We cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow

You know how some people can feel deep within their bosom the first waves of a surge of nascent born again Christianity or the stirring of some other life-changing need? I think I'm very close to beginning to think about becoming a Civil War buff. Mind you, I'm not about to start recreating famous battles or anything but a lifelong fascination with the photography of Matthew Brady, Alexander Gardner and others who dragged their cameras to the battlefield during The War Between the States is starting to morph into the desire to know more. Names, dates, battles, aftermaths. I've done this sort of thing before, making myself some years ago an expert on the Salem hysteria. I have volume after volume on the subject and personal notebooks filled with the names of the executed... so obviously this kind of mania is within me. Now, I haven't gone and done anything foolish... yet... but I suspect these wiggly inclinations are about to get the better of me.

I've always found those old photographs from this era to be surpassingly eerie. Sure, all the rubbery dead bodies in the frame probably have a lot to do with that but even more than the carnage it's the coldness and the presence of the woods in the background and the patchwork look of the soldiers' uniforms, which amount to little more than their own clothes to which has been added a cap with a military emblem, a satchel with a military buckle, or a musket. Dirty, bearded and starved, these poor bastards look like concentration camp internees more than terra stamping commandos. Those photographs have a power over me and prompted me to read the Civil War fiction of Ambrose Bierce. I find all of this unbelievably creepy and irresistible.

All of this is coming to a head now with the publication of a couple of books about the Civil War dead, about the (then) unfathomable volume of dead bodies that the Civil War generated and what had to be done about them. I'm particularly interested in Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008), which suggests that the way in which our country responded to the dead weight of so many war casualties actually defined America as we know it now. I quote from Gilpin's introduction:

Bodies were in important ways the measure of the war–of its achievements and its impact; and indeed, bodies became highly visible in Civil War America. Commanders compared their own and enemy casualties as evidence of military success or failure. Soldiers struggled for the words to describe mangled corpses strewn across battlefields; families contemplated the significance of newspaper lists of wounds: "slightly, in the shoulder," "severely, in the groin," "mortally, in the breast." They nursed the dying and buried their remains. Letters and reports from the front rendered the physicality of injuries and death all but unavoidable. For the first time civilians directly confronted the reality of battlefield death rendered by the new art of photography. They found themselves transfixed by the paradoxically lifelike renderings of the slain of Antietam that Mathew Brady exhibited in his studio on Broadway. If Brady "has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets, he has done something very like it," wrote the New York Times.

This new prominence of bodies overwhelmingly depicted their destruction and deformation, inevitably raising the question of how they related to the persons who had once inhabited them. In the aftermath of battle survivors often shoveled corpses into pits as they would dispose of animals–"in bunches, just like dead chickens," one observer noted–dehumanizing both the living and the dead through their disregard. In Civil War death the distinction between men and animals threatened to disappear, just as it was simultaneously eroding in the doctrines of nineteenth-century science.

I mean no pun, but it sounds like there's a lot of meat here. It would be interesting to find out that a lifelong interest in morbid subjects on my part is actually part and parcel of a perfectly American legacy.

Loving the art in myself

Yesterday I caught a glimpse in the newspaper of this drawing by George Seurat, a study in conté-crayon for what would be his 1884 oil painting "Bathers at Asnières" (which hangs in the National Gallery in London). I've never been a Seurat fan but I was taken with the Dreyeresque aspect of this sketch. Working on coarse-grained Michallet paper, which ate up his charcoal, Serurat left a lot of space untouched and so defined his subject not in terms of lines but in the juxtaposition of tones. The effect is beautifully dreamlike, more dreamlike to me than Seurat's color pointillist paintings which, I don't know, are too sweet for my taste. I love the inkiness of "Echo" (as this is called) and I prefer the study to Seurat's finished oil.

Looking at this for a few minutes set my mind to thinking about art. Maybe it's different for other people, but I definitely feel as though there are media that are mind and media that belong to other people. Film, for example, is a medium that I feel close to, even though I know full well that millions of other people feel the same way. Still photography is another - I've always connected to still photography and have haunted many more photography museums than I have portrait galleries. Painting, music, poetry and sculpture are all arts that I admire but I'm definitely on the outside looking in, nose pressed to the glass in awe. I can love a particular painting or a particular style or even admire a particular artist but my appreciation of fine art is still relegated to the nerdy ghetto of what sets off an emotion in me. I love the work of Edward Hopper, because I can connect with his sense of loneliness in a crowd... but I rarely admire artwork in this media solely in terms of technique or context, as I do in cinema or fiction.

My favorite photographer is Ralph Eugene Meatyard. As with the Seurat drawing above, this shot is one I hadn't seen before yesterday. Born in Illinois, Meatyard lived and worked as an ophthalmologist in Lexinton, Kentucky, and his work has a definite Southern Gothic feel to it. He seemed to work exclusively with his family and friends as subjects when he wasn't just snapping away at found objects (torn flags, broken dolls, dime store monster masks), which suggests to me an excessive shyness despite his artistic ambitions.

He seems in this respect a soul mate of Diane Arbus (who was Meatyard's New York contemporary and committed suicide a year before his death from cancer in 1972) but instead of going out and trolling for freaks on the streets of the urban sprawl, Meatyard went native, trucking into the country to channel his inner freak, the ghoulishness and monstrousness within that is not necessarily predatory in nature but defensive, reflective. Without having seen any Meatyard in his lifetime, I was living a Meatyard existence, keeping away from home, shoplifting Halloween masks from the bargain bin at Diskay's Department Store on Main Street and hanging out with my few friends in abandoned houses or sewer runoff pipes that ran along the highway. Meatyard and I seem to have shared a perverse attraction to dead animals, road kill as found art. And I often wore my hood up like the kid in the picture above. I remember getting a plastic skull mask and a raincoat for my birthday one year, putting them on, going out of the house and making a girl next door scream out loud. Her name was Martha and she was tall for a pre-teen, big-boned and blonde. She looked like the St. Paulie Girl. Kind of.

Bear with me...

... this is a work in devilish progress.