Apr 2

Apr 2 On Seeing a Different Picture

No better place to go for thoughts about hope than to Rebecca Solnit. Her latest, The Beginning Comes After the End, is going to be indispensable to keeping our heads, I think.

In it she quotes Anand Giridharadas: “I see then that this is both a very dark time and, potentially, a very bright time. It’s important to hold these truths together. When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the hoizon, I see a different picture. This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something.”

“An old world was dying,” says Solnit, “This is the time of monsters.” She refers to the line by Antonio Gramsci: “Il vecchio mondo sta morendo. Quello nuovo tarda a comparire. É in questo chiaroscuro nascono i mostri.” Which translates to: “The old world is dying. The new one is slow in appearing. In this light and shadow, monsters arise.”

Well, thinking of horizons I’m reminded of Gwendolyn MacEwen. And then the words by Robert Macfarlane, also quoted by Solnit: “Yes, the monsters are abroad, but as we know monster comes from monstrare, meaning to demonstrate, and to warn. Monsters — the bad kind — show us the way forwards, as well as pushing us back.”

We don’t yet know the future, as I keep hearing.

Meanwhile, there is a new monograph out on Rachel Ruysch. The last book written about her, and there has only shockingly been one, is well out of date. This one is put out by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and is a gorgeous volume. In an essay within, Marianne Berardi notes, “Over the course of her seven-decade artistic career, Rachel Ruysch developed a highly nuanced way of painting that makes every flower, leaf, butterfly, peach, plum, and damselfly seem formidable, precious, and important.” They are astonishing in their realism, their use of light, colour, and attention to detail. Even more remarkably, they “portray imaginary arrangements she invented from careful studies made from nature, and then patiently assembled like jigsaw puzzles as though they truly existed right before her eyes.” And I can’t help but think that this is useful to think about at this present moment as we need to invent and imagine new pictures. She took all the well-researched information and her own detailed observations and with her imagination, talent, skills, made something new and excellent from them.

I keep returning to adrienne maree brown’s book Emergent Strategy. It’s so good on resilience, on small things mattering. She reminds us that her book, the whole thing, us being here, is about love. Love of the planet and all the people on it. Our time here (memento mori) is so limited, so precious. I was reminded of this lately when I heard one of my best friend’s husband had died. It seems impossible that someone so full of fun and life could be gone. The love remains though, it really does.

In other news, it’s time for us all in my home province to read or re-read Fahrenheit 451 I do believe. It’s time to make sure you have a library card wherever you live. It’s time to stand up for your Intellectual Freedom. If you want to do one small good thing, just visit a library and get your card.

As Maya Angelou said, “The horizon leans forward. / Offering you space to place new steps of change.” Wage peace, wage love, wage imagination. Your small acts are meaningful. Your imagination is at stake.