Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art

In Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, Dean Rader begins at the end, with his father’s recent death and a retrospective, each a lens through which to experience the other. The first poem asks whether death empties and erases, to what extent painting or writing can alter a loss or detail a life:

Remember: the unseen is never truly empty.

Despite erasure,

                          the canvas never blank.

The writer’s interruptions articulate loss at the meeting of image and text: “did I write page? I meant canvas […] Did I write word? I meant image.” 50 Twombly full-color reproductions usher 32 poems that borrow the artworks’ titles, gestures, and affects, as when “Meditation on Circulation” wonders “How is anything a sign of what it cannot be?”

Given that “art both fills and empties a life,” Rader deliberates on what any artist’s medium can offer the grieving, what meaning is presented or refused by light, color, repetition, depth, time, or silence. But he also hopes the eclipses and asymptotes of language present more than elegy for the grieved—for his parents, Gary Dean Rader and Ginger Rader, whose respective deaths bookend a work that is

wholly inscribed by death. Twombly is dead. My father is dead. My mother is dead. My father-in-law is dead. One of my closest friends is dead.

For the speaker, these accumulations of death transform into abundances of extremes in diction: “everything” and “nothing” repeat, as do “always” and “never,” accelerating definition and emphasizing declaration. Questions about the book’s making—“what if all writing is a form of betrayal? [...] what if all writing is a form of return?”—both betray and return to a semiotic anxiety. One poem quotes Robert Hass’s “a word is elegy to what it signifies”; another notes “[e]very sign is a symbol of its vanishing, / every mark the beginning of its erasure.” “Meditation on Inscription” addresses the reader-viewer:

as I imagine you in front of the painting—

                                              lost in the swirl of signifier and signified,

the mind patterning the possible.

[…]

Consider:

              words begin with their own nothingness.

Consider:

              art, like life, begins in the void.