Archaeology: The Silence of the World— Now at Principle Gallery
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
–Robinson Jeffers, Carmel Point in Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954)
I came across the poem above from poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) written in the early 1950’s and was struck by how much it mirrored what I see in some of my work. Most specifically, I see it in the Archaeology series. Those paintings can be seen as landscapes free of all humankind, the only traces of their existence found deeply hidden under the surface beneath many layers of earth.
Earth has shaken itself loose of our pesky and destructive nature and has resumed its place in the beautiful eternal. Timeless and silent, once again shaped only by the forces of nature and their continuously balancing harmonies and rhythms.
But now, as we cut down swaths of ancient forests, deeply gouge and scar the surface of the planet, and fill the oceans with garbage and poisons, Earth simply abides. As Jeffers wrote:
It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.
In the grand scheme of things eternal, we are little more than a minor rash between the toes of Earth– temporary and soon gone with a little patience.
Jeffers urged us as humans to recognize the temporary nature of our existence, that we are not the center of the universe in any way and will soon return to the Earthly elements from which descend. Rock and ocean, as he puts it.
This was actually a theme for Jeffers in much of his work, which he termed Inhumanism. He encouraged us to change our perspective from that of a self-centered human to a recognition of being a small part of the greater whole that is Earth and the Universe.
He did not view this as being misanthropic or nihilism. He saw this instead as being an act of liberation, one that forms a detachment from humanity that gives an emotional distance that allows for greater mental clarity, a sense of inner peace, and a greater ability to stand in awe of nature’s beauty and grandeur.
Into the Blue Tangle– At Principle Gallery
I can get behind that and see it in much of my work, in the Archaeology pieces as I said before as well as in much of the work from last year’s Entanglement series, such as the painting shown here on the right. Not sure I would want to call it Inhumanism even as much as I agree with its premise. It implies that the work is somehow inhuman with all the negative connotations that come with that word.
And I certainly don’t see my work as being inhuman or anti-human. If anything, it is deeply human. But like Jeffers, I would like us to be more open to a different perspective on our existence, one that recognizes our temporary nature and the significance of our insignificance.
Maybe that is just what we are– significantly insignificant.
I got to chew on that one for a while. You better leave. I think better when I’m alone and you’re crowding me a bit right now. I still lack the patience of Earth and Nature.
Not yet fully inhuman…