Offered to the Wind— At West End Gallery
What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.
Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.
–Jay Griffiths, Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness
I had a procedure at a doctor’s office this past week. As I sat there waiting for him to come in, there was music playing. It was modern country music. There wasn’t much to focus on, so I listened more intently than I might have done otherwise. The doctor was running behind schedule and I ended up listening to four songs. I am not saying it was bad or anything like that. It was just nothing. The sound was pleasing but bland. Unmemorable. The lyrics said little if anything. The first two I heard could have been the same song in many ways. It all reminded me of some awful AI concoction.
I was still a bit prickly from the events of last week and the music began to grind on my nerves. I could feel my blood pressure rising. After the fourth song, his assistant came in to let me know he was behind schedule and asked if I wanted to listen to something different.
I said that I did. When she asked what, I said immediately Nina Simone. She instructed the Alexa there to play Nina Simone and when the first notes from her piano slowly began asked if that was right. I assured that it was correct and she left me alone to listen.
The song was Wild is the Wind. I couldn’t have asked for a better song in that moment in that sterile doctor’s office at the end of a perfectly awful week. It captured my mood perfectly. I could feel an easing within me as I sat there. A heavy sigh came forth.
The contrast between that song and the stuff I had heard before was stark. This song had a rawness of emotion and a uniqueness and human touch that the other songs seemed to be lacking. As I said, the others felt to me as though they were created by AI.
Contrasted against the dullness of their conformity, Nina’s song felt like a rebellion of the spirit. Though it is not upbeat and has a sense of loss to it, it did feel wild and free in that moment. The other music, on the other hand, felt boxed in and constrained. No wildness, no freedom.
There seemed to be an analogy there to what I sensed has been happening here in this country. The sense of loss is for that wildness of spirit that seems to be leaking away, being rejected and replaced by uniformity of belief, thought, and action.
Maybe there is no analogy to be had. But for a moment I felt inspired at a moment that was uninspiring in every other way.
Maybe that is the purpose of art — if there is any at all.
Something to think about this morning. Here’s Nina Simone and her version of Wild is the Wind.
The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic as you might guess from the lack of posts here. There was the Gallery Talk last weekend at the Principle Gallery down in Virginia then a few days spent setting up and leading the painting workshop at Sunny Point on Keuka Lake with a bunch of personal things jammed in between. I was plain pooped out yesterday and just couldn’t get myself to write anything for the blog.
But the workshop at Sunny Point this week went really well and was, I think, fun for the folks there. Me, too.
There’s been a huge resurgence as of late in interest in the music and life of the great Nina Simone, who died in 2003 at the age of 70. You hear her music on all sorts of movie and television soundtracks and commercials. There has been a couple of documentaries made of her life ( this includes the highly acclaimed What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix) and there are a number of big screen biopics in the works.
Redtree Times 