for laurie lange

Wasteland: An Elegy

Written with the eye of a nature connoisseur, this is a lovely little piece. It hints at what I think is perhaps the most important thing for us to comprehend in facing environmental renewal of the planet: that the planet doesn’t really need us for the greater part of this process---we just think we’re that important in the scheme of things. The author says as much: “I could walk there and see birds I found nowhere else”. Birds choose habitat according to their nature, not according to what we think their tendencies are.

We’ve arrived in an era in which we’re coming to comprehend fully that, rather than our human built improvements being that in nature, oftentimes what we design causes degradation. This is a step in the right direction, but the final step comes when we understand that we’re part of nature, rather than an agent outside of her. This doesn’t mean it’s OK we’ve created burn dumps. What it means is that ecosynthesis happens, and that we’re part of that equation, degradation and all. There is no such thing as perfect, and preservation tends to be an exercise that will sometimes be futile. We do cause extinctions, we do lay land to waste, but other, natural forces do as well.

We’re not the designers here on planet earth---though it seems mostly we have an egocentric notion that we are. Living at the remove we do in “civilized” culture, we’ve cut ourselves off from the kind of exposures that build understanding of the intricate vastness of nature’s plan such as, say, aboriginal cultures had. Nature walks at a burn dump are one way to remedy that and, as the author notes, no other humans were ever encountered there acquainting themselves with the nature of the place.

Soundscapes/Soundwalk

Our soundwalk project and the McCartney reading have enriched my circle of attention Though I’ve worked over the course of decades in media that are tactile, like fiberarts and landscape design, my orientation as an artist has always been with 2D visuals. I’d like ever so much to explore sound further as a medium.

I’m exploring architectural illustration this semester. The treatise on the subject that’s most caught my attention focuses on exercises to convey a tactile sense of space and buildings rather than just a visual rendering of them. The author points out how much vision is attached to our intellectual understanding, rather than a felt sense of a space. In a similar way, soundscapes coax us away from a purely mental world into places where the kinesthetics of sound amplify other gleanings: intuition, perception, eros, dreaming.

Oddly though, the comments McCartney makes about how the success of a recording is a measure of how well the artist knows a space applies also to photography: learning a place over time is the only way to know when the light is just right for that incredible shot. It’s not just drama, like a picture of a fantastic sunset: knowing the place cam convey in a photo what a place is in subtle ways as well.

Mc Cartney speaks of the holding power of a place. I think of the power of silence, and wonder how a recordist would capture it. There is presence in a place where silence has been practiced over the course of centuries; I once visited a gathering place in Phildelphia whose only purpose for 300 years or so has been for gatherings of prayerful silence. It was so deep there, I could fathom no bottom to it. I just wanted to soak it up.

Serpentine California

I hope this comic creator will, or has continued to develop his craft. As comics go, Serpentine California is a beginning effort, but it hints at things it would be interesting to see more fully embodied in the form. What caught my imagination was his evocation of “the elemental passion of small things”, and his hints at the epochal emergence of rocks.

Once in a sharing with others about what peoples’ spiritual experiences were, and where they’ve occurred, it emerged that what everyone shared had happened in nature. Kinne describes a simple kind of spirituality in a quiet way---not a big deal, spiritual.

In psychology, rocks represent the soul, and as I’ve sat with them, I’ve learned this. They’re beings whose marriage with water and with air begets their offspring soil, and dreaming them what comes to me is that their lifetimes are on a scale unimaginable within the skin of a human’s life. Let’s have more comics about rocks!