Not All the Way to the Tigers
Good, then, he would go a journey. Not far – not all the way to the tigers. - Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
We cannot carry our father's corpse with us everywhere we go. ~ Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913
I have chosen to title this body of work “Not All the Way to the Tigers” because I find Thomas Mann's tale about Herr Aschenbach apropos. Aschenbach's desire for a little adventure is an apt metaphor for life – he wanted to wander a bit, but not too far – not all the way to the tigers – but the tigers found him anyway. Aschenbach could not anticipate what life had in store for him, no matter what plans he had made. The tigers had their own plans. They found him; they devoured him.
As in all of my work, these works do contain personal subtexts, which I can provide, but they are meant to stand alone as representations of both the personal and the universal, both the private and the communal. Through this body of work (which continues to grow), I am exploring the idea that while we do exist singularly, each of us moves through the world carrying with us our past experiences, and those experiences continue to shape who we are. We are the totality of our past selves – either real or imagined, our current selves, and the future self as we either hope or project. None one of us is a static being: Apollinaire was correct, both literally and in theory, but wrong in practice. Of course I carry my father's corpse with me; I carry, too, the corpses of so many other things that litter the trail of my past like flotsam. The same is true for you. One does not undergo any new experience as a tabula rasa; whatever one does, wherever one goes, one brings one's self. After any experience, the self cannot remain unchanged, as events and experiences change and shape the individual. Moving forward in life, one carries more and more corpses; some are burdens, some are blessings. Wisdom comes from learning to differentiate between the two.
The work is ultimately about experience, death, and loss – loss of self, loss of understanding about one's place in the world; it is an attempt to come to grips with the paradox that the more one sees of the world, the less one comprehends its complexities; it is an attempt to capture moments, to record feelings, to serve as epitaphs to those people (and places) who have filtered in and out of my life, all in an effort to pinpoint the thing that can never be touched upon: who we are, what we are, why we are. This work celebrates and elevates the human experience and the wondrous sense of being.
We cannot carry our father's corpse with us everywhere we go. ~ Guillaume Apollinaire, The Cubist Painters, 1913
I have chosen to title this body of work “Not All the Way to the Tigers” because I find Thomas Mann's tale about Herr Aschenbach apropos. Aschenbach's desire for a little adventure is an apt metaphor for life – he wanted to wander a bit, but not too far – not all the way to the tigers – but the tigers found him anyway. Aschenbach could not anticipate what life had in store for him, no matter what plans he had made. The tigers had their own plans. They found him; they devoured him.
As in all of my work, these works do contain personal subtexts, which I can provide, but they are meant to stand alone as representations of both the personal and the universal, both the private and the communal. Through this body of work (which continues to grow), I am exploring the idea that while we do exist singularly, each of us moves through the world carrying with us our past experiences, and those experiences continue to shape who we are. We are the totality of our past selves – either real or imagined, our current selves, and the future self as we either hope or project. None one of us is a static being: Apollinaire was correct, both literally and in theory, but wrong in practice. Of course I carry my father's corpse with me; I carry, too, the corpses of so many other things that litter the trail of my past like flotsam. The same is true for you. One does not undergo any new experience as a tabula rasa; whatever one does, wherever one goes, one brings one's self. After any experience, the self cannot remain unchanged, as events and experiences change and shape the individual. Moving forward in life, one carries more and more corpses; some are burdens, some are blessings. Wisdom comes from learning to differentiate between the two.
The work is ultimately about experience, death, and loss – loss of self, loss of understanding about one's place in the world; it is an attempt to come to grips with the paradox that the more one sees of the world, the less one comprehends its complexities; it is an attempt to capture moments, to record feelings, to serve as epitaphs to those people (and places) who have filtered in and out of my life, all in an effort to pinpoint the thing that can never be touched upon: who we are, what we are, why we are. This work celebrates and elevates the human experience and the wondrous sense of being.
