Jan’s Place

Andy Goldsworthy is a reticent, ethereal Scottish artist who draws on the land, light, weather, the seasons - all raptly watched and listened to - for his inspiration and materials. He wanders through landscapes, picking up flowers, twigs, sheeps’ wool, colored rocks - then begins to play like a child in the sand, leaving behind fey, dissolving artwork of often amazing beauty. He gathers shards of icicles in one scene, wetting them just enough to stick together and form a meandering curve that weaves through a rock. Within hours, it is gone. He builds an oval hut from driftwood, then watches the tide flatten it and carry it away, looking like some animal’s unmoored lair. He gathers dandelions and places the brilliant yellow flowers in a groove in a rock. They make an unbelievably vivid mark in the landscape - for a day. (The ironic twist to all this is hinted at in the movie and shown clearly in a short film on the DVD - after making his transitory art, Goldsworthy must leap up and set up some highly sophisticated photographic equipment. Leaves may be his materials, but without modern photography, no one would know of him.)

Even though some of his materials are less fleeting than ice and leaves, Goldsworthy has no interest in defying time. His piled stone sculptures are made without mortar of any kind; although they look solid, they are designed to collapse sooner or later. I suspect that if they didn’t, the artist would find them far less appealing. Time itself is his subject as much as the leaves and rocks he works with.

In a long sequence in the movie, he works on a large stone wall meandering through a park. Workmen build the wall; Goldsworthy’s job, in his words, is to find “the line of the wall” that resonates with the landscape. The result is woven in great loops in and out of a line of trees, disappearing under a river and reappearing on the other side. For me, this work is surprisingly moving for its extravagant nature: a hugely labor-intensive wall built to the rhythm of trees, not of land division, and built with an eye to its future collapse. Goldsworthy noticed that a line of trees had grown up in the protection of a previous wall, contributing to its long-past collapse, and used this as the basis of his design. Some day in the future, all that will be left is rubble and a mysterious looping line of trees, and this will be as much his artwork as the wall itself.

The movie itself is slow-moving, paced to the artist’s introspective comments, which come out in sometime painful stretches while he searches for words. Although he is fairly articulate about his art (until his attention is drawn to something much more interesting to him, like the wind on his face), talking does not seem comfortable to him. By the time you have seen some of his artwork, you wouldn’t expect it to be. Intellectual understanding is the opposite of his art. He has the rare gift of startling an audience into its own intuition, not leaving it standing, admiring his.

If you get the DVD, be sure to watch the the slide show of artwork and the short movies to see more of his work. There are also a large number of photos of his art online.

Click on image to see larger view:

Ian in light from Venetian blinds. I’m still messing with this one. It looks kind of under water on my monitor. He didn’t really dye his hair red, but it’s red where it catches the light, and I liked it.

A Spectacle of Corruption, by David Liss, gives this explanation of the origin of “chip on your shoulder:” laborers in the 18th century British naval yards made a significant portion of their incomes by taking wood chips left over from sawing operations and selling them. When the Navy tried to end this practice, workers protested by placing bags of the chips on their shoulders and walking out with them, shouting and jeering at the naval officers as they went by. So having a chip on your shoulder means hostile, quick to anger, in a fighting mood.

Spectacle of Corruption uses an anachronism by allowing a character in the 1720s to refer to “communist notions.” As far as I can tell (with the help of the OED), the earliest usage is in the early 1840s. Anyone with any other info? (Mom?)

This book reminds me of an animation sequence at the end of Men in Black. The camera pulls back from the earth at dizzying speed until the earth is a speck in the Milky Way, then pulls back further until the Milky Way disappears in a swarm of other galaxies, then these galaxies fall back until they are revealed to be inside a marble, held in alien hands about to make a random toss in a game. If you can’t stand the thought that someone is about to randomly throw the dice of the universe, don’t read Jonathan Carroll. I picture him sometimes as the capricious god of a Sims game, swirling his fingers in waters that a mad programmer has configured to alter the rules of life and death itself. One of the characters in White Apples says plaintively, “They’re playing with us, Vincent. They’ve got us like lightning bugs in a jar and they keep shaking it to see how we’ll react.” Like Sim characters, they look up and shake their fists at the incomprehensible god of their world.

The god swirling the waters in White Apples revels in a “What if?” game. What if an ordinary person has the fate of the universe in his hands, but has no idea what he’s supposed to do? What if he comes back from the dead, and some people remember he’s dead and some not? What if his memories are stripped from him and returned and stripped again? What’s left?

White Apples is a close sibling to The Wooden Sea. (Of the two novels, I prefer The Wooden Sea because of its wonderful central character, Frances McCabe. You might say the central character in White Apples is a love affair, much stronger than the sum of its parts, but nowhere near as strong as McCabe.) Both stories feature mysterious alien intervention in human lives, casual changing of the ground rules by which we live, and people struggling to understand these changing rules in a high stakes game. While bewilderment pervades The Wooden Sea, Carroll has tried to explain much more in White Apples. The cosmology almost makes sense, but I find, surprisingly, that not a great deal is gained by this. I think Carroll’s cosmologies are like the shake of the jar: they’re there to cause reactions. While his characters are powerful enough to support this approach, it’s a path that can squander a reader’s trust, especially when the cosmology is so patently absurd.

There is something schizophrenic about these books. On the one hand we have the author’s lovingly drawn characters: Isabelle, Vincent, and McCabe have roots in tremendous observation of daily life, and Carroll brings to this a sharp eye and a gentle heart. The books are filled with wonderful details of their lives - amusing, incisive, heart-rending. Something, however, wants to torment these characters. That’s not unusual in fiction, but the aliens and gods that bring this about in Carroll’s novels are so threadbare and silly that the true tormentor is too clearly revealed as the author himself, hovering over the Sims game and poking away. The author, unfortunately, does not bring either a sharp eye or a gentle heart to this side of his work; instead, a kind of frustration and brittleness shows through.

Why does an author create great characters and then proceed to torment them for no coherent reason? Carroll’s books seem to deal with death and what our lives are for, but set out to trivialize any message you might get from this; they are like a misshapen koan, forcing us back into confusion. (For a prime example, consider the last pages of Wooden Sea, where a transcendent scene is slammed shut with a return to the badly bedraggled alien plot.) There is no window left open to either a higher or a darker reality, so they feel like closed systems, far too much like the Sims game. I look in vain for a Zen master whispering through the pages. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not looking for mysticism; if what he wants is to make us feel the utter absurdity of the universe, that’s okay, but making us feel the absurdity of the plot is not the way. At his best, Carroll can evoke the feeling of walking for awhile in an unknown world and seeing with fresh eyes the haunting beauty of cracks in the sidewalk, flags in the wind, and our children’s faces. This is a great gift; an alien thrown in haphazardly here or there, unfortunately, jars it out of our reach.

David Liss writes about the 18th century, but his subjects casts a curiously strong light on modern institutions. In his previous two novels, early finance capitalism is all too recognizable to modern readers for its pervasive corruption. A Spectacle of Corruption turns its eye on another cherished modern institution, “free” elections. British voters of the early 18th century would have been confounded at the idea that elections should be free, when so much money was there to be made, and insulted if no one bothered to buy their votes. The idea that elections should be free and fair is by no means a natural one, a fact we ignore at our peril. David Liss shows that elections in England were a well handled tool of the British ruling class, not a great leap in human liberty. The subject is quite topical as we watch the modern spectacle of electronic voting fraud, a president elected by nine judges, and Afghanistan peasants perusing comic books that explain free elections while warlords extort their votes.

A Spectacle of Corruption returns to the story of Benjamin Weaver (from A Conspiracy of Paper), a Jewish pugilist turned “thief taker” – an occupation much like detective, except that its practitioners are expected to fabricate evidence as often as not. He accepts a commission to identify the author of letters threatening a priest for his duplicitous defense of British dock workers. The waters turn very deep when Weaver finds himself framed for the murder of a dock worker and quickly condemned to a death sentence. Someone badly wants him dead, but it appears that someone just as badly wants him alive when a mysterious woman gives him the means to escape. His journey to exonerate himself takes him from the world of the British working class, where incipient trade unions degenerate into gangs run by thugs, to the parties of the ruling class, where election fraud is an openly practiced art.

Liss is a better writer with every book, and his knowledge of the era makes for fascinating reading, but I find him less capable with each book of creating a likable main character. This may be by design, but it’s a dangerous tactic for a writer. Weaver was a sympathetic figure in The Conspiracy of Paper — outside the Jewish community looking in, trying to maintain a standard of honor in a sordid trade. Within the first 120 pages of A Spectacle of Corruption, he has cut off an unarmed man’s ear and thrust another’s head into a chamberpot, nearly drowning him. He does these acts with a peculiarly detached, even sociopathic attitude, at odds with his previous depth of feeling. “I considered his words for a moment and then reached out with a speed than even I found remarkable. With one hand I grabbed his right ear, and with the other I used my knife to sever a substantial part of it. I held the bloody thing in my fingers and showed it to him before tossing it onto his writing desk, where it landed on a pile of correspondence with a heavy slap. Too astonished to cry out or even to move, Rowley only stared at the little pieces of flesh…’Where do you keep your banknotes?’ I asked again.”

The author tries to redeem Weaver later with strong concern for abused geese and women, but he certainly didn’t win me back. You could make a good argument, based on The Coffee Trader, that Liss wants to show his characters increasingly alienated and disaffected, but pushing ordinary people into the realm of sadism without remorse is not the way to go. With all his writing skills, he doesn’t seem able to darken his characters without making them emotionally flat. He’d be wiser imputing torment to his characters than deadened feeling. At some point, wonderful period detail notwithstanding, I will stop reading if sociopaths become the subject.

I actually got an email from Jonathan Carroll about my review of his book The Wooden Sea!!! (See 9-14-2004.) I believe he found it on Amazon.com, not my weblog. It’s a treat to think that authors may actually read these reviews. Here it is:

Subject: A smile from Vienna

Interesting, smart review of THE WOODEN SEA. Thank you.

JC

… And a later answer to an email:

Don’t kid yourself– ALL authors read their reviews, whether they admit to
it or not. And sometimes the Amazon reviews are smarter than the ones in the
NY Times.

Keep moving, keep dreaming,
JC

Take a look at his blog (I put a link in the upper right) - he writes interesting sketches of people.