Seán Gaffney: An Appreciation of the Poet

Abstract

As he stands before the masterpiece, the poet, a “wandering Paddy, a butcher’s son,” feels the gaze of the painter, who peeks out from behind his canvas, if only momentarily, to contemplate the scene in front of him, a 17th-century Spanish artist catching the eye of 21st-century bard, who had dropped by the museum for a visit one mid-September day. The painter is Diego de Velázquez. The painting is Las Meninas. The poet is Seán Gaffney. The poem is “Figure/Ground.”1Seán has come to see, of course, for that is what one does at an art museum. And Seán, like so many others in the Prado that day, has come to see Las Meninas. But one cannot merely see Las Meninas. Velázquez’s magnum opus resists passive reception. “I can see him looking at me still,” notes Seán. The roles have been reversed. It is not Seán who stares at Velázquez; it is Velázquez who stares at Seán as the painter extends himself across space and time, “[g]rabbing me,” says Seán in his muscular verse, “balls, guts, heart and head.” But now the final turn, the final act of defiance that becomes its own profound moment of co-creation, for Seán refuses to be subsumed by the painter’s gaze; he will instead respond in kind, “[j]oining you here again, dear Don Diego,” but “[t]his time seeing you see me.”The story is not over, however. The process of seeing entails the possibility of invisibility, and invisibility abounds in Las Meninas. What is Velázquez limning on the large canvas that dominates the entire left side of his painting? And whom does the artist see as he looks out into the space that lies beyond the picture frame? For the cultural critic Michel Foucault (1973, 8), it is the mirror on the back wall in which we see the reflected image of King Philip IV and his wife Mariana de Austria that “allows us to see, in the centre of the canvas, what in the painting is doubly invisible.” Foucault argues that the mirror allows the viewer to see what is on the canvas and what lies outside the painting. The king and queen, who have come to the artist’s studio to sit for an official portrait, are at once present and not present within the pictorial space. Foucault may be right with respect to the royals, but is the same true of all viewers, viewers who, like Seán, now find themselves “standing where they [the royals] sat” looking at Velázquez’s painting of Velázquez at work painting? The world outside the picture frame is always changing. Museum patrons come and go, and some, like Seán, are gone too soon. Does the fleeting spectator have any permanence? Is the invisible real? Velázquez, alas, remains silent on the question. Seán, however, will have his say.Seán, you see, is comfortable in the presence of absence. In “Siblings,” for example, the silence that lingers in the house after his sisters’ visit grows “louder by the hour,” filling the void left behind in the wake of “hallway goodbye hugs” with a palpably disquieting quiet.2 The invisible has substance in a poem that demands that we understand, a poem that demands that we literally “stand under” and accept the weight of the memory of sibling chatter “now fading into the absence of silence” that slowly takes up residence in Sean’s home.The siblings’ visit is, at least, a memory of a lived moment, sisters there then gone. The family who visits Seán in “Who,” however, comes from a different kind of past, a past at once unattainable and inescapable.3 Named for an uncle he never knew, Seán lives in the shadow of that other Seán, an invisible specter, “always with me an ideal beyond my reach.” The two Seáns exist not as uncle and nephew, but as a single though composite being: “Now by my imagination so am I a you who lived on here in me still here and not still / Not me really nor you.” Two lives, simultaneously enmeshed and separate, each giving life to the other, enter into communion with each other, a kinship born in the mingling of one Seán’s silence and the other Sean’s verse. In carrying within him a past that was never his, a life that he never knew, Seán makes visible those “who made and make me who I am.” Such is the poet’s duty.