scorched earth

when we stop tethering our "value" as people to interactions with others, so that the very concept of "worth"—what Joan Didion considered "self-respect", and Toni Morrison examined in her final writings on "self-regard"—is detached from the ways that they leave us or we leave them—when we are able to finally dissipate the heavy weight of conditioning and projection through a gathering-in of essence that is as much a puzzle as a practice, we are also, fundamentally, buckling down on our bones. beginning again from ground-level, we are asking our bones to be strong enough to support us, to facilitate a full plasticity of self as we retool its musculature. we are asking the osseous to serve as subjectivity’s pliant anchor and physical source. in reaching for a root, we hope to transcend external substantiation, ditch the mirror, abandon those places where we go for comfort that we know are not forever. bones, of course, have a timescale more eternal than our economized thinking can induct on its own. so we must be patient with the secretive forces of the skeletal.

that being said, I am sick of my skeleton’s deterministic, dharmic casing: sick of explaining away my losses, failures, and disappointments as necessary, of having to accept, because it really is truth, that the thing that I believed I desired was not ultimately in my interest, or mandatory to my success, and that its denial, while painful, is appropriate, even fortunate. as we turn inwards for guidance, as we arrive at higher needs by stripping away our surface wants, the question arises of what to do with the temporal world we have just ejected ourselves from, but that remains within view. in our new state of "congruence", how should we treat those things (persons, objects, narratives) in which we no longer seek validation but have perhaps kept around, with the permanence of battle scars, for apotropaic solace? there often remains a tinge of doleful fidelity to that which we hold responsible for provoking our withdrawal from attachment, as if the fact that we can navigate a minefield of triggers with dexterity makes it neutral, safe and sound. yet even the most well-tuned mind can swell reflexively at the first sign of friction, for that sign will activate the larger matrix of our interpersonal impressions. experiences are inevitably undergone with only certain pieces of information accessible—so when their layers have been revealed and defused, how do we relate to them from a more "bone" perspective? 

bone being terra, we have the option of going "scorched earth". singeing one's territory to ensure that whatever it might bear can no longer be of use to us, so as not to be useful to an adversary on approach, is a storied military tactic illustrated in a literal, elegiac sense across Anselm Kiefer's Holocaustal landscape paintings. Kiefer sets fire to his native German turf to combust the possibility of conquest, even as generations after might re-seed it with hope. Leaving a Doll's House (1996), Claire Bloom's famous account of her marriage to Philip Roth, is probably the classic example of a "scorched earth" memoir. in this real-life counterpart to the fictional book that Meryl Streep's liberated lesbian releases about her ex-husband (Woody Allen) in Allen's film, Manhattan (1979), English actress Bloom dismantles the superlative and self-controlled veneer of Roth the artist by profiling the unctuous duplicities of Roth the man. reviewers thought that Bloom—who at her prime starred as another "shrewish" matron in the 1980s TV adaptation of Brideshead Revisited—was far too generous to Roth; they wondered why she stayed with him for so long: in her marriage and in her recollections of it. for even as the book's publication unleashed a torrent of ill-will from its subject, Bloom could have skewered him further. why did she make excuses for his ugliest behavior? 

Bloom's light touch, her choice to sear but not char Roth’s authorial image, reminds me that Rauschenberg erasing de Kooning was a "scorched earth" gesture, of closing out with a transformative holding. the younger artist's torch-act, or negating excision, reduced his predecessor's imprint to pencil pentimenti, but not, or not just, to clear the way for his own work. for Rauschenberg as for Bloom, his artwork was the scorching’s negation of all but the intrinsically visible. what survives conflagration must be bone-deep, innate to the dynamic at hand—and not yet ready to go any farther. likewise, when Kiefer presents the fields of Eastern Europe as bloodied, with a pittance of beauty for its ash-remnants, he is restricting the beautiful to the bounds of his image; it would be too soon to give that beauty free rein. scorching is a razing of that which is closest to you, what you took for yours. I see it as a means of claiming autonomy by laying the contents of that claim corpselike, out in the open. no one who crosses your path, threatening incursion, can till for their benefit what you have sacrificed from your preexisting order. scorching is the deliberate spoliation of what once cropped up as nourishment and a curtailing—for a period—of all that might still grow. we choose to scorch so that the choice and the domain of choosing is ours, alone. 

this parching of past and present primes the earth for future construction, once it has been restored to the individual's orbit—your bones. the fact that there can be no sweetness, no fruit, borne from an immediate attempt at post-scorch flourishing helps to succor the frustrating amenability of a determinist outlook. if the determinist model posits that events happen for a reason, scorching ensures you are responsible for that event's corrosion, and that its grander reasoning culminates only on your terms. idioms like arte povera or Chinese architecture (Yuanmingyuan) avail ruin and desiccation as found material, a creative strategy that, in our century of surplus stimuli, has become an artistic first principle. but scorching does not reward casual something-from-nothing synthesis as mere transmutation; it defines transmutation through the patient anticipation of a "rightful" return. Rauschenberg played the long game against Ab-Ex, leaving us as his descendants to wait out the re-flowering of what in it was good. the laws of nature mandate that destruction beget the new: that, after nuclear explosion, terra eventually buds, and that even those bones caught in crematoria recompose into form. inside fires set and fires endured, between scorching and recomposition, those bones will be your home.

picture: Thy Golden Hair Margarethe, Kiefer, 1981.