Death is Young

This is my monthly art-related newsletter/blog. Usually, its contents include new art I've made, news about exhibitions, and other art-related ideas I've been thinking about. However, August has been pretty rough, and so I wrote about pet death, family, and life history. If you'd rather look at the art I've been working on, please check out my new art-only instagram account, @edengallanter.

This month my sweet, two-year-old cat died of cancer.

One day she was running and playing, and jumping into my lap every time I sat down. The next day she started acting sick, and after two subsequent visits to the hospital, the doctors told me that she had cancer—lymphoma. It was incurable, and she was only going to get worse. We arranged immediately for a vet to come to our home to euthanize her, and she died in my arms. It was so shockingly fast.

If you've ever had a pet to whom you have a special connection, who follows you around the house, who trusts you, and just wants to be near you all the time, you already know that this pet feels like family. Whatever the world family has come to mean to you, it acts as a soft, warm cocoon around your heart. Family, whether made up of biological relatives, caretakers, close friends, partners, or pets, is one of those parts of life that appears to me to be fundamental, and vitally important for survival.

I am very close to my parents, and I know how lucky I am that this is so. Many people I know have bad luck in this regard. They have parents they are unable to connect to, or unable to respect. Some have parents who were cruel, or violent, or neglectful, or who abandoned them. I am fortunate to have parents I can love and admire, and who have always, always strived to be loving, supportive and faithful to me.

My Father. Charcoal on paper.

My parents are also quite old—especially my father, who turned ninety this year. I am writing his biography. This is both intensely pleasurable for my father, and incredibly difficult. There are few happy memories of childhood and youth to detail; an overwhelming number of his recollections are marked by loneliness and tragedy. It is an incredibly intimate experience to do this with him. He has now told me stories he hasn't told anybody else. Sitting with him, holding his hand, sometimes crying with him, while listening to these memories that have been buried for so long, touches me deeply.

In writing a story, we are always haunted by the story's end.

Both my parental grandparents died suddenly of cardiovascular disease in their fifties, his elder brother in his forties, and my father himself survived a triple bypass when I was in the third grade. Nevertheless, he is ninety, and I couldn't help wondering what it would be like when my dad passed away, as I was spending my last remaining days with my sick cat.

Anushka. (August 2016 – August 2018)

There is no real way to prepare for tragedy. I believe that the best we can all do is try to face the inevitable, and accept the fact that the world we live in gives us an illusion of control on a truly immense scale. There was no way for me to prepare myself for losing a very young and beloved pet to cancer. All I could do was focus on what mattered, when it happened. I wasn't ready to say goodbye, but I knew that the most important thing was my responsibility to take care of her. In this case, that meant protecting her from suffering any more pain. I stayed awake every night to sit with her. I could barely eat—food choked me. Grief can fill you up and bury you at the same time. The world around us faded. I couldn't even feel the chill of the house, sitting on the floor with her at 4:00 AM. I sat there, with my dying cat leaning against my leg, and I thought about what it would be like to lose my father.

The culture I live in has shielded itself from death. Death happens in hospitals and dark alleyways. Open casket funerals are increasingly rare in this country. The processes of mortality are more secreted away from us that they used to be. But isn't death as natural as the ocean? Can't death be as gentle as the wilting of cut roses, which leave behind a subtle fragrance even after they have faded? It seems to me that life is very short. Living in perpetual fear of tragedy isn't realistic, but at the same time I believe I ought to make the most of whatever time I have with the people I love—my little family, my close friends, and the small number of people who have profoundly inspired and changed the course of my life.

I don't have an answer for grief, or for the inevitability of future grief when you let yourself love someone. Grief is a living creature, with its own logic, its own desires, its own food. All we can do is care for it as tenderly as we would care for anything else we loved.

suppose
Life is an old man carrying flowers on his head.

young death sits in a café
smiling,a piece of money held between
his thumb and first finger

(i say “will he buy flowers” to you
and “Death is young
life wears velour trousers
life totters,life has a beard” i

say to you who are silent.—”Do you see
Life?he is there and here,
or that, or this
or nothing or an old man 3 thirds
asleep,on his head
flowers,always crying
to nobody something about les
roses les bluets
                    yes,
                              will He buy?
Les belles bottes—oh hear
,pas chères”)

and my love slowly answered I think so.  But
I think I see someone else

there is a lady,whose name is Afterwards
she is sitting beside young death,is slender;
likes flowers.

- ee cummings, Tulips & Chimneys

Artifact

This is a monthly art-related (or at least art-adjacent) post about what I've been doing and thinking about. Welcome to the month of August!

General News

1. One of my tarot paintings, "Love" was accepted to a group exhibition at The Studio Door in San Diego! It will be on view from August 3rd to 26th. If you're one of my tarot customers and live in the area, it's really worth seeing the original painting, and it looks like it's going to be a wonderful show!

2. My drawing "The Sparrow and the sparrows" is up on view at Arthaus Projects gallery in Williamsport, Pennsylvania! Exhibition closes on August 11th.

3. I am participating in San Francisco Open Studios this year! Open Studios is a series of five weekends where local artists open their studios to the public and sell their art. The weekends are divided up by neighborhood, and my weekend is November 3rd and 4th. If you're going to be in the bay area, mark your calendars and PLEASE COME! I'll be posting more details as the event gets closer.

Painting in my home studio, photo by Jessica Palopoli (https://www.jessicapalopoli.com/

It's been a weird weekend. Over the last year, I succeeded in tracking down the movie that scared the everloving shit out of me when I was four years old, and I finally watched it last Saturday night.

If you ever have the opportunity of revisiting movies (or stories, songs, amusement park rides, pictures, or any other innocuous thing whose fearsomeness derives from the unformed and imaginative mind of the very young), I recommend doing so. You will find that you remembered some parts with surprising precision, and that other parts (in my case, most other parts) were largely fabricated. It is a glimpse into how utterly unrecognizable the same event can be when experienced by different people. I often think how miraculous it is that any of us can communicate with each other at all.

Me wearing my favorite elephant bathing suit (I still think the Pink Elephants song from "Dumbo" is one of the best things Disney has ever done), summer of 1983.

Now, of course, you would like to know what the movie was.

Embarrassingly, it was "The Horror at 37,000 Feet", widely known (among Shatner fans, at least) as William Shatner's worst movie—a made-for-TV production that first aired in 1973. The plot featured a haunted airplane, and ended relatively tamely, with two gore-free human deaths and one frozen dog. It was apparently still making the rounds on one evening during the summer of 1983, when my parents took me to their friends' home for a dinner party. The household children, who were several years older than me (and I imagine were secretly hoping to be entertained by putting a little kid into hysterics) were clustered around the TV, and of course I joined them. It appears I made it through almost the whole movie before silently leaving the room and rejoining my parents.

I need hardly say that William Shatner's worst movie was not, on second viewing, especially scary. The interesting part wasn't the movie, it was watching prototypes of all my nightmares since age four march across the screen for 90 minutes. Although I had apparently invented several scenes, my inventions had done a strangely excellent job of capturing the story and the characters' state of mind—better, in fact, than the actual movie did.

To conjoin a pair of disparate dictionary definitions of the same word, "artifact" (an unintentional or meaningless by-product of, say, a scientific experiment or photograph) turns out to be a valuable treasure-trove of historic information. Making up stories is an essential part of the pattern-recognition processes of the executive system. Our minds come up with a plausible narrative about what is going on and even who one is. These narratives never quite match with reality, but that is not their purpose. Without our stories, we would not be able to learn, to remember, to sympathize with others, to recover from negative emotions, or even to recognize ourselves. We would have no coherent identity.

I'm not exactly saying that such mental artifacts are either desirable or destructive—it really depends on the mind that's making them, I guess. Although every story we can think of is in some sense true, not every story is equally useful. However, I am surprised by how often our memories turn out to be deeply insightful fabrications, if that makes sense. Because isn't this, too, a form of art? Isn't reconstructing reality in a more human-sized way, in a way that distills its importance and meaning for us, what art is? And our minds do this all the time—it is fundamental to our functioning in the world. Many scientists even argue that this storytelling part of the brain is the cornerstone of consciousness.

LOCUST X LOCUST (Chortoicetes terminifera x Robinia pseudoacacia)

Speaking of finding important truths in trite places, the idea for my latest painting came from a misunderstanding I have always cherished. When I first heard the word "Locust", I thought the teacher had said "hocus" (as in Hocus Pocus). The association is now immovable; I always think of magic—of fairytale, joyfully implausible magic—when I hear the word Locust. Magic then becomes the foundation for all the word's other associations: penny-slice leaves clattering in the breeze (the black locust tree), destruction and ruin (the plague locust insect), species invasion (the tree), the dry, muffled snapping sound of the swarm (the insect), creamy and delicately scented cascades of blossoms (the tree), the judgment of God upon Egypt in the Book of Exodus (the insect), and so on.

The best part of making something new is always over as soon as it is finished. Artists and makers who feel the way I do tend to make the most intricately detailed things, because we don't ever want it to end. More opportunities for new artifacts, too.

The Life-Cycle of the Angels

            Many tarot books describe the first 21 cards of the deck following the Fool card—otherwise known as the major arcana—as the "Fool's Journey", in which the Fool progresses through 21 stages of existence. In the Cheimonette Tarot, one could just as easily call this the Angels' Journey. The Fool transforms into the Angel in two ways, both of which are represented in the narrative sequence of the major arcana.

The Biological Life Cycle

            If you have been following my recent work, you've seen my recent botanical/ entomological paintings, which experiment with different pair relationships: morphological (maple tree samaras resemble the wings of lacewings), geographic (the Southern Catalpa and the tredecassini 13-year cicada have intersecting habitats), morphological (maple tree samaras resemble the wings of lacewings), and chromatic (the petals of white columbines have the same hue—even down to their rose-mauve shadows—as the wings of the white moth). As I learned more about each of these species, I became familiar with their life cycles, which are often incredibly detailed and bizarre. For example, periodic cicadas remain underground in their larval stage for the majority of their lives, progressing through several morphological stages as they feed off the sap from tree roots. At last, they "hatch" out of their hardened larval bodies into the large, singing imago (the winged adult) at which point they mate, reproduce, and die over a span of only a few weeks.

Magicicada tredecassini x Catalpa bignonioides, (2018). Ink and watercolor on paper.

Acer circinatum x Chrysopa perla (2018). Ink and watercolor on paper.

Aquilegia vulgaris, Iris sibirica x Haploa reversa (2018). Ink and watercolor on paper.

The Cheimonette Angels

            The 21 cards of the major arcana organize different primary concepts of human experience. In the Cheimonette Tarot, the Fool (card 0) takes two overlapping routes to become the Angel (card XX): in one sequence, the Fool simply grows wings (card XII: the Hanged Man) and finally reveals the Angel nature it had all along (card XX: the Angel); in the other sequence, twin angels divide (card VI: Love), separate (card X: the Wheel) and converge (card XV: the Devil), and finally combine to become a single Angel (card XX), by appropriating the human qualities of the Fool.

The Fool (2002). Ink on paper.

            These two parallel life cycles of the Fool/Angel can be thought of as interrelated, symbiotic life cycles of different biological species: sometimes mutually beneficial or harmful, sometimes competitive, sometimes parasitic, sometimes merely commensal. The two angels in Love (VI) are locked in a shared gaze of mutual support, trust, and safety: the perfect foundation for great freedom, experience, and exploration. In the Wheel (X), the angels have separated to form two independent bodies, working together to turn the wheel of time, dreaming their private dreams. In the Devil (XV), separation has become painful and the angels are reuniting catastrophically, seemingly in the act of annihilating each other. Only by becoming human can they be whole again, and they at last take on the animal characteristics of the Fool (its two tails), and resurrect as a single being, with the flower of immortality from the Tree of Life growing from its body, and the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge for a heart.

VI: Love (2003). Ink, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper.

X: The Wheel (2003). Ink and watercolor on paper.

XV: The Devil (2003). Ink, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper.

            The other life cycle is simpler and gentler. It represents not the fall of a God, but the apotheosis of a mortal. Even though the Fool and the twin angels have different characteristics (the Fool has its tails, and the angels have their wings), they are arrestingly similar creatures: bald as an infant, androgynous, and seemingly sexless. This insight is personified by the Hanged Man (a card I should have renamed as gender neutral), hung by its own tails in a window of one of the Moon towers (which appear in both the Priestess and Moon cards). The Fool in the Hanged Man is clearly not compelled into its position: as a symbol of its freedom, it holds an unattached chain between its hands as a plumb weight. Out of its back grows incipient wings. It is passively waiting for its transformation to occur, suspended between the strange world within the Moon tower and the outer world occupied by us, the observers. Its eyes are open—which shows that waiting is perhaps not so passive as it might seem. It believes in its own potential for divinity. In the Angel card, we can see that the Fool's conviction was justified.

XII: The Hanged Man (2003). Ink, watercolor, and colored pencil on paper.

XX: The Angel (2004). Ink and watercolor on paper.

            Plants and animals tend to have precisely as much as they need—and no more—to survive. If their lives are hard, they usually have the ability to endure those hardships. Animals are exactly as intelligent as they need to be, and so are we. Our own phases of existence are less apparently intricate than those of the 13-year cicada, but they are profoundly detailed nevertheless. The world we live in today is both of our own creation as well as far beyond our control. We experience reality as a web of probabilities: a fine mesh made from our own sensory experiences and from trusted authorities we use as outside sources of information.

           But I believe that these probabilities rest on a set of core beliefs. Whether those beliefs are religious, scientific, philosophical, or emotional in character is of little importance. What is important is that there is a fundamental particle, somewhere, in all of us, that will bear no division, no scrutiny. Our blind spot.

"If this is not true, then nothing is true."

Not all of us must reach that part of our life cycle where we are called upon by circumstances to shatter our fundamental beliefs. When we are, we often become even more hard and immovable, so that our shells may be the easier to shatter, our hearts more easily broken. To allow the possibility that the imago, winged and singing, may emerge from the ruins of truth.

The Tree and the trees

A few months ago, I began reading about something called "visual release hallucinations".

In neuroscience, the term "release" has always fascinated me. It denotes that the phenomenon preexisted, but up until now, was held back by the inhibitory functions of the brain. In receiving sensory information from the external world, the brain copies, analyzes, and reinvents the information it receives, and then treasures it up for future use. In a very real sense, there is a whole other, invented world, housed inside our minds. Visual release hallucinations, otherwise known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS), tend to concur with the partial or total loss of eyesight. What this means is that, in the absence of external information, the brain simply supplies its own.

            People with CBS (unlike people with psychosis) are usually aware that their hallucinations are not real. CBS hallucinations also have some characteristic qualities—they tend to be composed of objects and spaces that are plausible, but almost never familiar. This is because they are thought to derive from a categorical image library in the brain, without much participation from the brain's emotional centers. They are purely neurological hallucinations.  They derive from a lower level of visual perception, where there is a dictionary of what researchers refer to as proto-objects or proto-images. Proto-images are a set of generic objects and object features—similar to a wooden art manikin, or those how-to books for drawing everyday things. By filling in common components of one's normal environment, visual models made from proto-images greatly speed up visual cognition. They facilitate object recognition and guide visual attention. However, by themselves, proto-images have no emotional or intellectual significance—they are simply building blocks for visual perception.

            One man with Charles Bonnet Syndrome saw a red double-decker bus drive through his living room. Close inspection of the bus would reveal any amount of detail, but there would not be anything surprising, or unexpected, to see. The bus was a generic bus, composed of the thousands of red tourist busses the man had seen any number of times on his daily walks through London. It was likely modelled on the very first such bus he could remember seeing— his image prototype, later elaborated by all the red tourist busses he saw subsequently.

            The most interesting part is, what we see is primarily composed of proto-images, not from the world around us, as we suppose. The brain, even before it perceives the environment, creates a model based on what it expects to see. This provides a rudimentary impression and directs our visual attention to discrepancies between our proto-image model and the real world. For instance, the bedroom we see when we open our eyes in the morning is the bedroom we expect to see. If the cat has knocked over a lamp in the night, we see it at once because the room then fails to match up with our visual model. The external world is thus used as a kind of memory storage. When we use language, we are accessing our brain's library of words, phrases, and grammatical templates. In visual perception, the "memory" we refer to is sensory data, continuously supplied by the external world.

            I didn't know it at the time, but I actually started making art about visual expectations back when I was an undergrad in college. The director of the art department had sneered at my portfolio, calling it "illustrative" in the same tone of voice you'd use while wrinkling your nose at an overdone dish and ordering the waiter to take it away. I loved making the intensely detailed drawings I'd always made, and I would make as much work for myself as I could possibly fit on the page. The end result was hardly important. I'd sit happily, drawing tiny details for hours, using whatever imagery came to mind. I never used any reference, and, while I certainly recognized that drawing from life improved my technique, life drawing never felt like art to me—it felt like practice. I discovered that I had to reconcile a heavily stylized aesthetic with the big, abstract ideas I wanted to explore.

"Cascadilla" (1999). Graphite on paper.

            I didn't think much of the art director himself—even at age 20, I could see that a person who assumed that certain styles of art couldn't be about big ideas, must be using snobbery as a foil of some kind. Nevertheless, I knew I had to start thinking about how my work might come across to others; I had find a way to connect my inner world to the shared outer world. My solution was to combine drawing from life with drawing from my imagination, to start exploring what exactly the difference was. I started drawing maps of familiar places from memory, and overlaying them on top of real maps. I got interested in how the things from my imagination did and did not line up with the things from life.

"Tree" (2000). Acrylic on canvas.

            The best thing I made at this time was a painting of a tree. I painted what I thought of when I thought of a tree, the way I was used to: from memory. Next I went in search of real trees on campus (I was lucky to be attending Vassar College, whose entire campus is actually a large arboretum) that seemed iconic to me, reminding me of the Tree of my imagination. I color-coded them, and plotted out the different trees over the top of my proto-Tree, following their branch structure and internal architecture, trying to fit them together. It was the first piece of artwork I valued for its own sake, not just for the delight I got in making it. I gave it to a very dear friend four years ago, and I've made other artwork that I've loved since, but in many ways "Tree" will always be the most special and meaningful, and the most beloved art I've ever made, because it was the first.

"Generation" (1998). Ink on paper.

            In a sense, all the art I made after that was an effort to fit the style I had developed as a kid—madly doodling angels and devils in my school notebooks—into the world around me. When I learned about the brain's library of proto-images, I felt strangely vindicated. There is no such thing as real life. What we see begins with what we expect to see. Our world is unavoidably framed by our own content, supplied by the vast content of our imaginations. What the artists of the Italian Renaissance called "artifice" forms the foundation of how we experience everything around us. Objectivity is what is really artificial (Ceci n'est pas une pipe!), but why should we expect ourselves to be objective? Why not embrace the insights and beauties of our human, subjective understanding?

            In the visual-cognitive loop, our minds are in continual conversation with the world around us. We assemble a model of what we expect to see, receive sensory feedback, and modify our model, again and again and again.

The mind's model and world will never match, but they will always strive to meet.

And the mind and the world will always strive to meet, because they will never match.

Superimposition

            In 2012 I worked as an urban planning consultant for a human rights NGO in Israel. I lived in a crummy, tiny little basement studio, furnished with leftovers and decorated with stencils, giving the room the look of a dollhouse decorated by a four-year-old. I never really got over jetlag for the four months that I lived there, and I spent a lot of time lying awake in bed, listening to the crackle of 1940s American jazz radio drifting down from my upstairs neighbor's unit. He would smoke on his balcony, staring gloomily into the dark, around 10 PM every night. I listened to birdsong when it began to get light outside—nothing feels quite as far from home as listening, half-asleep, to unfamiliar birds in the morning.

            Being in Israel was both frightening and fascinating. I went there having very little idea what I thought of Israel as a country, or even as an idea, for that matter. I had grown up in a secular American Jewish household, with a secret distaste for my Jewish heritage, and, while my parents were liberal activists and devoured the New York Times every morning, I remained largely uninterested in political matters well into adulthood. Although I know very well that this was an illusion generated by the sheltered bubble I lived in, politics seemed like a large, frightening world that had nothing to do with me, and which I would never be equipped to influence.

Hebron, West Bank. June, 2011.

            But in 2011 and 2012, I seemed to have somehow tripped and fallen into the world of activism. I marched with Occupy Wall Street for several weeks, and then landed a position as a research fellow in Tel Aviv. I've always had a habit of taking any new opportunity that presented itself, and so there I was, working with an organization to raise quality of life in Israel, while feeling no real connection either to being Jewish or to any political orientation—I was not Zionist, I was not a Palestinian rights activist. I was nothing. But it turned out that nothing was the perfect thing to be that summer. As nothing, everyone felt comfortable talking to me—they all assumed I shared their viewpoint, with the added benefit that I was a temp—nobody would see me again. And strangest of all, I felt Jewish for the first time in my life, as I began to develop political opinions about what was happening in Israel.

But I kept those opinions to myself then, and I remained nothing.

Safed, Northern Galilee. May, 2011.

            I spent every day listening, and reading, mostly in nothing's natural state: silence. It was peaceful, but it was also lonely, and it drove me farther into myself. I felt introspective, spacey, distant, and preoccupied—when I wasn't listening to somebody else's stories. It was when I was traveling in the West Bank that I began thinking of these states of mind as a wishing well. It seemed to be where I lived so much of the time that summer. I would climb to the top of my well to listen to others and check on my surroundings, and then I would fall back in, curl up at the base of the well, and watch the darkness settle around me. It felt like a refuge, because it was so far away from the rest of the world—the safest possible place.

            It wasn't necessarily pleasant down there. If I felt calm and thoughtful, the well was full of clear groundwater, and I would float gently to the bottom and the light from the sky would shimmer around me. If I felt afraid or ashamed, the well was dry, and I would hit the ground like a stone. Dry wells felt cavernously empty, and there was always a flavor of despair in the silence. Wet or dry, though, there were always ideas down there. There were dreams, and hopes, and bitter memories—and plans and ambitions as well. But a wish is all of those things, isn't it? Any idea has to begin with some desire, no matter whether we believe in the possibility of its ever being realized.

Wells, 2018. Ink and watercolor on paper.

            For the last eight months, I've been working on a series of paintings that I've been calling "composites". Each one is composed of multiple objects from a common category, superimposed so as to occupy the same space. The four wells in this painting are all from 2012: holy wells in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, water wells in Palestinian farming villages, ruined wells in Acre. These are the wells I descend into when I enter my own wishing well. The smell of the dry desert and the silence of being nothing—and the thoughts that rush into the absence—all these things are with me, down at the bottom.

            I have since found out that wishing wells are not always safe. You need to be careful: the air can be poisonous, the water can drown you, and for a thousand other reasons, you might never come up to the surface again. And it's important that we do, because we all have to help each other. After all, of what use are the thoughts and dreams of the wishing well if no one else ever knows about them? I have come to believe that bringing these things to the surface is my job as an artist. Even if I have nothing else to give, I know that I always find ineffable, sublime things down in my wishing well, and I can bring what I have found up to the surface to share.

            The only really important relationship is the one I create (or fail to create) with you, the person who is present with my art. I may not know you, and we might very well never meet, but the possibility remains that we will end up being beautiful together, in this thing I have made. Maybe it's just for a few moments, but it could leave something lovely superimposed on some dear, related memory of yours. Or even better, something from your own wishing well might speak, and then you would pick up your own tools, whatever they are, and make something more, add another layer.

            That this most important relationship in an artist's life can happen between total strangers—strangers who may never see each other’s' faces, strangers who may not even like each other—seems miraculous to me. It's like discovering that I had the same dream as the businessman sitting next to me on the train. It's like realizing that the feral dog hunting rats in the city gutters has the exact same color eyes and hair as my late grandmother. It's like finding my childhood bedroom perfectly replicated deep inside an ancient, ruined palace on a distant planet. We are all drawn through a superimposed sequence of associations, through our buried thoughts, beliefs, memories, and selves, within each moment of our lives. What's more, these moments are shared, and the associative links interconnect and diverge into the vast, tangled nebula of human experience.

            This is what I am always seeking as an artist. I know this relationship can't be forced, or even created deliberately. It has to grow up of its own accord, if it grows at all. The wishing well is dry, and the floor at the bottom feels hollow and cavernous. The dust clustered in the corner over there is a great vast desert of silence. That's where you keep your secrets. I will not find them out. I will walk over to the corner filled with dust and lay myself down in it, with your secrets, quiet like they are quiet.

We will not disturb each other.