Great Things Labouring

That sport best pleases that doth least know how;   
Where zeal strives to content, and the contents   
Die in the zeal of those which it presents;   
Their form confounded makes most form in mirth,
When great things labouring perish in their birth.

Love's Labour's Lost
(Act V, Scene ii)

This painting is called Geopoliticus Child, it was created by Salvador Dali in 1943.  Dali’s home and mother country, Spain was engulfed in a bloody civil and world war, deep in a national identity crisis.

What does the crazed genius Dali do? He shows us mother earth pointing to a new child grapling its way into the world.  The innocent new born is the United States of America. The land mass of the United States is the body tearing its way through the earth (egg) into life. The new born grips Great Britain, as this is the lever of its roots.

The head of the ‘child’ is yet to grace the light of day, still to find its vision, realize it's focus, reason, purpose and identity.

In every ruling class and culture throughout history has established its presence through bloody mindless military rule, gained power by reeking fear and destruction, be it the Mughals, the Romans, the Greeks, the Mongols or the British. Each in turn brought untold suffering and devastation to the cultures and communities in their path, but in equal measure, they also co-mingled with the existing cultures and heritage to bring new depths of creativity, breakthroughs in the arts, science, engineering, social order, learning and growth have emerged out of this darkness, the genesis of which would otherwise have been inconceivable.

The industrial revolution and the British Empire may be two separate chapters in the history books, but they are one indistinguishable event. Economic power, military rule and the creative power of human creativity and innovation  are all one ying-yang whole.

Each of the ruling cultures have always been a mix of political and militaristic expediency (greed) and in equal measure the divine power of their artists, poets, thinkers, engineers, their builders of education systems, community and an advancement of the human experience. You cannot separate the two. Ugly as it is to admit, they are one.

The question that Dali’s painting begs – is that as this next child tears out of the darkness, as it spreads its desperate economic and geo-political grip on the world, Mother Nature can do nothing but look and point, natures other child (existing cultures and communities) cling to the mother earth, for fear of what will come.

We are left to wonder, WHAT will America’s contribution and legacy be? It is the utimate mystery of any new born child, its potential greatness and destructive powers are unknowable.

Over half a century after the painting was put on canvas, the U.S. is getting through puberty and only just beginning to shape its legacy, it will take much longer than our lifetime for it to make is true mark. This is the birth place of the internet, the global on-line community, the source of the new wisdom, the unexpected contribution of this child is only just unfolding before our very eyes.

This is a vision of America's legacy, one that reaches beyond the narrow politicians lens of greed and consumption, politicians come and go, the only thing that will endure is the value created by ordinary human beings, born in ordinary circumstances, the artists, poets, thinkers, engineers and builders of education, communication systems, community as these are the men and women who bear the burden of broadening the bounds of human experience.

We have no idea what will be created or what will survive once the Geopoliticus Child has come of age, or once it has passed through the usual passage, the life cycle that every empire that preceded it has been through.

All we do know for sure, is that once it has run its course and bites the same dust that we all have to bite one day, another egg will hatch and a new empire will clutch the earth through its birth pangs, to destory what has been created and plant new seeds of learning through its own lethally glorious legacy.

Sweet lords, sweet lovers, O! let us embrace.
As true we are as flesh and blood can be:   
The sea will ebb and flow, heaven show his face;   
Young blood doth not obey an old decree:   
We cannot cross the cause why we were born;
Therefore, of all hands must we be forsworn.

Love's Labour's Lost
(Act IV, Scene iii)

Comments

[Bernie Quigley]

Thoughtful. But Google "Poetry in America" by Dali painted the same year. It shows the egg hatched and the dripping blood to be coming from the "Christ wound" in the chest. Eggman also has a candle in his head to indicate he is the Enlightened One. It is an Aquarian Creation Myth. He has another titled "The Second Coming of Christ" - Christ here is a Buddhist monk in a desert, possibly Texas, but the same one likely in Geopoliticus Child.

[Kashmir Birk]

Thanks Bernie. Please unpack this a little more for me. I read your blog, with great admiration. I never knew John Lennon's 'eggman' in "I am the Walrus" was in homage to Dali's painting? Wow. Thank you so much for that. That's a keeper.

I am familiar with "Poetry in America" just not quite sure the desert is Texas? I am not even sure the figure is America itself. My sense is that these figures are the world stuck and trying to fight their way out of the new global desert, the new born 'poetry of america'. It is the world (which of course includes American's) clasping the light of Christ, dancing with flowers for arms, coming with no danger, only an invitation to love.

As you may know “Christ of St John of the Cross” depicts the harbour in Port Lligat in Spain. It is a celebration of Dali's rediscovery of Catholocism. The landscape is a merging of Port Lligat in Spain with Galilee, with boats borrowed from Velasquez and Le Nain to boot.

I am no art critic. My sense is that given Dali's propensity to mix metaphors and landscapes, I am just not so sure the desert is Texas or the figure is America? My sense is that the world is being consumed by the poetry of commercialisation, commoditization and consumerism. This is the poetry that consumes the world?

Hence the blood of christ is now the dripping blood bottle of Coca Cola, and phone oozing black ink as the mass media (especially Hollywood and the Press) begins to consume "the word" and in so doing, the making of meaning, Its darkness a contrast to the light of the candle in the cave of the human spirit, the light of Christ still there - if we want to see our way through - to guide our way back to our innocence, our hearts, our children, our lives, our selves.

These cosmic athletes, two sword fighters like yin and yang, graplling air around the phallus. The dance continues around and around as time runs out for Africa, the cradle of humanity. In the distance a naked child, pure and clean seeks the "time of day" with the stick, as all our ancestors did before the poetry began with its soft watches, machine like consumption ordained poetry.

Here is what Dali said of Poetry of America in 1966... "The greatest passion of the American people is when they see little children killed. Why? Because, according to the greatest psychologists in the United States, the massacre of the innocents is the favourite theme, the one which is found in the innermost depths of their subconscious minds, since they are constantly annoyed by children, so that their libido projects itself filling the cosmic surfaces of their dreams. If Americans adore bloody orgies and the slaughter of the innocents and soft watches which run like real French Camembert when it is just right, it is because what they love most in the world are 'dot,' or bits of data, those information bits that symbolise the discontinuity of matter".

But screw Dali. I am intrigued to hear your thoughts on this. As an Americano, half a century later what do you think? Are Indo-China the new breed of geopoliticus children? What would our twirly moustached, mad capped genius made of their lost innocence?

On a recent trip to Beijing, I sat in a mall, listening (agast) to "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town"... thus I heard the "poetry of america" lives and breathe large in the new geopoliticus desert. I spoke to many Chinese friends who said that the Olympics had turned Beijing into 'just another American city". The same is true of Delhi, Gargaon and Mumbai. The "New India" is hardly anything close to the independant, "Desi India" of Gandhi or the "Soviet India" Nerhu envisaged. Only Lord knows which way Mao must be spinning in his "re-educated" grave?

That's is what I make of the Poetry of America. The poetry of the new global child. And 50 years later more children have begat in her image. What do you make of her hurt and her heart?

Kashmir