An Arian Christ under glass
Was beaming his charity down
As Emma thought, “This, too, shall pass!”–
Regarding the heart of her frown.
Beside him a handsome young man
Smiles from the same hallowed wall
The same idolatrous plan–
Which Emma believes to be All.
Worship of graven images is idolatry. The Germanic Christ picture and the picture of a handsome young man will not dispel Emma’s grief.
Who is Emma?
I am called more and more my own name now.
What’s Your name now?
If you hate you, you don’t know you. Is Emma you?
Emma Looks Up
But who is Emma?
May be, she is like a Picasso oddilaesque.
Emma is an everywoman whose internal problems are not settled by worship of external saviors, even though she believes they should be. Both the Aryan Christ and the handsome young man are posed images. What matters is how can Emma resolve her inner conflict? Can she find salvation within herself? What advice would you give her?
Try to visualize the images as recycled through mobius transformations. Once seeing them as an eternal manifested duality, she can rest assured that the exterior visage correspond to the interior by a deeply set necessity, that need not be overcome, because it already is.
She must satisfy herself finally that she need not e cluzuvely worship male deities, but can find solace in androgi nous ones.
If Emma succeeds in this mission, she will need not concern of whether to look up, or down, sideways, or all around. Kandnsky can usurp Picasso’s power.
Emma worships the faces in two pictures that hang from a wall. Each picture is a reminder of something it is not.
Meno, I wish I could understand your thoughts here… They seem deeper than this small poem merits.
Irrellus:
Appreception of levels depends to some degree on aesthetic distance.
I may be reading into Emma, but what unassailable fact that remains I’d, whether it was Emma’s intention to limit the object that she is trying to become. .
Is she representative more to impress her admirers? If she has any.
Or is she trying something else, to express some feeling, in a two dimensional venue, that .tries to minimise her subtleties, or lack of.
Is there some trace of a backward reflection which tries to come to grips with a shudder, from a growing conviction of more, not less fragmentation to come.
Irrellus writes:
“As Emma thought, “This, too, shall pass!”–
Regarding the heart of her frown.”
It seems she is inconclusive whether it really will pass, or why she is frowning.
How does reading into this add extra dimension, or clamp further inquery, giving rise to something hidden, secretive, unconscious, or even unnerving.
That she is every woman, does her self image, concept and relationships blend into a retrograde picture, more attuned to no finally represented should be idealisoms,
or, does she carelessly with old any more self description, as to give the impression, such as Greta Garbo gave upon her retirement: ‘I want to be alone’ or, I am tired of overexposed populism, just want to become more like everybody else, since my simulated roles are no longer what the appear?
There is intent in wanting to be everyone, even in stating it with honest modesty of purpose.
Otherwise, she may feel hemmed in by a singularly generic personality.
But if all these attributes failing, has she ever thought to herself, that maybe she does not want to become every woman really, because then, she may loose all appeal based on any consciously arising objective.
She may be a negation of Botticelki’s rising out of the sea, and instead trying to drawn her visage as inescapably pulled down and drawing in a see of tears.
Maybe she is a tragic figure or some semblance of it.
I think she her conscious self awareness is fearing extinction.
The above may appear as an aggravation and an exiorbie station of her past motives, literally disinfuguring so, and You may see this as an appendage that makes Your suggestion of reading into it even less palatable.
But that she is basically an inverted figure, I have no doubt.
Of course, unless I am wrong. ( This borrowed from Biggie)
Perhaps Emma is a tragic figure in the sense that Hamlet was. The idolatry is a option which her internal pain considers. It’s all a game of masks.