Twenty long years (almost), with the length of twenty long years, and I’ve continued to use images from the oeuvre of Dutch twentieth-century painter Piet Mondrian, on covers and in many key situations. The way I write, both formally and thematically, has little in common with Mondrian’s paintings— I employ abstraction, to make points and for other reasons, but much of my work is realistic, or at least grounded in realism. Mondrian, of course, is most famous for abstract work, which also sets him adrift from Abby, Jenny, and Mary. What gives? I gave some thought to this, as I picked yet another Mondrian for Deep Wood’s Woven Shade, and came to the conclusion that, led by my own subconscious, I use Mondrian’s abstract imagery to create a sense of balance or counterbalance, with or for the texts in question. The writing is dark, twisted, tangled, and often only achieves limpidity when focused on painful realities; the smooth, limpid clarity of the Mondrian abstractions allow some air, some sensory data against claustrophobia into the books as a gestalt whole. It’s a mojo thing, and a positing in place of another dialectic; my thesis to Mondrian’s antithesis. The readers of the text are left to synthesize the material, presented together. I would like to make the argument, furthermore, that the covers of Deep Wood’s Woven Shade and the rest, are meant to be active agents in reader’s assimilation of the books. They are not meant to be perceived as incidental in any way. In an important gambit, I have spent twenty years choosing Mondrian to oppose me, and to understand that dark, tangled writing could often use something, any destabilizing element, to offer an impression of textual well-roundedness, or to approach the consummate. That’s the synthesis I would most covet— a sense of being consummate. Over a long and short expanse of time, however, it will not be for me to evaluate whether that sense, of the consummate, subsists in these efforts or not.
