All art is temporal. All art is lost.

It has been a while since my last post.  I had a lot of fun putting together that post about Encounter, and it was great that it reached some of the band members and other people involved with them.  Whenever I do a post about music, one of my hopes is that people might reconnect with something from their past, or appreciate a different perspective on it.  

In the two months since that post, not a lot has happened except the passing of time and the changing of the seasons.  Although today isn't the best example of the warmer spring weather (as a matter of fact, a woman with a horribly bruised face stopped in front of me in Central Square today and asked me, "This is spring???").  My health is continuing to improve although I did have some manifestations of graft-versus-host disease (something that was expected to happen eventually).  That seems to be under control now and I will learn more at my appointment tomorrow, which will mark 10 months out from my transplant.  

What has really kept me busy has been my art.  I've continued to paint and decided that since people continue to express interests in my paintings, I opened up an Etsy shop to make my art available to those who might want it.  At first I was selling originals but quickly realized it made more sense to make prints of paintings and offer those instead.  At the advice of my friend Dave, I took my time to gather materials and get everything ready.  Right now, my shop has 8 different prints available, with more to be added soon.

As you can see, items from my Etsy should be showing up on the right.  You can click to the shop from there, but the URL itself is www.etsy.com/shop/HarrySkoylesArt.  If you see something you like, enter coupon code BLOGMONEY for the "loyal reader" discount. 

I owe megathanks to my friend Dave who really helped me throughout the whole process of getting my shop off the ground.  He is an incredibly talented artist working on his thesis at Mass Art, and you can check out his own shop here.

The cliche about art is that it survives us.  That the things we create will remain on this earth long after we've left it, maybe even forever.  It's not difficult to see why such importance is placed on art and man's creations in general.  People hate the fact that they will die, and have dreamt up elaborate stories and religions in the neverending quest to establish meaning in our lives.  The significance of "leaving something behind" simply reflects man's struggle to find meaning in his life.  Do man's creations hold the only meaning that persists through death?

When we first invaded Iraq a decade or so ago and everything was blown to pieces and looted, an Iraqi painter was asked how he felt that all of his work had been destroyed.  He admitted his sadness, but ultimately accepted as a fact of life that all things come to an end.  The great poet Alan Dugan explored this idea in one of his later poems, which I have included the complete text of, but I encourage you to listen to him reading the poem in the video below.

All art is temporal. All art is lost.
Go to Egypt. Go look at the Sphinx.
It's falling apart. He sits
on water in the desert and the water table shifts.
He has lost his toes to the sand-
blasts of the Saharan winds
of a mere few thousand years.
The Mamelukes shot up his face
because they were Iconoclasts,
because they were musketeers.
The British stole his beard
because they were imperialist thieves.
It's in the cellar of the British Museum
where the Athenians lost their marbles.

And that City of Ideas
that Socrates once had in mind
has faded too, like the Parthenon
from car exhaust, and from
the filthiness of the Turks
who used it as a dump.
If that city ever was
for Real in public works
and not just words he said:
No things but in ideas.
No ideas but in things
I say as William Carlos Williams said,
things as the Sphinx is our thing,
a beast of a man made god
stoned into art to guard the dead
from nothing, nothing and vanishing
toes first in the desert,
sand-blasted off into nothing
by a few thousand years of air,
sand, take your pick, picker,
go to Egypt, go look
at the Sphinx while it lasts.
Art is not immortal.
Art is not mortal.
All art is ideas in things.
All art is temporal. All art is lost.
The imperial desert is moving in
with water, sand and wind
to wear the godly native beast of man apart
back to the nothing which sculpted him.

And remember the Mamelukes, remember the Brits.
They were the iconoclasts of their own times,
primitive musketeers, primtive chiselers. This time
we can really blast the beast of man to bits.

The view from behind my Sphinx

Thanks for reading.  Till next time...