SILVERING
Louisa Punt-Fouche is a South-African author, poet and artist, intellectual mystic, scholar of the evolution of consciousness, clinical psychologist, Jungian scholar, yoga teacher, naturalist, and lifelong activist in service of the voiceless. She attained a doctorate in psychology in 1993. She has exhibited her art in numerous exhibitions and has written 11 books.
Louisa’s voice chants poetry in luminous word paintings, imploring humanity to hear the everlasting sound of Nature. She composes a novel anthem of interbeing in polyphonic song verses. The movement of her work rests in its music.
The art of poetic living is like an agave tree. First, it shoots one long branch towards the sky. It then slowly collapses to one side, hovering for a while, before it dies, decomposes, and unravels into a silver filigree of threads of incredible beauty.
There is a quiet ache in the solitary darkness of a poet’s soul, which is unfathomable for many, but an unsuspected treasure at the same time.
The treasure is in a silver casket, created with the ash of burnt shadows and the blazing fire of eternal struggles. It contains the ultimate secret – the secret of the cloud of unknowing flickering the purest transparent flower in bright but brief flashes of lightning.
This book celebrates the possibility of a wild and multiplicituous otherness in a super sensory landscape of silver, where awareness is propelled laterally into the nuances that are at once both profoundly psychological and sensual – a space where we share the living dream with the Silver Oak Tree, the Crow, the Mountain and the Stones – a dwelling place of the gods in the past which has mutated into a chiming mirror of many selves co-existing in the Silvering of the ineffable and unfathomable.
I sit silently inside the secret of my soul, which has, over time, transformed into an empty beggar’s bowl.
Passers-by come and go, oblivious to my heart’s quickening beat as I fall – a pile of brash as I crash, although I hear the silver bell’s silent call.
My creations, poetry and art can never engender the purest flower, the complete breath, the authentic wildling or the perfect parable.
There is no objective foundation from which to interface Louisa’s poetry and art other than the realization that her human story is a splinter of an infinite reality where pockets of wholeness can be intuited.
Poetry is an olive tree that grows slowly on the threshold of death in the dry karoo, spreading its roots horizontally to find the sweet but sparse water of life. It salutes every sunrise, singing, “I know you, you are old, gnarled, twisted, a knotted whip in the light of the earth, gestating in the love of all humans”.
The photos, poetry, and art in Silvering are letters of the unconscious in myriad forms. It is primarily ambiguous, paradoxical, terse, and multi-facetted in meaning. It can only be contemplated in a stance of openness to the complexity of human existence, irreducible to single intentions. It is a visual manifestation of the impossibility of self-portrayal.
The olive tree’s silver-olive green tongue tastes the blessings of the afternoon bergwind and speaks what it is, “I am a poet. Despite your fearful thoughts of suffering, do not be afraid to live a meaningful life”.
