0.6 Where light draws breath: green angel

image --> The delicate subject of angelic embodiment lends itself well to Wolfson’s abstract painting Green Angel (2006), and to the lyrical structures of the poem “embodied naked.” Situated within an exquisitely paradoxical moment, these fragile apophatic relations unfold in a temporal interval that lies suspended between a quickened sense of anticipation and an overflowing void of time:

“embodied naked”

through gate return

yet to be born,

flowering light

in silence beyond,

the meadow below,

under which dwells

empty sign,

laughter of lover,

lurking in touch,

approaching retreat,

fragment unbroken,

echo of word

never once spoken,

yearning to hold

what must be scattered,

naked in body,

fully attired

The balanced morphological flux of Wolfson’s poem generates a constellation of paradoxes, of opposites flickering and fusing into a state of complementary union. To engage the angelic presences symbolically embodied in the poem and painting—to be “embodied naked” yet “fully attired”—thus entails returning to an existence that has not yet begun, even as it is already unfolding. This experience turns on the simultaneous knowledge of sound and silence, emptiness and fullness, eros and alienation, above and below, advance and retreat, wholeness and breakage. Within the resonant aesthetic structures of this coincidentia oppositorum , the numinal and phenomenal realms are held in tension, just as they converge in a reciprocal play of “flowering light.”

The literary critic Elaine Scarry has observed that the exceptional vividness of flowers makes them particularly easy to visualize. As a result, flowers “often come to be taken as the representative object of imagining,” just as they are frequently situated, both perceptually and imaginatively, “in the arc between material and immaterial” presence. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 34-44, 62. Wolfson presents a thematically related discussion of the creative imagination in a commentary on the philosopher Martin Heidegger, in which he characterizes poetic (and implicitly, painterly) expression as the assemblage of multiple elements into a single time-space. As Wolfson writes of poetic language, “the gifting of the gift accounts for the gathering of the elements into the single time-space that provides the framework ( Gestell ) of what is held together ( Verhältnis ) in the unifying dispersal of what we experience visibly as world.” Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being , p. 21. Much like the aesthetic structures of Green Angel , the poetic language of “embodied naked” represents just such a symbolic expression of the human impulse to grasp the ungraspable. The result is a visual choreography of emerging desires and dissolving unions, of “yearning to hold / what must be scattered,” in paintings and poems that shimmer and blossom in seedbeds strewn with light and longing.