I write
about such issues that occurred to me while designing a catoptric or mirror
anamorphosis. The picture itself is an illustration of a poem, The Raven by
Edgar Allen Poe. “The bonus” is in the mirror placed on the picture: the
portrait of the poet. The text is going to explain the connection between the
two illustrations with the help and criticism of Poe’s art philosophical
ideas.
Inspiration
or design? When speaking about a work of art, you may want to know which of
these predominated in its creation. The author of one work I chose to
illustrate also asked this question and his answer was that a work of art can
be created consciously “with the precision and rigid consequence of a
mathematical problem”. The writer was Edgar Allan Poe and the work was The Raven. Poe wrote an essay, The Philosophy of Composition, in which
he offers a radical theory on the creative process as he describes what lies
behind his poem. (This essay is reproduced on page
XX and the poem is on page XX.)
The Raven remains
one of the most widely recognized and respected poems in literature. How the
situation is established is astonishing, embarrassing and, it has to be
admitted, faintly comic as well. A talking raven lands in a room: at a first
reading (or listening), you can hardly take it or the situation seriously.
However, with Poe, you can never tell what he takes seriously and how seriously
he takes it. An idea making no sense could end in a question of life and death,
and sentences that sound straightforward may be intended as parodies. Therefore
The Philosophy of Composition too has
to be read with certain reservations. Who would believe Poe’s claim that
intuition is not needed to compose poems, that inspiration does not exist? That
all you need to compose a poetical work is a logical, step-by-step design and
that effects have to be cautiously and precisely calculated?
When
translating the poem visually, my first step was to show the time and the
place, or at least what we know of it from the text. Clearly, it is the home of
the narrator, easily depicted through “homely” disorder (shoes kicked off,
books all over the place etc., at least my home looks like this). I didn’t want
to use these objects as a reference to the fact that the poem was written in
1845; I depicted them as of today and, quite selfishly, I “left” there some of
the devices that I needed for creating illustrations and for designing my
anamorphoses. Although this kind of self-reflection does connect to the
Romanticism of Poe and to twentieth-century Postmodernism, the fine,
etching-like character of the coloured drawing unmistakenly indicates the
nineteenth-century time frame. Picturing the precise time of day, however, is
more complex – the poem says it is midnight. The geometrical equivalent of
midnight in the image is symmetry, and so I used a sphere within a square as
the basic structure of the composition and distinctly highlighted its centre.
The symmetry, present in Poe’s poem as well, is the result of viewing from
above, a bird’s-eye perspective. Of course, if we were to be satisfied with the
top-view, with the raven’s eye view of the milieu, that would definitely not be
enough to fully interpret the situation; but to depict the raven itself would
be perhaps overdoing it. This problem also goes back to the question whether a
raven really does make its appearance, or is only the product of the narrator’s
imagination. The greatest virtue of the poem is that it does not come down
decisively on either side. If a real raven is depicted, then a side is taken.
Is it possible for the illustrator, as it was for Poe, to keep an open mind?
Yes, it is, if a depiction of the bird is avoided, and only its shadow, its
image in a mirror is represented, or anything that refers to a raven —in this
way an open mind is kept. My illustration presents all three possibilities. The
dark shade in the middle of the picture can be taken as the shadow of the bird
hovering above; in the wine cup, the beat of a wing is reflected; the
illustrations in a natural history book lying open on the table also depict a
raven.
The next issue is the identity of
the narrator. He hovers between sleep and wakefulness, hence he is shown as
slumped over the table (“While I nodded,
nearly napping”), and this also circumvents the question whether Poe and
the narrator are the same. The empty armchair opposite this figure and the
drapery on it refer to the loss of the lady in the poem. To symbolize love, two
books are intertwined.
In The Philosophy of Composition Poe argues at length that the
monotony of the frequently repeated refrain lends the poem its melancholy. In
the illustration, there is a monotony in the repetitive pattern of the parquet
floor, and in the books and the sheets of paper scattered everywhere. The books
and the illustrations on the pages bear out Poe’s notion that consciousness and
calculation, intellect instead of “fine frenzy”, lead the creative process; it
is also crucial that they allow none of the important details to be omitted. I
would have been sorry to leave out the bust of Pallas Athene, highlighted by
Poe in his essay too.
On
re-reading the poem or Poe’s comments on its creation, one senses that he is
intentionally hiding something. The blurred mystical-metaphysicality of the
poem and the provocative brainstorming of The
Philosophy of Composition seem to there to distract. So that you wouldn’t recognize a soul torn by
fear and doubt, so that you wouldn’t take the first-person narrator seriously,
so that you shouldn’t identify him with Poe. He did not have a dead lover
called Lenore, his room did not contain a bust of Pallas Athene; yet there is
no doubt that the shadow of the raven hovers over Poe’s soul, destiny and life.
If you have not been aware of this, the fifth line of the penultimate stanza (“Take thy beak from out my heart”) makes
you sure that here it is the poet speaking and not his narrator, slumped over
his books. This is the first metaphor that re-interprets the whole poem as it
has developed and clarifies the symbolic character of the bird.
Someone
viewing my illustration (I would call any such person a co-creator) will place
a cylindrical mirror onto that point which covers the bird’s reflection in the
wine glass; in so doing, they emphasize the metaphoric interpretation of the
poem and of the picture. In the mirror is reflected Edgar Allan Poe’s virtual
face, made up of the objects lying horizontally, the requisites of the
illustration for
The Raven. Once the
cylinder is raised, the face disappears, what is left are these scattered
objects, the shades, the man lying on his face and the empty room.
Poe claims in his essay that the most important effect to
be created in a work of art is that which allows it to be interpreted
backwards. His conclusion explains all the parts of the composition and their
role in the whole. Poe was true to this in most
of his works. In
fact, the same compositional
scheme is at work for an anamorphosis that has a second meaning, since by
placing a cylindrical mirror onto the centre of the paper, the viewer will
realise why certain objects have been placed in the picture.
How can
you distort an image so that it only becomes visible and recognizable in a
mirror of the right size and from a certain angle? This is what I did: I
selected a photograph of Poe and made a line-drawing from it. (Figure 1)Then I
produced a reflection of the picture (so that when its reflection appears in
the mirror, the original image can be seen). I drew a grid of 11 columns and 9
lines upon the picture, adding numbers and letters for the sake of clarity. The
drawing was first reflected vertically, and then horizontally to be reading to
turn into the anamorphosis. (Figure 2)
Then I
drew eleven concentric circles from the centre of the illustration, and split
the area into nine pie slices.
In other words I made a distorted form of the grid of squares. I then had to
redraw the image in the small squares in the exact deformation into the exact
plane figure. (Figure 3) I placed the cylindrical mirror from time to time onto
the centre to check the work.
If we
consider The Philosophy of Composition,
this is no more than practical creation, logical composition and a systematic
sorting out within the possible solutions. The procedure I have followed in
composing an anamorphosis is actually what Poe suggested in his essay. What the
artist should do is first to dismantle and deform reality, then create, through
his imagination and intellect, a new but unreal world out of these realities.
This creative process does not require inspiration—at least so Poe says—and
there is no place for irrational melancholy or for subconscious instincts. Art
should stand apart from the uncontrollable flow of emotions, creativity should
be led intellectually, so that pure art can be created merely on a mathematical
basis.
I
find it interesting that Poe expressed great interest in the characteristics of
optics and visual perception. In his short story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the detective, Auguste Dupin,
explains how the details and the different viewpoints should be used to examine
something as a whole—and then, with surprising precision, describes the
technique of distorted perception.
Truth is
not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do
believe that it is
invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek it, and not
upon the mountain-tops where it is found. The modes and sources of this kind of
error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at
a star by glances—to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the
exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible to
feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star
distinctly—is to have the best appreciation of its lustre—a lustre which grows
dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of
rays actually fall upon the eye in the latter case, but in the former, there is
the more refined capacity for comprehension.
When designing my anamorphosis to
Poe’s poem, I attempted to work with a conscious and calculating mind, but I
was also aware of traps such childish logic might lead me into. All I could
hope for was that the ‘inexplicable’, too, always has and will have a role in
all kind of creative work.