by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Aug 8, 2019 | Featured, Poetry, Travel
As I turned away from Degas’ statuette of a dancer at the Musee D’Orsay in Paris last week, I almost missed the imitators. The imitators were lining up, looking at the statuette and striking a pose. The reaction was not mocking and somehow not disrespectful. The imitators were reacting to a man-made object created out of his imagination. The interaction is what mattered.
When I was in high school, I read a line from W. H. Auden that said “poetry makes nothing happen.” It stopped me in my tracks. It was the late ’60s. I wanted to do things that made things happen. I became a lawyer. I made things happen.
Now I know I misread the line. Auden was making fun of all those things that appear to make things happen but really don’t. Art makes things happen in that it offers the chance to interact with a created object from another person’s imagination.
But why does that matter? It seems that at the center of our existence we travel a number of years in the mundane pursuit of what we need to survive, but art offers a conversation with another who is, or has been, on that same journey. It offers, but does not demand, this conversation.
In the same gallery, hordes of people were moving from picture to picture, cell phones out, photographing the exhibit as they hurried by. They had not accepted the offer. They were just capturing the object.
The imitators had accepted the offer. They were interacting with the Degas’ statuette.
The conversation can happen in many forums but it is always between the artist and the self. It can come through some or all the senses. It can be theoretical. It can come with an artist’s demand for your attention, as with Andy Warhol asking you to notice common objects, but for me it is always a very personal person-to-person communication.
It can also be environmental. On my way home, I noticed the statues in the park and the park in the city as I walk through. The art of the statue inside the art of the park surrounded by the mundane existence of the traffic and commerce of the city.
I found Auden’s quote:
“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”
In Memory of W.B.Yeats
(d. Jan. 1939)
He says all this better than I but I had to learn it for myself.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Aug 1, 2019 | Featured, Travel
It is almost impossible to describe the First World War in simple terms. It is unresolved as to how it evolved into the war it became — the number of casualties it caused easily exceeds eight million dead and double that in maimed and wounded — and its end probably was the beginning of the Second World War only twenty years later. Books and books and books continue to be written about it. It is a wellspring of scholarship and a mirror for the future and present.
There are two things it demonstrates to me, however. First, we seem to be incapable of maturing at the same speed as our ability to make weapons evermore capable of our mass destruction. Second, we seem to be able to commit ourselves blindly to use these weapons without realizing the extent of the destruction that we can cause. Both of these observations demonstrate the incredible capacity we have in the form of the “nation state” to destroy ourselves, despite our individual capacity to feel compassion, empathy, and kindness for each other on a daily basis as human beings who are not in a state of war.
Why have I attached a picture of a crater?
WWI introduced airplane warfare, submarine warfare, the machine gun, the tank, and gas warfare. The warfare was so intense that there are specific monuments dedicated to both missing soldiers and unidentifiable body parts.
So, is there something, a simple example from this war, that demonstrates redemption? Yes, I think there is.
Both sides built tunnels for days and months for incredible distances under entire towns and enemy lines to set explosives. Some of these tunnels were only four feet wide and three-and-a-half feet high. The excavation of the dirt was extremely difficult and endlessly time consuming. Imagine the commitment. Imagine the claustrophobia. Imagine the amount of explosives that then had to be carried underground to blow up a town or an enemy stronghold.
As I have said, the picture I have provided is of a crater. It is thirty to forty feet deep and almost a football field wide. The explosion sent debris four thousand feet in the air and killed and injured people who were never found. I took the photograph from the far side. There is a monument on the other side which, if you look closely, is a cross that is several stories high.
In the alternative, it has been documented that during a one-day armistice for Christmas the soldiers from both sides came out over their trenches, exchanged chocolate and cigarettes, and sang Christmas carols together.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | May 14, 2017 | Featured, Travel
Recently I was fortunate to spend two weeks in southern Africa in the bush in a zoo without Borders. After a long flight from New York to South Africa and a relatively short flight to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, a small group of fellow travelers and I flew in several single engine planes and later three helicopters to a wonderful elegant resort campsite miles from everywhere deep in Botswana. Botswana is about the size of Texas , has a population of about 2 million people and has reserved approximately 37% of its land for the preservation of its natural habitat.
The first thing you notice as the dawn comes up on the first day is how wide the sky is. As you scan it you notice that the clouds offer several widely different configurations and weather patterns. Then you realize how big the land is beneath the sky and how far away you are from everybody else.
Slightly before dawn, during breakfast on the first day, we are told explicitly that the jeeps which we will be riding in have no sides and as long as we stay within the boundaries of the jeep we will not be attacked by any of the animals. The animals are apparently not threatened by the jeeps for the jeeps are apparently perceived by them as foul smelling mechanical elephants which neither attack the animals or are worthy of their attack. That is the basis for our safety.
However, we were informed, if we get out of the jeep it is an entirely different game. We are told that within the last two years in South Africa a photographer who leaned out of one of the jeeps for a better photograph was attacked by a lion and when the guide tried to save her he was also killed.
The first morning as we leave the campsite we travel into the bush and see huge herds of zebras and impalas that are living in fear of the lions which stalk them but we see no lions. The second morning just after Dawn we turn into a small clearing and are confronted by four lions walking slowly toward us from a distance of about 50 yards. The driver stops the jeep and instructs us to say nothing but feel free to photograph. The Lions slowly and methodically move toward us. We are facing them and they are walking toward us.
As the lions slowly approach my fellow riders in the jeep become either “believers” that the jeep is safe territory or “nonbelievers” and with every step of the Lions, start to show an increasing countdown of the last seconds of their lives. They can’t move and the fear becomes palpable. The eyes are wide and the breathing becomes slightly labored.
On the other hand, the believers or happily photographing and silently adjusting their telescopic lenses. The Lions grow closer and closer and within 10 feet they veer to the right and one veers to the left so that it will be behind us. Everyone in the jeep recognizes that they must keep their eyes on the three lions that will pass to our left within several feet of the jeep but we will not be able to turn and watch the one lion that is moving behind us on our right. The believers continue to happily photograph adjusting their telescopic lens to catch the reflection of the jeep in a Lion’s eyes. The nonbelievers are breathing softly, their eyes closed, waiting for death.
After a few moments they were passed us and we started the engine and continued our day.
