The Anatomy of Tragedy

Let’s mingle some death with our lovely myths
And take a page or two of papyrus, or stone.
Beware of flying things bearing strange gifts
Wrote no man yet I have yet to know.

From hoary Athens to the relic of Rome,
An eagle on high carried hard carrion.
Terrestrially bound below, a poets poor dome
Was strong eye spied, a thing to be smashed upon.

The talon claws acted like yawning jaws
Unloosing the clasped terrapin in shell
So that, now grasped under natural laws
And the full felt weight of earth, he fell

Down upon, crashing upon, the poet’s poor pate.
Dull thud, echo-eeking, calamitous knock,
Aeschylus could not write, but lived, this mistake;
The sad, sorry fate of a head for a rock.

Cracked and halved, the tortoise split for the feed.
The sharp beak and eye to tear and devour.
The skull, too, in mirror of the thing, lay cleaved 

As if opened and splayed on a dangerous hour

Like curtains that part for the act that brings death.

His cold ruddy blood flowed from a place
Winding round and down and round toward Lethe
Washing ashore on the hard banks of fate.

Plays upon a stage are often written this way.

Nature, when true, keeping all creatures in mind,
Unmaliced and free of care, simply throws her clay; 

As free from bound earth, her seeing is blind.

So in this new time of old wars waged for crowns,

While those who care less and less yet by degrees,
And try, as once was said, to ‘drink life to the lees,’
Good nature toasts to those follies of tragedy.

The Artist, The Art Critic, and Innocence Lost

I always fancied myself an artist even at an early age.  I was naturally adept at drawing and painting and unlike those things I was not particularly good at—school work comes to mind—I actually enjoyed doing it.  I could with a certain amount of easeful sweeps of the wrist characterize the essence of ordinary objects around the house.  Give me some fruit and a bowl and I would give the very same back, on paper, or canvas, with the added feature that it all arose from my burgeoning, artistic soul.  I could depict the same with people as I loved doing portraits of friends and family expressing their wonderful flaws and features.  I was very good at drawing faces.  All this flowed from the well-spring of a young artistic mind.   All this was artistic expression enjoyed immensely.  That is, until Ms. Ferguson became an art critic.

Note her title. I didn’t know it then but the woman was unmarried. This may say something. It may not. However, this is neither here nor there and in fact, may be unfair of me. To the point:

All this creativity, mind you, was, as mentioned, largely due to an unself-conscious artistic youth.  It was before any seeds of doubt supplanted those notions that criticism brings as an inner mirror and forces one to reflect on a self not yet known.  The artistic expression I enjoyed ‘immensely’ might have had to have been wrestled away. This had to happen sometime.  Some of the greats like Picasso may have successfully continued the work in that child-like ability to create art uninhibited, but most of us are shaken out of that beautiful slumber.  We are taken like virginity.  Unwittingly or not, Ms. Ferguson sowed these seeds of doubt for me and, though I knew it had to happen, she became the reaper in the haunting of my memory.  It did have to happen!  I know this.  We cannot sustain it.  We may get too big for our britches.  It is, after all, as the philosopher man once said, the unfurled, proud white sail that is first blown away by a powerful wind.  I did not want to be lost at sea. I would be at the mercy of her harsh wind.

I had her for my fifth year at school at the unripe age of ten years old.  Ms. Ferguson was not an art teacher but a science one.  It did not matter.  If she had taught the ways of sprinkling fairy dust coupled with the fine art of tiptoeing through day-lilies, she would have been just as harsh and unbending.   She was just too exacting and much too demanding in a way that spilled into a certain kind of rigid dogmatism for which she was ruthless.  It is difficult to say science can be dogmatic. But I think it’s important to remember she touched me subjectively where I lived. It may have only seemed dogmatic to the naked ten year old ego. But then again, as you’ll see, I may have touched her, too. The never ending dance around that eternal flame vanity.  Notwithstanding, she knew not the art of compassionate teaching and owned none of the tactful grace that lends itself to open -mindedness.  She did not practice gentleness.  She declared things (and facts) quite matter of factly and if one deviated, as I dared do once, one paid the price with a ruthless single-mindedness. This single-mindedness, I picked up on then, did in fact stand shoulder to shoulder with dogma.
 “Children, you see God has made the grass a soothing colour our eyes can enjoy,” she once declared. I innocently cut out the middleman by cheerfully suggesting something else.  “Maybe our eyes just learned to like it!” I gleefully shared.  I was met by a condescending stare seemingly fit with child crushing capacities.  I was told I talked nonsense and clearly spoke before I had formed ideas correctly.  More than this, she sadistically expected consensus.  “Isn’t it, children?  Isn’t it nonsense?” she asked aloud as if compelled by a teacherly duty to make my shame public.

With this, I gave up on her class and went inward.  What was waiting for me there was a pencil, a clean white sheet of paper, and a thought of the near ecstatic activity of drawing something.  With no intent of listening to the lesson but absolutely no conscious intent towards revenge (and this is true!) I decided to attempt my hand at drawing Ms. Ferguson. 

Despite her almost unnatural inability to be humane, I was for reasons even an artist cannot explain, quite taken by her visage.  In my clandestine way, I started sketching her doing my best to catch her very essence.  I sketched the way her hair, cut straight to the shoulders, framed a bony, sharp face.  I managed to create a beautiful shadow where her cheekbones protruded like the rigid rocks from craggy cliffs.  It was as if a person could stand under them in a rain storm and manage to stay dry.  I captured them as if in flesh.  I also captured a protruding nose of which the bridge created cavernous depressions that housed deep set, darkened eyes.   I enjoyed sketching her eyes with her lazy, drooping eyelids that effectively seemed the control center of her overpowering condescension.  I could not help but notice (the artistic eye!) that one of her lids slightly drooped lower than the other.  They reminded me of entering a room with two windows where one of the window shades was pulled subtly lower than the other causing a case of strange equilibrium in the viewer.  That was it!  I realized why I liked her face!  It was asymmetrical and interesting, qualities I could not bestow on her as a teacher.  She was depth at least written in the physical.  I thought I had captured her and was again proud of my ability to imitate life in art.  But it was short lived.

My self-congratulatory artistic expression was indeed short lived.  The model, the muse, the inspiration, and very soon the critic, all encompassing the one person, stood behind me ready to extinguish it. She caught me just as I finished.  Ms. Ferguson did not take kindly to the drawing.  She actually claimed I was making a caricature of her (what’s a caricature?) and, in the process, poking fun at her features like---dare I say it?---like a common doodler!  My artistic pride slowly fizzled to shame and it was this display planted the seed that I was just not nearly as good as only I thought.   How I wanted to tell her it was actually a loving expression to how I saw things! Is that not scientific? May be not.

            But at that moment, it did not matter how I saw things.  What was in charge as a matter of ‘seeing’ the situation were a pair of droopy but sharp eyes.  As I said, I any artist must face this situation to be shaken out of his own comfortable consciousness, and certainly at a young age this can be traumatic. So be it. That’s life.  Before I ask again if Ms. Ferguson had to be this harsh, I might meditate on the possibility that she did me a favour.  After all, she may have caused me to plant my own seed of doubt that now seems an engine of improvement.  Is it possible I owe her thanks more than I owe her condemnation?  The slow and linear artistic strokes of time soften even the hardest edges of memory.

            However, I still do wonder if she really thought what she claimed.  Was her criticism a reflection that my art was less than stellar?  Or did I do such a good job that I created an ugly feeling in an ugly lady who may have finally saw herself mirrored in some energetic and youthful art?   It certainly amplified my self-consciousness, but maybe, just maybe, I did the same to her.