Objects and bodies have a radiance all their own / NICK BLINKO

ABOVE & BELOW:
Untitled, by Nick Blinko
Ink on card
Images courtesy Henry Boxer Gallery

The sentence introducing a dream vision in Nerval’s Aurelia follows this one: “As everybody knows, one never sees the sun in one’s dreams, even though one is often aware of a light far more luminous.” A radical shift of perspective, from Copernicus to objects, which is to say, what we expect and accept as given, carries with it a basic principle of radical Romanticism, to find energy elsewhere, to find sources of illumination where one expects, at best, to encounter reflected light. It takes oneiric states of mind to reveal this truth. (“travel with ghosts”—Gerry Loose)

In Wordsworthian Romanticism consciousness of the radiance of objects wraps around it consciousness of the all too prevalent wish to possess, even to destroy, it:

“A very hunter did I rush / Upon the prey [the butterfly]:--with leaps and springs / I followed on from brake to bush; / But she [his sister], God love her, feared to brush / The dust from off its wings.” 

Here that wish to possess is testosterone, but the social analysis of Wordsworth and Keats reveals a social source: capitalism and its modern neighbours colonialism and imperialism. A four-way intermixture of persons and things (non-human) makes up the whole: loving attention and suspicion and possessiveness in the subject along with the simultaneous permanence and precariousness of object radiance appears in this poem by the Scottish poet Gerry Loose:

how delicate the dove
at the river’s edge
quenching a thirst
relentless
[half-arrows, one over the other, in opposite directions, as a divider]
I’m just going along
noon naming some of
her names
not stepping on
that one
neòinean
enduring beauty
danger of death
forty thousand volts

Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)

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