Cliff Fell

from L’Anima Verde

III

To know where the soul goes on its journey,
to be in on the inside of what we are
when all else is shucked away,
to go savage and naked
and not give a damn about the world on his mind:
the quest for this knowledge (the quest for sex)
the quest for the primitive—
these things propelled Paul Gauguin
on his voyage into the Pacific.
Go, Gauguin, the world might want to say,
though what the world should mean by this
is hard to know—a rallying cry, perhaps,
or, rather, Go home, Gauguin;
but go, you bad man with your gaggle of girls
and the doozie douze of your big colonial footprint,
go as you will—to listen
to the silence of the Tahitian night,
not even the cry of a bird,
though a falling leaf might rustle like
an idea tripping its way through the dark.
But, go—that we may go with you
to sit in the shade for days at a time,
gazing sadly at the sky’s primal blue. And watching
for you to make your semiotic of heightened sensuality,
the blocks of primary colour
that proclaim the virtue of nakedness
and transaction of the gaze.
Go, even as though you are not you,
but she or he or me,
the third person implicit in the work,
the one who is we—for it’s only in Tahiti
that Gauguin begins to realise
it’s all in the eyes,
the gaze that will return his gaze,
but obliquely, glancing it away
into the eyes of the viewer, of the beholder,
and holding us there as witnesses,
actors in the life and death of the painting’s deed.
This is what’s new: the intensity achieved before
only in self-portraits, and one painting of his mother,
and the sly vulpine regard
of the conqueror in ‘The Loss of Virginity’,
the creature who is, of course, himself:—
the artist who will tell us now
that we can’t live in these islands and not get to feel
the sleek muscle of the colonising eel,
the eel as it swims up into the land.
As in 1891, when Gauguin broke tapu
and wandered into the interior.
Through the valley of Punaru there is a huge fissure
which, as he tells us in Noa Noa,
divides Tahiti in two. From Tamanou,
you can see the diadem, Orofena and Arorai
which forms the center of the island
and is known as a place of miracles.
The people warned that he’d be tormented
by tupapo, the spirits of the mountain.
The riverbanks he walked were a confusion of trees—
breadfruit, ironwood, coconut, hibiscus,
guava, giant-ferns, what he calls
a mad vegetation, growing always wilder,
more entangled, until he entered the gorge.
There he made his way up the watercourse,
the river sometimes over his shoulders,
and the fissure so narrow, its walls so high,
the sun couldn’t penetrate so that (as he tells us)
he was able to see the stars burning
in the brilliance of the sky at noon.
Where was he going?—
Did he know of Māui, trickster god,
who turned himself into something sleek,
a worm (read eel) so that he might climb into the vagina
of the sleeping goddess of the night,
and the underworld, Hine Nui-Te-Po,
into her great cavern, on a quest
to find the cure for death.
We know what happened: he looks so funny,
the fantail laughed, its shrill piping song—
and so he was lost in there,
which is why, the story goes, we people must die,
all on account of a waiata.
Gauguin camped that night in the bush,
troubled by a powdery luminous light
that flickered around his head,
making him half believe
the mountain was alive with ghosts.
In daylight the river was now a torrent,
now a brook, now a waterfall.
Sometimes, he says, it seemed to flow
back into itself, the green of the jungle
cascading in such depths around him,
he walked as though underwater.
Crayfish in the river regarded him curiously
seeming to question why he was there.
Then, he says, at a narrow bend in the river
he came upon a young woman, standing nude.
She was caressing a great black rock
as she drank from a spring that flowed from above,
down the smooth surface of the stone.
He watched her cup her hands to catch the water
and let it run over her breasts.
Sly old fox, Monsieur Gauguin:
the symbolism replete,
we gaze with him upon this scene
as she, his perennial subject,
senses his presence and plunges into the river,
though not before she utters a curse
—Taehae—
meaning ‘cruel’ or ‘savage’,
even as she glides among river pebbles,
a human no more, but in the form of an eel.