Hampl, Patricia - BLUE ARABESQUE: A Search for the Sublime
Harcourt (224 pp.) $22.00, Nov. 1, 2006 ISBN: 0-15-101506-6
Hampl’s
memoirs of discovery are exhilarating. Writing of both earthly pilgrimages
and the inner journeys they provoke, she brings a poet’s love of language,
fluency in patterns and modulations, and fascination with the life of the
mind to unusual aesthetic, spiritual, and cultural inquiries. Her most
sensuous, sinuous, and radiant book to date arcs from contemplation of a
painting by Matisse. Woman before an Aquarium has served as icon and
lodestar for Hampl ever since she was first “apprehended” by it in Chicago
in 1972. Matisse’s arresting image of a self-possessed woman gazing at
goldfish in a fishbowl in a room with a blue Moroccan screen inspires Hampl
to compose scintillating and spiraling reflections on containment, the
nature of time, the significance of leisure, Matisse’s love of fabric,
European fantasies about harems, and a little-known filmmaker from Hampl’s
hometown, St. Paul, Minnesota. Entwining the gold gleaned from her inspired
research with bright strands of autobiography and unforeseen turns of
thought to create finely filigreed prose, Hampl does with words what Matisse
does with line and color, that is, reaches to the essence of perception,
“not simply what was seen, but how seeing was experienced.”-- Donna Seaman