I rationalized that I haven’t written anything lately because all my creative energy has been spent on the production of Christmas cards and Valentines since the day after Thanksgiving. Well, I made it through another two months of monkish devotion to small repetitive motions and once again I am left to consider what I have wrought. The Christmas cards are usually safe for holiday consumption although the naked Santa in my take-off on the Birth of Venus may have been an exception. I want receiving one to be like unwrapping a present that makes you say “Wow!”. This year, the little monkey climbing up the tree decorated with fruit probably didn’t elicit much more than a smile. For the valentines, I want the experience of image and poetry to be passionate and disturbing. I imagine that people probably don’t have a hard time appreciating and maybe even being moved by my expressions of passion but I worry about how they react to the dark aspects of my art for a holiday that is meant to celebrate romance. A few years ago, the heart that was skewered on a pitchfork burning in Hell was at least full of warm colors and accompanied by an unrepentant lusty verse. This year, the stark simplicity of a heart behind jail bars did not do much to alleviate the poem’s painful irony about a lover who cannot let go of someone he has no power over, thus imprisoning himself. I can only hope that my recipients will feel the loving care I tried to put into the execution of the image and the abstract serenity in the symmetrical equilibrium of the delicately pale gray bars and perfectly centered heart looking out at a sunny day and realize that I am celebrating the indomitable power of love that lights the darkness.
With that said, I would like to reprise from last year’s Valentines Day blog, the reading of Oscar Wilde’s letter written in prison to his lover. Happy Valentines Day and may it be a passionate one for you.
"My sweet rose, my delicate flower, my lily of lilies, it is perhaps in prison that I am going to test the power of love. I am going to see if I cannot make the bitter warders sweet by the intensity of the love I bear you. I have had moments when I thought it would be wise to separate. Ah! Moments of weakness and madness! Now I see that would have mutilated my life, ruined my art, broken the musical chords which make a perfect soul. Even covered with mud I shall praise you, from the deepest abysses I shall cry to you. In my solitude you will be with me. I am determined not to revolt but to accept every outrage through devotion to love, to let my body be dishonored so long as my soul may always keep the image of you. From your silken hair to your delicate feet you are perfection to me. Pleasure hides love from us, but pain reveals it in its essence. O dearest of created things, if someone wounded by silence and solitude comes to you, dishonored, a laughing-stock, Oh! You can close his wounds by touching them and restore his soul which unhappiness had for a moment smothered. Nothing will be difficult for you then, and remember, it is that hope which makes me live, and that hope alone. What wisdom is to the philosopher, what God is to his saint, you are to me. To keep you in my soul, such is the goal of this pain which men call life. O my love, you whom I cherish above all things, white narcissus in an unmown field, think of the burden which falls to you, a burden which love alone can make light. ... I love you, I love you, my heart is a rose which your love has brought to bloom, my life is a desert fanned by the delicious breeze of your breath, and whose cool spring are your eyes; the imprint of your little feet makes valleys of shade for me, the odour of your hair is like myrrh, and wherever you go you exhale the perfumes of the cassia tree.
"Love me always, love me always. You have been the supreme, the perfect love of my life; there can be no other..." Oscar Wilde
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