Robert J. Mahoney

FOR LACK OF DIAMOND YEARS BY CAROLINE BEASLEY-BAKER ISBN 978-1938349096 NOVEMBER 2013 PELEKINESIS As a literary person who became an art critic, the nexus of visual art and poetry has always been of interest to me. I have known Caroline Beasley-Baker as a painter; now I know her also as a poet. In Beasley-Baker’s visual art—in all of its diverse forms—I always saw a perceptually acute link between the visual and myth. In his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer describes how visual feints and impressions, physiognomies (seeing faces in things), fears, animation of the inanimate, and conceptual reversals begin; how nervous ticks comprise the human fight-flight physiology. He describes how epiphanies were experienced and then clarified over time as the presence of a god (or “temporary gods”) emerged, places subsequently becoming sacred as shrines. In secular life, such huhs? are often the result of mishearing something, of making a [...]