The author spent his life working with media. He naturally thinks in images
as well as in words, and is aware of how the image may reveal meanings hidden to rational thought. These are visions and inferences rather than explanations. Coming to a second portal, he finds himself startled by what he wrote down and expressed about his mother in the Marwnad - through the first portal. Now he seeks dreams and explanations which were not obvious to him then - even a whole life-setting, an integrated philosophy for living worthy of his kind upbringing and heritage. New births …
Through the following portals, the creator of the verses looks again at what he has said, examining and interpreting the meaning of Wales the Motherland through his mother, his childhood mother town Gloucester, and then his “Alma Mater” Oxford University and Balliol College. The further cruel cradling of an accidentally-caused disaster leads him to other sorts of motherhoods - the influence of a kind woman psychiatrist, and the Mater et Magistra - Mother Church. Finally and at last he finds his own parenthood in his fuller family and a home valley. He explores further, first by digital renderings of his settings - a sort of digital painting and graphic art - and from his reactions to them, and here he uses other new symbols to reinforce and amplify discoveries suggested in the Marwnad verses.
Later still, he uses recollections to analyse the happenings of a lifetime, and writes for his family present and future. These often light-hearted but sometimes tragic musings appear in a hyperbook - with links to letters and short stories addressed to his family and descendants. After each event he says what he made of the happenings in his very eventful life. Further poems and images arise from and within this group of writings.
No one is of course expected to read all these, one by one, randomly or otherwise. As a digital work with hyperlinks, the whole point is to give the reader a creative choice - an individual way of using and assimilating what is in the trilogy of the three “portals”.
At the end, both of the book and of his own life, these reflections lead him to articulate what he sees as a rational philosophy for living fully.
“I have tried to give visible form” says the author-artist “to a sense of how things fit together for me. My world of imagination has brighter colours, subtler emphases and symbols, to conjure up those places which are connected by association rather than logic.
“Some moments have such overwhelming individuality that their pure distinctiveness impresses itself on the inward self.”
“This is the sort of vision I have tried to celebrate, brought by digital tools out of that mere objective thing that eyes see and the lens images.”
“So, few of these images are simply what the eyes sees, or can see. Rather, they are transformations, wielded light.”
“Here then is my internal landscape of Wales, in a Triscel gallery of Images & Inscapes.”
AS kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
(Gerard Manley Hopkins - As Kingfishers Catch Fire)
By a system of donations described fully in our “shop” it is possible to buy the images and chapbooks of Port Two in a variety of forms (canvas, prints and mounted for your wall, electronic).
Basically, the versions on canvas and art-paper come in A4 and in A3 sizes. Please see the shop for all details and arrangements.
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Dafydd ap Ffransis Meilir