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A Sudden Art of Pain

In Orhan Pamuk’s My Name Is Red, Master Osman asks Black how two miniaturist painters from different epochs could have created two identical paintings without having seen each others’ work, before answering the question himself -

To paint is to remember.

In William Gaddis’ The Recognitions, Wyatt Gwyon has an uncanny ability to reproduce paintings by the Flemish masters. According to him -

Originality is not invention but a sense of recall, recognition, patterns already there.

To recall, and to recognize? Akhmatova on Lot’s wife, in her looking back at Sodom’s red towers, at her life in longing in a poem called (wait for it) “Lot’s Wife” (tr. Stanley Kunitz with Max Hayward) -

A single glance: a sudden art of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound.
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
And her swift legs rooted to the ground.

Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her, who suffered death because she chose to turn.

The moment that Lot’s wife turns into a pillar of salt - “a sudden art of pain stitching her eyes” - is also the moment in Akhmatova’s poem in which the words still themselves into a moment of pure ekphrasis, ut pictura poesis.

Writing as a remembrance game, then, the sudden art of pain. The choice to turn.

(The latter two images: by Jacob Jordaens and Nicolas de Crécy)

25 January 2012 ·

• Tags
• Orhan Pamuk
• William Gaddis
• Akhmatova
• art
• writing