January 29, 2010
(c) quintan ana wikswo
Getting struck by lightning last week over the ocean – and in a 757 – gave me an unexpected but perhaps not perversely unwelcome glimpse into the cosmic beauty of death by simultanous drowning and burning.
This came at an odd juncture. I am looking for more confidence in the human species these days. Forgive us, for we know not what we do. I hope our crimes are more from ignorance than from intent. I so want us to do well. The man seated next to me was watching Avatar on his laptop – post-communist piracy dubbed into Russian with subtitles in Korean. What a way to die.
As several of us contemplated what seemed a fair likelihood of crashing into the Pacific in a hunk of flaming metal, I must admit that it seemed like a fair victory for the elements.
Maybe there’s still a large part pagan soul deep inside me, and that soul suggests that humans now think a little too highly of ourselves. Take too much credit, and not enough responsibility.
And as we descended closer to the whitecaps with uncanny grinds and whirring, I felt the means of elemental terror came as a bit of an inter-being rebuke. In a mechanical bird, in a mechanical fish, neither operable, humans suddenly revealed in all our arrogance and vulnerability…and the pagan soul laughed.
As though we should spend more time giving thanks to the earth, the water, the air, the wind, the fire and so forth.
As though this is precisely the kind of thing that happens when we stop gathering below the full moon and singing. When we cease from a constant gratitude.
Perhaps because it was all so improbable – this drowning by fire – and yet seemed so likely, and that’s when poetry took place.
That, and the shivering.
It made me think less about death and more about transfiguration, transmogrification, transformation. About my tenderness towards animals, and how that same tenderness towards humanity can elude me on days when my head and heart are buried in our shared indignities.
It seemed ridiculous and glorious, riding down to the sea astride a phoenix of mechanical malfunctioning.
An existential dousing. It’s how a metalsmith tempers steel.
A human, improbably flying, and then swimming, and then becoming something else…maybe a bit of bone coral. Swimming down there, with friends perhaps. With barnacles and gills.
And so this blue piece ensued. And then a little more. But so much for a meditation upon lying in a bed of California sea kelp.
It’s a little fragment from a work in progress – a longer photographic work, a MUCH longer text work, and perhaps a silkscreen…a prayer for this full moon Pacific ocean, and our irrational human quest for flight.
Good shabbat.
And wishing all’s well under tonight’s full moon.