The Hammock Papers: Haunted.

02 November 2017

Haunted.

Curtis, Hoop on the Forehead, Crow, 1908

The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other. Consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time.

Edward Sheriff Curtis

In 1981, writer John McPhee wrote The Survival of the Bark Canoe, a study of Henri Vaillancourt, a man obsessed with making birch bark canoes today using exactly the same long forgotten methods handed down by Indians in the Northeast woods for the past several centuries. Vaillancourt’s preoccupation with duplicating those methods and materials is a mirror of Curtis’s need to find the spiritual as well as visual essence of North American Indian civilization at the point where it was being annihilated.

Curtis knew exactly where he was going and he had absolutely no idea where he was going. Born shortly after the Civil War, there were two pivotal events that cast his destiny. His father, a chaplain and private in the Union Army, brought home a camera lens, and Curtis used instructions from Wilson’s Photographicsto make a crude camera from a box. Curtis subsequently came across an engraving of a mass hanging of Indians—an image which stayed with him and haunted him forever:

All my life I have carried a vivid picture of that great scaffold with thirty-nine Indians hanging at the end of a rope.

CONNECT

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL