art

i was enjoying one of the quiet joys of life this morning, having coffee and conversation with a friend on a cool summer morning. he was (kindly) concerned for me, given that he’d seen the day before that i’d published yet another essay on generative software’s (“ai”‘s) intersection with higher ed.

i appreciated the concern, but i’ve mostly made my peace with our imperialist technologists’ ongoing hyping of their statistical probability software and their grand (half-baked) visions of technological glory.

i keep writing on it b/c, as a thinker and writer of an ecological, spiritual, and anti-imperialist bent, i think the counter-position to the mainstream techno-optimism and -complacency needs regular articulation, in order to offer genuine alternative ways of thinking and being that aren’t backed by mass amounts of capital, yes, but also b/c given my current role at a university i have lots of time to think and dialogue about the current set of problems and so can say some things others will agree with but may not have had the time to think out explicitly in their own day-to-day. also, it’s just cathartic for me to get all these ideas and critiques out of my mind, and i (deo gratias!) had gotten decent at the essay-form before this all went down.

anyway. as i was trying to say something to this affect to my friend the other morning, i struck on one notion i hadn’t come across before. (the rambling and enthusiastic conversation is another form i’ve practiced a lot with very generous interlocutors.) and that’s about humanism in the present moment. i’ve recently begun reading more about the origins of humanistic education in the italian renaissance, since i’ve recently also been embracing the ignatian tradition of my jesuit university. but that’s another story.

midstream, i made the association of our imperial technological moment with the humanist recovery of the 15th century with the monastics of the early medieval period i’ve studied and learned from for the last twenty years. the story of the “dark ages” has flipped somewhat, in scholarly circles due to further work on all the intellectual and artistic work happening during the early medieval period in europe and in popular circles due to books like how the irish saved civilization. basically, the idea is that while the monasteries didn’t make revolutionary strides in culture, intellectual and otherwise, they did keep the lamps burning during centuries in which it was difficult to do a lot beyond keeping folks fed and safe. and later on, the early humanists brewed up their own recovery of classical learning in direct response to and in defiance of the overly technical and professional nature of education in the medieval universities.

taken together, these movements (resisting utilitarian education and preserving a tradition of culture in the face of hostile social currents) give us a sense of where humanists are now. in the face of the whole technique-obsessed mode of civilization, the firehose of “content” in online spaces and the devotion of so many to the feed as a cultural form, and the techno-imperialist pushing of generative software (what we’re calling ‘ai’ in capitulation to industry), humanists cannot always get heard over the broiling cacophany. but we can trim the lamps and keep them burning—while software is trained without consent on artists’ and intellectuals’ work, while education is coerced into ham-fisted applications of industrial statistical-probability generators in their classrooms, while humans are conditioned into a culture that (at least in some sectors) sees interacting with certain software systems as “good enough” substitutes or at least corollaries to social and romantic relationships, etc. while the guys (and it’s largely guys) with capital spout off about colonizing space and “turbocharging” intelligence or whatever, we can keep the lamps of the long tradition of human art and thought burning. and, while not ideal, maybe it’s enough.

i’ll try to do more, and lots of folks (some of whom i agree with on lots, some of whom i would agree with on very little) will try to do more. but we’ll also hope that keeping the lamps is enough to get us thru to whenever larger groups of people want literature, philosophy, theology, history, and visual and aural arts in person again, when more of us want in-person culture again, when more of us want in-person communities that celebrate together again.

we’ll see. regardless, it was a good, convivial morning. +u.i.o.g.d.

over the last several years, i’ve been working on an edition of the selected poems of bernard isaac durward, a scottish immigrant to milwaukee in the mid-1800s. along the way, i’ve made some fun discoveries; one of which is a book hand-painted by bernard’s son charles.

in my childhood, i visited durward’s glen with my grandparents who lived in baraboo, wisconsin. the small sandstone and conglomerate gorge on prentice creek shaped my young imagination and grounded me in a sense of the numinous in the natural world linked to the devotions of the catholic faith. little did i know that decades later, when i finally got a job teaching in a university english department in milwaukee, i’d end up living on the same street as bernard (the old plank road, humboldt ave) before learning that this early milwaukee poet was _the_ durward that the glen was named after.

once i learned this, and started looking into bernard’s literary and visual art, it felt as though making his work more widely available was a sort of mission. i’ve been in archives throughout milwaukee and at the glen, visited the seminary here in milwaukee where bernard worked as an english professor, and worked thru every issue of the daily milwaukee paper _the sentinel_ (and other periodicals) to track down bernard’s publishing history. all while accumulating quite a little library of bernard’s and his children’s books, all self-published in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

then, i happened on a blog post from the milwaukee public library that featured a book i hadn’t yet come across: a one of a kind book of paintings featuring one painting per page of plants found at the glen, all painted by bernard durward’s most artistically inclined son, charles.

chalres percy durward (1844-1875) was born in prestwich, england and came with his family to milwaukee, wisconsin in 1845. he learned to draw and paint at his father’s side, first at riverside in milwaukee (the plot now called gordon park), then at st. francis seminary in st. francis, wisconsin. when the family moved to durward’s glen in columbia county in 1862, charles painted plants and landscapes, but he found the only money to be had from art was in portraiture. he dutifully obliged to some extent, and farmed some in order to afford a trip abroad to scotland, england, and france. but generally speaking his “contempt for money was as absolute as any poet or philosopher could wish” (says his brother wilfrid in his moving memorial to charles in his book annals of the glen—wilfrid’s poem on his brother’s memory is reproduced at the bottom of this post). charles died suddenly and prematurely by eating a root he found while hoeing one morning; they speculate it was water hemlock—a grimly ironic death given charles’s great love of plant life. near the end of his life, when he was painting more and more religious paintings, he said “i only want enough money to live on, and then to paint madonnas the rest of my life.” well said.

two years before his death, he also painted the book of wildflowers and tree branches from the glen, the idiosyncratic book i got the chance to leaf thru in the rare books collection last month. it was lovely and big and heavy and a touching relic of this man’s life and his fondness for the growing things with whom he lived at the glen. knowing the glen and its various inhabitants from my earliest years, and knowing that charles wouldn’t live more than a couple years after compiling this book, having some time with it was a powerful experience. here’s hoping i can get the selected poems out in the near future!

the milwaukee public library has given me permission to use their own (clear and straight-on) images of the book, and i’ve included a few more of my own with poorer lighting but more “hands-on.” i hope you enjoy, and do stop by the glen to meet his models someday if you’re in the neighborhood.