Crossing the Rubicon, crossing a cultural divide

In 2000 I built, with Andy Rosen, a 25′ sculpture of a North Atlantic Right Whale. The sculpture was part of a collaborative exhibit, about our relationship to the rapidly warming Gulf of Maine, on display in two locations since then. The second exhibit recently came to an end, but as fortune blessed us, we have been able to donate the entire exhibit to the Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness Center in Bangor, Maine.

On the leap day, 29 February, I delivered the whale et al to the Wabanaki Public Health & Wellness Center. I was greeted by enthusiastic people, who welcomed our gift, and all of whom bore a similar resemblance. These were “people of the first light” members among the First Nations, and I powerfully realized that in crossing the Penobscot River I also crossed a cultural divide.

“Sea Change” within my/our culture was “other,” a puzzle, an odd fit. It had been well reviewed in the Sunday Press Herald and approximately 60,000 people experienced the exhibit. But we had a hard time getting people to embrace it, institutions especially. A robust PR campaign was promised, but in the end little was done to promote the exhibit. The board seemed to hold it at arms length while the administration neither recognized our donors, nor even acknowledged our “in kind donations.” One of our artists summed it up, “Our exhibit pushed some buttons that the museum was uncomfortable with….” One has to wonder.

We were invited to meet with a local ocean research institute to move the exhibit there, including an educational outreach, but their leaders rejected it, in part because of political issues; they directly said they could not take the whale because it touched upon the fisheries issue. Their major supporter is the fisheries industry. So our exhibit had run its course, its welcome worn out, and would have been hauled to the landfill.

To the Wabanaki it is a cherished asset, which they will use to help teach future generations (emphasis plural) about their link to the land. They welcomed my delivery not as plywood and tree trunk, not as wire and fabric, but a component of health and wellness. Their community has serious issues of addiction and mental health; in fact, alcohol, substance use and mental health disorders, suicide, violence, and behavior-related morbidity and mortality in American Indian and Alaska Native communities are disproportionately higher than the rest of the U.S. population. Our exhibit will be expanded into an immersive permanent exhibit in the Cafe of their Bangor center, showing the integration of life, the sustaining power of the Penobscot River, the grand web from Katahadin to Cashes Ledge, that all life is one.

What to my/our culture had become detritus is, to the Wabanaki, a most obvious opportunity. This has come to challenge me in a way reminiscent of paradox to Kierkegaard.

In the Oxford English Dictionary myth has two definitions. The first being “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events” with the second “a widely held but false belief or idea.” To my mind, in common parlance myth has become a pejorative term.

Carl Jung wrote, ““Everything that the modern mind cannot define it regards as insane.” Within our Western tradition of rationalism, dominated by monotheism, it is striking to note that one of our Great Men, the maven of rational insight and the material world, Sir Isaac Newton, led a secret life as a leading alchemist. He refused to publish his alchemical work – indeed, it was burned in a fire – perhaps for fear of scorn and rejection. The English Crown issued severe penalties for alchemy, including public hangings. Within our culture heretics have been burned at the stake, and witches sentenced to death.

Art-making predates agriculture, and thus predates civilization. Archetypes would seem to predate religion. Jung thought so, observing that organized religions had perfectly adapted the archetypes to their ritual stories. He wrote this not to denigrate religion, but, as a man of science, to pursue his “study of the soul.” The word archetype is derived from the Greek ἀρχῇ which is also, interestingly, the first noun [Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος] of the “Book of Books,” the dominant sacred text within our Western tradition.

The word “archetype” first appeared in the English language during the 1500s, and conceptually relates to the Platonic forms, so I feel on solid ground considering them a priori and the religious narrative secondary. I am growing in certainty that archetypes may be the keyhole through which the light of consciousness shines, with myth providing the keys to unlock the “many rooms in my Father’s house.”

The act of making, to my mind, then is one means to manifest these truths.

Allow me to close with this story from the First Nations:

Whale witnessed the events that led to the settling of Turtle Island (North America) and has kept the records and knowledge of the Motherland alive. It is said that Mu (the Motherland) will rise again when the fire comes from the sky and lands in another ocean on Mother Earth. All of Earth’s children will have to unite and honor all ways and all races in order to survive.