Platte Clove Residency: Some Remove

Plattekill Falls; Platte Clove Nature Preserve;
Catskills; NY; July 2012

On the first afternoon of my residency at Platte Clove, after settling into the cabin and familiarizing myself with local trail maps, I decided to explore a short path that begins a few steps from the cabin's porch and winds its way down one of the valley's uppermost gorges to Plattekill Falls. It was a lovely reintroduction to the Catskills. Late afternoon sunlight filtered through the mixed forest's overstory, unevenly illuminating a floor decorated with eastern hemlock cones. Hidden from view in the canopy above, red-eyed vireos ceaselessly repeated their lilting questions.

Old Mud Blood at the Banshee

"And I do not want anymore to be useful, to be docile, to lead
children out of the fields into the text
of civility, to teach them that they are (they are not) better
than the grass."

-Mary Oliver, excerpt from Rain, originally published in "New Poems"(1991 - 1992)

A year or so ago I met a friend for drinks at The Banshee on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Sitting next to us at the bar was a poet, in his early fifties, who had recently moved to New York from Los Angeles. Feeling uncharacteristically social (after sufficient lubrication), I got into a conversation with the man. He had experienced some critical success within west coast poetry circles but had grown frustrated with "the scene," and opted to try on NYC for size.

After a half-hour of talking, he announced, "Well this is really great. You're the first person I've met since moving that's really got me feeling like there is that creative pulse you always hear about New York." He insisted on giving me his card and asked for information on my website and future exhibitions. I've lived in New York long enough to view his gushing with some skepticism; still, I'd enjoyed the chat and exchanged information with him agreeably enough.

As the gentleman prepared to depart, he paused, cocked his head quizzically, and asked, "So who are your favorite contemporary poets?"

It was an easy question to answer. "At the moment I'm enjoying collections by Mary Oliver and Galway Kinnell. I've always..."

I couldn't finish my reply; the poet broke into a peal of laughter. I was understandably taken aback by this reaction. After regaining some semblance of self-control, he exclaimed, "And the whole time you had me thinking you knew good poetry from bad poetry. Mary Oliver is garbage. Kinnell is little better." I stared at him blankly. He laughed a little more, shook his head, and continued, "I mean, that's like me telling you that my favorite painters are Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell. You'd be appalled. That's not even art! That's illustration!"

I wasn't quite sure what to say. I shrugged and finally said, "Well, I read a fair amount of poetry, so my landing on those two isn't just chance. I think they're good."

He appeared genuinely crestfallen. It was as though my bad taste sapped New York of the intellectual and creative energy he believed he had just become acquainted with. He may have pegged me for an appreciator of mundane poetry (guilty as charged, I suppose), but his explosive dismissal of Oliver and Kinnell, both gifted and rewarding poets, and his use of Hopper and Rockwell as parallels reveals inherited (or adopted) prejudice.

Hopper and Rockwell painted with reproduction in mind and, indeed, both worked as professional illustrators for a time; this being the case, labelling them illustrators isn't entirely inaccurate but, as Peter Schjeldahl wrote recently, "If 'Nighthawks' is an illustration, a kick in the head is a lullaby." Hopper and Rockwell aren't favorite artists of mine, but their work is not deserving of the lambasting it receives from so many art world experts. (The unintentionally comical Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, comes to mind here. In the documentary, "Who The $#%& Jackson Pollock?," Hoving dismisses the opinion of someone outside the art establishment by wagging a finger and saying, “She knows nothing. I’m an expert. She’s not.”)

The truth is, many critics and connoisseurs build upon the existing scaffold of criticism and connoisseurship to such a degree that, generations down the line, their tower of opinions is an esoteric curiosity, shaky and too tall to be buttressed by the masses. I'm not suggesting that experts don't have a place nor that populist art is superior to "high" art, but merely that it is unfortunate that so many members of creative communities are eager to demonstrate their "expert" status by espousing those ideals or ideas most removed from the general consensus.

I sometimes struggle to explain Mary Oliver's value to non-believers. One acquaintance described Oliver as "the Thomas Kinkade of poetry." The comparison is ludicrous. Oliver writes of the "live animal," of a becoming with the natural world that impregnates experience with a meaning distinct from reason. Kinkade is the master of commodifying kitsch. They are worlds apart.

At any rate, I was all too happy to read Bioephemera's recent toast to Oliver. Cicada observes, "Some critics grumble that [Oliver] is insufficiently challenging or unsurprising, but she leans so heavily on the sense of wondrous recognition fed by nature, I wonder if a failure to be moved isn’t primarily a failure of that wonder-sense." Or, in the words of Oliver herself,

"I don't want you just to sit down at the table.
I don't want you just to eat, and be content.
I want you to walk out into the fields
where the water is shining, and the rice has risen.
I want you to stand there, far from the white tablecloth.
I want you to fill your hands with the mud, like a blessing."
-from Rice, "New Poems" (1991 - 1992)

Later in her post, Cicada describes the sense of belonging, if you will, that an Oliver poem provides. "...her poems make me feel rooted in humanity, grounded in my own body, aware of this lumpy, piecemeal tangle of cells which is somehow, miraculously, taking pleasure in language. Oliver’s poems are spiritual experiences for those who would not necessarily describe themselves as spiritual." But why take her word for it?

The Fish
The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and ate him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.
-from "American Primitive" (1983)

I guess it's true that one man's "garbage" is....

Photo credit: Hungry Hyaena, 2002

The Human Face: Ambivalence As Objectivity

"Gaiety and glee are usually twinned with misery, however, which sneaks up on you like an ocean wave, filling your mouth with seawater, and can almost take you under, like a nether beast risen from below."
-Edward Hoagland, Compass Points


Woody Allen and the Voyager 1 disc
In moments of profound sorrow, my chest collapses, as if compressed by some exterior force. Air escapes my lungs and a temporal vertigo consumes me. Such absolute heartache is, thankfully, extremely rare. In my twenty-eight years, it has been summoned twice by women and, on several occasions, by the realization that, though all existence is fleeting, humanity must continue to strive. Contemplation of this proposition has, in the extreme, led to sobbing, but the tears are ambivalent, like the sentiment itself, simultaneously borne of intense joy and pathos.

Most recently, I was thus overcome while contemplating an image of the Voyager 1 disc in the pages of National Geographic. The gold-plated, copper record, placed on board the interstellar bound spacecraft in 1977, is, to my mind, the culmination of modern art. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory describes the record as follows:

"...a phonograph record...containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The contents of the record were selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan of Cornell University. Dr. Sagan and his associates assembled 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, and other animals. To this they added musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings from Earth-people in fifty-five languages, and printed messages from President Carter and U.N. Secretary General Waldheim.

Each record is encased in a protective aluminum jacket, together with a cartridge and a needle. Instructions, in symbolic language, explain the origin of the spacecraft and indicate how the record is to be played. The 115 images are encoded in analog form. The remainder of the record is in audio, designed to be played at 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. It contains the spoken greetings, beginning with Akkadian, which was spoken in Sumer about six thousand years ago, and ending with Wu, a modern Chinese dialect. Following the section on the sounds of Earth, there is an eclectic 90-minute selection of music, including both Eastern and Western classics and a variety of ethnic music.

Once...Voyager...leave[s] the solar system (by 1990, [it] will be beyond the orbit of Pluto), [it] will find [itself] in empty space. It will be forty thousand years before [it] makes a close approach to any other planetary system. As Carl Sagan has noted, 'The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.'"

If aliens should happen upon the Voyager 1 spacecraft and discover the disc, they are expected to play the record and learn something of our species' history. In this sense, the engraved disc is a tool and, as such, it will one day be considered an artifact, if it isn't already. (A reproduction will more likely find a home at the Smithsonian Institution than the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) But the disc is an object of abstract utility, a symbol representative of modern philosophy's crest. It was manufactured moments before the Enlightenment wave began to break: part Scientific Revolution, part postmodern doubt. Given this transitional moment of conception, the record is an embodiment of contradiction. It is a leap of faith taken by the faithless - the late twentieth century being the pinnacle of secularism - and a tool, crafted with aesthetics in mind, that is unlikely to be put to use. But, above all, the contradictory power of the Voyager 1 disc resides in the recorded content. An attempt to limn a collective portrait of humanity, the disc is at once a gesture of hopeful optimism and naive hubris.


The Necker Cube
I'm preoccupied by such ambivalence. Most people think of the word, ambivalent, as a pejorative. Without question, it can be used in a disparaging way, especially when interpreted only to mean indecision, but what of the word's other meaning, "the coexistence of opposing attitudes or feelings"? This latter usage accurately describes the balance sought by yogis, the Chinese yin-yang symbol, and the quantitative and qualitative possibilities figured in E=MC2. Contradiction, in this sense, is an altogether natural, even positive, phenomenon.

From my late teens on, I've been obsessed with another symbol of contradiction and ambivalence, the Necker Cube. The drawing figured prominently in the margins of my undergrad notebooks and throughout old sketchbooks; it was of particular interest to me during the peak of my drug experimentation. Flipping through an old "trip journal," I came across the hallucinogen-inspired rant below, proof that, if you keep pen and paper handy, not everything flashing through a chemically-addled mind is worthless (even if poor motor control makes it nearly illegible).

"A good idea will always contradict itself or, at least, the person exploring this idea will accept the reverse to be true as well. There are always multiple truths (2 symbolically, many more literally). It is the impossible middle-ground that is important. This is the yearning chasm, the heart, the Meadowlands. The yearning chasm must never be achievable, but does provide something to aim for. This target is our quaquaversal. At the peak of this quaquaversal - at the point of slope's origin - is the ylem. We can never reach the ylem; we can not even claim to know of it's existence, except on faith. Therefore, I have already arrived at a prime contradiction, making my logic sublimely impotent."

Unfortunately, when sober, humans are not programmed to readily accept such ambivalence; we prefer "empirical" truth, assigning meaning, often moral in nature, to our observations. Our data gathering can be objective, but our interpretation and the resulting intellectual constructs are rarely so. As a species, we are reluctant to give ourselves over to ambivalence. When faced with doing so, our bodies react in unusual, sometimes surprising ways; hence, my involuntary sobbing while contemplating the Voyager 1 disc. To contemplate the ambivalent universe is to be simultaneously overcome by wonder and mired in tragedy.

"...the idiosyncratic surfaces of the other orbs floating serenely in space; the pristine interstellar vacuum; the inscrutable emptiness of intergalactic space, that immense, echoing, absolutely featureless void enveloping the spinning galaxies: it all serves as a perfect philosophical mirror image, reflecting back the quandry of the species, the limitations of human knowledge. The frail architecture defined by our distant tools, which places the human race at the center of 'what's known,' is actually our own map of ourselves - a chart that we'll hand down to successive generations, who one day may see a charming primitivism, or even an prescience, in our view of all that."

-Michael Benson, "A Space In Time" (Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2002)

Many artists vacillate between the poles of glee and misery, of joy and sorrow, but one of my favorites, Woody Allen, is firmly entrenched in the tragic camp. In a recent Manchester Guardian profile ("Master of Neurosis," Guardian Weekly, Jan. 6-12, 2006), Allen tells Emma Brockes that, although he wouldn't trade his sense of humor for physical beauty, he "would've exchanged being funny for being a tragedian." He continues, "I always would've done that, from day one, to now, I mean, I always would have preferred that. [...] I wish my career could have been one in which film after film has not been comedies, but been dramas and tragedies." Reading the profile, one gets a sense of Allen's general melancholy; as he describes it, "I'm almost burning on a low flame of depression." I used to associate such a temperament with keen intelligence - and there is no denying Allen's brilliance, whether or not you like his films - but, lately, I feel depressives, like Allen, are denying the opposing pull, choosing the one-directional shrug of apathy over the contradiction of ambivalence.

Near the end of the piece, Brockes asks Allen, after having listened to him bemoan the pointlessness of it all, "Isn't having children a consolation of some sort?"

"No. There's no sense of continuity. No sense of, no sense of...I always used to think that art is the intellectual's Catholicism. You think that because your work may be seen after your death, or read, after your death, that it's compensation. But it's not. Not kids, or art or anything. There is nothing compensating about your own death."

Allen's bleak world view reminds me of a character I created for a screenplay I never completed, an angst-ridden twenty-something with a penchant for drug-fueled conversation and navel gazing - a thinly veiled reflection of myself at twenty-one. At one point, early on in the action, this character stands in a salt marsh with a friend and delivers a rambling monologue. Near the end of it, he says,

"I don't know...I think our answers - if you can call them that - are no more sensible than...I don't know...a mole. I mean, sometimes I like to think about...you know....'future man,' like, poking his fingers around in a human skull, my skull. But then I realize how far fetched that is. I mean, I won't be lucky enough to be a fossil. I've never even won at Bingo."

Presumably, this character would share Allen's feeling about children and art. With good reason: the idea that immortality may be achieved via lineage or the leavings of a creative career is short-sighted, as both, eventually, will be buried and forgotten, long before humanity vanishes. But Allen and my unfinished proxy are wrong to believe death offers nothing in the way of compensation. As our bodies rot, the contained energy - your concentrated mass - is released into the humus and the ether. Again, E=MC2 or, as Galway Kinnell, my favorite contemporary poet, puts it in "The Quick and the Dead," "the crawling of new life out of the old, which is what we have for eternity on earth." In this sense, even after our species is gone and other lifeforms populate the planet, each of us remains an essential piece of the weave, recycled and reconstituted.

Contrary to Woody, I feel there is much joy in accepting our inevitable decomposition, even if our conscious minds yearn for permanence, making eulogistic joy rather wistful. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 continues it's interstellar journey to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Photo credits: images ripped from Nature Publishing Group, lnx.indajaus.com, and The Focusing Institute website