Archaeology: The Silence of the World— Coming to Principle Gallery
I can imagine the silence when the world
will have stilled itself—no more poems tossed
off the tongue, no more screams
of raven lugging entrails of porcupine,
no more tales of the Navajo, or Louisiana black man,
or old-time Vermonter,
no more breathing in the ear of last lover…
The Silence of the World, Galway Kinnell
These are the opening lines from the first poem I encountered from Galway Kinnell, who I briefly wrote about t a few days ago. That idea of the world being without the hive activity of humans, forever cast in silence, stuck in my mind. It was just kind of hovering there for several weeks but came back to the surface in the past week as I worked on the new painting shown above.
It’s from my ongoing Archaeology series which first came about in 2008, after I returned to an exercise from a 5th grade art class when I was feeling deeply blocked creatively. I have only painted a handful of these Archaeology pieces in recent years, despite the fact that I do enjoy the process of painting them and that they have always been well received, both here and abroad.
Why that is, I don’t know. I suppose it’s as simple as the heart and spirit having to be in just the right place. Recently, I found that working on this piece and another in the same series have forced me to focus on the small moves that create the artifact fields in both. I needed to bring my mind back into the work and this really seemed to serve that purpose.
As I was working on this particular painting, that Kinnell poem–and its title specifically– began to haunt my thoughts. While many of the Archaeology paintings deal with the world beyond the time of man and how our existence will be reduced to buried artifacts, this piece brought other thoughts and questions to mind.
The primary question was: When humans are no more, does that mean that heaven no longer exists? Are heaven and hell attached to humans and will therefore cease to exist when the last human returns to dust?
I wasn’t bothered by either a yes or no answer to these questions. It will be what it will be without my opinion, fears, or hopes. Just wondering.
Yes or no, it will be a quieter world, filled with more silences. And that pleases me somehow. Humans seem to have a need to fill every empty space with sound and noise. And I think– without any evidence, of course– that this somehow throws the world out of equilibrium. That it seeks more silence.
And that is what I see in this painting. I chose to fill the artifact field mainly with chairs that represent the passing of man. For some unknown reason, I resisted making them Red Chairs. The upper part is painted in shades of blue that have a unifying silence in them. No noise from the contrast of colors or lightness.
Just a placid blueness.
And the tree in the foreground might be expressing in its twists the slightest delight in finally regaining the silence the world desired.
It’s a piece that fills me with a variety of feelings. I am saddened to see in it the end of our time and all that the human mind has produced that is good. Music, art, poetry, literature, and so on. But the idea of a reign of real silence along with the world returning to a greater equilibrium somehow satisfies me.
Don’t ask me why.
It’s given me a lot to both focus on and think about in here the studio. And I am grateful for that.
We all need things that make us think about things other than the things we think about. If you followed that, you’ve got a quicker mind than me.
Of course, I borrowed the title for this painting, Archaeology: The Silence of the World, from Kinnell’s poem which I have included below in its entirety. I am also including a wonderful piece of music from composer Samuel Barber, his Adagio for Strings. This is performed here by the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Simon Rattle. The composition is built around beautiful silences that I feel reflect well on the painting.
Lovely music for a quiet Saturday morning, even if those damn humans are still out there making noise.
I can imagine the silence when the world
will have stilled itself—no more poems tossed
off the tongue, no more screams
of raven lugging entrails of porcupine,
no more tales of the Navajo, or Louisiana black man,
or old-time Vermonter,
no more breathing in the ear of last lover,
no more angelic beings left to be kissed
into the claustrophobia of flesh,
no more temples giving light
from open doors into bitter winter nights, no more
curious weasel who leaves
her black ring frozen in the air,
no more tooth that gnaws through gum and bones into
the cathedral of the mouth.
No more splat when singer spits
mouthwash into the washbasin after the concert,
no more “Quit yer bawlin!”
from punk principal to slob schoolboy
when sore mother hauls
small boy into classroom by sore ear.
No more young woman in large hat in profile
in afternoon light saying, “So what, darling?
I don’t hate you. I love you. So what?”
No more flutesman trudging through snow
on 125th Street on the last Sunday morning of his jeopardy.
No more husband saying, “Snack bar’s the other way.”
No more wife replying, “You aren’t going to eat again, are you?”
No more husband replying, “I don’t want to eat,
I was just telling you where the snack bar is.”
No more wife replying, “For Chrissake! I know where it is.”
No more caesura or else everything one endless caesura,
no more feminine rhyme such as “lattice” and “thereat is,”
no more parallelismus membrorum panting in one ear,
no more Neruda’s slowly deepening voice saying,
“Federico, te acuerdas, debajo de la tierra . . .”
From across the valley the thud of an axe
arrives later than its strike
and the call of goodbye slowly separates itself
little by little from the vocal chords of everything.
– The Silence of the World, Galway Kinnell, The New Yorker, May 13, 2013
Redtree Times 