The number of known works by artist Martin Ramirez has just expanded by about a third (over 140 new drawings).

There's a funny article about how they were preserved and discovered, in Tuesday's NY Times (read it here if you're signed up).

(cf. also various sections of Fontegaia...)

Fontegaia, onward, underward...

18

 
Under alp-bank in Switzerland, scientists
mole through superdimensional cheese,
carve expansive titanium race-
course for unknown particles

 
(Higgs hobos - shifty-eyey - elusive).
Junior Einsteins carry oversize
branes across antimatter (sideways)
toward theoretical, onion-beehive

 
Domesday - can they count every bee?
We seem to be alone in the multiverse.
A saddle-shaped cosmos.  Our hearse
or hers (Bootes up backward)?  Maybe.

 
He's the oldest son of the youngest 
paisan.  Prodigal scrabble-player,
dense brown dwarf (WIMP).  Here
and gone, we hardly nothingested

 
his talent for tunneling (with pencil)
athwart our own plain planet.  Maimed,
drawn (with quarters in the subway) -
shame on her, was he, dense exile,

 
doodlemeister.  Sand Franciscan
on rocky road, indeed!  Heartbreak
of the Protons on TV - let's make
Caesar salad spread veinous marzipan!

 
HOBO RAY MIRRORS HOMO-YEAR
crows crazed witless Addition (EZ-
duz-it) - REASON? SLEPT IN BREEZE-
WAY OVERNIGHT chortlez Shanty Choir.

Mumbled something here a few days ago contrasting present-day concept of form/beauty with that of Moderns 100 yrs ago - Joyce's autotelic "quiddity" vs. today's "intelligibility". The excerpt from Fontegaia I posted yesterday might suggest I'm not practicing what I preach... what the heck is this strange obscure garbled stuff? Especially if you haven't been following the whole loopy string-along poem...

Anyway, it's a work-in-progress, & there are limits to what I can clarify about it, but... It's from the 2nd section of Fontegaia, which has been focusing on the distinctive Sienese horserace called the Palio. What I've been doing is using features of the race & of Siena/Sienese history in general as a foundation, & also as a jumping-off place (metaphors for other things).

Gradually I'm working toward some structural parallels or analogies between :

- Palio/Siena
- poets & poetry (as horserace)
- history/eschatology (the concept of the "end of time" - Apocalypse, 4 Horsemen of, etc.)

Siena links (in my mind) with eschatology by way of Joachim of Fiore, St. Francis & franciscanism. The Palio race itself is, for the Sienese, a way of sort of "stopping time" - it celebrates & mythologizes the "original" independent city-state & its founding victory over Florence at the battle of Montaperti in 1260. 1260 or thereabouts was also supposed to be an apocalyptic date in Joachim's & Joachimite messianic thinking.

In my private symbolism here in this & other sections of the poem, the contemplative/unworldly loser-poet (kind of an image of poets in America generally) is identified with the visionary saint/hobo (Francis), who paradoxically wins the race by losing it - wins it riding his slow donkey (Francis called his own body - affectionately - his "ass", bearing burdens). Contemplative vision & spiritual poverty are "slow" in relation to the quick foxy worldly utilitarian thinking which surrounds the poet on all sides. & the confrontation between these two mighty forces (worldly & spiritual) has its analogy in the Book of Revelation & the Apocalypse itself - the end of time.

"Ramirez" (in the section posted previously & others) refers to the "outsider" Mexican artist Martin Ramirez, whose paintings of railroads & immured horsemen etc. I'm using as another sort of link in the nexus Francis/hobo/San Francisco/Siena/horsemen/Apocalypse. (As noted in an earlier post, Ramirez, who was famously mute most of the time, sent a message through his family to the wife he had left behind in Mexico - "I'll see you again in the Valley of Jehoshaphat", ie. at the apocalyptic Last Judgement & resurrection of the dead.)

For "Ezekiel" - cf. the Louis Armstrong version of that song (alluded to by Eugenio Montale in his poem "Ezekiel Saw the Wheels". Montale also wrote a poem titled "Palio").

The last line - "Father! the chariots..." - an excerpt (revision?) of prophet Elisha's cry as his mentor Elijah is taken up bodily to heaven in a fiery chariot - "the chariots of Israel and his horsemen!"

There - all clear now?

Martin Ramirez, ultimate outsider artist, remained mute during the decades he spent in confinement in a California mental hospital. Observers said he mostly hummed. But he did speak occasionally. He was visited exactly once by a relative (a cousin) during that time. His cousin asked him if he wanted to come home & see his wife again (in Mexico). He replied, "tell her I'll see her again in the Valley of Jehoshaphat".

9

 
Those large, pensive eyes... that gaze
goes back to Byzantium (ripple of pebbles
on a curving dome).  The Emperor trembles
in her presence - offers his prize :

 
a little model of Byzantium.  Jasper walls,
carnelian towers, sapphire gates.  A rainbow
slipped like dew into its dream (tomorrow).
A teeming beehive spun from its own entrails

 
(immaculate and blind).  It was Byzantium.
O city of sea-walls, washed in salty spray!
Here you are (Siena-California) on display -
Ramirez matrix-vortex... (hear the painter hum).

(p.s. "Ramirez" in previous post : reference to Martin Ramirez, subject of marvelous show
currently at American Folk Art Museum in NY)