Goat Code: November 2018

Monday, November 19, 2018

Ocean Roar, Engine Roar

(acrylic and oil on canvas, 9x12)

Metaphor, Painting, and Nothingness

This blog has mostly eschewed amateur words for the last year or so (almost two years really) in favor of amateur images, as I find myself in full retreat from a longtime attempt to develop some real creative writing material (poetry, fiction or non-fiction - all efforts have failed spectacularly), running instead headlong into the arms of joyful and messy acrylics and oils, brushes and knives, boards and canvases, a world with no fear of failure, where a blank space isn't intimidating, where meaning isn't important, and where words are entirely absent, save for the rather random titles I have been assigning to my pieces, sometimes prompted by songs I'm listening to or poems that I'm reading, or just by moods that I'm feeling.

But I also teach poetry on the side, so whenever I paint I'm often - if not usually - haunted by some or other poem or poetic image, or often also a song lyric. Earlier this year, for example, there was a series of paintings based on my ongoing fascination with the lives and works of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, and on their lifelong fascination with each other. Some of those paintings buried words from their poems here and there in the canvases in a rather pretentious tilt at marrying words and images.

In poetry, though, the marriage of words and images is a given - words conjure images; words stand in for images; words say one thing, but suggest something else, suggesting a cascade of meaning from the literal to the figurative to the frankly rather speculative, as the poem, loosed upon the world, in turn loses control of its original groundedness and becomes a free-floating and freely signifying machine/creature.

Robert Frost famously (famously? - that assumes a notoriety and renown that poets don't often receive anymore, for better or worse) averred that poetry "is metaphor," the full quote going as follows:

"There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority."

"Saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority." What words to conjure with, and what mischief to set before us, that there is pleasure in not saying quite what we mean, that poetry, among other modes, delights in misdirection, and in establishing a surface of meaning while immediately directing us to what lies beneath that surface, with nod and a wink, suggesting fairly strongly that we start digging, as Heaney put it in one of his earliest and best poems.

So I'm wondering how metaphor works in abstract painting, which seems to have become my mode of expression. Since there's never anything real that I'm actually painting, since it always already and only about color and texture and composition, it would seem therefore that this is, in this mode, only ever metaphor, but always somehow without, to use that awfully stuffy term, an "objective correlative." That doesn't stop people from finding one, mind you - they often say, "That looks like the ocean," or "That looks like a sunset," or "I see a person there," even though I rarely intend to paint anything that even remotely resembles something "real" or figurative, mostly because I actually can't. I have no training and no skill. I'm only ever painting from feeling and instinct. But if there is only metaphor here, in the visual mode, there is also only ever "ulteriority," only ever something *under* the surface, which means, paradoxically, that there is also at the same time never anything *on* the surface, which effectively renders every painting an illusion. It's only ever a reference to a non-existent realm of the real, so that this only ever a signifier without a signified, or a signified without a signifier (I haven't worked that part out yet).

Further, though, if there is nothing *literal* here in this work, then it would seem logical that what I'm offering is only ever *figurative,* if that is the nominal *opposite* of what is "literal." But since the painting isn't figurative either, because it is necessarily abstract, then in some senses, it's nothing at all. None of my paintings actually exist because they are metaphors for a non-existent referent! I love this discovery, for all that it's a lot of sophistry, and for all that it confuses me to no end, and for all that it leaves me way out in the void. But there are worse places to live. So welcome to my color void, everyone, where nothing means anything and everything is disconnected metaphor.