So I already painted sunflowers once this summer, which I blogged about at https://thirdagethoughts.com/sunflower-maze/. Yesterday I finished a second sunflower picture, inspired by the same experience. This one was a little out of my comfort zone because of the small figure, which I’m not sure I’ve done before. But I am a fan of expanding the comfort zone! I thought maybe I now have sunflowers out of my system but then I read that Van Gogh painted them 15 times. He wrote in a letter that he used sunflowers to express ‘gratitude’. I think I have plenty of reason to express that!
– In which Dorn explores his interest in art, and artists.
athleen and I went to the National Gallery of Art last weekend, and saw two fantastic shows. One of them, The LIfe of Animals in Japanese Art, was (a) spectacular, and (b) over and done–Sunday was the last day. It’s going on tour to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art next, I think. We just noticed the “last chance to see it!” article in the Post this weekend and rushed over. It was totally worth it!
The other great show there, that we didn’t even know about till we got there, was of works by American painter Oliver Lee Jackson (b. 1935). It’s running for another month or so in the East Gallery.
Seeing these two totally different shows, one expected and one totally unexpected, reminded me about what I like about being married to Kathleen. There are many things, but the one I remembered specifically that day was that I like being married to an artist.
I was a bona fide scientist when I met Kathleen, and I figured I liked art, and life with an artist, because it was completely different from science, giving me a chance to experience a whole separate universe of experience. This was a contrast, I thought, with many scientists I knew who were married to other scientists, and so missed out on some of this diversity.
But over time I decided maybe the worlds of science and art aren’t so different after all. They both are endeavors to describe how the universe works and our place in it. They both have rules for how the process is to be conducted, and have widely agreed-upon conclusions that could nevertheless be changed or discarded over time as our understanding grew. The main difference (and it’s big one), as I saw it, is that science seeks to describe the world in ways that are independent of human biases and experiences, and therefore constant no matter who was measuring or experiencing them, where art seeks to describe the world in ways that are completely dependent on human biases and experiences, with all the chaos and unpredictability that brings.
On 9/11/2001, Kathleen was at work teaching at GWU in DC (across the street from the State Department, a viable possible secondary target) when the World Trade Center and Pentagon buildings were hit. During the days after that, she watched the news and analysis of the attack, and waited alone for me to get home from a Sea Grant meeting half way across the country, in a car because of the total ban on commercial flights. During the nights she painted.
She produced a still life from an apple we had in our fridge at the time, which she called “The big apple still shines”. It was a faithful rendition of the apple, but it was more–
The Big Apple, of course, is a nickname for New York, which was the meta-subject of the artwork. I don’t know how well this small picture does it justice (the original is almost two and a half feet wide), but the stem of the apple feels like it is descending into a shadowy vortex. The apple is sound, but dark and foreboding. When I first saw it, I could feel something starting to try to pull down the apple, make it less bright than it was.
This is what art does for me: it captures the human experience in ways that science cannot. The feeling of danger, both immanent and long-term, was pretty universal in America right after 9/11, and I feel Kathleen captured that, as well as a sense of resiliency, in “The big apple still shines”.
Other art doesn’t describe a galvanizing moment in history or an easily identifiable human thought or feeling, but I can still feel its power even if I know that most people might see something completely different. This happened with one of the paintings by Oliver Lee Jackson this weekend, which struck me deeply enough to want to try to write about art.
This work is untitled, so I have no idea of the context of the painting. For me, it evoked a feeling of supernaturality. The blue figure on the right and the red one on the left seemed almost human to me, but dreamlike. But the black one in the middle really captured my imagination. In form, it was very like the other two figures, but it was completely unhuman, while still seeming (to me) to be very much alive. The picture made me feel like I was experiencing human and other spirits communicating together through a ritual dance.
I don’t know if what I saw bore any relationship to what the artist was trying to show. But that’s all right, because art is intended to be filtered through human experience, which is different for me, him, and everyone else.
I can feel the validity of the work even if I can’t begin to describe it in the scientific language I am more used to. And it’s the idea that I can feel the rightness of an artwork, or an artist, even if I can’t yet understand why it’s right, that keeps me coming back for more.
– In which Dorn searches for a buried memory and a moral truth.
Reading several different books lately, I was surprised to find that they all contained a theme that tugged at the same half-memory. They brought to mind a vague recollection of a national or world leader speaking at some monumental event or great sacrifice, saying that this had been done to build a world where “the strong shall not eat the weak”.
As vague as this memory was, I have the sense that it had such a finely tuned emotional choreography that I think it must have been staged. Perhaps it came at the end of some epic movie, say about World War II, and I was remembering a voice-over by an actor reading from a speech by Churchill or FDR as the screen went dark. I remember most the use of the verb “eat”–not exploit, oppress, take advantage of, or terrorize. The word seems so straightforward, and yet so evocative, that the phrase stuck deep in my memory ever since.
The memory was brought near the surface when I read The Righteous Mind: why good people are divided by politics and religion by Jonathan Haidt, which I’ve mentioned before (here). To explain why he thought conservatives and liberals think the way they do, he described his search for the fundamental building blocks of social morality. One block was the principle that all people in the community are treated fairly, and even the weakest are protected from undeserved harm. He described how this principle had been around since the dawn of recorded morality.
The very first sentence of the Code of Hammurabi (eighteenth century BCE) includes this clause: “Then Anu and Bel [two gods] called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak.” (p. 167)
Haidt described half a dozen universal building blocks of morality, and posited that different cultures make use of these in different amounts to construct their moral codes. Liberals, he said, put a very great emphasis on the principles of avoiding harm and treating all people fairly. As a card-carrying liberal, I can confirm this. I find that a powerful person or group using their power to take advantage of someone weaker can get my outrage up like almost no other situation.
I share this feeling with the famous Pirates of Penzeance, the good-hearted if ineffective protagonists of Gilbert and Sullivan’s great comic opera of the same name. At one point, the pirates try to understand why they are not more successful:
SAM. Besides, we can offer you but little temptation to remain with us. We don’t seem to make piracy pay. I’m sure I don’t know why, but we don’t. FRED. I know why, but, alas! I mustn’t tell you; it wouldn’t be right. PIRATE KING. Why not, my boy? It’s only half-past eleven, and you are one of us until the clock strikes twelve. SAM. True, and until then you are bound to protect our interests. ALL. Hear, hear! FRED. Well, then, it is my duty, as a pirate, to tell you that you are too tender-hearted. For instance, you make a point of never attacking a weaker party than yourselves, and when you attack a stronger party you invariably get thrashed. PIRATE KING. There is some truth in that. (https://gsarchive.net/pirates/pirates_lib.pdf)
I read another book recently, Nature’s Mutiny: How the little ice age of the long seventeenth century transformed the west and shaped the present, by Philipp Blom. I expected it would mainly be about that period of rapid climate change, but there was very little about the climate (other than a description of large-scale repeated crop failures). The book was mostly about the societal changes that took place in the 1500s to 1700s that transformed European culture from a largely agrarian feudal system to one of competing mercantile states driven to philosophical and technological advances and global conquest in pursuit of commercial interests. The concept of the strong eating the weak came up repeatedly in this book, and not in a good way.
In medieval agriculture Europe, even the lowliest peasants had a rightful place in society. The landowners knew that their power came with a responsibility of care over their vassals, defined by centuries of tradition. The shift to a colder climate and resulting crop failures triggered a revolution in culture, commerce and technology that largely destroyed the subsistence lifestyle of the peasants. The powerful landholders changed and adapted their own culture to immense financial gain, and unilaterally severed the bonds of care and service with the no-longer-useful peasants. They redefined their own morality to justify their own opulent wealth, and the extreme destitution that the former peasants had been cast into, as the natural order of things:
“the pomp of Buildings, Apparel, and the like, in the Nobility, Gentry, and other able persons, cannot impoverish the Kingdome; if it be done with curious and costly works upon our Materials, and by our own people,…” This blessed vision, however, was endangered by the serious character flaws exhibited by the monarch’s subjects, especially the poorer ones, who appeared sadly unable to cope with even the most modest trappings of wealth…. The wealthy merchant Mun clearly saw wealth as a danger to weak characters, and his therapy was equally unambiguous: “As plenty and power doe make a nation vicious and improvident, so penury and want doe make a people wise and industrious.” Wealth, it seemed, was good only in the hands of a small number of people who were born into it….(p. 133)
If I was surprised to find stories of the strong eating the weak in a book I thought was going to be about climate, I was fully expecting it in the next book I started: Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of the United States. This famously subversive history, first published in 1980 and updated many times since, is about American history from the side of the “losers”. Howard Zinn elaborates:
Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to try to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott’s army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish-American War as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. (p. 9)
The book has so many examples of what could be considered the strong eating the weak, from the 1490s up to the 2000s, that I hesitate to try to pick one or two to describe. I’ll instead commend this fascinating book to the reader. Many of the stories can induce indignation, in a helpless, it’s-too-late-to-redress-that sort of way, but some are inspiring, even optimistic. You can read a copy of it online at http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.html.
Having an early memory of my moral ideal awakened in one book, and then promptly squashed by reality in two more, I wanted more than ever to find that memory of mine. The stories I read were horrifying to me not only for their calculating brutality, but also for their familiarity. From the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, I could not find a time or place where I could say, “Here is the point at which we made the turn, and started to create a world where the strong do not eat the weak.”
I very much wanted to find that memory, that quote, that event which was the turning point, so I started searching the internet. The search wasn’t completely straightforward, because I wasn’t even sure I was remembering a speech that had occurred in real life–it could have just been some screenwriter’s tear-jerky conclusion to a sentimental but fictional movie.
I was encouraged when I found a quote by the nineteenth-century Chancellor of Germany and quote-factory Otto Von Bismark: “It is the destiny of the weak to be devoured by the strong”. This was so close to my memory’s opposite that it seemed plausible that a real person might have made the counter-statement, especially to mark a wartime defeat of Germany. But maybe I had my quote a bit wrong. Was it not “eat”, but “devour”? Maybe it wasn’t “strong”, but “powerful”? I kept looking, trying different word combinations, and concentrating on Germany and the World Wars.
I finally found what might be my remembered quote somewhere else entirely, at a press conference by John Kennedy in 1961 to mark the opening of a conference of non-aligned nations in Belgrade:
We believe that the peoples represented at this conference are committed to a world society in which men have the right and the freedom to determine their own destiny, a world in which one people is not enslaved by the other, in which the powerful do not devour the weak.
I was only seven in 1961, so if I actually heard Kennedy say this, on the news or something, I’m surprised I remember it at all. But if this is the source of my memory, I’m glad it was a real promise by a real person, and not just a movie line.
But was what he said back in 1961 true? Were people and governments so committed to this ideal? If not then, is it true now, or will it ever be true? Will the meek ever inherit the earth? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but as long as they continue to be asked, and self-serving rationalizations of oppression and exploitation of others continue to be challenged, I have hope.
Those who are old enough may remember that geodesic domes
were a popular fad in the sixties and seventies of the last century. I admit to
being caught up in this fad and, in fact, the first structure that we built
when we bought land in Accokeek in 1977 was a smallish geodesic dome. However,
time was not kind to my little dome, especially around the round windows that I
had made out of old industrial light fixtures. Sometime last year I looked on
in despair at my forty-something dome and decided it was time to tear it down.
This is where my facebook friends intervened, after I posted my intention, some
even giving me teary eyed emoticons! Friends, this really helped me see it in a
new light – as a building with historic value! I decided to restore, not destruct.
Last year I replaced rotten panels and struts and redid the shingles, and this
year I have cleaned up the floor, and installed, for the first time in its
life, an actual real door.
So far, so good, but I had actually no idea what I would use the building for. I thought it wouldn’t be that great for an art studio since, because of the previous window problems, I now had only three small windows and a small skylight. This is where the original thinking of granddaughter #2 came in handy with an idea I never would have thought of on my own: “We should hang aerial silks from the ceiling!”
– In which Dorn describes a vision that few have experienced.
Here is the second promised story of a magical nature experience I’m grateful for, which I never would have had if we didn’t live where we do on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay. (My first story is here.)
2. Many years ago (May 6-7, 2003 to be precise), when we hadn’t been living here long, there was a news blurb that a transit of Mercury across the sun was to take place that would be visible from the east coast of the US at about 6 AM. At that time I was working in Silver Spring, a 75-mile commute, and I got up before dawn to get ready to catch the bus into DC.
Because the Bay is to the east of us, we get to see some wonderful sunrises. That morning started out cloudless but hazy, and before I left for work I could watch the sun come up. Looking closely (which I could safely do for at least a few minutes as the sun came over the horizon), I was able to see a little tiny black dot on the surface of the red sun, slightly off center at about 4:00. I really don’t know for sure if it was Mercury that I was seeing, or maybe just a sunspot, but I told myself (and still tell myself to this day) that I was privileged to see something almost no one had seen since the beginning of time: the planet Mercury, backdropped by the sun, unaided with my naked eyes!
(This is just what it looked like back then, but it’s actually an “artist’s conception”. It’s a picture I took at sunrise yesterday, onto which I placed a small black dot with Photoshop.)
