Battling with questions of honesty I encountered Gauguin
for the first time today in the Gallery. Viewed later
there's inevitability about a masterpiece:
but before the act of creation the canvas is blank,
an immense void with no fixt points or preset scale.
In this desert there is no success or failure,
Only an oasis of experience: but merely
Unshuttering perception alarms the bourgeoisie
Whose rules are concrete – one's battle, to uncap
A spring of living energy to flood the world.
The Great and Good trade in certainty – for those outside
The headlong rush meanings are more opaque, shadowed.
Cunning old Gauguin knew that the richness of his uncertainty
Was worth all the money he never got :: for me too the struggle
Between what I know, and what the world can bear to hear.
Inside each, invisible within the thickets of forest
Truth wanders, unseen save by a unicorn-whisperer,
Until the magic kairos when it and I and you
Align as sudden lightning cracks the darkness open
And in that sacred second, shadowless, we know.
I have re-expressed the sense of the original by rewriting the thoughts with the benefit of 40 years more poetic experience. My choice was led by a marvelous film about Gauguin just aired on BBC4.
The film took me back to my first encounter with his blazing canvases at a time when I was a young parent still trying to define myself to myself in order to make headway in the world. My semi-answer worked well enough to finagle a career in broadcasting for 15 years – but ultimately, the more successful I became the more acutely I felt the dichotomy between permitted public discourse and my own private meanings.
What struck me as forcefully as the image itself (and still does) was Gauguin’s courage in choosing to depict a completely subjective personal vision and executing in a way that must have been completely baffling to his contemporaries. Which of course he went on doing - famously in his final exhibition of work from Otaheite where practically nothing sold.
Gauguin’s M.V. confirms my conviction that where a work has passion and coherence it embodies the vertu or quintessence of its creator in a projected independent form. And that where these are as-it-were imbued with heart energy (need to tell) naked subjectivity yet in-formed by crafted in-tuition they contain within them the visionary reality which others then come to inhabit - in the sense that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the future’. (Shelley?) We are all now heirs of Gauguin, even tho they meant nothing to his contemporaries.
I certainly hope/believe that is true of certain unperformed works of my own - tho it took another 25 years to raise my craft skills and lower my intellectual inhibitions sufficiently for them to emerge.
And so, seeing Gauguin in depth again, I ask myself now as I did 40 y/a: what is this inner knowing? What is the relationship of the dream world to external reality? How does manifestation cone about? In the interim I have had the writings of Mary Louise von Franz to shed light on the energy of the subconscious & how /why to trust it.
Who knows what outlives us? I have always been driven by a sense of the world beyond this one, and the belief that if we could unify these two fields of awareness we humans could live in harmony with other planetary inhabitants. I believe Gauguin (certainly, and all great creators probably) shared a similar perspective, and that all art worthy the name shares this same characteristic of being an attempt to express the inexpressible. To me, the alternative to this viewpoint is the death and degradation of our physical world. And thus I have to believe, as the evidence of history shows, that all efforts to bring light into the world are worthwhile. Even tho all are (probably) doomed to failure.
for the first time today in the Gallery. Viewed later
there's inevitability about a masterpiece:
but before the act of creation the canvas is blank,
an immense void with no fixt points or preset scale.
In this desert there is no success or failure,
Only an oasis of experience: but merely
Unshuttering perception alarms the bourgeoisie
Whose rules are concrete – one's battle, to uncap
A spring of living energy to flood the world.
The Great and Good trade in certainty – for those outside
The headlong rush meanings are more opaque, shadowed.
Cunning old Gauguin knew that the richness of his uncertainty
Was worth all the money he never got :: for me too the struggle
Between what I know, and what the world can bear to hear.
Inside each, invisible within the thickets of forest
Truth wanders, unseen save by a unicorn-whisperer,
Until the magic kairos when it and I and you
Align as sudden lightning cracks the darkness open
And in that sacred second, shadowless, we know.
The film took me back to my first encounter with his blazing canvases at a time when I was a young parent still trying to define myself to myself in order to make headway in the world. My semi-answer worked well enough to finagle a career in broadcasting for 15 years – but ultimately, the more successful I became the more acutely I felt the dichotomy between permitted public discourse and my own private meanings.
What struck me as forcefully as the image itself (and still does) was Gauguin’s courage in choosing to depict a completely subjective personal vision and executing in a way that must have been completely baffling to his contemporaries. Which of course he went on doing - famously in his final exhibition of work from Otaheite where practically nothing sold.
Gauguin’s M.V. confirms my conviction that where a work has passion and coherence it embodies the vertu or quintessence of its creator in a projected independent form. And that where these are as-it-were imbued with heart energy (need to tell) naked subjectivity yet in-formed by crafted in-tuition they contain within them the visionary reality which others then come to inhabit - in the sense that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the future’. (Shelley?) We are all now heirs of Gauguin, even tho they meant nothing to his contemporaries.
I certainly hope/believe that is true of certain unperformed works of my own - tho it took another 25 years to raise my craft skills and lower my intellectual inhibitions sufficiently for them to emerge.
And so, seeing Gauguin in depth again, I ask myself now as I did 40 y/a: what is this inner knowing? What is the relationship of the dream world to external reality? How does manifestation cone about? In the interim I have had the writings of Mary Louise von Franz to shed light on the energy of the subconscious & how /why to trust it.
Who knows what outlives us? I have always been driven by a sense of the world beyond this one, and the belief that if we could unify these two fields of awareness we humans could live in harmony with other planetary inhabitants. I believe Gauguin (certainly, and all great creators probably) shared a similar perspective, and that all art worthy the name shares this same characteristic of being an attempt to express the inexpressible. To me, the alternative to this viewpoint is the death and degradation of our physical world. And thus I have to believe, as the evidence of history shows, that all efforts to bring light into the world are worthwhile. Even tho all are (probably) doomed to failure.
