Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Masterworks Series: Mont Sainte-Victoire



Unbound View

That one span of human engineering
Traces the valley floor
Bringing railway to the village
And symmetry to the eye.

Sheer mathematics of stone and mortar
Make a straight line excursion
Across the gentle lively curves of fields and hills.

What did they see,
Those builders who labored
As they put the viaduct in place?
Did their eye catch the expansive flow of the valley?
Did they view the stark unchangeable rising of the mountain?

Yet that human endeavor
Would change the perception
Of the eye that would come to
Look out over the valley –
Where tree and viaduct
Divide the seen world
Into four equal corners.

Without the intrusion of human structure
The scene would flow
Uncontained by form or thought.

Only now the human eye
Makes a quadrant
Where everything finds its place
In one box, or another.
And the whole is contained
In a singular notion.

But when that viaduct crumbles
The eye will once more see
A world unbound by constructs and corners;
A world unbound by constructs and corners.

                                                                                ~ CK







____________________________________

Image: Mont Sainte-Victoire and the Viaduct of the Arc River Valley at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Artist: Paul Cézanne (French 1839-1906)
Date:1882-1885
Medium: Oil on canvas


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