Rendering the Elusive Subject
We may note from our new vantage point how Venus' rotation is somewhat curious in that it appears indifferent to our existence. Employing the Relationship-As-Third-Party model, we may find that the Third Party, in this case, is not the poem for which we had hoped, nor even a convenient re-working of the myth of Venus, but rather a flesh-and-blood child from Denver, named Venus, a child of a very different God, a child whose childlike countenance, removed from her shoulders, yet shines; a child whose “ideal form” is now spread over hill and dale, in streambeds, along dirt roads, in a stone quarry.
According to poet and forensic linguist Gordon Massman, the act of depositing a partial right femur in a plastic bag labeled “partial right femur” is not “interesting,” in terms of the signifier and the signified, so much as it is “instructive,” in terms of its ability to evoke nausea even in this period of late language. “The Devil's in the details,” says Massman. “It's common knowledge that one murdered middle-class white child receives more US media attention than two-hundred-thousand murdered Iraqi children, but we're incorrect to assume this is the natural result of Americans' concern for ‘their own.' Rather, our minds seize upon the image of a ‘partial right femur.' When all we get from overseas are numbers, we can't expect to care. We need images, one for every dead Iraqi child—the boy popped by a tank, the girl whose eyes burned like marshmallows in her skull, etc. Not to say that large numbers can't be visualized. 100,000 children = every East Coast gas station blanketed with their skin; enough children to circle the US Capitol, fifty, with a rope of small intestines. And so on.”
Renoirs's Pigs at market (Porcs au marché), 1873, however, remains a cautionary example of overly graphic images' ability to shoot their own cause in the foot. The painting, which depicts a pack of tusked boars goring their would-be handlers, has always been regarded—if discussed at all—as one of Renoir's minor works. In 2003, the painting sold on E-bay for a mere $261, and we may never have seen hide or hair of it again, if not for its recent appearance in the picket lines of Wal-Mart employees on strike. The painting's owner, however, Cleopatra Constantine, herself an ex-Wal-Mart cashier, said that she expected little to come from either the workers' or the painting's new visibility. “Honestly,” said the single mother of seven and owner of an organic feedstore in Vermont, “I take comfort in knowing that when the stars have all burned out and their protons and neutrons have decayed into mere light particles and radiation, the universe will be in a state of almost complete disorder. And none of it will be my fault. In my lifetime, I've found no shortage of ‘animals of my species and preferred sex'—all I've needed to create seven wonderful children. These animals were not pigs anymore than they were monsters. One and all, these animals were men.”
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