Revealing Ourselves to the Indifferent Stars

by | Apr 1, 2015 | Blog

By Kevin Blake

It was dead on all accounts. Dead–curled in a forever pose on the patio chair. Silent. Breathless. Still. It was an omen. It was a sign. It was a memory. It was a haunting. It could be anything that my consciousness willed it to be.

It was a trying winter–one that tested us all. In the early days of spring, the yard came to life. The grass emerged from the hundred day’s winter frost with a new partner–the purple crab grass flower–a weed with a pretty face. The softest limbs of the old oak trees indent the soil of the ground–strewn about the yard by the winds of winter and pushed into the earth by the weight of snow and ice.  All that remained, deserved this spring. This rebirth. This chance to live when survival is seemingly easier.

The paradox that its death suggests is timely. It arrives at a time of life–at a time where all things thrive and multiply. In this moment, the conditions may have made it brave. It may have disrupted its good reason that had helped it survive the winter. The conditions may have made it careless. With its belly full and its mind aloof, dying was easy.

It lay peacefully dead on my chair–the one that I had moved just slightly over so that I could be more comfortable when I was sitting on the deck a few days prior. My instincts told me to place blame. To find fault. To develop reason. To retrace its death so that I could find comfort in whatever loss I felt I had sustained through its death.

I proposed, to myself, that it had fallen from the tree–that it missed its mark on a leap of faith. There were no broken branches to suggest a failure of a known bridge to the neighboring tree and no remnants of the nest to suggest a struggle. Directly below its home in the listing limb it lay, until another force moved it.

Its position on the chair gave me pause and the impetus to take a picture. It looked comfortable. Settled. Dreaming. I felt the need to document the scene. The tree. The squirrel. The chair. The yard. I knew I had to remove it from its final resting place. I had to feel its weight on the end of a shovel–I felt it in my wrist and forearm. It became an extension of me–an alien prosthetic, if only for a moment, that forced me to consider my position.

As I walked the carcass to the front of the house where I intended to put it in the trash, I discovered another dead squirrel next to the curb–a bizarre synchronism. It too remained in a peculiar position–leaving the world in a bed of fallen leaves–a metaphor within a metaphor. Its location relative to a splash of white paint on the yellow curb made the scene appear composed–a work of art. A balanced image in every sense of the word. Diagonals. Space. Bands of color. Range in scale and marks. I could see the paint making this painting. I could see the process of its painted life beginning very much like its birth–thin, hesitant, bare, and vulnerable.

My intuition told me to build this narrative. To find a purpose or lesson in this trauma–in this coincidental ether I am allowing to be the center of my attention. What became glaringly apparent was that I was looking for a profane image from which I would base my thoughts–from which I would create an abstraction worth excavating.

To create anything that conjures abstract thinking is to allow oneself to take their eyes off the ball. To swing at something in the periphery. To focus ones attention away from the center of the mandala is to drift into the unconscious consciously. This is where the waves of casuistry begin to carry you to a composition of your own design. This is where the world resembles a place painted by yourself for yourself.

When you close your eyes, and open them behind the lids, you will not see nothing. You see light. Patterns emerge. If you focus your eyes on one pattern, the others will dissipate and the image you have created takes motion. It will attempt to flee your field of vision and the only thing that will wrangle it back to center, is your focus–your undivided attention to it. This exercise is both a testable experiment and an apt metaphor for the attention we pay to the seemingly pivotal moments in our lives that are, in reality, a portion of something infinite and perpetually moving in and out of focus. Though our individual roles may be finite, we all carry potential–potentials realized through pursuits chosen.

The Latin phrase, omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis–all things change and we change in them–seems useful here to describe our relationship to the incidentals concurrent with our pursuit of what we consider primary objectives. I certainly wasn’t looking for dead squirrels. I am not a photographer. I was drawn into this essay by allowing myself to be–by knowing it would be somehow useful. I took the photos last spring, because I wanted to recognize anomalies of my experience. I wanted to chase a pattern that caught my eye. I wanted to recognize a possibility. I wanted to identify myself in the visual world and reveal myself to myself.

 

Kevin Blake
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