It’s 1 o’clock in the morning again.
What I love about visual art that literature can’t do is how the viewers’ experience of it may exist outside of time. You can peripherally process a shape on one part of the canvass while looking at a shape on a different part of the canvass and, as your synapses connect the two, have already moved your attention to a third area without thinking about it. You don’t move your eyes across canvassed oil pigments the same way you do across a line of written text. I used to think, perhaps from the romanticism of knowing little about its mechanics, that music was the most affecting art form for its capacity to surpass logic and language and jump straight to emotions. But, if art, the same can be said of scent. Music is too similar to poetry, literature and theatre in this respect, it only occurs in time. I wrote a poem inspired by Rousseau’s The Dream in which I tried to emulate its freedom from a linear viewer experience. One of the things I love most about that painting is how it can surprise you: you don’t know what you have already been processing until you have looked at it more closely. In this way, certainly, the viewer’s experience of it exists in time as well. However, by the repetition of similar shapes scattered across the canvass, Rousseau draws you in to the arrival of recognition by allowing your brain to process the images before you are aware of them. Layered within that process, the painting’s invitation to the viewer to be aware of separate elements to interchangeably different degrees all at once, is much closer to how people think than language is. Most of the time, we don’t think linearly. My thought process is typically shaped more like a shadowed map than a sentence. If a composer or a writer used Rousseau's technique to attempt to make their audiences’ experience nonlinear in this way, it would have the opposite effect. Callbacks and repetition, in these mediums, serve to help us build a maturing relationship with the content and therefore remind us of time’s passing. In my poem from the painting, I attempted to try this by separating stanzas from right to left as well as from top to bottom—a device in contemporary poetry which I usually despise for its tendency to dilute, to me, the writer’s experience of the impulse of the poem. I wanted to make it ambiguous as to where a recitation of the poem should begin the stanza on the right in the middle of the stanza on the left or after it. Or if the two stanzas should be recited in tandem, their lines leapfrogging and interchanging. Had I been more ambitious, stanzas on the right would contain more detail or story but I didn’t want to confound the reader with extraneous details—or myself for that matter. Without a correct answer about how the stanzas are to be arranged I attempted, and failed, to make this poem like the painting that it praises. Or like a painting, in general. I also paid homage to the painting’s use of repetition. However, with an effort to banish the experience of time passing I compacted the repetition, placing words immediately next to themselves rather than calling back to them from a distance, attempting to stall time rather than highlight it. Ultimately, perhaps because I learned poetry from within conservative literary traditions, I felt the need to build towards this structure and then to denouement from it, supporting it with—pun intended—a frame. But, alas, doing so ensures that any whole experience of the poem occurs in a linear beginning-to-end like music and stories must. I haven’t slept well enough lately to presently pull from a properly exhaustive catalogue but to my knowledge there are few popular works of art, outside of painting, that occur in the audiences’ experience in the nonlinear way that thoughts do. Samuel Beckett certainly attempted it throughout his career. His short plays, Not I, Rockaby, and Footfalls come to mind. But in order to approach that experience the pieces had to be brief in content. Being brief, of course, they lose the full potential of their hypnotism. I think this is particularly true to a present-day audience that has already been touched by these works even prior to seeing them. By having a second character in Not I however, a tall vague human figure shrugging its shoulders in the distance, Samuel Beckett might have succeeded. The existence of that figure has a rationality but its conjecture in context with the rest of the piece in performance is not rational: it’s emotional. Like dreams, like music. The beauty of this is that the figure is neither dramatic, like most western theatre, nor literary. It succeeds, perhaps, because it is visual. To call you back through time for a quick simile: it’s like Rousseau’s canvass. Unfortunately, that figure is completely omitted from most contemporary productions of the play. The opening sequence to Apocalypse Now comes close as well. But again, that’s a visual use of a visual medium. Sarah Kane wrote dramatically active performance text. Fight me, she did. But in an interview with Dan Rebellato she famously demonstrated a way of toying with structure which separates plot from story through fragmentation. Just as theatre itself—because time itself—cannot be experienced as a whole but as a moment, Sarah Kane’s representation of a self arrives fragmented, lacking a whole, and therefore separated from its own story. In writing, she achieved this in her in-yer-face play, 4:48 Psychosis. Lacking in Kane’s trauma, I hope that my poem is a little more palatable to the sensitive spirit. I’ve only ever seen a student production of 4:48 Psychosis so I may not have been exposed to its broader traditions of staging. But I’d posit that, for the first while, the audience will be fighting the text to arrive at a linear experience of it while Sarah Kane insists them away from such traditional notions. How would you relieve the audience of such unnecessary labour in a traditional theatre staging? You would have to Artoud it: surround the audience with it on all sides, make it impossible to search for a beginning-middle-end right off the top so that the audience can live inside the character’s experience of herself, fragmented. Like thoughts. My poem, obviously, is completely incapable of immersing the audience because a poem is two-damn-dimensional. Visual art, however, manages it all the time. Or, as the case may be, manages it outside of time. Not always well. But you don’t have to do things well to achieve them. I’ve only just sent my poem to a literary magazine to receive the very first in its official litany of rejections. So, no, you can’t read it yet. Thanks for your curiosity though.
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6/4/2023 10:20:35 pm
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