Signs of Life
A few of you know this already: middle age has kicked my ass but good.
But I’ll get back to that later.
First, imagine this (if you can): A nation deeply divided. A populace polarized beyond redemption. A government deep in crisis. Seething portents of civil war looming near and far.
If you were in New York City, and were willing to stand in line long enough, and could spare a quarter for admission (it’s 1859), you would eventually be escorted into a gallery exhibiting one enormous painting, The Heart of the Andes, by Frederick Edwin Church. This vast landscape was displayed in a carved wooden case, standing on the floor and draped in velvet. (If you were lucky, you might even be able to sit on the sole bench opposite the picture to rest your tired legs and look until your heart overflowed.)
So realistic, so microscopic in detail, and yet panoramic in its sweep and ambition, The Heart of the Andes so vividly portrayed the forces of nature and time, the epic struggle of life - and by analogy, the epic struggles of a nation - that women came close to fainting. Men wept in its presence. As a once familiar world spun around them faster than they could comprehend, viewers somehow felt this landscape told them where they were: here.
This seems unbelievable now, saturated to bursting as we are with images today. (And as mostly forgotten as Church is as well.) But that’s what happened. Reports from the time all agree. Church’s work was the blockbuster Marvel movie of its day. He had a similar hit later with Cotopaxi, depicting this smoldering Ecuadorean volcano, which he painted at the height of the Civil War.
Thanks to the 19th century German Romantics, landscapes became the permanent marker - either sublime and/or terrifying - of humanity’s place in the cosmos. But, even before them, landscapes were depicted as representations of the soul. Most often those landscapes were imagined or composites, even as they were meticulously rendered, so they could be viewed - like the soul unsullied - as an ideal.
Think of the portraits of Renaissance saints or Madonnas. The central human figure was set against a landscape which was always viewed from a great height and receded into an impossibly far distant horizon. Unspoiled, so as to suitably frame its spiritual subject, the landscape was formed of fantastically sculpted rocky outcroppings and rivers snaking across verdant fields, reaching endlessly back until everything dissolved into the pale blue-gray empyrean.
Over time, this relationship changed. The land itself inhabited the spiritual and came to dominate the human figure which shrank in size or disappeared altogether. Eventually, the land itself vanished, leaving only the spiritual state behind - a trace, a shadow - as in the mysterious shimmering horizons of Mark Rothko, the parched crags of Clyfford Still, or the calligraphic splashes of Cy Twombly.
Whatever its depiction, a landscape serves as a means of location, a kind of GPS. Establish yourself in the land around you. Determine your relationship to what’s near. Then you begin to know where you actually are. (I’m remembering those posters and tee shirts of the ultimate landscape, the Milky Way Galaxy, with an arrow slicing through the swirl of stars, bearing the caption “You are here.”)
Spring reminds us of how we orient ourselves in regard to the landscape. It is the time of year when we are most alive - hungry, as we are, for signs of life - to our relationship to the world around us. The landscape announces itself - a green shoot which stubbornly and valiantly pushed itself up through the earth, a magnolia tree, a meringue of creams and pinks, with just possibly the most beautiful blossoms in all of creation.
We pay attention. We notice, if only for a moment, where we stand, what’s at our feet.
Passover and Easter, the great spring religious festivals, situate themselves within landscapes, too, ones both literal and metaphorical. But they do so in ways that are indirect and ambiguous. Rather than a place of recognition, landscape exists to be passed through, endured. In both stories, the terrain to be traversed is stony, unforgiving, elemental. If there is a view along the way, it doesn’t invite admiration; it only disorients.
Passage - safe passage - is far from certain.
Even if the destination holds out the promise of profound joy, the restoration and rebirth of freedom, the only way there is to stumble though the subtle derangements of grief, one foot in front of the other. And even if the new destination has been long-desired, long-sought, and deeply necessary, it requires the shedding of what was once known along the way, the gradual abandonment of all one carries,
The Biblical narrators of these stories, as usual, extend little kindness to human frailty. They describe the traveling companions of Moses and Jesus as feckless, inconstant, and exhausting. (Which they are, but, even so . . . ) Everyone seems trapped in the proverbial car trip from hell, with the kids in the backseat relentlessly remorselessly demanding “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” while dad white knuckles the wheel, all patience ground down to a nub, his last nerve seriously this close to being worked, secretly wanting to hit the brakes while shouting “DO NOT MAKE ME STOP THIS CAR AGAIN!” but knowing all he can do is drive on and keep driving on if they are ever to arrive.
But the traveling companions are understandably freaked out. It’s hard to blame them; they’re sore afraid. They don’t know where they are. But they’re certain it’s not where they imagined they’d be. (Yet.) It looks nothing like what was promised. What once was known has grown strange and foreign. It’s useless in this new country. So much has fallen away and falls away still. There’s no way to locate oneself. The landscape they brave yields no clues save stones.
Appearances deceive as they do.
What looks like anxiety or panic or doubt is simply the underside of faith for it still recognizes possibility. Along the way, someone picks up a stone and inspects it. It’s all they can do; and at least that’s something. Someone searches the stone for the degrees of difference between inhospitable and uninhabitable. That could be enough. Someone strikes the stone against another - sparks, the possibility of fire to light the way. All of these stones, hard as they are, reveal signs of life: Sunlight glinting in the mica. Flecks of green moss. So green. Alive. And here.
Discontent, and all its attendant maladies, can push through the earth, through even a stone, stubbornly, valiantly, yielding a green shoot which transforms into the landscape. Which, as promised, brings me back to my subject: middle age.
Even though I worry I’m merely taking the same photograph over and over again, in early spring and late fall, I go up to the park near my apartment to shoot. I’ve been doing this for a few years now. The park is in northern Manhattan, dominated by views of the George Washington Bridge, and ringed by traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway below, roaring like a wave that never breaks. Nevertheless, it remains an elemental landscape. Ancient. It is filled with fantastic rock outcroppings, granite boulders moved by glaciers long ago as they sculpted the earth.
It is a landscape built of stones.
But stones streaked with green moss and lichens, from which trees grow, in which birds nest, and where falcons alight. Stones revealing life like the stone rolled away from the entrance to an empty tomb. Like the stone in the desert, there and waiting to be struck with a staff, from which water will flow - cold and clear and alive - with the force of tears long unshed now finally shed, to land at your pilgrim feet, at the place in the landscape where you stand: here.
(Click on image to see full size.)
