Picture Window
Feb 15 2014


The winter scene
through my picture window
is more kitsch, than art.

Cinematic snow, fluttering down.
The high blue sky,
air-brushed
like a glossy cover.
And the wind-blown pine, powdered white
as if some art director

had positioned it
precisely.

The frame is minimalist,
plain blonde wood
so as not to distract the eye.

The sort of thing a connoisseur
would find laughable
in a high end gallery.
Pretty, he'd say
but why?
Which may be the difference
between reality, and art.

Where reality is free
of irony, abstraction
schools of thought.
Is not heightened, distilled

politicized.
Is not instilled
with the artist's doubt, guilt, pride.

Because this picture resonates soul deep,
with the atavistic urge
of origin.
A still life
of our ancestral home,
before words, and pictures
would distance us.
Before ambition
persuaded us
we could remake the world.

As kitschy as a snow globe
gently stirred.
Like the first time

I ever saw one,

a small child

still immersed

in wonder.  

I looked out and thought how beautiful it was. But also realized, that if the same image had been hung there -- as a piece of art -- it would have been patronized as kitsch: a generically pleasant scene exposing my bland bourgeois taste, my lack of refinement, my uneducated eye.  

And my silent protest was this poem. Which is a way of saying: why can't we honour our gut response to beauty? Why can't we honour unprocessed emotion without analyzing and intellectualizing, without bleeding the life out of it?

And the poem also asks why we seem to have this universal response to natural beauty: its healing, how it makes us feel whole. Is the answer that it’s baked in to our DNA? That this represents some sort of "ancestral/atavistic" recognition of "home"?