A Method toward Transcendence
In summary, Michael Lownie is seeking the underlying ultimate edge between materiality
and the transcendent. This type of quest, which is often attended by a cold impersonal
silence, resonates with the non-sequitor paintings of Magritte (e.g., in Threatening
Weather and La
Voix des Airs), the expansive color fields of Rothko, the static
ambient music of Erik Satie (Gymnopedies), the temps
mort silence in the films
of
Antonioni, and the metaphysical poetry of Wallace Stevens (The
Snow Man and Of
Mere Being).
Perhaps an alert disorientation of the viewer’s equilibrium is a method
toward transcendence, as in the blurring of the viewer’s equilibrium
in Adrift, Nozone, and the vertigous Urban Sky. I had experienced what I imagined
to be a transcendent moment as a result of a disorientation. In a strange town,
I had been surprised by the sight of a wide expanse of seaside devoid of people
and objects; and under a birdless, cloudless sky. So, all that was in my field
of vision was only three horizontal bands of color. That encounter is described
in a set of poems called Infinitations from the Beach:
from offwards, to the
whorl of an ear, only the muffled ee, and cleansing waft, of a salt-tinged
air, compels me there, to turn to see, suddenly, the shock of a planar verizon
rising!
slicing the world with a tri-color of infinity: the wide azure sky above
a fluid cerulean sea and solid sand below.
Here, on the edge of the earth,
Its reality disintegrates all I have learned, and ego is.
If this is a curtain to the next world
Then this town is its proscenium.
|
