite insistences. | |
| What is the realism of a plasmic germ | |
| Whose species we do not know?— | 35 |
| Creation is the only reality.” | |
| Phantasmagorical statues almost emerged | |
| From the gray draperies of his subconsciousness | |
| At moments of such proclamation. | |
| Everything in the universe swirled | 40 |
| Or went through his mind in fluid conceptions. | |
| “There is no infinite—only our questions | |
| Which are unreal until we answer them definitely; | |
| Only space which our minds do not fill with forms. | |
| But it is not of the ego … it does not exist. | 45 |
| I am my universe. What I know, exists. | |
| What I do not know is not”— | |
| He would say to his reflection in the mirror, | |
| And it did not disconcert him with a refutation. | |
| Whereupon impulses that were themselves masterpieces | 50 |
| Arose from the dormancy of his will. | |
| He planned to put them into marble. | |
| “Eternity is the metabolic process of the universal germ; | |
| The universe is an organism … | |
| Species the corpuscles in its blood, its veins; | 55 |
| My intellect is the skeleton of my universe”— | |
| He told portraits upon the wall of his room. | |
| They acquiesced. | |
| Some day through the sweep of his imagination | |
| He would come upon form, transcended | 60 |
| Beyond the limitation of line and contour. | |
| |
| Meanwhile … He worked on lesser things, recalling: | |
| The tiny spotted fawn he had found in the woods— | |
| A hunter must have killed its mother, | |
| For hunger had robbed it of instinctive terror. | 65 |
| An inquisitive baby snout had sought his face | |
| As he carried it in his arms— | |
| Moist nose, little hungry tongue licking, | |
| Luminous trustful eyes … | |
| Tenderly he recalled the tiny thing | 70 |
| Which of course died, too young to eat as he could feed it. | |
| So beautiful, so sweetly pathetic an impulse | |
| Was in him, | |
| He put it into marble in the form of an oval, | |
| With dim lines to subtly suggest many possibilities— | 75 |
| New life, love, destruction. | |
| He would always disdain visual reproduction. | |
| |
| Tiny lizards, antelope-like in grace, | |
| That he had watched for days out on the desert, | |
| Certainly could not be caught in cold hard stone | 80 |
| By showing them in any fixed postures. | |
| Their alert listening bodies, when they stopped | |
| In running through lavender sage-weed, | |
| He had memorized in marble | |
| By slender oblongs that bent upward in a quick angle. | 85 |
| |
| Only because the unique shape of sea-horses | |
| Fascinated him had he copied their likeness. | |
| Twining two stallion-necked, worm-headed beasts | |
| With watch-spring bodies together, he felt gratified | |
| Believing he had them as they made love | 90 |
| In the marine garden’s tank. | |
| Yet he was not sure that his tapering-based | |
| Interrogation marks did not please his sense | |
| Of the thing to be done with them in art the more. | |
| And for these things to be called | 95 |
| “A symbolistic ironist!” He shuddered. | |
| He trifling with that ephemeral quality—irony, | |
| Doing a burlesque of the things that change! | |
| “I have no religion but self— | |
| Nothing I worship but my art,” | 100 |
| He told his quivering sensibilities to soothe them. | |
| He knew there was lion passion in him | |
| As well as lamb softness. | |
| He would run the gamut of experience, | |
| Then compress a year’s living into a gesture, a line; | 105 |
| So that his passion of resistance, | |
| His thwarted longings amidst loneliness, | |
| His cleansing of soiled actualities, | |
| Had permanent expression in symbols | |
| Sufficiently withdrawn not to be subjected | 110 |
| To the misinterpretations of the multitude. | |
| |
| Music that sent him forth | |
| To walk across Brooklyn Bridge, | |
| His heart caught between the pricks | |
| Of pointed melodies, | 115 |
| His breast cold in the salt wind, | |
| His wrists singing with the pain of being, | |
| This music— | |
| Flutes—cold water ringing on thin glass, | |
| Sombre violins droning bee-tragedies— | 120 |
| He would hold these tonalities into being | |
| For a longer time than it takes silence to seep them in. | |
| He would put music into white marble— | |
| Marble that sang; | |
| And dancers—and colors— | 125 |
| These he would transform to marble too— | |
| White marble—abstract of form. | |
| But sensitive intuitions would recognize | |
| The color, the motion, in them; | |
| Attuned ears would hear the music | 130 |
| Of his white marble— | |
| Gray-green-violet, magenta-orange-blue-yellow | |
| Moss, melody, movement, | |
| Caught in white marble, | |
| Caught in the whiteness of abstraction, | 135 |
| Worshipful beauty for spiritual intimacies. | |
| |
| But this morning he could not speak to himself in the mirror. | |
| Morning was a pathologic time of Time for him. | |
| From his window he saw that hills were green, | |
| But he did not care to explore their greenness. | 140 |
| After all, green is a slavery— | |
| Green trees, then red-yellow, white; | |
| Spring, summer, autumn, winter, | |
| And after some years | |
| Other trees come into the slavery of the same routine. | 145 |
| |
| As for his sculpturing, | |
| Well enough— | |
| But what of his living?— | |
| Between sunrise and sunrise any life is held pendulating. | |
| What if a few stars are stitched | 150 |
| In the hem of the garment one cannot throw off— | |
| The sky one cannot look far into? | |
| What of his living—just to live? | |
| Life swirled past him in a flowing stream— | |
| Ebb the tide, flow the current— | 155 |
| Wind of Time: | |
| The only thing existing the things in his mind, | |
| And it a mind wild for freedom … | |
| Wind-gust were dry leaves crackling, | |
| Dust on his windowpanes. | 160 |
| |
| He washed his teeth, and combed his hair; | |
| He tied a colored cravat in a freshly linened collar. | |
| In the mirror his face was a morbid picture, | |
| Rather appealing perhaps— | |
| Sullen with youth … grave with despondence. | 165 |
| But there was breakfast to have— | |
| The day was never his without his coffee. | |
| So he thought of coffee: | |
| In his mind the universe—thinking | |
| Alone of coffee—sieved his self-perceptions. | 170 |
| Coffee—with not too much cream and sugar. | |
| |
