The Truth in Ordinary Things

In his Nobel address, Seamus Heaney spoke about the issue that's been obsessing me lately: how, as artists, do we continue to do our work when the world seems to be so filled with sorrow, violence, and despair? What is our responsibility toward expressing that? How do the quotidian and personal intersect with the larger issues that we face, and with the suffering of people far away? The ink and watercolor drawing above might not feel connected to those things, but I discovered it actually was. Let me begin, though, with Heaney.

He starts by quoting a poem by W.B. Yeats, from his series "Meditations in Time of Civil War", written when Ireland was struggling internally following the war of independence from Britain. Yeats had noticed honeybees working in the cracks of an old Norman tower where he was living, and he used that image to speak about the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of senseless human tragedy.

Heaney writes:

"[The poem] knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minivan are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences in times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth-telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust..."

Then he goes on to quote a passage from the Iliad, where Homer describes a woman who runs onto the battlefield to her fallen husband. As she bends down to take the dying man in her arms, crying out, she feels the spears of the enemy prodding her back, and is soon bound and led away into slavery. Heaney praises the concrete quality of that image of the cold spears on the woman's shoulders, noting that:

"Even today, as we channel-surf over so much live coverage of contemporary savagery, highly informed but nevertheless in danger of growing immune, familiar to the point of overfamiliarity with old newsreels of the concentration camp and gulag, Homer's image can still bring us to our senses. The callousness of those spear-shafts on the woman's back and shoulders survives time and translation. The image has that documentary adequacy which answers all that we know about the intolerable."

Homer managed to express the tragedy of war in a document that has lasted for millennia. Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings and Picasso's "Guernica" have the same direct power. But it's important to remain true to ourselves: we are not all given to painting or describing things literally. Heaney himself seldom wrote directly about the Irish "Troubles," but used images and metaphors from the past and from his own life -- things as simple as plowing a field -- to evoke exactly what he wished to say.

For myself, I know that it would be a stretch and probably false for me to try to draw pictures of human suffering, or to devote myself to describing it graphically in words. It's also important to keep things real: I don't feel comfortable talking about events I've not witnessed or been told about directly, only my own reaction to those events. In the case of the crisis facing our earth, that's a different matter: we're all experiencing those changes in our own lives, and nature has always figured heavily in my art and writing. I was serious when I wrote about finding trees a powerful symbol of human resistance and resilience, or realizing that there is often a hidden symbolism in my still lives.

The act of drawing/painting is often a meditation for me -- even a kind of prayer, if you will -- in which I allow myself to be led by intuition in the choice of objects, the medium, and how I depict them. There are a lot of "no's" on the way to the eventual "yes." In the case of the seemingly innocuous still life here, I now realize that there was more going on than a clichéd "bowl of cherries": the deep red color of the fruit, the memory of their bloodiness on my tongue and hands, the sense of sudden interruption of a meal represented by the torn, partial piece of bread. Looking at it later, I recalled a passage in Nadezdha Mandelstam's book, Hope Against Hope, where she describes the evening when her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, was taken away by Stalin's henchmen - he would later die in a concentration camp. But she writes about how he was eating a hard-boiled egg, which he had just dipped into salt -- and that image is what stayed with me. Probably what the viewer sees in the still life is simply moment of calmness and beauty -- and that's also as it should be. I just find it interesting to realize that for me, the maker, there was quite a bit going on, and whatever healing or calmness I found in the making also had to do with the choices and subterranean current I followed, but barely recognized at the time. I felt satisfied with the result - it felt right and somehow complete, but I couldn't have explained why.

Does this subconscious process impart some ineluctable quality to the finished work? I don't know the answer to that question, and I'm not sure it's my job to know. I feel like my job is to show up in response to the inner prompting, and do the work.

To close, I was moved by this passage by Marina Tsvetaeva, from a collection of letters written in 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke, quoted recently by my friend Rory (thank you!) Tsvetaeva was referring to Rilke, but Rory has replaced his name here with "the poet":

"[The poet] is neither the mission nor the mirror of our times; he is their counterpoise. War, slaughterhouses, flesh shredded by discord – and [the poet]. The earth will be forgiven for our times for the sake of [the poet], who lived in them. He could have been born only in our times because he is their opposite, because he is essential, because he is an antidote. That is what makes him our contemporary. The times did not commission him, they brought him forth… [The poet] is as ineluctably necessary to our times as a priest is to the battlefield: to be for these and for those, for them and for us: to pray — for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen."

When I read that last line, "to pray for the enlightenment of the still living and at the parting from the fallen," I thought of the images of the funeral of the young Palestinian boy recently killed by Israeli soldiers in Gaza: the rawness of the sorrow on the faces of his friends and relatives, the wrongness that they are there at all, the fact that killing has gone on and on and on since Homer's time and long before that, and we never ever seem to learn.

Heaney again:

Poetry's power (is to do) the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being."

So our mind's eye holds the families killed by the suicide bombers in Kabul, the children killed by the retaliatory U.S. drone strike. And yet, in the face of all this horror, we must continue to create out of "the vulnerable part of our consciousness" which is right in spite of the wrongness all around it.

 

Comments

[Edward Yankie]

Thanks, I needed that. Art as meditation and prayer--I get that. I'm reading Whitman's Preface to his 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a real literary manifesto, and it fits in nicely with what Heaney and you are saying.

[am]

"... the choices and subterranean current I followed ..."

Thanks so much for the truth in what you write and what you draw and paint.

[Beth]

Thank you, Edward. And yes, I think Whitman would feel much the same way, except that he saw the Civil War with his own eyes, serving in the hospital tents, so his words came from first-person witness.

am, thank you very much for saying that. You are the kind of reader who keeps me going.

[Susan]

Thank you, beautiful art and words to think about!

[Greg]

Searching for the Homeric parallels to the unnamed Geats woman at the end of Beowulf, lamenting her fears of future invasion, mayhem, slavery and abasement, I found this passage in Odyssey 8:521ff:
"So sang the famous bard. And Odysseus’ heart melted, and tears poured from his eyes. He wept pitifully, as a woman weeps who throws herself on her husband’s dying body, fallen in front of his city and people, trying to ward off that evil moment from the city and his own children: watching him gasping for breath in dying, she clings to him and screams aloud, while behind her the enemy beat her back and shoulders with their spears: then she is led into captivity to endure a life of toil and suffering, her cheeks wasted pitifully with grief. He hid the falling tears from all except Alcinous, who, aware because he sat by him, noticed all, and heard him sighing deeply." A.S. Kline, trans.

Reading this, I recalled this blog post of yours from only a few days ago.

Is there a similar passage in the Iliad that Heaney is citing?

Echoed in Heaney's version of Beowulf, line 3150ff:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.