Last time I talked of love and freedom. Freedom is being shouted in city streets and love is the cry of pop-singers. They are like foods that nourish us, heart-beats that make us human. They also have a dark, destructive side. Is not racism rooted in an aggressive love? Misogyny and homophobia are they twisted forms of self-love? Are not hates often the rebound and regression of some form of love. Freedom can be reshaped as the claim of caged-in egos or it can be an opening to meeting and understanding the other.
This poem is about love.
Our Song
Ah, these black wings that hover and that tree
Standing, bravely standing, bold and verdant voice
Through all uncertainties!
The wind moves compelling music from
The forest glades and all high-reaching things,
Yet none from beaten earth and ponderous stones.
The unfenced deer, love’s emblem, know
The scented paths we trod, the sunlit and
The dark dense leafage of our lives.
We journey on together and alone.
The heavens mirrored in the silent lake
Shall sing our song.
I want to describe how the painting in the previous post came about. I show it again for convenience.
I had already painted on the canvas a richly coloured woodland, rushing stream and pale sky. Disliking the result I decided to overpaint turning the canvas from ‘landscape’ to ‘portrait’. A face in profile appeared to me and with a broad brush and naples yellow I superposed it on an incongruous background. The face, looking down, was there in a few strokes and remained unchanged. Beneath was a rectangle mainly of blue sky and a few brushstrokes of prussian blue produced an accidental shoulder and an arm. The gesture suggested a figure from the story of Parzifal, Amfortas, the wounded and suffering king of the Grail castle. His healing depended on the asking of a question. He seemed to be lying, not in a bed in a castle, but in nature. A space remained on the right of the rectangle.This was a time when the horrors were happening in Myanmar, when babies were being slaughtered before their mothers. It was only when I had finished that I began to see the meaning. The words of the question, ‘What ails you?’ is for our time, for humanity, for each individual and for the earth.The accidental gesture looking down triggered the subsequent elements of Amfortas and the Pieta and also provided the meaning of the head itself.
And I add another, my most recent:
