The surface of the Earth is covered with overlapping racetracks. Take the wrong turn, & a jockey is likely to find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings, sometimes not even on the continent they started off on. & often lost from sight, until a convenient cave opening allows the invisible to regain some visibility, even if in a parched & foreign land.
What people see is the title, not the subject. & the subject contradicts the title. “I was inspired,” said Magritte. “The subject to be painted: a bicycle on a cigar.” Or to put it even more bluntly, a bicycle riding roughshod over another object — no state of grace in that. Ex- cept . . .The objects float, & perhaps a belief hovers that the laws of gravity are defied when things are in a state of grace. Which brings in Simone Weill, who wrote: “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” ‘Analogous to’ is the escape clause that allows St. Thomas Aquinas to come on board & point out that grace builds upon, not contradicts, nature. Then, once all parties are on stage, lined up like ten pins in a state of grace, Magritte reappears, wearing his bowl- er hat, & with a solid verbal cast, scatters the skittles with his addendum: “A bike sometimes runs over a cigar down in the street.” No gravity, no grace inherent.
This what we set out attempting to do, the catching of a bird in flight. So fast, so hard though. Requires practice, patience, per- sistence. Means starting in one domain, which, if we fail with its mode of manual dexterity, must, then, move ahead to another, leaving some familiar forms be- hind. Ironic, though, since many of those are classed as futuristic, but the intention must be there to move forward, to invent the fu- ture or re-invent it before our one arrives. Observation: the painter on the road, bowler-hatted but yet to become Mr. Everyman, still in the future. But the pre- sent striding on toward the peaks & villages. & the past, Vincent van Gogh. The Road to Tarascon.
The literal meaning of jan ken pon, the Japanese equi- valent of rock, scissors, paper, is ‘beginning with stone.’ That was the given. To go with it, various other items were then subjected to a battery of tests. This painting shows some of them undergoing the fire test, to see how easily they burn, how long for, & how much is left behind. Only one additional item survived the testing relatively unscathed. To choose the third, a handoff was be- gun between the best of the first round failures. Paper won.
L'abîme est un band de Montréal in- fluencé par le jazz, le rock, & le classique contemporain. This isn't them. More likely the painted shape is one of those bits of bricolage, the detritus one finds rolling around the bottom of an abyss. Magritte, more concerned with shadow than with shape, appoints it the head of a child. No jazz there. Possibly death metal.
The woman hides her head. Except she has no head. Is that what she is trying to hide? The wall is a dirty gray. There is an oval shape on it. Egg? Opening? Mirror? Is cracked, whatever it is. The presence of the woman's hands prevents us from looking past the cracks to see what's hidden there. The mirror stares back at us. We raise our hands. The wo- man hides her head before them — except she has no head to hide.
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There are two pipes. Or, rather, two paintings of the same pipe which are meant both to please others & ourselves, & to make others pleased with us. Do not say there is no heart in the work here—its basis is the human heart. The sorcery lies in an operation rendered invisible by the simplicity of its result—to make the pipe new, but floating in a natural silence where attention to the small details extends it more than it illustrates it or fills the void. To make it legend. Text Sources: This Is Not a Pipe, by Michel Foucault The Ladies' Book of Etiquette (1860), by Florence Hartley
So it doth appear, said Macbeth, or something like that. Though he was talking about daggers, not about pears or people who resemble them. Even so, the underlying mess- age was certainly clear — all appearances are subjective.
Three paintings of a dog, all different dogs but the same one painted. All different names but painted under the same name. Somewhere I read that this Loulou was black, but painted white for the occasion. Narrow nostrils, but supposedly had a big heart. So loved by its child- less owners that it traveled with them everywhere, even to the States, its right of passage paid for by a promise to allow the fuse- lage of one of the airline’s planes to later carry a Magritte motif. All things pass, including the in- fluence of a civilizer. The livery of the plane redone to reflect new alliances. & of the other themed air- craft, Tintin will be the next to go. |
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I put on a bowler hat take an apple for lunch & head for la plage at Yeppoon where I en- gage in a bit of plagiarism by purloining the i- mages of Magritte & putting them forward as my own.
& on the sixth day She remade man in their own image, after their own likeness, but with minor differences. The one to carry a briefcase, & the other a clean handker- chief, so that he could remove the small chips of stone that would in- evitably catch in the eye when tears didn't come.
