John Gardiner

Arabesques John Gardiner

A page of literature, whether poem, play or novel, similarly, an Artist's canvas or fresco, represents a two-dimensional palimpsest impressed with multiple overlaid inspirational sources derived from Time and Tradition, and read/viewed by a three-dimensional human persona. Arabesques presents in its narration, analogically, the proposition that the novel's would-be three-dimensional dramatis personae, are themselves overviewed by their individualised four-dimensional Inner Thinkers, derivative from Descartes' famous statement: Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Australia's continental landscape is evoked as a geographical palimpsest lost to evolutionary Time, uniform in an unchanging sameness, transformed only with the coming of the Anglosphere's colonisation, dramatically contrasted with the cultural textures of Classical, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque creative genius still vibrant in today's Italy. Arabesque's principal protagonist, an eponymous Artist, aged fifty, romantically and socially unattached, a devotee of the highwater mark established by Italian painters and sculptors, finds himself alienated from, and in open conflict with, 2019's Identity Politics and virtue-signalling, determining to visit Rome, Florence and Venice to revivify his creative vision. In today's climate of shifting ambiguity and ambivalence, is it possible to delve one's own incarnational palimpsest, and rediscover in thought, feeling and artistry, the ecstasy of romance?