Near-Life Experience: Rowland Bagnall
This week's blog is by Rowland Bagnall, author of Near-Life Experience, which is published this month. Use the code MARCHBOOKS for 20% off the collection and free UK P&P.
The cover of Near-Life Experience shows a slice of Flight or Freeze (2020), a painting by the Scottish artist Mariota Spens. The picture seems to be a landscape, a yellowy hillside, tinted by shadows of ochre and umber, canvas patches peeking through as though the ground has yet to fully form (or, worse, is just beginning to disintegrate and melt away). Above the land, a grey-blue sky with darker shapes that might be clouds or treetops, though they look like giant ginkgo leaves, some tethered to the earth by tendrils, others floating, unconnected, little clumps of solid sky. Something about the painting puts me in mind of Bellini’s Agony in the Garden (c.1458-60), with its own strange clouds and rock formations, its hovering cherub, not to mention the trio of sleeping disciples, more or less positioned in the same spot as the orange figure that appears in Flight or Freeze.
I first saw Mariota’s painting in her studio during the heatwave of July 2022. I’d recently compiled a version of my new collection, so was just beginning to think about the poems as a single organism. I’d also been thinking about the space between experience and imagination, where the concrete data of the world begins to be transformed, processed, augmented, etc., no longer quite the thing it started as, but neither totally imagined. This is a space that certain poets or kinds of poem seem to occupy; I’m still working out what I think about this, but – at the time of writing (January 2024) – am reminded of Douglas Crase’s poem ‘Great Fennville Swamp’, from The Revisionist (1981): The thing is, / With a swamp you’re between a dying lake and still-emerging / Land…
I was struck by something similar, I think, in Flight or Freeze, which seems to show a landscape caught between the real and the imagined, even the dreamt or (mis)remembered. Of course, this has something to do with the bright, cartoonish un-reality of the scene, as well as the liquid (swampy?) quality that characterises both the sky and hillside, each made of the same fluid substance, like the “still-emerging / Land” of Crase’s poem, never quite finished. It’s a landscape in the process of becoming something else, every element seeming to warp and morph, en route to something else. I’ve had this thought in front of other paintings, too, by R. B. Kitaj, Joan Mitchell, and J. M. W. Turner. “Either the landscape has yet to emerge into view, is yet to come into existence,” notes Geoff Dyer of Turner’s late paintings, “or, as J. K. Huysmans wrote after seeing an exhibition in 1887, the landscapes in such works ‘have been vapourised.’”
My sense of Mariota’s painting is likely informed by the fact that I first saw it on an especially hot day of an especially hot summer. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to infer a sense of problematic breakdown, here, the hills seeming to melt or thaw in contradiction to the title’s “Freeze”. The sky becomes a massive sea, as though a huge wave were about to crash in our direction, spilling from the painting like the blood that rushes (albeit in slow-motion) from the elevator in The Shining (1980). That 2024 has started, as I write this, with another month of UK flooding – the countryside replaced by water – seems almost grimly appropriate. (I’ll save you! (2023), another of Mariota’s paintings, seems more explicit about dangerous water, a series of muddy landscapes engulfed by waves and storms that even Bananaman & Co. seem unable to do anything about. The second panel shows a group of houses being swept off by a mudslide; the fourth and final scene is abstract, a landscape fully ‘vapourised’.)
Flight or Freeze’s sense of danger is compounded by the presence of Sylvester J. Pussycat, depicted dashing from the scene. He’s moving so quickly that he’s produced a puff of smoke, like a squealing tyre. Moreover, we see two spectral versions of Sylvester lagging in his wake, a visual indication (and illusion) of his speediness, as if outrunning his own body. On the subject of threatening weather, it doesn’t seem surprising that Sylvester reminds me of John Sloan’s Dust Storm, Fifth Avenue (1906), a wind-swept scene that sees a group of children hurrying for shelter. I’m reminded, also, of Mark Ford’s Enter, Fleeing (2018), which takes its title from a passage of Walter Benjamin:
Again and again, in Shakespeare, in Calderón, battles fill the last act, and kings, princes, attendants and followers ‘enter, fleeing’. The moment in which they become visible to spectators brings them to a standstill. The flight of the dramatis personae is arrested by the stage. […] Our reading of this formula is imbued with expectation of a place, a light, a footlight glare, in which our flight through life may be likewise sheltered in the presence of onlooking strangers.
While Sylvester doesn’t appear in a hurry to slow down, perhaps this brings us back to the solitary orange figure in the painting, who does seem to have stopped or paused, looking curiously out at us. While I’m not sure what to make of him, he seems to represent a moment of stillness and solidity in a painting otherwise concerned with motion, liquidity, running, and “Flight”. For me, he makes a point about attentiveness, articulating an idea about the value of stopping and looking around, even if the world you find turns out to be a changing, melting, terrifying place.
Having said this, I think there’s something else at work here, too, as the world in Flight or Freeze seems only partly real, partly imagined, twisted and augmented by a dream or the imagination. It’s as though the landscape in the painting were a landscape in the mind of someone else – possibly the orange figure, mediated through him – like seeing not only through another pair of eyes but through another set of memories, associations, understandings, and beliefs. “If only I could see a landscape as it is when I am not there,” laments Simone Weil, a line that puts me in mind the New York School poet, James Schuyler: “Getting the most of out a stone might be to leave it alone.” “One thing’s / For sure,” writes Doug Crase in another poem, “to know a place you have to disturb it / With your touch.”
In Colonial Delusions (2023), another work in four panels that features Bananaman, Mariota references (see the upper left quadrant) a painting by the Scottish artist John Faed called The Poet’s Dream (c.1882). In the lower half of the painting, we see a young man dressed in black, lying on a grassy mound, his hat and book laid to one side, gazing out over a glassy lake. Above this, taking place in the sky, is a fantastic vision of celestial bodies, mounds of naked figures engaged in a battle, presided over by a bright, illuminated figure sitting on a throne. It doesn’t seem a stretch to see this as the War in Heaven, related by the archangel Raphael in Books V and VI of Paradise Lost (1667-74); perhaps the man is Milton, or a young man reading Milton’s poem. More interesting to me is that this doesn’t seem to be a dream; whatever his identity, this man is not asleep but rather watching something in the sky, propped up on one elbow. Moreover, despite their grisaille (greyscale) rendering, the monstrous figures in this scene seem solid, very different to the pale translucence of the cherub in Bellini’s painting. They seem, in other words, quite real, as though imagined, read, or daydreamed into tangibility.
What Faed’s painting communicates, to me at least, is that the contents of imagination, produced by experience, are part of the world, too, as real and significant as any rocks or trees or water. We cannot help but experience the world through the augmenting prism of ourselves; “when I am in any place,” Weil continues, “I disturb the silence of heaven by the beating of my heart.” In this sense, the world includes – is even made by – what we make of it, whatever happens to arrive or turn up, unexpectedly. A lake is a lake, but it is also everything we think of or remember as we swim in it. “You see, it’s partly the place” – Doug Crase, again – “but / Partly the way of discovering it,” where discovering means accessing, experiencing, or living.
I’m not sure where this gets me, whether working out my thoughts on Flight or Freeze or trying to introduce the poems in Near-Life Experience, to say nothing of the work of several poets mentioned on the way, or the role that poetry plays in accessing/occupying “the space between experience and imagination,” as I mentioned earlier. On reflection, I wonder if my poems – or poems in general – are poised between fleeing and freezing, attending to what’s there, trying to slow it down or hold it back before it ultimately leaves the stage. A passage of Emerson comes to mind, from ‘Poetry and Imagination’: “Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist; – to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the sprit or necessity which causes it subsists.” As usual with Emerson, this is more than I chew today.
I’m grateful to Mariota for giving me permission to use her painting as a way to introduce the poems. I suspect this piece has failed to draw out a connection, but I hope it helps some readers find a way into my writing. At the very least, I’m pleased to direct more people to Mariota’s work, which always makes me think of Christopher Sly in The Taming of the Shrew (c.1590-92), who wakes to find himself inhabiting a life he doesn’t recognise: “do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?” I imagine both the young man in John Faed’s painting and the orange figure in Flight or Freeze – as well as the speakers of some of my poems – may well be asking the same thing.