Ekphrastic writing – Ekphrastic Life

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Self-Portrait, oil on canvas, 1659; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Hello R&W’ers. I hope your days have been trending warm as they have been here in Southwest VA. My daffodils are in full bloom, which is always exciting and a little scary when they open this early in the season.

On to this week’s essay…

In my first distance learning seminar for my MFA program, I learned about and practiced ekphrastic writing. I’d never heard of this writing technique. After studying it, however, I realized I am familiar with it, only in a different kind of way.

Here is the definition of ekphrastic writing, from the front of my syllabus:

On ekphrastic writing from Jackie Craven (poet and prose writer): The term ekphrastic (also spelled ecphrastic) originates from a Greek expression for description. The earliest ekphrastic poems were vivid accounts of real or imagined scenes. Through effusive use of details, writers in ancient Greece aspired to transform the visual into the verbal. Later poets moved beyond description to reflect on deeper meanings. Today, the word ekphrastic can refer to any literary response to a non-literary work.

Here is an oft used example of ekphrastic writing by Elizabeth Jennings, in which she writes about one of Rembrandt’s self-portraits from later in life:

Rembrandt’s Late Self-Portraits

You are confronted with yourself. Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care
Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.
There is no arrogance. Pride is apart
From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift
The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt
But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last
Experiment went on. You stared beyond
Your age, the times. You also plucked the past
And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,
And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,
The sadness and the joy. To paint's to breathe,
And all the darknesses are dared. You chose
What each must reckon with.

Here is another ekphrastic poem by Anne Porter from her collection, Living Things:

A Turtle’s Shell

I found a turtle dead
Trapped in a dry well
Gone was her scaly body
And there was only the hollow
Dome of her black shell
Strong as a monument

It had an indecipherable
Yellow message
Painted all over it
In figures not unlike
The Hebrew alphabet.

In each of these poems, the author uses a variety of descriptive techniques to bring vividness to a still life subject matter. But something more is happening here. While each ekphrastic piece varies in the amount and style of details offered, each one’s descriptions resulted in what I might describe in math terms as a multiplicative effect; or, in religious terms: a liturgy. In each case, the combination of their parts (in this case, descriptions) produced a result far greater than their sums.

This is the way of ekphrastic writing.

By deft use of sensory-heavy, descriptive techniques, the writer opens the reader to something far greater than a vivid description of an object, an artwork, or a scene. Instead, the writer invites—sometimes forces—us to reckon with the messy, sometimes tragic, often broken but still somehow beautiful human reality beyond the scene we “see.”

In the Christian tradition, this kind of “seeing”—this illuminated seeing—is akin to sacrament.

The word, sacrament, at its broadest level means a physical sign of God’s divine grace.

In sacrament, the concrete—without losing its concreteness—reveals God’s goodness, the gift of His love for us.

Furthermore, through sacrament (I’m speaking in quite broad terms here), there is a way in which the physical and eternal live together in a kind of symbiotic relationship. Each thing, by itself is “good.” Yet, when brought together, they create movement toward a greater reality. They offer a vision of, and participation with, the “very good.” That is, of a Greater Story being told.

Let’s go back to our ekphrastic poems.

In each one we recognize the vivid description of each author’s subject matter:

• We see Rembrandt’s pouchy, ugly face, his bloated nose.

• We see the black, rounded, dome of the turtle’s shell with its yellow markings.

• We hear the unflinching brushstrokes across Rembrandt’s canvas.

• The echo of the empty well, in the hollowness of the shell

• We “see” Rembrandt wielding his brush; the sadness and joy he paints in his expression.

• Even as we “see” the missing scaly body of the turtle.

These are all sensory details. As Rembrandt did his brush, so Jennings and Porter deftly wield their pens, giving us a true and sensory-rich account of what they literally experience before them.

And this is good!

But the thing is, by their vivid accounting, they give us so much more. They give us glimpses into eternal matters, as well as the One who made all matter to begin with.

Jennings makes this more explicit for us. Interwoven in her description is the heart of things: the mystery and wonder of a soul’s growing beauty, even as the outer body decays. In fact, she seems to be suggesting that all the joys and sorrows of life that show up on our outer bodies and “uglify” them, are truly graces allowing us to see ourselves and the world with clear-eyed honesty and humility, and causing our craft and in our souls to grow into deep and striking beauty.

Porter is less obvious. But we perceive it in the second half of the poem:

It had an indecipherable
Yellow message
Painted all over it
In figures not unlike
The Hebrew alphabet.

An “indecipherable yellow message, painted all over it… not unlike the Hebrew alphabet.”

With these lines, we can “see” the markings of the turtle’s shell. But now we see them more than simply a pattern that identifies the turtle as a certain “type.” We see the hands of a Creator, who “painted” the turtle into its own unique existence by the same Word and words spoken “in the beginning.”

This is very good.

It is a kind of goodness that overflows in completeness—an infinite times more than the sum of its parts.

That is, if we allow that very goodness to penetrate our seeing, hearing, and understanding, and turn us toward the eternal grace to which the ekphrastic is inviting us into.

This is ekphrastic life.

Which is to say, a sacramental life.

A sacramental life is one that sees the details one’s day--however mundane, unimpressive, or even troubled--as grace-filled. It is also to see oneself as being personally invited into the deeper meaning of the grace.

In this way, by which I mean, by our participation in the ekphrastic life, our lives become like the ekphrastic poetry above.

A living liturgy and sacrament.

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Is there a piece of ekphrastic writing that has been meaningful to you?

Now that you know what ekphrastic writing is (assuming you’ve never heard the term before), do you find that you, too, are actually more familiar with it than you might have thought?

Shouldn’t all descriptive writing be ekphrastic??