Tag Archives: susan Sontag

“Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said.” — Wittgenstein

01 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by in Aesthetic philosophy, Art, Nature, philosophy

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In the yard of my childhood home, a robin drunk from devouring over-ripe cherries on our tree, flew into our bay window that must have held an attractive illusory world, so much so that more than a few birds met that hard, bludgeoning reality. And after struggling for air on the ground below, it became still and lifeless. My mother, sensitive to the meekest of life forms, gathered the corpse and her two fledgling daughters for a funeral. A hole was dug, and as I watched the corpse of the bird descend into the dirt void, my mom said words, words of ritual, wishing that this bird would be in peace.

That robin’s life, unlike the other carcasses of animals on roadsides or worse, was made sacred to me, and the abyss into which some part of this bird, the part besides feathers and flesh, inhabited when it was into the ground became the eternal question mark.

My mentor describes the pre-classical Chinese pictogram of sacred as a person standing on earth, on one’s toes, reaching for the sky, the heavens. The sacred cannot be without the earth, the mundane requirements of being human, but it also has the urge for beyond such knowing.

Eventually and logically, that became the case for those beings lying unceremoniously in rotting ditches who by my eyes were not made sacred. And a moment of heightened attention in a car passing by was, and continues to be, my attempt to sacralize, because it feels necessary that we would all be given the mere gift of attention as we disappear.

Finally this week, it was this scene that appeared to me in my own ritualized space of art-making in my studio, where I stared upon the flocks of quiet, often dissolving, single, little dead birds I’ve painted over and over for the last 7 years. After enduring the dissonant if not polite questioning and dismissal from others and myself — amidst a cultural popularization of cute birds on every sundry item available (“put a bird on it”) — I was partially decoded.

And luckily, also this week, I read an essay by Susan Sontag, who fully understands the impulse to make art “towards the ever-receding horizon of silence.”:

“One result is a type of art which many people characterize pejoratively as dumb, depressed, acquiescent, cold. But these privative qualities exist in a context of the artist’s objective intention, which is always discernible. To cultivate the metaphoric silence that’s suggested by conventionally lifeless subjects (as in much of Pop Art) and to construct “minimal” forms which seem to lack emotional resonance are in themselves vigorous, often tonic choices.”


(My painting: “Bird Elegy #1″ (detail), 2012.  14″ x 19” Watercolor on Paper)

But my recent writing/searching has drawn my attention to the fact that all things, especially the experience of love, are of a continual parting. Perhaps that impossible constant attention to that coming and going, the making sacred of every moment and every thing that makes a heartbeat, that presences and reaches into us, and then dissolves into silence — Heidegger’s clearing and gathering and clearing — that is a  glimpse into the untranslatable state of Being.

For now, I can only handle my little birds.

“It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one’s assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all.” Susan Sontag

Today’s Issue: “The opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.” (Blanchot)

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Art, Uncategorized

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What a better way to spend a sunny weekend day than to read Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” and then to “enjoy” subsequent evenings full of nightmares stemming from her war photography imagery.

What allures me to Sontag is an analysis that concerns all artists — how is art, in this case photography, received amidst the unprecedented onslaught of attention-seeking images and information people are bombarded with.

I followed Sontag eagerly on her beautifully written essay, wholeheartedly compliant to her assumption that it is the consumers, including myself, who are blunted by habituating news of atrocity, and how easy it is for an elitist, educated population in the richest part of the world to become cynical. Yet, she finds, almost fortuitously, there persists images that do not lose their power on the viewer, despite the improbability of such resilience.

Before I could ponder why such images persevere, I happened upon a writing: A speech not directed at the public for its lack of awareness or state of distraction, but rather at one’s contemporaries; other artists, writers and poets — to call them out for being fearful (and therefore meaningless) in a most fearful time:

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

“Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

This was William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950, when the number of lives obliterated in the middle of their daily habits were still being counted — the aftermath of the U.S. atomic bombing on hundreds of thousands unarmed, Japanese civilians.

But somehow we need both impulses: Sontag who calls our attention to the suffering captured by art in order to remind us of the atrocities we are capable, sometimes enthusiastically, of; and Faulkner, to take us out of that paralytic grief, to summons everything forgotten in those acts of inhumanity, and despite the heaviness, to lift our hearts.

Today’s Advice:   “To think, to write a poem, is to give thanks for whatever measure of homecoming to Being is open to mortal man.” Steiner on Heidegger