to render, say, out of sight out of mind as invisible lunatic

excerpt from Employment for the Castes in Abeyance

I was a translator at the Institute:
fair pay, clean work, and a bowerbird's delight
of theory and fact to keep the forebrain supple.

I was Western Europe. Beiträge, reviste,
dissertaties, rapports turned English under my
one-fingered touch. Teacup-and-Remington days.

//

The trade was uneasy about computers, back then:
if they could be taught not to render, say, out of sight
out of mind as invisible lunatic

they might supersede us - not
because they'd be better. More on principle.
Not that our researchers were unkindly folk:

one man on exchange from Akademgorod
told me about Earth's crustal plates, their ponderous
inevitable motion, collisions that raised mountain chains,

the continents rode on these Marxian turtles, it seemed;
another had brought slow death to a billion rabbits,
a third team had bottled the essence of rain on dry ground.

They were translators, too, our scientists:
they were translating the universe into science,
believing that otherwise it had no meaning.

//

Les Murray's Employment for the Castes in Abeyance and Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia, featuring a Piero della Francesca in the chapel where the Italian cult of the Virgin is ritualised; miraculous birds fly out of the Madonna as a woman prays for a child. The Madonna is a protector of women and symbol of childbirth, and although she doesn't feature heavily in the bible, over time, especially over the late middle ages and early Renaissance, she has become an equal figure to Christ himself, and most prominently in Italy. The film is about a writer who is as unsure about the modern age as the poet in Employment; he befriends a mad man convinced that 1 + 1 does not equal 2 but a more comprehensive 1, and that he must wade through a steam pool with a lit candle in order to save the world. Gorchakov begins to dissolve into a transferred madness, exacerbating his alienation from the modern world; fusing his wife, the Madonna, and his interpretor; and attempting to fulfil the madman's vital task.

Andrea Mantegna and cardiacesque coral

La Vierge de la Victoire // Madonna della Vittoria (1496)

Hither, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), one of my favourite painters and a principal figure in the Early Italian Renaissance, whose dramatic use of perspective and foreshortening combine with a sculptural style to emphasise arrested energy and the human subject. Trained in the study of marbles, he revered antique art over that of his time and even went so far as to avow it more eclectic in form than nature, (which would have had more than a slap of controversy about it). His painted cloths are always severe and closely folded; Mantegna is said to have dressed his models in paper or gummed weaves to achieve this stiff perfection of form.

This work is Completely Striking, particularly the ornately adorned arch filled with exotic birds, fruits, and precious stones, and the cardiacesque coral, a symbol of the Passion of Christ, which reminds me of another coral favourite, Piero della Francesca's Madonna di Senigallia (hither>>). 

The painting is a commissioned commemoration of the Battle of Fornovo in 1495; it shows the Virgin protecting Gonzaga (bottom left of frame), the military leader of the Holy League of Venice who successfully defeated the French invasion. The latin inscription, barely visible on the base of her throne, reads REGINA // CELI LET. // ALLELVIA (Queen of Heaven, rejoice, Alleluia). 

Ironically, around three centuries later, the painting was looted by the French army during the Napoleonic invasion of Italy and exhibited in the Louvre, where it remains, and where I visit it with antique adoration.

the wonderful faces of Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca (1415-1492) was an early Italian Renaissance painter whose faces epitomised the humanist ideal that would become the hallmark of this creative period. Interestingly, his portrayal of a baby Christ marks the beginning of a general wane in Western art of the adult-faced infans Son of God. The knowing child-Christ, whose upraised hand signifies a wisdom that no child can possess and the foreknowledge that no man can, slowly begins to soften into the embrace of his mother and become a natural child, innocent of knowledge and the horrors of the earthly world that lie in wait.