In a 1925 letter the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of the artist’s task in transforming objects into art: “We are the bees of the invisible. We…gather the honey of the visible in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.” [qtd in notes (p. 70) to Duino Elegies, North Point Press, 2001]. This task of working with materiality until it becomes a part of our inner lives and then offering it up to the world as “honey” or “art” is not about making money or a big social splash. It is about receiving, and then giving, to others, to the gods, a gift.
I like Rilke’s articulation. Art and honey. It might be easy to see each as non-essential, until one imagines them gone from the world. Today, we live in a time of ecological stress and our heedless treatment and killing of bees threatens both the natural world and our own survival. This mistreatment exists in parallel with our loss of inner life and our confusion about the role of art.
People have been making art for at least 10,000 years. The earliest cave paintings celebrate the sacred and the wondrous, be that through healing, giving thanks, or supplication to the gods.
Bee cultivation and honey gathering are at least 8,000 years old. Cave paintings in Spain show bees and the collection of honey. Other petroglyphs suggest that people collected honey from as long ago as 10,000 years. So, making art and raising bees for honey have a similarly ancient past.
We also know that the ancient Greeks and Egyptians built their temples on sites belonging to specific gods, and created temple art and rituals (afterwards changing to dramatic plays) to such an exacting standard that their enactment would attract the presence of the sacred. The theory being that the god had no choice but to come if the preparations were perfect. (See Jane Harrison on the theory of “dromenon”).
What a wonderful basis for the making of art! And wherever there are people gathered to appreciate art, the theory goes, the sacred is present—as long as the mood is not too somber or overly serious. The belief in such a construction maintained ancient Greek culture. People went to the ancient Greek drama festivals to see their favorite plays. In the process they might experience catharsis, healing, transformation and entertainment.
Similarly people have consumed honey for thousands of years because of its sweetness and as a base for herbal medicines. Bees were also studied as builders of communities and it has long been known their collection of pollen allowed for the fertilization of plants—both flowers and food-bearing crops. Bees do what they do; they gather, they transform. Honey is the result.
When Rilke writes in his letter that the artist enters the realm of the invisible (feelings, imaginings, spirit) as part of the process of making art, he is not simply referring to the work of great artists. Anyone who dedicates himself or herself to this process is included in this transformation. This process is seen as similar to collecting pollen for the making of honey. The resulting art, honey, is a gift.
In these paintings, I have explored the idea of making art and how it might connect to other activities, states, and even other realms.
I read recently about someone who had a “built-in” bullshit detector! I am completely unable to picture how that might work, but, then, I would not be the person to ask. Kids, I’m told, have built-in bullshit detectors, so maybe you need to be young. Like a lot of older consumers, I have not kept up on the technology.
Living without a bullshit detector can be peaceful and relaxing. As you know, there is a lot of bullshit out there, and I got sick of having the alarm go off all the time. On the other hand, I do feel a need for the ol’ detector occasionally.
etc...
and feel a little warmth in my hands.
The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.
The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.
I shove my hands in my hadynpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.
I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."
The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.
The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.
by Tomas Transtromer
tr Robert Bly
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a cheese cake one with
berry stripes, sweet
after the tangy barbeque and the bite of beer.
But all night long we burped up stars
bursting like fireworks
in the black bedroom.
I lie awake in the night
wondering why we celebrate our country?
Back on childhood’s Western Avenue,
the rows of corn stand knee-high next to the freeway.
In Summer’s thumping heat,
I had swimming lessons in the blue village pool.
My sister hung me out the upstairs window.
JFK turns to his side, in a car,
and dies. We rent a TV to see
the funeral, my father standing
on the linoleum
when they play the star spangled.
We are on holiday at Cape Cod,
and a shirt-ful of steamers
is set for boiling and bowls of butter.
My father took me to Chicago in the train,
and we rode in an elevator
to his desk in the sky-
scraper, and sat me in his leather chair
with my legs hanging down.
Later, Martin Luther King Jr. leans on a railing
holding the bullets inside,
but no one told me.
None of us stood up for him.
Nor did I understand my childhood’s war
in the other world
of bamboo and napalm, and the color
of the cake was agent orange
and there was so little sweetness.
2
And how we slid from being
an engine in the world,
full of zest and freshness,
to this fat self-interest.
How greed waxed, and joy waned,
until history was just trotted out
once a year to justify guns, or fresh excess.
How squabbles were fanned into fires
and we lost the union, consumed for
short profits and the gratification
of a few.
When our collapse came
we barely noticed:
we were bickering like spoilt kids
as the car left the asphalt,
The tires shuddering in the air.
As we tumble,
I wonder,
Are the words that choke us
grateful to be free of us at last,
so that life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness
can find new throats,
new champions with less
avarice and more need?
