Both Sides Now

Life is strong and fragile. It’s a paradox… It’s both things, like quantum physics: It’s a particle and a wave at the same time. It all exists all together.
– Joan Jett

I promise not to talk about politics. Instead I’m going to free-fall into paradox and quantum physics. But if you’ve been listening to the finer (original) convention speeches in the last two weeks, you have been party to the power of language, the slick pronoun pick (the intimate I, the confrontational you, the inclusive we) and the abiding nature of voice. You will have completed a crash course in Aristotle’s three appeals – logos, ethos and pathos – not to mention the synergy of three, the logic of twos and the essential nature of one. And you’ve probably figured out the most potent sentence turns out not to be the choreographed multi-clause sentence increasing in intensity, filled with proofs and turns of phrase, but the shortest one, especially when it follows the longest one. Brief ­– and straight to the heart. You will also realize a compelling argument (or story) lies not in abstract generalities and vagueness. Specific, definite, concrete language and sensory details echo long after the balloons drop. Ah, the art of persuasion.

Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.
– Lao Tzu

I also promise not to talk about religion. Instead I’m going to delve into the bizarre and unknown. Possibly dabble in the afterlife. In conjunction with the Mummies of the World Exhibition at the Bowers Museum, I am currently teaching a workshop Linking Past & Present – Unwrap Secrets and Create Stories with Images and Words. Had I not been so steeped in the mystery of mummies these last few weeks, I might not be so tuned to secrets of the dead – to the process of natural mummification in hot dry climates, sand-salt environments, cool caves, peat bogs and castle crypts or the advanced science of intentional mummification. I would not have imagined transporting an ancient mummy to a hospital for a CT scan to discover diseases and information about life span and life style. Nor would I know about the strange and illegal practice of procuring mummies to unwrap at parties for entertainment or to grind up for pigment – mummy brown. I would also be in the dark on the finer points of shrunken heads – the victim’s head prepared and worn by the victor of a battle thus transferring the victim’s power to the victor. And I would not have experienced the beauty of a 2000-year-old sarcophagus for a woman of wealth made of imported Lebanese cedar decorated with hieroglyphs, creatures and a human-headed god. But the array of canopic jars for organs, Egyptian ushabtis (small figurines as servants for the deceased), mummy beads and other funerary art for safe passage to the afterlife got me thinking…

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
– T. S. Eliot

For this Linking Past & Present workshop, I rediscovered Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks filled with sketches of the body, detailed studies of nature, musings and more. He believed “nature is the source of all true knowledge.” Painter, sculptor, architect and engineer, his insatiable curiosity and skills challenged perceptions of proportion (his famous drawing of Vitruvian man), conceptualized inventions and created such works of art as the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. His interdisciplinary investigations got me thinking…

What I really want to talk about revolves around the absence of language, politics and the man-made. Late in the evening, I love to walk miles along the harbor after the twilight picnickers depart, the partiers and dog walkers, even the clusters of daytime teenagers eyes on their devices, backs to the sea, have packed it up. A woman strides off after a lover’s quarrel and a lone man, his home in his backpack, positions himself near the rocks to sleep. Only the sound of waves lapping the breakwater, as they vie for the other side, and the intermittent call of a night bird edges the silence.

Like Leonardo da Vinci who spent a great deal of his life in search of connections between the human body and patterns in nature, I too (without such genius) spend much time in wonder. I ponder paradox, the human body, the spirit world, quantum physics, the impact of language and art. The last two weeks against the backdrop of politics and ancient mummies got me thinking about acts of persuasion and the art of perspective – how it all depends where you position your lens.

Now I’ve discovered what I really came to say belongs to the stars, deep in the indigo sky, whirling with infinite answers…a particle and a wave at the same time.

Both sides now.

Join the second half of the Bowers Museum Workshop, Linking Past & Present – Unwrap Secrets and Create Stories. Saturday, August 6th and 13th.