Onion Sandwich

Who's usin' who? What should we do?

Well, you can't be a pimp and a prostitute too.

                                    -Jack White

                                            

Today, mounting horrors out of the lavant. I've not looked or listened since this morning. To be surprised and shocked is stupidity. To be surprised but not shocked wise. To be neither shocked or surprised and find some romantic comfort in cynicism is nihilism. Better that you should buy a fresh loaf of sourdough, toast a slice from her meaty heart, spread it with butter, and layer on sliced sweet onion. A little salt, a little pepper, and you're good.

Movement Within Movement: 

The Physiognomy of Story and Narrative 

When we talk about story and narrative, we're talking about the difference between, say, a song and music. The later is the raw material of the medium, the former is a genre. A genre distinguishes itself purley by how the raw material is constrained. All art depends on material constrained. A word is a sound constrained by a beginning and an end, an open vowel (the primitive yowl of existential dread or the mother's sigh over her baby) is held in my the terminus supplied by constenants. 

A story has a temporal condition that is unique to forms like music. Music, of course, doesn't exist outside of time, though narrative or story may. Think for example of a representational painting that displays figures frozen in action, the narrative is the sum reslut of the meaning of the various attitudes of the characters and their props, and the idea, the implication of time: something happened before the event depicted and something will happen as a result.  Even the most dull, static still life, the trompe l'oiel, suggests that that jug of wine has just been poured and lets the viewer imagine the consequences of such a delight, it's taste and refreshment. 

Time's arrow is malleable in a story. I tell my students that far from being a mundane, mechanical gesture it's a truly magical and auspicious maneuver, radical in its possibilities, albeit the closest thing to actually being able to control time that we have. One might concede that the ability of limitless imaging making might trump this exercise, but I would strongly advice the reader to actually begin writing a story with an attention to the flexibility of time and see how unique this astonishing technique really is. 

The containment of a story, its frame, we long ago think of as linear, as having a beginning, a middle and an end, a form that has at its base a truth that is indisputable. Though like every truth it's very easy to fall into the trap of reductive cliche; hence there's a strong aversion among even the dilettante to ignore such rules or rules of thumb. But a story seems to ache under the strain of not having these simple features, these dictates of formalism. The story needs somehow if it exists in time to relate to time in some way, to advance forward in a relative dance with the reader. I am primarily talking about the written form of narrative here, though many of these conditions and constraints are applicable to motion pictures and visual narrative forms as well. 

The motion forward in a written story depends on the reader's ability to do some heavy lifting, to read. And reading in this case isn't the shallow practice we learned in elementary school, the dreaded method of "phonics" which reduces the art to a pasteboard masquerade of sounding out sounds to make sounds, rather than assuming the challenge of exploring meaning. In order to read well, one has to work a bit at it, and a text should both make demands on a reader's skill, but also excite and encourage them to take on the non-passive role that will require them to, say, dig into Moby Dick and remain with Ishmael through several hundred pages. 

The requirement is that the author produce this thing called "narrative drive" that mechanism that catches the reader by the collar and helps them up hill. The reader is doing the work, but the text is what gives her traction, and nourishes her while it's happening. A queer symbiosis is at work here. Part of what keeps the reader reading is that idea that is peculiar to narrative, but also shared by other mediums and art formas, that question of what will happen next is worth answering. The narrative drive is how this question is formed in the reader and gives her that desire to look at the sentences that follows the first, then the next paragraph, and encourages her to lick her finger before turning the next page over. Narrative drive is the fuel, accomplished in many different ways that brings the reader through. It can work in an overt way, keeping the stakes high, (The Painted Bird, Crime and Punishment) or even in a more quiet fashion, (Housekeeping, Herzog). In each case there are two parallel mechanisms that create narrative drive, both opperating in harmony to keep the reader interested and their attention on the page.

The autotelic and exotelic refer to the process of moving towards a target as a straight line, or imagining the target as the action itself. The root of both words, "telos" refers to target and if one imagines a bull's-eye, such an image will suffice. The exotelic narrative drive is what keeps us in the big picture. It's the thing that propels the reader to push towards the ending, even if it's a very long book. These are overt block and pulley systems that keep us in the big picture, the long journey ahead. Will we find out who the murderer is? Will Sam and Frodo deliver the ring to the mountain and survive? Will the child survive his bildungsroman through the horrors of central Europe during the Second World War, will the anti-hero succeed in murdering his landlady? Our noses are pointed toward that final destination, the end result, even the "take away" that we expect when we read the last page. 

The autotelic is more delicate a mechanism, the thing that, when mismanaged, causes us to be impatient readers that jump to the last page to spoil ourselves of the outcome. We might do this because the actual flow of the narrative as it happens lacks the procedural development we require to remain interested. Perhaps the skill of the writer isn't up to making interesting scenes, or developing characters? Or maybe it's that there language is dull, or ponderous, or their insights shallow and cliched. Getting there should be more than half the fun. 

Imagine a canoe trip across a lake. One could set their direction to a distant shore lined with giant hemlock, dip the paddle into the water and begin sliding their canoe in a simple forward direction, sans diversion, a straight line with only the scale of trees in your eyeline growing, the horizon ever stretching away, but your destination an eventual terminus. You arrive. And there you are. 

The other way to canoe might be to simply go in circles, observing at close proximity the transparent depths of the lake, the flora and fauna

A Story Is A Revelation

A Story is a Relationship

"They is..." A phrase familiar to anyone who's taken an American Lit class in the last twenty or thirty years, an idiomatic droplet that catalyzes and determines the vocation and subsequent tragedy of the life of Anders, Tobias Wolff's protagonist in his diamond cut, "Bullet in the Brain." Find a situation that will get your character in trouble--a setting and problem, a locus and opportunity-- that is at odds with the peculiar fashion of their performative behavior. Anders is embittered perhaps, angry, mean, but in a manner that emerges from the application of a  heuristic begot of an innocent and even humble preoccupation. He takes sarcastic jabs at a woman standing in front of him in line at a bank, mocking her complaints that otherwise would draw strangers together in the face of slow, trudging bureaucracy. "A lousy way to treat customers," She defensively summarizes, and he says, "Surely, heaven will take note." He all but delights in making her feel small, though true delight is a mood he is no longer capable of feeling at all. And his whole arc begins with and seeks to celebrate this tiny, fragile sensation.  

I won't trouble you with a summary, only that we learn that Anders is a book critic, a rather spiteful one who's famous for the "elegant savagery" with which he "dispatches" the writers unlucky enough to end up in his cross-hairs. The final line being the equivocal grammatically awkward "they is..." that somehow prefigures this destiny motivated by a tender urge to rediscover the delight in poetry. That the line maintains an existential odour, a sort of Zen koan answer to a riddle that has yet to be asked, is second to the function it plays in respect to the central question of the story: that wonder and delight are a gift that, when commodified, pursued in the manner of an addict always trying to score, always disappointed a little bit that it doesn't meet up with the memory of that first time, will eventually require payment after the fact. 

 

A Story is A Relationship.

In my limited understanding, we have several possible forms or criteria that a story can take, even if some theorists, writers, and academics have only one. For example, if you've taken a screenwriting course, a "story" must, absolutely must, have conflict to maintain narrative drive. A muddled mess that goes nowhere and bores the audience is the effect of passionless exchange. In a short story class you might hear instructors insist that a story have characters that change. In a literature class stories must have a revealing theme asking questions that haven't been asked before, even about phenomena (like death, for instance)  examined in literature since the "ur" story. And of course, there's the standard criteria that we learn about in kindergarten: a story must have a beginning, middle, and end.

    As excellent as these rules of thumb may be, I'm not sure if any (except, perhaps, the last criteria) have an absolutely solid foundation. Perhaps if we're merely talking about art, we don't expect absolutes as we might in science. But we're talking about a phenomenon that extends in different directions, that is the material of art perhaps, but could indeed follow something more coherent with consciousness and events. True, conflict creates tension which moves drama forward, but if you look at, say, a Coen Brothers' film, like "Fargo" there are plenty of scenes that don't have much conflict and, truthfully, don't move the story forward (at least not in a singular, exotelic direction). I also insist that a story is a form (a genre) of narrative. No one would argue against this, but I also insist on the essential narrative form as a "chronicle of change." That the bare and atomic elements of narrative are time, space, event, entity, observer/reporter, medium, etc.

         It’s up to us: the destroyers of worlds. As writers, we are the masters of what is under our pen point. But are we? Perhaps the over-controlled, heavy-handed story isn’t really a story at all, just as a blueprint isn’t really a building. To invite chaos, inspiration, confusion, your view of your God, or whatever way that you accept that you’re not always in control of things, even those domains that seem ultimately and absolutely under your control, is to live as an artist.

When we constrain narrative into story, harness and tame it, these elements mirror the habits of molecules. Particles coalesce into more complex materials fashioned to key, or dovetail into the mechanism of a story. There are narratives that aren't story. A list, a litany, for instance, or a ship's log, or a report, an account, an anecdote, a flow-chart, a graph, an algorithm, etcetera, are not stories in the true narratological sense of the word (though they may be in the vernacular sense). Narrative elements constrained are what we're most comfortable talking about character, plot, setting, point of view, theme, voice and style, etc. 

       Think of variations of what a story should have, or how her elemental form might take shape, and that different aspects of the raw narrative elements may be emphasized over others, or more critical to the various definitions that we're speaking of. For example, one might insist that a story has conflict, but I would say that conflict itself isn't the necessary feature, but that conflict, as well as other conceivable patterns of power, is the consequence of relationships between entities. 

    Simply, "a story is about relationships," would suffice here. Whether there's conflict, or not only changes the scale of forward movement within a story's form. Conflict is only one of the many ways two entities (characters) can interact. They can be drawn to each other, or apart or even orbit each other. But without relationships, we have nothing. To get crafty here, one might envision the atomic structure of a hydrogen atom (bear with me here), where one electron orbits one neutron. The energy between the two keeps them in balance, forever in cohort with each other. Without at least those two particles, we don't have matter at all. 

    There can, of course, be more than two entities in a story, and they don't, in this theory, have to be characters at all, really. But characters, as we define them, are complex and reflect our experiences (of course), and stories are usually about the human experience in some way. Even when we think of animation, or magical stories with animal characters, these entities are essentially human characters in drag. Without those very human qualities of wants, desires, and needs, they forfeit their right to occupy the story as characters at all. 

    A story about, say, water, as an entity provides some challenges. Water, much like a character, can change under various pressures and external circumstances. It behaves in a way consistent with its material form, it flows, it drips, it even erodes and provides life. But while it has tendencies, these aren't reliant on any psychology, but on simply their relative relationship to the other material elements and external changes that coerce them. But in my simplified definition, you can imagine that a story can exist as an entity interacting with something else, ergo a relationship between it and some other material thing.

    This is just a way to think about stories. When we don't have conflict it's often a simple problem, though it might be a deal-breaker in terms of a story's set up. Imagine you're writing a story about a character who is all alone. Here, there's no relationship between the character and anything, or anyone else. You might argue that the character's inner world may be subject to a continuing narrative, and assert that the inner world is an excellent domain for exploration by the writer, that literature is the medium that can bring to life our internal worlds, much more acutely than, say, filmmaking or theater. I would agree with that: but I would also insist that once we get inside the domain of a character's psyche, we have to treat it, the brain, mind, or soul, as we would any other material landscape, occupied with features that complicate it, and certainly an menagerie of characters, who inevitably will find themselves in relationships with one another to spar, fall in love, or compete in some way. The devil and angels sitting on our shoulders provide a nice simplified idea of what our internal worlds provide for their inhabitants. So even in a story that takes place in the interior of a single individual, there still must be relationships and possible conflict between the various lobes, souls, spirits, dybbuks, cherubim, G-d, gods, goddesses, demons, ids, egos and super-egos! 

    And as to a story only achieving its form when a character goes through some fundamental change, we've met a lot of characters who don't necessarily turn into something entirely different in a fundamental way. "Hills Like White Elephants," may not have that overt kind of metamorphosis that this idea suggests, nor might "Cathedral" necessarily. Though often the rookie writer may not see the delicate alterations in the fabric of a character's interior world that might affirm this axiom, and it should be through the practice of reading, the art of reading, that we begin to see distinct differences in a character's outlook, mood, or understanding. But sometimes stories really don't work at all on the possibility of a character changing, and it might be that the "entity" that changes isn't in the story at all, but in the parallel experience the reader goes through in which, perhaps, they change! What the story might do in terms of technique is reveal something discreet that we were unaware of at the onset, something that alarms or disturbs or awakens us. Hence, another perhaps necessary feature that a story can take is that it must reveal, like an onion, various levels of truth about our experience as human beings. 

We are the storytelling animal. 

Jim Sidel

A Story is (a) Grammar; Narrative is Language. 

The infant's laugh is sound, her mother's cry as it leaves her room an utterance. "I" the instant the synapses connect to see the self, "U" as the front of the brain reaches to the back and we see the other.

The consonant gives shape to the vowel, form in the void of waves and particles. Shape and then figure, entity to character. 

A story is a sentence,  a relation to things in time connected by action or agreement or repulsion. A verb. 

The analogy is the attainment of a thing not yet imagined, though taped from the surry of experience. The metaphor offering that magic "click" the acid spark that lights up the eyes. 

As we proceed, there are things to remember. A story is a narrative, but a narrative is not a story. A narrative is

A chronicle of change...

Chronicle being the operative word, its prefix from the Greek, Kronos--Time. Events over time (as if there's anything else. The index of a witness that entails jugement for what is narraitable. The analogy here is safe:

A song is to music what a story is to narrative.

Hence, story is a mere genre of narrative. Narrative is the raw material, elemental and formless phenomena in a certain wavelength.

Time

Space

Entity

Event

Witness

One might ask about the tree falling in the woods. Only constraints of a particular style diminish these red hot formless objects into a story. Constraints are freedom. This isn't Orwellian Newspeak, but the same limitations that make light (darkness) and fashion our own character out of flesh. 

A story has its own definitive elements, mostly familiar to the novice.

Plot > event+time

Character> entity

Setting> space

Narrator> witness

We can also add additional material that furthers the nature of the type of narrative unfolding.

Point of View

Voice and Tone

Tension

And then further things by getting into a finer grain.

Narrative Time (scene, summary, etc.)

Tension

Narrative Drive

We can dial in further, if you'd like, but for the time being let's contemplate these materials and what they give us, but also why.

In all things, gray. The pallet nuanced. Indefinite supplants the definite. Melville's river boat passengers in The Confidence Man are shadows, not material, described by the volumes filled. Anti-literature, anti-story, anti-matter. How does the writer retreat from the habit of rendering, in the material of abstraction, the concrete? How does he not fall prey for absoluteness, for accuracy, for truth? To break this taboo, the secular and constant affirmation of "best practices: beginning with details that are concrete, fixed, relevant and absolute presents a catastrophic erasure of the discipline itself. Where does one find the solid if not in the abstract liquid domain of language?

"'I pretend not to divine your meaning there,' said the herb-doctor, after a pause, during which he eyed the Missourian with a kind of pinched expression, mixed of pain and curiosity, as if he grieved at his state of mind and at the same time, wondered what had brought him to it; 'but this much I know,' he added, 'that the general cost of your thoughts is, to say the least, unfortunate.'"

Song is to music what a story is to narrative. Music is an assortment of elements relating to sound: rhythm, tempo, dynamics, harmony, tone, texture, time, and a song is a particular arrangement of these elements according to constraints. A pop song is different from a dance mix, a piece of jazz is different from a symphony. These genres differ in how these elements are constrained; that is, how they are held back, reinforced, shaped, formed, etc. All forms of creative work exist as a combination of elements constrained according to fashion, style, or genre.
    The same is true with narrative and story.  While music is sound configured to, and arranged by constraints. Those configurations might have aesthetic or sensual values, or they might be meaningful in some other way. Narrative, for our sake, we’ll refer to in this class as “A chronicle of Change.” This is my definition and it suits the cross pollinating reality of teaching students engaged in multiple variations of creative work. Note that word “chronicle” begins with the root, “chronos” which refers to sequential time. A chronicle is an index of events over time.
    Narrative (like music) is merely a set of possibilities.  The raw material of event, space, time, entity, and observer: a chronological index of events. More precisely these elements concede to plot, setting, time, character, point of view, voice, tone, style, etc.  A story is a genre of narrative. In this class, we’re focusing on a literary form known as the short story, which is short, but, as all great art attests, much bigger than the sum of its parts.

Story and Narrative

   “I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.”

Indeed, readers, writers, filmmakers, game designers, illustrators and other practitioners of art and design that rely on narrative design and story, (even those we don’t readily consider dependent on narrative, like musicians, fashion designer or architects) take for granted their limited understanding of story as something with a beginning, middle and end, as being all there is to know about this plastic form, this universal means of organizing and transmitting experience. 

In understanding a story it’s imperative that we define and distinguish story from things it might resemble. The difference, for example, between “Story” and “Narrative” is often misunderstood.

Tony Buba at The Pacific Film Archive

Braddock Revisited

(2014) This week, the Pacific Film Archive hosts filmmaker Tony Buba. I mention Buba and his work in my April, 2012 post in Where The Weather Suites My Clothes.  Buba was one of my first film teachers back in the 1980's when I was a teenager eager to get my hands on the "big guns," a clunky Frezzolini news camera, and an ARRI BL that claimed pedigree somewhere at the front lines of "National Geographic" production: Jakarta, maybe the Alps... A documentarian himself, Buba proved to be a hands-off instructor, endorsing a DIY, guerrilla-style of filmmaking that insisted that anything he could teach us was better learned in the field. Of course, we're talking about shooting film here ($$$), not recording on an iPhone.
  His own work hit a chord; his short, gritty black and white profiles were both humane and ripe with poetics, despite directness and transparency. Characters inhabiting these hometown streets are Buba's friends, family, and acquaintances, and yet they are as rich and sparkling with color as any method actor walking Scorsese's Mean Streets. Watching the Braddock Chronicles, mostly filmed in the mid to late seventies, is akin to listening to a lost Tom Waits album from his Rain Dogs era. At the heart of such lyrical narrative, in Buba or Waits, is the place itself..."In the neighborhood, in the neighborhood...," Waits sings. In both, context becomes character. Or, each entity refuse to distinguish itself from the other.

   In a dozen or so short films we're introduced to Braddock's inhabitants: The consummate optimist, the hopeful and tragic entrepreneur, Jay Roy, proprietor of Jay Roy's New and Used Furniture, coaching his sales staff on self-respect and the dangers of not making mistakes (a moving and tender scene, balked by his own grand dreams); Peabody, a young man who's claim to fame is a fall from a six story window as a boy, a tragedy that he can't shake, that forever characterizes and determines his fate; Buba's own grandmother, Mrs. G.; and Sweet Sal, the caustic, streetwise braggadocio who's screen-time of less than half an hour forever dooms any of Hollywood's iterations of like hustlers, to the thinnest cliche. Rich, funny, and moving portraits all.
  And though self-concious and performative, his subjects are in earnest. They are grounded, yet striving for something that will enable transcendence, economic or spiritual. These are relatable themes. In Buba's cinematic Braddock, the familiar becomes exotic. The cinematography is subtle, stylistic manipulations elegant in their subtly (choices made are motivated by content).  True to realism, the Ordinary is made Extraordinary.

   However, to reduce the work to a sort of interior travel-log of hip exotica, would be to ignore exactly what the filmmaker intends, which is (first and foremost) to hold on to people in his life, people that will eventually fade away as we all do, but also to witness to how these people fit into this larger socioeconomic system and how they respond to guaranteed failure. After the houselights came up, after a bout of good natured self-deprecation (a disposition I share: idiomatic to the region) Buba's rigorous, insightful critique followed: a scalding indictment of capitalism, measured and thorough, evidenced in stories from back then and now, regionally, nationally and internationally.

For a long time I've tried to track down a quote by, I believe, Grace Paley who said a story cannot ignore the economics under which its characters exist. My awkward paraphrase highlights the  Marxist lens through which Paley writes: Marxist in the sense that the reality all human beings share is a condition of material survival, and even in the most lyrical, obtuse and intimate entries to the Republic of Letters, its a constant an artists cannot ignore. She herself poo-pooed her writing, her art: it was insignificant in the grand scheme: she was an activist first.

In almost all fiction writing and literature classes I've taken, character trumps plot and setting. This is usually a trail head undertaken to dissuade students from aping cliches, or fetishizing novelty, but beyond the pedagogical is a deeply moral, classical humanist polemic. I too am comfortable with this ideology, but cannot ignore the relationship of context to character in quite the same way. The early practitioners of Naturalism, Zola and Huysman, configured narratives in which determinism, economic and otherwise, forecloses on character. Characters are at the mercy of systems (where God had previously held office): class, economics, nature, and, cannot possibly enjoy free will. Any exhibition of agency is an illusion. This is the lens through which Stanley Kubrick saw the world, the attitude of a distant, cold scientist looking at his subjects under a microscope. Buba started in the social sciences, and film was the tool, like many documentarians, he used to explore the limits and boundaries of free will, but he never lost sight of the human beings undergoing such a challenge. These are people he loves.

   Buba's subjects are inseparable from their setting and their concerns are usually about making a buck. To write about characters in a setting, and not have a notion of how they put food on the table, lacks verisimilitude and endangers my ability to hold the author of such work up to any standard of Ethos. An odd example to use here would be Carrie Bradshaw in Sex in The City, the newspaper columnist who collects Italian pumps, lives in a Manhattan apartment as big as a presidential suite, yet probably makes $40K. Bradshaw professes no limits or sacrifice, and enjoys voraciously expensive luxuries at every turn. Anyone I knew who watched the series, no matter how latent their politics, seemed to notice this disparity, a poetic license taken but not easily swallowed. And while their might have been many things to take offense at in such a sit-com, this odd lack of realism seemed to stand out and irritate like a hangnail. 

It's a good time to think over what's changed in the last couple of years, in Braddock and in my shallow assessment of what's going on there. The thesis of my essay from 2012 pivots on what it means to re-imagine landscape: aesthetics and phenomenology. I accomplished this using Braddock as a set piece in parallel with how advertisers and image makers create mythology, and how a viewer can re-purpose that mythology to their own, perhaps more ennobled, ends.

   But a difficulty arises here when we consider Braddock and the mythology Levi's imagined of the setting. It's a mythology distinguishing wilderness from civilization, and the heroic pioneer's adventure between. The same difficulty that poisons all colonial aspirations: We think of landscape and wilderness in contrast with civilization, visually represented as an absence of people, as if we, they, us, are (as spoilers--guilty) only good in respect to not being visible. The question of aesthetics, our understanding of landscape as a visual phenomena, adapts well to these conditions. Note that even our national parks, that paragon of what we think of as the best of American Progressive tendencies, were founded on the displacement (often violent) of native people.

Visibility is a quality worthy of deep meditation. The difference between what we mean by wasteland and wilderness, and their antecedents all presume what can be seen and not, text and subtext. What lies beneath a wasteland and who determines what waste is in the first place?

In this case, Levis with the mayor's approval, portrayed Braddock as an open space, a wilderness of sorts, in which to "homestead." The ironies here are compounded when we think of this seemingly virtuous, salt-of-the-earth idea of building a home. But Braddock wasn't an empty space, it was still full of people, just not as many as had been their fifty years ago. And, of course (as the familiar story follows), these were people of color. Braddock is mostly African American, with sprinkling of Whites here and there. And the overall population grew by about 20 people. 
   Perhaps this isn't negligible in a town of such a small population, but the "settlers" were mostly white, and now many have them have also abandoned Braddock. The people of Braddock still exits and struggle to raise families in the valley. They are visible, as photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier reminds us, and they are not ghosts, nor caricatures, dolls or manikins garnishing a landscape.

   I'm always excited to see the region I grew up in grow and bring in culture. Pittsburgh, a few miles down the road, I envision as a place where art, work, landscape, and life, can cohabitate. I lived to make this happen when I spent a portion of my life there, and as a emigre I still want it to happen. The recent media hype about restaurateur Kevin Sousa's Kickstarter campaign to open a high-end establishment, Superior Motors, in Braddock sparkled with the same magic that all of Fetterman's projects induce. Apparently, Sousa's fundraising surpassed any previous food related campaign in the history of Kickstarter. As Buba pointed out during a Q and A, most of the people who gave Sousa money were white, and white people tend to give money to other white people. The groundbreaking will be in a neighborhood where the majority of the local residents (more like, all the local residents) can't even afford the tomato salad. This seems almost a dull story, how predictable this route of gentrification becomes.

   Where will the Sousa's patrons park their hybrids, and will they be able to walk down the street with the blinders, avoiding the annoyed sneers of locals? Can one simply ignore the economic realities around them in favor of pleasure? Blindly we assume authorship, dictating what comes into our everything but our most peripheral of senses, like flimsy sit-com writing. Is there shame in eating a meal, (perhaps with ingredients locally procured, something they can rest their morals on), that the family living across the street will never be able to afford? A bit of disgust floats up at this point.

The worst thing in the world, perhaps, would be for the ambitions, the visionary quests, of people like Fetterman, Sousa, and the folks at Levis, to come to light and for a shitload of people to "homestead" Braddock by buying up and restoring turn of the century homes (if that's even possible in a town where the most notable landmark is a carcinogen huffing steel mill). Property values go up. Where will the people of Braddock go?

   And yet the tax money is leaving. USS pays a sickeningly small portion to the city. The property on which the Edgar Thompson (ET) Works are built is valued at something like 3 million. This is a mill produces something like 2.9 million net tons of steel a year, approximately twenty percent of the nation's current steel production. ET employs, however, only a few hundred people. Schools are underfunded and closing. The hospital closed. The streets are falling apart. This is a corporation folks, responsible to no one.

   Aching over Braddock (or Pittburgh, a city that kept its head above water and is now being courted by Google) isn't just provincialism: it takes little foresight to see the parallels all over the country, from Midtown Manhattan to San Francisco. The contempt for the poor and the middle class, the unceasing efforts of the rich and the powerful to dominate and push away. One doesn't have to even be a inhuman avatar of the plutocracy, or even a predatory, pinky-ringed Wall Street villain to play into these mechanisms. It might be that  John Fetterman and sensualists like Sousa, or any of the wide-eyed, have good intentions, but without bracing against capitalism measures of success, then failure is eminent. It's in the broth.

Rather than further the topic through my own lens, I offer an update by Sean Posey (who's also a photographer) in Rust Wire, "The Battle for Braddock, PA"

Szopka Part 3: The Paxton Boys

The Conestoga massacre perpetrated by the Paxton Boys 

Calendar Gearwheels

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.

Isaiah 11:6-8 (NKJV)

                                                               

Edward Hicks painted dozens of different versions of The Peaceable Kingdom. Hick’s has trapped the moment. Not only once, but in each painting he violates the fatalism of the clock. A profundity I can’t let go of. Death can be postponed, but the arrangement of past, present and future on time’s progressive slide-rule, the immutable law governs everything and offers no loopholes or compromise. But as Hicks reminds us, we have ways of subverting even this. Art, narrative in particular, offers a glimmer of hope. 

Edward Muybridge

A model trapped in time, never advancing or receding. A snapshot, like Muybridge’s racehorse, four hooves off the ground. Suspension. Each rendition starts and stops with an eternal moment, the treaty signing. Neither a history, nor a foreseeable future. Such an understanding of time underscores the child-like, or childish dysfunction of the work. Childhood, as Gaston Bachelard described, “liberated from the gearwheels of the calendar.”

   One imagines Hicks in his studio, painting a fleur-de-lis on a rocking chairs by the candle light. Boredom keeps him company. But there’s also guilt. Ornamental painting is, though not outwardly prohibited, frowned on by the tenants of “simple” Quaker living. But finances are problematic. A debt that will follow him for the rest of his life forces him to paint. Or so he tells his friends. He confesses guilt over attending to such a “superfluous” profession. To live the quiet Quaker life, free from distracting things (like painting) was to make space for this “inner light.” He quits painting and tries farming and fails, eventually returning to art. Over time, his patient friends accept, or tolerate, his work. He advertises in local papers, receives clients, hangs sign-boards and hires apprentices. Perhaps there’s a hint of rebellion when he picks up a shingle and draws an outline of an ox and then a lion. Over years he paints his Kingdoms in secret, trying again and again to “get it right” or to refresh a vision that comforts him. As an action, revisiting this narrative moment, Hick’s demonstrates some agency himself.

Time is conditional in art. Hick’s deference to his “inner light” won’t allow him to shake reason in favor of imagination, history in favor of memory. In the attack and completion of multiple Kingdoms, Hicks lived the memory of the history. The paintings aren’t to be confused with events real (as in historical), or anticipated (as in prophesied). Penn’s treaty and Isaiah’s prophecy are re-lived by the act of painting rather than the existence of the paintings themselves. The Kingdoms are indexes, foot prints, of the artist as inhabiting an idea. In this act of playfulness, Hicks “speaks” events to life.  

Distinctions between the spoken and the written, the act of listening in respect to the act of reading, are profound. As Walter Ong explains in his seminal, Orality and Literacy, “Sound exists only when it going out of existence. It is not simply perishable but essentially evanescent, and it is sensed as evanescent. When I pronounce the word ‘permanence’, by the time I get to the ‘-nence’, the ‘perma-’ is gone, and has to be gone.” (Ong 32)

Walter Ong

The brush stroke as breath, as a word spoken. And so Hicks made manifest a kingdom peaceable; not by finishing a painting and showing it off, but by the act. Process over product. The artist Hicks, becomes Sendak’s Max (Where The Wild Things Are), imaging and inhabiting his inner world. The final painting, doesn’t illustrate faith, but replies as an index, a footprint, of the artist at “play.”

Mnemonic Device

Direct written documentation of Penn’s treaty with the Lenni Lanape at Shackamaxon hasn’t survived, though the tribe recalled and retold the event for decades using techniques that hadn't changed in thousands of years: physical, tactile gestures corroborating memory. Hick's repetitions with his brush echo such gestures.

The oral traditions of the original inhabitants of the continent were complex and varied. For the Lanape and their neighbors these technologies were particularly elegant. These soft technologies of memorization are far more portable than writing and reading, and, unfortunately, are lost in our world of print and screen. In this particular oral culture, recitation was practiced under ceremonial protocols and coached by other members of the tribe (usually clan-mothers) who acted as correctives (ie. bullshit detectors), insuring a level of remarkable constancy over generations. These were not casual or primitive means of keeping record.

A Lenape man dedicated to preservation of the “Treaty of Amity and Friendship” would have relied on a belt of wampum beads. Wampum is neither currency nor text, but, like the knots on prayer shawls worn by Orthodox Jews (or the beaded bracelet, the japa mala that encircle the wrists of Buddhists and Hindus; or the pearls on a Catholic rosary; or the misbaha preferred by the followers of Islam), the beads are pinched to provoke the memory of a prayer, history, or in this case all of the above. In practice, each grain of narrative, each beat or phrase or formula, inhabits a bead caressed.

Like Faulkner’s claim to art (literature), in which he attests to “arresting motion,” in order for it to “move again, for it is life,” the wampum speaker would “breath” life into the event itself, for the breath and the word are coordinate, as is breath and life. “Law” therefore, becomes a living and breathing spirit, while written law an object, a thing, a contractual arrangement and to molder. Like any living thing, the oral agreement requires repeated husbandry. Life must be breathed into the agreement time and time again in order for the treaty to remain “alive.”

We think of breath as transient and paper and ink as fixed. But the paradox here is that written laws, which seem so intractable, are easily ignored or forgotten. And this forgetfulness anticipates one of the darkest periods of Pennsylvania’s history. Perma-nence here, was the idea, not the law as written

In the nineteenth century, the nadir of Penn’s Holy Experiment, a militia calling themselves The Paxton Boys would massacre the last remaining peaceful coalitions between the Indians and white settlers, a belt of wampum, strewn among the ashes, would surface as a sad reminder of all that was lost.

The New Orthodoxy and The Schism

Quaker ministers, Hicks in particular, favored allegory as a rhetorical strategy in their sermons. Yet the beasts inhabiting his Kingdom—lion, wolf, ox, and lamb—go beyond simply illustrating Isaiah’s prophecy.

   Allegory, any figurative comparison between un-like things, requires intellect and imagination rather than submission to literal interpretations. For Friends the Bible was a product of man’s imagination, not God. The Gospels were a source of inspiration, not law. Arriving at a such modern credo was symptomatic of The Enlightenment. Quakers were a product of the Enlightenment. The Quaker principle of “inner light,” was at the seat of Reason itself. The inner light as the universal germ of the divine: the ability to reason the gift of that divinity. Reason as virtue.

A painful schism among his fellows would disappoint Hicks, a revolution that would become the subject of later iterations of his Kingdom. His disillusion was a product of a new generation of Quakers, the up and comers in England, failing to adhere to the virtues of “inner light,” and the trust in Reason that so characterized his fellow believers. To Hick’s, the heresy of deluding the centrality of the “inner light” and the subsequent abandoning of Reason allowed for one’s animal nature to take over. 

The Four Humors

Descriptions of human behavior in that century still relied on pseudoscience. That relative balances of four bodily fluids (humors) produced distinct variations in temperament had yet to be challenged by hard science. In Hick’s Kingdom, each animal represents a particular temperament and its connection to one of the four humors. Note that each humor manifests itself in a virtue and its negative counterpoint.

 the wolf  > black bile/melancholic = thoughtful yet clever, deceitful

 the leopard > blood/sanguine = cheerful yet savage, wanton, cruel

 the bear > phlegm/phlegmatic = rational yet apathetic, calculating, voracious

 the lion > yellow bile/choleric = brave yet lustful, dominating, merciless

The schism began, Hicks believed, when the Orthodox lost their faith in “the inner light,” that flame of Reason over nature, the divine over the alchemical, thus falling prey to lust, greed, and ambition. The Later Kingdoms chronicle events. A historical record of the Quaker faith in the 19^th century.

Understand that the idea of an “inner light” was considered a radical heresy for which European Quakers had been persecuted. William Penn himself spent time in jail for his beliefs. Freedom of religion was a novel idea, a meme adrift in salons. Quakers of Hick's generation were more than products of the Enlightenment, they were radicals. American Quakers read Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Reason and the ability of the intellect to discern God and worship him were required. But their practiced “quietism,” the philosophy of serenity through passivity, also kept them quiet. To live the quiet Quaker life, free from distracting things (like painting) was to make space for this “inner light.”

   English Quakers, evolving in a more fractious spiritual climate than their American counterparts, began to chafe under these ironically coined “primitive” beliefs in Reason and the Inner Light. Amidst the nineteenth century’s evangelical awakening, younger Quakers felt pressured to compete. To insure survival, the horizontal, egalitarian structure of the sect gave way to a deterministic, centralized authority. Adherence to scriptural dogma neutralized dissent. The idea of the “inner light,” so endemic to Quaker theology, diminished in value along with other trapping including a mistrust of worldliness and vanity. Yet they proved excellent in business, due in part to the rigor of their work ethic. English Quakers, and many of their cosmopolitan compatriots in Philadelphia, went about like dandies in expensive coats and buckled shoes. They shamelessly entered into commercial enterprises, banking and money-lending, professions frowned on by the Primitives. And they were successful (think Cadbury Chocolate and Lloyd’s of London). This new Orthodoxy was producing an entirely different animal.

   While tensions always existed between rural and cosmopolitan Friends, the arrival of this “new orthodoxy” instigated the schism. Characterization of the schism is difficult. The splinter, at first, was diametric between the new “Orthodox” and the old “Primitives.”     

   The “Orthodox” strove to incorporate the members of the Society under fundamentalist and authoritarian dogma. Ironically, it was these Orthodox Quakers that would ignite the eventual abolition of slavery on a global scale, an end to what was previously understood, throughout human history, as an intrinsic organ of civilization without which it would cease to exist. The “Primitives,” on the other hand, while they agreed that slavery was a gross injustice, were appalled by these broad sweeps of moral authority, and asserted the “inner light” as the only truly “Quaker” mechanism for achieving justice on this earth and resisted involvement in the noisy, worldly public sphere, even when such mechanisms support justice. And it must be noted that, while Quakers by Hicks’ time reviled slavery, their predecessors (even the founders of the sect) owned and traded African slaves.

     This perforation, while never violent, was so demoralizing that Hick’s couldn’t help expressing his disappointment through his art. His perceived role as the feud unfolded can be read in the faces of his beast. One imagines him laughing, for example, when he painted the miserable countenance on his poor lion. He’d made room for his anger on his easel.

Our painter Edward Hick’s, emphatic about the virtues of Primitive Quaker values, was a staunch follower of Elias Hicks, his cousin, whose followers became known as “Hicksites.” Though the schism remained bloodless, Elias found himself excised from Friend’s meetings, his followers ostracized.

Gladtiding

In later Kingdoms a new theme overshadows Penn’s Treaty Vignette: a gathering of primitive Quakers. A banner proclaims: “Mind the LiGHt Within…IT IS GLADTIDING of Grate JOY…PEACE ON EARTH…GOOD WILL to ALL MEN Every where.” By this time the schism has become history, and though the sect has split, Edward has rekindled hope. The homage includes the recently deceased Elias Hicks, as well as founding fathers George Fox, Richard Barklay, and Edward’s hero, returned for the sake of continuity, William Penn.

     William Penn represented for Hicks the paragon of Quaker quietism, piety and virtue. He didn’t set out to deceive, but his “inner light,” his reason, like the Orthodox generation that would follow, was eclipsed by an animal nature. The “Holy Experiment” ran at cross-purposes with Penn’s obligation to King Charles II. Penn was merely a real estate agent. His true nature, his humor, might have been the cartoonish bear: a chubby, slow moving, coldly calculating appetite. Though Penn deserves some credit for at least imagining tolerance at all (particularly novel at the time), divergent from reality as it was.

After he died, utilitarian materialism would outlive any fairy-tale of oxen and black bear, kid and leopard, poisoning the story that would unfold there after.

Predator and Prey

Pax Zoologica is a fantasy, but who wouldn’t like to imagine an alternative universe in which the Conestoga, the Lane Lanape, and the Seneca live side-by-side with German Anabaptists and Hickite Quakers without threat of violence? The end of the international slave trade began in the late eighteenth century, and, though it would take decades of work to put an end to the peculiar institution, freed slaves as well would be part of Penn’s happy enterprise. Given insurmountable odds against such a peace, is it worth envisioning the hybrid style of civilization that might have evolved if things hadn’t gone to shit?

If I could imagine a fantasy for Pennsylvania: What would such a peace yield?

Even holding to the best of intentions, tragedy, unfortunately, appears illimitable. Syphilis and small pox would have taken their toll no matter how righteous William Penn might have been. Even without violence, jostling between vastly different cultures creates insurmountable deficits. Imagine the growing pains of an ancient culture fully adapted to oral discourse suddenly switching to chirographic technologies, to writing and reading. Every mode of discourse no longer has meaning: standards of truth and falsehood rendered in-concrete. memories and histories lost forever. And that’s just the start.

Tolerance

Even the word “peace” is difficult to translate, particularly when “peace” for the Seneca doesn’t mean cessation of inter-tribal warfare but simply the maintenance of a balance of power. Peace is a state of perpetual nature. For the nineteenth century Quaker “peace” meant the antithesis of violence unless necessity, such as a revolution, required a call to arms. And for the new “Orthodox” Quakers “peace” meant the complete absence of aggression.

    The outlook for my fantasy of Pennsylvania, even with a generous dose of luck, remains grim. But to imagine a peace that encourages the mutual cooperation between vastly different societies into perpetuity, is a worthy vision. Is it worth considering intentions, even when sewn with hypocrisy?

Pennsylvania’s “Great Law” hosted incongruous religious stripes that otherwise lived in the expectation of violent persecution. Along with the Quakers, Anabaptists and Amish, Moravians, Unitarians, Mennonites, Coptic Christians, even Jews braved the Atlantic to get here. Tolerance, a fringe virtue in Europe, delivered them. William Penn himself, jailed for his beliefs, had first hand experience. Following an unheard of model set forth by Rhode Island, Pennsylvania boasted no official religion. It would become, in eighteenth century, one of the most diverse communities in the entire world. The epitome of enlightened tolerance, and a cautionary tale.

     Having come out of Europe’s bloody religious wars, the notion of tolerance seemed like a pipe-dream. Intolerance didn’t undo the Peaceable Kingdom, private property, the idea that land existed to be mastered, cut apart, bought and sold was the misplaced gene that caused the malignancy of intolerance. The distinction determines everything, if you’re a Marxist. Private property is like a corrupted gene from one generation to the next. Though more like a virus with its likelihood to spread. Land as currency is an awkward analogy to make unless you’re a capitalist. To the Lane Lanape and Conestoga the forest was eternal, endless, as was their preeminence. The Indian believed in the permanence of the land and her people, with the colonists as novel irregularities.

     Had Penn’s vision, his idealism, displaced his official mandate, and had it survived past his lifetime Pennsylvania, predicated on coexistence and tolerance, a living and breathing hybrid of folk styles, would be the most advanced society in the world today. Now its lost history serves as only a vague reminder of a genre of democracy that seems further and further out of reach. But this is the convenience of rear-view mirror thinking. A utopia, perhaps?

The End of History

Lotto and Capoferri's marquetry, Bergamo, Italy.

On the rocky hills outside of Bergamo, in the north west of Italy, behind ancient stone walls is a small church. Displayed here are several inlaid wood panels depicting biblical stories, products of a collaboration between Renaissance artist, Lorenzo Lotto, and master craftsman Giovanni Francesco Capoferri. The subtle art of marquetry illustrates David’s victory over Goliath, the trial of Lot, and Judith’s beheading of Holofernes. The characters’ gestures, the ingeniously rendered through the deft pairing of swatches of olive, oak and walnut. As astonishing as the craftsmanship may be, what struck me most was that each frame contained a single landscape in which all events of a particular story were contained simultaneously. Certainly this contamination of a narrative present by its past and future isn’t unique to Lotto’s work, but his particular arrangement, his  elevated liberties elevates the work above crafty novelty. Time acquiesces to the artist. Stories unfold clockwise or not. The end suggests a beginning, etc. This is painting akin to memory, not history. Art, not politics. 

As any undergraduate will tell you, utopia means ou topos, no place, and eu topos, a place where All-Is-Well. An oxymoron of sorts. All is well, as in “all,” that is, “everything.” Taken literally, theoretical dangers begin to mount, probable hazards confirmed by history. As Steven Pinker points out in his seminal, The Better Angels of Our Nature, utopian dogma begins with “pernicious utilitarian calculus.” Thomas Merton calls this state of state-being "the proximate Utopia" a provisional, penultimate state "where the last sins are currently being eliminated and where, tomorrow, there will be no more sins because all the sinners will have been wiped out." If one believes in a forthcoming infinite happiness, a true utopia, the systematic removal of obstacles to this perfected state of being is rational. Of course, these “obstacles” are the would-be critics of this perfect happiness: i.e. people who bleed. But of course their numbers are limited in respect to the future. Finite individuals, even in gross hoards (tens, hundreds, millions?) remain finite, and their elimination, absolute and complete, is validated in the happiness, absolute and complete of the lucky generations inhabiting this infinite state of happiness, infinitely. A utopia must be born out of purges…

     Christianity, even in this century, continues to believe in such a perfected life, the afterlife, and proves the best example of this grim logic: this imperfect world matters not when perfection exists elsewhere. Those who believe go to heaven. The utopian vision imagines holding on, pinching the clock, stopping time as imagined in the pages of their lexicons. Mao attempted to end history by the implementation of continuous beginnings (perpetual destruction), an unquenched revolution. And all this orbited his megalomaniacal narcissism. Some thirty million dead, mostly by neglect.

     The classical Marxist notion of historical inevitability features as a target the end of change itself. Christianity serves the beginning of history (as Christians like to think) and the Marxist revolution as its end. The proletariat will cleanse the world of inequity and paradise will follow. Free will and agency only buttons fitting buttonholes, links in a causal and final chain. The Third Riche was supposed to be around for at least a thousand years. The narcissism of childishness. Idealists of the worst kind make play with time on a grand scheme.

     Perhaps then, Penn’s vision, or any democracy, is not utopian in the strictest sense of the world, for such a society was predicated not on a purified ideal, but on an awkward cohabitation between distinctly different ways of life. This cohabitation takes every day for its own history. Every day one must relive the notion of tolerance, breath life into it word by word.

The inmates of Hick’s zoological allegory stand waxen, static: an ideal to ruminate on, an infinity to ponder. His beasts animate his inner turmoil, personal as it was, but freeze themselves in symbiotic harmony. The arrangement of Penn and his treaty’s cosigners stop in their tracks. This is the best it will ever be. Perhaps. A singular moment of tranquility. A beautiful notion, but imperfect.Verbs acquire the taint of time.

     The clock stops. Not a megalomaniac messing with the gear works, just an artist, an obsessive in his workshop. This is passive agency, this peculiar Kingdom. A suggestion of how we could be. The verbs that describe the behavior of the actors may be passive. The grass is being eaten by the lion, the treaty is being exchanged, etc.

The image of these beasts coexisting becomes a fetish, the fetish becomes is reclaimed as parody, the end result may be satire. What happens after the ox and lion run out of straw, or when the child that leads them looks away? While Hick’s fantasy achieves a state of perfection, Pennsylvania’s Peaceable Kingdom fell short of Utopian absolutism. Its flaws were in its DNA. When Penn died his sons inherited the mandate, and, perhaps chaffing against their father’s piety, detoured the colony away from peace, particularly in respect to the “heathen” natives.

The Paxton Boys

Outliving its moment as a flagship of tolerance and peace, Pennsylvania succumbed to capitalism’s predatory nature and thimblerigged one of the most outrageous shell games of all time. The American art of larceny went pro along the banks of the Susquehanna River in the nineteenth century. The most infamous, the so-called “Walking Purchase,” in which the Penn family defrauded the Lane Lenape (Delaware) out of a million acres, cut so deep that, to this day, the unhealed wound continues to sting Diaspora. As recently as 2004, the Delaware Nation sued for justice, and even though the US Supreme Court acknowledges The Walking Purchase as fraudulent, it still dismissed the case.

  Shackamaxon Wampum (Penn Treaty Museum, Pennsylvania)

Like present day Israel, squatters fueled by a mythic sense of entitlement pushed westward, laying claim to prohibited territories and, unsurprisingly, provoking violence from inhabitants brushed aside.

     Paramilitary bands of Scotch-Irish settlers marshaled tit for tat raids of revenge. One of these militia, The Paxton Boys, marched on the city of brotherly love, lobbying for assistance. But Philadelphia’s pacifist, Quaker lawmakers, scoffed at such requests. At least officially: It was mighty convenient to leave the dirty work of conquest to these Ulster Presbyterians.

     Issues of class complicate the narrative. The Quakers running the show from Philadelphia were the same breed that so irked Edward Hicks and his cousin Elias, while the settlers, as cantankerous and violent as they were, lived hand-to-mouth. The Scotch-Irish had had it up to here with landed, ruling classes and would stop at nothing to cast off the yoke of servitude of serfdom endured for millennia. Liberation for these immigrants started and stopped with property. Land was their divine entitlement. The Indians were heathens. Do the math. 

     The tipping point occurred in 1763, after the peace settlement between the French and British, when the Paxton Boys, a militia made up of these Scotch-Irish, massacred a settlement that included a half dozen Conestoga Indians, including men women, and children, who’d been living peaceful with Moravian residents for over a decade. The event would prove the tipping point in Pennsylvania’s relationship with Native Americans. The long downward slope from Shackamaxon to finally coming to its flat-line at a place called Conestoga. The Paxton Boys, blood soaked murderers, marched on Philadelphia a month later to galvanize state officials, including Benjamin Franklin, into supporting their campaign, and were met, while not with immediate support, without punitive disaffection for their lawlessness. In other words, the overt breaking of treaties and bloodletting was no longer criminal.

     A further irony is that, according to historian James H. Merrell, the site of the massacre was itself a historic treaty ground, and, from under the smoldering ruins of the house in which the murders took place, wampum belts and paper treaties were recovered. One document, signed by the hand of William Penn, pledged:

“…that they (the colonists, and the Conestoga) shall forever hereafter be as one Head & One Heart, & live in true Friendship & Amity as one People.” Penn’s own note to self and surviving offspring stated, “for himself, his heirs and Successors, yt he and they will at all times shew themselves true Friends & Brothers to all & Every one of ye Said Indians.” (Merrel 288)

Now the Indian population in Pennsylvania, while present, is officially invisible. Those who remain have little political clout. During the Kennedy administration Pennsylvania Indians were forced off tribal land so engineers could minimize the risk of flooding by the upper Allegheny river. The resulting Kinzua dam condemned forest belonging, by law, to the Seneca, displacing 600 people whose claim went back as far to a treaty with George Washington. The tense shifts to past participle: were living, were breathing.

Evanescent

Ignoring all this inglorious history, Edward Hick’s vision, his William Penn and Tamanend, and his wild-things all frozen in amber, might be read disdainfully as romantic. A willful impediment to that narrative quality called profluence, the river’s condition of constant forward movement. A gesture of sad longing for a past that really never was. A fantasy. Even if there was a historical moment in which enlightened tolerance produced any modicum of peace, that moment was like a word spoken, impermanent. Or as Walter Ong might insist, evanescent.

 

As Edward’s brush settled on a liberated landscape, he holds his breath. In that instant he succeeds in perfection. His work is play, perhaps, but serious play. Serious play in which he controls time, a magic that remains, and will always remain, solely in the hand of the artist and the poet. Breath expired, the moment is gone again, only to be re-imagined on another plank. And as we spectators stare back at the lion and the lamb, excusing their tentative uncertainty, we too relish the possibility of peace.