Essays

The Geometry Blinked Ruin Unimaginable

‘I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries and when morals catch up there’ll be no need for any of it.’ – Harry S Truman

‘The killing machine has a gender, and it is male.’ – Susan Sontag

A 1962 newspaper photograph of a plane crash led Andy Warhol to produce a series which tackled catastrophes and gruesome events. ‘I guess it was the big plane crash picture, the front page of a newspaper: 129 die. I was also painting the Marilyns. I realised that everything I was doing must have been death. It was Christmas or Labor day—a holiday—and every time you turned on the radio they said something like ‘four million are going to die.’ That started it.’

‘Death and Disaster,’ Warhol’s mechanical reproductions¹ and repetitions of suicides, car crashes, the atomic bomb, the electric chair, race riots, and earthquakes are memento mori that turn death into a deliberately remote event. Warhol’s 1965 painting Atomic Bomb is not so much a protest, more a description, a silkscreened snapshot of a mushroom cloud in black surrounded by a deep red—it’s aggregated, apolitical, and banal. His negation of experience is taken to its most disturbing point in White Car Burning: an overturned car burns in the foreground, the driver impaled on a pole, arms extending downward and head bent forward, while a pedestrian casually walks away. ‘When you see a gruesome picture over and over again it doesn’t really have any effect.’

Whale in the Moon When It’s Clear

American artist, illustrator and adventurer Rockwell Kent wrote that Glenlough, County Donegal was ‘a place never to be forgotten – a place, indeed, to be remembered with nostalgia.’¹ Kent sojourned there in 1926, ‘painting in a remote and all but inaccessible coastal valley … lived there in a tiny one-room house, painted the surrounding countryside and the great cliffs that dropped almost a sheer thousand feet into the sea.’ It was in Dan Ward’s² converted cow barn he completed some of what are now considered to be his best paintings: ‘And Women Must Weep,’ ‘Annie McGinley,’ ‘Dan Ward’s Stack.’ was also in this year that Kent was approached that year to produce an illustrated edition of Moby-Dick.

A failure on publication in 1851³, Melville’s magnum opus was enjoying something of a comeback with ex-pats in twenties’ Europe (and Kent’s handsome edition, published in 1930 with its two-hundred-and-eighty woodcuts, assured Moby-Dick’s rebirth). Moby-Dick, says Nathaniel Philbrick,⁴ ‘in its wilful refusal to follow the usual conventions of nineteenth-century fiction, … possessed the experimental swagger that so many authors were attempting to capture in the years after World War I,’ and D.H. Lawrence was an enthusiastic admirer: ‘[Melville] was a futurist long before futurism found paint.’ ‘At first you are put off by the style,’ Lawrence concedes. ‘It reads like journalism. seems spurious. You feel Melville is trying to put something over you. It won’t do. And Melville really is a bit sententious: aware of himself, self-conscious, putting something over even himself. But then it’s not easy to get into the swing of a piece of deep mysticism when you just set out with a story.’

The Asian Woman

By Adrian Nathan West.

In Philadelphia, on New Year’s Day, it is customary for working class men, who have received money to this end from the city government, to dress themselves in women’s clothes or as harlequins and march or ride floats down Broad Street while making noises that are reciprocated by the throngs of people on the sidewalk. It is therefore necessary, if you want a bit of peace and quiet, to go to places you do not usually frequent; and this is what I did on the first day of 2009, walking fifteen or so blocks from my apartment to a Starbucks on Ninth and South streets, thinking there to read a book I had bought myself for Christmas, La mauvaise conscience, by Vladimir Jankélévitch, in the Spanish translation, and to make notes on that book for an anthology of ideas on ethical philosophy that I had been compiling at home to no foreseeable purpose, and also to think back over the course of the preceding year with its many disappointments. I ordered a hot chocolate at the register and took a place at the counter beside an Asian woman in her forties who was wearing a burgundy down coat with a fur-lined hood and a pair of what seemed to me very fashionable boots, with squared toes and a zipper running up their back side. I laid my books, journals, and pens before me.

Wilhelm Meister & Me

By Barry Sheils.

When I returned to Ireland that summer after my travels around Europe with Michael, I took a train by myself to a small town in Leitrim called Carrick-on-Shannon. This was as far north as the train went, the Ulster Transport Authority having in their wisdom many years before closed the majority of the cross-border lines. I had nearly a whole day to kill until my mother’s nursing shift ended and she could drive to collect me, a journey from Omagh that would take her over an hour. The weather was fair so I managed well enough, snoozing in the park where a circus was setting up, watching passers-by.

I assumed Carrick was a typical small town, though I hadn’t made the connection to the town mentioned in so many of John McGahern’s stories: it turns out that Carrick was not just any provincial backwater, it was paradigmatically provincial, refined by literature to represent everything suffocating and ennobling about living in a particular place. An apt location, in other words, for me to remain vaguely European, sublimely detached from my surroundings, and lie the length of that day in imaginative solidarity with my fellow travellers, the bare-chested itinerants who were just then erecting the scaffold for the big top. I didn’t know it at the time but I was playing the part of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, at the end of his travels, artistic and existential experiments behind him, inducted into the secret society of those who know what experience is. I was basking in the feeling of aesthetic bliss adjoined to economic privilege; and this, despite the fact that I didn’t have a penny to my name.

Symptoms of the Subterranean

By Suzanne Walsh.

I’m sick again, and so my world shrinks to the boundaries of the house, sometimes to the bedroom walls or the soft edges of the bed. The living room feels remote, but when I’m a little stronger it become safe territory again. The outside world is still too brash, too bright, in its distance. Better to be laying grey and quiet on a couch instead, supine and still, awaiting the possibility of restoration. Out there, like some stronger strand of the same species, the healthy attend events, shop, talk, drive, walk. I look down at them, from my remote exiled state, like a vulture that longs to feast on their vitality.