Walking Into Paintings
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
Last week, I showed Moonlight how to walk into paintings. That is a simple detachment once someone shows you how. When you are inside you can reach out to anyone looking at the work. You can reach them and speak to them. They won’t hear you with their senses but they will get your message. You can do that because works of art create their own psychic space, no more or less real than any other space. Some paintings do it better than others.
For excursions, I don’t think that I’d recommend The Scream. Not to Moon anyway.
You immerse yourself in the landscape, in the world of the painting, in its sounds, in its life. Moonlight learned where I go when I crave peace. I took her hand. We opened a book and stepped into a Monet. Dressed in white cotton. We wore straw hats tied with silk scarves. We carried parasols with Oriental patterns on them. In high-button shoes. We stepped softly through an infinite Monet. We crossed a footbridge. We paused to languidly gaze at waterlilies. We watched the fishing boats go out at sunrise. The light played through radiant clouds on stacks of hay and sparkling cathedrals. How wonderfully it changed throughout the day. We floated on the clouds reflected in lily ponds. We were pink and blue reflections on ripples of water. We laughed. Moonlight was radiant with joy. I showed her that the place she often saw in her visions was real. It was tactile. It was aural. We felt the breezes and we became breezes. We felt the dew. We became the sparkling droplets on dark green leaves. We felt the warmth of the sun. We became pure lights. We radiated warmth. We gave life to flowers. To the pond. To each other. All of it was real. We wore long dresses of white cotton. We were flowers of every possible color. We held hands. We carried parasols. We flew kites. We walked across the meadow. In white cotton. In high button shoes. With silk scarves. We danced. We laughed. I shared the secret of the Muses with Moonlight. With love.
Last night we walked into Starry Night. Moon rearranged some stars but when we left, we tidied up. Everything was just as we found it. Floating on music is another acquired skill. I wanted to show Moonlight how to float on Baroque music. On Enya’s music. On Sarah McLachlan’s music. On Loreena McKennitt’s music. Finally I believe that some humans may be capable of Soul Ballooning. Back home Soul Ballooning is a team sport.
(C) Copyright Cary Enoch Reinstein
I wrote this in 2001. It came to me in a daydream from the unusual (for me) point of view of one of the women in a famous Monet painting of two women in a meadow. There’s a print of it in my doctor’s waiting room where the daydream happened.
I used two characters from a story I had already written. The speaker is the Melpomene the muse of tragedy. In my story she was a wholly alien life-form. This wasn’t written as poetry. It’s just an evocative meditation.
Countless works of art have been truly inspired and that inspiration stays in association with the work and is mirrored in the heart and the mind of the receptive viewer. (Otto Rogers)
When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion you seem to move inside the painting. (Botero)
Tags: Loreena McKennitt, meditation, Sarah McLachlanRelated posts
Death in the Suburbs
There are intangible realities which float near us,
formless and without words;
realities which no one has thought out,
and which are excluded for lack of interpreters.
– Natalie Clifford Barney
I saw Death driving a small pickup truck. His disguise was perfect. I felt safe because he wasn’t looking in his rear-view mirror at me. He was following someone else. The experience was very matter-of-fact. Death, himself, looked ordinary. Except for his black cowl, he looked just like a fresh-faced kid.
he was really Death
the genuine article
imagine Death being a kid
nobody else noticed Death
driving down 124th street
that amazed me
I suppose that they’d panic if they did
so their defenses kicked in
but I didn’t panic
he was really Death
other people have dulled senses
they’re insensitive
too disinterested
to see the threat
his name was Death
he drove a cheap pickup truck
he looked like a kid
the only thing strange
about seeing Death
driving down 124th street
was his pickup
every other time that I saw him
Death drove a Camaro
I wrote this poem in 1997 in Kirkland, Washington. I had frequently observed that aggressive or menacing drivers preferred a few specific types and makes of vehicles. This time I was driving in rush hour traffic behind one such driver. Tags: death, Poetry, road rage
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Entering the Qiblih
i remove my shoes bow my head in respect
and perhaps in fear
and enter the Qiblih
hear the nightingales sing the praises of the Splendor
i smell the attar of roses
see the dazzling lights
hear the laughter of the Adored One
i feel the echo of his emotions
though he has not spoken in the flesh for 100 years
i feel his reality
though i have never been convinced of mine
and never shall be convinced of it
i prostrate myself at the threshold
invoke the name
of the mystery
of the lifter of veils
of the comforter
the healer
invoke the names
invoke as many names as i can remember
feel the power
beg to be freed of grief
hoping to serve
i offer the service of art
my senses are numbed with shock
in the face of this power
i try to rise but stumble
offer my gratitude
vow never to forget
all the while
a chant a flute a birdsong a lullaby
plays softly in my head
Notes: The building I described is the Shrine of Bahá’u’lláh, the holiest spot in the Bahá’í World. This is the point to which all Bahá’ís turn in prayer, the ‘Point of Adoration’ or Qiblih. Read more at: The Baha’i Faith Index. These are the original web pages for my two Qiblih poems:
Entering the Qiblih and Qiblih Entreaty. Tags: Baha'i, faith, Shrine of Bahá'u'lláh
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Visionary Park
In Whispers we read: “Where do the others live, the ones who sent us here? The ones who exiled us to the earth?”
One restless night, I dreamed about a dystopian planet where all the poets, writers, artists, and seers had been banished. Eventually they all died out and nobody grew up to replace them.
After a very short time, that world with the ironic name of Harmony withered and almost died.
It took a very long time but Harmony’s dominant species finally realized their terrible error so they tried to nurture new artists and poets. But nobody could find any books on “How to Make an Artist” or “How to Make a Poet” and definitely not “How to Make a Prophet.” They flew from Harmony out to the stars but found no thinkers that they could understand. Too long ago they had exiled their visionaries to alien worlds that were now long forgotten and out of their reach.
They built effigies and habitats. They made studio replicas. They put desks covered with pens and notebook computers in a place of memory and reverence. It was a theme park complete with carousels and a roller coaster.
They named it Visionary Park.
People thronged to see the effigies of the long-gone creative souls. Sadly all they saw were wax statues. The walls were bare. There was no art, no poetry, no books. Nobody remembered what was in them. Nobody knew how to make new ones any more.
So it was too late. And not long thereafter everyone was gone. The planet became a desert. It was dead.
The End
Is this poetry or is it history? Remember the Stalinist Purges, the Maoist Cultural Revolution, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Nazi book burnings, the persecution of the Iranian Baha’is, or farther back to the Christian Inquisition, and oh so many more on a smaller scale, all in the name of maintaining social harmony.
“Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”
– Marshall McLuhan
