Fingernails slash roughly into thick oil paint. It’s a built in palatte knife, the fingernail. The finger moves the paint in a swirl of modernist, non representational movement. The artist takes a rough hoghair brush and tamps it into the mass of color spreading in the void of everything, catching the emotion of sunlight as a snowstorm begins to swirl. With a breath, J.M.W. Turner (b. 1775, d. 1851) pauses and takes a step back from his canvas. He knows that he’s done something in the capturing of this thing called emotion that many around him would flatly reject. The history painting ruled his day, and although his atmospheric snapshots were often included in history paintings, they would not be understood because of the visceral physical gesture captured they would not be understood for their full vocabulary for some time after the artist’s passing. The english painter J.M.W. Turner did not live a life of tragedy at the same scale as, say, Van Gogh. His far seeing technique was well beyond his age. I did not come to understand him until recently. Now I rank him among my favorites.
Sometimes we do not see things because we are not ready to see them; we do not hear things because we have not developed enough, collected and gathered enough maturity in order that we might hear the thing as it should be heard…and we cannot often feel the full impact of a life experience until much later in the journey. I remember when I first read the book The Giver. Even on first reading, I was left breathless. But you know, I go back to that book every so often because it reminds me of an ancient puzzle, always unlocking and reminding me of things in the present. In its simple story, there are complex moments; for example, the main character, a young boy who lives in a black and white world, has never seen color, not one glimmer of it. Then one day, when he is tossing an apple into the air, in mid throw as it flies up to fall down, he sees a flash of red. In that second, a seed is planted that for him means that his world is not as simple as the black and white humdrum of mass culture. I did not understand the full impact of this moment, either as I was reading it originally or as i continued to read it through the years. But now, at the age of 32, I have a clearer picture. I can see the detail that had eluded me. I am a different person than I once was.
Note that I don’t think that anyone can truly say that everything is understood by them. Good art, good thinking, always can be revisited, rehashed, and reborn, into new self awareness. Not everyone understands this. Now, it’s not a jem of some cosmic truth, but people often simply miss the point. They read too much or too little into every action and/or reaction.
This week, twenty five miners died, I could not help but think, as I do about everything, where were each one of those miners in the walk of life? What were they thinking about, what did they understand anew, what gifts had been brought to the world through their hands, their hearts, and their minds? I could not help but think about their reality as individuals, and the impact that their community would feel. How long it would take for the families to come to terms even if they ever could. All this swirled in my mind at 3 AM as it broke through the white noise of my television. Then an interview with an early morning news program. A typical family from the coal fields answered questions in an unmistakeable coal field drawl, and then at the end the mother said, “And we have not even gotten word from the coal company that our loved one is dead. We heard it in and through the community.”
The way we treat the coal industry reminds me of my first true look at J.M.W. Turner. His stormy skies brought to life through slashes and heavy brush marks, were always there. I was just too naive to see them. I had classified it as a type of realism and filed his paintings away as not being relevant to my time, style, and taste. Now with a fresher mind, I see him everywhere in my work. It is these new eyes that we need to cast upon the coal industry. We need to say that we recognize the historical patterns and we demand that you change, because in the end, the industry is not betting that anyone will approach them with a fresh perspective. They view environmentalists as crazy reactionaries and historically, they’ve painted a picture of the environmental movement in this way (noting that some in the environmental movement have helped in the creation of this stereotype). They view the worker as simply that: a mechanized gadget to improve profit margin. And the rest of the masses outside of the industry and the environmental movement? They historically see them as cows, simply interested in chewing their cud, in this case the cud being electricity. We must cast new eyes on the coal industry and see their pattern for what it is. We must galvanize as a mass culture to demand changes, changes that should be brought about not just by the blood of these 25 victims, but by a whole history of a people being oppressed here in the colonial land of Appalachia. For what it’s worth, wipe away the cataracts which are the filmy residue built up over the mind’s eye of the society, and we can make a difference.
Leave a Reply