Our Beginnings Never Know Our Ends is a mixed media book illustrating re-sequenced excerpts of various poems by T.S. Eliot.
My self-possession flares up for a second
This is as I had reckoned
We must leave it now to fate
You will write at any rate
Our beginnings never know our ends
I just finished this collage called Transplant. I did the original collage in 1999, made some changes to it in 2005, then cropped and mounted it this past week.
I recently scanned a book I made back in 1994. I was living in Boston at the time, and happened across several old books that had been discarded. Actually, it looked as if someone had died and their apartment had been cleaned out.
Included in the pile were some old medical books, some children’s books in Russian, and central to the creation of this work, some notebooks used for practicing written English.
There were many interesting phrases. Why, for example, would one practice writing “to take a walk down quicksand?” It was an evocative image.
I began to tear phrases out of the notebooks and arranged them on a table top into a collaged narrative. The process took a few days as I shuffled the fragments around, adding new bits here, taking out bits there. I then began to collect images from the other books to create illustrations of the constructed tale, and arranged the pieces into pages.
Click on the first thumbnail below to view the complete story.
Falls the Shadow
Collage, watercolor and ink on paper
Page from a mixed media book illustrating re-sequenced excerpts of various poems by T.S. Eliot.
From “The Hollow Men”:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
From “Ash Wednesday”:
Here are the years that walk between, bearing
Away the fiddles and the flutes, restoring
One who moves in the time between sleep and waking…
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
Till the wind shake a thousand whispers from the yew
And after this our exile
Page from a mixed media book illustrating re-sequenced excerpts of various poems by T.S. Eliot.
From “Portrait of a Lady”:
“Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands”;
…
“You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.”
