Sunday, February 19, 2012

Eye of Odilon Redon by Purple Mark

 
 

The eye, like a strange balloon, moves towards the infinite.
The pupil of the eye gazes heavenward, a halo of eyelashes or the
rays of illumination burst forth as though of some Zodiacal light.

Beneath it on a platter, a severed head is transported as its
lone passenger unseeing above the marshland grasses.
This Icon of Dream is Surrealism Incarnate:

It is a message from the Id to provoke the Ego to action
within the eye of the viewer. It sails through the sky reflecting
on the Divine above, bound for the Tower Hills in the West.

Within the tallest of the three white towers, which gives these hills
that name, a Seeing-Stone gazes only at far off Aman. It is looking
beyond the horizon to the beginning of the sea.

No one has returned to tell what is seen there, but the Seeing-Stone
gives glimpses of what might be or maybe only what was. The Eye floats
by uncaring both seeing and unseeing what could be.

Do we truly see what is there before us? Or are we so focused
like the Eye on some insubstantial goal we cannot hope to reach it?
E.A. Poe would’ve loved this had he survived his cooping demise.


---Purple Mark, 021112

 
 

Prompts:                                                                         

  1. Charcoal Drawing, Odilon Redon c. 1865. pg. 42. of Redon by Michael Gibson, Taschen Press 2011.
  2. The eye, like a strange balloon, moves towards the infinite.” Odilon Redon pg. 46 of Redon ibid.
  3. Tower Hills: a high range of hills in Eriador, to the west of the Shire. The hills are crowned by three white towers that give them their name. A Palantír or Seeing-stone was once kept in the tallest tower; but while the other Palantiri were invaluable for watching distant events in all of Middle Earth, the stone of the Tower Hills gazed only at far-off Aman.” from J.R.R. Tolkien by way of The Dictionary Of Imaginary Places by Alberto Manguel & Gianni Guadalupi, Harcourt Brace 1980, 1987.
 
 
 
 
 

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