Paint Your Nose

Auden wrote: “It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one’s nose, a good deal of it to know in which direction to point that organ.”

Well yes, but the observation is much more interesting if we substitute “paint” for “point”–in which direction shall you paint your nose?

I will paint my nose pointing south. My nose, my canvas, my lady at the prow…

Here: I’m painting a nightingale on my nose; not Keats’s nightingale, but Shelley’s. (A distinction for English majors perhaps?)

Now I’m painting a circus, the world’s smallest. The lion tamer has fallen asleep in the cage…

O what will happen?

Let’s keep painting.

My point? I love Auden; but like all poets he generalizes and forgets things. In the quote above he’s saying something important about art, namely you can have details galore but you need to make use of them or its just a lonesome game of Scrabble.

But I think the game of Scrabble must go on while you race into the unkown. Today I’m painting my nose all the way across Italy. I will make an old woman laugh to see such sport. I will be painting my nose with the world’s smallest brush. 

Right there on the street. No cops in sight.

Let the world go to hell. I’m painting my nose which I’m told was my mother’s nose, and her mother’s before…

I’m painting something Melville would have seen in passing, something on scrimshaw, something from mornings at sea.

How beautiful it is to make no sense and have an audience in an otherwise busy locale.

S.K.

Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University View all posts by stevekuusisto