a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

On the state of us, or out of the mouths of...


 For a few days now, I have been working on a set of small art pieces trying to make sense of an increasingly enraging trouble in the world, ours and beyond, which has so far evaded words...the right words, anyway...to be able to speak/write about.

It's not unusual for me to trade out words for pictures, and vice-versa, when one carrier of images won't perform.  It's how, in fact, I came to art to begin with...a story I may have told you already:  decades ago, finding myself word-tied, a friend advised me to find something else to do with my pen.  I began to learn to draw, then paint, and on from there...from then on I could trust one form of expression to release the other.



What's coming out now on these small draw-paint-collage pieces are what I am trying to express of my state of mind...about the state of things, of the world.  There is terrifying stuff appearing in these images, at least the impulse behind them is.  I can feel it even in this relatively peaceful place I live, a place where life seems to go on as usual, as I seem to, despite the news of horror across the planet...a place where just beyond it, or just in imminent reach, is the violence of ignorance (often deliberate ignorance), greed, and terminal hubris...the erosion of humanity from within a man, a people, a country...seeping farther, whether we see it or not, into aspects of our lives both public and private.  It's not fear I feel, but anger.  Especially since we have seen it before, again and again over time and place.

It comes in the guise of expensive suits, of well-documented desks, perfumed encounters, across tables laden with excellent repasts and elegant table-settings. Far from the realities of lives outside those closed rooms.  On the news each day, out-lash by out-lash appears...another shooting in another school or marketplace, a war on those who are not enemies, on women who have the least respite, on children who can live in no field of safety.

The other day, Alexander showed me a youtube site he had come upon...a cartooned man running to attack another...like so many video games.  But I had caught the heading to this segment as it flashed into view and out again:  Choose violence, it glared in white letters on a black background.  "Shut that off," I demanded.  "I've had enough!"

He looked at me, quiet for once, not arguing.  What he would usually tell me, I know, is it isn't real...it's just a show, Nana.  But my tone must have silenced him.  "Listen," I said.  "There is a chasm...do you know what a chasm is? (he nodded yes)...of disconnection between make-believe and real...and yet, there is also a dangerous impulse between one and the other.  People who fight instead of talk, who blame without thinking things out, who go to war on people, on children, who have brought the two together...make-believe and real...until there is no peace, no safety, no humanity, on your screen and in the streets...things like that...it makes me sick..."

I stopped talking.  He, still looking at me, said calmly, "But that's the way people are." The life went out of me.  Is that what he believes?


It's been a long time churning, this outrage, finally bursting out at those words, Choose violence!  Even before then, I'd already done the first of the pieces I began to entitle "If there is a war..."  I didn't know, when I'd begun to draw on some old watercolor sketch paper, nearly ecru with age now, three buildings, their windows and doors, a tree leaning too near, that, paint brush in hand a few minutes later, its sky would be darting with flames.

"If there is a war, who will save us?" it asked. 

The thing is, there is already a war.  Missiles attack in many forms, from many composites of powders, seen and unseen.  As I look at the world not all that far beyond me, I am feeling attacked, and spend my psyche on searching for places of safety...not  to hide, but to uncover the ways to counter the deep injuries of those attacks, on myself, on others...on our bodies, on our minds.


I went back to art.  This second one:  against wide brush strokes the colors of fire and ash raining down, it draws a house like mine, with trees like smoke, a burnt roof, singed walls.   "If there is a war, what will happen to the trees?" it asked me, for me. 

The third and fourth came quickly (I think I worked on them nearly simultaneously):  "If there is a war, what will happen to the music?"



And "If there is a war, what will happen to the children?"

There is one more, unfinished until tomorrow when I will know how, but it already asks its question:  If there is a war, what will happen to...water, air, the means by which life...all life, any life...is able to grow? 


Violence grows nothing.  There is no phoenix waiting in its ash of body or mind.  

It is tempting, as comfort and sameness call out from these quiet streets, to go on as usual, routines domestic and social safely in place.  But is safety even there, really? where only the illusion--the delusion--that the horrors of the outer world (someone else's inner world) do not affect us, have not struck its bloody sword into our widest arteries.  Only small pinpricks so far.

It is easy, too, to write of the usual things...of that small, barely undulating daily life, of natural beauty...gardens and rain and wind shaking leaves...the safe subjects, those where hope or peace or smiling adventure...the spirits of growing, not destroying beings...rise to ordinary theme.

Perhaps I could have begun this with that moment earlier the same day when, walking through the narrow pass between copse of trees and shed that connects our houses, Alexander and I consider a fallen leaf, exquisitely laced by a tiny bright green mite feasting.  Holding the leaf, he asks me, "Do you think this is art?"

"Of course," I say.  And at the same instant we say together, "It's nature's art...the art of nature."

It is, to turn an overused coin, the other side.  I want to believe what is in there somewhere.

How to teach, to instill, that life is growth instead, even in that fallen, delicately eaten leaf?  that violence is not the chosen way? How?