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The Mystery of Goya’s Saturn

Saturn’s rings (NASA/NSSDC)

In NER 22.3 (2001), Jay Scott Morgan relates Goya’s painting, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, to Richard Nixon and Vietnam, and that’s just for starters:

Critics have called his Saturn a symbol of evil, a Satan, a monster, and that is how I first saw him – like a huge, mad Richard Nixon, devouring the young men of America through the Vietnam War: a cannibal father, jealous of our freedoms, determined to destroy us, our ideals, our hopes.

Thirty years later, the painting still evokes in me an interior terror, a sense of isolation, loneliness, grief–this god on his knees, tearing apart his own child, enshrouded in a blackness that is like a psychic tar, clinging to me, clinging me to him, to a drama of primal murderousness, so that now I seem to be participant as well as viewer. I look upon him, and I am implicated in the crime.

This story of fathers and sons is one of the foundation tales of Western tradition: Abraham binding his son Isaac for sacrifice on Mount Moriah; God offering the sacrifice of His son Jesus on the cross.

[read more here]

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Filed Under: NER Classics Tagged With: Goya, Jay Scott Morgan, Saturn Devouring One of His Sons

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Vol. 43, No. 1

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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