Archive
02/18/10 - (1)
Black
Buried somewhere deep inside its desolate reservoir, The collective psyche's febrile emotional core, Lies the human heart's awful, black universal truth — That enduring reality, from man's primal spawn, In a time of single mitotic cells throbbing in the primordial slime, That explanation, justification for his sado-fascination with evil, That fanatical faith in the death of the immortal soul, That will to equate, conflate ugliness with beauty, Prove mankind capable of creating its own reasons for being, Based upon the most gruesomely grostesque esoteric beliefs In the supremacy of unholy ghosts Disclosing grace in the basest of hateful desecrations, Fool's-gold nobility of the irredeemably sick soul.
For the sake of not ending on a didactic, philosophic downbeat, Let me highlight this perhaps simplistic juxtaposition of disparatities, Both iconic epitomes, synecdoches of the ironic, Both located in Amsterdam, Netherlands, One the Rijksmuseum, set on the Museumplein, That sprawling, stately blend of Renaissance and Gothic, Containing the nation's collection of Rembrandt paintings, Those exquisite meesterwerken of shadow and light — Biblical scenes of stunning vibrancy, portraits pulsing with real blood — The other a lackluster office building, at 263 Prinsengracht, With its shabby, four-story annex cum warehouse, The secret hiding place of Otto and Edith Frank, their two daughters, The van Pels (father, mother, and son), and Mr. Pfeffer.
Today, visitors to the Franks' "house" (Where all eight refugees "lived," in the top two floors and attic, From July 6, 1942, to August 4, 1944, Before being deported aboard an every-Tuesday cattle-car transport Headed for the Westerbork transit camp and all points "east" — Sobibor, Treblinka, Auschwitz, Birkenau...Bergen-Belsen) Are equal in number (a million or so, annually) To those of the repository housing Rembrandt van Rijn's riches, Those worlds unto themselves, less than a mile and a half away, Beckoning admirers to revel in their eliightened brilliance, While those touring "263," with subdued, introspective melancholy, Stare at steep stairways, narrow corridors, crude furnishings — Canvases painted completely, irretrievably black.
02/18/10 - (1)
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