ORBIANA OLIVETO

A suite of nineteen drawings by James McGarrell, made and printed in the monotype medium on the intaglio press of the Ligurian Study Center for the Arts and Humanities at Bogliasco Italy in March and April of 2003. They derive from close study of the olive orchards there and a recent rereading of Homer's Odyssey although they were not made from direct observation of the former, nor are they to be viewed as illustrations of the latter.

The nineteen short prose poems written to accompany them are by the distinguished poet, Rosanna Warren. Her most recent volume of poetry, Departure, was published by W.W. Norton in 2003.

1. Frontispiece.

Recognition: that we live inside and outside. Light
corrodes both. Living bodies take shape from
corrosion. Olive trees tremble in sunstroke and shift
into phantoms. We are all pouring through our own
forms, and the house shudders. Who is safe?

2. Athena's Visit

Her sacred tree, the olive, rises like flame from
shocked earth. Visitation. In twisted boughs, at
evening, a new light plays. Tinder glance. Athena will
burn off his boyhood. To be ready to receive the guest
is to be flammable; is to step into a pyre; is to say,
let me be taper, flare, and ash. Is to say farewell.

3. Nestor's Heifer.

The sacrifice sends a message with gilded horns
tiptoeing among the gods. Blood jets from the heifer's
sliced jugular from time into eternity as old age
steps back, wiping gore from his axe blade. He has
sent a gleam into the darkness. The house door blazes.
Olive trees lean in toward the altar: they have
messages to send, something indecipherable whispered
as leaf whets leaf blade and the bark cracks. The sea
groans in its sleep.

4. Penelope's Dream.

Through the wall and window the boughs grope, finger
the massive darkness in her bedroom, pry into the
dream, which creaks open and releases a spasm of
starlight. Her son's safety will be woven of such
glimmering. But the lost husband? That story requires
a different tongue.

5. Nausikaa's Linens.

The virgin's trousseau of cloud and mist: she runs
her fingers through the atmosphere in which she will
robe herself as bride, upon sheets of dew she will
spread on the bed for the husband. Waiting, she is
cleft, gap, an opening between boughs. The sea calls
her, but can it pronounce her name?

6. Eurymedousa's Fire.

Girlhood is a flame. The princess has stepped from
sea-fire to house-fire, and she flickers, the sun is
in her eyes, she is keen to sway up straight. The
olive tree imitates her but it is the young palm that
knows her best. Affection kneels. Affection tends the
coals. Affection, with hard hands, a stolen past.

7. Wine of Maron.

Distilled sunlight, drugged with red earth scent,
cicada-song, lavender, thyme, flecks of mica, the
cries of dying men. They poured it from slaughter into
twelve amphorae. There is a techne for distilling
blood and prayer. That wine has the texture of honey.
It catches the light. Apollo approves. It will keep
you from harm.

8. Kirke's Swine.

And that is our nature, as well. Did you think we
were all light, air, fire and mind? Light can
precipitate into flesh, we are driven into solids,
solidly driven, we forget our names, this too is holy:
the olive tree suffers a paroxysm, and sky thickens to
lard. If you claim not to know this, you're lying.
Come here.

9. Antikleia's Shade.

He must always leave her behind, she must pursue him.
It is his job to outgrow her and to hurt her to death.
She is a shade now, reaching out to him. When was she
not a shade? She was flesh, bone and strapping pain
when he rammed his way out of her womb. Ever since,
she has faded, into substantial air. And yet he needs
her, that too is in the contract. Needs her hand on
his brow. So he can turn, strongly, and leave again.

10. Oxen of Helios.

Yes, we know about prohibited meat, but we don't
really know until it writhes and bellows and leaps off
the spit. Mad cows. These cattle strike a disease in
the brain deeper than sunstroke. The sun had seemed
benign. Now flame shoots along the nerves, spasms into
sparklers, and hunger turns to horror. We thought we
had eaten fire. Our leader slept.

11. Eumaios' Hospitality.

A small, dark hovel can contain a monumental light.
It is still hard to see in the dark. Of the two men
crouching, which is noble? Both? Neither? The past
translates into the future, but in an unrecognizable
dialect: all the vowels are changed. You can eat and
sleep in trust, and not be known. Childhood was
fortunate and can be lost. The trees spring back in
awe.

12. Helen's Divination.

She knows more than she should. After all those
years, she stands straight, a gash of sunlight, yet
remains cold, though the beam she directs into the
hearts of others reveals more pleats and hollows than
anatomists could name. Her own heart is practiced,
tired of its practices, and unstoppable. The eagle
lumbers past with the plundered goose. She knows more
than she wants, she sees more than she wants to see of
tawdry mortal repetitious rapacity and longing for
anesthesia. Which she supplies, in small doses. At
cost.

13. Telemakhos' Bath.

When the boy-man falls into the hands of women, his
body turns to steam. They massage his cloud muscles
with gold-flecked oil. Under a stream of hot water, he
will take the shape they want, doll-body. He will slip
through their fingers. Mist between trees billows into
female thighs, pelvises, chests, a company of promise
always just beyond his grasp.

14. Penelope's Loom.

Through the strong warp of the past, she shuttles the
woof of the future, and the fabric of the present
tightens into shape. But the present? Laertes' death
is constantly deferred. Constancy is her métier: to
preserve it, she lets the present unravel at her
fingertips, while night breathes over her shoulder and
complicates the pattern.

15. Eurykleia's Recognition.

Who had nursed him, dandled, swaddled, soothed him
as a baby-- who had sent him off in a clean tunic to hunt
the boar-- who had tended fires and scrubbed pavements
and counted sacks of grain these four score years, now
startles back on her heels, his hand at her throat. A
man's grip. A known hand. We can call it another name
for tenderness. As the boar's tusk ripping the boy's
thigh can be counted a blessing, a kind of caress. A
ring of oily scum forms at the basin's rim. In
hearthlight, their shadows leap.

16. Slaying of the Suitors.

Arrow in the throat, pitched wine, meat smear in hot
grease. To gag on an oath, to gulp blood. To have seen
no script in birdflight. One rolls under the table,
gutted, where once he tumbled the plump-armed maid
and poured himself out against her belly. For flesh seeks
flesh, even in the final banquet, and dark meets light
as if it were a dance. A kind of music floats from the
shuttered hall.

17. Lynching of the House Maidens.

Spasm in the pelvis, involuntarily jerking legs: they
have known this dance before. It wasn't called
justice, then. Pleasure takes us by storm. One has to
have a knack for abandoning oneself, that too is an
art. The human body would break most olive boughs,
there is such weight in us.

18. Laertes' Supper.

You want the pattern to declare itself, you want the
puzzle pieces to snap into place. Who among us does
not want to be known? They are to be recognized in
deeds of blood: same set of jaw, squared shoulders,
reddening eye. Inheritance. The mother long since
expelled. They have made this scene with their own
hands, they almost believe they have made themselves.

19. Endpiece.

Tell me what it looks like when the olive groves have
burned, and mist rolls in at dawn over charred earth
and sifts between skeletal branches. It may take this
scorching to make peace on earth. The last pyres have
petered out. If bones stick from ash, they are barely
distinguishable from roots. In the emptied groves,
among twisted ghostly forms, we dreamed justice was
done.

Further notes: monotypes are simply drawings or paintings made on an unmarked plate, most commonly copper or plexiglass, and printed in an edition of one. In this case the drawings were executed in brush washes of blue lithographic ink on a sheet of formica and printed on 22 x 30 inch dampened Stonehenge paper.

They were done while the artist and his wife, the writer and translator Ann McGarrell, were Resident Fellows at the Center on the Ligurian coast just south of Genoa. After several days of contemplation and drawing in the olive grove surrounding his studio there, he followed his usual procedure of improvisational drawing from memory and imagination.

Between a frontispiece and an end piece of olive tree motifs are 17 compositions alternating verso and recto between figurative interiors suggested by Odyssian incident and “rhyming” configurations of the trees.

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