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It's interesting that there's a
third in this poem, the implied speaker, who is looking at the "he" the
amateur
painter looking at "him" the one painted. There are several distances here,
several removals of gaze. "In an antique book" or "In an old book," the
speaker
looks at him, the one painted, and it's the painter that's missing. So these
ellipses or elisons of being, the one missing, evoke a sense of distance and
loss;
interestingly, it's only the beloved whose image remains and the gaze that
gazes
is the phantom of that image, which is why I think these poems seems so
haunting, haunted, and also why at the end, they seem to sink within some
inarticulate feeling that is almost unbearably close.
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The idea that we live at two removes from reality is one of the major legacies
of ancient Greece. Plato thought reality was the ideal world of the forms,
and human life its reflection -- thus he called art, which is an imitation of
human life, the imitation of an imitation. Pindar put it more incisively: we
are the dream of a shadow. Freud, the major modern inheritor of this
tradition, set out to find "What do we really want?" The answer was, "our
unconscious fantasies," but those fantasies are themselves reflections of a
prior reality that created them: the experience of the fetus in the womb, the
infant in traumatic birth, the child at the mother's breast. So Freud too
found that what we think we really want turns out to be a reflection of what
we really want: we want something that stands for something that was real.
These poems' similar doubling of desire at two removes may well be another way
that Cavafy surprisingly, in an almost casual art, invokes the deepest
insights of Hellenic tradition.
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Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
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