. My husband, Simon Dinnerstein, is an artist. who,since the start of the pandemic, has been working on a huge painting that literally inhabits the world of childhood. My grandson,Adrian Greensmith, who is now almost twenty-four, sits in a cardboard box in the center. How many of us have seen young children turn cardboard boxes into spaceships or castles. He seems to be in a boat, patiently waiting, in the midst of the swirls of his upcoming journey. The painting juxtaposes all different times, people, photos – all that could be in the lives of all children. Where is he going? That is, of course, yet to be known
So here is my 82 year old husband, reaching backwards and forward in time, as he works,, every day, on this wondrous and mysterious “Voyage.”
One day, Andrew Reiss, an artist friend, visited the studio to see the painting in progress. He seemed transfixed by the many images and began to recite, from memory, this poem by Baudelaire :
For the child, in love with globe, and stamps,
the universe equals his vast appetite.
Ah! How great the world is in the light of the lamps!
In the eyes of memory, how small and slight!
One morning we set out, minds filled with fire,
travel, following the rhythm of the seas,
hearts swollen with resentment, and bitter desire,
soothing, in the finite waves, our infinities:
Some happy to leave a land of infamies,
some the horrors of childhood, others whose doom,
is to drown in a woman’s eyes, their astrologies
the tyrannous Circe’s dangerous perfumes.
In order not to become wild beasts, they stun
themselves, with space and light, and skies of fire:
The ice that stings them, and the scorching sun,
slowly erase the marks of their desire.
But the true voyagers are those who leave
only to move: hearts like balloons, as light,
they never swerve from their destinies,
and, without knowing why, say, always: ‘Flight!’
Those whose desires take on cloud-likenesses,
who dream of vast sensualities, the same
way a conscript dreams of the guns, shifting vaguenesses,
that the human spirit cannot name.
(click on link for video)
