Thoughts in Progress

What if we were to wander onto the canvas of an artist painting a landscape? Stroll in at the precise moment when the painter is trying to capture the choreographic movement of a field of wheat? Would we be considered accidents, errors to be erased and painted over? Or would we be incorporated automatically into the piece?

That seems to be the dilemma facing Kate Northrop in Affair with Various Endings. Of course, her two lovers, meeting “outside Kempton, with the creek rising behind us?” have plenty of reasons not to want to be included in the painting. Editing reality out of a canvas is a form of lying, albeit benign. Editing our own reality in order to create a story that casts us in a good light is also a form of lying. At times like this I think of couples around the world attempting to erase the meaning of “the last of the light lifting this evening from the field of wheat”. Perhaps one is the painter and their view does not include the other one anymore.

To paraphrase Nick Cave, one of them is still a good muse, but the other one is still not much of a poet.

© 2019