Art in Life and Art as Life

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There was a time when the world made no sense to me and I opened a curious book of art and I felt relief. I had seen the paintings and photos before as a child, but now, they made sense. More sense than the world that chattered along with its endless appointments and meaningless deadlines. It spoke to how death comes profoundly. It comforts me that some understand war and remember what happens. Sometimes our world forgets. To feel these things. How quickly, cruelly, savagely, there is great loss with no reason like angels falling from the sky and before you can even draw your next breath, you know that something or someone was wrenched from you. And no one will mark that spot or remember that day, but you know the very moment where everything changed.

Surrealism sears the soul. Not because it is ugly which it is sometimes. Not because it is cruel which it often feels, but because it is when finally someone somewhere paints and photographs and gives some strange, but haunting voice to what is unspeakable, to the moments in this life, when the world seems mad and nothing makes sense. Those pictures helped. They did not heal, but they pointed to what lay inside the frame, to themselves and said that we are all wounded in some way or another. That we all ache for healing. And that we are not alone.

Broken angels gave me hope. Art can release one’s spirit to higher things. It also can just release and show the world at its worst. Randomly cut up figures, scraps of newspaper, pieces of bodies, jumbled up words, they say something too. Surrealist pictures do not grace my walls and I look at other things, but that time still stays with me. My friends ask why. I can only say this. I believe that as a writer, any artist can write and draw about both war and peace. Branding be damned. Art is made for life and the living and it also remembers what wars outside and the tempests that lie within.

Lee Miller: Vogue model, lover of Man Ray, friend of Picasso. There are lots of stories about Lee Miller. She was also a pivotal part of the Surrealist movement. An artist in her own right. A famed beauty who could have stayed that way. But there is nothing as surreal as war and that is where she went. Now, another story unfolded. One many do not know. She was the only female photojournalist who documented World War II. Her photos, the ones that were printed, were often considered outside of the public’s comfort zone. Real in content but surreal in execution. Odd angles. Close ups no one wanted. Many readers could not believe what she had seen and worse yet, why she would document it. After the war finally ended, she did not seek acclaim for those photos. Indeed, she never photographed again. She took up cooking. But after she died, in one of those twists of fate that only a storyteller could make up, her son discovered in the attic sixty thousand photographs, letters, and negatives of hers. Photos never seen. Brilliant and devastating. Shocking and true. War photos that she had taken and for which she is finally recognized today.

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For Lee Miller, WWII photojournalist

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You saw the wreckage of war,
The futile bodies laid waste,
Caught in the barbs of cruelty
Marked by hunger and fear,
Forged by the hands of hate.
Numbered, but how innumerable
Imprisoned for name, for sex, for race.
Then shipped away to a foreign place
How even their cries were mocked
as their bodies were swept away,
Their spirits rose from mud, from filth,
from mire, from all the broken, cratered
places a war can never fill and yet
still desires another nameless body.
The ruler clenched his fist and said
the world was a cleaner place and
he thrust his arms like a weapon
cocked and launching it into space
And his rhetoric crackled as an open fire
And haloed his head like a faith inflamed
While the duped, the lost, the tricked,
the humbled, the battered, the broken,
the weak and the bereft, the dispossessed
who wanted only food and water and rest
Now wore the insane smiles of those who lust for death.

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