Lyrical Poetry & Madness

Is the lyrical world - of poetry, of song - a world of such danger that those who draw their inspiration from it court madness?

I listened to a TVO poscast, Nick Mount on Sylvia Plath's Ariel, where he makes this point so strongly that I was left wondering if that's what it is.

When you put Nick Mount who says we all become lyrical poets when we fall in love (towards the end of the talk) with Julia Kristeva's Tales of Love who says we all become poets who burst our stories when we fall in love then... well, you'd see where my mind is tonight.

For Mount, the lyrical poem/song has an inherent danger (of madness, break-down, suicide) to the creator of it since it requires a 'leaving of time' to be. For Kristeva, the language of the poets, the lyricisms of the semiotic, are part of the story of love itself, which is only possible outside of the narratives we live our lives through.

Are our narratives, and perhaps all narratives, stories of time, then?

Does narrative have a deep connection to conventional time in ways that lyrical poetry and perhaps falling-in-love itself does not?

You can see why I rarely write discursively in my blog. How do I explain these thoughts without giving you the backgrounds of the books I have read, the talks I have listened to? There is so much more than these few thoughts, too, on this question.

I wonder if it's permissible to write a few cryptic things as best I can rather than nothing because whatever it is I am thinking about today is too complex to relate fully?

Insomnia

Tell it with split tongues
and lightning flicker
in bleary, bloodshot eyes.

The black flood of night.

Remember the never-healing wound
of the fisher king,
I know it well.

Clots like rocks in the flowing black river
of the volcano within.

I want my words to rise like incantations.

On the fumes rising above the tripod
where the Oracle of Delphi sits knowing,
knowing she knows...

I almost don't care about you who are reading this.

It's a life and death struggle within myself.

It's very private.

Pulling the curtain back slightly, I hear
no birdsong at this dark hour,
no glimmering dawn.

In the void, I throw the antidote in.

Incantations

that would undo the spell if it were a spell.

Probably it isn't a spell,

probably it's
reality.

Words to split the earth apart,
change the dismal landscape,
re-orient the black 
burning spots.


_
pieced together from words spoken into a voice memo during a sleepless night,
final draft written July 8, 2012 in Toronto

In case of misunderstanding, I need to say that this poem is not bleak but very positive.

Those Strange Anatomical Terrains: The Underlayers of Our Bodies

Lateral Head 2012, Brenda Clews, each page: 27.9cm x 21.6cm, 11" x 8.5"; graphite, charcoal, Waterman sepia ink on Fierro paper.


I did a Fine Arts degree at York University in the 1970s, during the height of Conceptual Art. My painting teacher for 3 years, who I liked very much but who had a very different aesthetic to my 'natural' one, painted very large shit brown canvases and made rooms out of white sheets.  He was very 'in.' I was encouraged to make 'ugly' paintings that had no colour and no recognizable form. This era was a celebration of highly controlled abstract art (think of the critic Clement Greenberg and his group of artists, of Newman, Still, Frankenthaler, Bush [Pollock was passé already], of Colour Field (memory of how we were force fed this still makes me shudder) and of art in general in disintegration (a Modernism on the crux of Post-Modernism).

After finishing that degree, I did not paint for many years, only interrupting my hiatus when I was pregnant in 1987 (when I did the Birth Painting series knowing I was violating every single tenant taught by my teachers at York U in the 70s).

In 2004, I began to draw and paint again. It remains an uphill battle. Always looking over my shoulder are my old art teachers, who never taught us anything about the body itself. While we did have models to paint, we did not study anatomy, bone structure, muscles, anything of any use. It was about what you could say about your drawings or paintings that counted. The more indistinct and abstract your art, the better. So I learnt to be clever in the stories I wove about what I was doing. Dialoguing about my art was perhaps somewhat of a charade, though. I was never a Conceptual artist at heart.

Give me sensuality, rich colour, bodies that are embodied. When we painted with colour and with any sense of the body of the original model, be this a person or a landscape, we did it at home and never brought those paintings in to the university.

Of course, times have changed. It is not like this anymore.

Because of the era I studied in, though, there remain holes in my art education. Holes, like anatomy. But, hey, it's never too late, as they say. While I certainly know general anatomy, I was recently given some iPhone apps that are superlative guides to those strange anatomical terrains, the underlayers of our bodies.

Here are two of my 'muscle' drawings, which I am itching to paint. I deliberately did them in a throw-away sketch book so they would remain quick sketches - if they re-appear painted, ah well. The paper they are drawn on is good paper at least.

Butter Breeds Content

Speaking of 'super kitten'...

Sunlight shining in the window, catching my latest painting with a luminescence the iPhone4 couldn't quite capture, but it did my kitten who at that moment leapt to the window sill to chase a tiny fly.

See her shadow.

Spring God, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, oils on canvas.

And here are my two furry babies! Keesha, my Springer Spaniel who will turn 13 on August 25th, and Songa, my 3 month old kitten of Russian Black, Siamese and Tabby lineage. Aren't they sweet!

Shall I tell you about the butter solution to cat and dog problems?

A friend told me about a friend who had a dog and a kitten. She slathered the kitten in butter and the dog would lick it off. After about a week of this daily buttering, the dog and cat were sleeping together.

Our little kitten, all 6oz of her, arrived as a hissing, clawing ball of frightened bravado. She had a special technique where she could aim projectile spit straight into the eye of the dog. My dog barked at her, but would turn her head when close; she wouldn't look at her due to the 'hiss-spit.'

Enter butter. On my finger.

I wasn't into a fully buttered kitten, only a dab or two. So I tried it, and had to hold the little kitten in my hands offering the spots of butter to the dog at the dog's mouth level. It was quite strange to be doing this on the floor of my kitchen.

The first buttering went well. Songa purred like a little tractor when she was being licked by Keesha. Soon afterwards, they were stopping to touch noses on their way through the small apartment.

Then Songa began purring underneath Keesha when she was waiting on the stairs for her treat after having gone out for a whizz.

After only a few days of tiny dabs of butter, I found them sleeping together. And I took the photograph you see here with my handy iPhone.

The other morning the kitten spent quite a long time washing the dog - underneath where her teats are.

After the dab and lick today, and after Songa had torn the place apart, you know, tearing up the hemp room divider via the Chinese satin cloth slung over it, running across the antique silk sari that is draped over another room divider, attacking my iPhone cord, the usual, when she tired, she slipped over to sleep close to Keesha, and curled herself enwrapped in the dogs paws. Her trust of the dog is entirely the opposite to when she arrived. Butter breeds content.

Among my favourite books to read my children when they were little were the stories of Krishna, the Butter Thief in a small book of Hindu tales for children.

It always delighted me because I, too, am a butter freak. All my life people have laughingly asked if I was having a little bread with my butter, the latter being spread so thickly it seems it should be illegal.

And see, now I can say, butter is good for many things, including creating bonds between dogs and cats.

The Portable Studio

My current 'shared-room' studio. I can have it dismantled in 10 minutes flat. The palette is upright because my 3 month old kitten is, well, '...is it a bird? a plane? no, it's super kitten!'

Canada Day 2012

When I first came to Canada, it didn't even have its own flag. I remember the flag competition, and that the maple leaf chosen wasn't my favourite of the designs.

The drawing I did today is somewhere between skinless vulnerability and the goalie's hockey mask. Ambiguities and paradoxes abound.

Canada Day 2012, Brenda Clews, 27.9cm x 21.6cm, 11" x 8.5", graphite, charcoal, red Bombay India ink on Fierro paper.

An interesting graphic of stats in Canada compiled by a design team in a free newspaper, 24H, that I was given exiting a subway a few days ago.

I clipped this to a table-top easel and have been staring at it for a few days, and now it seems part of the sketch (with its overly largish maple leaf considering the height of the borders).

Spring God gets more paint

Today I worked on this painting. While I can't say for certain, likely it is finished.

He's on my bedroom wall, where the light hits the paint just right, and finally I like this painting. So that's a relief. :) He has more substance now, and looks like he could stand up and shake the rain clouds loose.

Spring God, 24" x 30", 61cm x 76.2cm, oils on stretched canvas.

Below, earlier versions. I began this painting on March 30th, 2012, at a Toronto School of Art friday night drop-in non-instructional life painting session. The model was working on a B.A. in English Literature at York University, I recall. The one to the far right is what I did that night.