A few weeks later I found her card sitting on my desk and thought I might as well send her an email, just letting her know that I appreciated her art. She wrote back thanking me, but also saying that she’d followed a link in my email “signature,” found a photo that I took in Tasmania, and wanted to create a painting from it. Amazing. I said, “Hell Yeah.”

Here’s the photo:

And here’s the painting:

You can see her other work at Studio Hartig.

Where we are now, to me, is the real dark time, the proverbial moment before the dawn. The depravity of our culture, Disney merchandise, cool ranch Doritos, and all, is something that people of the future will marvel at for centuries to come. The purity of our surrender will fascinate them. They will conclude that we looked into the abyss… and decided that we liked what we saw in there.

- James Howard Kunstler

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older
Then we wouldn’t have to wait so long
And wouldn’t it be nice to live together
In the kind of world where we belong

You know its gonna make it that much better
When we can say goodnight and stay together

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could wake up
In the morning when the day is new
And after having spent the day together
Hold each other close the whole night through

The happy times together we’ve been spending
I wish that every kiss was never ending
Oh, wouldn’t it be nice

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true
Baby then there wouldn’t be a single thing we couldn’t do
We could be married
And then we’d be happy

Wouldn’t it be nice

You know it seems the more we talk about it
It only makes it worse to live without it
But lets talk about it
Oh, wouldn’t it be nice

The pins on the map are where I am planning to spend the night(s).

View Larger Map

[I will be updating this post as things progress]

Anyhoo, I looked up how to post to WordPress by email because I knew I could type emails in landscape mode. I configured my secret post-by-email address and then started typing up this blog post. About one paragraph in I goofed big time and sent the email prematurly. Oops!

I fired up the WordPress App again with the intention of deleting the post, finishing the email, and then reposting. But, upon revisiting the app, I found that I can, in fact, use it in landscape mode, so I went ahead and finished it…

Right back where I started.

Whatever else one thinks of how we live these days, it’s hard to not see it as temporary, historically anomalous, a peculiar blip in human experience. I’ve spent my whole life riding around in cars, never questioning whether the makings of tomorrow’s supper would be there waiting on the supermarket shelves, never doubting when I entered a room that the lights would go on at the flick of a switch, never worrying about my personal safety. And now hardly a moment goes by when I don’t feel tremors of massive change in these things, as though all life’s comforts and structural certainties rested on a groaning fault line.

– Jim Kunstler in Then All At Once

I couldn’t agree more, Jim.

If a Martian came to earth and tried to understand what humans do from reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that we mostly spend our time falling in love — and occasionally, murdering one another. But of course, what we really do is go to work – and yet this “work” is unseen, it is literally invisible and it is so in part because it is not represented in art. If it does appear in consciousness, it does so via the business pages of newspapers, it does so as an economic phenomenon, rather than as a broader human phenomenon.

The modern mystery of how things are made

Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and source of almost every one of the limited number of things they ate and owned. They would have been familiar with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has grown ever more obscure. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the production and distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.

The world is covered in factories and warehouses, but it is impossible for the lay person to go into them or even approach them. Despite their importance, they have no desire to advertise themselves to the public. In business parks, they are spread out across sites of determined blandness marked by gentle gradients, ornamental trees and expanses of preternaturally green grass.

When we think of tourist destinations, we don’t think of the places of work. Why, endowed as they are with both practical importance and emotional resonance, do cargo ships, port facilities, airport warehouses, storage tanks, refineries and assembly plants go unnoticed, except by those immediately involved in their operations?

Finding beauty in the industrial world

In an essay entitled “The Poet,” published in 1844, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented the narrow definition of beauty subscribed to by his peers, who tended to reserve the term exclusively for the bucolic landscapes and unspoilt pastoral scenes celebrated in the works of well-known artists and poets of the past. Emerson himself, however, writing at the dawn of the industrial age, observing with interest the proliferation of railways, warehouses, canals and factories, wished to make room for the possibility of alternative forms of beauty.

It was Emerson’s strategy to lead his readers by example, to encourage their evolving sense of what might be attractive by demonstrating that he himself, a trustworthy guardian of high culture, was capable of recognizing the appeal of a signal box and a chimney stack, and that a range of hitherto unlikely objects could therefore be safe for all to love.

The exception to the rule: Trainspotters

There is, of course, one particular kind of person who breaks the normal rules: I am thinking of spotters of ships, lorries planes and trains, the kind who give up weekends to admire the giant moving parts of our mechanized world. Whatever their inarticulacies, the spotters are appropriately alive to some of the most astonishing aspects of our time.

They know what it is about our world that would detain a Martian or a child. They take pleasure in sensing their smallness and ignorance next to the expansive intelligence of the modern collective mind. Standing beside a docked ship, their heads thrown back to gaze at its steel turrets disappearing into the sky, they enter into a state of silent, satisfied wonder, like pilgrims before the towers of Chartres. Nor are they ashamed to seem eccentric when their curiosity demands it.

Take note of our new kind of landscape

The spotter’s pastime harks back to the habits of pre-modern travelers, who, upon arriving in a new country, were apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbors and workshops, feeling that the observation of work could be as stimulating as anything on a stage or chapel wall – a relief from a contemporary view which tightly associates tourism with play and therefore steers us away from an interest in aluminum foundries and sewage treatment plants in favor of the trumpeted pleasures of musicals and waxwork museums.

How ignorant most of us are by contrast, surrounded by machines and processes of which we have only the loosest grasp; we who know nothing about gantry cranes and iron-ore bulk carriers, who register the economy only as a set of numbers, who think — even now — that it is only about money, who have avoided close study of switch gears and wheat storage and spare ourselves closer acquaintance with the manufacturing protocols for tensile steel cable. How much we might learn from the spotters at the ends of piers and runways.

Restoring work to the human world

At a time when recession is reminding us how badly we need work, it should be artists who teach us to discern the virtues of the furniture of contemporary technology. One can hope for a day when photographs of electricity conductors might hang over dining tables and when someone might write a libretto for an opera set in the sales office of a packaging firm. We need art that could function for our times a little like those eighteenth-century cityscapes which show us people at work from the quayside to the temple, the parliament to the counting house, panoramas like those of Canaletto in which, within a single giant frame, one can witness dockers unloading crates, merchants bargaining in the main square, bakers before their ovens, women sewing at their windows and councils of ministers assembled in a palace – inclusive scenes which serve to remind us of the place which work accords each of us within the human hive.

Finding meaning at work

We need an art that can proclaim the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, despite the current economic mayhem, with the principal source of life’s meaning.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is the new book by acclaimed philosopher Alain de Botton. Despite the fact that work is the central part of almost every man’s life, it has become invisible in our culture. In his book, De Botton makes a case for work — as opposed to leisure — as a source of inspiration for art and celebration.

During this period of economic turmoil, employment is on everyone’s mind. Maybe it’s time for us to re-consider how work fits into our visions of happiness and life balance.

Well, in these moments of malaise, I usually just wait for something big, something really interesting to get me back on the wagon. I thought for sure that I’d get a jolt of inspiration in my first few days back on The Ice, but when I arrived at McMurdo (almost 2 months ago now), I went right back into the Plumbing Shop. It was like I’d never left. The basic thrill of Antarctica had dissipated somewhat because I wasn’t doing anything new.

But since then so many wonderful things have happened: Robin & I are actually living together for the first time in our relationship, I got promoted and moved to the Electrical Shop, I’m playing League Soccer, I’m on the Rugby Team, I spent a week at Lake Fryxell in the Dry Valleys (bookended by 2 awesome helicopter rides), and all the other amazing (and sometimes not so amazing) stuff that goes on around here. I was so excited to write again, so much inspiration! I had all these plans: I was gonna write about this and use that photo, and then I was gonna write about that and use this photo.

Oh, right, photos.

That’s when I realized what has been holding me back this whole time: Flickr. I love writing, but what I really love is writing with visual aids. Unfortunately Flickr left a bad taste in my mouth last season. I fought with it and fought with it and came to the conclusion that Flickr just does not like satellite internet. When I got down here this season, I sorta decided to wait until I got back home to upload all my photos & videos.

I think I’ve decided to find a happy medium instead.

Anyhoo, like I was saying, it got me thinking about this new domain I bought recently, and I’ve decided to use that domain to give this blog a new home. It’s not a huge deal, but I thought it best to let the internet know of this change before it happens. For those you that like to type in “elisfanclub.com”, you can continue to do so and it will continue to take you on a magical word journey the likes of which you’ve never experienced before.

But for those of you that like to subscribe to an RSS feed, you are going to need to take some proactive action here. You will need to add the following RSS feed to your feed reader:

http://blog.eliduke.com/feed/

It’s not active yet, but it will be soonish.

You have been warned.