Of New and Old Art in a World of Fairytales

Here are some photos of the project that has recently occupied, and continues to occupy, most of my creative time:  the first three pages from an illustrated book.  These photos show the paintings and details completed and in progress.  As with most makers of anything, I periodically question the entire project - the images feel derivative, the story hackneyed.  But I continue painting and calligraphy-ing and the pages unapologetically display all of the flaws associated with anything crafted by the human hand.  I like this.  As soon as I finish this post, I will continue working on the fourth page...and then the fifth...usw.   

I have been experimenting over the past couple of years with medieval illumination and aesthetics, copying the work of 13th-century monks to get my sea legs in the style, but also playing with the images and designs because straight copying is interesting, but creatively unsatisfying.  In April, for the first time, I executed my first entirely original medieval-inspired work.  Like any medieval painting, it appeared to tell a story that, if one only knew it, would render the painting comprehensible.  Trouble was, I did not know the story any better than anyone else.  So I made it up.  I posted that story and the original painting here. With the story, "Amrita and the Ifrit", completed, I began imagining how I could tell it through narrative pictures; a book's worth rather than just one.

I describe "Amrita and the Ifrit" to myself as a multicultural fairytale.  I have been slowly, but persistently, working my way through Richard Burton's (in)famous version of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night.  I have deep affinity for the tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, for the creepy dark fables of ETA Hoffmann, and for Snorri Sturluson's Edda.  In addition to enjoying fairy and folktales on the unintellectual, visceral level for which they were created, I relish thinking about their epistemology.  Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment pays homage to the wisdom and moral ambiguity of fairytales and contends that they speak to children in important ways that modern, overtly pedagogic stories do not.  In When They Severed Earth From Sky, Elizabeth and Paul Barber examine mythologies from around the world to determine how oral cultures amalgamated knowledge into stories in order to pass it from generation to generation.  

Essentially, Bettelheim and the Barbers recognize the psychological importance and epistemological validity of the story, although not just of any story but of the most basic story - the story we tell to our young to introduce them to the way of things.  With all of this in mind, I deliberately wrote "Amrita and the Ifrit" in archaicized language.  I used that fairytale trope of things occurring in threes (or sevens or nines).  Physically impossible things happen without remark or explanation.  I could not, however, settle on a kind of fairytale - a region or a set of characters.  Instead, I grabbed elements, names and beasties from a number of cultural traditions.  I made them interact with each other.  I hope, when read in this light, "Amrita and the Ifrit" has some charm to it.     

The process of creating this book has proven rewarding, frustrating and comical.  I notoriously grow bored with too much repetition.  You know that guy who can eat tuna sandwiches every day for lunch and still love them?  He's bizarro me.  I knew I had found my master's thesis when I finished a research paper on the topic and still felt remotely interested in studying said topic.  I have similar impatience with repeating myself artistically.  Book illustration, which requires painting the same characters and settings over and over again, has thus proven quite challenging.  As with all good challenges, however, attempting to meet it gives me a great sense of accomplishment.  The jury is out as to how well I have succeeded; the characters change subtly from page to page and, as page four is turning out, one character is undergoing a more concerted and obvious shift as the story continues.  I also cannot seem to stick to my originally-planned format of medieval-inspired structural gilt framework.  The creatures are beginning to inhabit the frame; the gilt becomes less structural.  We will have to see how this ends up!  

Book: On the Beach by Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach over 50 years ago, precisely during the heyday of the Cold War's nuclear arms race.  A brilliant example of counterproductive thinking that would influence such near disasters as the Bay of Pigs invasion, not to mention the release of innumerable films and novels dealing literally and metaphorically with human kind's ability to wipe itself off the face of the earth.   

On the Beach, as novel and film, differs from works like the brilliant novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, for instance, in that Shute did not choose the relative safety (or creative freedom) of rooting his meditation on nuclear holocaust within the science fiction genre.  Shute chose the heartbreaking and alarmingly mundane real world for his backdrop.  Another difference between On the Beach and so many other fictive post-apocalyptic nightmares is that the action of the story concerns neither the grand conflagration that ends in human extinction nor the way humankind slowly, painfully recovers after a nuclear holocaust.  Instead, the plot explores what, given said holocaust, human extinction would feel like.

Shute focuses on the year or so after the northern hemisphere has annihilated itself through nuclear war.  The resulting cloud of radioactivity slowly, relentlessly creeps south, promising to eventually wipe out all animal life on the planet.  The story occurs in Melbourne, Australia, one of the last large cities to contain life, and it centers around a small group of people: an American submarine captain whose family back home must already have died, an Australian naval officer with a young wife and a new baby daughter, a spirited young Australian woman who dreamed big dreams and now mourns the loss of her future.  

As tales of post-apocalyptic horror go, On the Beach seems extremely quiet. Of course, therein lies its power and resonance.  Dialogue and character, rather than action, drive the plot, for the defining action of the piece has occurred before the novel begins.  The bombs have dropped, the combatant nations have exterminated themselves.  Now the human beings left alive in the southern hemisphere have only to wait.  The story concerns normal human life and the psychology of average people waiting for a guaranteed untimely death; moreover, for a death that will signal the probable end of all human life on earth.  

As Shute imagines it, and I tend to agree with him, people quietly go on being people.  Some anesthetize themselves with drink and wait pathetically for the radioactive cloud to arrive with its sickness.  Some take up dangerous hobbies and pursue them with abandon, perhaps hoping they go out on their own terms before the sickness overtakes them, and likely also managing to feel truly alive before they die.  Others, the great majority, simply go on.  Not naively, as though assured death were not approaching, but determinedly because what else is one supposed to do?  They plant gardens the issue from which they will never eat.  They take courses to prepare themselves for careers they will never pursue.  They go out to lunch and shop.  They take fishing trips and throw parties.  They live until they die.

 

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Book: Flesh and Stone by Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett deftly tackles a topic of considerable breadth in Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization.  Using primary and secondary sources, fiction and art, Sennett examines six cities at various historical moments in order to explore the development of the relationship between cities and the bodies of their residents.  He identifies attitudes toward the self and the Other, towards comfort and pain, that manifest themselves in western urban culture and spaces and, in turn, which act upon the human body dwelling in such spaces.  Sennett employs theory from a number of disciplines, including history, sociology, urban development, psychology, economics and cultural anthropology.  The latter is used in a way reminiscent of Greg Dening in The Death of William Gooch, where Dening successfully presented western culture as "other" to a western audience; Sennett performs a similar feat by objectifying the stage itself upon which western culture has been enacted - the city.  Urban spaces, and how we feel as bodies living in and moving through them, seem strange and manufactured - which they are.  We are simply used to cities and how we feel in cities and, so, naturalize them to a certain extent.  Sennett erases this naturalization and we see urban space not as an inert backdrop against which we move or as a mere product of human will or design, but as a dynamic organism that has the capability of acting on our bodies even as we act upon it, and of creating our understanding of ourselves in relation to it.  The city makes and is made, just as we make and are made.  The generative power at play in the relationship between a city and its residents flows both ways.

Sennett examines Athens of the Fifth Century B.C., Rome of the Second Century A.D., thirteenth-century Paris, the Jewish Ghetto in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice, revolutionary Paris, nineteenth-century London and modern New York.  Throughout his exploration, Sennett ties developments in western urban life to then contemporary understandings of the body and its processes.  For example, he links William Harvey's seventeenth-century discovery of the circulation of blood through the human body with a new focus in urban planning on motion through the city's veins and arteries and the desire to make human movement easy and unobstructed.  For Sennett, this impulse to free the human body relates directly to other modern conveniences, like television and automobiles, that end up instead imprisoning the body in a non-sensing bubble.

In fact, Sennett identifies this trend toward ease, comfort and lack of obstruction as one of the primary ramifications of how western cities have developed.  For Sennett, ease and comfort pacify the body and desensitize the individual to their connection with others.  The individual becomes a self-contained, disconnected unit moving through the city, claiming her right not to be interfered with and, thereby, isolating herself from society as a whole.  The individual in this scenario loses her sense of sharing a common interest with the individuals around her.  Sennett asserts that western civilization's historical drive toward personal freedom (especially in one's physical life) has actually culminated in passive bodies rather than active ones, in sterile spaces rather than lively ones.  These isolated individuals in the modern western city feel, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "strangers to the destinies of each other".  

Essentially, difference and human social friction constitute, for Sennett, true freedom; the freedom to act, to work out differences, to really experience the Other.  In many ways, Sennett's meditation on the city and bodies is really a plea to reconnect, to tolerate and even invite difference.  He writes:  

Lurking in the civic problems of the multi-cultural city is the moral difficulty of arousing sympathy for those who are Other.  And this can only occur, I believe, by understanding why bodily pain requires a place in which it can be acknowledged, and in which its transcendent origins become visible.  Such pain has a trajectory in human experience.  It disorients and makes incomplete the self, defeats the desire for coherence; the body accepting pain is ready to become a civic body, sensible to the pain of another person, pains present together on the street, at last endurable - even though, in a diverse world, each person cannot explain what he or she is feeling, who he or she is, to the other.  But the body can follow this civic trajectory only if it acknowledges that there is no remedy for its sufferings in the contrivings of society, that its unhappiness has come from elsewhere, that its pain derives from God's command to live together as exiles.

For a different look at Flesh and Stone, see the link to Neil Transpontine's unique and eclectic blog History Is Made At Night.


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