Opening Salvo: While You Were Out
by Heather Shayne Blakeslee
This article, the first editor’s note of the inaugeral issue, appeared in RQ Vol. 1 // Issue 1: The Animals, Summer 2019. Purchase single issues and subscribe here.
Original sculpture by Darla Jackson. Cover art by Michael Wohlberg.
Imagine that after a long time away, you’ve returned home in winter, opened the door, and turned on the light. You don’t think about the idea that your key fits the lock or that the illumination from the lights is effortless. Compared to the heat outside, you register that the room is relatively cool, but don’t think about how it came to be that way, with energy pulled from the depths of the earth somewhere and spit-polished for use in your living room.
You put your bag on the floor by the door, and you note without much thought that the furniture is as you left it. The room is in basic order. You walk further inside, and you sit down on the couch for a moment.
You are home, and your body involuntarily relaxes. You breathe deeply and you shut your eyes for a moment. You exhale. You open them again.
This is when you see it.
A thick black snake is entwined in slow-motion writhing around the trinity of white plastic candles on the electric wall sconce, directly opposite where you sit. Your own deeper reptilian brain recognizes the potential danger, readying you for fight or flight: Your pulse quickens, your breathing is disrupted, and your more violent instincts kick in.
You measure the distance between you and it.
You assume that the same has happened within the mind of this unexpected interloper.
It has registered your presence with sudden stillness. And there, as you stare at the snake, and as the snake stares back at you, you exist in a silent, balanced tension.
The work I’ve just described is a sculpture of artist Darla Jackson, who created the piece for a show titled, “While You Were Out...” the sculpture titled “....They Struck.”
The image itself is arresting enough. But lying in wait within the context of the titles is the suggestion that an opening salvo has been unleashed. A war is afoot. There is a we. There is a them. The real fear is from the idea that they struck. This is not a single interloper. This is merely the advance guard.
If we widen the frame in an effort to see more of the context in which the scene exists in our actual world, it’s reasonable to argue that it’s the humans who have struck: We’ve pockmarked the landscape with sanitized boxes full of artificial light, meant to keep strangers of any kind out. Meant to keep the bugs and snakes and predators out.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” says the old-timer to the narrator of Robert Frost’s famous poem, Mending Wall. But twice he counters with, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
I have to admit that I decided early on in viewing Jackson’s piece that I looked at that black snake and thought, “You belong here. We humans have dominated too long, and our light is fading. Be well. Good night, and good luck.”
I felt a relief of some kind to see that snake there. It was a welcome sign that perhaps unnatural structures were giving way to entropy, a natural state returning.
I have also turned that phrase, “While you were out…” over and over again in my mind. While you were out, the basic balance of the planet was thrown off by overuse of fossil fuels and oblivious consumption. While you were out, the country became impossibly divided and its institutions debased and imperiled. While you were out, corporations were given the rights of people, a foreign government interfered in a presidential election, and a wing of the academy was overrun with frailty and intellectual rot. While you were out, you gave all your personal data and too much of your time to social media companies who are now curating what you see to influence your decisions. While you were out, your rights were taken away and facts disappeared into the polluted ether. While you were out, the robots took over.
And where were you, exactly? Where were you standing when you realized the ground had shifted, and “they” were on their way for you?
The thoughtfulness of “....They Struck” is that for all its stark contrast—the pleasing aesthetics of light versus dark, straight versus organic shapes, the embedded conflict of man versus nature, of good versus evil, the reference to knowledge and to the Garden of Eden—it’s still an ambiguous piece, a Rorschach test of sorts. Who is the “you”? Who is the “them”?
This is how we have come to see difference in our time, as black and white, as us-against-them, as attack-or-die. But our own conflicts are ambiguous. They are nuanced. What is their intention?
And so what is our intention? To defend? To attack? To be right? To seek the truth, even if it’s ugly?
It is necessary in this time of unrest and unraveling to have a strong sense of ourselves individually and culturally—of how and why we believe what we believe—and to be open to changing our minds: Interlopers may become neighbors once we’re talking across the fence. Enemy ideas might become more familiar, and that familiarity may create the conditions for understanding, which in turn breeds either acceptance or a strengthening of the ground we originally staked; we become stronger for the conflict, armed with new knowledge, surer footing, a deeper context for our ideas, or all three.
This self-examination is more important than ever, and it should be a precursor to our civic discourse. For me, experiencing Jackson’s snakes and skulls, her blackbirds and broken hearts, is a little like slowing down to see a car crash, only to see your own face staring out from the wreckage. Who are we, anyway?
Jackson’s sense of mortality, and the fight to stay true to oneself through personal carnage, is part of what makes her work visceral, not haunting: Think guts versus ghosts despite her spooky goth imagery. In Darla Jackson’s world, when death is at your door, it won’t show up with a robe and scythe. It will be a snake overtaking a candelabra. A roaring, life-sized bear. A black raven in a white bunny suit, laughable and terrifying all at the same time, a Donnie Darko-esque imaginary that may be your foe—or may be your friend.
She continues to conjure one elemental image after another that invites us to first be shocked and then to let our mind’s eye settle so that we can find ourselves in the cracked mirror of her pieces. She compels us to examine our fragility, our resilience, our corporealness, our imperfectness, our internal and external conflicts, our humanness, our animalness.
Another of Jackson’s pieces, “Old Hurt,” the one on the cover of this first issue of Root Quarterly, is an equally powerful sculpture: A snake, its tail tied in a knot, is lashing out violently, a reminder that as we all strain against our past hurts, rather than unraveling them, the more we seal our fate. We become an animalistic eruption of pure rage that is nearly always counterproductive to our cause.
That constant state of hurt, of fear, and of rage, stoked by ever more divided media and entrenched ideology, is a perfect breeding ground for further division, and for the type of widespread addiction we now see in the United States. Thousands keeping the pain at bay on the streets of Philadelphia. Hundreds of thousands across the country, an army of walking dead shuffling around us with no spiritual tether, stripped of hope and humanity.
And then there are the larger hordes, all of us addicted to the glowing rectangles of various sizes, crawling with spiders and bots, algorithms sucking us dry of information, the feedback loop of ads and curated content meant to move us in this direction or that, a little more to the right, a little to the left, a little more lonely and deeper in debt.
It is social media’s job to numb us and addict us, exploit our worst instincts and most base biology, rather than give us anything that might actually heal us, unite us with facts, or strengthen our ability to reason and live peaceably with one another.
We are animals, and they have trained us.
However, we can be untrained to tune in to interesting ideas and honest disagreement. To contemplate art that illuminates our complicated humanity. To see our city in a new light. To enjoy a rootedness in our community. To that end, we offer you unplugged pages pressed with ink, which you hold in your hands right now.
The opportunity to say to oneself, I was not out. I was right here with you.
This piece was excerpted by podcaster and evolutionary biologist Heather Heying in the DarkHorse Podcast Livestream #31 (originally streamed live on July 18, 2020). Check it out below:
This article first appeared in RQ Vol. 1 // Issue 1: The Animals, Summer 2019. Purchase single issues and subscribe here.
Heather Shayne Blakeslee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of RQ. She’s served in myriad capacities with arts, social justice, and environmental advocacy enterprises in the last 20 years including as the COO of Red Flag Media and as the editor-in-chief of its sustainability magazine, Grid. She’s a contributing writer to Mindful magazine, an award-winning singer-songwriter who leads the folk-noir band Sweetbriar Rose, and is the founder of Red Pen Arts, a consultancy that offers support to social entrepreneurs and the arts and culture community.