Loud—limp—the wind…
huge cold shoals of cloud left dark
to park themselves above us…
Linger and see what rueful governing’s
due from their last low glowing.
Summers to come, by contrast, threaten us with a degree and longevity of heat we are unprepared for and loth to imagine.
In my 2-week exhibit coming up in later March this large work, God All Shape and Conduct: Shoreless, (watercolor & gouache, 22 x 30" unframed) is a picture not only of midsummer in Crex Meadows, a piece of western Wisconsin near Grantsburg, Burnett County, mid-continent in North America with a black tern streaking over a linkage of marshy lakes, but of youth venturing unconstrained, as much in body as in fantasy. A painting hand-lettered inconspicuously in neat black characters over the watery foreground, this work came into being over long, temperate summer weeks as a visualization of my 1988 poem of the same title:
I must remember that
wherever we assemble, overflow,
and with our wistful whiskers, blow alone
into canals that disappear under
the overpasses where today's roads veer
with pulsing whoops, we mix--a hazy current
full of crowding islets, blurring the flowage
with our thoughts' corrosion. Notably--
should this islet, floating, heave that other,
cleaving it, it would impair our gliding
clarity, that islet's death damming our stream,
granules in confusion teeming to
take refuge as a platform spanning a
scattered trickling to our river's panorama.
The panoramic painting incorporating earth's curvature is, more than anything else I've painted, a throwback to the summers of my teen-aged years and young womanhood, when I could get away to places like Crex Meadows, wander and sit looking on as the weather formed over vast marshscapes that could be re-conceived as the make-up of the whole American interior as far as the Rocky Mountains.
Though poverty and a scarcely-defined range of personal hardships are the proverbial bane of a solitaire who never trained into meeting the demands of a lucrative if tightly-governed public service--it was then and now my privilege to pass days in a wild setting undertaking artwork in response to visual compulsions I'd experienced in some way or other since childhood.
Much the way summer symbolizes youth blending into the prime or heyday of adult life, the solo trek in the poem describes a young individual setting forth to distinguish evil, either amid society or within dynamic unpeopled space adhering to its own biological laws. Nature "red in tooth and claw" in its everyday functions shows an observer paradoxes like predation suffered by conscious prey and terrors including volcanism, fires and floods. Since these are restorative natural phenomena that frame eternity, large-scale judgment of them trails off. So the young idealist is left to describe evils out of definable personal experience, or second- or third-hand encounters which in societal terms and religious terms have demonstrated punishable evil. And then, in some way that art itself may best be able to reveal, evil cited as a facet of the natural order may be compared with evils dealt out and experienced by our own kind, having repercussions within the law and in political systems.
Couldn't a whole art career including the literary arts base itself upon finding the distinctions and common ground between human evil and the forces beyond our sanctioning as our whole earth evolves, devolves and transforms however it must?
