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Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Rivers and Tides

[cross-posted on my Gaia site]

Last Christmas, my friend Kathy gave me a copy of the documentary Rivers and Tides, about the work of Scottish environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. I'm a little embarrassed about how long it took me to get around to watching it. I'm so glad I finally did.

At first blush, this documentary is 90 minutes of footage of a man playing with sticks, snow and rocks. Beneath the surface, this is a very compelling and beautiful story of a man who has found his life's work making beautiful sculptures from the elements. His work is designed to be ephemeral -- he'll spend a day or two or three developing a piece of art, only to see it melt, thaw or be carried out with the tide.

His work offers a window into the transcendent in nature and illustrates the extreme fragility of the world around us.

Something about this documentary touched some pretty deep chords in me. After sitting down somewhat skeptically and watching the documentary with just one eye over the first ten or fifteen minutes, I got completely drawn in. There is so much that I admire about what this man is doing. I rewound certain parts and watched them again and again. I got out the second DVD and watched a bunch of the additional footage, the kind that certifies your standing as a bona fide fan. And I had to stop halfway into the video and get out my journal and write:

"Here's a guy who is basically doing pure art. He's working in deep connection to a landscape and he seems to be working for no particular audience. The elements are so pure. Water, sun, earth. He is doing it to achieve a greater understanding of the transience of life. It's not about scoring xyz gallery or spinning his grant application in the right way with the right phrases. It is about pleasure, learning and beauty."

Over the past couple of years I have noticed the increasing volume of drumbeats in my head. The drumbeats calling me to The Great Work. This Goldsworthy video was another wakeup call.

I'm not even sure what I mean by The Great Work, and I feel more than a bit foolish talking about it here. But the idea isn't going away, so it's probably time to try to poke at it some more.

What it's not:
This is not about spraypainting my name ("Class of '92!!!!") on the caves of Lascaux. This is not some Salieri-esque dream of immortality. I don't wish to be famous or rich. I don't care about making some mark on the artistic world that will never fade away.

What it is:
It's a desire to create something larger and more honest and more direct. It's a desire to bring more truth to the table. It's what Mike Scott was getting at when he wrote a song called "The Big Music" for The Waterboys 20 years ago:

I have heard the big music
And I'll never be the same
Something so pure
just called my name

Why fill your life with hundreds of your dumb snapshots when you can take three or four or just one really good photo. I think that we have the opportunity to speak more truth, we should.

(For me, "truth" is still a word that has a lot of sticky Christian tentacles attached to it. Certain Christian groups talk about the world's "truth" and about Jesus's "Truth," and about how the only enduring Truth is that found in Jesus Christ. I don't believe that anymore, and I'm trying to reclaim the concept from the church. Truth is turning out to be something much more beautiful and powerful and startling and life-giving than I was ever able to see before.)

In all of its breathlessness and recklessness, Annie Dillard's Living With Weasels grabbed me by the scruff of my neck about fifteen years ago and it still hasn't let go:

"We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

"I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."

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