This week, some art smacked me right into bed with my clothes on. How to describe it?
No, it wasn’t a painting that distressed me, although for some folks a picture can be awfully rough. Every year around this time the Imaginus poster sale makes the rounds of campuses. One reproduction is always bigger than the rest: Guernica, by Picasso—but still too small, the poster can’t do justice to the real painting. A lady who saw the huge original told me, “That horse just screamed!” That was description enough.
We know from gallery reviews, music reviews and more that words can’t fully describe art, not even for art that is literally made of words. A five verse poem may be approached in five critical pages, but still not fully experienced: Go straight to the poem, go to the novel. If a novelist could put into left-brain words his characters, theme and symbols then he could have written a nonfiction essay. He didn’t. Art is deep, with layers half seen.
Even “entertainment” writers are touched by the muse. I remember an episode of M.A.S.H. where a new, legendary surgeon arrives: once, during a retreat, he had done surgery on top of a moving jeep.
Captain Pierce and the others all but hero-worship him… but then, during surgery… he breaks. Quietly leaves the operating tent. In his absence Pierce cries, “(Where is he?) I can either save this leg or save that life!” Not exactly a line of dialogue to be thrust in our faces during our one eyed war on terror, but things were real in the 1970’s.
The artistic meaning of the episode? Some viewers may sense that war and life are random, and that one never knows when their hour will come. Others may reflect that so much depends, in this harsh life, on whether you happen to be half fed and wearing dry socks during a critical time. Others may— But no two people “see” the same thing, we all bring “ourselves” to any art piece…
The Remainder of this essay is a “spoiler” for a “One-off Episode”
As for TV art, I recently finished watching the complete DVD set for Stargate Atlantis. During the first episode I was intrigued by a maverick, the symbolically named Major Shepherd. He, “some thought I’d never make it to captain,” has often come close to losing his career. The competent, steely colonel despises him.
Atlantis, reachable only by a special Stargate, is the only base in a far galaxy… There humans find out—too late!—they are not at the top of the technology food chain: Casualties mount; the colonel dies nobly and horribly; the major finds himself, while under civilian authority, in charge of the armed forces at Atlantis—for the foreseeable future. Shepherd makes good, “thinking outside the box.” And in his quarters hangs a big picture of Johnny Cash—Only at the end did I truly understand the symbolism.
For the artistic series finale? I coped, even when a main character lay dead with eyes half open. No, what tired me out was the second to last episode. It takes place in an alternate universe. On Earth. In Las Vegas, Nevada. The Atlantis crew, who never knew Shepherd, comes briefly to Area 51, using their Stargate, to save the world.
How to describe it? In this universe, even the science nerds within the crew wear suits and ties, because they are all confident, healthy “winners.” And just one of them, due to a space-time rift, had encountered, and highly respected, the “Colonel Shepherd” of the TV viewer’s Atlantis. He mention’s the Colonel counterpart to the Vegas “Detective Shepherd,” knowing that this Shepherd has “made a wrong turn” along the way. The hapless man never made it to any Stargate: He crashed his career. Now he is wretched cop in Vegas: rumpled, unshaven, without a partner: On this alternate Earth, none of the other cops want to be with him.
Detective Shepherd is “moral, but not ethical.”
Coming across an untraceable gambling fortune from a space alien, (wow!) he chooses to quit the police and drive off into affluent oblivion… But first he stays to find the alien, to save the world. Before that decision, he closes out his office, putting his personal effects into a file box, and then—deciding to take only his poster of “the man in black.” The same one Colonel Shepherd has.
Here’s the thing. Johnny Cash is a totem: for the maverick Colonel on the sunny side of thin ice; for the “unfortunate” who has crashed through into darkness; for anyone humbled by life. Cash eases lives, he knows people. Evidently Shepherd, even after gaining his shiny eagles, knows too. Knows himself. Hence his poster in Atlantis. Johnny Cash is the patron saint of the worn and humbled.
Like Colonel Shepherd, I too feel humble and frail: Success and failure, officer and detective, share two sides of a thin coin. Lonely mistakes, I’ve made a few. But I know from art, from Lot’s wife and Eurydice: Never look back! Lately, I’ve been listening to Johnny Cash…
Detective Shepherd, ignored by the Atlantis crew, tracks the alien to a desert hideaway, radios it in— a shootout! He loses! The alien is not killed until slow A-10’s come floating over from Area 51. Earth is saved…
Drifting smoke. Silence… Shepherd tries to get up, stumbles, falls… lies on his back… bleeding out… with no one to see him, or to hold his hand, as he passes on…
I was very moved.
…
…
Sean Crawford
West of Java, east of Banff
December 2020
Footnotes:
In Louis L’Amour’s first original novel, Radigan, the hero shoots a bad man, and then holds his hand as he dies.
Sorry, instead of my usual discrete URL’s I can only put huge blatant picture squares.
So if you like sci fi and want to search on your own, so that I don’t have to put up blatant pictures, then fans have made a web video of Cash singing over scenes of the tragic movie Logan using the song Hurt, and also Way Down We Go. Another video has Cash singing When the Man Comes Around over a tragic scene in the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Tragic because the scene only happened because two good men couldn’t bring themselves to trust each other. After it’s too late they look at each other, wordless.
OK, here’s a stupid picture; forgive the pic, any clip of Bill Murray speaking is, like art, a thing of joy.
My blog is so new; how new is it? I still get more spam than visitors.
In fact, I’m not saying my comments come from aliens, but I will say that none of the visitors that left the comments showed up as “views” or “visitors.”
Two more comments got sent to the spam bin.
Wow, ten little Ruskys,
popping up like moles,
Somebody whacked them all,
sent them to their holes.
Four more stupid Russian comments.
To take my mind off them, here is a happier “Counting to Four.” It’s my favourite music video of all time, the “Citizen Kane” of music videos.