So, I've been thinking more about the work of Mark Ryden, whose paintings my meat poems are based on. At first I was trying to "recreate" the paintings in words, but Ryden's paintings are singularly unsuited for that: as I've stared at them over many months, I realize how much his paintings are a reworking of a Byzantine iconology (Baroque Catholic as well . . . think Spain). The Byzantine spirit of sacred decoration aimed to overwhelm the senses . . . by painting, bejeweling, and gilding every surface, one could ensure that the worshipper entering the church would be instantly transported, bedazzled. So many images would be presented simultaneously that the viewer would have some insight, thus, into the multiplicity and grandeur of the deity. This was coupled by imagery that was purposefully flat and affected: I can hardly believe that it took until the Renaissance for anyone on earth to discover perspective. Rather, given that the entire point of the church and its work was to allow people to understand that there was another world, unlike this one, it made sense to make sure that images that purported to be of that world was unlike this one. (The Baroque sensibility in Spain took this from another angle: rather than creating flat images of people, it relied on hyperrealistic, wildly-colored, grotesque images of people). The people in Ryden's paintings have this iconistic feel, with a modern cartoon update (the oversized heads and eyes, the repetition of certain "god" figures, such as Lincoln). And everything that's not a person is a mad jumble of imagery and symbols--lush backgrounds of dinosaurs and prehistoric plants aside 1950s astronauts, Sacred Hearts, and words in Russian, numbers, and Asian symbols. In some respects, the paintings become a language without a decoder ring: signs repeat and enlarge over paintings, but you're left wondering if they have some defined meaning, or are empty gestures places in space simply for the bedazzling qualities they have. It's the semblance of meaning, of mysterious, important, spiritual meaning . . . but is there anything behind it? Do the paintings expose a naked emperor . . . that there is nothing more here than the attempts of the brain to order the flotsam and jetsam of visual imagery that we are constantly assaulted with into a recognizable and transcendant whole, as a way of denying that no transcendence is ultimately possible?
Okay, I think I myself might be descending into meaningless here. At any rate, the poems I'm writing have grown a bit smaller than they otherwise might have been. It's hard to recreate the visual field that Ryden has made, and I'm not sure that I care to . . . so, the poems have moved away from the paintings, a little bit, and have become more their own and different thing. When I first started to write them, I worried that they were incomprehensible without the paintings by their side. Now, I think they are more independent . . . and have a bit more of a Shaker approach to religious evocation: simplicity and unity focuses the mind on the oneness of god (or meat).
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