“What burns through existence to endlessness?” Dean Rader’s Meditations on Cy Twombly
“Why, or how, do we take solace […] in art?”
— Richard Shiff, A Running Hand [On Cy Twombly], 2012
Throughout his life, Cy Twombly inscribed words, lines of poetry and even entire poems into his paintings. However, it was by no means only his strong affinity with poetry that aroused the interest of poets in his work and person. From the very beginning of his artistic career, his hermetic visual language, in which pencil scribbles, expressive clusters of color, tumbling lines, geometric figures, numbers, words and later entire literary quotations appear and disappear from countless overlapping layers of paint, demanded poetic responses.
To this day, many of them contain extremely accurate interpretations of his artistic means of expression. In the earliest known poem about Twombly, “Cy Twombly, faced / with his first Chicago & New York shows,” which was written in 1951 on the occasion of two exhibitions by Twombly, his then teacher at Black Mountain College, the poet and literary theorist Charles Olson, cited the line as the nucleus of Twombly’s artistic articulation. His poem begins with the enigmatic lines: “Ashurbanipal, or the stern-view / of a whaler making West / on the Line.” In 1955, Frank O’Hara, then curator of the MoMA, emphasized the fundamental importance of the drawing and the feelings for Twombly: “If drawing is as vital to painting as color, Twombly has an ever ready resource for his remarkable feelings.” With regard to the significance of the color white for Twombly, the Italian avant-garde poet and visual artist Emilio Villa described the young artist in his poem “Cy Twombly,” written between 1957 and 1960, as “il talento bianco”, “the white talent.” In the same poem, Valla addressed the emerging use of writing, which was to develop into one of the main characteristics of Twombly’s art in the form of poetic inscriptions in the course of his work. As if in anticipation of later, famous sentences by Roland Barthes, Villa spoke of a “Germinant / writing, answers to the calls / of a germinal lexicon.”
Twombly’s painterly, sculptural and photographic work continues to resonate with poets to this day. In 2012, the exhibition “Cy Twombly Photographs 1951—2010” at the Paleis voor Schone Kunsten/Centre for Fine Arts BOZAR in Brussels was accompanied by a handout in which six poets (Bernard Dewulf, Roland Jooris, Stéphane Lambert, Monika Rinck, Alfred Schaffer und Antoine Wauters) responded to the lyrical qualities of the artist’s photographic works, which were still unknown to the public at the time. Jonathan Galassi’s poem “After Images” (2021) was also written as a poetic response to Twombly’s photographic works. Further examples of contemporary poets’ engagement with individual Twombly images are the poems by Anne Boyer, Michael Dhynes, H. L. Hix, Javier O. Huertas, Peter Laugesen and Cole Swenson. The photographer and poet Ewa Monika Zebrowski has published five artists books with poems and photographs on the artist’s Italian places of activity.
Perhaps no one has described the special approach of poets to Twombly’s work as sensitively and aptly as the long-standing director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Palma Bucarelli. In her catalog contribution to Twombly’s solo exhibition at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice in 1958, she characterizes the poet’s (italicized below) special ability to decipher the meanings hidden in Twombly’s pictorial signs: “On the old white-wash of the wall, innocent blackboard, echoes of lost voices surface, frail races of lived life, gone who knows where; signs traced by unknown, negligent hands, gleaned by the white page, voices of crowds long gone, forgotten memories. Humble, anonymous, shapeless material our everyday life; a wall with a few scratches; half-faded traces; words, shadows, scrawls, what is it? No one heeds. The poet, who sees, lends his soul to it, the wall tells of chance signs that he has guiltlessly gathered and it has a history. The poet listens and this nature that goes unlooked at, that doesn’t matter, that isn’t anything, carries to him the breath of secret human lives. Who has not left a mark on the wall, the unstoppable impulse to ascribe a sign, to make a gesture, a pure gesture on the pure white wall? Only a surface at first, then the signs overlap, create a time and a space, the wall now has a depth. Life is everywhere around, things wait only to be seen. Someone has traced those signs, unique unrepeatable presence of life, heart-rendering bewilderment of the unknowable, slender thread of hope of communicating with the invisible. […] the poet who grasps the voices of the world represents a wall on which idle signs have transfused a welcome human warmth, humble or haughty, strayed desires, broken words, tender, mocking, loving words, the unconscious mirage of coming to a halt, despair at passing on; poor, tenuous signs count for nothing, you can lay on a coat of whitewash, the voices fade now truly dead, the surface is white, everything is ready to begin again.”
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In his latest collection of poetry, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly (2023), one of the most significant collections of poetry written during the coronavirus pandemic, Dean Rader attempts to be the poet described by Bucarelli — “the poet, who sees, lends his soul to it, listens, grasps the voices of the world“ tracing the “slender thread of hope of communicating with the invisible.” In his volume, Rader presents 31 poems, all of which were written in connection with works by Twombly. The poems follow a triptych-like arrangement (the middle section is more extensive than those before and after), with each of the three parts preceded by a motto. A conclusion entitled “Pentimento” and subsequent notes shed light on the personal circumstances surrounding the creation of the volume.
Each of Rader’s poems enters into a dialog on a double page with a drawing, a painting or an entire cycle of works by Twombly. The fact that the volume is nevertheless only loosely in the tradition of the picture poem is due to the concrete, radically personal context of reception in which Rader’s volume places Twombly’s pictorial works: As Rader notes in the conclusion, the passing of his father in 2017 and the Covid death of his mother in spring 2022, a few weeks after he finished writing the book, span an elegiac bracket around the poetic project. The motto of the third part of the volume is a verse from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, “Was ist deine leidendste Erfahrung?” (“What is your most painful experience?”), in English in a more precise intensification: “What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?” Twombly’s work, but also the artist himself, become the addressees of subjective pain in Rader’s volume — of having to live under a “scarred sky,” as tyhe last poem in the volume puts it. Nevertheless, this poem entitled “Once again in Thought about Rilke, Twombly’s “Orpheus Paintings, and Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss” also ends with the life-affirming words: “Even so, / I will let the entire lie down in my body’s blue light / in hope that something will start / to heal.”
In “Pentimento,” Rader describes how it came about that he (and behind him his alter ego, the “Dear Reader” of the poems — a play on words with which the poet works) sought solace and healing from a visual artist: in 1995, on a spiritual journey of insight, he visited the Rothko Chapel founded by John and Dominique De Menil in Houston. Unexpectedly, however, he did not have the transcendental experience he was looking for in front of Mark Rothko’s paintings, but in the Cy Twombly Gallery just a few steps away: “To my great surprise I found […] Twombly’s work much more spiritually alive.” Twombly’s works, according to Rader, “were soaring and searching. Many contained words of poems but were nevertheless unreadable, inscrutable. And in their inscrutability, their inaccessibility I felt the presence of the divine, itself inscrutable and inaccessible.”
In 2018, immediately after his father’s death, Rader undertook “a Twombly-pilgrimage” to New York, where the Gagosian Gallery presented the first retrospective survey exhibition of the artist’s drawings and works on paper — In Beauty it is finished: Drawings 1951-2008, to which he confesses in “Pentimento”: “I have been taken with Twombly for over 30 years, but I don’t think I was prepared for the deep emotions his work would ignite.” Still completely enveloped by the death of his father, Rader had an experience in front of Twombly’s paintings that was comparable to his first encounter 25 years earlier, “but perhaps even more revelatory. It was as if someone gave me a meal, but I did not know I had been starving. Or that I had suddenly learned to see, not knowing I had lost my sight.” In this second ‘awakening experience,’ Twombly’s works seemed to respond to his experience of loss, becoming dialog partners in his coping with grief. Thanks to their literary inscriptions, they touched his pain with two different voices — through painting and poetry: “Twombly’s work has always been deeply elegiac, and in those drawings, I found what I have come to think of a masterful mourning. Entering his visual fields of pictures and poetry helped me process my father’s death as nothing else had.”
Rader read the exhibition title In Beauty it is finished — also a fragment of a Navajo prayer inscribed by Twombly in one of his drawings — as a description of the artist’s life’s work and at the same time the life’s work of his deceased father — “It is finished / A life’s work.” Twombly’s drawings confronted the poet with the same question he had recently addressed to his father’s (public and private) legacy: “What makes a life?” It seemed a strange coincidence to him that the lives of his father, Gary Dean Rader, a “successful public figure,” and Edwin Parker Twombly, Sr., the artist’s father, were similar in several respects. Twombly’s father had also been a public figure as athletic director of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, VA, after a notable career as a professional baseball player. “As I moved through this career-spanning exhibit, I kept finding parallels between the act of looking at the effects of Twombly’s life and the act of looking through the effects of my father’s.” Against the background of these analogies, Rader recognized in Twombly “a big mind and big talent trying to come to terms with meaning, life, death, the weight of history, and the ability of art to put us in touch with that which is beyond articulation.”
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Death, the meaning of life and contact with that which defies naming are recurring leitmotifs in Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. Rader approaches these themes with the help of the dialogical method of maieutics, which helps the interlocutor to gain knowledge through targeted questioning. The motif of dialogical address runs through Rader’s entire book. Often using the convention of a letter salutation (“Dear Cy”), Twombly himself becomes a dialog partner and confidant of the poet to whom and whose work he addresses his questions. Even when he first encountered Twombly’s paintings in Houston, they appeared to him first and foremost as works of a questioner (“soaring and searching”). In “Pentimento” he writes: “It is that poetics of seeking that draws me to Twombly.” In this attitude of a questioner, even a doubter, for whom “[i]mages were not enough. Poetry was not enough,” Rader sees the questions raised about everything that makes up a life. These include death, grief, loss, pain, failure, fears, feelings of guilt, remorse, love and hope, but also the search for the absolute. Twombly’s work as well as the dead artist himself thus become the addressees of supra-individual questions of meaning, which the author formulates both against a spiritual background and in the context of burning contemporary problems (Covid pandemic, police violence against African Americans, climate crisis, wars) and which in this respect reach far beyond his personal experiences of loss.
According to Rader, questions like these gave rise to the first poem in the volume, “Troubled by Thoughts about Infinity and Oblivion, I Exit the Twombly Retrospective at Dusk and Walk the High Line with the Ghost of My Father.” The poet addressed it to both his deceased father and Twombly on his evening walk back to the hotel on the High Line after visiting the exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery.
The following morning, Rader also included one of the works seen at Gagosian’s in this dialog with the two deceased—Twombly’s 1979 drawing Orpheus. The drawing, which stands opposite the first poem in his volume, shows the name of the mythical poet and singer in Greek letters that have been blurred and painted over several times. Below it, Twombly has inscribed four lines from Rilke’s “Sonnet 23” from the first part of the collection of poems Sonnets to Orpheus in German.[1] It is surely no coincidence that Rader also juxtaposes the last poem in the volume, “Once Again in Thought about Rilke, Twombly’s Orpheus Paintings, Fatherhood, I Consider the Inevitability of Creation and Loss,” which is explicitly dedicated to the memory of his father, with a painting by Twombly (Orpheus, 1979) on the same theme. The mythical singer’s lament after the loss of Eurydice had so moved the gods that he was the only human allowed to descend into the underworld in search of her spirit. For Rader, the evening High Line — that intermediate place between earth and heaven — becomes the Orphic ‘shadow realm’ in which he enters into a dialog with the spirits of his father and Twombly. Rader’s description of the futile attempt to lead his mother, Ginger Rader, out of the “valley of the shadow of death” a few hours before her death with this last poem in the volume is also reminiscent of Orpheus’ fate: “I held her hand and read her the final poem in this book, hoping the last lines, offered as a kind of prayer, might save my mother’s life. They did not.”
Rader had also read lines from Rilke’s “Tenth Duino Elegy” to his mother on her death bed, including those he had copied from Twombly’s Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus to the Shores of Asia Minor) during his return visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston in 2020, just before the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, while working on his poetry collection. The poet spent several hours in front of Twombly’s 52-foot opus magnum, which he had worked on for 25 years in Rome before completing it in 1994 in his native Lexington, VA. The work contains a total of ten handwritten inscriptions from eight different literary sources, including Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus and his Duino Elegies. For Twombly, the direct source of inspiration for the work was Catullus’ “Carmen 101,” an elegy entitled “Ad inferias (Gift to the Dead),” which the Roman poet wrote in response to the unexpected death of his brother in the Troad. Like Rader after him, Twombly combined the theme of death with his own life against the backdrop of Catullus’ tragic personal loss in his monumental painting.
The motif of death is omnipresent in Rader’s volume. The poet repeatedly invokes the spirits of the deceased: those of his father, his mother, his grandfather, his father-in-law, his best friend — and again and again Twombly. In “Letter of Resignation,” Rader addresses the artist directly in an intimate prose letter: “Dearest Cy, Everything is ending. My mother, an artist, painted her final work on the cast covering my son’s arm. I think about her dying every day. I feel it is impossible to write. I feel as though this book, composed almost entirely during the pandemic, is both bookended and wholly inscribed by death.” Death even seems inherent in his first name as an alliteration: “And do you know what else? When I tried to type dead above, I spelled dean. Dear Cy, did you know that dead and dean are only one letter apart?” And even the poet’s attempt to fathom the phenomenon of artistic inspiration seems to fail due to thoughts of death and loss. “Meditation on Inspiration” states: “This poem was going to explore the notion of painting as a picture – / but cannot / […] there is so much to say about line and color and symbol and loss. […] I am thinking of Twombly in his grave / [one letter from grove] / in Rome – / My father in his in Oklahoma: / every mark: a suture: a slash: a wound: / Sing in me, / mute muse – […]”.
In “Meditation on Instruction,” the only prose poem in the volume, Dean Rader explicitly names the work by Twombly that he most strongly associates with death: Untitled from 1970, showing six rows of brown-bluish loops tapering from bottom to top. The earthy tones of the painting remind Rader of his own childhood in Oklahoma. The second of the six parts of the poem reads: “II. When I look at this painting, I see Oklahoma, I see autumn, I see wheatfields, I see the sun and a ray of rust and the wind bending the stalks but at the same time mending them into something akin to skin smoothing itself over a body that is not there, internal swirl of the not-yet-cut, glume and awn, spike and stem, glazed gold in the long / rake of late light, all spiral, all coil, here tiller and rachis, here the ligule of last leaf.” And further: “V. In 1970, Twombly is 41 years old. He paints this in Rome where, 41 years later, he will die. More than any other by him, this piece makes me think of death: the palette of harvest: the season receding into the long barrow of winter: the harrow hard into the ground: […] the silent shift from stem to soil: the last release: the unlocking leaf: the slash of sickle and scythe: the brush lifting from the canvas: the pencil pausing:”
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“Meditation on Instruction” closely follows the formal pictorial structure of Untitled in its division into six parts. Even the six parts of the poem change their number of lines, so that the blocks of lines of different lengths correlate with Twombly’s loops. The poem thus shows the close formal link between Rader’s line structure and the pictorial syntax of the Lexingtonian, which can be found again and again in his poems. For example, the lines drawn by Twombly in Beyond (A System for Passing), Part X (1971) are transformed into lines of poetry in Rader’s system. The open, asymmetrical compositional style of Twombly’s The Fire That Consumes All Before It is taken up in Rader’s poem with the same title through words and lines of words scattered seemingly at random on the surface of the book page. “Meditation on Absolution” shows ten litany-like double verses of only between one and three words, which also frequently insert a grammatical pause in the middle of the verse (“My heart: / green”). With its short line length, the poem not only takes up the breaking off and resumption of the white lasso-shaped ‘ls’ and ‘es’ of Twombly’s writing-evoking traces of painting in Note I from Three Notes from Salalah (2005-2007), but at the same time, in the downward division of the lines, also reproduces the trickling down of the pseudo-writing on Twombly’s canvas, executed in white against a green background. “Meditation on Communication” applies this mimetic principle even more ingeniously in the arrangement of individual words or groups of words, which are offset both in relation to each other and to the lines above and below them, thus alluding to the pseudo-letters in Untitled, III and Untitled, V (both from 2008). In “Meditation on Mimesis,” the entire visual appearance of the poem is pulsated by a wave-like structure that ideally refers to the basic idea of Twombly’s Poems to The Sea from 1959, which is juxtaposed with it, and thus approaches the ‘visual text’ of the ‘classical’ picture poem.
Cy Twombly, Note I, 2007, Lexington. Acrylic on wooden panel, 96 × 144 in. (243.8 × 365.8 cm), Collection Doris and Donald Fisher, San Francisco, © Cy Twombly Foundation.
Yet nowhere do Rader’s texts evoke a feeling of direct depiction or repetitive description. On the contrary, formal correspondences are answered by just as many formal and content-related contradictions. For example, Octet, a poem with an extremely austere appearance, is juxtaposed with one of the most chaotic-looking mixtures of scribbles, erratic chunks of words and linear eruptions of color — Ilium (One Morning Ten Years Later). Twombly’s slowly unraveling jumble — of pictorial signs and of war — is juxtaposed with a military-like arrangement of 48 individual words in six rows of eight lines each, which do not form a meaningful text, neither in horizontal nor in vertical reading. In Rader’s work, Twombly’s war-induced chaos is resolved into a shocking realization: the last two words of the poem—“One more”—already herald the next war … Rader’s ten-part cycle of poems “The Fire That Consumes All before It,” which runs parallel to Twombly’s epic thematization of Homer’s Iliad in ten paintings (Fifty Days at Iliam), also ‘responds’ to this with an actualization. As the final verse of each part of the poem forms the opening verse of the following one, Rader unfolds a vivid war panorama that deals with revenge as the “first fire”, which continues to blaze into the present: “look: / it still burns.” These last lines of “Part IX,” also the only three lines of “Part X,” become (mutilated by inversion and the use of text-critical signs) in their “]Still, / ]it / ]burns-” a Cassandra-like evocation of the future. Rader seems to distance himself most obviously from Twombly’s model in “Letter of Resignation.” In this cycle of 38 sheets, created between 1959 and 1967, Twombly executed all the lines of the letter in pseudo-writing and then painted over some of them almost beyond recognition. Rader fills in some of these lines with his own words: “Dear Cy, / Tell me: / what do you want us not to see? / Homage to the aesthetics of negation – / the discourse of dissimulation. / From what are you resigning?”
Rader’s poems work with multifaceted breaks which, despite the ever-present reference to Twombly’s pictorial works, give his poems a high degree of independence in terms of form and content. Surprising insights arise not only when reading the poems, but already in the contemplation of the poem structure or the way the words are strung together, which in turn have an effect on the way Twombly’s paintings are viewed.
In terms of content, it is first and foremost the incorporation of literary quotations or fragments of quotations from Twombly’s works that relates Rader’s poems to them. In most cases, as e.g. in the case of “Unfinished Unending Journey” (“the shining white air trembling; the flat white sea; Once for each thing”) or “The Fire That Consumes All before It” (“shades of eternal night”), the poet identifies these adaptations as such by means of italics or square brackets and/or by moving them to the right-hand margin. Twombly’s literary inscriptions can also become poem titles in Rader’s work, as in the case of “This Is No Time for Poetry,” which incorporates a fragment of an Archilochos quote from Twombly’s Untitled from 1989, showing the Greek poet’s words above a wild color figuration: “Hang iambics / This is not time / for Poetry / Archilochos.” Rader sometimes uses the titles of individual works (“The Fire that Consumes All before It”) or entire cycles of Twombly’s works (“Letter of Resignation”) as poem titles, sometimes he only quotes parts of them (System; Elegies (Variations)). In “Meditation on Creation,” on the other hand, the very first italicized sentence quotes the title of a monumental blackboard painting by Twombly from 1968: “Synopsis of a Battle.” On the other hand, the adopted inscription can also be so strongly interwoven into the text of the poem that the non-specialist needs a reference from the author in order to recognize the quotation as such. This is the case, for example, in “Meditation on Remembering,” which enters into a dialog with Twombly’s large-format drawing Untitled (To Sappho) from 1976. As in a riddle poem, the last words of each line of poetry, read one after the other, form the Sappho quotation inscribed on the page by Twombly: “Like a hyacinth in the mountains, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains on the ground.”
At the same time, “Meditation on Remembering” proves that Rader’s poems and Twombly’s pictorial works are not only formally linked by the inscriptions, which are adopted in various forms of quotation. In addition to the intertextual dialogue, they also create a hypertextual one. For example, the words of the hypotext (the Sappho fragment) become key words in verses that overlap with them like palimpsests, forming new contexts of meaning in the process: “How to say in a poem that Breonna Taylor’s death is a stain / on a country, yes, but also on history? Tell me: what remains?”
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The range of literary genres in which Twombly’s quotations or references to his person appear in Before the Borderless is overwhelming. According to Rader, “Meditation on Remembering” varies the rare and complex poem form of the “golden shovel” created by Terrance Hayes. In addition to prose poems, a letter poem (“Mediation on Communication”) and an elegy, there are also older lyrical genres such as sonnets and octets —albeit always with a contemporary twist: the sonnet ‘crosses out’ its title (“Sonnet: The Inscrutability of Influence”) or remains unfinished by forming only six lines of poetry instead of fourteen (“Unfinished Sonnet”). The octet describes itself as an endless one (“Unending Octet”), the elegy limits itself to these as variations (“Elegies (Variations)”). The genre “meditation” appears most frequently in the title, namely 14 times and thus as the title of almost half of the poems. Their subjects revolve around central themes of Rader’s lyrical dialog with Twombly’s art — Comprehension, Absolution, Instruction, Circulation, Revision, Motion, Mimesis, Communication, Inspiration, Revolution, Direction, Remembering, Creation, Inscription.
The term ‘meditation’ refers to a literary genre that is not a traditional form of poetry but is borrowed from philosophy. Since Plato, it has initially generally described (methodically guided) thinking about or reflecting on something. Meditation entered the Christian tradition around 1300 with the Meditationes vitae Christi by an anonymous Italian Franciscan and became a fundamental genre of spiritual literature. In the following, ‘meditatio’ means reflecting on the content of the Christian faith with the help of a visualization of the Christian events of salvation in the form of ‘inner images.’ The spiritual closeness to the life and passion of Jesus achieved through concentrated imagination is intended to offer the reader the opportunity to inscribe their own suffering in the suffering of Christ and thus find consolation. In 1579, Francis Bacon transformed Christian scholastic epistemology into a pre-scientific separation of philosophy and theology in his Meditationes Sacrae. In his epochal Meditationes de prima philosophia from 1641, René Descartes discusses the question of what knowledge man can have of himself, of God, of the immortal soul and of the material world in six meditations corresponding to the biblical days of creation. (Descartes himself referred to his writing in letters as “mes Méditations de Métaphysique”). According to Descartes, being uplifted in the divine order and the self-assurance of the thinking subject converge in the meditative contemplation of man. With “methodical doubt” as a questioning and re-foundation of all knowledge, Descartes establishes a secure system of knowledge and at the same time creates the basis of modern metaphysics. In 1929, Edmund Husserl analyzed the question of the ground of being within the framework of transcendental phenomenology in his Cartesian Meditations.
Twombly himself chose philosophical terms such as ‘discourse’ (Discourse on Commodus), ‘treatise’ (Treatise on the Veil) or ‘analysis’ (Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair) for some of the titles of his works. Interestingly, the notion of meditation can also be found in the form of inscriptions in several of his works. This is the case in a central work that has not yet received sufficient attention from researchers as one of the artist’s central art-theoretical formulations. It is the collage Muses, created in May 1979, which inspired Rader to write the poem “Meditation on Inspiration.”
Cy Twombly, Muses, 1979, Bassano in Teverina. Collage: (illustration from a natural history book, reproduction of a photograph showing the village of Bassano, transparent adhesive tape), oil paint, wax crayon, pencil on print proof, 39 3⁄8 × 27 9⁄16 in. (100 × 70 cm), Private Collection, © Cy Twombly Foundation.
Twombly’s collage shows two pieces of paper glued on top of each other in the upper part of the picture: a child’s drawing and, above it, an illustration of an almost heart-shaped ivy leaf taken from a botanical atlas. Next to it is the handwritten inscription “song.” A photograph taken by the artist from his studio window in Bassano in Teverina can be seen in a central position slightly below the half of the sheet. It shows an arena-shaped view of parts of the medieval town and the foothills of a densely wooded hill. The pastoral photograph is inscribed “memory” by hand at the height of the sky. Finally, on the white edge of the photograph, almost like an artist’s signature, is the inscription “meditation” in the bottom right-hand corner. Below the photo, partly in Greek letters and in capital letters (which is extremely rare and emphasizes their urgent importance), are the words: “THIS GROVE (ἄλσοs) / IS DEDICΔTED TO THE MUSES / MELETE / MNEME / ΔOEDE.” The quote comes from Catherine B. Avery’s The New Century Classical Handbook from 1962 and can be found under the heading “Muses.” It reads: “Originally there were three Muses: Melete (Meditation), Mneme (Memory) and Aoede (Song).” Sound, memory and meditation are three central elements of Twombly’s artistic expression. Accordingly, in “Meditation on Direction,” Rader aptly describes Twombly’s painting as “a mode / of visual music: emanations, vibrations— / aural made visible:”
Rader generally reads Twombly’s art as “meditation.” Even if the poet possibly understands the term more as a reflective mental exercise in today’s sense, he is undoubtedly aware of the sacred dimensions of this genre of text, which resonate implicitly in the use of this term. (Rader’s poems also repeatedly contain lexical information on the etymology of central words such as “letter”, “write”, “scribble”, “resign”). In “Pentimento” he writes accordingly: “Twombly’s paintings and drawings are meditations on what is possible to communicate through the marriage of the visual and lexical.” He clarifies this statement in his second poem, “In Which Twombly and Rader Consider the Letter,” with reference to the Prologue to St. John: “In the beginning was the word, / and the word was with / the letter: the letter / is the beginning & / in the beginning / is the letter: first mark, first slash, first line, first / sign — not drawn but notched,”. The consonance of the painted and the written goes far beyond the use of writing in Twombly’s pictorial works. As the poet clearly recognizes, it refers to the fundamental indistinguishability of image and writing that is so characteristic of Twombly’s entire œuvre, which the artist himself formulated with the words: “I never really separated painting and literature”. It is certainly no coincidence that this dictum also forms the motto of the first part of the collection of poems. Rader explains: “I saw Twombly groping for meaning, relevance, connection, expression by way of two different but interrelated acts — drawing and writing” (“Pentimento”). Twombly’s characteristic equalization of image and writing (or rather: the deliberate undermining of the difference between writing and painting) could be expressed in the English neologism ‘drawriting’: Drawing is writing and writing is drawing. Thus, the above-mentioned quote from “In Which Twombly and Rader Consider the Letter” refers to Twombly’s synthetic achievement of understanding the letter, indeed the line, as a point of reference even before any dichotomy of image and word: “the letter: first mark, first slash, first line, first / sign — not drawn but notched, / scored: the spoor of speech: / the trace, the track //”. The passage may remind us of the significance of graphism in André Leroi-Gourhan’s paleontological theory of images, who in his two-volume work Le geste et la parole (1964/65) mentions the importance of rhythmic carvings and indentations on stones and bone fragments as a common prerequisite for writing and artistic figuration. Before the Borderless also repeatedly addresses moments that lie before the pictorial or linguistic. In “In Advance of All Parting” it says: “Another canvas, / another blank page— / more of the same: absence within absence, / uncertainty and indeterminacy, / those twins language lifts out of. / What came first—drawing or writing?” “System” in particular (juxtaposed with Twombly’s drawing Beyond (A System for Passing), Part X from 1971, which shows a collection of blue and black lines of different lengths and textures) explores Twombly’s characteristic fusion of the drawn or painted and the written, of the drawn and written line. Rader’s line also creates pictorial forms and writing on an equal footing — line and line of poetry become one: “did I write write? I meant draw [watch me write line] […] / Did I write word? I meant image, so I drew line […] / What does it mean to write a line?”
Rader’s cross-media work with image and text culminates in an interesting artifice: in the sense of Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum “All artworks are writing” (the motto of the second part of the poetry collection), he reverses the relationship between image and text in his volume in a chiastic intensification and asks whether (Twombly’s) paintings and (Rader’s) poems could not swap their traditional roles? “I think of Twombly’s artworks as struggling poems trying to cover all kinds of emotions — anger, fear, excitement, aggression, regret, beauty, intensity, and ambition.” (“Pentimento” and adds more precisely that Twombly’s “work mimics both a poem and the act of reading a poem. Traditionally a page is just a setting for the black type of text, but here, the negative space of the page and the positive space of print strive to create a scene as dynamic, as interdependent as a Twombly canvas. Or, put another way: What if Twombly’s images are the poems and my writing the illustrations?” (“Pentimento”). The inversion of image and text assumed by Rader is far more than just a captatio benevolentiae that reverses the hierarchical relationship between the written and the painted in Twombly’s favor. By perceiving Twombly’s pictorial works quasi as (‘primal’) text, Rader emphasizes that the basic characteristic of all poetry applies not only to Twombly’s writing, but also to his paintings: the ability to evoke inner, i.e. mental images.
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For Rader, this inner vision — in keeping with the sacred tradition of the concept of meditation — remains connoted with knowledge of God. Twombly’s art, Rader confesses in “Pentimento,” also appeals to him as a kind of religious experience: “I feel about [his work] the way I feel about Rilke’s Duino Elegies or how others feel about the Sistine Chapel or Machu Picchu or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or the 23rd Psalm. In Twombly’s work I see the faded traces, the disappearing spiraling spoor of something sacred.” “What burns through existence to endlessness?” asks Rader in the first poem of the volume. But even for the questioner, the sacrum remains unrecognizable. In “Meditation on Revision” it says: “To those who ask, god reveals himself through absence, / to those who do not he stays silent. / Still, we feel the red bleed blue.” In “Meditation on Creation,” it is only the act of artistic creation that allows God to enter into being in an existential struggle. Thus it says in this poem, which is juxtaposed with Twombly’s monumental painting Synopsis of a Battle (1968): ”Synopsis of A Battle / as a diagram of God’s becoming – / a chart of the battle to be, an advancement from absence / [into presence] – as though existence is an incursion, a plan of attack on the / uncreated by an army of singular lineation […]”. “Meditation on Instruction” ends with a question to Twombly that reverses the creation myth from the Book of Genesis in favor of the artist: “I […] asked him if he thought god could learn anything new. […]. When god looks at my life, the lord learns nothing from me but infinite regret. But when the lord looks at this painting, it is god who learns about light.” Nevertheless, Rader postulates in “Meditation on Comprehension”: “Query: / All seeing is a form of believing,” to turn directly to the unknowable deus absconditus in his longing for knowledge in “This is not time for poetry”: “O Absent One / […] let me gaze into what I shall not see, / let the questions, / small as seeds, / drop into the dark garden of the mind.” And in “Elegies (Variations)” the poet asks: “O show me the / place words lift light.”
The fact that Rader’s space of poetic imagination also encompasses sacred space adds a new level of meaning to the common interpretation of Twombly’s paintings, one that was possibly intended by the artist himself, although never explicitly addressed by him. Conversely, paraphrasing a statement by Rader about Twombly, it can be said that the poet also tries “to come to terms with meaning, life, death, the weight of history, and the ability of art to put us in touch with that which is beyond articulation.” Although the book’s basso continuo is in a minor key, Rader’s collection also moves beyond mourning in its gesture of lamentation. Beyond the (in)describability of death, he circles around and insistently asks about the meaning and value of life, even in the face of loss, regret and pain, and insistently searches for straw-like answers, for anchors of hope, for existential consolation in a world that threatens to be lost to us today. The very first poem, which turns the canvas into a metaphor for human life, concludes with the comforting lines: “Remember: the unseen is never truly empty. / Despite erasure, / the canvas never blank.” Here, Rader draws closer to the healing effect of threnos, the ancient funerary literature that, with Simonides of Keos and Pindar, was transformed from a lyrical lament sung only as part of the funeral service into an independent artistic genre with a consoling mood. For Rader, the spirits of the deceased become his personal Holy Helpers, offering comfort and restoration: “I thought of Rilke, Twombly, my father — that furious trinity of ghosts haunting. Helping. Healing.”
Rader’s constant resetting in life as a writer, even when every “line seems like a wound” (“Eternal Return”), when “Our lives are illegible” (“Meditation on Comprehension”) and even writing “is to rend” (“Letter of Resignation”), is summed up by the technical term “pentimento,” with which Rader surprisingly titles his very personal remarks at the end of the volume of poems. The term, derived from the Italian verb ‘pentirsi’ for ‘repentance,’ according to Merriam-Webster, refers to “a reappearance in a painting of an original drawn or painted element which was eventually painted over by the artist”. The term thus has a double directionality: on the one hand, it stands for the subsequent overpainting and erasure of something painted, and on the other for its later reappearance from under the new layer of paint. The practice of crossing out, overwriting and erasing, which is characteristic of both Twombly’s painting and writing (his ‘drawriting’) and Rader’s poems, gives rise to intimate palimpsests of thought on the canvas of the one and on the sheet of poetry of the other, which fluctuate painfully between decay and emergence, repression and the forcing out of the hidden. In this sense, “Pentimento” also stands metaphorically for remorse in the form of self-reproach due to the tragic uncertainty of possibly having infected his mother with the coronavirus and thus possibly being indirectly responsible for her death.
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Rader’s view of Twombly is reminiscent of Georges Didi-Huberman’s approach, who in his book Devant l’image (Confronting Images, Penn State Univ. Press, 2004), published in 1990, called into question the iconographic method of ‘decoding’ works of art in all its aspects, developed by Erwin Panofsky from 1930 onwards, in order to allow for the formless, the invisible and above all the non-descriptive in a work of art. According to the French art historian, Panofsky’s instruments are not sufficient to describe the often shocking and painful immediacy of art, especially as they are ultimately not aimed at the artwork itself, but rather focus on linguistic equivalents to the art objects in text form. Such a description of an artist like Twombly must fail at the very outset if the immediate aura of the work, its physical presence, its emotional and intellectual intensity, its simultaneous visual inaccessibility and linguistic untranslatability are not only to be lamented, but explicitly addressed in the description. If there is an active, even immersive relationship between the picture and the viewer, it can only be assumed that the artwork is simultaneously present and absolutely, unattainably inaccessible. Rader addresses such topoi of uncatchability, even failure, in the description and understanding of art and poetry in his poetry collection in a diverse and confident manner. According to him “Ultimately, his [e.g. Twombly’s] greatness lies in his paradoxical ability to simultaneously fill and empty a canvas, the way art both fills and empties a life.” For Rader, Twombly’s paintings are spaces he wants to enter — “tonight my son / asked what my weird super / power would be and I said / to walk into / a painting” (“Mediation on Communication”), they embody the ultimate boundlessness, in which one can immerse oneself, in which one can merge forever (with lines that also explain the title of the volume): “Reader, / you and I stand once more before the borderless — / let us dissolve into it together.” (“Meditation on Inscription”). At the same time, the paintings themselves are bodies — “sky-skinned / seaskinned” (“Mediation on Communication”). They penetrate the viewer, much as the lives and deaths of Gary Dean and Ginger Rader forever permeate the reader of Rader’s Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly: “This book is for you, reader, but in it — and now in you — is them.”
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According to Rader, he made the decision to complete his book of poems during his renewed visit to the Cy Twombly Gallery in 2020: “I stood for who knows how long in front of Say Goodbye, Catullus, scribbling down lines from Rilke’s Duino Elegies that Twombly had himself scribbled decades before. In that room on that day this book began to take shape, not just as an idea but as a necessity.” Twombly’s Untitled (Say Goodbye Catullus to the Shores of Asia Minor) plays a key role in Dean Rader’s volume. The painting is featured on the cover of the book, and an excerpt from it, with four lines from Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy, forms the frontispiece of the volume. Against this background, Rader’s collection of poems, with its three-part overall structure, the many quotations from other poets, but above all the elegiac, consolation-seeking basic tone, appears as a kind of paragone with Twombly’s triptych-like painting with numerous inscriptions, which revolves around the themes of death, loss, exile, mourning and loneliness — a “masterful mourning”.
In Before the Borderless. Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, the Houston work is juxtaposed with the poem “Unfinished Unending Journey“, to which Rader incorporates three literary fragments from Twombly’s opus magnum. Two of them—“The shining white air trembling” and “the flat white sea”— are taken from Richard Howard’s poem “1889: Alassio” from 1969, while the third — “Once for each thing” — is a fragment from Rilke’s “Ninth Duino Elegy.” It is certainly no coincidence that the same quotation recurs in “Elegies (Variations),” the last poem of the first part, which Rader dedicates to the memory of his mother.
“Unfinished Unending Journey” begins with the famous, slightly abridged first verse from Dante’s journey to the beyond: ‘In the middle of our life’. Rader corrects himself by crossing out the title when he recognizes in the painting not only an unfinished journey. Rather, according to him, it is a journey without end. Twombly himself (in one of his rare self-interpretations) made a comparable statement about his Catullus-painting: “I think of the painting’s movement as falling … It cascades and it exits on the left. The painting is about life’s fleetingness. It’s a passage. It starts on the right and as you move to the left it just goes out.” Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) is a painted and written trace of life, of our being here, and of our bidding farewell — for Twombly, “a passage through everything.” Rader transposes this “passage” into personal actuality and his own existential world of experience. This journey leads into “the blankness beyond the beyond:” (“Meditation on Motion”). Dean Rader’s poetry collection could therefore also be entitled Beyond the Borderless instead of Before the Borderless. The poet could likewise refer to an inscription by Cy Twombly in Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) — a fragment from Rilke’s “Tenth Elegy”: “How you gaze / Beyond / on bitter duration / the bitter duration / to See an end / (…) our winter / our dark evergreen / Our dear / Duration / Our time.”