René Magritte
titled this painting, completed in Carcassonne in 1940, "Le mal du
pays". The standard English translation is "Homesickness."
There has been no end of discussion of what the artist intended. I applaud Magritte's own response to those who plied him for explanations of his paintings. He said, "People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it." I feel the same way when people ask me to explain my poems.
There has been no end of discussion of what the artist intended. I applaud Magritte's own response to those who plied him for explanations of his paintings. He said, "People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it." I feel the same way when people ask me to explain my poems.
Magritte's statement on what is going on in
"Le mal du pays" is worth quoting.“Have you never seen a man leaning
on the edge of a bridge, looking at the water, with a lion behind him? Well,
now, thanks to this painting, you have.”
What seizes me in this image is not its strangeness but its absolute familiarity. I have been on that bridge in my dreams, sometimes as the winged figure, sometimes as the lion, or as both. I feel I was at a place like this before I agreed to come into the world, this time. Feeling what it will be like to be down there, yearning for the home of my spirit.
As I write these words, I hear again the high, keening voices in the procession of the birth-funeral that I walked before I came into my present body, and I am filled again with yearning for those I love on another plane of being.
My personal title for this memory-dream of the winged spirit and the lion on the bridge above the world is, "You'll be missing home."
What seizes me in this image is not its strangeness but its absolute familiarity. I have been on that bridge in my dreams, sometimes as the winged figure, sometimes as the lion, or as both. I feel I was at a place like this before I agreed to come into the world, this time. Feeling what it will be like to be down there, yearning for the home of my spirit.
As I write these words, I hear again the high, keening voices in the procession of the birth-funeral that I walked before I came into my present body, and I am filled again with yearning for those I love on another plane of being.
My personal title for this memory-dream of the winged spirit and the lion on the bridge above the world is, "You'll be missing home."
