Images surround us ...

[alice wellintown]

How it means is what astounds me. The poem, like a good tentmaker's
thread, or like the Apostle Paul's notion of the redemption of time,
or the recognition of the Christ by an embryonic prophet, will lose
most of what it means once we devorce it from how it means by
explicating it. Try writing it out in other words or writea paraphrase
of it and all is lost. We hear its images that cling like women
collecting conversations and people walking round in a ring in Eliot's
Preludes and Wasteland.



On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 8:32 PM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> alice wellintown wrote:
>> This strikes, leaps off the page a poem, it rings all the bells in all
>> the un real city
>
>
> b-but what the heck does it mean?
>
> I mean, we got the images surrounding us,
>
> and then it transpires he means the images *of us* that others have
> [or so we may reasonable presume] which are subjective and probably
> not at all how we think of ourselves
>
> and then our qualities good and bad changing and somehow in their
> interactions they create recognitions
>
> but how do we get from there to John the Baptist leaping in the womb
>
> and then trying to intuit Jesus's feelings on the cross -
>
> which, hey maybe this is the connection??? -  just as our own selves
> are seen thru the filter of the other preoccupations of those who
> notice us, so Jesus's experience and emotions are filtered [and then
> written, nay painted] on the wind by Saint Paul the tentmaker who
> presumably had a full set of his own distorting distractions and
> preoccupations? and come to us 2nd hand, or really 3rd hand since we
> are reading about it via WBG
>
> so it goes, Otto's not alone in seeing thru a glass darkly
>
>
>>
>> Images surround us; cavorting broadcast in the minds of others, we
>> wear the motley tailored by their bad digestions, the shame and
>> failure, plague pandemics and private indecencies, unpaid bills, and
>> animal ecstasies remembered in hospital beds, our worst deeds and best
>> intentions will not stay still, scolding, mocking, or merely
>> chattering they assail each other, shocked at recognition. Sometimes
>> simplicity serves, though even the static image of Saint John Baptist
>> received prenatal attentions (six months along, leaping for joy in his
>> mother's womb when she met Mary who had conceived the day before):
>> once delivered he stands steady in a camel's hair loincloth at a ford
>> in the river, morose, ascetic on locusts and honey, molesting
>> passers-by, upbraiding the flesh on those who wear it with pleasure.
>> And the Nazarene whom he baptized? Three years pass, in a humility
>> past understanding: and then death, disappointed? unsuspecting? and
>> the body left on earth, left crying out - My God, why dost thou shame
>> me? Hopelessly ascendant in resurrection, the image is pegged on the
>> wind by an epileptic tentmaker, his strong hands stretch the canvas of
>> faith into a gaudy caravanserai, shelter for travelers wearied of the
>> burning sand, lured by forgetfulness striped crimson and gold,
>> triple-tiered, visible from afar, redolent of the east, and level and
>> wide the sun crashes the fist of reality into that desert where the
>> truth still walks barefoot.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "...seems the simplest things are hardest to explain" - Dave Mason
>