The Shape of the Shadow

A response to Agnes Martin, “On the Perfection Underlying Life” (excerpted here)

The shape of the shadow does not always or even often conform to the shape of the body that throws it. I am thinking of shadows that break up like fleas, say, and crawl undetected over the skin, to shadows that grow to the size of dragons as Martin describes and haunt one day to day in one’s solitude, to shadows that form grotesque shapes on the floor of the sort Holbein painted in The Ambassadors (the “skull smudge” that proves, to me, that it was only the hardened Christian mind that sought to slay the dragon), to the chimeras that Baudelaire spotted on the shoulders of the men walking outside of Paris – “to each man his chimera”! – a modern resignation born of “romantic despair.”

I wake up this morning in a sort of despair – not having been able to defeat or moderate my own dragon/shadow and so defeated by it, having given it voice, having allowed it to amplify and enlarge by bouncing off the walls of others, carving holes in my own solitude to cast that shadow on those walls instead of containing it within, jack o’lantern instead of pumpkin.

The role of the dog in all of this is interesting. Dog as screen on which shadow’s thrown. Dog happy and playful when one is having difficulties, dog being cute when one is arguing with another, dog running along the periphery as in those wonderful paintings by Rubens that capture so much more than the mere pageantry of the Medici who commissioned them. How one comes to rely on this almost without noticing it, to treat dog as ground for one’s emotional state, to toss things on it as on a coffee table as one rushes in and out the front door.

Is it always best to tip-toe around the dragon, I wonder, to try to get it to sleep rather than enrage it from time to time and watch it burn. Perhaps it’s a question of longevity in the practice of art. I think of Keats who once called poetry a jack o’lantern. Keats who was so hurt by the double wound of his brother dying and finding out that his brother had been led on by a cruel prank, a friend writing fake love letters that made fun of the poet’s style. The vitriol expressed in his letters, for this one, “If I have the chance to hurt him I will,” VITRIOL as an alchemical element/acronym: Visit Interiora Terram (to) Rectify Intentionally Occultum Lapidam, to face, in other words, transform, perhaps be broken by, modify, defeat even, for the moment, match one’s life against this flame.

I spent several years in the practice of therapy, starting out with the concept that I could not defeat or destroy, but only hope to understand and integrate my own shadow. There is no need to go into the particulars of this or how it has played out in my life. But it’s some powerful mojo, that. What one gradually comes to learn is simply to endure its coming, at times with some semblance of equanimity, at others “dazzled and horrified.” It is part of the territory one works in as an artist, like a matador working in close to the bull.

Isn’t there a sort of deliciousness in the presentation of the fog in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”? “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes,/Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening”… And in Roethke’s “The Lost Son”:

The shape of a rat?
It’s bigger than that.
It’s less than a leg
And more than a nose,
Just under the water
It usually goes.

I know that I’m getting off-track here, that what I call shadow is not exactly interchangeable with Martin’s “Dragon,” but I also know that there were times in San Francisco I was physically unable to do something because of its presence, or I should say the sudden awareness of its presence, which to me is the genius of the painting by Holbein and of the pieces of poems I mentioned above. That is, first, the recognition of the presence of the shadow, next, the growing familiar with the proximity of its terror and (potential) destructiveness, third, the beginning to transform that into a positive entity which might be art and which might or might not point to “perfection,” or hold a mirror up to the imperfection of the Real in all its beauty.