SEMAPHORES AND DESTINY
In that small place where my uncle once lived,
there was a carbine on the wall. His closets were
stuffed with music - and the wonder of it all:
photo albums of Alsace-Lorraine, where he
spent three long years, he said, teaching English
to miners, or minors, I never got that straight.
I was but twelve at that time, and always wished
to own that prison-painting he had hanging.
He said it was done by a guy serving life
for murder. It was about 12X15 inches, I'm
guessing, but was a wonderful three-dimensional
farmhouse, with a fence and a distant vista
and some trees and a stream or a river.
What struck me about it, always, was that
it wasn't simply flat. It had a third dimension,
pushed out where the mountains and trees were,
recessed for the river and water. I hope you
can get what I mean. I marvelled always:
this prisoner in some distant land, spared
of death, I'd suppose, but doing life (not
so unlike us, after all, I'd think), finding a way,
in mostly greens and blues and browns, to show
some fuller extent of Life as known than one
would normally see. A super-realism behind bars!
An optic intensity missed forever! Some kindred
surrealist lost by an escaping death sentence!
I never really knew, but, alas - now all gone.
My uncle's long dead, the prisoner too, I guess,
has gone to meet some final judge, and the painting
itself, why - now, when I ask about it - none who
should know know a thing at all. It's as if it never existed!
(I hope that final judge appreciates art).
In that small place where my uncle once lived,
there was a carbine on the wall. His closets were
stuffed with music - and the wonder of it all:
photo albums of Alsace-Lorraine, where he
spent three long years, he said, teaching English
to miners, or minors, I never got that straight.
I was but twelve at that time, and always wished
to own that prison-painting he had hanging.
He said it was done by a guy serving life
for murder. It was about 12X15 inches, I'm
guessing, but was a wonderful three-dimensional
farmhouse, with a fence and a distant vista
and some trees and a stream or a river.
What struck me about it, always, was that
it wasn't simply flat. It had a third dimension,
pushed out where the mountains and trees were,
recessed for the river and water. I hope you
can get what I mean. I marvelled always:
this prisoner in some distant land, spared
of death, I'd suppose, but doing life (not
so unlike us, after all, I'd think), finding a way,
in mostly greens and blues and browns, to show
some fuller extent of Life as known than one
would normally see. A super-realism behind bars!
An optic intensity missed forever! Some kindred
surrealist lost by an escaping death sentence!
I never really knew, but, alas - now all gone.
My uncle's long dead, the prisoner too, I guess,
has gone to meet some final judge, and the painting
itself, why - now, when I ask about it - none who
should know know a thing at all. It's as if it never existed!
(I hope that final judge appreciates art).
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