The Woman on the Seawall

Hours ebb.  The horizon
sags into sea.  Not much left of the day:
towels that checkered the beach

folded away.  No children
tumbling from castes like pawns.  Last
walkers leave: a man and his mutts,

the woman who clutched
her shoes to her chest for hours -
all chased away by the night tide exhaling

 - excerpted from "Night Tide at Ostend" by Laure-Anne Bosselaar, from Small Gods of Grief, Rochester, BOA Editions, Ltd.: 2001

This is a strange night world where seabirds fly and the docks and beaches are so many stripes illuminated by a mysterious source, backlit like a Hollywood movie yet painted a century and more ago by Leon Spilliaert of Ostend (Ostende in French, Oostende in Flemish), an important distinction in his native West Flanders.

Similarly poet Laure-Anne Bosselaar paints in words a visual equivalent to Spilliaert's world.  For both, the night and the sea become seemingly fathomless and static, unlike the usual characteristics  of night and sea.  Both Bosselaar and Spilliaert are true Oostendenaars, fluent in both Flemish and French, their imaginary worlds are split at the root, as Luc Sante described it in The Factory of Facts, "Belgian art, the id of the nation, manages to be extravagant and tight-lipped at once..."

In art the beach at Ostend is as familiar to Belgians as the beaches of Normandy are to lovers of French Impressionist painting and for the same reason: during the late 19th century swimming and sun-bathing became popular pastimes for a growing middle class with newly acquired leisure. 

Ideas, applied indiscriminately as they almost always eventually are, prompt a reaction.  As the German philosopher  Hegel put it: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Well, maybe the first two but in art synthesis is no sure thing.  At the end of the 19th century European arts were marked by a fascination with irrationality in response to philosophical positivism with its claims to explain every phenomenon by scientific and rational means.

Symbolism was a literary movement first: the poet Jean Moréas published what became its manifesto Le Symbolisme in Le Figaro in 1886.  Symbolism's attraction for visual artists was immediate, followed closely by the critics.  In Le symbolisme en peinture and other books, Albert Aurier defined symbolist painting as one that would "clothe the idea of ​​a sensitive form" in suggestion and mystery.  It would be subjective, it would have its own recognizable language of forms, and it would have decorative elements.   Although Aurier was only twenty-seven when he died (from typhoid fever) he had not only made a reputation as an astute critic but had assembled a considerable personal  art collection.  His Van Goghs were acquired after his death by another astute collector, Helene Kroller-Muller for what eventually became the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterloo, Netherlands

In Brussels and in Paris, Leon Spilliaert, painter,  frequented literary circles. He particularly admired the French-speaking Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren. Verhaeren was so highly regarded that he was considered for the Nobel Literature Prize but considered a long shot after his countryman Maurce Maeterlinck won the prize in 1911.  Although it is difficult to pin his poetry in modern terms, Verhaeren was close to the art of  Fernand Khnopff and the expressionist James Ensor, two Belgian painters whose works he analyzed.

Spilliaert was a night walker; he came by his deep feeling for the quiet atmosphere that attends theouble to hear it. restless ocean for those who take the tr

The Belgian poet Laure Anne Bosselaar grew up in Flanders,in Bruges and Antwerp; her native tongue is Flemish.  She worked for radio and television stations in Belgium and in Luxembourg before moving to the United States in 1987.   She has taught French poetry and published a collection of her own French poems, Artemis.  Widow of a fellow poet, editor, and translator Kurt Brown,  Bosselaar currently lives in Santa Barbara, CA.

For additional reading:
The Factory of Facts by Luc Sante, New York, Random House: 1998.

Image:
Leon Spilliaert (1881-1946) - La femme sur la digue (The Woman on the Sea Wall), 1907, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.