after great pain a formal feeling comes (Angela de la Cruz)

"Deflated"

"Ashamed"

 "Homeless"

"Hung"

"Flat"

"One feature of the old revolutionary abstraction that survives in recent works is a kind of demotic invitation to a (relatively) innocent eye to play the game of Seeing As. I don’t mean, though, Clement Greenberg’s innocent eye as „a machine unaided by the mind” (...). I mean, rather, an eye capable of laying down the gaze, capable of relaxing the demand for importance, meaning, value, and truth and letting the picture look back at us, speak to us; an eye that refuses to be shamed by its temptations to projection, identification, and empathy. „After great pain,” says Emily Dickinson, „a formal feeling comes.” The long goodbye of heroic modernism has been a great pain – and not just in the neck, as art historian T. J. Clark’s  Farewell to an Idea makes clear."

W. J. T. Mitchell, What do pictures want? The Lives and Loves of Images, The University of Chicago Press 2005

After great pain a formal feeling comes--
The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;
The stiff Heart questions--was it He that bore?
And yesterday--or centuries before? 

The feet, mechanical, go round

A wooden way

Of ground, or air, or ought,

Regardless grown,

A quartz contentment, like a stone.

This is the hour of lead

Remembered if outlived,

As freezing persons recollect the snow--

First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

(Wielki ból zastępuje rutyna cierpienia —

Jak trawa Grób, tak Nerwy porasta konwenans —

Zdrętwiałe Serce nie wie — czy to w nim te ćwieki

Naprawdę tkwiły? kiedy — Wczoraj? czy przed Wiekiem?

Stopy drepczą bezwiednie po Chodniku wąskim

Zdrewniałego Powietrza, Ziemi, Obowiązku —

I niezauważalnie

Twardnieje cierpienie

W Kwarc pogodzenia — w uciszenia Krzemień —

Ołowiana Godzina —

Kto przetrwał, ten ją wspomina

Tak jak ktoś, kto zamarzał, wspomina Biel Śnieżną —

Ziąb — potem Odrętwienie — potem wszystko jedno —

przeł. Stanisław Barańczak)