Janus

The New-Made Shore

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I will charter a narrative ark.

Truth by truth,

I will fill it with every story.

After the deluge,

I will wait for the ebb

And settle with my cargo on

The new-made shore.

This poem was written in response to Poems for These Times 14, From ‘The Cure at Troy’ by Seamus Heaney (to read this, click here).

Nicoletta Arbia

Light and Darkness

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For a few years during the 1990s, I was part of a small group of students learning to gild and to paint on gesso panels using the egg tempera technique. Egg tempera was widely used by all masters until the Renaissance, when it was supplanted by oil.

What I attended wasn’t a Higher Education course but a circle of passionate amateurs gathering around an inspirational professional painter. Lynette lived in a large, self-contained bedsit in North London. When we arrived every Saturday, the room had magically turned into an art studio. She wasn’t wealthy but she could always create an environment that was full of beauty and she baked for us some of the most varied and delicious cakes I have ever tasted. We worked all day around a big, sturdy table, breaking up collectively for tea or taking individual pauses whenever we were tired and wanted a rest on the sofa. There was conversation here and there but mainly a lot of silence, a focussed, contemplative atmosphere.

Egg tempera is a fascinating technique. We used to grind pigments on a tile and, as a medium, we utilised the yoke of the egg mixed with distilled water.

We painted a lot of figures. Being a lover of Greek myths, my first one was Botticelli’s Venus followed by Rossetti’s Persephone. We started working on a face by applying a coat of viridian green, then we went on to the shadowing, for which we employed lamp black. The shadowing was generally quite heavy and by the time we were done, all the face features were almost submerged in darkness. I remember this stage as always being heart-breaking: you had put so much effort into drawing the face and now you could hardly see it. It seemed gone and irretrievable.

But the tempera technique is based on layers of transparent colour that must be applied very thinly without blending. It is painstaking work that cannot be hurried. If you lose patience and apply a slightly thicker layer because you are looking for quick results or because you can’t bear having lost the face and, in your anxiety, you want to see immediately if and how it can be saved, well then you create a lot of trouble for yourself and risk ruining the final effect.  But if you keep going ever so slowly with the thin layers of lighter flesh colours, a miracle happens: the shadows remain visible where they should be, but they soften and recede while the face slowly re-emerges in all its beautiful chiaroscuro.

In egg tempera you go from darkness to light and the metaphor of seeing the face re-appear is powerful. It’s like recovering the soul that has been lost in the darkening inflicted by the world. It’s like learning how to manifest things through tuning into the Earth, to its cycles of first descent (the buried seed) then ascent (the sprouting of the flower). Again, it’s like Persephone being trapped in the Underworld, counting the months, burning to resurface, wanting to accelerate a process that instead needs to be lived out in trust and in slow and full engagement from inside out. Only this way can Persephone develop the inner capacity for holding both the pain of living and the joy of fulfilling her wondrous true destiny, that of becoming the Queen of the Underworld.

The final result of the paintings Lynette taught us to create was very special as the winning quality of an egg tempera work of art is its unique transparency and luminosity.

Nicoletta Arbia was born in Italy and has been living in England for the last 42 years. She is a transpersonal psychotherapist and a poet. Her volume of narrative poetry Otherwise: Five Myths of Transformation Told in Verse Through the Voices of Women is available on Amazon, Waterstone online and in Kindle format.

Lesley Gann

Whose Light

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I watch the pieces float and swirl
I sing the sounds each moment tells
I hear the echo of time beginning
And smell the scents of matter forming.
A place I am, a mirror shining,
Whose light is it, this place defining?

And now upon the blood-stained streets
The holy soul she writhes and weeps,
To smell the blood and ruined flesh,
To see the bones of nakedness.
This horror spawns a chilling hate,
The rage of pain revenge must sate.
Then sickening fear becomes our food
And fractured minds go dark and brood
Upon each heart-sick layer of grief,
This knotted clot becomes Belief
And righteousness a pitiable salve
To smear on wounds too deep to tell.
And who will hear us, who will hear us?
Single in our millions wondering,
Whose light is it this place defining?

Lesley Gann is a traditional acupuncturist who lives in Monmouth.  She is a long-time student of Beshara and the School at Chisholme House. She writes: ‘The education from the School has been the best and truest thread throughout my life, since my first introduction back in the late 70s. I’m not a scholar but I love that this is not an education into a set of beliefs, but rather a reaching for an all embracing perspective, ever changing and alive.’