It's James Thurber's birthday today. In his quasi-fairy tale, The Thirteen Clocks, time is frozen; the warm hand of Saralinda can do nothing to set the clocks ticking again. I've always loved its strange mix of logic/magic, as when the Golux offers this instruction: "If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them." "Hold your hand this far away," he tells Saralinda. "Now that far. Closer. Now a little farther back. A little farther. There! I think you have it! Do not move!"
That space between the hand and the clock, like the distance between the poem and the work of art.
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Ten years ago, my students were reading poems about Caravaggio's painting, "Conversion on the Way to Damascus." It offers a fantastically foreshortened view of Saul/Paul on his back on the ground, almost under the feet of the horse he's fallen from, his arms wide apart as if forced open by the light. Behind the horse and under Saul's back, everything is black. It's a great, strange painting. But when I tried to show it to them, the projector blew its bulb. Blank wall. Had I been waiting for that to happen? We were not in rural Ohio, but--for that lucky semester--in Rome, a twenty-minute walk from the Piazza del Popolo. We get up, go out, and hit the cobbled pavement.
Elizabeth Bowen, in A Time in Rome, insists that "knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather." We sweated our way along the crowded sidewalks of the Via di Ripetta, eventually spilling out off-axis into the wide piazza. Across the way, there's a billboard half the expanse of the church wall: just a line of writing and a tiny car. Avvicinati di piu, it says. "Come closer."
Does it matter what it's selling? That's what we've been trying to do--come closer to the painting. We cross the piazza, but just as we arrive at Santa Maria del Popolo, the doors are closing for a service. It's not for so long that we've missed our chance for the day. Just enough to make us wait. We sit outside on the steps and re-read that morning's poems: Thom Gunn's "In Santa Maria del Popolo" (1958), Stanley Plumly's "Comment on Thom Gunn's 'In Santa Maria del Popolo' Concerning Caravaggio's The Conversion of Paul"(2000), and Paul Otremba's "Surfing for Caravaggio's Conversion of Paul"(2008). In all three poems, getting close to the painting is crucial to feeling what it wants us to see. Gunn's poem sets the scene in the narrow chapel where the painting hangs:
Waiting for when the sun an hour less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.
Gunn waits to see the light. Plumly, responding to Gunn, puts his lire in the lumen box to light up the painting. Otremba, following in the literary but not literal footsteps of the other two, enters the keywords, "Caravaggio, painter, Santa Maria del Popolo" into his computer.
I don't have to go to Italy
to stand in line for a conversion,
or to be, as the poet says, still falling.
In fact, the computer gives Otremba too much: other versions Caravvagio painted of the scene, other Caravaggios, an intensifying chiaroscuro inducing a vertigo of its own, and a sense (Otremba writes) that even "If I were closer, I wouldn't understand." When, at last, we go in, there is no place to stand in the tiny Cerasi Chapel. When we see it, it knocks us back, we are too close. Caravaggio wants us to enter Saul's experience, wants the painting to be difficult, almost impossible to see.
Is it perverse of me not want to show you the painting at all? I'd almost rather go back to Alice Fulton's "Close," which, like Caravaggio's painting, situates us
...an arm's length from unbeing, as it seems.
I was what flashed through me
in full frost. We were life to life,
in our flesh envelopes,
insubstantial, air to air and you and I.
Sitting near the window of a coffee shop (this was a year ago, after looking at the Frankenthaler exhibition), I thought about these paintings and these poems, until the window washer came and erased my face.
I recommend that you read Milton, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Yeats, and then tell me what you think.
Posted by: Bill Bailey | March 10, 2022 at 05:39 AM