On Defiance, Uncertainty, and Empathy

Photograph by Joe Gaffney

Shortly after my last post on this site, I began chemotherapy for breast cancer. I am now halfway through that grueling treatment protocol. Meanwhile, Blued Trees was awarded a 2016 Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the category of Architecture/ Environmental Structures/ Design, and a wonderful new article was published in the Village Voice on Blued Trees, by Audrea Lim, which included this quote:

"Michael Royce, editorial director of the New York Foundation for the Arts, says there's a strong case to be made that Blued Trees"expands the boundaries of traditional sculpture installations and symphonic orchestration by allowing for a fluid interplay of music and physical experience...with the viewer as participant or observer."


The article makes clear, that in Peekskill, New York, the site of the 2015 overture launch of Blued Trees, the Spectra Corporation defied both good public policy, and legal constraints, to place their corporate profits above safety for millions of people. On the other hand, the article also made clear, that an idea cannot be killed. 

As I negotiate the private process of surviving the medical protocols for cancer treatment, in the midst of creating the Coda movement which will culminate Blued Trees on the American Election Day, November 8, 2016, I am reminded of all the ways humans must publically negotiate uncertainty in the Anthropocene era.

A central thesis in my dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Activism," circled around the implications for the second law of thermodynamics, of James Clerk Maxwell's nineteenth century idea model, Maxwell's Demon, which posited that the work of sorting information, is a form of entropy. The implications I saw for environmental triage, were that the correct information can effect surprising change, in even the most apparently hopeless situations. In an era of unprecedented uncertainty and risk, the need for clean habitat for life on earth supersedes the disruptive impacts of greed.

In the case of the Blued Trees Symphony, which evolved out of Blued Trees, the surprising information is in the resilience and power of beauty, and empathy, in the face of destruction and greed. Effecting that surprise is the task of art. It is the mission of the Blued Trees Symphony. One tree,  one note in our continental music. One person's struggle to defy despair, is all of our struggle to hold onto hope. That is how I would define empathy.

We now have the legal framework to resist the proliferation of fossil fuel infrastructure poisoning the earth, thanks to the work of the legal team of Gale Elston, and Michael Gentlesk. It will be made available to the Blued Trees painters.

Hope

Personally, I find it very hard to be hopeful when I'm exhausted. It has been an exhausting year. But as we approach the last hours of 2014, I happen to be rested today and can think more lucidly about hope. Jim White, one of the scientists I work with always points out to me, when I feel gloomy about our environmental prospects, that there is always hope. It just gets harder.

At dawn this mooring I looked out my window to my Manhattan viewscape
to see a workman flexing his muscles for my camera.

The image I snapped this morning of a man on the roof across the way, looks like a small King Kong on the skyline. He may or may not have seen me taking shots, so may or not have been posing. But at this early hour, this man represented to me how humans stand on top of all we have created and look out to one another, or the future. But perhaps, we might more profitably consider what is below all we create, for example, soil or water and how fish might reflect the health of either.

The future many of us want to see these days is just something hopeful. I have written often here, about how fish are indicators of aquatic habitat health. Soil is a material that stands at a confluence between animal life,  geology, and water. It reflects the health of all the relationships that make clean water possible. It is what the quality of our food depends upon.

As the year turns, we have a few days to rest up and regather our stamina to go forward, to consider the basics that support us and build our "hope" muscles. As rested as I am, at least today, I think it is just a question of work and not impossible.

In other posts, I have written about Maxwells Demon, the premise from thermodynamics that implies that the energy of work can change the most closed systems on earth, by presenting new data. So, rest means we can do the work of that data transmission.

The task we build our hope muscles for, may be to identify that critical data that can make that critical transformation.

In the new year, I wish us all enuf rest to feel hope, to exercise the work of environmental transformation, to see more fish, that we may enjoy clean water and fertile soil.