Abstract sumi e Print “Pure Contradiction” by Marilyn Wells

Abstract sumi e painting, Zen style, print with ink wash and both wet and dry brushstroke work by Marilyn Wells was inspired by Rilke… “Rose - oh pure contradiction, joy Of being No-one’s sleep under so many lids.”   -Rilke 1871S-2 This poem mystified me a long time. I searched for uncovered meanings of this poem. “Rilke wrote in his diary: “I invented a new form of caress: placing a rose gently on a closed eye until its coolness can no longer be felt; only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn.” Claire Chan writes in The Student: “To read Rilke is to reach into emptiness. One of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, Rilke’s writing dealt with the sublime, our constant inability to reach it, and the solitary nature of human existence… reverberating in some unknown depths of the soul.” Just 4 years after completing the Elegies, Rilke died of leukemia at the age of 51. “His self-composed, paradoxical, epitaph says: ‘Rose, oh pure contradi