An immense bee subdued me!
A pictorial essay
Sela
Visual artist
In
social isolation my gaze adjusts to the boundaries of the wall, in my garden, a
space that is colourful and alive. I realized in contemplation that there is
rhythm, interval, harmony, contrast in the way in which lives grow,
accommodate, associate and cooperate; they have their logic in the space at
their disposal. The perception of details allows us to dig deeper, and also
broaden, the aesthetic awareness of what happens near us, and especially the
fact that there is an aesthetic in the life of animals and plants.
If it is proving to be a
challenge, for me, to stay home in a small space, it is also so to paint in
smaller support, because I usually paint on a large scale. As a return to
myself, I enter my garden: an introspective space and a platform to experiment
on social relationship, and I consider that the gardens cultivated, in their
moments and places, by artists such as César Manrique, Claude Monet, Frida
Kahlo, Jacques Majorelle, Mary Mattingly, must have also been an exercise in
introspection. Social isolation may be the opportunity to broaden our vision,
our consciousness. Now we are in the interval, this time that we always lacked
for looking at what is close; plant, animal, house, the other. We can cultivate
a longer, more careful gaze, with more sense and
feeling of cooperation. And who knows, maybe, after the pandemic we can
revisit the gesture itself, what it has been in this smaller space, and rescale
the importance of things to better adapt ourselves to the existential reality –
speaking of bioempathy, really, of feeling part of a living system. And not
always in the dominant and overwhelming way that we have done.
I realize, in face of
the forced isolation, that the pandemic which has put into question the
planetary contemporary society – as we do not know what will happen, what we
can do next month – has made it possible for me to practise the exercise of gulliverisation that the philosopher of the imaginary Gilbert Durand discusses
in The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (1997) – an
anthropological classification of the images based on collective archetypes
that he groups in two regimes of the
imaginary: diurnal and nocturnal. Durand considers the image in
its symbolic character and applies the anthropological
trajectory, a device for the study of the image that encompasses both
the subjectivity of the being and the influxes of the environment. In
this work, specifically in the framework of the mystical
nocturnal regime of the image, the author presents the symbols that
characterize matriarchy (return to the mother, return to the earth), the
processes of miniaturisation or gulliverisation (appreciation of the atom, the
intimacy of the substance); presents the earth, the water, the movement of
descent, the euphemisation (the fall becomes slow descent); defends that the
atom, this minimal portion, is capable of promoting the most important
transmutations; that atomism is a process of gulliverisation and, just like
alchemy, is substantialist.
Below is a quote from
the referred work:
[...] the processes of
Gulliverisation are representations, in the form of images, of the intimate,
active principle at the heart of things. Atomism - Gulliverisation with claims
to objectivity always reappears sooner or later on the substantialist horizon,
as does the theory of hidden "fluids" and "waves", which
constitute the efficacy of substances. [...] It is "superlative"
interiority which constitutes the notion of substance. "For the
pre-scientific mind substance has an interior, or indeed, is an interior'', and
alchemists, like poets, have only one wish: to penetrate lovingly to the core
of things. This is a consequence of the psychic schema of inversion: intimacy
inverts. All envelopes or containers, notes Bachelard, appear less precious and
less substantial than the matter inside them. High quality and substantial
treasure are not found in what contains, but in what is contained. (DURAND,
1999, pp. 248-249)[1]
The following lines
express subjectively an experience that I relate to the concepts proposed by
Durand.
In one of the pictorial
incursions through the garden in these days of isolation, visiting the world of
insects and little plants, I was subdued by a bee! And
it tells me that, despite the serious risk of extinction, it is, yes, essential
for the continuity of the life of various species on the planet: it produces
life, it is responsible for more than 70% of the global food crops that
humankind consumes – it is true what UN News published days ago (2020) – and
argues that they are fundamental for food security and for the conservation of
biodiversity! The human species has been on the planet for only 350 thousand
years, while bees have been here since 100 million years ago. When I returned
from the garden I was impressed with the grandness of that insect. How giant!
I elaborate my worldview through painting, so I began investigating with colours this phenomenon of my giant surroundings, my garden that became immense, such as the bee. I think that prehistoric painters had a more accurate view of the importance of the human individual on the planet, as they represented us in few lines, in figures of apparently little elaboration and importance before majestic animals on the walls of the caves.
It also seems to me that
in Nordic romanticism, painter artists rescaled the presence of the individual
before Nature. For example, in the painting The monk by the sea (1809)
by Caspar David Friedrich (ROSENBLUM, 1993, p.16), the painter illustrates the contemplative
human being, in silence and stillness, immersed in an immense, engulfing
landscape, the individual powerless before nature. In times of crisis, when the
chieftain is made curumim[2],
Friedrich and other romantic painters advocated a return to nature.
I would like to conclude
this excursion to my garden with the wish that contemporary society may
lovingly consider the core of small lives in the environment around it and see
itself not as an aggressive and deadly owner, but part of the living system, as
Bachelard noted in the words of Gilbert Durand: the essence, the high quality,
the substance is not the container, the dominant but what is embraced. High
quality is found in what is contained.
If
there is hope, I glimpse it through the leaves: that overcoming this crisis of
human society may sprout from our acceptance, firstly, of human vulnerability;
in second place, of the thoughtlessness and truculence of our gestures towards
other beings in the environment; next, of trust in the wisdom and sense of
natural life balance that even small insects express; and, lastly, of our
acceptance that it is possible to feel part of this living system that is the
planet, with all its biomes, and to feel embraced by this bigger continent of
ours – who knows, as prodigal children? – completing the path of eternal
return, that according to Mircea Eliade (1992) is the path of the
individual on Earth, the return to the mother's arms, the dissolution of
egocentrism before the uncontrollable forces of nature. The author also says:
‟Como Hegel observaba con noble suficiencia, nunca ocurre nada nuevo en la
naturaleza” [As Hegel observed with noble assuredness, nothing new ever occurs
in nature]. (ELIADE, 2001, p. 97). Because everything repeats itself in an
eternal return: the days, the seasons, birth, growth and death, rise and fall
of civilizations.
Florianópolis, June
2020.
Translation by Dayana
Hashim
REFERENCE
DURAND, Gilbert. As
estruturas antropológicas do imaginário:
Introdução à arquetipologia geral. Translated by Hélder Godinho. São Paulo:
Martins Fontes, 1997.
DURAND, Gilbert. The anthropological structures of the
imaginary. Translated by Margaret
Sankey & Judith Hatten. Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 1999.
ELIADE, Mircea. El mito del eterno retorno [The myth of the eternal return].
1st ed. Translated by Ricardo Anaya. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001.
FRIEDRICH, Caspar David. Monje junto al mar [The monk by the sea]
(1809). Painting. In: ROSENBLUM, Robert. La pintura moderna y la tradición
del Romanticismo nórdico: De
Friedrich a Rothko. [Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic
Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko] Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1993.
UN News. Brasil e Portugal são analisados
em relatório da FAO sobre polinizadores [Brazil and Portugal analysed in FAO report on pollinators]. 9 June
2020. Web page. Available at https://news.un.org/pt/ story/2020/06/1716152>. Access: 15 June 2020.
