As the Impressionist Festival starts in Normandy this summer, one cannot help but remember the glorious birthplace of romanticism in paintings from Delacroix to Monet. Its the nature that is depicted with love- the frills, the caprices, the fleeting moods and the light. Here I have tried to do meditation on this painting done by Claude Monet in 1885 titled Still-Life with Anemones. The objective behind my work was to enter into the consciousness of this painting and to reveal as I have felt the evolution of its consciousness with respect to time. I call this Consciousness-Analogue and this is not poetry but a form, a rhythm that comes directly from this painting.
Still-Life with Anemones and The Chariot of a New Race
Still life glances at the bare thoughts
A naked sign floats in the stream of ignorance and death
Beauty resides imprisoned in a shell
The glory of the sunbeam hasn’t touched her hairs
A tragic world lives in its past, crumbles the present
The future is hidden from the mortal eyes
An emblem chariot is deserted in the fields
The rose is plucked by the dire hands of a monstrous time
Too long in the sands under the desert sky
There’s the riddle that perplexed man and his friends
His kingdom laid waste in a gleam of illusions
There Europe lay battered in the centre of its birth
A ravished Leda, “a broken Coriolanus”, a murder in the Capitol
All these have swept the tide of our times,
The aeon-rings of this delivered birth
From the empty-handed void to the colossal death
Nothing changed the course of this ancient proceed
Nothing altered this submission to an unchanged destiny
But a grace can act in our dreams, move and surcharge and grow
Like the beautiful anemones in the casket of light
This great supramental force taking its birth
To blow the winds away from a cold heartless time
The darkness shall end with the eternity of dawn
And the slumbering fields draw the new chariot of a race.
– Joy Roy Choudhury
Kindly note the reference, “a broken Coriolanus” from T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland v. What the Thunder Said (“Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus”)
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