article, Blog

“I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I’ll go to it laughing.” ― Herman Melville

moby dick

In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Ahab, the captain of a whaling vessel, is obsessed with a gargantuan white sperm whale that took his leg. Hopelessly entangled in that obsession, he loses regard for all other life, including his men, his family, and himself. He has to get that whale. Kill it, conquer it…or maybe he wants to be a part of it.

To many people it’s madness, the term used to the ones who have said, “to hell with society, civilization, to hell with man made rules.” They are called mad because they defy majority opinion, the limitations placed on behavior and thought designed to keep a level of control over communities. And while those limitations are understandable…after all, we can’t have people doing whatever they want to the detriment of the whole…is there anyone who hasn’t thought now and then, “to hell with it all?”

Every now and then we see someone, perhaps an artist, perhaps a whaler, who says, “this is not doing it for me.” The vastness of existence looms before them, beckoning, hypnotizing, and everything thing else is laid bare in its meaninglessness. They want to look deeper, further, and challenge, explore, understand, and grow past what life offers.

That sense of challenge is what possesses Ahab as he chases, smiling, after something that seems unconquerable. To surrender control of life and be swept away on a wave of the unknown – isn’t that why people go on roller coaster rides? To experience for a brief moment the not knowing of what is coming next, and not caring; that madness is exhilarating. Of course, those who go on roller coasters feel safe in the knowledge that they will most likely come back down and resume life as they know it. Most likely.

To Captain Ahab, that gigantic white whale is the very incarnation of the boundlessness of the universe, of everything untouchable that throbs and pulses around us. He wants to conquer the unconquerable, one might say, or maybe he is just fed up with the pettiness of life around him, and wants to be a part of something bigger and more powerful. He knows full well he will not survive and goes to it laughing.

There are those who say his complete disregard for the lives of the sailors and their families is unconscionable and selfish, etc., etc. But the very first time Ahab encounters the whale, he catches a glimpse of the enormity of the whole picture. And there is no return. It’s undefinable, which is what beckons us, the artists, writers, spiritualists. physicists. We are all looking for a bigger meaning.

Rumi says, “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” Perhaps this is what Ahab wants to touch in the end. The ocean within himself. For in that seemingly endless, powerful body of water, that giant whale is God.

It can be called madness, to be sure, in that moment, that place in time. But when we look at it in the framework of death, infinity, and with the underlying feeling that perhaps none of this is real, but just a dream that we will all waken from one day, is it madness?

In the end, we see him being dragged along the ocean by the whale, but he seems to be smiling…he’s finally free, free of the limitations of life, the narrow-mindedness, the limited vision and petty rules of society.

He’s one with the universe.

Blog

Guernica: an Expression of Madness

Image result for guernica picasso

My husband and I visited Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid recently. What an honor. I had done my masters thesis on a comparison between the elements of Modern Art, specifically Guernica, to Gothic literature, both visually expressive mediums. And seeing the original gave me chills. Spanning an entire wall in the museum, it was profoundly dreadful, but thrilling at the same time. Dreadful because of the tragedy it’s based on, a tragedy that has been endlessly repeated over time, is being repeated even now, and thrilling because of the power of creative expression. Throughout history the injustices, cruelties, agonies and miseries, as well as the beauty of life have been recorded for all posterity by masterful artists in the form of writing, and painting.

Guernica is about the slaughter of innocents. The painting is based on the bombing during the Spanish civil war in 1937 of the Basque town, Guernica, by Fascist allies of Franco. It was Market Day in Guernica, and thousands of innocent civilians were killed, among them merchants, women, children and animals. One might think that perhaps a realistic painting would have done a better job of portraying the horror. But Picasso expressed through Cubism the madness of war in a way that realism could not have accomplished. Cubism was a product of industrialism and technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time which saw the development of photography and its unique perspectives, angles and compositions. It is created by tearing apart photographic, or realistic representations of subjects, and reassembling them in unexpected collages unrelated to reality. Basically it replaces order with disorder, a process equivalent to madness. And what is war if not madness?

Expressed through the stabbing, piercing aspects of Cubism, the blacks, grays, whites and dark blues convey the disorientation of an attack during the night, when all that would be visible would be a chaotic jumble of figures highlighted by brilliant flashes of light, and darkness. The images: a dead man with his arms outstretched, a woman with torn clothing, a wounded horse, a woman howling as she cradles her dead child, a house in flames in the background, all bombard us with emotions: panic, confusion, terror, agony. They remind us of what we have done wrong in the past perhaps in the hopes that these will not be repeated, or perhaps to expose the darkness that is an integral part of human nature, and of what we are capable of if we are not mindful of it. Because that’s what Art is all about, right? Expression. Perhaps an expression of madness.

Blog

Guernica: an Expression of Madness

Image result for guernica picasso

My husband and I visited Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica, at the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid recently. What an honor. I had done my masters thesis on a comparison between the elements of Modern Art, specifically Guernica, to Gothic literature, both visually expressive mediums. And seeing the original gave me chills. Spanning an entire wall in the museum, it was profoundly dreadful, but thrilling at the same time. Dreadful because of the tragedy it’s based on, a tragedy that has been endlessly repeated over time, is being repeated even now, and thrilling because of the power of creative expression. Throughout history the injustices, cruelties, agonies and miseries, as well as the beauty of life have been recorded for all posterity by masterful artists in the form of writing, and painting.

Guernica is about the slaughter of innocents. The painting is based on the bombing during the Spanish civil war in 1937 of the Basque town, Guernica, by Fascist allies of Franco. It was Market Day in Guernica, and thousands of innocent civilians were killed, among them merchants, women, children and animals. One might think that perhaps a realistic painting would have done a better job of portraying the horror. But Picasso expressed through Cubism the madness of war in a way that realism could not have accomplished. Cubism was a product of industrialism and technological advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a time which saw the development of photography and its unique perspectives, angles and compositions. It is created by tearing apart photographic, or realistic representations of subjects, and reassembling them in unexpected collages unrelated to reality. Basically it replaces order with disorder, a process equivalent to madness. And what is war if not madness?

Expressed through the stabbing, piercing aspects of Cubism, the blacks, grays, whites and dark blues convey the disorientation of an attack during the night, when all that would be visible would be a chaotic jumble of figures highlighted by brilliant flashes of light, and darkness. The images: a dead man with his arms outstretched, a woman with torn clothing, a wounded horse, a woman howling as she cradles her dead child, a house in flames in the background, all bombard us with emotions: panic, confusion, terror, agony. They remind us of what we have done wrong in the past perhaps in the hopes that these will not be repeated, or perhaps to expose the darkness that is an integral part of human nature, and of what we are capable of if we are not mindful of it. Because that’s what Art is all about, right? Expression. Perhaps an expression of madness.