“I come to give you something, and it is the gift of my own beaten self.” — Oedipus at Colonnus

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art, Burial at Sea, dead whales, George Steiner, J. M. Turner, Pacifica, tragedy

(My son looking over a piece of whale blubber, April 2015)

For the third time since April, small crowds gather at the beach near my home to see yet another corpse of a dead whale washed ashore. Even for gawkers, an homage of solemnity surrounds this image of great defeat. A gentle and magical beast once gracefully at home in the mysterious reaches of ocean inaccessible to us, is now a heap of rotting surrender, rocking gently in the most derelict of slumbers by the relentless waves. Feet away from our local strip mall.

When we read Oedipus, he pointed out the passive structure of the line — the gift of my own beaten self. Because that is what happens when our will fails, we can no longer act. In those moments when we worry about the increasingly acidic and inhospitable ocean, we pick garbage off the beach, we sign petitions, ban plastic bags, we are careful about what sloughs off into our gutters leading to the sea. And I can’t help but think that this third beacon, a totem of majesty now throroughly exhausted, signifies that it doesn’t matter. And a part of me is like that slumped over dark mass of hopelessness, filling me with deep apology. And like a true gift, there is only a response of stillness — not transaction — just acceptance.

The first whale in April was a headliner. It was a 49-foot sperm whale, a species rarely washed ashore because they are at home so far from land. My son and I stood at the perimeter to pay our respects. In the meanwhile, scientists butchered the prized corpse for data. “Why did it die?,” my son asked. A spokesperson from the Academy of Sciences fielded questions, for some reason focusing mostly on a British vacationing family, whose youngest son was poking irreverently at a dead, starved seal pup a few yards away. While we eavesdropped, the spokesperson told them some facts about the sperm whale and what the scientists were looking for. “Why did it die?,” again. She recounted that the whale was later in life, because his teeth were worn down significantly. “Why did it die?” Then she added that although emaciated, the whale had a big meal of squid in his entrails. “Why did it…?” Finally she addressed my son, mostly to stop the grating repetition known only to young children who are ignored and don’t realize the futility of trying not to be. “We don’t know.”

Analysis is a form of subordination, of trying to assert a superiority. Steiner asks, do you ever find a representative from a faraway subsistent tribe in the middle of a North American city, studying our first-world behaviors? Most thinking is indeed a form of self-establishment, of self-congealing.

In real thinking, he said, you almost disappear. There is an intense turning towards — and it is to be in love with everything around you. But here, I go back and forth, wanting to know why so many dead things are being hurled against our shore, and I am met with a harsh refusal.

It is a crisis of consciousness to try to make beautiful things in what can be described as very unbeautiful times. As Steiner says, music never says no. And my god, there are so many seductions coaxing me away from real-art making, even just the projection of myself into this very writing — which Steiner says is an act of a minor craftsman falling short of any originality. But I must give testimony, for the hope that art happens and shows us the freedom not to be. A freedom that sometimes enters after the beaten self is off-stage, dissolving slowly into the sea.

“whatever we lose like a you or a me
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea” — ee cummings

(Detail from Turner’s Burial at Sea painting, 1842)

“The luminous ruins.” – T. Nishiuchi

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art, Joos Ven Cleve, language, Photography, Summer Lee, the birds of San Pedro Valley, tragedy, words

“These words feel as if two waves of water meet each other, his and now mine, and collapse — but they sometime even obliterate, they are definitely torrid and some of mine are too fucking little, too fucking late. True to the man and what he taught, though, they are luminous even as they are tragic. And so unbelievably, painfully, precious now. Because I just thought there would be more. When really there are none.”

The whole writing is here:

http://thebirdsofsanpedrovalley.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/the-luminous-ruins-t-nishiuchi/

(My photograph of Lucretia’s veil, from Joos Van Cleve’s painting, 1525.)

“Let it dazzle and confound you.” Ionesco, Exit the King

Tags

art, Ionesco, Mortality, philosophy, poetry, semiotics, tragedy, Wislawa Szymborska

I confessed to my philosophy mentor last week that I am not interested in painting or sculpture right now — just words. He responded by saying that he himself left making for writing many years ago, but maybe he would return to drawing, who knows. Words, he said are so close to us, you just say the word elephant and in a moment the image is there. And words can also in a moment reveal themselves as just words. They are only a thin veil between us and the abyss of meaning and meaninglessness below.

A scene lurked in my mind. A few years back, I was traipsing through San Miguel De Allende, uncoincidentally on a painting retreat. On a break from the studio, I wandered to a cobbled churchyard, where from a humble, wooden bench in the shade, I saw an epic tree, unusual for the area. In its wrangled branches were surrealist swaths of pure white, which to my delight were tussling and preening and honking — egrets. As I moved under the tree, I said good morning to the weathered, bent, workman washing the stones in the nearby driveway. This welcomed him to stop his toil and commune in the sight of hundreds of birds and their nestlings crowded onto this one tree, this cathedral of bird life, hymnal bird hums, and unreal feathery white light.

On the ground at my feet was a grey lump, a dead baby egret whose coarse feathers were just emerging from fluffy down, with a twisted neck terminating at a beak open in an eternal gasp. The man saw my tragic discovery, and since Spanish is unavailable to me, I uttered impotently, “bébé mort.” With eyes that have understood much more about life than mine, he faced me and offered plainly, “Que vida.” Not quite sure what it meant, I answered him, but now know I will never fully comprehend it: que vida.

And though I tried to paint the pathetic little creature back at the studio, perhaps because of my technical shortcomings, it never matched the man, the tone in his foreign words, the moment, the elusiveness of “que vida.”

A somewhat well-known, poet, Wislawa Szymborska, dedicated to “que vida,” left life itself this week, and I am on the trail of her lifelong attempt to put it all to word. In her 1996 Nobel Prize Speech, she paradoxically leaves me with a striking image:

“The world — whatever we might think when we’re terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we’re embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants (for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain); whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets dead, still dead, we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose life span is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.”

Somehow she tells me it doesn’t matter what tool or tongue I use to insert an image or two of my own into this “measureless theatre.” I don’t know the ending: Just enjoy the show.

Today’s Advice: “The next day
Promises to be sunny,
Although those still living
Should bring umbrellas.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, “The Day After –Without Us”