Death is not a continuum you might believe. One either is, or isn’t. And pushing daisies as one answer on Yahoo
says, “means you're dead ... like they bury you in the ground and then plant
flowers on top of your grave.” But is it
all so simple? The arts often portray
reality more complexly, as reflected in the imagination of the artist. In the arts this simplistic notion of death
can be played with. My three poems deal
with this ultimate boundary of life and death.
Death
can, for example, come before the end of life.
It was with just such a self-portrait that an old, and obviously tired,
Emilie Charmy (a French painter of vibrant, sexually charged portraits and
self-portraits) expressed that one can be alive ‘in death.’ And in Self Portrait Charmy’s last painting surreptitiously
communicates this sentiment to a hanger of her paintings 45 years after she
died.
And
what is death if it is not the disengagement from one’s surroundings. Yet one can leave the immediacy of life
without dying. One can escape life in
the material sense and find a home in the mind.
But is such an escape from life’s actuality also a form of dying? This is the question asked by the road that
goes no where and the heron who does not fly in Ekphrasis.
Of
course, it is only in seances that the dead are able to communicate with the
living. But who are the dead? Must they once have been alive, or are
fabrications of the art, fictional characters, also dead? And can they turn around and communicate back
to the living? Do they have a voice to
complain, to beseech, to demand justice?
Can their complaints sully the artist and her reputation beyond her
epochs? This is the question posed in Serving
Tea in an 18th Century Miniature.
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