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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>The Painter Dreaming in the Scholar’s House</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">in memory of the painters Paul Klee <br>and Paul Terence Feeley</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">I</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The painter’s eye follows relation out.<br>His work is not to paint the visible,<br>He says, it is to render visible.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Being a man, and not a god, he stands<br>Already in a world of sense, from which<br>He borrows, to begin with, mental things<br>Chiefly, the abstract elements of language:<br>The point, the line, the plane, the colors and<br>The geometric shapes. Of these he spins<br>Relation out, he weaves its fabric up<br>So that it speaks darkly, as music does<br>Singing the secret history of the mind.<br>And when in this the visible world appears,<br>As it does do, mountain, flower, cloud, and tree,<br>All haunted here and there with the human face,<br>It happens as by accident, although<br>The accident is of design. It is because<br>Language first rises from the speechless world<br>That the painterly intelligence<br>Can say correctly that he makes his world,<br>Not imitates the one before his eyes.<br>Hence the delightsome gardens, the dark shores,<br>The terrifying forests where nightfall<br>Enfolds a lost and tired traveler.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And hence the careless crowd deludes itself<br>By likening his hieroglyphic signs<br>And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child.<br>That likeness is significant the other side<br>Of what they see, for his simplicities<br>Are not the first ones, but the furthest ones,<br>Final refinements of his thought made visible.<br>He is the painter of the human mind<br>Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness<br>That is in things, and not the things themselves.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">For such a man, art is an act of faith:<br>Prayer the study of it, as Blake says,<br>And praise the practice; nor does he divide<br>Making from teaching, or from theory.<br>The three are one, and in his hours of art<br>There shines a happiness through darkest themes,<br>As though spirit and sense were not at odds.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>II</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The painter as an allegory of the mind<br>At genesis. He takes a burlap bag,<br>Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher.<br>He paints it black because, as he has said,<br>Everything looks different on black.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe,<br>And black because its volume is the void<br>Before the stars were. At the painter’s hand<br>Volume becomes one-sidedly a surface,<br>And all his depths are on the face of it.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Against this flat abyss, this groundless ground<br>Of zero thickness stretched against the cold<br>Dark silence of the Absolutely Not,<br>Material worlds arise, the colored earths<br>And oil of plants that imitate the light.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">They imitate the light that is in thought,<br>For the mind relates to thinking as the eye<br>Relates to light. Only because the world<br>Already is a language can the painter speak<br>According to his grammar of the ground.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">It is archaic speech, that has not yet<br>Divided out its cadences in words;<br>It is a language for the oldest spells<br>About how some thoughts rose into the mind<br>While others, stranger still, sleep in the world.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So grows the garden green, the sun vermilion.<br>He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall<br>And be the same rose still, the radiant in red.<br>He paints his language, and his language is<br>The theory of what the painter thinks.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>III</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">The painter’s eye attends to death and birth<br>Together, seeing a single energy<br>Momently manifest in every form,<br>As in the tree the growing of the tree<br>Exploding from the seed not more nor less<br>Than from the void condensing down and in,<br>Summoning sun and rain. He views the tree,<br>The great tree standing in the garden, say,<br>As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight,<br>Growing its green height from the dark watered earth,<br>And as suspended weightless in the sky,<br>Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head.<br>He follows through the flowing of the forms<br>From the divisions of the trunk out to<br>The veinings of the leaf, and the leaf’s fall.<br>His pencil meditates the many in the one<br>After the method in the confluence of rivers,<br>The running of ravines on mountainsides,<br>And in the deltas of the nerves; he sees<br>How things must be continuous with themselves<br>As with whole worlds that they themselves are not,<br>In order that they may be so transformed.<br>He stands where the eternity of thought<br>Opens upon perspective time and space;<br>He watches mind become incarnate; then<br> He paints the tree.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>IV</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee,<br>About how he in our hard time might stand to us<br>Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning<br>As patron of the practical intelligence of art,<br>And thence as model, modest and humorous in sufferings,<br>For all research that follows spirit where it goes.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">That there should be much goodness in the world,<br>Much kindness and intelligence, candor and charm,<br>And that it all goes down in the dust after a while,<br>This is a subject for the steadiest meditations<br>Of the heart and mind, as for the tears<br>That clarify the eye toward charity.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=410467" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">So may it be to all of us, that at some times<br>In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail,<br>And when impatience in the street and still despair at home<br>Divide the mind to rule it, there shall be some comfort come<br>From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his<br>Whom I have thought of, for the wholeness of his mind,<br>As the painter dreaming in the scholar’s house,<br>His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought,<br>The same dream that then flared before intelligence<br>When light first went forth looking for the eye.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Howard+Nemerov">Howard Nemerov</a></strong></div>