Beseech the Moons–At Principle Gallery
Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.
–Herman Melville, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)
This passage from Melville pretty much sums up the painting shown here. It is about the questioning many of us put to the universe, asking why the world is as it is. Asking what our place in it is. Asking for guidance.
Begging for answers or for a truth to be revealed that displays clearly why life is worth living.
I say that many of us put these questions to the universe, but I may be wrong. It might be that only a small fraction of us feels the need to beg for answers to our questions while standing on a rooftop at night.
Perhaps most of us would simply stand in silent appreciation of the moons’ faces before us. Like a child that accepts what life puts before it without question. As Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård wrote in his 2015 novel Autumn, the first book in his Seasons Quartet:
What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until … a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?
This passage struck me pretty hard when I read it. I remember that feeling of being a child who is deeply immersed in the world, viewing each experience without judgement or question. Things that I might now see as being questionable or out of the norm felt then as being natural occurrences. Just part of the world that everyone experienced and knew. Or so I then thought.
I felt safe in that child’s world. Accepted and part of it. Nothing was unnatural to me then.
But at some point, as Knausgård writes, a distance appeared between my reality and that of the world. And grew. I can think of instances, some quite early, when that distance first made an appearance. I will spare sharing those instances with you.
But it was in those instances that I began to ask myself questions that never before seemed at place in my child’s world.
Why did some people do the things they do? Why are some people so unhappy or angry all the time? Why is there so much hate in the world? Why do people hurt each other?
It’s an endless list. And it has got longer and longer with each passing year.
I often would like to be that child once more looking up at the night sky and taking simple pleasure in the shape and color of the moon, the patterns formed by the stars, or the movement of the clouds across it without asking what the hell the point of it all was.
I remember nights like that when I was kid, sleeping in the summer on a lawn chair out in the yard in my sleeping bag under an amazing sky. There was a lot less light pollution in the night sky then so the stars would put on a quite a show in the dark sky. I have no memory of putting any questions to that sky then.
Just the beauty and thrill of it was all I remember. Awe.
I have instances now where that feeling returns. I momentarily see the world with childlike wonder, accepting it without question. It is a wonderful moment that makes me feel once more immersed in the world.
I find myself asking why I can’t live my entire life as that child. Then I remember that there is so much suffering in this world and to not ask the question Why? is not something the person I am now can do without feeling some sort of deep guilt.
So, here I am standing on my roof, asking the question Why? to the night sky with all its moons that I can and cannot see. I never get an answer. Don’t expect one. Ever. Part of me thinks that just asking that question Why? is just what I have to do, that thing that makes life worth living for me.
And so long as I get a visit once in a while from that carefree and trusting child that still resides in me, I am good with that.
It is as it should be. Just as a child would see it.
Here’s Annie Lennox asking that same question, Why.
Now get off my roof before the child in me takes a powder and my grumpy old self comes back to push you off. Don’t ask me why I would do that. It’s just the way it is. Now, git.
Redtree Times 