freedom & the unbothered sea
purposeful movements
The Sea by Gustave Courbet, 1865
As I think about the US Presidential election results, this poem keeps rising up.
Breugel’s Two Monkeys
by Wislawa Szymborska
This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.
The exam is the history of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.
One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away --
but when it's clear I don't know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.
translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems by Wislawa Symborska, Harcourt Brace, 1995
Creative Invitation
Pieter Breugel the Elder, who painted “Two Monkeys” in oil, was unaware that he gave a gift to the poet Wislawa Szymborska; the artist perished in 1569. The poet sat down to describe her dream of the painting in the 1990s, four hundred years later. When she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, this poem was shared as emblematic of her work. The Nobel committee said her poetry "with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."
I didn’t include the painting by Breugel above because I don’t like the movie to spoil the book, regardless of which came first.
This poem, like the painting, is dark. Yet the final image is open, undetermined. The clinking chain prompts the poet to remember what she knows about the history of mankind, but it’s up to the reader to choose the meaning(s).
The clinking could speak to what people can’t seem to stop doing—chaining ourselves up. Alternatively, it could speak to the necessity of breaking chains, the endless historical striving to undo harm and power-over; the human urge toward freedom. The clinking could be about how we chain others, both human and nonhuman; how we perpetuate enslavement. But there’s also a monkey dreaming away. The clinking could refer to the urge and efforts to both chain and unchain. Is this our essential nature? Even as primates, we chain primates; we also unchain them.
The clinked chain on the monkey’s limb might say—we are so close to the sea, so close to being able to move beyond the open window, just undo these stupid chains. Hidden in the painting is a method to release the chains.
Or, it could say, we are so far away from freedom that we are chained to the floor, even though we look at liberty through the window. The sea is taking its bath, unconcerned. We could be so free, yet here we are. What are you going to do about it?
The painting is a moment of interaction, as is the poem. The monkey is helping the poet pass the final exam.
Here is my creative invitation to you: imagine that it is 400 years in the future. It is 2524.
You share an image from 2024 as a message to 2424. (It could be anything—an image from art, from your own life or imagination, or a seen image that imprinted itself on you.) A poet in 2424 will write about it. What do you wish to say to her?What visual image would you share, and why? Let us know in the comments.
Tenderly,
Abriel
P.S.
It’s wise to now download & migrate your internet activity to a browser and search engine that doesn’t track your internet activity or share it with the government—like DuckDuckGo.
P.P.S.
More on the painting, from Staatliche Museen de Berlin, where it lives:
“In terms of its symbolic or allegorical meaning, the monkey was a symbol of man chained to his instincts, a prisoner of his animal desires….Bruegel would not be the moralist he reveals himself to be in many of his paintings if he had been satisfied with depicting the situation that he felt was unchangeable. In this painting, the chains are a symbol of a desperate situation. Only a closer look reveals that there is a way out. They end in a gag that is inserted through a ring. If the gag is pulled back a little and brought into a vertical position, it can be pushed back through the ring and the connection is broken…”