Two Poems

Abstract

42 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 In Spanish, the Toreador’s Outfit Is Called Traje de Luces, or a Suit of Lights From Maximo to Sterling Manor, down Clam Bayou to Coquina Key, St. Pete’s once had a world record 768 straight days of illumination. Sunshine City. As florid and fantastic a place as any to celebrate Salvador Dalí who claimed not to do drugs, because he was drugs. There among palm fronds waving at a more distant, bobbing forest of masts, a wormlike blob composed of over a thousand different faceted triangular pieces of glass engulfs the vertices of the hurricaneproof minimalist box that houses the rest of the art. Like being inside a giant fly’s eye, this free-form geodesic bubble, a liquid gesture to amassing clouds, nearly translucent, shimmers to eat the rational concrete walls. Its creator, an architect who previously worked with I. M. Pei on the Louvre’s glass pyramid, calls it “the enigma.” Appropriate for the famous moustache about whom André Breton coined the anagrammatic nickname “Avida Dollars,” the seeker who flummoxed Mike Wallace with his discovery of “the logarithmic curve of cauliflower” and “the erotics of everything,” the superstitious Spaniard with a pet ocelot named Babou on leash and collar, the would-be Moor cultivating “creative paranoia” with Gala by his side, the nuclear mystic collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock on Spellbound, the childhood bat-eater visiting Sigmund Freud in London, nearly asphyxiating himself in a deep-sea diving suit, casting Alice Cooper as a hologram, always just a false eyelash or two beyond grossly excessive in his life, his art. Now I’m striding past real rocks meant to be simulacra of formations from his native Cadaqués, the biomorphic ones that jut and hang in many of his dreamscapes, those childhood crags, cuneiforms replete with rock pools where he once scripted Un Chien Andalou with Luis Buñuel. Now having streamed through a box-hedge spotted grotto, an avant- (continued on page 44) Two Poems by Ravi Shankar Unadorned Box with Landscape an erasure remix of Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde Attitudes” (1968) and Rosalind Krauss’s “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1979) Prevalent confusion from a welter of everything exploding. A swelling in the earth: aesthetics. Boundaries obliterated, immutable, the accidents of gravity, invading surface appearances in degrees of order. The sublime, the banal. Within this expanded field: me, a map, the root cause. opposite Salvador Dalí, The Hallucinogenic Toreador, 1969–70, oil on canvas, 157 x 118 in. cover feature art poetry WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 43© salvador dalí , fundació gala salvador dalí , artists rights society ( ARS ), new york 2015 44 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 44 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 garden laid out according to the proportions of the golden rectangle, I’m shimmying up the helical staircase, modeled on the molecular strand, to stand confronting the monumental Hallucinogenic Toreador whose Venus is as close to goddess as I have come since gazing upon Notre Dame de la Belle Verrière, the intricate blue-hued, stainedglass Virgin at Chartres. This Venus de Milo is a double image glimpsed from the logo on a mass-produced color pencil case that onionskinned into other faces in shadow in Dalí’s mind, a doleful bullfighter draped in the Spanish colors, tiny dots turning into St. Narciso flies in squadron formation forming his cap and cape, a bull whose glassy-eyed decapitated head pools in blood, no, it’s a translucent bay, a raft not on coagulating but wavering water at the foot of the cliffs of Creus, the whole protean spectacle contained in a Palladian arena where amid floating roses, a bust of Voltaire, flecks of reflecting color resolving into a Dalmatian, this statue from antiquity embodying feminine beauty reduplicates ad infinitum, growing more archetypal and less precise in the distance, stretching back through time as in those dated depictions of evolutionary progress where the hunched simian finally straightens into a naked white man. Dalí received her as a gift in his youth and our Venus changes shapes and gender, her immortal breast really the toreador’s nose, her green skirt his tie, beatified Gala looking down disapprovingly from one edge while from the...