Collage Me, Owl Baby

Have you ever seen a picture of an owl and been mesmerized by its big eyes? By how the feathers around its eyes radiate outward as if they are reaching toward infinity? How they look, just a bit, like they came from outer space? Or if not from outer space, then from some high-tech genetic design?

No?

The Cleveland Museum of Art has a postcard collage made by the surrealist Leonora Tawney. It shows the head of an owl as its primary image. You can see it at this link. Today’s poem was originally inspired by this work, but the postcard is covered under copyright and I can’t share it here. Really, go take a look.

You see me with only the big owl eyes
as if only light were required, lines of photons
screaming from transmission to reception

catch me, catch me if you can
if I am the speed of light, so are you
and we will never be together

never touch the other, we will flash
ever forward from the eyes to infinity
you can see but never catch me, as I

can look but never wait, each of us
doomed, free will dismantled by the anchors
of physics and mathematics

those wholly uncaring elegances

A similar feel (says me) is projected by another work in the Cleveland Museum of Art’s portfolio, this one available through their open access system. It is a Japanese scroll from sometime in the 1620’s-1640’s. The detail of the owl head is above in the opening of the post, and here is an image of the whole scroll.

A pen and ink drawing of an owl with big eyes and detailed feathers around the eyes and on the body sits on a branch, looking slightly downward as if toward the ground, with writing in the upper left corner of the scroll — Owl, 1630s. Tsuda Bensaku (Japanese, active 1620s–40s). Hanging scroll; ink and slight color on paper; painting only: 81 x 52.5 cm (31 7/8 x 20 11/16 in.); including mounting: 170.2 x 59.7 cm (67 x 23 1/2 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Kelvin Smith Fund 1988.35

I don’t know what is written in the upper left of the scroll. However, I hope it is something deep, not an admonishment to someone to pay attention, keep your eyes as open as an owl or something equally disappointing. Can you believe this is about 400 years old?

The 1600s were a period of great upheaval in understanding the world around us. The emergence of the structured, formal scientific method came in the 1600s. Isaac Newton argued that light was a particle and Christiaan Huygens argued it was a wave. Science (and religion) was reeling from the idea that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but that the Earth (and other celestial bodies) orbited the Sun.

Probably owls were not the center of this mathematical and scientific disruption. But just look at their eyes…it’s like they knew all along 🙂

Collage Me, Owl Baby