Friday 13 March 2009

answering a double call from beyond






Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day

You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.


Christina Rossetti (Remember)

18 comments:

  1. i have done only one commissioned artwork in my entire life. it was for a one act play about the rosetti's. i did a massive portrait of her, and i will always remember how much i enjoyed working with that big canvas, spending all amounts of time on her hands! they were folded up in her lap. i thought about those hands a lot, how expressive a pair of hands could be.

    the end.

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  2. Da... nu e chiar zambet, dar cred ca intelegi tu...

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  3. Hi Roxana, i was away so c'd not comment earlier. this is re your 'self portrait with crescent moon'. as usual there is a flurry of comments but since your creativity is personal and to an extent private( if the publication of these photos here can be called private though you are still impersonal for the majority of your readers), any analysis of your photos will be superfluous. maybe peter james' comments are to some extent reasonably on the mark, but then i don't know him and i don't know how much he knows you.

    i was genuinely impressed by your pics but why was i so? and then, if there was no attached poem, there w'd have been no effect. in other words, these photos, if i may so suggest, reflect a symbiotic relation with a text that i find really poetic for the hum and repitition( whosoever influenced you) matches the dark repitition of the images.

    you confess it is you, with the "my fever,
    dance with me, my pain,
    swirl me into the shape", and then you give us some lines of luminous intensity, reflecting on a shadowy 'you', soul touching moments etc etc.then gone.

    i think the lines are remarkable and i eat my words again, sometimes words can convey the frozen poetry of still images, but only sometimes. if there is ache and pain and fever in the flesh, surely you can convey and show it in relation to another body? or do you duplicate it in mirrors?

    anyway, i have actually not been able to convey what i wanted to. the photos are poetic, the lines more so. my comments dwindle now into nothingness, so don't mind.take care.

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  4. i find the photo somehow much more tragically dark, much more despairingly about death than rossetti's poem ..

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  5. what a terrifying photo... i found the poem comforting after that.

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  6. Photo couleur dans les terres, être une personne me fait comprendre que je suis un être conscient, un être libre, autonome, indépendant, un être qui est redevable de ses actes devant lui-même; tu cherche ou Roxane (Narcisse tombant amoureux de son reflet dans le miroir de l'eau), la flatterie qui consume de prétention, ou à l'inverse tomber dans l'auto-négation, la honte de soi: L'image du corps n'est rien qu'une pensée qui enveloppe une représentation de ce que je suis.

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  7. OH, strangepress, really? have you done that? I can't believe this! I'd like so much to see that portrait... do you have a picture of it?

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  8. Kubla, hi!


    I think there is always something private in the work of an artist (again: speaking generally, I don't see myself as one), and in the case of a self-portrait, even more so. but, when he or she creates, the artist has the ability to become im-personal too, and thus universal, as Keats put it:
    'poetical character... has no self- it is everything and nothing- it has no character and enjoys light and shade; ... A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body'.


    do you mean Peter or James? they are two different persons, I believe :-) but no, they don't know me 'personally'.


    do you really say that the pictures by themselves would have had no impact? wow, for the first time, you accept that words can also say something that a picture cannot, or at least 'complement' an image :-)

    anyway, I am very happy that you liked it so much, be it images or words or both together... and thank you for telling me how you felt about it, thank you so much...

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  9. ffflaneur... the poem was here as a kind of self-delusion, but I see that it hasn't managed to delude the astute observer that you are :-)

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  10. manuela - somehow a picture showing grief has much more impact than a grief poem, or am I wrong here? but more than grief, I think there is despair in this picture.

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  11. Siam, mais il y a plusieurs images du corps, justements parce qu'il y a plusieurs images de soi-meme, et elles sont aussi contradictoires, la plupart du temps. je trouve la photographie un moyen fabuleux pour s'interroger sur l'identite et je vois mal comment la pensee de la corporeite pourrait etre eludee. de toute facon, le corps est present dans le geste createur, en photographie encore plus qu'en litterature.

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  12. multumesc de flori si cuvinte. o sa dureze nu stiu cat, dar o sa se si termine si voi reveni.
    be well
    m

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  13. there is a translucence here reminiscent of the oils of the old masters.
    But i do not see grief or death here. i see reaffirmation of life. an unwillingness to fade or let fade. maybe i am alone in this, but blood, wound and pain conveyed here seem as motiffs of life's desire for itself. Besides the picture moves from deathly green on the left to the lively rouge on the right...and that is how the eye travels, no?

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  14. zuma :-)

    I am so happy to read you again.

    there was a hot debate on this topic on another blog, whether the way we read (from left to right in our languages, but from right to left in others) influence the way we perceive motion (ascendent versus descendent movements and emotions related to them, for example hope versus sadness).
    but I agree with you, the picture could be understood (or more precisely 'felt') also in this way. I am glad that you pointed that out, we were all kind of dark and despairing here :-)
    my friend gentle even called me to ask if I was ok after she had seen this :-)

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  15. no of course i can see the pain. a desperate primal pain. but pain is nothing but a being desire to stay alive. those that fade gently into the night feel no pain. only a mild grief or maybe nostalgia - but this is too strong for that

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