Now I understand the commandment against worshiping idols. At The Prado, the first thing I wanted to do in front of Velázquez’s La Meninas was to bow down. Why? Because of its monumentality and celebration of art itself, of seeing: vision raised to the second degree. Or is it to the third. We see Felipe IV and Mariana of Austria reflected in a mirror, watching the scene and our vantage point is theirs as we are watching them in the mirror. And Velázquez has painted himself inside the painting and yet also stands outside the painting occupying the same space as the royal couple. It is as though the artist as magician were both the hand and the rabbit being pulled from the hat. For the canvas which has a fraction of its back to us upon which the artist paints is the one we are now looking at. The frisson of art representing itself (Foucault was right about that). Within the frame, there are really three figures who are staring straight at us: Velázquez, the young dwarf María Bárbola, and the Infanta Margarita. Yet it is really this last figure, the girl with her long blonde hair, who occupies the center of all this looking and reflection. A painting reflecting on reflection.
And to step back in the room at The Prado, where the painting reigns at the end of the hall, is to feel as though the painting itself is a continuation of the room—the adjoining room we can enter (as in a dream) only with our gaze. And the rooms continue, as the man at the back on the steps, either entering or exiting, with the great wood-paneled door ajar, looks as though he is pulling back a curtain to reveal a white space that is limitless.
And what does this have to do with poetry? Poetry is that space that opens to us, that mirrors back our imaginary selves. To be the gazer in front of Las Meninas is to occupy the position of Felipe and Mariana and Velázquez as well as ourselves. To be the reader/ writer of lyric poems is to occupy the position of the “I” as well as the “you” to whom the poem is addressed.
For many years, to Bishop Berkeley’s question, Does the tree fall in the forest if no one hears it? I always thought, Well, of course it does. But now I would agree with him and say: If no one is there to observe the painting, if no one can reflect upon the poem, then it does not reflect, it does not sound.
And then this strange coincidence, when I strolled through Retiro Park in Madrid on Sunday and chanced upon (is there anywhere in this city without art?) a series of sculptures by the contemporary Spanish artist Jesús Soler: “Madrid Recycles.” All the installations were based upon the portrait of the Infanta Margarita. Because it is the girl’s gaze (not her parents) that is central. What I realized is this: She is an icon of seeing—no different than the Mona Lisa, of which there is a copy in The Prado that I and others raced towards until we read it is not Leonardo’s but a copy and so backed away. A very good copy. And yet, in walking away this copy held my gaze, not the copy of my gaze.
Soler’s sculptures used the portrait of the girl, painted, I believe, a few years after her image in Las Meninas as its visual scaffolding and cultural reference point. In his monumental sculptures, she is instantly recognizable by the thick nest of her hair, now done up similar to her mother’s in Las Meninas. But her face is always missing. And the body is a body of recycled parts, mostly electronics and the detritus of modern life: keyboards, circuitry, cans, bottles, pills, tubes, and boxes. As though the new monarchy is consumerist trash—recognizable yet faceless.
As we speculate upon seeing in Las Meninas and in Soler’s sculptures, isn’t that what we also do in poetry as readers and writers: speculate upon seeing (with images and the disposition of words on the page) as well as revel in listening to the sound of sound? Poems are, after all, acts of attention and we say, Ah ha! So this is what it means to see. This is what rhythm and sound patterns can do. And when we observe ourselves seeing or listening (and in this way animals are not people), we experience a kind of self-consciousness that instead of paralyzing the self or producing nausea, exhilarates us. The moment is fixed yet fluid. Or, rather, the moment transfixes us. And so for poets, the Cartesian dictum is transformed into its postmodern cape(r): Language reads/writes me as I am reading/writing it; therefore I am many selves.