The woman is Wyeth, the figures floating by are Chagall--modified via Photoshop. I like the sense that she is dreaming them.
This morning I read an article in the New York Times about the rules of courtship in Saudi Arabia, For all of their wealth, I know of no Westerners who would envy their way of doing things. Romance, in our sense of the word is impossible. Yet these young men are as driven and sexual as any man is in his 20s. They think all day of what they cannot have until they are married.
The irony, of course, is that they are the rabid enforcers of the very rules that make them miserable. They zealously defend the honor of their female relatives, alternately lust after or berate woman who are seen in public. They don't know whether to ask for her number or flog her--the contradictions are hallucinatory. It makes for some very unhappy, frustrated men--I think it has everything to do with their fervor for jihad and the like. They don't know what to do with all that energy.
I remember something I heard from a Turkish film director in an interview along time ago. He said the Islamic fundamentalist men were both the guards and prisoners of their own concentration camp. And just as I was feeling so Western and superior to what I think of as a backward and soul-killing approach to the relationship between the sexes, I stepped back and realized that I too was once the guard and the inmate in a prison of my own making.
I'm not talking about my incarceration. I'm talking about my life prior to my arrest, when I made myself absolutely miserable by the addiction that isolated and defined me like four walls of a very small cell. Everytime I tried to imagine a way out, I came up with unrealistic scenarios that never included sobriety, therefore dooming them to failure. And so I would pick up the phone and get more, sell more, do more, adding to the thickness of those walls. I needed, ironically enough, a real prison to free me from my self-created one.
If I look at the outsides, it would be hard to find a link between my experience and that of the Saudi men. But if I look at the insides, there is in fact a tremendous commonality between us.
No matter how much separates us, as human beings we always have more in common than we don't. We often don't question, and sometimes propagate the very cultural tenets that do not serve our happiness. We all experience a longing for connection, to not be alone, a willingness to find enormous succor and joy in friendship--these impulses permeate almost all of our experiences, whatever our nationality, sex, gender, or creed.
MCO 2008
I like the Wyeth and Chagall mix. Windows in paintings always intrigue me; the images from Chagall work well in this work.
I like your observations about our commonalities, especially our need for connection. Even when we are hurting, and protest, a la Garbo, that we want to be alone, what we really want is the comfort of being made to feel valued.
I also think that your theory about the channeling of frustrated passions into fanaticism is quite interesting. I wonder if some of our home grown religious fanatics aren't acting out of a similar need to dispel pent up energies.
Hi! I wanted to say that I like your Borg analogy. Hadn't thought of it that way, but it certainly suits the image I have.
Bri.
I really like this Chegall-Wyeth piece. Two enormously varied artistic approaches married so beautifully. The context becomes so rich! And on an analogous level, it brings back childhood memories of peering out the window on luscious, early fall nights when all was bright, blue and vivid.