Last year we didn’t go to the beach courtesy of the layoffs at the foundation where my partner was working as a writer/editor. Took a short trip to a KY state park which I enjoyed immensely — Rhododendron Forests! It was fine and much more than many people can do even in better economic times but it wasn’t the two day trek to the beach through the mountains and piedmont. A trip we have been making more or less regularly for over two decades.
Three or four years ago at the beach I began to notice oyster (?) shells with holes in them. I suppose starfish bore into the poor bivalves and slurp them out bathed in a sauce of cool sea water. What I was noticing was that the sea-worn bored-through holes combined with the not-quite-bored-through holes made faces. Of course everything makes faces for humans. We are hot-wired to recognize our kind. But these were not faces a hungry infant would be happy to see.
Some were the exaggerated faces of the women who knitted in Paris while the heads fell into the baskets during the Reign of Terror — Gallic noses from 1793 as in a Daumier drawing. Some were faces that called up Munch’s iconic painting Scream. But unlike the over-exposed and hence perhaps life-less image from the painting, these faces were powerful and real. I could hear their silent screams. I hasten to say that I was not disturbed by these silently screaming faces nor by the grotesque French women, I was amused. Enough amused that I would bend and laugh out loud walking down the beach. Sometimes I would photograph the shells in situ, sometimes I would collect them in a pocket, sometimes both.
Not all the shells had human faces; I have found both Curious George and sock monkeys, though neither of these seems to be readily apparent to other viewers. The faces amused me, and perhaps worried those who walked along the beach with me, but they also were stimulating beyond the pleasure of pattern-recognition. They made me think, first about the content I was projecting onto the innocent calcium exoskeletons, and then about why I was projecting that content onto them. Was there a larger message or was it simply yet another reflection of my internal state this time expressed while awake rather than in a dream.
This year walking along the beach I am not seeing screaming faces nor am I seeing the faces of those watching the upper classes lose their heads. I do see a few but perhaps a tenth of what I noticed before. Perhaps the shell-faces have lost their novelty. Or perhaps my internal zeitgeist has changed over the interval. Certainly the times are worse in many ways than they were several years ago and spending the past few months reading Holocaust literature hasn’t sunned-up my own disposition much. But maybe the screams were silent then, sort of an emperor’s new clothes of screams, and they are being articulated today in the ever present yard sales that are an important income stream in this part of the country as well as in Eastern KY and WV where we were over Easter weekend; and in the reaction to the Faustian disaster in the Gulf just down the coast and around the corner from where we sit on oil-less beaches and eat sweet fresh-caught shrimp. Maybe I needed those silent screams (or the hope of a revolution) to remind me of the privilege and precariousness of my middle-class existence. Maybe I just was spending too much time looking into the abyss.
Vacation always pricks my class consciousness. Not that we go to fancy places. We hardly even eat out. But the weary housekeepers pushing their carts through the halls of the Hampton Inn where we stop on the way, the middle aged baggers at Food Lion who call me “sir,” and the all Hispanic crew building an enormous beachfront vacation home in the 98 degree heat just yards from the cool green Atlantic always give me pause. Tolstoy in 1902 wrote in one of his essays on religion (after quoting John III,19) that “the mind becomes crowded with all sorts of useless rubbish, deflecting [our] attention from what is important and essential and making it possible for [us] to stagnate in the lie, in which [we are] living, without noticing it.”
I don’t know whether my response to the oyster shells was a form of useless rubbish, some sort of wake-up call from the right side of the brain to a visual artist in hiatus, or just the organizing ability of the organs of perception firing randomly while I was in a more or less relaxed state. I do know that I am not sad to see fewer of my grotesque friends this year, though it would be nice if the other daily reminders of the suffering in the world were not quite so apparent and obvious even on vacation.
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