Louise Glück’s Telescope

Tomorrow, Oil on Canvas, 10” x 11,” 2007. Several times I meant to deliver this small, black-on-black painting of a glass house at night to Louis Glück when I would go to hear her read. I always chickened-out. Now I just think of it as “Louise’s Painting” and it hangs in my basement.

I started reading Louise Glück in my early twenties. Reading her poems was like a clean, deep gulp of self-recognition. A kind of mirror or eclipse. Her tone and tempo, her cool clarity and reserve, came from a place I understood. Her voice looks sadness, even terror, in the face and does not look away. A kind-of is that all there is attitude when staring-down the deep underpinning loneliness of existence.

But at times her voice has a distance quiver. And it is just enough to let you know there is someone breathing, smothered there beneath the armor.

I wore her poems around me for years. They made me strong in my own sadness. They made me love the purple-blue bruise through which I felt all of my own experience.

Telescope

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on the cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.

 -Louise Glück, from Averno

Glück’s speaker walks us through a perceptual shift like a reporter. We’ve just taken the lens away and are adjusting to an altered proximity.  In the first three stanzas we are out in space, away from the earth, our own bodies, our sense of self. In this loss we gain connectedness with all of eternity. When we return, in the final three stanzas, to our body, our mind, we are again separated, alone. Like experiencing the loss of Paradise. Gaining consciousness and losing connectedness.

I love that the poem calmly describes that transition.

The poem offers no redemption at the end. Just hard facts.

But if you loop back around, through the other end- the beginning of the poem- you cross again, through the threshold of the lens, into another way of seeing, of being.

Meaning, there is a loophole where, at times, we can alter our perception.

Terror remains intact. And mystery too. And somehow, through this ritual, on top of this hill, in the dark of this night, some comfort is found. Though it is cooler and stranger than you had hoped.

***

This past week on my podcast, The Painted Garden, I talked about a similar simultaneity. The ability to live with terror and beauty, consciousness and eternity. I’ve also written about liminality, the boundary between things. Of the role of the trickster, the artist, the healer to live on that edge, to thrive on that bridge by swapping-out perceptions and creating new realities. The Telescope is a Wand. It is an instrument for altered perceiving.

Like a paintbrush. A pencil. The ability to change the scale of mark and depiction.

To alter our relative distance to what we are perceiving.

Reflecting Pond (Persephone), Oil on Paper, 16” x 20,” 2019.