What do we value?

Photograph of red tree in Central Park.

This past week I have been thinking of my grandparents, who failed to escape Nazi Poland before anecdotally committing murder suicide to escape their fate. I never met them and never heard a verifiable account of why they didn’t leave although I know their four children either left on their own or were sent out.  Increasingly, as this country appears to move inexorably towards lawless but theocratic and oligarchic fascism- the conflation of all possible abhorrent systems of “governance”- I think about my grandparents decision and the consequences: stay with hope or stay with despair but either way, the end result is tragic.

I feel grief over these thoughts. The implications for me are about how intransigently and easily personal attributes like stubbornness or selfishness can mortally doom others as it has often devastated me as much as any natural catastrophe, like a tornado can. One insight it has brought me is to understand why what I value in great art, is the recognition of the depth of tragedy in the world, whether defined by beauty or humor. I also spent time reviewing art for a show this week to distract myself from my grief-stricken speculations and had to note my impatience with work that just depends on bells and whistles or some shallow observation. Life is so short, fragile and vulnerable to casual judgements and short-sighted decisions.

Besides these sad meditations, I am hard at work on my present project, test a new app to geolocate elements of my work-in-progress for The Blued Trees Opera. I have begun with a series of stills and short video takes of iconic trees in Central Park. The Park recognizes nine iconic trees in its landscape, few of which are Indigenous, albeit all are beautiful. There are nine notes in the iterated melody central to this project. Nine has mystical significance about completion, art, the feminine and vision http://numerology-thenumbersandtheirmeanings.blogspot.com/2011/05/number-9.html which fits nicely with the intentions I have. The visuals I’m assembling will be layered with a number of other elements, such as some very simple, ancient questions, like, “what do we value?”

What were my grandparents valuing when they stayed or when they ended their lives? There is no way for me to know but I feel like their ghosts whisper incoherent warnings in my ears.

That question about what we value goes to legal questions about ownership, which might be too abstract to make clear in a series of short takes but I intend to make a stab at addressing.

This work won’t go live till April, when I might be back in Maine, so I can’t spill too many beans except to say that it is very exciting to be moving ahead with a new project, even if the country is going to hell in a handbasket.