Art Journal
Moira Roth, Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds Part 8: Of Surfaces and Depths. #1, The Pierian Spring, August 20-29, 2000
August 20, 2000, To and FroMy friend, Boreth Ly, quotes to me today two lines from an eighteenth-century text by Alexander Pope: "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
The Pierian spring? Where the Muses drank.
I had been lamenting to B. L. about ( yet consumed, too, by the seduction of it all) the increased quickening of the tempo of my last few days as I glide to and fro over endless surfaces of information and exchanges.
August 22, 2000, Memory, History, and Echoes
Darting into the Internet today, I find a site on the Muses, and discover that Memory plays a curious role in their birth and original form.
Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne ("Memory"), the Muses were born at Pieria at the foot of Mount Olympus, and I learn that their name (akin to the Latin mens and English mind) denotes memory and "a reminder."
Originally there were only three muses? Melete (meditation), Mneme (memory), and Aoede (song). Strangely enough, however, when the larger group of nine muses emerge, two of these original muses (Meditation and Memory) disappear.
Until I learn of Mneme just now, Cleo, the muse of history, has always been the most fascinating one to me.
I seek out on my bookshelves Theresa Hak Kyang Cha's Dictee.
Cha's book is divided into nine parts, each dedicated to a muse. Her section on "Cleo" weaves together narratives of a young Korean revolutionary (Yu Guan Soon, who dies at age eighteen in 1920) with a 1905 petition from Koreans living in Hawaii to President Roosevelt.
Why resurrect this history now, Cha asks herself in Dictee.
"To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion."
And I turn to another book, In Honor of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, created a year after her death in 1982 by her family and friends. This includes Hyung Soon Cha's poignant text addressed to her daughter in which she quotes from a letter Theresa sent her from Paris in 1978.
"I think I am getting some answers from deep inside. It will be blown out some day. I believe it. It is not only for myself. I like to let other people know that there is the pure, lily-like simplicity and beauty somewhere in the world. Of course, I will get a lot of sufferings and heartache because of the crazy and strange world but I will be satisfied with illuminating my ideas like a clear mirror to one or two persons. . . . Anyway if I am good someone will listen to my voice."
The echo of Cha's sweet voice comes through the printed page.
It reminds me of her haiku-like text on echoes which I love. For Cha, echoes are "in-between-time: from when the sound is made/to when it returns as an echo/ no one knows if it was heard/ when it was heard/ when it would be heard/ if at all/ but it continues on and on/maybe a thousand years/someone's memory/tale/legend/poem/dream."
Later in the day, I look at the New York Times. There is a blurred color photograph on the front page of Kursk, the Russian nuclear submarine which was destroyed ten days ago by "unexplained but powerful explosions "350 feet under water. Its one hundred and eighteen crew members are dead. The photograph is blurred with computer language in capital letters at the top 'ROLL PITCH DEPTH . . .'"
August 23, Earth's and Mars' North Poles
I am fascinated by the recent fracturing of the knowledge about the relationship of depths and surfaces in our world and that of Mars.
Today I read an editorial in the Times, "In the (Un)frozen North," which is a continuation of the news of last weekend: the discovery of open water rather than ice at the North Pole, and what this implies in terms of global warming.
Moving around on the Internet, I find many photographs of NASA's expedition to the North Pole last year that are amazing in themselves. But even more amazing are the NASA close-up photographs of the north polar region of Mars. (Last month I had read in the Times about the recent investigations of Mars's surfaces and depths, and the discovery there, too, of water, but this time way beneath the surface.)
Slowly on my computer screen, images unfold of the North Pole of Mars. I can never see a single full image so it is strangely like working with a Japanese scroll. First I scroll down one taken from the southwest of the Pole.
Then, equally slowly, I look at the polar outer mesa and tongue at the mouth of Chasma Boreale.
August 25, 2000, From Pluto to Hades
I travel further, to Pluto, the outermost planet of our solar system.
Discovered only in 1930, Pluto's rotation is the same as its moon, Charon, and so the two continuously face one another as they travel through space.
Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, and Charon, the boatman of the underworld? Surely these are the most suitable of traveling companions in my search for the Pierian Spring, and so I go back to the Internet to read about them in an amazing site: Dictionary of Mythology.
It is Charon who ferries the dead souls to Hades across Styx, the river which winds itself nine times around the underworld. I read that in addition to the Styx (which means "Hate"), there are rivers of Sadness, Lamentation, and Fire, together with the most famous of the other rivers in Hades, Lethe, the river of Forgetfulness.
Dead souls who live in a world of live rivers of hate, sadness, lamentation, fire, and forgetfulness.
And I read on to discover details of Charon's payment: the obol, a coin which is "to be placed in the mouth of the dead at the time of burial." Those who have no coin must wander for a hundred years on the shores before being allowed to cross the Styx, which acts as a moat to the underworld, "preventing the living from entering, and the dead from leaving."
I ask Alan Bernstein, who is writing on the history of hell, about the river, and he responds quickly by email. "In my research I have recently come across a suggested etymology for Styx, which translates it as the Latin 'tristitia,' which becomes a condition of the mind, a foretaste of death, which one must learn to heed, lest one die in the state of having unresolved problems or, as we would say, a guilty conscience. So here is a link I have been investigating between inner death, personal hell, and the underworld."
Page DuBois, another friend, tells me of Sappho's curse-like address to a rival: "When you die, you will lie unremembered for ever more; for you there will be no regret, no share in the roses of Pieria; invisible in Hades, as on earth, you will wander aimlessly among the unknown dead."
"A foretaste of death"? To "lie unremembered"? I wonder if this is what is haunting me beneath my preoccupation with surfaces and depths? Beneath my preoccupation with the metaphors of rivers and underground seas beneath frozen ice.
In the Times today, there is a headline, "For Now, Experts Discount Radiation Peril from Sub." Greenpeace is urging that the Kursk, which has now joined six other nuclear-powered subs on the ocean floor, be removed.
"It is not a matter of if radiation will be released . . . [but] of when."
August 26, 2000, A.M.
Seen from the Voyager 2 and Galileo spacecrafts I find out yesterday, from the Times, that there is now talk of "liquid water beneath the thick outer layer of ice" on Europa, and so I leave Hades to look for her. Europa—once a nymph brought to Crete by Jupiter, where she became the mother of the minotaur—is now one of the thirteen moons of Jupiter.
My head is spinning with this sudden invasion of Roman gods and goddesses, presences from my childhood education in England, but certainly not a world that I consciously inhabit these days.
In a path I would find hard to retrace (as is so often true when surfacing the Net), I come to Project Galileo Homepage, where I find links to four simulated computer-generated views of Jupiter and Ganymede, and overhead views of Jupiter and Jupiter and Earth. They are taken from the Galileo spacecraft, and automatically change every five minutes.
I watch as "27 Aug. 2000, 16.10 GMT" turns into " 27 Aug. 2000. 16,10" . . . and then to . . . .
I make a bookmark of this site for my computer, and plan to return to it as an experiment, perhaps tomorrow at the same time, or even to return each morning?
And finally I find myself with a single unmoving image, one recorded on July 9, 1979 from Voyager 2 (both Voyager space ships were launched in 1997).
It is a black and white photograph of the "first ever close up look" of Europa, and is taken from a distance of 152,000 miles.
I sit staring at the small photograph of Europa on my computer screen, then click on it. That easy gesture that suddenly enlarges the image.
A partial view of a moon that Galileo discovered in 1610 covers my screen. All the anguish of such heretical discoveries of centuries ago (Galileo's trial and recanting) are now seemingly forgotten in this smooth cyber world of surfaces and echoes.
August 29, 2000, Kursk
I sit here again at my computer thinking of the possible hidden water beneath Europa's ice surface.
And I think again of the speculation about liquid water on Mars. Gully-like shapes have been found on the red planet that are similar to those formed in earth by ground water. I go into the Internet to look for this, and discover a photograph of the Apron Covering Dunes.
Later in the day, in response to a draft of this essay, I receive an email from Ellen Zweig, the performance artist and writer. She writes: "Perhaps the water under the ground of Mars or Europa or Earth is a kind of open and closed space? A place where the mind can burrow instead of surface skim?"
Today there are more reports and speculations, but nothing conclusive, as to the inexplicable underwater explosion on Kursk.
Postscript
This essay is dedicated to Rudy Lemcke, whose web artwork, The Uninvited, Walkabout, and the as yet unfinished Tidepools, has deeply inspired me. It has also taught me (in conjunction with our extensive email exchanges over the last two years) so much about navigating cyber spaces.
