Icons
A friend was talking to me about the apple blossoms in Ghost Maps the other day. Like several things in that book -- velvet and other fabrics, the colour pink, the ocean, the word "tumble,"-- they seem to have become more than themselves. They're not symbolic; they are real and don't stand in for something else. But they are ... icons, iconographic. If that makes any sense.
In fact, in revising "The Floating World," one of the Bridge of Birds poems, I find that apple blossoms have made their way out of Ghost Maps and into a more personal iconography. They seem to carry a weight of delicacy, of loss and redemption, that goes well past their real presence. I'm not sure that it's working for everyone, but it's working for me.
Apple blossoms are not my only icons. Blue glass pops up in the oddest places, even where I didn't mean to put it. (Here, here, here) Here's the original: I am driving with my father -- I am 14 and trying to learn to drive a clutch. We are on a backroad somewhere South of Omaha. A break in the thicket. Glimpse of overgrown rail line, a half-toppled telegraph pole with blue glass insulators. Dragonflies in the nettles. I try to write a poem about it, it never comes together. But the glass sticks with me: an icon of glimpses, of things half-felt, of things ruined and lost.
Apple blossoms and blue glass. Wish Wendy had a print of this painting.
There are more, though I only half understand them: sparrows and blackbirds, the colour gold, sumac which means hiddeness, roof which means danger. Possibly I'll end up like Chagall, full of roosters and floating violins.
What I'd like to know: do all writers developed these sorts of personal iconographies, or is it just me?
4 Comments
Personal Iconographies… For myself, mosses keep coming back as some sort of centredness. Other than that I see Li-Young Lee’s birds that keep coming through as in A Table in the Wilderness.
Apple blossoms remind me of the frequency of cherry blossoms in Japanese poetry.
I am not necessarily a writer, but I developed a personal symbology that has grown with my life, but certain things represent feelings, much the same way that certain smells bring back memories.
Also, the mind has familiar terms and images that it likes to play with like a shell fragment with a soft divot for running the finger over again and again for comfort.
For myself: the latticework of tree branches shadowed on the ground, both spring grass, and blue shadows in snow. A white salamander running across a linoleum floor. The sunset over Heady Crick. My hand running through my husband’s hair. There are more.
Mica does it for me. No, seriously, I think it has to do with what C.S. Lewis more largely talks about as “joy” or “nostalgia,” which he sees as a longing for something we were made for. That doesn’t completely do it for me, either. On a totally different tack, musical gestures or expressions achieve that sort of power for me sometimes. It frustrated me, as a lad, that I couldn’t translate a musical meaning into words, until I realized that, duh, that’s why it’s music. Wouldn’t be necessary to hire the orchestra if you could express it without music. And then I worried for a while that musical “values” were simply by association, i.e. “that song” that charms us due to the life-context we were in. This does happen - why else would anyone still listen to ‘80’s music? But there is music that forms very strong emotions regardless of the setting for me.
Have I gotten off course yet? Back to the linguistic front, I do think certain words have certain powers for us, and it’s no good trying to pin down why. I think all writers develop them. Now - what are mine? They’re more like concepts, and they’re pretty universal and vague. I realized in my series of poems on Christ that I keep going back to the sea. Storm water. The idea of weight, being loaded or freighted with something. I can’t think of anything as specific as blue glass.
For me it’s blue sky, stars, flying birds, the sea, and images of landscape seen through windows or gates.