Medusa Beach by Melissa Monroe

Author:Melissa Monroe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

Feux d’artifice

The poems in this sequence were suggested by an exhibit of graphic representations of fireworks at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. They incorporate material from the exhibition catalogue by Suzanne Boorsch (Fireworks!) and from Incendiary Art by Kevin Salatino.

ON ATTITUDES TOWARDS ALLEGORY

For centuries, no fireworks  display could take place

without allegory. Burke’s  “splendid confusion”

was in fact quite schematic,  and the lexicon

of classical  devices still accessible

to the general public;

              even the rabble

recognized the fire-breathing  lion of Lyon,

and understood  Apollo as a figure for

Louis XIV,  dolphins for the dauphin, a rock

for the Princess of Saxony.

                The actual

pyrotechnics  merely provided the climax

to a splendid and  didactic demonstration

of the glory and the power  of whatever

crowned head could currently claim

                     divine endorsement.

The very stars would seem to burst  free of their spheres

to enlist in the service  of empire: serpents,

suns, and rains would rout  Cerberus, the Turks, the Dutch,

Huguenots, heretics, the Hun,

                  even the Beast

of Revelation.  One role of the festival

was to mediate boundaries  “between, among

other things, the real  and the fictive . . . citizens

and regent.”

        According to Cahuzac, the best

model for a fireworks fête  was Paradise Lost.

“The attack, the battle, the fall . . .  the good angels’

moment of triumph”  were edifying as well

as entertaining.

          “All spectacles represent

something. . . . The movement  of the most brilliant rocket

if it does not have a fixed  aim, displays nothing

but a trail of fire that vanishes  into thin

air.”

    The same principle naturally applied

to commemorative prints,  which strove to convey

a scene’s transcendent  significance, favoring

the metaphorical rather  than the mundane

literal “truth.”

         An ordinary market square

is transfigured.  The vegetable carts are gone.

Twelve vices, each identified  in Latin, burn,

and Virtue, rampant,  reigns at the center, astride

a chariot that

         does not appear to be made

of papier-mâché.   Overhead, pillars of flame

erupt in a strict colonnade  and intersect

to decorative effect  with Catherine wheels

which whirl in perfect clockwork circles,

                        their rims just

touching, creating  a fiery celestial frame

for the king’s insignia.  At a shilling apiece,

such emblems  of imperial entitlement

sold prodigiously in their time.

                   But eternal

truths have fallen out of fashion,  and allusions

to the classical tradition  either are not

appreciated, or are  viewed with suspicion,

since they remind us

              of what we now know to be

a heritage of rapacity.  We snicker

at Commerce, the Arts,  and Domestic Industry

clothed in togas,  bearing their little attributes

tucked in the crooks of their elbows, like toys.

                          Today’s

sensibility rejects  the hieratic

and the excessively  symmetrical. We feel

that verisimilitude  entails exclusion

of received meanings,

              and admire a measure of

dissonance. Images once  hailed by the critics

as paragons of composition  now rarely

rate a second glance.  A minutely detailed Amor

Victor with twin phoenixes

                 exulting above

a Temple of Hymen is consigned  to long-term

storage, and Dumont’s  engraving of the goddess

Isis atop a rainbow  spanning the summits

of two eighty-foot

            Pyrenees (or “volcanoes”)

and a rising sun (the Roi-Soleil)   all floating

on a large barge in the Seine  is dismissed as “a

rather tepid visual record,  unlikely

to impress.”

        Instead, we prize expressionistic

depictions, like Claude Lorrain’s  view of the newly

elected King  of the Romans emerging from

a burning tower amidst  a black staccato

salvo of dashes and dots.

                The rockets’ urgent

if indecipherable tracks  all but blot out

the Double-Headed Eagle,  the Crown, and the Four

Continents, which will not be  recognized, except

by a few cognoscenti.

              But is even this

illegibility innocent  of meaning?

The gestural refusal  to recognize one

climactic moment  of universal order

is surely allegorical, too,

                only more

constricted and self-absorbed  than the grand tableaux

of off-the-rack  equestrian saviors, high-waisted

lyre-strumming graces,  and hydra-headed tyrants

which we currently disdain.

                 Since authorities

are suspect, and no  perspective is now “correct,”

we have become our own sole  point of reference.

Historic events,  terror and jubilation,

combustion, motion, darkness and

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