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Happy Halloween! As a special inktober treat for the special day, here is another little allegorical ink drawing of our times featuring strange orchid bishops sheltering in their Romanesque monasteries. The churchmen (who do not seem especially holy or worthwhile) interact with their doomed milieu through their little handheld personal communication devices. Meanwhile the haunted world outside is subject to dragon attack, volcanic eruption, war, and doom.
As ever, the strip of nature in the foreground is the true key to the meaning of the composition.
Imagine a colony of little shrimp frolicking on the bottom of the ocean when suddenly the earth opens up its mouth and swallows one of the shrimp: the sandy substrate was actually a lurking flatfish hunting for dinner. In the shadowy depths even bigger predators are in turn hunting the flounder. Glistening hooks with sparkling bait descend from unknown realms above.
The Great Flounder of Babylon (Wayne Ferrebee, 2016) Ink on Paper
The Great Flounder is a symbolic avatar of the worldwide ecosystem–a seemingly adversarial realm of constant cutthroat competition. Yet closer study of ecology reveals that living things are far more dependent on each other than the predator/prey relationship makes it seem. If a flounder eats a shrimp, the world moves on. If all of the shrimp vanish, or if all of the flounder are fished out of the ocean, other dominoes begin to fall and the whole web of life starts to dwindle and fold inwards.
This brings us to humankind, a worldwide collective of cunning primate colonies which are in ferocious violent competition with each other.
Fluke Baby (Wayne Ferrebee, 2019) Mixed Media
If there were ever an aymmetrical animal, t’is surely us. Our history and our science have given us a unique place in the world ecosphere–but we are not dealing well with our new prominence. This piscine artwork reflects our past and our present. In the flounder’s tragicomic eyes we can perhaps glimpse our future of glory, grandeur, and doom.
Heav’n from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescrib’d, their present state:
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas’d to the last, he crops the flow’ry food,
And licks the hand just rais’d to shed his blood.
Oh blindness to the future! kindly giv’n,
That each may fill the circle mark’d by Heav’n:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.
An Essay on Man: Epistle I, Alexander Pope
Protesilaus is a figure from Greek mythology. As one of the suitors of Helen of Troy, he was party to the binding alliance between Greek warrior-kings which pulled them all into the Trojan War when she was stolen by Paris. Protesilaus was a king in Thessaly (long a rumored haunt of wild magic, and sorcery run amuck). He brought forty ships full of warriors to the campaign…but there was a problem which nearly foundered the entire Greek effort before it even got started: a dark prophecy stated that the first Greek warrior to leave the boats would also be the first Greek warrior to die in the war. When the war fleet reached the beaches of Troy, nobody wanted to set foot upon Trojan land and incur the prophesied doom. So all the fearless warriors set quaking in their boats.
Finally, Protesilaus had enough of this pusillanimous behavior and he leaped to shore (even though he was newly married and had much to live for). Sure enough, in accordance with binding laws of war narrative, he was killed by the Trojan hero Hector during the first foray of the war—and the prophecy was thus fulfilled (although it should be noted that Protesilaus killed four men before dying at the hands of the greatest Trojan hero—so he went down as a fighter).
Laodamia voor het schilderij van Protesilaus (Pieter Serwouters naar David Vinckboons,1626, engraving)
When his widow Laodamia heard about this, she went mad with grief. Since the two were newlyweds when the war broke out, their love was in its first flower and burned hot and wild. The Gods admired the bravery of Protesilaus and they took pity on his distraught widow. For half an hour, the hero was allowed to return from the underworld to the mortal world to give a more thorough farewell to his wife. Unfortunately (but perhaps not surprisingly) Protesilaus’ brief return from death—followed by a permanent return to the land of the dead–unhinged Laodamia completely. She commissioned a beautiful lifelike sculpture of her dead husband and proceeded to treat it as though it were him.
Her father, baffled as to how to proceed in the face of these terrible happenings, decided to destroy the statue by casting it into a raging fire, but Laodamia could not be parted from her husband a third time and she leapt into the blaze and was burned away. His traumatized subjects built a lavish tomb for him and nymphs planted elms upon it. According to the poetry of antiquity, these trees grew to be the tallest in the world, yet when their tops were high enough to come into eyesight of Troy, the leaves died back and withered away (for the bitterness and sorrow of the dead hero remained even when he and his wife were gone).
Sarcophagus with scenes of Protesilaus and Laodamia (Roman, second century AD, marble)
In the business world it is considered terrible to be the first person to do something truly bold and new. Business leaders pay lip-service to innovators, but, in truth, business schools teach that ideas should be tried out by others first. Wang got nowhere, while the wily Steve Jobs took the best parts of his ideas and made an empire. There is a race to be second. The world’s leaders know not to be brave, but to be sly and calculating. This is prudent counsel (and has been so since before there were stories of the Trojan War), but I wonder if the world might not have more innovation and invention, if the first movers were not punished so brutally.
ferrebeekeeper 