'In Silence and Solitude, Without a Word'

My graphic abilities are stalled at the stick-figure level. I draw with the same proficiency I did at age six. Even my handwriting is rudimentary. After musicians, the class of artists I envy most are painters. A reader sent me a recent article about the American painter Richard Diebenkorn and his “Cityscape #1” (1963). I don’t have the language to explain my reactions to work at this level of accomplishment. I experience a pleasure that is simultaneously physical, emotional and analytic, at once soothing and energizing. Nothing else is quite like it. To call the painting “beautiful” seems feeble. I’ll let it go at that. Here is “Conversing with Paradise” (The Western Approaches, 1975), a poem Howard Nemerov dedicated to the painter Robert Jordan:

“To see the world the way a painter must,

Responsive to distances, alive to light,

To changes in the colors of the day,

His mind vibrating at every frequency

He finds before him, from wind waves in wheat

Through trees that turn their leaves before the storm,

To string-bag pattern of the pebbled waves

Over the shallows of the shelving cove

In high sunlight; and to the greater wave-

lengths of boulder and building, to the vast

Majestic measures of the mountain's poise;

“And from these modulations of the light

To take the elected moment, silence it

In oils and earths beneath the moving brush,

And varnish it and put it in a frame

To seal it off as privileged from time,

And hang it for a window on the wall,
A window giving on the ever-present past;

"How splendid it would be to be someone

Able to do these mortal miracles

In silence and solitude, without a word.”

All first-rate art is a “window giving on the ever-present past.” In his final lines, Nemerov expresses every writer’s envy of the visual artist’s gift. We’re stuck with words.