Bikers, Nano Birds and the Abyss
In sixth grade, my friend Marisa created a world called Chaos. She said I was in it and my name was Kaokee. I don't remember any of the plot, and I haven't spoken to her in over forty years, (or 280 if you like to think in dog years, seeing as how time is pretty much an arbitrary human construct to order the chaos of everything. Which, apparently, we really need). The fact that I had a name in grade school cosmology has stuck with me.
The word "chaos" comes from the Greek for emptiness, chasm, the abyss or void. A bunch of those old Greek smart guys wrote a lot about it. Heraclitus posited that it was the true foundation of reality. In the news today, chaos is a constant theme. It has morphed from "Chaos in the Middle East" into "Chaos in the __________ (fill in the blank). ER’s (which magically are now ED's, emergency departments, just ask any doctors). China, tornado wreckage, grocery stores, the Dow, cruise lines, Yemen, nursing homes, medical supply chains, the Amazon, Amazon, elections, payrolls, coral reefs, closures, poaching, oil storage, farm subsidies, school, etc. etc. etc...
Jens Voigt is a retired pro bike racer from Germany who was famous as one of the true "hard men" in cycling. He was a breakaway specialist who would take off from the pack, the peloton, and routinely hammer an attack alone. He once fractured his wrist in a nasty crash and rode the entire day before the doctors x-rayed it and ordered him out of the race. After a crash utterly destroyed his bike in the Tour de France, he borrowed a child's bike because the car with the team bikes had left him behind. He rode it nine miles before the team realized he was still in the race and left him a proper spare. He famously printed "Shut Up Legs" on his handlebars. He set the hour record by riding 31.76 miles in a velodrome after he "retired" from racing at 43 years old, generating an average of 412 watts, an incredible ouput. The peloton of a stage bike race is chaos --180 humans, with five-foot-four climbers weighing 125 pounds, big power-house sprinters with massive track-racing-built thighs, twenty different languages, food on the fly, sixty mile-an-hour descents, flat tires, screaming mobs lining the roadways, broken bikes, broken bones, 180 different brains riding elbow to elbow for three weeks. Jens said, "Having things organized is for small-minded people. Genius controls chaos."
Years ago, I was in my front yard drinking a coffee and a bumblebee buzzed just by my ear. I turned to discover, instead, a baby hummingbird, the tiniest bird I have ever seen, zipping off into the sunlight. So naturally, I made a piece of art to honor the little guy. Called it, "The Rookie." Art helps me order reality. Doing some homework, I discovered the smallest birds in the world live in Cuba. The Bee Hummingbird weighs two grams, the same as two dollar bills, or a couple of raisins, or a half a teaspoon of sugar. They eat half their body weight a day and make nests smaller than a golf ball out of spider webs, which they shingle with lichen to make waterproof. Their eggs are the size of a pea. Our hummingbirds in Vermont arrive later this month, something I really look forward to as a way to order the chaos of time. You know, seasons. In the Greek comedy, "Birds", Aristophanes explains that chaos transitioned into the creation of birds.
In my art, I have a whole genre I call "Chaos" pieces, which range from the inexplicable like "Lush" or "Ruckus," to randomness with elements of structure like "Imperium". I have done a series of pieces that slide from structure into total chaos -- "Crystalline" then "Warren" then "Haystack" -- from the ordered, angular grid of a meteorite's guts, to the organic randomness of a pile of cut hay, Mondrian to Monet, M. C. Escher to Pollack.
In Germanic tradition, the hero had to battle with chaos, generally depicted as a monster like a dragon, Beowulf versus Grendel. Chaos is the base nature of all reality and man must make it orderly to be comprehensible, if even just a bit. Slay it or just give a beat and a nice vocal, maybe a guitar break with some horns for punch. Jens, our hero, once said, "You have to make your own luck. If you try to win, you might lose, but if you don't try to win, you lose for sure." I am constantly in the studio wrestling with the chaos. The formlessness of an empty canvas is the void. There is nothing. Our nature is to make rhythm out of all that, to find patterns for comfort. My favorite artists are the ones who take the familiar and twist it into the unfamiliar or vice versa. Take the twirls and stripes and explosions of our daily realm and build a latticework to see it and understand it. Look to my Instagram #havocgallery for the bizarreness of our natural world, how the simplest moments can hold visual magic. My job is to transmute that into art you can hang in the dining room.
We are bombarded today, more than ever in my lifetime, with CHAOS. Shouldn't the mission be orderliness and consistency, applied science and medicine, structured policy, to save our citizens and our cultural fabric? This fabric is what we have evolved over millennia because it works to keep the chaos at bay, the monsters, the abyss. Keep your rituals as best you can my friends. They are the separation of us from the mess. Take it from Kaokee. I know what I'm talking about. (Fact checked it myself, yep, spiderwebs). Note the name of my gallery that I hung on the door ten years ago -- HAVOC. I am intimately familiar with this stuff. "Random Order" is a nice oxymoron and the title of a piece from 2009.
Finally, one last nugget from Jens: "At the Tour, you always have some fantastic days and some days where you hit the asphalt. Today was an asphalt day for me." This is our collective asphalt day. Get up. Get it moving. "On With It". The hummingbirds will come back soon.
Stay home. Buy art. Hug those you are living with.
Find order that comforts.
love love
as always,
Bruce Mac
