These deceptively simple one-syllable words together are potent. They bear the enormously important question that has obsessed most artists at some point in their lives. When Rembrant and Picasso painted self-portraits, they were attempting to capture the figurative (and literal) artists’ eye. Modernist meta-poets like Eliot, Pound and Stevens likewise sought to explore the complex and intermingled relationship between art and reality as the creator’s mind touches upon what is perceived through the senses.
Does art depict and capture reality? Or does art create that reality?
Perhaps art and writing allow us to explore reality, to run it through individual and temperamental filters, and to choose what words, lines or colors will be used to create something visible to others and to ourselves. In this case, art provides one perspective, one version of reality. This in turn influences those who see or read it with open minds, whose own realities are influenced.
Creating art, be it painting, photography or poetry, also contains the sheer joy of creation, a celebration of the human ability to communicate nuanced emotions and ideas. Wallace Stevens explores the joy of language, and its necessity in a world which can be vulgar, banal, and menacing:
The Plot against the Giant
First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.
Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.
Third Girl
Oh, la...le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.
"Harmonium," 1923
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