Poësie vir gekwelde siele

André du Pisanie - This anthology of poetry and prose, powerfully complemented by the energetic brush of Erik Schnack detonates as it evokes the poet’s own unique retreat and contemplation of the self, place, life and time. Poetry and art possess transcendental importance for the human spirit because without them, no full statement of life is possible. Through art and poetry what is hidden in the human mind is made manifest. Without them, life is not whole. Art and poetry expel the malaise that afflicts us. The mind is not only a geographic landscape for the poet, but also an ‘inscape’ – an inner world – for as the poet Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote:

“O, the mind, the mind has mountains,

Cliffs of fall,

Frightful, sheer, no man fathomed”.

Albert Einstein opined that:

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science”, and for Harper Lee in her evocative To Kill a Mockingbird, the ultimate authority is a person’s conscience.

Elke Debortoli is blessed with the gift of observation and expression. In her poems and prose, the ‘without’ and the ‘within’ are interdependent as she deals with the topic of collective mental illness.

She does so with rare poetic intensity and intimacy when she explores, with moral courage and inborn intuition, the feeling of belonging, family, friendship, life, time and nature. Both poet and artist are absorbed in the stirrings of the intuitive imagination. 

Ultimately, both recognize the emancipatory courage of the imagination and how it alone sets us free from fear and open the doors of perception and prejudice to the fullness of life. In the words of the philosopher Henri Bergson in his Time and Free Will: “We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist”. For the world of appearances is but one aspect of life, and rather shallow at that. This is poetry, prose and art with compassion, imagination and dedication, written and painted with warmth and dignity of feeling. 

While the battle with the forces of the unconscious rages, both poet and artist, unleash their primordial worlds of infinite energies to broaden our consciousness, so as to create hope and meaning.

In her ‘note to the reader’, the poet speaks of her “deep love for poetry and art in all their incarnations”. She boldly states that: “I inherited the gift of manic depression (bipolar disorder)” and credits it “a gift because it is the source of my inspiration”, [adding] “I am nothing if I cannot write, bipolar disorder be damned”. Equally, she acknowledges that mental illness has a wide trajectory, touching on “the nature of self, the nature of family, the nature of community and consciousness”.

She also credits many of her poems as having been influenced by her psychiatric hospitalisations and the many “fascinating souls” she has met as a result. Her poems explore “an alternative reality shaped by a psychological yet fertile mind”.

The tile of the anthology ‘Liquid Paralysis’ is rich in meaning. As an adjective, ‘liquid’ implies a normal condition of water, oil, etc. in which particles move freely over each other but do not tend to separate like those of gasses. It also means that something has the transparency, translucence, or brightness of water or wine. 

‘Paralysis’ (n.) is an affection marked by impairment or loss of motor or sensory function of nerves and figuratively, as a state of utter powerlessness. 

My reading of the title tells me that the poet finds her poetic inspiration, not in the silence and blackness of night, but below the solid surface of things, in the archaeology of dreams, voices, celestial visitations, in the conscious/unconscious, in a vision so charged and startling that it breaks through the mind to become a dream experience of the intuitive imagination. The title of the anthology appears in ‘Moon Song’ with its celestial imagery that references a lucid dream with ‘phantom visitors from the past’.

The poetry and prose mine various themes. These include, among others: the power of the word, guilt, loathing, friendship, grief, fear and attraction, the duplicity and toxicity of love, decay, insomnia, corner shop souls, Josef a fellow haunted soul in the psychiatric hospital in Cape Town, the ocean, visitations and friendship.

The energetic and meditative artwork by Erik Schnack with their sensitive colour shading, floods the viewer and adds immeasurably to the anthology. Accompanying the poem ‘word alchemy’ a painting of a women’s face appears with spider-like spirals/threads dripping from the nose, lips, mouth and chin. The ‘spiral of words’ in the poem, appears in the form of a circle in the brain. The poem and the artwork remind one of the Cosmology of the San (Bushmen), with its potency of out-of-the body travel. The poem ‘Foundling’ is accompanied by the face of Artemis, originally a primitive earth-goddess, who appears in Greek mythology as the daughter of Zeus and Leto and patroness of chastity, and in Roman mythology with the goddess of Diana. The evocative poem ‘Josef’ is illustrated with a painting accompanied by two connecting circles that capture an intimate, tender and celestial moment. The male person, ‘Josef’ gently kisses the poet on her cheek, with her eyes shut in ecstasy. The poem ‘Red hat’ references the crucifixion of Christ and dialogues with a symbolic painting of a crown of thorns. The reader is left enthralled by Debortoli and Schnack’s offerings of the creative mind made possible by the transfiguring agency of words and art. 

There is a lured hinterland to the human mind, beyond order, reason and conscious restraint, where it is sometimes possible for the unusually gifted as in this anthology to meet to converse.

*André du Pisanie bied vanaand om 18:30 as deel van die maandelikse Krit-gesprek’n bespreking van LIQUID PARALYSIS – Poetry for Haunted Souls in die NG kerksaal van Windhoek-Oos aan. Indien enigiemand hierdie geleentheid wil bywoon, kan hy of sy per WhatsApp aanmeld by Susan Alexander by 081 272 0459 of by Elizma Theron by 081 122 4110. Die toegangsfooi by die deur is N$50. Daar word nie vooraf kaartjies verkoop nie.