for 9. 4. 2023
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It should be of the pleasure of a poem to tell itself how it can.
Robert Frost, 1939
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It is of the pleasure of this website to both make and point to superficially improbable links, or those that emerge only from extended mulling.
Here is a poem about the beauty in an inescapable great truth about the making of art. What it has in common with Easter is its appreciation of what matters most, and is acknowledged as such in so many world religions and folk tales. In the Christian tradition, the man on the cross said, in defending himself against that sentencing, ‘To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.’
Religion is not part of this site’s remit. Nor is it the subject of the gently wry, judo- and koan-like, but strictly secular poem by the Anglo-French poet Roy Eales. Yet his poem is written from that same preoccupation with the supremacy of what is both essential and true — in this case, about the purpose and meaning of the lives and work of artists.
What are these worth? On the Indian subcontinent in the 1600s, the Moghul emperor Jehangir — who was also a consummate art-lover and collector, and a good writer — arranged for artists to receive regular wages roughly equivalent to the pay of soldiers. Unfortunately, he failed to start a trend. Connoisseurs of unlikely connections will want to know that the record of his admirable innovation was gleaned from following a mention in a finely wrought miniature essay on a financial news site, the other day, to a detailed explanation by Polyxeni Potter of the choice of cover art for a 2009 edition of Emerging Infectious Diseases.
‘The essence of a fine idea’ is taken from Roy’s latest collection of poems in Hazy mist on the sea, delicately illustrated by his wife Susan, an artist in her own right, and published this spring by Blackbird-Pawel Editions in a slender volume that looks and feels as if it grew out of a masterclass in exquisite bookmaking. In another expression of the dream of a culturally unified Europe, it includes English, Breton, French, German and Dutch versions of each poem.
I am placing the English verses after their French rendering in this post because French is the language in which I believe they came to Roy, in the unaccountable way poetry does to all genuine poets.
My ordering is a matter of sensing more or less music in an arrangement of words. What faculty decided the question? Citing the theories of the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, the virtuoso Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim has pointed out that we perceive more finely with our ears than with our eyes. A foetus growing in a womb begins to listen forty-five days into a pregnancy, giving hearing a seven-and-a-half month edge over the development of vision. This, Barenboim says — without any bias, naturally — means that the ear is ‘probably the most intelligent organ the body has.’
If nothing else, that makes me wish I could say and not merely write to anyone reading here today or tomorrow:
H A P P Y E A S T E R
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L’essence d’une idée admirable
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La poésie n’est pas nécessaire.
Les idées sont essentielles.
La poésie représente les idées du poète.
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Peindre n’est ni utile ni nécessaire.
Les idées sont essentielles.
Les peintures représentent l’idée d’un peintre.
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La musique est abstraite et n’est pas nécessaire
sans paroles pour chanter l’idée du compositeur.
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Les idées sont essentielles.
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Faire des images avec des mots
revient au même
que d’étaler la peinture sur une toile
ou bien de coucher des notes de musique sur le papier.
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Seul, chaque processus n’est qu’un processus, une abstraction,
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dépouillée de l’essence
des idées de l’artiste,
cachée pour enchanter,
pour être dévoilée
par nos imaginations.
Les idées sont nécessaires.
Faire quelque chose qui n’est pas nécessaire est une admirable idée.
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The essence of a fine idea
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Poetry is quite unnecessary.
Ideas are the essence.
Poetry represents the poet’s ideas.
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The process of painting is neither useful nor necessary.
Ideas are the essence.
Paintings represent a painter’s idea.
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Music is abstract and quite unnecessary
without words to sing its composer’s idea.
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Ideas are the essence.
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Making pictures with words
is no different
than stroking paint on a canvas,
or penning musical notes on paper.
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Alone each is just a process quite abstract,
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bald without the essence
of the author’s ideas,
concealed to delight,
to be unveiled,
by our imaginations.
Ideas are necessary.
To do something unnecessary is a fine idea.
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post-Gutenberg 
Dear Cheryll,
Easter Monday, 2023.
Your post on my new book Hazy mist on the sea underlines, yet again, the superbly fertile gift of insight within you. Perhaps ‘gift’ is not exactly the right word, but it is like the warmth of feeling one gets from the sparkling eyes one looks into of a person who speaks understanding, naturally, without effort, who confirms to you what you hope your words convey.
Your tour of “superficially improbable links” makes the inevitable link, and led me to reread all your previous posts, of many years now, with the recordings and words from my friends, about our work together here in Brittany and Europe, all of which links the insight I mention above to create a veritable whole. Yes, it is a rare gift, Cheryll!
As such, you spread your vision broadly, bearing the same sense of breadth that art and culture embodies and deserves. This you do surely with sparkling eyes, naturally, without effort, to confirm to those everywhere who read your words their own desire to be understood.
Thank you, Cheryll, for this great pleasure. There is no richer way for me to spend this morning of Easter Monday.
Roy
So eine sanft ou gentille réponse, cher Roy, trugarez vras. As we are all the products of our upbringing and believing almost any compliments was all but verboten, it will be at least ten years before I can allow myself to absorb any of that, and only with no one looking.
The honour is anyway all mine. In some tiny edits and additions since Easter, I have added the word koan to my description because it took me weeks after I first read this poem to begin to see how many dimensions it has. … Some of the shorter poems in your book are apt to get lost in pages in languages I don’t know — but then pop out as a lovely surprise. The one about Ivan the raven, for instance. I had no idea that I knew another great fancier of these formidably intelligent, dignified birds, which do not stoop to inter-species begging or pestering — or caw like crows, either.
I am sorry for being so slow to liberate your comment, posted on Monday, I see. As usual, I was checking the wrong virtual postbox — hoping that you or Susan would have had a chance to look for typos in my transcription. I did that carefully, but the arrogant word processing software — though it did not pretend to know French — kept making arbitrary alterations, eg., turning ‘cachée pour enchanter’, into ‘cacher pour enchantée,’ or dévoilée into dévoilér. … And I have always been a terrible proofreader.
I have given up the struggle to get the colour in the background of Susan’s drawings to match perfectly, or find a way to add a little pigmentation — to make them easier to see in search engine image galleries — without losing the red lettering in your Hazy mist’s titles, on the cover.
It’s also proved to be impossible to translate for screens the joy of handling indented, cold-pressed (‘NOT’), heavyweight watercolour pages — just like the best cashmere or raw silk.
Ken ar c’hentañ … elsewhere … but before I forget, the first Susan drawing on the page is an acrobatic feat, like one of Matisse’s cutouts.
Dear Cheryll, Thank you. I must note that within your post, your Breton is very good indeed! Just an aside, as you mentioned Ivan. The idea for the poem came to me from my notes because Max and Ivan were Sascha’s real pets. He told me about Ivan’s leftish-leanings and how Max took him on rides. I noted Sascha’s many comments and humorous stories. Sascha, always poetic, embroidered words better than any other artist I know. One can see how from his work, how truthful his fanciful, satirical mind worked.
Cheers.
Roy
Dear Roy, I found that I am very good indeed at winkling out new (for me) sites dedicated to making up for Google Translate’s incomprehensible omission of Breton from its list of offerings — even though it has Basque.
My Breton will be even more impressive once I can find pronunciation tutorials. Perhaps I will send this suggestion to my helpers, Baidu — which is Chinese, for heaven’s sake, wake up, Google! — and myonlinetranslate.com. … ‘Max carries Ivan on his head. They go shopping for sausages.’ (But how many of those were left when they got home to Sascha?)
That’s Sascha’s comment: I can only assume that Max and Ivan were accompanied by Sascha and/or his wife Lün. I will ask Lün next week when I Susan and I see her in Germany.
Roy