THE FLORA AND FAUNA OF THE MOON

Interrupting what may be the most euridite sex scene in literature--which appears in The Dawn of Erewhon, the final story in Guy Davenport's 1974 collection, TAITLIN---is a translation of Jules LaForgues' Climat, faune, et faune
de la lune. LaForgue(1860-1887) is a wonderful poet, who has never quite gotten into English despite the advocacy of poet-critics as different as T.S. Eliot and Randall Jarrell. French friends
can not find a complete edition of his works in Paris.How could such a wonderful writer be ignored? Well, we ignored Monteverdi for three hundred and fifty years--it can be managed. The poem begins,

"I imagine in the evening cool
Your flora, fauna, and lunar weather,
Moon of the Immaculate Conception,
I, louse on a roof in Babylon.
Deep in your dim and halting nebula
I offer what I spin from my boredom
O barge floating upon nothing across
The night, along the dark's quays. desolate..."



What follows is in the realm of the taxonomic-fantastical,
enumerating mermaids licking their own tails, and
reindeers with cut-glass antlers, and polar
bears "grave as the Magi before the honey
Of divine silence..."floating hippoppotami,
luminous dugongs, lilies with hysterical smiles,
mushrooms like palaces...it is proto-surrealist,
true, but its splendor is its own,
and I have never re-read it without wondering
what it LOOKS like, Odilon Redon? Blake?
Windsor Mc Cay's LITTLE NEMO?
Joseph Cornell knew this poem,
I am sure, and half-intentionally illustrated it.
That,and Nerval's AURELIA. The part of French symbolist
literature on the cusp of the occult.

This poem has followed me ever since I read it, so much so
that I have half-intentionally illustrated it myself a
number of times. It coincides with the absurd
but persistant notion that the moon must
be sacrificially placated, which I half- believe,
somewhat on the lines of those statistics which testify to an
increase in suicides and murders during a full moon.
I try to suppress this Pierrot-Lunaire-ish, paleo-psychotic self
as much as I can but I have done a number
of versions of the Moon Poem/ Painting even so.Avatism is
stronger than rationality. Plus those dark blues
always draw me in..
There is a variant painted on a large window;
it was begun by shooting flat black krylon enamel
through lace, and then drawn upon,there have been drawings,
screen paintings, and even a collage
made of wallpaper on this theme over the years.
This is what happens when a poem resonates.


The latest of these was bought the other day by a friend
who is a country-western singer-songwriter. She does
hospice work, and described to me how she calmed a
twitchy, fearful, dying person by singing to them
a last lullaby. Such a person wanted something of mine.

The La Forgue poem ends,
"O stillness, stillness, to whom shall we give
The lunar crown? What lesson can be learned
From this quiet? Everything has kept
Faith with the same negation of being
Day after Day, saying nothing at all
or asking why...
"You will not get to the end of it sane
but with that idiotic smile of the of the marble Greeks,
For all this will not stand in a mirror
Dead. And you forget as you turn away.

We will return and press the question, Ah!
when we have understood the coral isle."

NEREID

A small relief painting, made of five painted layers,

each with different imagery and a different shape. The Nereids

were the original Mermaids, the daughters of Poseidon, seen

in the current and the wave. One, Leto, lends the ship-

wrecked Odysseus her scarf lest he drown and instructs

him to return it to the sea when he arrives at shore.

I don't think mine is quite so serious.

KNOCKING ON SATAN'S DOOR

THE BOOK OF LIGHT AND COLOR:ON DANTE

(this is an excerpt from an essay by the poet Howard Nemerov called "THE
DREAM OF DANTE" and appeared c. 1980 in Prose magazine)
...it happened that I took children to a night game. But Dante's poem, for anyone
working with it closely, has the power of infecting a good many thoughts about things
which would seem quite remote from it, so that when...I saw on the electric scoreboard
a bright red Cardinal swooping up and down and across I thought:O dear, thats
the trouble, isn't it?...that Cross in the Heavens of Mars, the imperial Eagle
in the heaven of Jove, the ladder in the heaven of Saturn, all made up of
spirits who are lights (after you get past Justinian in Canto vii they no longer
have human faces)--we can actually do, or show these things. That scoreboard
could as readily flash out to us glowing crosses and ladders and eagles as it can that
cardinal or pitcher pouring golden beer...and what a vulgar production it is!
Surely poesy rules in the realm of the impossible because it is the impossible;
realization is ruin.


But a few nights after, taking the children to the Fourth of July fireworks and
seeing those wonderful sprayings and flowerings, those glowing showers of
embers slowly going out...I thought with a kind of stupid relief, Ah well, that's
more like it, the spirits on the cross and ladder come and go swiftly, like the
fireworks brilliant with heat as well as light, and with the continuousness of a musical
phrase, legato...only they don't go out.

...And, still thinking on cross and eagle and Jacob's ladder, I remembered two
quotations on this matter, though written three centuries apart.

"What a beautiful hemisphere the stars would have made if they had
been placed in rank and order;if they had all been disposed of in regular
figures...all finished and made up into one fair great composition
according to the rules of art and symmetry."
That is Bishop Burnet, as if he were introducing the eighteenth century.
But here is how the same thought occurs to George Santayana, introducing
he twentieth,
"imagine the stars, undiminished in number, without losing any of their
astronomical significance and divine immutability, marshalled in geometric
patterns, say in a Latin cross with the words In Hoc Signo Vinces in
a scroll around them. The beauty of the illumination would be perhaps
increased, and its import, practical, religious, cosmic, would surely be a little plainer,
but where would be the subliminity of the spectacle? Irretrievably lost.' ''

VEILS OF PALE SHADES

Study for a stage set for Pelleas et Melisande, Tristan und Isolde, Ariane et Barbe-bleu, Peter Grimes,

and Elektra.

WAVE TOWER

study using five cut out tiers, painted on both facing

and verso sides of each tier,

with imagery which interlocks with its corresponding

tiers above or below. How to make a structure out

of a Leonardo drawing of the Deluge. The two photos at the

beginning show it "Xray'd", almost, with the Flash

attachment of my camera.

A PICTOGRAPHIC TOWER

A study in translating the imagery of the pictogram drawing (1))

first to two layers (2,3) and then to two structures,

(. 5,6,7,8 )the inner structure circular, the outer a modified figure eight.

Both inner structure and outer structure have corresponding imagery

painted--or in this case, inked--upon them, on both the facing

and verso sides.