What is being born beneath our noses? |
Campus has seemed
quiet today but there is an undercurrent of nervy potential for disruption and
confrontation, so in caution we have been sent home. I mark a few draft essays from students who
are trying to hold their work together; check over a couple of journal articles
that have been sent to me for review, sign yet another petition to government
to do something swift and creative about the fees issue. Should I then feel guilty that I take a bit
of time to work some recalcitrant acrylic paint across the surface of a canvas?
I think not. It was something of a mantra during the
apartheid years: How can one write poems
about flowers when people are suffering and dying in the streets? But it’s precisely at times of human turmoil
that I think it most important to try
to produce even one article of beauty – a poem, a song, a painting – something that
will outlast and eventually outshine our moments of madness and gloom. Most important, too, to take a moment just to
appreciate the astonishing beauties that reveal themselves to the attentive eye
just metres from one’s back door.
Even the tiniest people have their bevy of servants and friends |
This is not a
cop-out. It is not a sign of
indifference to human plights. Rather,
it is an amplification of one’s awareness, a sharpening by contrast. For me, it is itself a protest. It is a protest against crassness and
trampling boots. It is an antidote to
blinkered selfishness. It is a reminder
that ours are not the only lives, that we live within and by virtue of symbioses
wider and subtler than the merely human.
It is a kind of humility, a slitting open of ideological arrogance. It is to live out the best in us, to enjoin
ourselves to create of every social interaction a thing of beauty, too.
The critic Jonathan
Bate writes to this effect: “To miniaturise the world is to dwell better within
it.” Notice what is normally beneath
notice. I blithely walk in and out of my
back door several times a day. But adventures
happen just a metre or two away. After
all, this is the spot I once found the cat in wary conversation with a rather
handsome Night adder. And not a
fortnight later I found her, in exactly the same spot, in wary conversation
with a rather handsome legevaan, roaring like a passing jet liner.
And what if I pause,
and bend, and look even more closely?
At the corner of the
wall a string of glossy ants bustle up and down, their every social interaction
a thing of comradeship and beauty.
And
on the rippled glass of the door, a moth rests, a powdered fragment of moon,
the lightest breath of a fine idea.
Raindrops line up
along flower-stems like beauty queens, transparent rosaries, each one a
tremulous prayer to transience.
Flowers smaller than
a child’s fingernail, when magnified, unfold galactic complexities, a purple
richer than royalty.
Trapdoors spiders
lurk in their gossamer architectures, though not for us. Only when the nuclear holocaust has passed,
will they truly emerge and gobble up all our pretensions.
Ferns growing out of
a wall-crack. I hear the words of a
friend: Get those things out, you have to
preserve the integrity of the infrastructure! But the fern is the infrastructure of life
itself.
The trick is this:
to bring the given into aesthetic conversation with the created: the heron
imagined in a burned branch, the heartfelt rosary of heart-shaped shells, a
yin-yang mandala meditated out of broken glass cleared from the forest.
Lovely. The cultivation of an awareness that goes beyond the urgencies of the present melodramas.
ReplyDeleteJ
Reminds me a bit of this, too, from Tim Ingold:
ReplyDelete'Perhaps what truly distinguishes the predicament of people in modern metropolitan societies is the extent to which they are compelled to inhabit an environment that has been planned and built expressly for the purposes of occupation. The architecture and public spaces of the built environment enclose and contain; its roads and highways connect. Transport systems nowadays span the globe in a vast network of destination-to-destination links. […] Yet the structures that confine, channel and contain are not immutable. They are ceaselessly eroded by the tactical manoevering of inhabitants whose ‘wandering lines’ […] undercut the strategic designs of society’s master builders, causing them gradually to wear out and disintegrate. […] Life will not be contained, but rather threads its way through the world along the myriad lines of its relations.' (Ingold Lines 102-103).
Thanks, Dan - Julia
I do understand Ingold, though in so many ways it seems a losing battle. My counter-adage: "'Development' is the uprooting of multiple living things to replace them with dead things, for the benefit of just a few other living things." Unchecked, this can only end badly. But yes, the ferns persist!
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