When, in the course of human history, people coalesce around a cause, invariably, it is the fringe and fanatical that visit shame and derision on said cause.
Case in point:
Climate change is real. To assume otherwise is to ignore both established science and our own eyes. Further, and this is also beyond argument, climate change is linked to humans—the extent to which that link is made, whether larger or smaller, can be debated. The fact remains that human action has influenced our climate; our climate is changing, and barring any technological leap in space travel, we have but this one planet on which to live.
There are several sources to this statement (Indian and Greek, among others), but the sentiment is the same:
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.”
Whether it is the group Just Stop Oil or Riposte Alimentaire, I believe in their causes. However, I also know that while fossil fuels are limited in their amount worldwide and the cause of enormous amounts of pollution, I also know that neither Van Gough, Da Vinci, nor Monet will be painting anything ever again. Throwing paint or soup at these masterpieces does two things.
First, it brings attention to the cause. I would argue in the wrong way. Again, I believe in their cause. However, their cause, while not getting nearly enough meaningful action from politicians and nations, is not a generally unknown niche item. Everyone has heard about climate change. You don’t need to draw attention to it as if it’s been wallowing in a distant dark corner. You are turning millions of like-minded individuals from standing with you. They want to crawl into a hole to avoid being associated with you and your idiotic stunt.
Second, I believe the attention you ultimately sought with your stunt had less to do with your cause and more to do with you having your picture taken standing next to a disfigured masterpiece covered in paint or soup while you gloomily pose, maybe glued to the frame.
Grassroots activism takes organization and time. It takes determination and persistence. Ultimately, it takes moving the Overton Window so politicians feel they must be part of your movement. And that comes from the inside. It comes from boldly participating in legislative hearings. It comes from lobbying legislators at all levels repeatedly. It does not come from petitions or stunts.
We need change on many social issues, not the least of which are climate change for the planet and gun violence in America. Mothers Against Drunk Driving set the template for success. Moms Demand Action, Everytown, and other gun violence groups have adopted that template. Just Stop Oil and Riposte Alimentaire may have arms of their organizations that attempt the same measures as these more successful organizations. All I know is what I see on the news. And the photos I see on the news, especially as an art lover, make me cringe. The tiny conspiracy theorist in the back of my head wonders whether these stunts because they are so antithetical to the genuinely just cause, are backed by the petroleum industry to discredit all climate change activists. I hope I’m wrong.
Either way, stop gluing yourself to paintings, throwing paint on masterpieces, and throwing food at art. You look like an idiot and damage your supposed cause. These masterpieces have survived (so far) because art restoration professionals consider it an honor and duty to protect and preserve the art. The activists should adopt that level of care and dedication, again, in whose cause I believe, before a masterpiece is lost because of their stunts. Passion alone will not win the day. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. One cannot plant a tree tomorrow morning and expect to sit in its shade in the afternoon.
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” – Carl Sagan, Cosmos
It may seem strange to begin an article about traveling with a quote about a book but hear me out. Books let us travel the world, even through time and to fantastic places, without leaving our homes. I am not alone in thinking this. John Lubbock wrote, “We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.”
Books are to travel as dreams are to experience. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page,” wrote St. Augustine. And for the past two weeks, I have experienced a world beyond my dreams. My wife, sister-in-law, and I traveled to Germany to visit my niece at Ramstein Air Force Base. What was originally a two-week visit to spend time with my sister-in-law’s daughter blossomed into a whirlwind jaunt across several European countries. We landed in Frankfurt, Germany, and traveled to my niece’s apartment in Heiligenmoschel, about thirty minutes from Ramstein. From there we drove to Paris for two days, then we drove to Luxembourg, and back to Heiligenmoschel. From there we took the train from Ramstein to Zurich, Switzerland, went into the Alps to Jungfraujoch, then a train to Munich, a bus to Neuschwanstein Castle, back to Munich, then back to Heiligenmoschel. Then, we drove from Heiligenmoschel to Strasbourg, France before returning to Heiligenmoschel and then Frankfurt for the flight home. Home to our little corner of the world, same as before but we were different.
My initial thoughts, driving through Germany and western France were of the stunning beauty of the landscape. We drove in late fall; however, the summer was longer than usual (climate change?) and the trees still exhibited their autumnal magnificence. Colors orange, red, green, and yellow danced on the trees as we whisked by them, bidding us stop to appreciate their performance. The rolling hills and bright green winter crops made me think I had jumped into my Windows start-up screen.
Paris is Paris. It’s a big city with big city swagger. History drips from every street corner. It is big, loud, frenetic, always moving, almost breathing, and teeming with people. Locals mix with tourists and every restaurant seems full. Cabbies are nuts and motorcycles, scooters, and bicycles swarm around cars like fruit flies around overripe bananas. And yet, somehow, it works for them. I love big cities and Paris is wonderful. The Louvre is closed on Tuesdays, so we did not get to see the world’s greatest museum. However, I checked off the Pantheon on my bucket list on this trip, revisited the Eifel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle, ate at a charming local restaurant so small we felt part of the conversation at the loud table next to us, and had dinner on a boat cruising the Seine. To see the transformation of a church (Sainte-Geneviève) into a revolutionary monument was incredible. Visiting evidence of the earth spinning while watching Foucault’s pendulum took my breath away. So, too, did visiting the mausoleum and visiting the graves of Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marie Curie, Alexandre Dumas, Josephine Baker, Emile Zola, and other luminaries. Paris has so much to offer, one visit is not enough. This was my second visit; still, there is so much to see. I could go on and on about Paris, however, others have written about it better than I could ever attempt.
Sainte-Chapelle, there are no words to capture its beauty
From Paris, we drove to Luxembourg. Like New York, there is a Luxembourg City. We stayed in a magnificent Airbnb apartment just outside the city in Strassen. We took the free bus into the city and walked around most of the day, eyes turned upward as each corner revealed yet another postcard view. Luxembourg City is essentially built on and around a steep hill. Houses seem carved into the scenery. The Grund is the lowest point and the view up from there to the cathedral and bridges is awe-inspiring. When viewed from the top, the view down is equally spectacular.
The Grund, Lux City
Where Paris is potentially overwhelming, Lux City is approachable and digestible. The architecture alone is worth a visit. Appreciating the history there for your taking if you take the time to look and listen is everywhere in front of you. We also drove to Vienden Castle and were overwhelmed by the magnificence of the castle. Home to two families over about 33 million years (or so it seemed), the castle was the first of many we toured. Like many castles, it sits above the town, commanding an inspiring view. Here again, the photos I’ve seen that we took do not do what we saw justice.
Vienden Castle
Zurich, Switzerland was our next stop. Ostensibly just a spot we had to visit to catch the tour to the Alps, Zurich, too, found its way into our hearts with its architecture, friendliness, shopping, and food. Again, local friendliness helped transport us from tourists to travelers and we took advantage of it to eat the local cuisine. It is somehow off-putting to see a KFC, a McDonald’s, or a Starbucks when so many local eateries offer travelers a way to visit their city via senses other than visual.
Zurich, Switzerland
My wife, Stacey, and I visited Colorado a few years ago. The elevation almost wrecked me when we took a day trip to Vail. Outside tourist t-shirt shops were displays offering tiny oxygen tanks. They sold shirts with slogans such as “Oxygen is Overrated” and “Sea Level is for Wimps.” Against that backdrop, we took a bus from Zurich to Interlaken and Grindelwald on this trip before taking the Eiger Express gondola to Jungfraujoch. I read the Eiger Sanction in my late teens! Trevanian was one of my favorite authors (The Eiger Sanction, The Loo Sanction, Shibumi, The Summer of Katya), and here I was looking at the North Face, sheer, snow-covered, intimidating, and beautiful. Marketed as the Top of Europe, Jungfraujoch sits between two higher peaks and requires a cog train from the gondola to reach it. My chest tightened with the lack of oxygen at 11,300 feet and as dehydrated as I was, my head hurt so much it flipped my stomach. Matched with my broken foot, and I looked quite the mess. Still, it did not stop me (or any of us); we have the photographs and memories to prove it.
View from the Eiger Express gondola
Eiger, North Face
View from Jungfraujoch
Munich, like Zurich, was meant simply as a weigh station to catch buses to other locations. And like Zurich, Munich melted our hearts with its charm, beauty, architecture, and food. Yes, I ate my way across Europe and always the local cuisine. On the day we were to catch the tour bus, it was my wife who didn’t feel well, and early in the morning, I found myself racing against a deadline to get her meds. I limped from hotel to hotel looking for gift shops, finding none, and then limping to a pharmacy and waiting outside until it opened. Limping quickly across Munich, I felt a little like Jason Bourne in The Bourne Supremacy. However, I knew who I was, knew my limitations, and knew I couldn’t drop a dachshund never mind elite assassins. Armed with her remedy, I limped back to the hotel to find my traveling partners waiting at the corner to proceed to our tour bus.
New Town Hall, Munich
Our destination that morning was Neuschwanstein Castle. You may know it as the basis for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty Castle in California and Cinderella Castle in Florida. Before Neuschwanstein Castle, our tour took us to Linderhof Castle. Both were built for King Ludwig II. He’s an interesting character whose life and untimely, early death at 40 are wrapped in mystery. If you get a chance, read up a bit on him. You will be as charmed and confused by him as me, I promise. Linderhof is a “small” castle where Ludwig II lived for eight years. It is in the high, European Rococo style, ornately decorated with organic swirls and gold leaf everywhere. It is overdone by today’s sensibilities and garish in its opulence.
Linderhof Castle
Neuschwanstein Castle is very different. It is a monument to Ludwig’s admiration of the operas of Richard Wagner, his increasing isolation, and his identification with medieval royalty. While beautiful and much larger than Linderhof, the tour allowed access to little of the castle. Armed with my Disney fandom, wrapped in memories of having breakfast with my small children and the Disney princesses inside Cinderella Castle, I left Neuschwanstein a little dejected. I couldn’t help but think the castle might have been the first version of Michal Jackson’s Neverland, itself built by someone removed from society with access to seemingly endless vision and money.
Neuschwanstein Castle
The last city we visited was Strasbourg, France. A national rail strike in Germany prevented us from taking the train, forcing us to drive from Ramstein’s train station. Strasbourg mesmerized us again with its charm, architecture, accessibility, and food. As mentioned above, there were several times when every turn seemed to reveal another postcard view of cities. Nowhere was that more evident than in Strasbourg. Literally, I would stop, photograph a wonderful view, and while still breathing in the sight before me, turn and see another, equally amazing sight. This was even though we only saw the sun on our two-week trip during our drive to Paris the first day and part of the next day. Every other day was raw and cold coupled with either overcast, drizzle, or outright pouring rain.
Charming La Petite France, Strasbourg
It was the trip of a lifetime. Paulo Coelho said, “One day you will wake up and there won’t be any more time to do the things you’ve always wanted. Do it now.” I always think of the picture I once saw of the elderly couple asleep on the gondola in Venice. They say, “Carpe Diem!” Seize the day. I would adjust that to seize the day while you can still enjoy it (“carpe diem dum potes adhuc frui est,” if Google Translate is to be trusted.) My wife and I have worked hard and now enjoy a bit of disposable income. Better it be used on travel, expanding our understanding of the tiny planet we inhabit, than on other less expansive vices.
I thank my niece for her hospitality, my sister-in-law for her willingness to share her time with her daughter, and my wife for giving me the life I now enjoy.
I found many other wonderful book/travel quotes in researching this piece. I share my other favorites below:
“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
– G.K. Chesterton
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
– James A. Michener
“Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.”
– Joe Abercrombie
“I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.”
– Charles Bukowski
“In the meantime, there is not an hour to lose. I am about to visit the public library.”
– Jules Verne
“Travel improves the mind wonderfully and does away with all one’s prejudices.”
– Oscar Wilde
“To travel hopefully is better than to have arrived.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
“Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life.”
– Michael Palin
“Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.”
– Thor Heyerdahl
“It’s temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment pil’d to heaven.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Nothing can. Be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have been changed to the bones.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Every Englishman abroad, until it is proven to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveler and not a tourist.”
“Necessita induce, e non diletto.” (“It is a necessity and not pleasure that compels us.”) – Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno)
There may be droughts, but ultimately, the artist must create. Left alone, thoughts smolder, and a flame sparks.
The writer must give voice to thought, the artist must give voice to vision, and the singer must give voice to sound. The musician must give voice to the melody. The medium is different; however, the result, sometimes free-flowing, other times tortured, soars.
My daughter showed me a quote sometimes attributed to Ernest Hemingway (though it probably originated with Red Smith, Paul Gallico, or another earlier scribe) that reads, “Writing is easy. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”
What I write here is the result of the wrestling match inside my head bled onto the page (screen). Writing is, for me, cathartic. I write for me. Just me. I write to exorcise the demons occupying too much real estate inside my little brain. When I am bothered, angry, upset, happy, confused, enamored, penitent, wistful, nostalgic, depressed, disgusted, or (name the emotion), I can often only truly understand how I feel by wrestling with my thoughts on the page.
I am not alone.
“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in a way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.” – Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
All creative people have this compulsion to understand. The lyricist and musician (sometimes the same person) are restricted far more than me by structure and rhyme, whereas I am only limited by coherence and cadence. So too, the painter, who must become an architect to effectively develop the vision they are compelled to reproduce on canvas.
I am fascinated by the creative process and the different paths inspiration takes through inspired people. These people are heroes to me. Not in the Marvel universe way or celebrity way, but in how they are compelled to produce, driven to evict the vision seen only in their mind and share it with others. I am fascinated when I listen to a piece of classical music and find a story developing inside my head played out by the various instruments. I wonder if that was the composer’s intent or if I’m just nuts.
I write because there is an overwhelming need to sit and purge what is ruminating deep inside. I don’t know what the end result will look like or even where I come down on various topics until I sit, research, and write it down. It is cathartic and oftentimes the healthier vent for sadness, disappointment, or anger.
I have witnessed this process within my own house in different ways. My daughter studied art in college. I watched, sometimes with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, as she painted Dorian Gray repeatedly. She reflected the pain she experienced watching her mother die of cancer over many years onto the canvas. Her body image issues spilled onto the canvas. She was compelled to exorcise these thoughts through her art. It pained me and fascinated me to watch. Like me, my son writes. His work is a mélange of Douglas Adams, Rod Serling, Christopher Marlowe, and Ian McEwan. He cloaks analogies in irreverent prose and biting satire. He, too, is compelled to exorcise these thoughts through his art.
“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” – Anton Chekhov
Another in our family also has this drive, this compulsion, my niece, Jackie Marchal. I call her my niece because, as my late wife was the only child of two only children, we joked that her family tree was more akin to a creeping vine. Anyway, my late wife’s cousin’s children, ergo my niece! She is a singer, lyricist, and musician. Recently graduating from Columbia after having been raised in NYC, I have witnessed her art mature with each successive song. I admit to not having seen any of her live performances in the city and have only recently focused on her burgeoning portfolio of music.
This past weekend, I worked on finishing a desk and putting on her music while I sanded, stained, and polyurethaned. The first thing that struck me was the effortless fluidity of her voice. Her voice floats. I have no better word for it. Despite not having an empty bourbon glass in my hand, I could almost see her voice floating throughout the garage as the rain beat down outside. I shuffled through many of her songs and then, and only then, listened to the words by playing them a second time. All artists pull from their personal lives. As I listened to the lyrics of each song, I wondered how much of what I was hearing was experienced and how much was storytelling. That may come from knowing the family. I generally don’t consider that when listening to other artists. The pain and the heartache in several of her songs compelled me to sit and write this because I once again saw (heard) the creative process demanding a voice. She is compelled to exorcise these thoughts through her art.
“Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.” – John Milton, The Complete Poetry
They say stereotypes are often rooted in reality, a caricaturist’s reduction of whole and unique people. The tortured artist is one such trope. And while I often struggle with thoughts and sometimes need to organize them on paper to understand how I truly feel (and sometimes it is a tortuous journey), it is an exercise I cannot do without—no more than my daughter, son, or niece. The artist must create.
For more information on Samantha Thivierge, see her Instagram.
“All art conspires toward the condition of music.” Walter Pater
I agree with Mr. Pater, one of Oscar Wilde’s influences and a proponent of Aestheticism (Art for art’s sake, i.e., neither social nor political).
Artists must create. It is in their blood and must be birthed onto the canvas. I use the word “birthed” purposely. I have seen the great effort artists willingly undertake to create art from nothing. As the blank page stares back at the writer, so does the white canvas mock the artist. The effort required to transform nothingness into art is akin to birth.
I once needed help with where to rank photography in the order of the arts. Artists must labor (pun intended) over their work to bring their vision onto the canvas, but the photographer “simply” captures the world before them. Now, I do not dismiss the intimate understanding the photographer has over their instrument nor the “eye” they must exercise when capturing the scene before them. However, historically at least, once the shutter is activated, most of the artistic influence of the photographer is exhausted. True, in days of old, efforts could be taken by the photographer with the development process (more additive here, more time there) to bump up the contrast or wash out a double exposure. And today, image editing software can transform any photo into a masterpiece with masking, editing, filters, and many other tools. But is that just window-dressing of an existing property? When I was younger, I would have agreed. However, I now believe photography blends perfectly well into the prism of art without hesitation or equivocation.
Allow me to diverge into another art form, music. Here, Mr. Pater is spot on. I have always said musical genres speak to the individual emotions of humans. Whatever mood I am in, there is music that matches it. A sad song can spark creativity in me. Black Sabbath can assuage my anger. Jazz can even out my temperament. Classical can elevate my senses. Smart, clever lyrics can drive me to my keyboard. A David Gilmour solo can transcend words altogether. Unlike other art forms, music elicits emotion from the audience via the ears rather than the eyes. Certain composers can tell a story with their music without the employment of any other sense.
I once attended a performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat major, where a fully-fledged story presented itself in my mind. As it began, the piano sounded very playful, almost childlike, not in its complexity but in how it meandered in and out of the string instruments behind it. At some point, I imagined the piano as a child and the stringed instruments as the parents and extended family. The strings would play a piece first, and the piano would respond, often playful but still in keeping with the string direction. It was always strings first and then piano. Sometimes the piano would go off into a new direction without accompaniment as if a child was wandering around in the safety of the family’s embrace.
The second piece introduced the wind instruments (who’d been there all along but had yet to stand out). Because of the increased complexity of the music, I envisioned the piano as a teen beginning to interact with the wind instruments, which I saw as friends/schoolmates/lovers/colleagues. The piano would sometimes lead, and the wind instruments would follow. And then the strings would return with the refrain, telling the piano to come back into the fold and remember its responsibilities.
The third piece saw the ascension of the piano to a full-grown man (I say man because Emanuel Ax was the pianist, it could have been a fully-grown woman). The piano-led, and the strings followed. The piano assumed the refrain to which the strings (and sometimes the winds) would follow, but always with a sense of individuality and playfulness in the piano. It was as if the piano was now the patriarch/matriarch of the family and responsible for it, but it had never given up its individualistic flair. Perhaps I heard what I wanted to hear to make the story fit, but after the first piece, I anxiously awaited the next piece to see if my storyline fit- and it did every time.
By the end, I was in tears, weeping for the story Mozart had told me that day, written 234 years before. I had listened to the concerto over the previous few months, anticipating the performance. Still, there was something about seeing the piano up front, the strings extending as wings behind it, and the wind instruments centered in the back that made the story explode before my eyes. If this all sounds incredibly corny and uncultured, or if I’m missing the true intent of the concerto, I apologize. But as I sat there applauding, tears running down my face, I knew I had seen the storytelling power of music.
Painters can do the same thing with their medium. Stand before a Bierstadt landscape, and I swear you can hear far-off thunder or birds chirping. Stand before a Monet, and I promise you’ll see the wind interact with the haystacks. Stand before a Michelangelo, and I swear you’ll see muscles tense before your eyes.
Ultimately, the difference between painters, sculptors, composers, and photographers is one of perspective. Painters and sculptors offer you their vision. Impressionists do not provide you with a photorealistic version of the scene before them. Instead, they offer you their interpretation of that scene. You, the viewer, can choose what to see in the offering. Stand up close, and you’ll see the artist’s effort, brush strokes, and palette knife sweeps. Stand back, and you see sunlight where a smudge was, passion where disparate colors touched up close. Same with the sculptor. Go to a museum and listen as a docent regales a group with seemingly pretentious interpretations of the work before them. But do listen! Because while you may disagree with things being said or not “get” specific points, they offer you a vision into the artist, a glimpse into their intent.
The difference between viewing a painter’s or sculptor’s interpretation of the world before them and the photographer’s is a shift in perspective. As a viewer of paintings and sculptures, we are a passive audience of another’s life. As a viewer of photography, perhaps because it is easier for our 3D brains to insert us into a realistic 2D scene, we are the center of the world, active rather than passive. We see a photo of the shore and envision ourselves in that place. We see a picture of the mountains and ourselves on the plains before them. We may recollect a memory from a photograph of a familiar subject that fills us with the accompanying emotions. Alternatively, we may inject ourselves into an unknown scene, envisioning ourselves in that space and projecting matching feelings.
Mr. Pater is correct in that all art aspires to the purity of music in that music exists beyond our eyes. But in the end, whether it is photography, painting, music, sculpture, poetry, or prose, they all live on the spectrum of art. Ultimately, the spectrum of art is another analogy for the full scope of human emotion.
Isolation became as much a pandemic as the COVID-19 virus that caused it. And the social paradigm shift left in its long wake continues to affect millions of people. Social pastimes such as going to the movies, going out to dinner, visiting friends and relatives, comedy clubs, concerts, art shows, vacations to amusement parks and bucket-list cities all foundered. And like the millions of virus victims, many of these venues and pastimes did not survive.
We were left to entertain ourselves at home. And some of us did this better than others. The American Journal of Emergency Medicine said domestic violence cases increased by 25% and 33% globally, with an increase in the United States by over 8%. In my house, crafts replaced excursions. It began when my daughter, Samantha, came to my house wearing a stylish three-ply mask she fashioned from a curtain. In what might have been a humorous episode of a sitcom (you fill in the blank), she proceeded to sew another mask at the dining room table while watching me try to do the same with her guidance. Ultimately, my finished product was less fashionable and (probably) less effective. Still, I wore it to the grocery store until better masks were readily available. I still have it.
And then there were the crafts. Let me back up. Pointillism is a method of painting developed by Georges Seurat and others in 1886. It is an offshoot of the impressionists (Monet, Manet, Cassatt, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, and Cezanne). In pointillism, artists use dots of paint to form images. It was the precursor to pixels on televisions, monitors, and cell phones. Seurat’s most famous painting is A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.
Incidentally, my son Cameron and daughter Samantha saw the 2017 revival of the Sondheim penned Sunday in the Park with George musical on Broadway; itself a fascinating statement on art, artists, people, humanity, and human interaction as the painting comes alive before the audience. Little did we know how human interaction would be a recipe for a lethal worldwide pandemic just three short years later. Ironically, Johnson & Johnson, supplier of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, was created in the same 1886 that Georges Surat created pointillism. Pfizer was formed in 1849. Thanks, Google.
Art proved to be the salve for my family and me. And as a corollary to my last post, art proved once again to forestall being lost. This time, while writing continued to provide me a venue to consolidate my disparate thoughts, “dipping dots” consumed our time and provided hours of entertainment (and a few sore necks!). Of course, they are not called “dipping dots.” Those are the frozen pebbles of ice cream found at hockey games and stadiums. I refer to the tiny, colorful plastic dots (or squares) on a sticky canvas.
My wife (and sometimes my two stepdaughters (although typically, they would start a project and we would finish it)) saw these projects devour hundreds of hours of quarantine and isolation during the pandemic. I also know every word to every pop song played on the radio over the last 50 years as we listened to these songs on a loop while working our dipping dots. These craft projects (I differentiate here between creating (art) and producing (crafts) so as not to offend artists who create original works) were terrific distractions from the horror of the pandemic and the schism of politics.
Both mindless and intoxicating, these projects consumed us. We couldn’t wait to finish working for the day so we could “dip dots.” Maybe it was a consequence of the work we each do. My wife works for an insurance company and spends most of her days in meetings. I live in Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, deep in the weeds of cells and formulas. Although we both work from home (I have worked exclusively from home since moving back to Rhode Island in 2016 while she was new to the concept, as were millions of others affected by the coronavirus), there was no tangible evidence of our daily efforts. She ends the call; I close the file. There is nothing to see, nothing to hold up as real progress or something that will exist beyond the next call or following report. Dipping Dots projects checked that box. It exists today, tomorrow, and always as a physical manifestation of effort.
Again, to create is to exist and to endure. Tiny plastic dots, pixels, or pointillism gave me a productive outlet during a worldwide pandemic and many enjoyable hours with my family. These are but a few of the many projects we completed during the lockdown. They were good times in an awful time, centering and fun while the world spun off its axis.
As I write this, I can watch the gel ink dry behind each subsequent word. Dried into the paper, permanently a part of the wood fiber. Immortal, eternal as long as the paper exists. Put the paper in a vault, and the words live forever. There they will remain preserved, filed, recorded, and likely unread.
The same can be said of humans. As the ink dries, we move on. The relentless marching on of time. Relentless. Never ending, never pausing, never caring. Once the ink dries, it is done. It is the past. It is our past. Our memories. We are the vault. And our vault, memories, and existence exist only as long as anyone who experienced something with us or heard a story about us exists. Once we are gone and those who recall us are gone, so are our memories, the ink, the paper, and the vault. That’s life. Our life. Everyone’s life.
There will come a day when the very thought of us as individuals will be lost. There will be a day when the last person who remembers you or recalls a story about you recalls it for the last time. You will be lost to eternal oblivion. Sure, there are individuals whose memory transcends time. Shakespeare, Caesar, Keith Richards, but for most of us, we will be lost to time, just a number in the ever-expanding pile of humans that once existed.
Is there a way to combat this eternal oblivion? Or is this simply an exercise of someone who just celebrated a birthday and is reminded that the road before him is shorter than the view in the rearview mirror? And, let me add that the road before him is neither clear nor guaranteed.
Clifton Fadiman said, “A cheese may disappoint. It may be dull, it may be naïve, it may be over-sophisticated. Yet it remains cheese, milk’s leap toward immortality.” Creativity (the arts) is our antidote, our cheese. Write a book, and it remains available forever. The internet is the newer, better Library of Alexandria. Paint something, sculpt something, and it exists long after you perish.
In episode eleven of Cosmos, Carl Sagan said something I’ll never forget, “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
Another favorite of mine, again, capable of stringing together words far better than I’ll ever dream of, Oscar Wilde said, “All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.”
So, create! Rabindranath Tagore said, “The one who plants trees, knowing that he will never sit in their shade, has at least started to understand the meaning of life.” So, plant a tree! Paint a picture! Write a story! Write your story! Eternal oblivion awaits us. Leave something behind that outlives you, outlives the memory of the last person to recall you. Will you be remembered for it? Maybe. Maybe not. However, your creation will endure.
As the ink dries on that last word, I wonder if anyone will ever read this. I wonder if anyone will ever remember it if they did read it. Create, people! Our ink is drying!
Forrest Gump is revered as a movie, in part because Forrest is a witness to or active participant in many historical events. he interacts with many cultural touchstones throughout the movie. These touchstones exist throughout popular culture, and when we participate in them or witness them, we are historians, chroniclers of culture, a modern-day Pliny.
Throughout our lives, we occasionally find ourselves in these situations. Sometimes we are unaware of the cultural significance at the moment; other times, we know we are creating memories. The birth of our child, the death of a family pet, or seeing a famous landmark on a business trip or personal vacation all qualify as these moments of instant memory. Still, at other times, we are made aware of the significance of the event we find ourselves in, either as witnesses or participants. Examples of these situations might include being in downtown Manhattan on September 11, 2001, seeing a young, unknown Jimi Hendrix perform in a nowhere club or as a background musician for another act, or seeing your favorite baseball team win in person as they start the fifteen game winning streak that propels them into the playoffs and to a World Series title.
This is a long-winded way of saying that memories, be they known at the moment or recognized after the fact, are branded into our conscience. My father used to say, “A good day is any day you create a memory.” I would edit that to limit it to a “good” memory. Bad memories are just as searing, just not as welcomed.
The previous few paragraphs represent the (half-formed) internal conversation I had in my head this past Saturday evening as my wife and I waited for Adele to take the stage as part of her Weekends with Adele residency at the Colosseum at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. No opening act, no warm-up-the-audience comedian, just her and her band. She was outstanding. The show started with her and her piano player, Eric, performing about five songs together. Just them. She didn’t change outfits twelve times (she never changed outfits), and she didn’t have a choreographed dance routine for every song (she didn’t dance at all (and neither did anyone in her band)). I was just her, her powerful voice, and her band performing hit after hit. She honestly didn’t need a microphone or speakers. Her voice could have shaken the rafters and The Strip without them. Seeing her perform was one of those significant moments- an instant memory. And I knew it at that moment.
I reflected internally on how fortunate I was to be there to see her perform in her prime. I was at Red Rocks in Colorado once to see the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra perform Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. The organic, cathedral-like venue cut into the mountain, and the moving music brought me to tears with the same emotions. How fortunate was I to:
Appreciate art forms in their purest representation?
Have worked hard enough to achieve the means to have enough disposable income to spend on the arts?
To be in the right place at the right time to experience such artistry?
Dad would be proud to know I had a good day where I made a (good) memory.
There are people you encounter in life that offer a glimpse at the purity of soul you know you’ll never achieve. They own a confident sense of self for which we can only reach. It doesn’t matter at what stage of your life you encounter these people. You know it when you see it. And because they are so rare, you remember them, envy them, and admire them. They follow their own inner song and seem to have their own gravity. They appear to travel through life but as if from a tangential universe not bound by our universe’s constraints, touching ours and changing us.
I met one of these people in high school. He was equal measures effortless cool and offbeat quirky. I don’t recall anyone not knowing him – or not liking him. I’m sure I was instantly forgettable, and I doubt he would have remembered me. But I never forgot him or the free spirit he beamed. And unlike so many other radicals who age morph into stamped replicas of our parents, he was an artist in the purest sense of creating art every day and supporting himself and his family. He created in many media, and each piece radiated his spirit.
That is not to say his tangential universe was immune from pain or suffering. His long illness and death yesterday afternoon seems unreal. How can so pure a spirit suffer? Why are those we admire taken so early?
I had not seen or spoken to him since high school. He lived in my memory, online via Facebook and through his art installations. And now, unfortunately for everyone in his life, his family, friends, and acquaintances, he only lives there for them. The free spirit he brought to everyone’s life was gone; the darkness of grief replacing the light he brought. The pain for his family is all too real.
However, though he is gone, remember, he was an artist who created objects that outlived him. Each piece exudes his spirit, a physical manifestation of freedom. His paintings were not photorealistic (or at least to those of us who live in this universe). Perhaps, in his, that was how he saw the world. They survive. And through his works, he is immortal.
To his family and friends, I am sorry for your loss. I know your loss and understand your pain. I know you don’t believe it right now, but the darkness and despair you feel right now, the burning heat of doctors, nurses, hospitals, treatments, pain, and suffering, will eventually be replaced by a glow of light. The morning will return to replace the night. That light will be the good memories and his spirit.
Luke Randall touched so many in life. Today, at least, try to reach for the spirit of freedom by which he lived. We may not reach it, but try. I’ll never forget him that way.
I read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point when it was first published in 2000. At the time, my children were 6. This past weekend, I attended a gallery opening for my daughter whose work from her summer studying in Tuscany was being displayed along with her peers.
At exactly 6:30 on September 19, 2014 I witnessed a seismic tipping point in my life. You see, at that point, the second sentence of the first paragraph ceased being exclusively true. No longer was she “my” daughter as much as I was “her” father. This shift in possessive pronouns is significant in that it, while it may not have closed out my paternal protectionism (that will ever dissolve), it forced me to acknowledge that my daughter is a fully functioning member of society, a woman upon whom the planet can lean for guidance, joy, art and direction. In short, just what the world needs.
The Romans warned us to “cave ab homine unius libri’ (beware the man of one book). Today we call this epistemic closure. We only talk to those who agree with us. We only read (if we read at all) that with which we already agree. The deafening din in America today of people talking over one another instead of to one another is both disheartening and a recipe for stagnation and anger. Congress is the best example of this. The last congress, the 113th, passed just 108 non-ceremonial laws due to infighting among Republicans and the Tea Party and among Republicans and Democrats. Essentially, the Republican/Tea Party mantra became one of “whatever the President wants, we’re against, consequences be damned.” And that included shutting down the government! We don’t debate one another anymore. We don’t discuss anything or seek common ground. “Compromise” seems to be a naughty word now. Every one is screaming and no one hears anything.
My son wants to grab the world by the throat and drag it gurgling and choking into a rational, logical future. I fear most of the world may need this approach. My daughter will need to lead the rest of the world into that same, better future with art and compassion. They will use different tools, but both will move the world toward the same beautiful, peaceful future. And then I will truly be “their” father, “their” friend, someone who has an autograph from way back when, an autograph in crayon with the “a” written backwards, where the foundation of their genius was still forming and I was a fortunate passenger. I am proud of “my” children. Proud to be “their” father. Excited for their future.
Thoughts at Large 