Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Mark Doty is enlightened through an experience with a painting that forces him to question our very substance of being. The boundaries that distinguish reality, through which light can pass is a fine art that painters fight amongst themselves to re-interpret. Painters have studied insurmountable levels of skills to develop pigments, oils, and brush effects to reproduce the fascinating mist of light that penetrates everything. He sees the light around bodies of oysters as almost dissolving, the shells of the lemon as luminescent as though the artist has captured them on the edge of reality. Painters are the equivalent of poets of light, and it brings Doty to question the substance of being. A painting can be a reflection of reality and capture the light and essence of lemon, in defyingly outrageous curls of peel, that spark the feeling and memory of taste such that one can't help but pucker at the mouth. Doty points out that the artist is waging his arrogant skill in the art of evoking memory and sense through light. He is brought to another, deeper question: What is reality? If it is there at some moment in the past, it is also there captured at in the painting in super-reality, or is it in the memory? Doty takes us back to the memory of his mother, now dead, but with the memory he questions what is the real form of his mother, other than the memory; She is not in the form of the carcass he recounts seeing as a child. Doty argues, instead, the carcass was not death. As he leaves the museum, he is left with a hue that he's taking out into the world. He describes it as a warmth but not love; Something greater than love, but without the vocabulary to describe the gravity of his sense of enlightment, that he is simply part of the matrix of this world. This matrix of light, in which styles one form of death.

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