ABSTRACT
The first poem in Transforming Vision (1994), a collection of writers' responses to works in the Art Institute of Chicago, sets a tone of meditative escape: 1 Today as the news from Selma and Saigon poisons the air like fallout, I come again to see the serene great picture that I love. Here space and time exist in light the eye like the eye of faith believes. The seen, the known dissolve in iridescence, become illusive flesh of light that was not, was, forever is. O light beheld as through refracting tears. Here is the aura of that world each of us has lost. Here is the shadow of its joy. (Transforming 18) 2 The poet is Robert Hayden, and the "serene great picture" he has come to see is Monet's Water Lilies (1906). The speaker enters the museum to forget the political upheaval that troubles his moment, to find sanctuary from news of racial violence and the Vietnam War. For Hayden, Monet's almost abstract vision of water and light evokes an eternal realm of transcendent harmony in which "The seen, the known / dissolve in iridescence [...] The final stanza apostrophizes light in a lament for lost innocence, and suggests that this museum experience allows an "aura" of that lost world to be regained. Based in feelings of love and faith, the speaker's response to the painting exemplifies what Bourdieu has called the "charismatic ideology," the belief that aesthetic experience is a spontaneous "descent of grace (charisma)" (Love of Art 54)—a visitation, as the theological term suggests, of a divinely conferred gift or power. In a volume that gathers responses to art under a heading of "transforming vision," Hayden's poem is an appropriately visionary starting point.
