Marsha Silverman, Grey vase with etchings, won in a CLM auction
A song of Enchantment I sang me there, In a green—green wood, by waters fair, Just as the words came up to me I sang it under the wild wood tree.
Widdershins turned I, singing it low, Watching the wild birds come and go; No cloud in the deep dark blue to be seen Under the thick-thatched branches green.
Twilight came: silence came: The planet of Evening’s silver flame; By darkening paths I wandered through Thickets trembling with drops of dew.
But the music is lost and the words are gone Of the song I sang as I sat alone, Ages and ages have fallen on me— On the wood and the pool and the elder tree.
Aristotle also credits Empedocles for highlighting the functional affinity between the parts of what appear to be different living things, such as the seed of a tree and an animal fetus. Empedocles’ belief in the continuum of living species perhaps finds its deepest expression in his groundbreaking view of the origin of life. He appears to have believed that the cosmos begins in a state of Love, in which all the roots are fused and combined in a perfect sphere. Then Strife enters the fray, and the sphere begins to be pulled apart in a centrifugal, whirling motion, eventually resulting in the complete separation and segregation of the roots. Then, at the highest degree of Strife, Love begins to exert her influence, pulling the homogeneous roots into an accord, synthesising like with unlike, until the world as we know it, with its sea, sky, Sun and Earth, begins to take shape. Love increasingly holds sway until, after a vast stretch of time, it consolidates once again into a perfect, undifferentiated sphere, only to be disrupted one day by Strife, and so on, endlessly.
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Empedocles’ solution to the prejudice, dogmatism and narrow-mindedness afflicting existence differs from that of the modern impartialists. The answer is not to try to adopt an impersonal, God’s-eye perspective, foregoing all and any relationships as the inexorable source of ethical harm. It is instead to strive to forge new bonds or to recognise bonds that already exist. It is Love that allows us to do this. Whereas Strife sorts like with like, atomising the cosmos into homogenous parts, Love combines unlike and like, forging a higher unity, bringing together what seems to be different. Thus, Love overcomes prejudice not by overcoming partiality but by providing it with a more inclusive, elevated form. The highest such form is partiality towards the living as such.
To achieve Empedoclean enlightenment is to divest yourself of your ingrained attachment to familiar body shapes and conventional kinds of conduct. It is to recognise the seemingly alien other as in fact fundamentally akin to you. Revising and widening the Stoic maxim, the Empedoclean position can be captured in the proposition: I am a living being, I consider nothing alive alien to me. From this higher standpoint, the relations that bind us to our family, friends, compatriots, humanity and to other animals appear much like the spiralling whorl of a mollusc shell, each form enclosed within broader forms, with the all-embracing form of life encompassing them all.
The other two, slight air and purging fire, Are both with thee, wherever I abide; The first my thought, the other my desire, These present-absent with swift motion slide. For when these quicker elements are gone In tender embassy of love to thee, My life, being made of four, with two alone Sinks down to death, oppress’d with melancholy; Until life’s composition be recurred By those swift messengers return’d from thee, Who even but now come back again, assured Of thy fair health, recounting it to me: This told, I joy; but then no longer glad, I send them back again and straight grow sad.
Seung Ah Paik (b. 1979, Seoul, Korea) lives and works in Pittsburgh, USA. Gratin. Rubell Museum.
Body Cartography represents skin and the human body as tangible, living records–each blemish, wrinkle, or callous signifying the passage of time. These topographical markers connect moments in time to physical sites of transformation, transfiguring skin into what Paik terms “emotional terrain.” Paik is by no means new to the practice of morphing body and landscape, however. Her paintings serve as testament to the inextricable bond between nature and humanity, gradually eroding this barrier until her paintings become physical maps. With wrinkles as trajectories charting growth and defined lines suggestive of boundaries, the human form self-records its age while becoming a metaphor for external landscapes.
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Paik seamlessly transforms that which is internal into external corporeal maps, meant to be followed and understood as one’s own. She does exactly that by painting entangled limbs and sloping breasts from obscure perspectives, presenting the illusion of looking down on one’s own body to establish a sense of familiarity. Paik reconstructs her body as a collection of objects observed from disjointed angles, complicating relationships between artist, viewer, and the created image.
