"...este toro es un toro y este caballo es un caballo...Si buscas una interpretación a ciertas cosas en mis pinturas puedan que sean totalmente verdaderos, pero no es mi idea darles estes significados.  Las ideas y conclusiones que usted tiene yo también las obtuve, pero instintivamente, inconscientemente.  Yo hago la pintura por la pintura.  Yo pinto los objectos por lo que sean." --Pablo Picasso

"...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse...If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning.  What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously.  I make the painting for the painting.  I paint the objects for what they are."

While reading for Spanish class I decided to try and look up "guernica" to see if the town's name of the famous Picasso painting represented a specific object.  As far as I can find it does not; but I did find a request, typed in Spanish, asking if someone could check the translation of the quote above.  I could not find the original source of the quote, but I did find the English version on pbs.org.  I am entrusting that PBS is accurate in stating that this is an actual quote from Picasso.  I do not know if it was originally written in English or Spanish.  Of course Picasso is Spanish, but he lived most of his adult life in France and obviously learned to speak the language. I do not know if he also spoke English.

I would further assume that the quote was issued in response to the widespread speculation concerning the meaning of the painting's images.  It also directly relates to where our class discussions have turned of late, and to Stevens' own claim that his poems mean to be poems.  There is no great Ideal in the sky to imitate; the Romantics ultimately failed in their quest.  There are also no specific meanings to be found in Guernica.  There is only an image of war, of a town bombed for no authentic reason, and there is no comfort to be found in the jarring, scrambled images of Picasso's brush.  This is the reality of what happened to that town, and reality is just as fickle in its ugliness as it is in its beauty.  The dead are gone:  their deaths as random as the cards dealt them in life.  There is no rationality.  There is no grand purpose, no promise fulfilled of a plastic paradise waiting for us in an immutable afterlife.  And what comfort is afforded even to the living?  

None.  That is what Stevens and Picasso are trying to tell us; that is what Lucretius tried to tell us.  There is not even comfort to be found in poetry, for the modernists have wrenched us from the lap of our mother, the moon, and her dark maternal veil.  We have been thrust into the full starkness of the northerly glaring sun to walk the plank with our eyes wide open, over the edge out of the abyss and into the interval of earthly life.  We cannot languish in our mother's lap forever.  It is jarring, it is shocking, but it is nonetheless all that we are ever truly granted in life--the plain sense of things, the cherished pipe of a father, the blank pages of a crumbling book whose words are spoken even as they ripen to dust.  Life is poetry, and what is poetry but a mere little poem, an ordering of words on an empty canvas?

This is all that there is.

"Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." --Picasso

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun."--Picasso

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."--Picasso

"So this is the end of the story,

Everything we had, everything we did,

Is buried in dust,

And this dust is all that's left of us.

But only a few ever worried.

We walk the plank with our eyes wide open."--Gotye