LETTERS FROM INSIDE THE WHALE

Of THE APOCALYPSE

THE APOCALYPSE…A RECKONING

Dear Dad,

In the years immediately following the war, rather than talk about it, you made paintings and drawings bearing witness to what you found there, the unspeakable nature of War. Two years after your death, Mom decided it was time to move on, to a smaller place of her own.

And so, on a fall weekend in 1994, the four of us came home to North Carolina to help cull a rather vast collection of things acquired over the course of a lifetime. We spent a colorful Saturday afternoon out back, sifting through the remains of your workshop and studio. It’s there we found a painting we’d never seen before, a watercolor, wedged between sheets of drawing paper covered with practice sketches in charcoal, pencil, and pen and ink. In universal agreement, we called this one The Apocalypse. You never framed this piece of work. Never hung the thing on a wall. Could it be that, once spoken out loud in living color, you couldn’t face it again…the horror?

You also didn’t destroy it. Only wedged The Apocalypse among so many sheets of drawing paper, perhaps for us to find and wonder over, like your letters from war, after you’d gone. As so many artists I’ve come to know, you favored letting your creative expressions speak for themselves.

In the final distribution, I got it: The Apocalypse. And upon returning home, I too put it away. Wedged the thing between a couple of green plastic bins filled with Christmas ornaments. Joy to the world and all that, sparkle and shine. Peace and good will to men and women. What did I know, back then, of what you’d done or where inspiration came from?

Today, on the impetus of a letter you’d written, I decided to go down into the basement and fetch it up, take another look, give The Apocalypse its due. Now the stiffened watercolor paper, emboldened with imagery, stands on an easel made of the back of a chair and a stack of books holding it in place. You’ll see where this is going. The books I chose seemed appropriate standards for the study: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Melville’s Moby Dick, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Chronicles by Bob Dylan, Volume I. Traveling companions, all. My yogis.

Hear Dylan now: Beauty walks a razor’s edge…

I take on the task of reading The Apocalypse as child of the artist. In this painting, unframed, I find…

…in the lower right-hand corner, your name and the date of composition: Fick ’49.  Three years after your return from war. Three years prior to your becoming a father for the first time. At the time, you’re an ad man in NYC, taking night classes at the Art Students League.

…an abstract yet articulate landscape, awash in blues. Ice blue foreground, perhaps the sea. Blue-black peaks, recognizable mountains. Cobalt sky vacant of sun, moon, and stars. Night has fallen. Intense blues, battling with fiery reds, oranges, and yellows for dominance. Robert Frost comes to whisper in my ear…  

Some say the world will end in fire,

                        Some say in ice…       

…tortured trees bend this way and that, blackened branches, charred stumps, roots lost to a wavering sea at the foot of mountain range and sky. One tree looms vertical, larger than life, only dead. A murder most foul…

… in the crossfire of reds and blues, these slashes of black and white. Drips of white along fault lines. Ghostly figures haunting the landscape? A sailor’s knot torn loose from the main? A lifeline thrown out of reach? Hangman’s noose? Eternal Why? Ragged rips in the fabric of the universe?

…dead center, an unearthly black form, opaque, ambiguous, hovering. Is this a dismembered limb from the mother tree? A sinking ship? Anti-aircraft gun? Unidentified fallen object? Dark slash of anger in abstraction…?

…tears spilling from oceanic blue-green eyes over what’s been seen, felt, carried  So many, the possibilities of interpretation.

…in the lower right-hand corner of the deckle-edged watercolor paper, an empty space, unpainted. Did you do it on purpose, the mark of…absence?

What was it you saw there on the ground you’re not saying?

Puzzling through Art, without resolution. It helps, knowing something of the life and sensitivities of the artist. Am I wrong to see ghosts in The Apocalypse?

I’ve seen these images before, in so many words. Letters written in green ink on parchment paper. Word pictures sent home from war as it happened. Like this one, from 29 March, 1945, something of a portrait of the artist as a young man, 22 years of age…

…The excitement, the tension, and the quiet was thrilling…the dull pound of mortars, and the rushing whine of rockets being discharged. From behind and screaming overhead came the whoosh of the shells from the cruisers and cans, and finally a terrific pounding of exploding bombs from wave after wave of B25’s—we could feel their concussion a mile away. Several hundred yards from the beach, which was now a mass of fallen palms and smoking ruin, it stopped suddenly, and there was a knifelike tension and silence…

As the shells got nearer, you could hear them coming, and you’d learned awfully

fast to throw yourself down on the ground and get as low as possible…

At dark, the shelling finally ended. We completed the unloading several hours after dark and prepared to retract. For the first time since we’ve been over here, we couldn’t get off the beach. We tried for four hours and finally gave up. I had to stand the midnight to 4 watch on the conn, and all during that time, I saw the action going on inland…

Only a few days before, on 25 May 1945, you wrote:

Our convoy passed close by several active volcanoes. One in particular—a huge towering peak six thousand feet high, standing alone in the idle of nowhere like something that didn’t belong and was ostracized by the land many miles away.  It spewed a great column of steam that hung like a veil over its peak and the sea lashed at its shore. It was something mean and venomous and ugly-tempered; yet there was a powerful beauty that had significance…

Moments fuse in watercolors, a translucent medium. Sensory overload. Memory washed ashore. Wedged between the Beauty and Horror of it all. Beauty walks a razor’s edge…Of Beauty and Horror, which ultimately emerges as the dominant force?

Not so much a question, as a thought, for the ages. You had a hand in putting it there.

The human hand. There in the lower left corner, a recognizably human hand,  emerging from ice blue waters, as if to lift the translucent veil of fog. Five fingers painted a ghoulish green. The hand moves me, recalling what Dante would have me know of Purgatorio, words once borrowed by Robert Penn Warren as prelude to All the King’s Men:

Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde…

In English, As long as hope still has its bit of green…         

Green, symbolizing fertility, rebirth, new growth. Whose hand is this? I would have it be yours, fingertips burnt black, reaching into the world of the painting for something to hold onto. Out of so much death and destruction, fight the urge to surrender. As long as hope still has its bit of green…

In 1949, it’s not over. The story of WWII has never come to a close. Nor should it. In war, humans die. Creation dies, one piece at a time. Where is there hope for something different? A new and better way of seeing things as they most truly are?

I’m struck by the similarities between the hand rising from the chilling waters of The Apocalypse and the hand of Gunther staring at his own hand in awe, as if to say, What have I done? What am I to do now? Gunther, another of your post-war creations, oil on canvas. A painting you were willing to hang in the den on a wall opposite the television. The tie-dyed hippie in me would say, with conviction, what I believe Gunther would like to hear: Make love, not war. The grandmother in me would say to the man, every man, staring at his own hand: Listen. Hear. Look. See. Feel. Move. Do something creative, for God’s sake.

Bob Dylan raises his hand again, drops an offering of hope in the plate...

Beauty walks a razor’s edge…someday I’ll make it mine.

Love.