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Note
on The
Cry of the Gull
This is
dedicated to Max Ernst because it was inspired by one of his paintings,
probably Forest and Dove, which I saw in the old Tate Gallery.
This canvas shows what looks like a densely clogged forest of
surreal trees with a child-like outline of a bird in a cage embedded in
it. I remembered it
differently as grainy planks, the kind I used to see in the wooden
breakwater groynes which ran down at angles through the pebbles of
Southsea Beach at the Clarence Pier end.
Within the wood-grain in my mind’s eye there was a shape like a
trapped bird. I changed the
forest into snow and the dove into a gull.
My bird is any
living pulse. It’s
scarcely yet born to the world, ‘an embryo with a bloodshot eye’,
exposed before its time to the roughest elements, and seeking a more
protective body than it has. By implication, no physical body is safe enough.
White here is a symbol of weather at its worst.
There is only one way to get through life.
This assertion is repeated in the third and fourth verses.
The last verse says that the one way is no way.
A bleak vision.
For me the piece works by virtue of it simple imagery and
repetitions, and by not being bogged down in perplexing and
over-apposite oracles. Strangely,
though, its simplicity makes it the more difficult to enter.
Alan
Marshfield
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