Joseph Cornell, "Medici Slot Machine"

From Charles Simic, "Medici Slot Machine" in Dime-Store Alchemy:

The name enchants, and so does the idea – the juxtaposition of the Renaissance boy, the penny arcade, and the Photomat in the subway, what seem at first totally incompatible worlds – but then, of course, we are in Cornell’s ‘magic regions’ of Forty-second Street and Times Square.

            The boy has the face of one lost in reverie who is about to press his forehead against a windowpane.  He has no friends.  In the subway there are panhandlers, small-time hustlers, drunks, sailors on leave, teen-aged whores loitering about.  The air smells of frying oil, popcorn, and urine. The boy-prince studies the Latin classics and prepares himself for the affairs of the state.  He is stubborn and cruel.  He already has secret vices.  At night he cries himself to sleep.  Outside the street is lined with movie palaces showing films noirs.  One is called Dark Mirror, another Asphalt Jungle.  In them, too, the faces are often in shadow.

            ‘He is as beautiful as a girl’, someone says.  His picture is repeated in passport size on the machine.  Outside the penny arcade blacks shine shoes, a blind man sells newspapers, young boys in tight jeans hold hands.  Everywhere there are vending machines and they all have mirrors.  The mad woman goes around scribbling on them with her lipstick.  The vending machine is a tattooed bride. 

            The boy dreams with his eyes open.  An angelic image in the dark of the subway.  The machine, like any myth, has heterogeneous parts.  There must be gear wheels, cogs, and other clever contrivances attached to the crank.  Whatever it is, it must be ingenious.  Our loving gaze can turn it on.  A poetry slot machine offering a jackpot of incommensurable meanings activated by our imagination.  Its mystic repertoire has many images.  The prince vanishes and other noble children take his place.  Lauren Bacall appears for a moment.  At 3 A.M. the gum machine on the deserted platform with its freshly wiped mirror is the new wonder-working icon of the Holy Virgin.

Caravaggio, "The Conversion of Saint Paul"

From Thomas Gunn, "In Santa Maria del Popolo"

Waiting for when the sun an hour or less

Conveniently oblique makes visible

The painting on one wall of this recess


By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,


I see how shadow in the painting brims


With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out


But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,


Until the very subject is in doubt.

But evening gives the act, beneath the horse

And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,


Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,


Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.


O wily painter, limiting the scene


From a cacophony of dusty forms


To the one convulsion, what is it you mean


In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?

…I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel


To the dim interior of the church instead,


In which there kneel already several people,


Mostly old women: each head closeted


In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.


Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
--

For the large gesture of solitary man,

Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.

Hans Holbein, "Dead Christ"

From Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot: 

In the painting, the face has been horribly lacerated by blows, swollen, with terrible, swollen and bloody bruises, the eyes open, the pupils narrow; the large open whites of the eyes gleam with a deathly, glassy sheen. But strangely, as one looks at the corpse of this tortured man, a peculiar and interesting question arises: if this is really what the corpse looked like when it was seen by all his disciples, his chief future apostles, by the women who followed him and stood by the cross, indeed by all who believed him and worshipped him, then how could they believe, as they looked at such a corpse, that this martyr would rise from the dead? Here one cannot help being struck by the notion that if death is so terrible and the laws of nature so powerful, then how can they be overcome? How can they be overcome when they have not been conquered even by the one who conquered nature in his own lifetime, to whom it submitted, who cried: Talitha cumi- and the damsel arose, "Lazarus, come forth", and the dead man came forth? Nature appears, as one looks at that painting, in the guise of some enormous, implacable and speechless animal, or, more nearly, far more nearly, though strangely- in the guise of some enormous machine of the most modern devising, which has senselessly seized, smashed to pieces and devoured, dully and without feeling, a great and priceless being- a being which alone was worth the whole of nature and all its laws, the whole earth, which was, perhaps created solely for the emergence of that being! It is as though this painting were the means by which this idea of a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force, to which everything is subordinate, is expressed, and is involuntarily conveyed to us. Those people who surrounded the dead man, though not one of them is visible in the painting, must have felt a terrible anguish and perturbation that evening, which had smashed all their hopes and almost all their beliefs in one go. They must have parted in the most dreadful fear, though each of them also took away within him an enormous idea that could never now be driven out of them. And if this same teacher could, on the eve of his execution, have seen what he looked like, then how could he have ascended the cross and died as he did now? This question also involuntarily presents itself as one looks at the painting.

Joseph Turner, "The Slave Ship"

From John Ruskin, Modern Painters:

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night.  The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm.  Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood.  Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam.  They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying.  Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

Brueghel, "The Fall of Icarus"

W. H. Auden, “Fall of Icarus” by Brueghel

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel

when Icarus fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling

near

the edge of the sea

concerned

with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted

the wings' wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning