- I’ll tell you how the Sun rose -

 

by Paul Crombley                                                                                   

President of

The  Emily Dickinson International Society

 

 

One might say that there is something inevitable about Alberto Mancini’s discovery of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and the resulting fusion of artistic energies that has culminated in this exhibit’s display of poems and paintings. Despite his having grown up in the small mountain town of Atina, in southern Italy, where his family has lived for four hundred years, Mancini actually began life in America, not terribly far from Dickinson’s Amherst home. Born in Newton, Massachusetts, he spent his first four years immersed in the landscape and climate that figures so prominently in Dickinson’s writing. Perhaps this is why so many of his paintings evoke a way of being in the world that will seem familiar to Dickinson’s readers.

 

 The painting he links to the poem “Sunset that screens, reveals –“ is one of many that make this connection clear. Where Dickinson’s speaker describes the sunset as “Enhancing what we see / By menaces of Amethyst / and Moats of Mystery,” Mancini plunges us into the amethyst moment itself, directing the eye to a bright world descending through swirls of bay and ochre into darkening depths of green. In describing himself, Mancini writes, “the world that surrounds me is not that in which I live”; rather, his is a world “transfigured into a poetic dimension made of lights and colours that change continuously, of different realities suspended in time and space: pain, joy, sadness melancholy are the meridians and the parallels of our daily world.” Scenes of transfiguration proliferate in Mancini’s paintings, impressing us with the luminous, shimmering pulse of vital energies that we have come to know in different ways through Dickinson’s poems. He gives us her sunsets, flowers, and butterflies recast according to the terms of his own artistic vision.

                Even the most dedicated student of Dickinson will see her work in new light as a consequence of viewing the twenty-nine paintings Mancini has created for this exhibit. More a conversation with the poet than a systematic interpretation, Mancini’s suite has no central thesis as its axis, but rather performs as a series of visual rejoinders to Dickinson’s interest in the endless flux of human perception. Mancini is especially skilled at illuminating the natural beauty Dickinson sees as most appreciated in its passing.

 

                Flowers for this reason catch Mancini’s eye more than any other natural object that appears in Dickinson’s poems. Her flowers are never static; they are anticipated, recollected, glimpsed as they fade from more than the imagination can hold to an aftermath that celebrates what it dimly reflects.

Mancini displays this perceptual transport as sudden bursts of light that so infuse his often dampened colors that his images seem to sparkle, suspended in the fluid medium of memory and imagination.

 

Mancini is a master of modulated light. At times portentous, at others the understated prelude to a larger illumination, light breaks into and briefly reveals how shadowed our experience of the world ordinarily is. Through these paintings, Mancini points repeatedly to the divine, honoring Dickinson’s delight in disclosing the human reach for more than itself.

 

                Among the many paintings that might justly be treated as paradigmatic is the one Mancini based on “Exultation is the going,” a poem of both death and discovery. As in all his paintings, Mancini matches his visual experience to specific words from a Dickinson poem—in this case, the first and last lines of the initial stanza, “Exultation is the going” and “Into deep Eternity.” Sudden light radiates from a white source just left of center, flooding clouds that refuse equilibrium, as if to say our preparations for eternity are never adequate. This is the sentiment of the second stanza of Dickinson’s poem where the speaker asks, “Bred as we, among the mountains, / Can the sailor understand / The divine intoxication / Of the first league out from Land?” Mancini agrees that eternity is for us as the sea is for the sailor, a transport known only by magnificent disclosures. A purple plane a little to the left of the viewer rises like a ramp toward the dawn, whose whitest center is to the right of the plane’s midpoint and almost but not quite dead ahead. It catches us off balance, intoxicated, glad to be going we know not where. This is the shock of anticipation defied, expectation surpassed.

 

                Three of Mancini’s paintings deal with butterflies, clearly establishing how Dickinson’s fascination with the insect itself and its potency as symbol of transformation and rebirth speaks to his own imagination. Of these, the painting based on Dickinson’s poem “A fuzzy fellow, without feet –“ is not only a striking demonstration of Mancini’s ability to convey the circling currents of gestation, but quite simply one of the most dazzling pieces in the entire exhibit. For this painting, Mancini seizes on the final two lines of the poem: “To tell you the pretty secret / Of the Butterfly.” The painting without question gives us the “pretty secret” Dickinson’s speaker is so enamored of, but it does so in the manner of spiritual revelation.  The painting allows us a glimpse beneath the shimmering surface of the caterpillar’s cocoon so that our eyes are opened to the life change underway there without in any way diminishing its miraculous circuitry, showing us that the secret of the butterfly is magnified in the telling.

 

               Light flashes from four or maybe five places in the churning core of the chrysalis, impressing us even more deeply with life’s impenetrable beauty. Mancini’s response to the second butterfly poem, “From Cocoon forth a Butterfly,” shifts the scene from the dynamo of transformation to its aftermath, as egg-like stones settle in a lavender sea.  . This painting captures the quality of completed action conveyed in Dickinson’s line “The Clovers understood –,” the line Mancini highlights. The third butterfly painting responds to the present tense experience of a speaker caught in the throes of her own rebirth. For this painting, based on the poem  “My Cocoon tightens – colors tease,” Mancini underscores two lines that capture

 

the speaker’s dawning awareness of undisclosed powers, as she feels “A dim capacity for Wings” and assumes “The Aptitude to fly.” The canvas can be thought of as the first peek at a green world, peered at through the slit sheathing the old self’s outer shell. Here Mancini takes his viewer inside the cocoon seen from the outside in the first butterfly painting, and into the moment of the insect’s resurrection uncomprehendingly pondered in the aftermath of the second painting. This canvas offers a gray horizon that resembles the lower lid of an eye admitting light after long darkness; a black star tinged with purple persists just beneath the center point of the visual field. This is darkness on the inside, where we are, obscuring our ability to see what our new eyes reveal. Mancini signals that this is a moment early in the emergence of the new self and that the outcome remains uncertain.

 

                Mancini’s fascination with transfiguration derives in part from a personal encounter with rebirth that took place in 1990, when a cerebral hemorrhage left him in a coma for six weeks and resulted in partial paralysis that lingered for two years. Fighting back from memory loss so profound that for a time he didn’t know his name, he witnessed first-hand the way worlds materialize unexpectedly, shedding darkness with titanic operas of light. His title for this exhibit, “I’ll tell you how the Sun rose –,” indicates that he is still transported by the beauty of that awakening.

 

                                                                                                                      Paul Crumbley

                                                                                                                     

 

 

 

 Poetry as Traces of Memory

 

by Alberto Mancini

                                                                                               “Truth did not come into the world naked,

                                                                                               but it came in types and images ” ( St Philip Gospel)

 

 Years ago, I moved into a personal psychological regression, trying to understand myself in relation with nature which, in some way, has always been my feeling and my trouble. By accident, guided by an old friend, the poet Alfonso Cardamone, I started to read a collection of poems from Emily Dickinson. I was immediately touched by them: all my childhood came back to me: the woods, the mountains, the breeze, the breath, the sense of the entire.

Years later I found the complete collection of the poems, translated into Italian, and with the devoted help of my friend Ann, we read them, deeply. We spent hours and hours talking about the images, the intelligence and the deep devotion to the divine in nature spoken of in the poems. And I painted. This experience, became a kind of “meditation”, meaning that it was an opportunity to examine and revaluete the deep reasons and the need for writing poetry and doing art in general. We realized how the need has to move, in some way, the reason of the poetical research, otherwise it could remain at the surface without any real connection with the life, a kind of empty and useles aesthetic exercise.

In “The Power of Myth” from Joseph Campbell,  I found some other traces of what I was looking for at that time in my life: “Every mythology has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field. Then they come into collision and relationship, and they amalgamate, and you get a more complex mythology. But today there are no boundaries. The only mythology that is valid, is the mythology of the planet and we don’t have such a mythology (italics mine).”  I heard his words as a disperate warning !

It’s in my opinion, that Emily Dickinson was unconsciously creating a kind of mythology of the planet, combining archetypical images and a profound understanding of the natural world. Each poem become a kind of prayer and in each poem she lets us feel the divine of the elemnts and the elements as part of the One; an entire animated planet, one entire Anima Mundi She articulated a mythology that speaks to the eternal transcendental needs of all human beings.

It is my profound conviction that each one who is involved with art has the chance and the duty to work with these principles, tracing new paths, new directions for humanity. This is the deep meaning of poetry and creativity.