While still a child, I admired the obdurate convict on whom the prison gates always close. I visited the inns and furnished rooms he hallowed by his stay. With his mind I saw the blue sky Rimbaud
While still a child, I admired the obdurate convict on whom the prison gates always close. I visited the inns and furnished rooms he hallowed by his stay. With his mind I saw the blue sky Rimbaud |
Rimbaud's words intertext with Australian historiography and Australian artistic responses to that historiography. Ned Kelly was both a bushranger and a convict. Australia was full of transported convicts who looked through windows in penitentiary walls at blocks of blue sky.The world is filled to suffocating ... Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images [and other signifiers], none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture ... We can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior ... The viewer is the tablet on which all the quotations that make up a painting are inscribed ... A painting's meaning lies not in its origin, but in its destination. Sherrie Levine
Kelly's helmet becomes a window
through which we look at slabs of blue sky as if from Kelly's point-of-view. In
order to create or imagine the blue inside Kelly's helmet, however, each reader
intertexts an assortment of virtual (inter)texts that play around that textual
site, even and especially, of course, if they have no idea about the Kelly myth.
Paintings are traditionally painted onto rectangular boards or canvases,
simulating windows onto other textual planes. Jane Clark says of Nolan's Kelly
[as centaur], 1955 that, "as Kelly invades the landscape, so the
landscape and the sky -- pictorially and metaphorically -- invade him" (118).
This comment can equally be made of Kelly [as centaur], 1946.
Nolan's images continually play with landscapes, moving without care from
internal to external spaces. Rimbaud's poem resonates into both Nolan's
paintings of Kelly [as centaur] (figs. 40 & 46), and Nolan's images intertext
back into Rimbaud's poem (Rimbaud 179).
"Unhelmeted" looks behind the mask,
inviting readers to intertext with its substance
the four Nolan images that depict Kelly outside his helmet. Because I studied
intertextuality and the Nolan oeuvre, the oval "frame" around
the young Kelly's jail record, inter-images for me with Nolan's depiction of Eliza
Fraser (an English woman shipwrecked in North East Australia in the 1900s). In this
painting, Nolan paints Mrs Fraser as if being seen through binoculars or the telescopic
lens of a camera, or down the barrel of a gun.
In "mesh.html" I quote Deleuze and Guattari writing
about maps as metaphors for reading. I repeat their description here,
out of context: [What is it that] can be torn, reversed,
adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social
formation. ... [What is it that] can be drawn on a wall, conceived of
as a work of art,
constructed as a political action or as a meditation ... A map has multiple
entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes 'back to the same' ...
Can memories be torn, reversed, adapted ...
The word
eddy
appears throughout Australian novelist, Patrick White's oeuvre.
Undoubtedly it is a word liked by the writer, but after having read The Twyborn Affair,
Eddie Twyborn intertexts with White's uses of the word
eddy
,
drawing earlier White novels and stories (and texts written by other writers)
together in a kind of collagic way:
The blue sky seen through Nolan's empty visor, even though a body is present
(albeit
a headless entity), represents for me the "splitting" that takes
place during great pain,
especially that associated with violation of one's body.
Wanting to see with "his mind" is perhaps a sub-conscious cry to understand the
perpetrator's
situation.
Wanting to see with "her" mind is a double-edged cry
for the writer of "unhelmeted" because although
she wants to see again with the eyes of a child (with her own eyes),
one of her perpetrators was female and so, again, there is that strangely
child-like desire to "understand" the person behind
the mask: that entity which eddies ever outwards and away.
Their author/reader must work to construct them into political action ...
Both writing and reading are activities that spring from the entity inside:
the multi-faceted identities which are always being reworked, reformed: which may
have been shattered and reshattered in a cyclical fashion. Deleuze and Guattari
imagine that they are opening up the activity of reading to wild new spaces -- and well they may be --
but the map reading the map may be so fluid as to resist the notion of map
which suggests that somewhere is something that can be mapped: the metaphor needs
to shift afresh to one of a continually refreshing digital image,
to shifting filmic matter
which is not even interested in somewhere from whence it may or may not have come.
It is evolving into eddies that are now upon water, now in a poem,
now any of various novels.
'[s]o that Palfreyman and Miss Trevelyan
were reduced to a somewhat dark eddy on the gay stream of trite encounters and
light laughter that had soon
enveloped them' (Voss 107); '[o]r, suddenly, they would lose control, whirled
around by unsuspected eddies. But willingly. As they leaned back inside the
slippery funnels of the music, they would have allowed themselves to be sucked
down, the laughter and the conversation trembling on their transparent teeth'.
(Riders in the Chariot 29)
Both these passages intertext with the burning house in Malcolm Lowry's
Under the Volcano, '[a]nd leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself
suddenly gathered upwards an borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars
scattering aloft with ever wider circlings like rings on water' (337). What can
be written in words, authored in html by incorporating digitally reworked images
and or moving images, made into either video or films, however, does NOT equate to
what takes place when any conglomerate intertextuality interacts with
the virtual intertextual realms inhabited by readers and the complex
identikits therein. There is a continual movement between that which is
inside and
outside intertextuality in every way in which that phrase can be read.
Because "Unhelmeted" visits the embodiment of a
young child with great anguish as
other flesh and as other eyes enmeshed with her personal space, the meeting together
of several texts within the body of the poem, "Unhelmeted", then seems appropriate.
The fragmentary nature of the poem's assemblage
is also an attempt to embody the shattered-ness,
which is never fully restored, it
seems.
Diane Caney, 1998
References
Notes
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