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Triptych

Prelude, climax, aftermath,
that is the story of our lives, triptych
that takes away from he who hath,
without bell, book or even candlestick,
what he regarded as his own,
his life, which will be confiscated and
leave him with nothing, all alone,
trite triptych trash within a no-man’s land.
His narrative is adumbrated,
returning earth to earth, to adamah,
where he as prelude was created,
to be mere aftermath, from climax far.

Adamah is Hebrew for “earth, ” and the root of the name of “Adam, ” which in the Creative narrative denotes “First Man, created from the earth” (Gen.2: 7) .

Inspired by an article by Alan Jenkins in the TLS, December 5,2008 (“Human Meat”) . He writes:
That so many of Bacon’s motifs derived, in complex, vigilant ways from photography and film is entirely consistent with his acute awareness that these new art forms had rendered representation in painting obsolete, and with his horror of mere “illustration”. This was not to say that painting should not deal in “fact”: just that fact comprehended more than what is “seen naturally”. “One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object”, as Bacon put it to David Sylvester. He was also one of the most literary of painters, an admirer of Ulysses, an avid reader of poetry and drama who saw that the Oresteia and T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes were blood relations, who liked to quote lines from both yet who repeatedly and sometimes fiercely repudiated attempts to read “a story” into his own work.
But he insisted too much. At one level, his habit of working in triptychs, and at a deeper one the suggestiveness he often in fact achieved, not just in triptychs but in single paintings, militates against that very insistence. It is hard to look at such works as the “Crucifixions” of 1962 and 65, “Lying Figure” (1969) , “Triptych, Studies from the Human Body” (1970) or “Triptych March 1974” without a sense of prelude, climax and aftermath – though not necessarily in that order. Some such adumbrated narrative, an intimate human drama about to be embarked on, concluded or aborted also haunts the restrained and very beautiful portrait studies of a suited “Man in Blue”, his face and hands bright-lit on a deep blue ground, that are at once the most “readable” of all Bacon’s male figures, and the most ambiguous.

12/8/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
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