arts, literature

Frances Welling: Incendiary

Eighteen young Flemish and Dutch authors drew inspiration from the collection held by the Mauritshuis in The Hague. They looked at seventeenth-century paintings through the lens of an alternative history which they then brought to life in short but powerful texts. Frances Welling looked at the repainted hand on Peter Paul Rubens’ Old Woman and Boy with Candles, and wrote a poem about family ties. ‘the outline of the first hand a reminder of a fairer distribution’

Incendiary

        it’s a no go, writing about blood
when it hasn’t reached its lowest point
                                            is still pouring down the steps
                                 the dogs are still sniffing the corpses

an organism in motion keeps moving 
until it’s brought to a standstill

               an organism that stagnates will remain stagnant
                                                                  until it’s moved
                                                                   until it’s stirred

                               until it empties
                                until it expires

                                                 it took some doing though
                                    not just the candle the whole torch
       not just the revolution the guerre civile the escape too
           sometimes no external cause can be found for pain
                   it no longer matters you’ve simply had enough

the outline of the first hand a reminder
of a fairer distribution
(no Maecenas was affected by this)
I wanted the hands closer so she could warm herself and thus created her anew 

she died a few days later
the concept of progress had cut the ties
with the Huguenots and the peasants and the priests
and the parents and the parents and the parents
the wake attracted each and everybody
back to the first surname that connected us
it left the whole house buzzing

she’d grown hundreds of years old, maybe
resistance can be as simple as holding on

              brush dust off the forgotten names
                            trace the lines that I know

• deBuren
• Mauritshuis
• Rubens