about Monet and the art of seeing

[Suchin]

I know this isn't a poetry site but this one speaks so directly to all of us that I thought it would be appreciated. Monet Refuses the Operation Doctor, you say that there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction. I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and blur and finally banish the edges you regret I don't see, to learn that the line I called the horizon does not exist and sky and water, so long apart, are the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral is built of parallel shafts of sun, and now you want to restore my youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, the illusion of three-dimensional space, wisteria separate from the bridge it covers. What can I say to convince you the Houses of Parliament dissolve night after night to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don't know each other, as if islands were not the lost children of one great continent. The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, becomes water, lilies on water, above and below water, becomes lilac and mauve and yellow and white and cerulean lamps, small fists passing sunlight so quickly to one another that it would take long, streaming hair inside my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! Our weighted shapes, these verticals, burn to mix with air and changes our bones, skin, clothes to gases. Doctor, if only you could see how heaven pulls earth into its arms and how infinitely the heart expands to claim this world, blue vapor without end. - Lisel Mueller

[Dev Dodd]

Thank you Suchin for sharing this gift. An utterly transplendent poem, and I'll be forwarding it on to others.
I believe in the pure Surrealist joy. check http://www.screensite.org/courses/Jbutler/T340/SurManifesto/Manifes...

[Suchin]

Thanks for the link.

[Jean Detheux]

How timely!

Less than a week ago, I wrote the following (on another forum):
There was a trend recently to "dismiss" the works of many great painters (Monet, Giacometti just to name two) by suggesting it had been made possible because "there was something wrong with their eyes."

The ayatollahs of the "the eye works like a camera and we all see the same thing" cult are at work everywhere.

Where were you when I needed that poem?
;-)

[Suchin]

Here. You didn't tell me you needed that poem, lol.