Vincent Van Gogh and Iconic Realism (Click onto title to hear Don McLean sing "Vincent" with accompanying Van Gogh paintings.)

Vincent Van Gogh

Painting by William Rock

Poetry by Huang Xiang

Translation of Huang Xiang's poetry, written in Chinese calligraphy on painting:

The painting holds high like torches 

Sunflowers turning high-heaven's blazing

SUN

To burn up the magnificent painting spirit 

stopped by a bullet

To burn down the temple of golden yellow

Opaque color -

dabs like clots of Blood

Gush fiery tears

Struggling lines feverishly erupt, 

twitching like raw nerves

The back view of a giant

Reappears

~ Huang Xiang

Starry Night 

by Vincent Van Gogh

An example of using a visual image to enhance meaning through the collective memory of a community exists within Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, Starry Night. He places iconic, celestial figures: moon, sun, stars, as the focal point, disproportionate to the small, darkened village. With wide, brush strokes, he creates a memory in the form of movement that transcends the primary source of his painting, that of the cosmic link between the silent structures of society and the dichotomy of chaos and structure found in nature. 

He paints contrasts of light and dark, structure and non-structure, illuminating his audience of the need to consider his idea of the bleak constraints in many organized religions. Thus, he paints a challenge for the members of his society to consider personal enlightenment as an action that illumines the darkness of the soul. 

Through actively engaging in a positive response to our daily struggles, we become enlightened and aware of the chaos as seen in the brilliant, night sky. Once enlightened (or saved), we can attempt to make positive choices to help this world become more balanced and orderly, following the precepts set before us through our foundational beliefs. In this painting, Van Gogh illustrates his personal connection with the vast beauty of nature and many possibilities through spiritual enlightenment. 

William Butler Yeats' "Easter 1916" and Iconic Realism

 

I took this photo whilst driving into the town of Sligo, Ireland.

Easter 1916

by William Butler Yeats

(To hear Liam Neeson read this poem, click HERE.)

I have met them at close of day   

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey   

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head   

Or polite meaningless words,   

Or have lingered awhile and said   

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done   

Of a mocking tale or a gibe   

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,   

Being certain that they and I   

But lived where motley is worn:   

All changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent   

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers   

When, young and beautiful,   

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school   

And rode our wingèd horse;   

This other his helper and friend   

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,   

So sensitive his nature seemed,   

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,   

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,   

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone   

Through summer and winter seem   

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,   

The rider, the birds that range   

From cloud to tumbling cloud,   

Minute by minute they change;   

A shadow of cloud on the stream   

Changes minute by minute;   

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   

And a horse plashes within it;   

The long-legged moor-hens dive,   

And hens to moor-cocks call;   

Minute by minute they live:   

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.   

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part   

To murmur name upon name,   

As a mother names her child   

When sleep at last has come   

On limbs that had run wild.   

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;   

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith   

For all that is done and said.  

 

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;   

And what if excess of love   

Bewildered them till they died?   

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride   

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:   

A terrible beauty is born.

Specific poetic elements within Yeats’ poem, Easter 1916, illustrate my theory and explore the individuals specifically mentioned in his poem: MacDonagh, MacBride, Connolly, and Pearse. He lists these individuals to emphasize the political relevance of each person in the historical year, 1916. Yeats employed iconic realism within the multiple analogies contained within the lines of this poem, illustrating the cultural transformations that concerned the Irish citizens during the decade:1913-1923.

Throughout Easter 1916, Yeats places ambivalent characters in roles that align with various specific cultural hierarchies to elicit a challenge for his reading audience to align their mind-set with revolutionary deliberation. His characters possess multiple symbolic implications in his effort to fortify his stance on the duality of consciousness within Irish culture in 1916.  

Thus, Yeats places iconic illustrations of simplicity whilst he alludes to ancient complexities. His connections produce poetry that both inspire and enflame. Moreover, his revolutionary speech originates in his characters, who speak in terms with which most of his reading audience would be able to comprehend, terms that deal primarily with nature and its course. Finally, Yeats weaves his poetry to blend the linguistic patterns and cultural customs of his homeland in Sligo, Ireland, with the political events of 1916 and ancient cultural icons as he repetitively states, "A terrible beauty is born."

"Don't Stop Believing" and Iconic Realism

Photo of a lake in New England

Any song that speaks of south Detroit draws my attention, and the classic song, "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey is no exception. How does this song demonstrate the semiotic theory of iconic realism? 

1. The song reveals iconic images of the human struggle with emotions.

2. They are juxtaposed with light and enlightenment.

3. This placement brings the audience of this song in tune with the perpetual dilemma of humanity's search for meaning. "It goes on and on and on and on."

Don't Stop Believing

by Journey

Just a small town girl, livin' in a lonely world

She took the midnight train goin' anywhere

Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit

He took the midnight train goin' anywhere

A singer in a smokey room

A smell of wine and cheap perfume

For a smile they can share the night

It goes on and on and on and on

Chorus:

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard

Their shadows searching in the night

Streetlights people, living just to find emotion

Hiding, somewhere in the night

Working hard to get my fill,

Everybody wants a thrill

Payin' anything to roll the dice,

just one more time

Some will win, some will lose

Some were born to sing the blues

Oh, the movie never ends

It goes on and on and on and on

(chorus)

Don't stop believin'

Hold on to the feelin'

Streetlight people

William Butler Yeats' "The Tower II" and Iconic Realism

I took this photograph of Thoor Ballylee some years ago.

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;

and send imagination forth

Under the day’s declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

(“The Tower II,” ll. 18-25) [1]

Here, Yeats places himself in the midst of the Tower, the earthen icon of the human soul. Born of the ancient source of all life, this soul’s power rests in the simplicity of a child’s voice, echoing for the “blind man’s joy.” This simplicity is so powerful that “certain men, be[come] maddened by those rhymes,” (l. 42) a magnificent union of the duality existent in imagination and reality. 

To further illustrate this duality, Yeats incorporates the iconic representation of “The Great Memory” to signify the reality of human consciousness. The speaker is out of control while at the same time, he is in control, “Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;/And bring beauty’s blind rambling celebrant” (ll. 91-2). This ambivalence, accented with alliteration, leads to Yeats’ revelation that from chaos comes order and from dissonance, consonant harmony. He continues with his reference to human consciousness with an allusion to his recurrent swan’s song: “When the swan must fix his eye/ Upon a fading gleam, /Float out upon a long/Last reach of glistening stream/And there sing his last song” (ll. 141-45). 

The central theme of this poem is the realization of life’s paradox that art is both illusion and ideal. When Yeats reveals through the alliteration and rapid meter of “Man makes a superhuman/Mirror-resembling dream” (ll.165-66), he draws upon his references of the Easter Uprising and WWI in which reality of life recreates itself through the restructuring of chaos. 

Yeats’s iconic-bucolic imagery of singing birds in the introductory and concluding lines of “The Tower” reinforce his message of universal harmony that echoes throughout the sphere of life’s transformations. His final lines, “Seem but the clouds of the sky/When the horizon fades,/ Or a bird’s sleepy cry/ Among the deepening shades” (ll.193-96), indicate his reconciliation of life, art, Ireland and reality. It is not by accident that this poem leads directly to “Meditations in Time of Civil War.” 

In “The Tower,” Yeats illustrates the necessity for humanity to acknowledge the reality of life’s paradox and to nurture human consciousness with eyes wide open to human frailties as well as the glorious harmony present in one's creative endeavors.

The Tower

By William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)

                               I

What shall I do with this absurdity—

O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature,

Decrepit age that has been tied to me

As to a dog's tail? 

Never had I more

Excited, passionate, fantastical

Imagination, nor an ear and eye

That more expected the impossible—

No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,

Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben's back

And had the livelong summer day to spend.

It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,

Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend

Until imagination, ear and eye,

Can be content with argument and deal

In abstract things; or be derided by

A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

                                II

I pace upon the battlements and stare

On the foundations of a house, or where

Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from earth;

And send imagination forth

Under the day's declining beam, and call

Images and memories

From ruin or from ancient trees,

For I would ask a question of them all.

 

Beyond that ridge lived Mrs. French, and once

When every silver candlestick or sconce

Lit up the dark mahogany and the wine,

A serving-man, that could divine

That most respected lady's every wish,

Ran and with the garden shears

Clipped an insolent farmer's ears

And brought them in a little covered dish.

 

Some few remembered still when I was young

A peasant girl commended by a song,

Who'd lived somewhere upon that rocky place,

And praised the colour of her face, 

And had the greater joy in praising her,

Remembering that, if walked she there,

Farmers jostled at the fair

So great a glory did the song confer.

 

And certain men, being maddened by those rhymes,

Or else by toasting her a score of times,

Rose from the table and declared it right

To test their fancy by their sight;

But they mistook the brightness of the moon

For the prosaic light of day—

Music had driven their wits astray—

And one was drowned in the great bog of Cloone.

 

Strange, but the man who made the song was blind;

Yet, now I have considered it, I find

That nothing strange; the tragedy began

With Homer that was a blind man,

And Helen has all living hearts betrayed.

O may the moon and sunlight seem

One inextricable beam,

For if I triumph I must make men mad.

 

And I myself created Hanrahan

And drove him drunk or sober through the dawn

From somewhere in the neighbouring cottages.

Caught by an old man's juggleries

He stumbled, tumbled, fumbled to and fro

And had but broken knees for hire

And horrible splendour of desire;

I thought it all out twenty years ago:

 

Good fellows shuffled cards in an old bawn;

And when that ancient ruffian's turn was on

He so bewitched the cards under his thumb

That all but the one card became

A pack of hounds and not a pack of cards,

And that he changed into a hare.

Hanrahan rose in frenzy there

And followed up those baying creatures towards—

 

O towards I have forgotten what—enough!

I must recall a man that neither love

Nor music nor an enemy's clipped ear

Could, he was so harried, cheer;

A figure that has grown so fabulous

There's not a neighbour left to say

When he finished his dog's day:

An ancient bankrupt master of this house.

 

Before that ruin came, for centuries, 

Rough men-at-arms, cross-gartered to the knees

Or shod in iron, climbed the narrow stairs, 

And certain men-at-arms there were

Whose images, in the Great Memory stored,

Come with loud cry and panting breast

To break upon a sleeper's rest

While their great wooden dice beat on the board.

 

As I would question all, come all who can;

Come old, necessitous, half-mounted man;

And bring beauty's blind rambling celebrant;

The red man the juggler sent

Through God-forsaken meadows; Mrs. French,

Gifted with so fine an ear;

The man drowned in a bog's mire,

When mocking Muses chose the country wench.

 

Did all old men and women, rich and poor,

Who trod upon these rocks or passed this door,

Whether in public or in secret rage

As I do now against old age?

But I have found an answer in those eyes

That are impatient to be gone;

Go therefore; but leave Hanrahan,

For I need all his mighty memories.

 

Old lecher with a love on every wind,

Bring up out of that deep considering mind

All that you have discovered in the grave,

For it is certain that you have 

Reckoned up every unforeknown, unseeing

Plunge, lured by a softening eye,

Or by a touch or a sigh,

Into the labyrinth of another's being;

 

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun's

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

                                III

It is time that I wrote my will;

I choose upstanding men

That climb the streams until

The fountain leap, and at dawn

Drop their cast at the side

Of dripping stone; I declare

They shall inherit my pride,

The pride of people that were 

Bound neither to Cause nor to State, 

Neither to slaves that were spat on,

Nor to the tyrants that spat,

The people of Burke and of Grattan

That gave, though free to refuse—

Pride, like that of the morn, 

When the headlong light is loose,

Or that of the fabulous horn,

Or that of the sudden shower

When all streams are dry,

Or that of the hour

When the swan must fix his eye

Upon a fading gleam,

Float out upon a long

Last reach of glittering stream 

And there sing his last song.

And I declare my faith:

I mock Plotinus' thought

And cry in Plato's teeth,

Death and life were not

Till man made up the whole,

Made lock, stock and barrel

Out of his bitter soul, 

Aye, sun and moon and star, all, 

And further add to that

That, being dead, we rise, 

Dream and so create

Translunar Paradise.

I have prepared my peace

With learned Italian things

And the proud stones of Greece,

Poet's imaginings

And memories of love,

Memories of the words of women,

All those things whereof

Man makes a superhuman

Mirror-resembling dream.

 

As at the loophole there

The daws chatter and scream,

And drop twigs layer upon layer.

When they have mounted up, 

The mother bird will rest

On their hollow top,

And so warm her wild nest.

 

I leave both faith and pride

To young upstanding men

Climbing the mountain-side,

That under bursting dawn

They may drop a fly;

Being of that metal made

Till it was broken by

This sedentary trade.

 

Now shall I make my soul, 

Compelling it to study 

In a learned school

Till the wreck of body, 

Slow decay of blood,

Testy delirium

Or dull decrepitude,

Or what worse evil come—

The death of friends, or death

Of every brilliant eye

That made a catch in the breath—

Seem but the clouds of the sky 

When the horizon fades, 

Or a bird's sleepy cry 

Among the deepening shades.

[1] Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. (Hertfordshire, G.B.: Wordsworth Editions, Ltd., 2000)


[2] Lakatos, Jeanne. The Theory of Iconic Realism: Understanding the Arts through Cultural Context. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008, pp. 54-55.

James Joyce's Ulysses and Iconic Realism: Molly Bloom

Ha'Penny Bridge: Photo taken May, 2011

To celebrate Bloomsday (June 16th), below is an excerpt from a chapter, which I contributed to the book entitled, Breaking the Mould: Literary Representation of Irish Catholicism in Literature: 

James Joyce illustrates iconic realism by means of Victorian feminine perceptions throughout Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in the final chapter of his epic tale, Ulysses. Using stream of consciousness in a manner unparalleled at this novel’s publication, Joyce leads his audience to the entrance of the sphere of Molly’s mind, taking the reader to every crevice of her feminine consciousness. Joyce defies the social stigma of women during this era as he interweaves Molly Bloom’s expression of a unique feminine point of view.

Through Molly’s voice, he seeks answers to his own challenge with a feminine defiance of human weakness. The Ireland in which James Joyce lives is in the midst of revolution. As Joyce leaves his ancestral home, he allows his own genius to flourish. He sees the result of the male world’s design for women and seeks to illuminate the world with its significance. His personal associations with women frame the female portrait of Molly Bloom, as he places Molly in the midst of the Victorian era, with its focus on proper placement of gender roles, customs and even nations, carries the burden of living with this regimented philosophical point of view.

Joyce designs the person of Molly to reveal traits that originate from conventional Victorian male ideas of how a woman should act or think. Joyce writes Molly as one whose actions have a tendency to focus upon her sexual desires. Molly, like Ireland, is a contradiction of human spirit. On one hand, she is independent, wild, yet she depends on the ruler of her heart for identity. Nevertheless, Joyce uses outspoken behavior by Molly to reveal his personal hopeful desire for Ireland, one that seeks to declare independence from the established English Common law.

© Jeanne I. Lakatos

Symphony at The Cloisters, New York City, and Iconic Realism

The Cloisters, New York City

www.pbase.com/ terraxplorer/image/68935986

The following excerpt is in the Introduction of my first book: The Theory of Iconic Realism. I'd like to thank Professor Lionel Bascom, RIP, for telling me of this experience as his illustration of iconic realism.

A group of New Yorkers assembles in the Cloisters museum, which sits atop a hill overlooking the Hudson River, just outside of Manhattan. These individuals have come to listen to a concert, which will be presented just before sunset. Anticipating a traditional concert with musicians performing in front of a listening audience, they search for seating. They notice that chairs have been strategically placed throughout the museum, a few here, a few there, up the winding staircases, in the garden, along the walls of stone. Confused, the concert attendees seat themselves, waiting.

Soon, echoing through the interweaving chambers of the museum, low brass instruments create a resonating medieval drone, monotone voices chanting in Latin with sustained pitches, fill the damp air with a sound that transports the audience from the busy New York City museum to a medieval stone castle. The glow from the setting sun mixed with low lighting envelops the medieval tapestries, statuary and paintings while muted melodies fill the audience with an aural feast. Iconic melodies that signify this medieval period permeate the halls.

The medieval tones mingle with the realism in the works of art, architecture and presence of the audience, sensually transported to this era. When the concert ends, the members of this audience become aware of the cultural distinctions between the two worlds of medieval Europe and twentieth century New York City, now transformed in their perceptions of continuity of human interaction in time and space, having experienced iconic realism.