Turner’s Moon

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘Moonlight, A Study at Millbank’ – J.M.W. Turner, 1797 – WikiArt

This text is directly inspired by an analogy used by the teacher of non-duality Rupert Spira. I found it to have such evocative power that words started to pour out and I couldn’t stop them. This text is therefore dedicated to Rupert and his timeless vision and teaching.

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Sometime a painting just comes timely to move your heart. It is a gorgeous landscape painting, depicting a coastline and the sea, with boats and fishermen in the moonlight. At Millbank, Turner was painting in dark, subtle hues of black, blue, and purple browns, to define a night, leaving here and there traces of light, golden reflections on the water. In the wide expanse of the sky, he had left one portion of the painting untouched. Pure as white. Undarkened. For the painter had a view in mind. He was to paint a moon, bright and resplendent. And no moon was ever so bright.

This part of the scenery that wasn’t painted, it was you. You, before you were made a person, before the identification with thoughts, feelings, body, story, hurts, memories, projections, beliefs. The nature of the moon was that part of you that was left unseen, unexplored, but that had quietly illuminated you all along, giving you a self and an identity without your knowing, lending you a hidden strength for your bruised self, and bathing you in its unheard silence. It was the trusted one, the one reliable thing in a life of relentless changes and challenges. It was the peace of your true self, the precious being that had been covered up by the night of objective experience. This is the moon Turner had meant to convey.

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A meditation on the evocative power of Turner’s painting… (READ MORE…)

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The Starry Night

Posted on by Alain Joly
‘The Starry Night’ – Vincent Van Gogh, 1889 – WikiArt

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Van Gogh was depressed
A lonely heart in an asylum,
So he painted a starry night
And made it bright.
He said ‘The night is so alive
And more richly coloured 
Than day.’
The flame of his pain
Became a dark cypress
That rose on to the skies.
The grim is found in the defined;
The light and the spacious,
Say the precious — in airy sky.
There is a wide expanse
Below Van Gogh’s window,
An even larger one shining
Behind the iron bars of mind.
The darkest mood embraced
Turns into soft and tender mist;
Let it clear up, reveal a sky
Lit up by countless twinkling stars.
There is no mind, no gloom inside
That doesn’t rest on happy ground,
So he painted a starry night
And made it bright.
There is peaceful living under heaven
In a village with some shiny windows 
But more is meant in illumination.
Among the shadows, the murky
Does run a light so clear and vast,
Whirlpools of joy, luminous streams,
A saraband of radiant beings.
Even the quieter moon bragged 
And clothed itself in gleaming apparel;
There is glory in a silent night
And fireworks concealed
In the obscure.
There is a sea 
Beneath the hectic waves
And an eternity
Amongst the fainted lights of day,
So he painted a starry night
And made it bright.

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Poem by Alain Joly

Painting by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)

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Websites:
– Vincent Van Gogh (Wikipedia)
– The Starry Night (Wikipedia)

Suggestion:
– Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)

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