Robert Witmer
ART HISTORIANS and critics were fascinated by the painting A Man Hidden in a Dark Wood. Some insisted there was a Man. Others argued no man could be seen, and therefore, according to painterly logic, there was no Man. Only a word in the title, an image in the mind of the creator, the kernel of a conception that was, in the end, inconceivable. Some saw things from a different perspective, suggesting that there was a Man not everyone could see, perhaps not even the painter himself. They held the painting sideways and upside down. In an effort to decouple eye convergence from lens focusing, they pulled it to their noses and gently bumped their foreheads against it as one might do with an autostereogram. They viewed it with intense lighting, having discovered that this technique places less strain on the brain. A few eventually saw the Man, though they disagreed about his age. And so some asked whether it was the same man. Others saw a camel, laden with frankincense and myrrh. One guy even saw his mother. Which raised new questions. Was the “Man” in the painting, or merely in the title, meant to be a male? Over time, attitudes hardened, arguments were simplified, and increasingly bitter. The Man was there or he wasn’t, whether you could see him or not. Because he went to jail and was never heard from again, little is known about the man who claimed to have spotted a tiny No Trespassing sign in the lower left corner of the painting. Unfortunately, the painting was damaged when they moved it into a new room at the museum, and that small space at the edge of the wood is no longer there.
Robert Witmer has resided in Japan for the past 46 years, teaching courses in poetry and short fiction at his home university in Tokyo and India. Living in cultural spaces quite different from one he was born into helped him to understand at the deepest level of being, we are all the same. His poems and stories have been published in three collections of poetry and flash fiction: Finding a Way, Serendipity, and Sunrise in a Rabbit Hole.
