Drowsy with Divinity

There was an exhibition of paintings of women with their backs to us. I, as a woman, wondered why anyone would think to paint these paintings or arrange such a display of mixed motives: scornful watchfuless, loving care at a distance, stalking, pining… 

In fact, these name-hidden presences hung on gallery walls have given me some of the clues as to the possible permutations of reaction to such a ‘happening’ of themed images. 

As I walked around the gallery, I tried to put myself in the mind of each man who stood or sat behind each woman in the paintings … thus concocting for myself a new recipe of tempting emotions fitting for such an apparently bleak, often oblique experience.

Have you ever sensed eyes boring into your back? You dare not turn for whatever reason. It’s almost as if you are guilty about catching someone looking at you surreptitiously. They’re to blame for their own actions (or inaction in not looking away) but you feel guilty that you may have stirred their curiosity, their longing, distaste or even gratuitousness of idle gaze.

Well, today, that day, whenever it was to be, in that gallery-of-few-visitors but many guards-sitting-in-corners, you now somehow gazed at the backviews of each painting itself, knowing, in some intrinsic dream bordering on nightmare, that you were staring outward from the frame you could no longer see …. and you cried inwardly as you felt itches crawling along your back and nape of neck between canvas and frame’s backing. Or between canvas and paint. You could not be sure. Just the distant echo of a shout from a corner-guard whose words were deadened by the glass.

***

Later, I was filled by some greater sense of existence, ironically a drowsiness with divinity in various roles of painterly art. To the distant sound of violins, drums and flutes, reminding us that the planet’s paintings are subject to the twists of precarious immortality just as our own mortality is assured.

***

Symbols of genuine drowsiness or Null Immortalis? And backs turned towards us.

Some famous art depicting the gentle drowsiness of human divinity and more.