Redtree Times

A Bellow to the Void– Coming to West End Gallery

He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.

–Charles Péguy, The Honest People in Basic Verities: Prose and Poetry (1943)

I didn’t know much about him when I came across the words above, but the author of them, Charles Péguy, was an interesting character from what little research I have done this early morning. Born into poverty in Orleans in 1873 and fatherless since the age of one, Péguy transcended his rough start in life with education, becoming a well-known essayist and poet in France. deeply nationalistic, Péguy enlisted at the outbreak of WWI and was among the first soldiers sent into battle. He died in combat at Marne in 1914.

The Poetry Foundation article on him states:

French poet, philosopher, and journalist Charles Péguy grew up poor in Orléans, France. He combined fervent Catholicism with socialist politics to create a body of work unlike any other. As a Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism writer suggested, “Most critics find that Péguy’s literary works exist outside the mainstream of modern French literature.” George E. Gingras, writing in the Encyclopedia of World Literature, noted, “Ultimately unclassifiable, Péguy was a solitary, best remembered for resisting all forces seeking to make political capital out of moral issues.” Péguy composed lengthy poems and plays, but philosophical journalism is his trademark.

In my brief research, I am finding he it is hard to attach a label on him. Unclassifiable is probably the right word for him. There seems to be a contrarian streak to him, one that made him willing to speak the truth as he saw it even when it went against the prevailing tides of sentiment. The next lines that follow the passage at the top are:

One must always tell what one sees. Above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees.

A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

All three of these short lines speak a truth, at least in the way I perceive them. If you see what you see, you must say what it is and to remain silent, refusing to bellow out what it is that you do see, you then become complicit with those who seek to deceive and abuse. That certainly seems applicable to the current situation. Actually, it’s a truth that speaks to any time because there have always been those seeking to deceive and abuse along with the many who have remained mute as it happens.

That final line about a word not being the same with one writer as with another translates to artists as well. The work of some artists from the gut, is part and parcel of their being, while other artists maintain a distance in their work from their gut, their true self. This distance can sometimes be cloaked in beauty, but it is often perceptible, bringing a coolness and aloofness to the work.

Like the soul is not fully engaged.

Obviously, I hope that my work falls in that from-the-gut and with a bit of soul category. At least, I try to create it in such a way. Maybe I am not always successful, but I try to say what I see.

And I do try to bellow the truth in what I see. We have so little time here and the voice of each of us needs to ring out in some way that to not bellow what is right and true is a deception of ourselves and our souls.

That is what I see in the new painting at the top, A Bellow to the Void. It is 14″ by 14″ on canvas and is included in my October solo show, Guiding Light, at the West End Gallery. There is a primal quality in the image of someone yelling their truth into the night sky. Like Whitman’s barbaric yawp echoing over the rooftops of the world.

As I said, we have so little time here. We are witnesses to our lives and times. To say what we see, to bellow it out to the void, is a duty to ourselves, our descendants, and our souls.

That’s enough said for now. I have to get upon the roof now. A bellow will soon commence.

Here’s Mumford and Sons with their Awake My Soul. Good stuff to kickstart your soul on a Monday morning.