The Mysteries of the Deep

Last August we went to the beach on Oak Island, southward from Wilmington, NC. The top photograph is the view from where our rental beach house was. We'll be there again this August, but the pier was to be torn down. Will a local effort have saved the pier? Will the pier, through some local effort, have been preserved, allowed to stand against the tenditiousness of development, which supplies its own argument: no parcel of land that could be converted into money producing space can be allowed to stand idle - every square inch of humanely habitable land has to belch out dollars in a constant stream or there's no justification for it.
We enjoy the beach and right now, with a month to go before vacation, we're ready to hit the sand and dive into the waves. This year we've two solid weeks at the beach: one week in South Carolina and the next week in North Carolina.
At the end of those two weeks, Jami begins her new job at Duke Divinity. It's official now. Their offer letter arrived in the mail. Of course the way posts are dated, this post will appear off a day from that. That is I suspect that this post will be dated for Wednesday, even though I will probably finish writing it early Friday morning. Things interfere with writing: painting, sermon writing, reading for the sermon, thinking about the sermon, rewriting the sermon, eating lunch, shopping, replacing the dishwasher hose. But now I can write. Rain has pelted down on Decatur since 8 PM. I find the rhythm of rainfall to be conducive to creativity and meditation. Tonight was the first good rain we've had in over a month.
At the beach it will rain at least one day, maybe two. Last year it rained and Tony and Leanne braved the treacherous wind and surf to retrieve our beach umbrellas.
Last year I brought 32 books to the beach. Among them were Pound's Cantos and Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. This year I am thinking about Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Jung's Mysterium Conjuntionis. I will try to keep the total of books under 20. It will be difficult. I want to do more water color this year. And this year I will try to do some blogging, even as others blog from that location.
I brought a bunch of DVDs last year because the place we rent has a giant TV. The house gets Turner Classic Movies so I'll keep the number of movies down. I'll try to hold the total down to five. I have to keep my total baggage down because I'll be flying from Durham back to Atlanta. My CPE at Atlanta Medical Center begins on August 20. Jami and I will do the long distance thing for a few months as I arrange a transfer to a CPE program in Durham or Chapel Hill.
In the bottom photo I'm on a small charter craft with about 30 other people fishing 20 some miles off shore. Tim, Tony, Leanne and I went fishing last summer. This year I'm staying on shore. I've never experienced sea sickness before.
During our honeymoon, walking out to the pier on the Thames for a boat that would take us to the Tate Modern form the Tate Pre-modern, the lapping of the waves brought back the beginning of the whole sea sick wooziness that I'd experienced last summer. Jami felt it too but didn't want to say. We took other means to the Tate Modern. We loved the Modern. It's on the south bank in an old power plant. They had a great surrealist exhibit up. A large David Smith retrospective was displayed. I've never seen so much of his work up close and it blew me away. One of the concerns of modernism is attention to the spirituality of form in itself through attention to the form and material of work in process - without recourse to overt subject matter: that is the subject matter of painting is painting and of sculpture sculpture. Smith exemplifies this. Looking at his work in this retrospective, I could see how he'd progressed, how his process changed to meet new personal challenges, and finally how he'd mastered the materials and created a vocabulary of shape and handling that brought about a spiritual experience. That is: the sculpture created a space that I entered, and in that space the sculpture changed that space as I was in it and changed the way that I was in it. I think this is what my teachers meant by the presence of a piece. They used the word presence like most people would us the word illusion to describe premodern painting or sculpture. The presence of a piece can not be conveyed by a slide or photo representation.
A lot of work doesn't have presence - or I should say, we're not taught to experience presence. The lure of mimesis is that we're taught to search for mimetic illusion - but illusion fails to represent: illusion betrays itself as not the thing. This is the subject matter of Magritte's C'est ne pais une pipe. When we cease looking for mimesis and its false comforts we can enter into the presence of a piece - a piece is more like nature in that that's the way we enter nature (although mimesis is attempted in nature now as well in certain kinds of theme parks, think Maggie Valley or Pigeon Forge. Or consider that now we look at the Grand Canyon but look only for its resemblance, its mimetic appeal, to an idea we have of Grand Canyoness - we are now trained not to see its presence).
We can experience presence in terms of scale. Scale is the relationship between the size of the parts of a piece to the size. That is: it's possible to have a small but large scale piece - as well as a large but small scale piece. When a piece is really large it acquires the characteristic of monumentality. Monumentality is a large scale but with the absence of any kind of ratio between small and large. The monumental, because it is often minimal, becomes the small part of the surrounding space - and this is what makes it monumental - like Richard Serras tilted pieces of wielded steel plate - there is no small piece to large piece ration; there is only the fact of these large slabs. What these slabs do is energize the space so that the whole area is brought into the artwork's field. Or what these slabs do is make you the smallest part of the ratio - and they bring you into the field of the artwork. This is what Smith's later work does.
Last year we three brought in a modest haul. We got our 13 pieces of fish back to the house and Jami broiled them with some lemon and garlic - I think. It was the best fish I'd ever had. 23 miles out, the bottom feeders are fair game. You cast out 100 ft of line and wait for your baited hook to bump into the wide open mouth of whatever these fish were - I can't remember the name, although a young girl on board caught a Spanish Mackeral - far from home. It was a beautiful fish, all dark and smooth, silvery and fierce. It had a presence.