THE SCREAM                                 [Image]



   1

   Observe. Ridged, raised, tactile, the
   horror
   of the skinned head is there. It is
   skinned
   which had a covering up before,
   and now is nude, and is determined

   by what it perceives. The blood not
   Christ's,
   blood of death without resurrection,
   winds flatly in the air.  Habit
   foists
   conventional surrender to one

   response in vision, but it fails
   here,
   where the partaking viewer is freed
   into the under-skin of his fear.
   Existence is laid bare, and married

   to a movement of caught perception
   where the unknown will become the
   known
   as one piece of the rolling mountain
   becomes another under the stone

   which shifts now toward the happy
   valley
   which is not prepared, as it could
   not
   be, for the achieved catastrophe
   which produces no moral upshot,

   no curtain, epilogue, nor applause,
   no Dame to return purged to the Manse

   (the Manse is wrecked)--not even the
   pause,
   the repose of art that has distance.




   2

   We, unlike Munch, observe his The
   Scream
   making words, since perhaps we too
   know
   the head's "experience of extreme
   disorder."  We have made our bravo,

   but such, of course, will never
   equal
   the painting.  What is the relation?
   A word, which is at once richly full

   of attributes: thinginess, reason,

   reference, time, noise, among others;

   bounces off the firm brightness of
   paint
   as if it had no substance, and errs
   toward verbalism, naturally.  Mayn't

   we say that time cannot represent
   space in art? "The fascination of
   what's impossible" may be present,
   motivating the artist to move.

   So the poet, the talker, aims his
   words at the object, and his words go

   faster and faster, and now he is
   like a cyclotron, breaking into

   the structure of things by repeated
   speed and force in order to lay bare
   in words, naturally, unworded
   insides of things, the things that
   are there.



   Donald Hall

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