XXXIII 13th November 2004
This month I constructed a family tomb in Zagroba (Gravesend), the nearest village to Leszczyn, in the parish of Rev. Wiesław, who is a good friend. The design incorporates organic proportion of the golden mean on the front and physical proportion of Ѵ 2 on the side, both osculating on top to give four features being the principle of greatest number of shapes where each one touches all others: representing in my mind the four motive-forces in life. The tomb bears my name and those of grandmother Wanda and uncle Tadeusz, whose remains will be brought here from Blonie near Warsaw and from Bielsk; it also bears the symbols of four members of my family. The tomb, raised two feet from the ground is constructed in black Indian granite, with frequent flashes of deep red and other colours, named Himalay. It is built in concrete and sunk six feet into the ground, making room for six!
November is warm in Leszczyn this year which makes us regret ploughing-in of gorczyca (white mustard) our cover-crop, too early, at the end of October. One should leave it as long as possible since every day is putting centimetres on the leaves and shoots to be turned into nitrogen, laying in the soil through winter; but the danger lies in an early frost turning soil into rock and preventing the ploughing. We could have left it longer. In future it may not apply as Brussels is offering an encouragement of some 100 Euros per hectare if one leaves it ʻfallowʼ until 1st of March, which we are likely to take up. It will enrich the soil when shallow ploughed in spring remaining together with early weeds as fertilizer. This is a rotation which the Union encourages, as part of the art of ecological farming; and the substance of this art is inseparable from its form, as its truth from its beauty, both in the soil and on canvas, being two and yet mysteriously one: searching for substance and for the magic of giving it form.
So Falluja is the great Art now, a canvas of murder and scientific destruction, cast against a background of palpably material world, of enjoying and suffering human beings. The juxtaposition pleases one! The artist was always the person who could break fences between our physical and spiritual enclosures, and who often brought science, like the perspective rhythm, or wind and water mills, or cutting up a cadaver lesson, to face the emotions of real life of men. One can see a canvas incorporating all the scientific magic of killing: the Duracell batteries, used for hand remote-control of missiles, as eyes of a screaming face, trampled dates and grapes, torn sole of a soldierʼs boot, with blood, a foot with toe or two missing, a taxidermitised cut off womanʼs breasts. Why show pickled goats, when one has pickled humans in Falluja? For sound a Sony with baby calling ʻmammaʼ and a womanʼs scream seeing child squashed, by 1st Marine Division tank, when running to her and over-bellowed - by hysterical laughter and crying babies, broadcast, by courtesy of the US army psychological warfare unit - in the streets, with permanent batteries; placing sweet perfume at one end and dung-smell liquidised for lasting at the other, also areas made for touching and tasting - directly from the canvas. The background is important soft trees, vegetation, sweet animals, after all, this is where the Garden of Eden was, with darkened shadows of Neanderthal, moving threateningly forward and hyenas crunching: easily recognisable human bones, with Muslim dresses and head gear, on the grass and darkened corners with shapes: of late Goya forms and Behemoth, while behind a yellowish silhouette of Secretary Wolfowitz, the architect of the Total Event grinning a Voltaireian smile, burbling, with mirth and a Lynndie England, running barefooted and virginal. A canvas fulfilling the contrast: enjoying and suffering, killers doing most of the enjoying and victims most of the other. And when the CIA (covert) man comes to ask “did You do that?” answer, no bother: “no, You did” (with apology to Picasso).
The modern artist, afraid of being trite, may wash out the baby with the bathwater. Love, hate, peace or war, spiritual understanding of emotions in human culture and their juxtaposition with modern progress of atom or quark, of strictness in relativity and softness of choice in quantum seems still there as yesterday. It is the Art that anticipates and visualizes and renders the everlasting subjects for the public at large, who derive great pleasure in recognizing them; in the new world context, as if they thought of it themselves. Music, poetry, literature, theatre, sculpture or painting are all duty-bound and Idsanism tries to offer social structure for the great public to move towards Real Civilization. The world is at a cross roads and no painting, novel or symphony can be spared to overlook it today; Le Caréeʼs Gardener takes up the challenge. Can a painting convey the viciousness of a multinationals? Or a symphony the horror of War of Hegemony? Of course it can.
But it is entirely incomprehensible that nature should endow a species with an extremely complex luxury organ, far exceeding its actual and immediate needs, which the species could take millennia to learn to put to proper use, without an adamant intention to have it applied now. Normally evolution is supposed to cater for adaptive demands, but in this case the goods delivered anticipate demands: the potentiality of the nervous system of homo sapiens seems unlimited, precisely because the possible uses within his skull can fulfil an evolutionary intention to stop killing - to stop killing Iraqis.
“A girl of ten was carrying
A little child of four.
All she lacked to be a mother
Was a country without war.” ** Bertolt Brecht (poems 1941-1947)
