Steve_Bamlett_blog

Daily writing prompt

Describe a phase in life that was difficult to say goodbye to.

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The following blog comes from so many parts of my life but the immediate trigger was reading – only just in Chapter 1 still – James H. Rubin’s (1994) Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets, London, Reaktion Books (with his portrait of Mallarmé  on the cover) where I came across a reproduction of The Absinthe- Drinker by Manet in about 1859. Facially the drinker looks a little like I did when I too was a drinker – but not of absinthe, but in its symbolic look of duplicated impossible shadows reminding me of another drinker of what would have been absinthe if that was what was cheaply available. Underneath that were phases of life of a sort with a kind of link – a kind of obsessive dependency that seemed a solution to some unknown question but was neither a solution nor got me nearer to the puzzle of myself.

Now, contained but not trapped in true love with my husband, I adore him though not only for for seeing me through these phases – the first longer-term, the second over in a flash of three years late in life. But to The Absinthe Drinker – look at him, wanting to move away but stuck in the shadows that define him multiply in confusion dis-articulation. I thought about him. in England Browning’s Men and Women were still making a moderate splash though Tennyson’s Maud a bigger one.

I spent a long time in mt early life with Browning though and am still in inexplicable love with what he called his ‘off-hand style’ – something like the recitative from a grand opera whose arias have all been muted or forgotten. And I write, when at all, verse in these bland irregular iambic pentameters of his. Here’s one the Absinthe Drinker brought about, to keep on saying goodbye to phases.I know little of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) but was captured by an epigram (on page 9) of him in the Rubin book, which Rubin uses to articulate the way in which the eye is guided by the crafting hand of the artist – hands missing in the Drinker.

'L'Oeil, une main ...' que je resonge.

Mallarmé, 'Edouard Manet', in Méedallions et portraits en pied, c. 1896

‘The Eye, a hand, that I remember’, though that memory is defined as that which resonates in me, like a tuning fork. There is more of what is conventionally called poetry in that phrase than in my Browning pastiche – but here goes.

The Absinthe Drinker (1859) was not the only painting by Édouard Manet to be singled out as failing in  standards of morality and formal  design but it was probably the first to receive that treatment. In the latter domain, people often say, that it fails in particular to convince that there is an adequate representation of the legs and torso of the figure, although I find the ambiguity in the stability and orientation of the figure – possibly, underneath the cloak in transition between sitting and standing, and challenged in its present balance or that to be after the completion of the movement initiated by the figure’s  left leg.

The obscurity and darkness reminded me of a character from Browning’s Men and Women (1855) suddenly transported in time to the nineteenth century, but the type is known from recently – the man who finds reasons for his alcoholic death wish in the distaste he projects into them that he may interiorise it more fulsomely.

You know me, sir? Why look askance as if
You smelt a rat under the nose you hold
So high above the common level I
Rise from. This blanket hides all manner of
Mishaps of the social and aesthetic
Sort, that Browning prefers to see only
Under the robes of Italian monks
Or princes. But me, well I’ve Mallarmé
To point out that the eyes are by the hand
Guided, not the mind, in painters! So, see
Manet made mine hidden, under this cloak
As if  - had I them out-  I’d as soon drain
The glass of pungent sweet  green here, or snatch
That fallen bottle, just to test for dregs
That like me enough to still stick around
To be drunk in proof of my noble line
Of nose that once was not unlike your fine
Sniffer out of untoward taste, before
The lips have tested it further. Taste me!
I am sourer than the greengage you threw
Away, as not fine enough for you now.
Give me the chance to throw you first in the
Dust that you do seem to see me being.

With love

Steven xxxxxxxx