The title of this entry refers to a Sondheim lyric from Marry Me A Little:
Who, who could be
blue,
Knowing there’s
you somewhere nearby.
When anyone feels
your glow,
Their low has to
get high.
Following my last rather serious post, I wanted to say that my low has
been lifted by many encouraging friends.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that any artist in possession of some
form of talent must suffer for it. This
may not really be true, yet I find myself quoting Graham Greene with increasing
frequency…
“I wonder how
those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the
melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation.”
And so, I write.
It’s no surprise to me that in this Cruellest Month the ‘Art Hunter’ app
launched by National Galleries Scotland features a ‘blue’ theme. I became aware of this when I saw a painting
from Picasso’s ‘blue period’ tucked among the 15th/16th
Century European Masters at the National. At the Modern, in From Death to Death the juxtaposition of work from the permanent holdings
with pieces from the Daskalopoulos
collection demonstrates darker elements of the human condition. Rodin’s The
Kiss, recently planted in Edinburgh, may seem to present an erotic
celebration of life, but there is a sinister story behind it.
And at the Portrait, The House of Annie Lennox
shows the pleasure and pain of an iconic artist and talented musician laid bare. Next week, I will perform one of my poems in the Hawthornden Lecture
Theatre, in the prize-giving event for Inspired?
Get Writing! Reading your own words
in public can make you feel extremely vulnerable, but at least I feel confident
that my poem was good enough to be awarded special merit in this extremely
popular competition. And, as coincidence
has it, the poem contains an accidental reference to an Annie Lennox lyric: a ‘miracle
of love.’
Sometimes I think it’s a miracle that Art and Love survive at all in
this barbaric world.
The fourth in my sequence of poems on tones of blue is a mother, a
parent, an artist, not simply letting the fledgling fly the nest but actively casting
it out into the big, bad world. You
could say, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Joni Mitchel talks about the coyote who,
having raised her young, reaches a point where she bites its nose and says, ‘off
you go: fend for yourself.’ The poem talks
about fours: the Gospel-writers (symbolically), the humours, elements, archetypes,
and temperaments.
Conspicuously absent, ironically, is the colour blue. As Sondheim says,
Conspicuously absent, ironically, is the colour blue. As Sondheim says,
Long as there’s you with me,
the only thing blue is the sky.
Twelve
Tones of Blue
Canto IV
Send
them out!
Into the four corners of the earth.
The
blood-red earth, dry
but
for the laughter
of
the sacrificial ox, led
to
its sanguine slaughter;
Yellow
earth, inflamed
with
the choleric rage
of
the rampant lion,
Its
mane a fiery crown;
Phlegmatic
in the cool sky
the
eagle's wits perceive -
swoops
a green-coated catch,
gobs
its guts for greedy chicks;
Over
the blackened earth,
moist
with melancholy bile,
the
angel weeps in ludic
gravety
for divine insanity.
East and West, North and South:
Send them! Send them out!
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