LETTERS FROM HOME: CLAUDE MONET AND PABLO NERUDA ON THE BRAIN

Sept. 14, 1995

Dear Julie,

Sometimes words stop at my brain pan, roll around a few times and then fly off into the atmosphere. I can't get hold of them no matter what, and finally am left wondering if some ideas exist beyond the ability of words to convey meaning.

That happened twice this week. Like this: "Monet discovered that a single plane of color could evoke an inexhaustible field of space and time ... It is one of the most influential innovations of this century."

The idea of understanding one of the most influential innovations of the 20th century appeals to me, but these words escaped as soon as I tried to pin them down.

DC and I were taking the audio tour of the big Monet exhibit at the Chicago Institute of Art, so I played that statement and rewound it over and over. No question that planes of color have become important to 20th century art. It's the "inexhaustible field of space and time" that washes over me like a wave that then recedes and becomes ocean once again.

What is that thing those words describe? The universe? Or universality itself. And what words express that idea? God, maybe. Seems like that's where the path always leads when there's no place left to go.

At the end of the tour, almost overwhelmed by the earthly visions of Eden on the walls, I sat on a bench in the final gallery. It was filled at one end by a huge triptych of Monet's water lilies. Colors rolled over me, set up a slow, pleasurable vibration. I didn't want to leave, didn't want to move.

A French art critic compared Monet's painting to music, to an experience beyond the visual into a realm that is perhaps kinesthetic.

Call it caught in an inexhaustible field of space and time.

The second time I couldn't think straight we were watching the movie "The Postman." It's a beautiful Italian film about a postman who delivers mail to Pablo Neruda during a period in the 1950s when he was exiled for being a Communist. Neruda and his wife Matilde move to a small island off the coast of Italy where he writes poems and receives bounties of mail, all of it from women.

For a Commie, Neruda could write about love. "I love the handful of earth you are," one of his love sonnets begins. "Because of its meadows, vast as a planet, I have no other star. You are my replica of the multiplying universe." Not bad, even in translation.

A man adored by so many women is particularly impressive to the inarticulate postman. He artlessly enlists Neruda's help in winning over the barmaid he has fallen in love with.

Over time the two men become friendly, and the postman asks Neruda questions about poetry. Eventually he wonders, "So everything in the world is a metaphor for something else?"

Neruda goes for a swim. The postman is left to ponder a question with no beginning and no end. I empathized with him, brain pan-wise.

I left the movie in love again with the good human beings can do simply by sharing their lives with each other. And left with that unanswered question about the metaphors. It's like a Buddhist koan.

Of course everything is a metaphor for something else. "All the world's a stage." The moon is a snarling dog (not all metaphors are good).

Language itself is metaphoric, makes sense of the world through comparisons.

Of course everything is what it is, too. Rock is rock. Tree is tree, is molecules, atoms and quarks and maybe inexhaustibly reduceable.

Everything in the world. Maybe, like inexhaustible fields of space and time, just a metaphor for God.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a member of the Southeast Missourian news staff.