Ordering Molded Sound

Out of "The Symbol of the Archaic" by Guy Davenport

Hide-and-Seek
Pavel Tchelitchew (American, 1898–1957)

Derby, Vermont and New York, June 1940 - June 1942. Oil on canvas, 6' 6 1/2" x 7' 3/4" (199.3 x 215.3 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund

[Go to the MOMA page--linked--to zoom in.]

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Poetry speaks with phallic direction
Song keeps the world forever
Sound is moulded to mean this
And the measure moulds the sound.

--Ezra Pound (his last lines)

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In the seventeenth century we discovered that a drop of water is alive, in the eighteenth century that all of nature is alive in its discrete particles, in the nineteenth century that these particles are all dancing a constant dance (the Brownian movement), and the twentieth century discovered that nothing at all is dead, that the material of existence is so many little solar systems of light mush...

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First of all, it is a great oak tree against which a girl presses herself: she is the it in a game of hide-and-seek.  The hiders are concealed in the tree itself, so many children, who are arranged like the cycle of the seasons, winter children, summer children.

These children, seen a few paces back, become landscapes, and eventually two folded arms, as the tree itself resolves into a foot and hand; and, further back, the face of a Russian demon, mustached and squint-eyed.  Further back, the whole picture resolves into a drop of water...

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.mota eht fo erutcurts eht nianlpxe ot mih del hcihw fo noisnet ecafrus eht retaw fo pord, s'rhoB sleiN...

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This is a very modern picture, then, a kind of metaphysical poem about our non-Euclidian, indeterminate world.  But at its center there is the one opaque detail in the painting: the girl in a pinafore hiding her face against the tree.

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An ambiguous symbol of life and death...

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a depiction of Persophone or Eurydice in Hades.  In a euphoric or confident time she is above-ground...

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[In a time]...depressed beyond hope...[our] will is rotten and perverse...terrified by existence itself, [we put] Eurydice in Hades and spinelessly leave her there.

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The poetry of phallic direction
incloses and utterly wills
meaning sounded as ordered
measuring sound molded