triptychs

When Jill Talbot chose my three-part flash "Little Colored Pills" for the triptych section in her forthcoming anthology ESSAY FORM(S), she asked all the writers in that section to write a 100 words on why they chose to write their essays as triptychs. I was worried about doing that. Have I ever written a triptych before? Did I even think of the flash as a triptych? What makes triptychs different from segmented flash or essays with more than three sections? I knew I hadn't actually chosen to write a triptych. I started fooling around with ideas a week or two ago and discovered it would be a lot easier to ramble on for 300-400 words than to write a 100 (which actually required me to have an idea).

I don't know whether it's because Lent just started, and Steve has become so religious, but I landed in a fairly astonishing place, to me at least. I was thinking about the visual arts, not so surprising, but I was rereading the piece and struck by the line about religion. Here's what I wrote for her: 

II chose the triptych form by instinct rather than conscious design, possibly inspired by medieval religious triptychs. The reference to T.S. Eliot’s modernist montage of “glittering fragments” in the short central section suggests an aesthetic principle: meaning is generated through juxtaposition of the separate sections. Medieval triptychs were altar pieces intended to aid prayer; the three panels evoked the Holy Trinity. A direct appeal to someone in the afterlife, a celebration of life—“Little Colored Pills” might be a prayer. Is that why I included the inner room filled with light, “my only truly religious experience”? I honestly don’t know.

She loved the response, which is a relief, both the medieval context and the reminder that forms sometimes choose writers instead of the other way around. And, very exciting, she mentioned that she's just taught the piece again:  "I taught this essay in my graduate workshop last week, and the students really enjoyed talking about the variety in the sections, the Eliot intertextuality."

​So that made my day.

Here's the Annunciation Triptych from the school of Robert Campin. It's in the Cloisters, so maybe I've seen it in person. It's well known to me at any rate. And maybe I'm thinking about how meaning announces itself through art in mysterious ways.