Noise That Stays Noise: Essays

Cy Twombly, Hero & Leandro 1981–84

Cy Twombly, Hero & Leandro 1981–84 What did you lose? is the sound of the sea. And why from a tower does an ocean seem to stumble, to fall on its knees and bleed a pure thin salt that could have stained a cheek had she been inclined, but not she, who decided, after all, to go with him. That’ s what grief is, an accompaniment. Death ends the story, as it always seems to. He died at sea, as he often does, and the sea goes on. Life handed him a lemon and the sea made sand. Hero and Leander were like ever y other pair of lovers: one died. Hero & Leandro is an inverse ekphrasis: literature turned to a painting. Our basic stor y: a woman in a tower and her lover swimming nightly across the Hellespont guided by her lanter n who drowns of it as soon as the weather tur ns. And drowns of it: water is the per fect metaphor for love— formless, it will be shaped by outside forces, and knowing this, becomes a wanderer upon the ear th, in search of embrace, as was Leander, as is anyone in love. It is also the per fect metaphor for painting. Of the four elements , only land can be painted, while water , fire, and air ar among the hardest things to capture because paint is a solid object , albeit one always tr ying to refute that. And yet all paint is liquid when alive, and thus all painting is the proper ty of water, with which it must make its peace before it can go on to anything else. T wombly addresses this by addressing the sea, over and over, because it is that which must be crossed. Second Voyage to Italy, Fifty Days at Illium, Téméraire, Lepanto; the sea is in itself a 140 battle, and Leander fought it, The W ilder Shores of Love. And there it is again, in T wombly’s brush, in which a surrogate ocean of color is led shuddering across. Life crawled out of the sea. Hero and Leander, 1962, numerous vigorous things emerge from an even background, and the further we travel from the center , the more specific they becom until they start to take on form: a square, a tower, an X that starts to speak, to excise, one man from the sea of them. T wombly painted the first Hero and Leander canvas on a human scale—a great span composed of the myriad, minute conflicts and har monies that accumulate into a human life. From 1981 through 1984, he painted it again on an elemental scale, opening it out into Leandro, an O for ocean and a shocked exclamation in a huge sweep that breaks; the name howls in a swoop through a green and wine time across three canvases to a stark obser vation scrawled across a sheet of paper: oh amorous breath, he will not be breathing. When next we see him, he will have exceeded. She watched light brand the sky from her window where she’d watched all night, trying to distinguish the line between water and air. What did you lose at sea? In the twenty years between the two projects, one language slips into another , English becomes Italian, and the stor y changes, which was the whole point of the oral tradition; it’ s a different story every voice because language is the epic that the ocean is, directionless as a painting. By 1984, it had become a migration, this wave of unchained and uncharted emotion, of that mixture of love and despair that makes of love a mythic act and lets it par ticipate in eter nity, which love alone cannot do because it is one-sided; it requires its own opposite, which is not hate, but a despair born of the recognition of the impossibility of experiencing love’s eternity. Which is why this wave is composed of opposing colors—reds heading toward purples and greens heading toward blue—opposites that nonetheless lean toward each other and crash together into two more long canvases that quell. “T o paint involves a certain crisis,” Twombly states. Hero and Leander , epic poem by Christopher Marlowe, who died as he wrote it. Some say that, with Marlowe’ s flair for th irreverent, had he finished it, Leander might have lived 141 Here where water is...