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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