Category: Myth + Spirituality

  • Reclaiming the Monster

    Reclaiming the Monster

    Woman-as-monster: Medusa, bronze medallion from Pompeii, photo Gary Todd via Wikimedia Commons Women can be monsters too. From snake-haired Medusa to the horrifying mama-alien of the Alien movies, female monsters have often embodied male fears of women’s unchecked power. So it makes sense that women writers and artists have been changing the perspective on these archetypes. In her 2022 book Women and Other Monsters, Jess Zimmerman explores how the archetypal women monsters from ancient Greece illuminate women’s experiences now.

    And some recent horror and fantasy novels play with the woman-as-monster trope in a way that doesn’t just make them more sympathetic—they recast old stereotypes as a way to allow women to claim their monstrous power.

    Theodora Goss’s Athena Club trilogy does this on a meta-level, putting the focus on the daughters of such iconic characters as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, H. G. Wells’s Dr. Moreau, Victor Frankenstein, and more. Set in Victorian England and Europe, the three novels follow a band of young women, fictional heirs of the generation of mad monster-creating scientists from over a century ago, as they go on mystery-solving adventures.

    Each character deals with her inheritance differently: Justine Frankenstein, created abnormally tall and strong by her “father” Victor Frankenstein, is haunted by his abandonment; in contrast, Catherine Moreau, a human created from a puma, feels no ambivalence about using her animal strength, agility, and capacity for violence. The analytical Mary Jekyll, the most “normal” of the group, comes to develop a wary but meaningful sisterly relationship with Diana Hyde, a wild child fathered by Jekyll’s alter ego.

    Forging bonds of friendship, they all learn to accept and use their unusual powers to their own benefit. The Athena Club’s transgressive adventures (leading to economic freedom!), give agency to the women in ways they couldn’t have expected in the straitlaced Victorian era. They even argue over the telling of their story, underlining the sense of it as a kind of playful thought experiment.

    Silvia Moreno-Garcia‘s The Daughter of Dr. Moreau overlaps with Goss’s cat-woman character, expanding on the original Island of Dr. Moreau in a more serious vein. Moreno reimagines Moreau’s island as an isolated hacienda in Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula in the 1870s. Here, the scientist’s daughter undergoes a slow awakening, beginning as the coddled only child who worships her charismatic father, her only friends the hybrid human-animal monsters he has bred.

    As she struggles with her growing desire for romance and autonomy, Carlota eventually comes to accept her own monstrous power. Subplots around the Mexican peasants’ oppression and struggle for liberation add thematic resonance to this retelling.

    A number of recent YA novels have also shown a willingness to explore a darker sense of self for their protagonists—evidence that teen readers are ready to engage with dark or morally ambivalent characters. Two of my favorites are Melissa Bashardoust’s Girl Serpent Thorn, and Traci Chee’s A Thousand Steps into Night. Both of them go beyond the Western fairy-tale and monster canons: Girl Serpent Thorn takes place in a world that’s informed by  Persian history and stories, and Traci Chee’s A Thousand Steps into Night draws on a rich brew of traditional Japanese folk tales.

    At the start of Girl Serpent Thorn, Princess Soraya is confined to a walled palace garden, having been cursed at birth with a poisonous touch. Though at first she shrinks away to protect the people around her, Soraya’s self-abnegation falls away as she learns the truth of her own history and of the divs, the powerful monstrous spirits who are part of it—allowing her to claim her own power.

    In A Thousand Steps into Night, Miuko, a girl whose loudness and clumsiness has already made her a bit of an outcast in her village, is kissed by a shaoha—a female demon—cursing her to become one herself. As her skin gradually turns a deep, demonic shade of indigo, she finds herself embracing her new impulses to do violence. Her human and demon-selves clash within her, each one trying to get the upper hand. She realizes she needs to kill in order to stay alive and be able to save her companion, but then she would lose her humanity.

    Both these novels allow their young-woman protagonists to weigh the consequences of doing monstrous things, face their darker selves, and make their own complex decisions. Stories like this remind us how thin the veil can be that separates being a monster from being human.

    Read more:

    Women and Other Monsters by Jess Zimmerman

    The Athena Club series by Theodora Goss (The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter, European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman, The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl)

    The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

    Girl Serpent Thorn by Melissa Bashardoust

    A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee

  • Elephants and Radium Girls

    Elephants and Radium Girls

     

    The Only Harmless Great Thing coverIn The Only Harmless Great Thing, Brooke Bolander has taken on two strange and disturbing events from the early 20th century: the willfully negligent poisoning of young women painting radium-tinged watch dials for the United States Radium Company, and the public electrocution of Topsy the elephant at Coney Island in 1903. Bolander somehow burrowed into each story to find their shared DNA, and then performed some recombinant alchemy to merge them into one harrowing and resonant story, with a tragic and poetically just ending. 

    In its under 100 pages, the book brilliantly illuminates the dark side of our attraction to the shining, sparking effects brought by electricity and radioactivity. On top of that, it gives us fresh ways to think about how the DNA of our shared stories spirals through time and culture.

    The book’s central story pairs Regan, a fictionalized Radium Girl, with the elephant Topsy, in a fragile cross-species friendship. In Bolander’s topsy-turvy alternate timeline, Topsy is one of a number of elephants bought and trained by the company to paint watch dials after the Radium Girls’ health issues have come to light. In one of the book’s sublime inventions, the elephants have learned to communicate through an ASL-like sign language using their trunks, so Regan and Topsy are able to converse. (I wish that development could be imported to our timeline.)

    Regan’s ripe Appalachian twang brings the aspect of class into focus—she is a low-class rural outsider in the urban factory, able to get the elephants’ exploitation immediately. The slightly archaic idioms she uses make a strong vessel for her outrage as the story races forward.

    Two other stories frame this one, and they carry meta-questions about how stories are made, how they take root, are preserved, and shape us. In the first one, happening in a slightly skewed near-present time, Topsy’s execution has made an indelible impression on the American psyche, and cemented a pop-culture association between elephants and radioactivity—to the point that a Dumbo-like Topsy has starred in a beloved Disney movie. In this story, a young researcher urges the elephants to agree to have their genomes altered so their skin will glow when it’s near radioactive waste—a signal of danger to humans in the far future.

    The second story-layer gives full, mythic voice to the elephants. An elephant-mother recounts the legend of the revered long-ago ancestor who dove into a tar pit to retrieve the lost stories of her people. The storyteller, we realize, lives in that future time when she and her kind have agreed to be that glowing warning system for humanity. Their vast chain of memory, stretching eons backward and forward in time, shows humanity’s self-narrative to be pretty puny by comparison.

    For me, coming in with a long obsession with Nikola Tesla, Bolander’s Radium Girls-Topsy remix hits a nerve. The electrocution of the real Topsy has been associated with Thomas Edison, mainly because Edison was known to have arranged public electrocutions of smaller animals during the Current Wars of the early 1890s. (These spectacles aimed to show how dangerous Tesla’s AC current was; but Tesla’s AC won the current wars, being superior in numerous ways to Edison’s DC.) Edison most likely didn’t have a hand in Topsy’s death, but the electric-powered public spectacle at Coney Island was surely inspired by his venal stunts.

    Tesla, on the other hand, brought an almost utopian idealism to his electronic innovations. He even pioneered the medical use of electricity, believing that immersion in  electromagnetic fields was good for human health. (We’ve learned to be more careful about the effects of such constant bombardment.) Tesla’s idealism took part in his era’s belief that nature existed as a resource for humanity, in service of the progress of civilization. In Bolander’s vision, both Edison and Tesla are caught, found complicit in a system that blithely digs up radium and conscripts the weakest members of society to handle it.

    Yet the elephants’ understanding takes us beyond this stew of human, animal, and natural exploitation. Topsy recognizes electricity as a mutated form of lightning, and the far-future elephant mother shares that understanding. Even living with the poisonous aftereffects of the nuclear industry, she and her tribe persist, citizens of the natural world, protected  by their collective, long-lasting, storied understanding.

     

  • Doctor Atomic’s blast zone

    Doctor Atomic’s blast zone

    Trinity fireball, with lightning storm behindThe latest production ofDoctor Atomic, the opera about the birth of the Nuclear Age by composer John Adams and director/librettist Peter Sellars, saw it coming “home” to New Mexico, where the story is set. In the process, it became a stunning, unrepeatable artistic event. I was lucky to see one of the performances at the Santa Fe Opera this summer, staged only several miles away from Los Alamos, recalling the frantic months leading up to the first atomic explosion in July 1945.

    Santa Fe Opera, before Doctor Atomic performance
    Santa Fe Opera, before Doctor Atomic performance

    With the desert vista spreading around the open walls of the opera house, and Los Alamos lying some 20 miles beyond the open backstage, a rare synchrony clicked into place between opera and site. And Sellars’ new production went beyond this, making other connections tangible that had only been hinted at before.

    Doctor Atomic brings to life the consuming moral conflicts that colored the Manhattan project. Onstage, the characters trace a deadly dance: at the center, the brooding J. Robert Oppenheimer, the research director at Los Alamos; Edward Teller (who would later testify against Oppenheimer), radiating a dark acceptance of the responsibilities they will all bear; another physicist, Robert Wilson, whose attempt to petition the President not to use the bomb was overruled. This staging included a radically simplified set dominated by a huge reflective metal sphere hanging above the stage, and unobtrusive street clothes for costumes.

    First of all, let me say
    that I have no hope
    of clearing my conscience.

    - Edward Teller

    Adams and Sellars have collaborated before, notably on the pathbreaking and provocative operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer. In producing the score for Doctor Atomic, Adams has said he wanted to “musically” paint a picture of “this very sci-fi kind of vision”—“this scene of Alamogordo, a very remote desert place… almost like the landscape of the moon, with this eerie tower, with this strange object hanging from it”—the prototype bomb.

    Ed Emshwiller cover art for City at Worlds End, 1953 edition (detail)
    Ed Emshwiller cover art for City at Worlds End, 1953 edition (detail)

    Invited to create a new production for Santa Fe, Sellars leaped in with his usual ferocious enthusiasm, working not only to connect it not only to the land and local history, but to its inhabitants. The Pueblo Indians near the site of the first explosion suffered the first radiation injuries of any human community—weeks before Hiroshima, with effects that have lasted over generations. The director met with these “Downwinders” for months leading up to the performance, and with members of other Pueblo tribes surrounding Santa Fe.

    Ultimately, this led to their participation in the opera, in ways that transformed and deepened it. The members of the Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and Tesuque Pueblos agreed to allow its members to perform parts of the sacred Corn Dance, before the show began each evening, and as part of the hallucinatory second act portraying the nocturnal countdown to the explosion at dawn on July 16, 1945. And some Downwinders also took part, as still, solemn witnesses to the scenes that had so affected them—including Gen. Leslie Groves’ refusal to notify or evacuate the surrounding towns, though already knowing the toxic effects of radiation. This silent chorus of witnesses ranged in age from youths to people old enough to have been alive then—generations sharing a forgotten legacy.

    This was remarkable in so many ways. In the context of continuing cultural appropriation of Indian traditions, the Pueblos’ decision to make a gift of their sacred dance, for the purpose of a wider societal healing around the history of atomic weaponry—a history that they themselves suffered from—demonstrates a grace and wisdom we rarely see. By this gesture, as holders of the land, they embodied and strengthened a counterposing worldview, one within which the bomb’s making would be inconceivable. In the opera’s libretto, that worldview is represented by a single character, Pasqualita, the Indian nursemaid to the Oppenheimers’ children.

    In the west the cloud-flower blossoms,
    And now the lightning flashes,
    And now the thunder clashes,
    And now the rain comes down!

    - Pasqualita (Tewa Lullaby)

    Before one performance, Sellars talked about the opera’s contrasting of two technologies: a kind of indigenous technology, where “if you dance long enough, and seriously enough, your ancestors will notice and send rain,” with the Western deployment of scientific theory and methods toward a practical goal. The indigenous technology may have worked too well: one night, audience and performers were buffeted by wind and rain, the singers and dancers going barefoot on a rain-slick stage while lightning and thunder cracked around them. At this moment of literal danger (which my friend saw but I didn’t) the boundaries between art, symbol, and life—the actual thunderstorm; the historic summer thunderstorm that delayed the first explosion till dawn (part of the opera’s second act); and the atmospheric explosion of the bomb—merged into one wild, moving, meta-performative whole.

    All this helped move the opera deeper into the territory Adams has described as opera’s strong suit: addressing “large issues of… our collective experience… themes deep in the psyche of a nation [that] can be addressed in a way that no other art form can quite do it.” The place-specific alchemy of this production brought these deep-buried themes to new life in a way that could only have happened here.

    Some of the craziness of the past seven decades has been fed by our massive inability or unwillingness to reckon with the power humanity now has to destroy itself. Doctor Atomic doesn’t resolve those issues, but challenges us to keep them alive for ourselves, as individuals and as a community.

  • American Bardo

    American Bardo

    A 19th-century stone carved angel in a cemeteryAs I read George Saunders’ daring first novel Lincoln in the Bardo recently, I was struck by its strangely close parallels with another memorable and equally risk-taking debut novel, Chris Adrian’s Gob’s Grief (2000). Both novels use the Civil War as an entry point into crazed and original meditations on the reality of death.

    In Lincoln in the Bardo, Saunders reimagines the Buddhist concept of the Bardo, a threshold state of the soul that is thought to last a few days after death. His American Bardo is a cemetery in Washington, D.C., filled with a motley group of dead folks too short-sighted to realize they’re dead. At the heart of the book is a new arrival, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, who’s succumbed to typhoid fever, and his grieving father, the President, who is a year into the bloodiest war of the country’s history. History has left the tantalizing suggestion that Lincoln visited Willie’s crypt several times after the boy’s funeral.

    Gob’s Grief takes place during and after the Civil War. The story repurposes such real figures as Walt Whitman, who volunteered as a nurse to injured soldiers during the war, and the remarkable Victoria Woodhull, a feminist, a medium, and the first female candidate for president, in 1872. The emotional crux of this story is the relationship between Woodhull’s fictional twin sons, Gob and Tomo. Tomo runs off to be a bugler with the Union Army at the age of eleven, and is soon killed in battle.

    Gob is sickened by his mother’s insistence that his brother is alive and well in the Summerland, the Spiritualist equivalent of Heaven. Years later, a grown-up Gob builds a massive, Steampunk-like engine meant to bring back to life not only Tomo, but all the soldiers who died in the war. The engine combines “glass tubes and iron gears… bundles of copper wire,” human bones, and an array of glass negatives of fallen soldiers, floating above a set of cemetery gates.

    Both books are wildly non-formulaic and genre-busting. Lincoln in the Bardo is told in a multi-voiced chorus, shifting from the dead cemetery-dwellers to the living—the cemetery guard and the President—along with excerpted historical descriptions of Willie’s illness and death. Gob’s Grief leaps around in time and inside many points of view. But it also alternates between naturalistic depictions of events like the battle of Chickamauga, and otherworldly happenings and characters including the memorably creepy child Pickie Beecher, born out of Gob’s infernal machine. Angels appear in both books, hectoring the living and the dead.

    Both novels are heated into overdrive by the tension between denial and acceptance of death, two landmarks on the continuum of grief. The ghosts surrounding Willie Lincoln suffer from major cognitive dissonance as they struggle to explain their situation, clinging to sad euphemisms: “sick-box” for coffin, and “stone home” for their tombs. Their liberation, and Willie’s, hinges on recognizing the reality of their deaths in this false stage-set they’ve created. An unlikely communion with the dead helps Willie’s grieving father come through a similar emotional passage.

    Gob’s Grief is infused with the craziness of grief. Several main characters, including Walt Whitman, are each haunted by a brother or loved one lost in the war. Gob’s death-defying engine somehow feels like the believable response of someone who’s ready to change the rules of reality to bring back their loved one. Adrian’s later novels, The Children’s Hospital and The Great Night, show a similar willingness to dive headlong into the deepest waters where death and life, fantasy and reality mix.

    The idea of the Bardo came to the West from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the 14th-century Tibetan Buddhist text written as a guide for the newly dead, to help them move through the illusions of the Bardo toward clarity and rebirth. In fact, Bardo can refer to any transitional state, even our waking experience. Is there something distinctly American in the intransigence of Saunders’ ghosts, and Gob’s obsessive quest to undo his brother’s death? Their stubbornness may reflect our cultural prejudice toward happiness, toward holding on to a more pleasant version of things, whether it’s one that existed in the past, or some promised future. In whatever Bardo we find ourselves, only doing the hard work of acknowledging what we’ve lost can liberate us to move ahead.

     

  • Thinking about Gaia

    Thinking about Gaia

    Image of Earth from spaceIn this month of Earth Day and marching for science and climate, I’m thinking about Gaia.

    A hashtag popped up on Twitter last week: #ifonlytheearthcouldspeak. Yes! That’s a good prompt to contemplate right now. The hashtag elicited a range of responses from funny and snarky to thoughtful and earnest. Some tweeters suggested that the earth is speaking, but we’re not listening. Would that be Gaia? The environmental scientist James Lovelock first formulated the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, proposing that the Earth could be seen as one vast living and self-regulating system, and naming it for Gaia, the primordial Greek Earth goddess. The idea has been borne out since then, but its popularity may owe a lot to Lovelock’s naming it for the Greek Mother Earth, thus connecting it in our minds to the much earlier and long-lived human sense of the earth as a living force.

    In the last week, the earth’s atmosphere reached an ominous new milestone: atmospheric carbon dioxide levels broke past 410 parts per million, after hitting 400 parts per million in 2013. The last time atmospheric carbon concentrations were this high was in the Middle Pliocene, 3.6 million years ago. Our continuing to pump carbon and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, combined with the unknown effects of climate feedback, are cause for alarm. For those of us who don’t deny the facts, it’s a scary time. I’ll be at the People’s Climate March in Washington D.C. in a few days, one of the hundreds of thousands of people needing to bear witness to the urgency of this moment.

    But are facts enough to rally people to action? You can’t see carbon concentrations, and even though the earth is now experiencing changes that are much faster than the normal geological time scale, these changes are often too slow, too big, or too abstract for us to easily take in. As author Kim Stanley Robinson has said, “Fiction can tell us how new situations will feel, and also, what things mean.” Robinson’s new novel, New York 2140, set in a partially submerged future New York, is one of several just-published works of climate fiction (cli-fi), the emerging genre that invites us to picture the human consequences of climate change. Robinson offers a vision of people muddling along and making their lives in the Venice-like canals of New York, both coping with the disasters that have occurred and aware there may be worse ahead.

    But where is Gaia in this future? If Earth can be seen as a living thing, couldn’t we also benefit from trying to take its perspective—as different from ours as it may be? Science fiction has gone there already. Apparently inspired by the Gaia hypothesis, Isaac Asimov included a newly discovered, sentient planet named Gaia in his 1982 novel Foundation’s Edge. And Piers Anthony made “Gaea” a main character—an archetype of the Earth, embodied in a mortal—in Becoming a Green Mother (1988), part of his Incarnations of Immortality series.

    The Book of Joan, an ambitious novel by Lidia Yuknavitch, just out this month, offers a character who is empathically connected with the Earth. Living only a few decades into the future, the visionary child-woman Joan of Dirt leads a rebellion among the survivors of an environmentally ravaged earth who are now living on an orbiting space-station sanctuary ruled by a billionaire dictator. This Joan of Arc for a nightmare future can manifest volcanic eruptions—her symbiosis with the planet allows it a form of expression that can’t be ignored. It’s a risky novel, also taking on issues of gender, sex and race, and it’s on my to-be-read list.

    These and other cli-fi novels do a great service by bringing the human consequences of climate change into vivid focus, at a human scale we can reckon with. If they tend to be dystopian, that is the kind of future that seems to be staring us in the face, given the forces we have already set in motion.

    The Earth is speaking to us now, in her own language, not just through beautiful sunsets, but through rising sea levels, droughts, and strange weather patterns. Of course we need to be able to imagine the human costs of climate change. That’s how we think, and it is the most promising way toward changes in policy. But I also feel the need to see things from Gaia’s point of view—even if it means facing eruptions of traumatic scale and strength. What may be dystopian for us, may just be a cloudy afternoon for our long-lived planet. We desperately need to de-objectify the earth, and to try to reengage in something more like an “I–Thou” relationship with Gaia—not of equals, but in respect, and awe and wonder. I hope more writers will take up the challenge of imagining what she is saying, and might be saying in the future.

     

     

  • The radical leaps of A Wrinkle in Time

    The radical leaps of A Wrinkle in Time

    The witches of A Wrinkle in TimeI was in sixth grade when I was swept up in the world of A Wrinkle in Time, part of the first generation of girls to discover it. Madeleine L’Engle’s novel imprinted itself on my imagination and gave me a sense of what speculative fiction could be, before I had read much science fiction. Its tingling sense of possibility, and its fearless leaping into deep territory stayed with me, as I later found and read other pioneering authors like Ursula LeGuin and Octavia Butler.

    What makes A Wrinkle in Time such a touchstone, a kind of pole star that has helped many readers, and particularly girls and young women begin navigating their sense of themselves in the cosmos? Many people have written about the power of encountering the anti-cheerleader Meg—a twelve-year-old girl who excels at math and science—not to mention Meg’s mother, Mrs. Murry, who is both a working scientist and a loving, understanding parent.

    But it’s not just these two strong female characters that made this book different. L’Engle pulled off something wildly, radically original, marking her own path into a field that is still male-dominated. The title slyly announces its difference: it’s a “wrinkle” in time, not some grand, adventurous noun (Trek, anyone?), but a humble, domestic thing that normally reminds us of fabric—the tangible women’s work of sewing and ironing. Yet this image animates the Tesseract concept that allows Meg and others to leapfrog through space and time on their quest to find her scientist father. Likewise, the story roots itself in the creaky details of Meg’s shabby but welcoming old house before launching into its playful exploration of different planets and ways of being, all without recourse to any of the shiny, tech-heavy details that characterize hard science fiction.

    That’s not all. L’Engle, who knew her world mythologies, offers three characters who are introduced as witches—one of them is even named Mrs Which. But these witches are thoroughly de-demonized. No shrill Queens of the Night or interchangeable Weird Sisters here; these are three old-lady pals who genuinely like each other, each with her own distinct personality. They are in fact mentors and helpers to Meg and her companions, and even as they shape-shift, shedding their gender to reveal more cosmic identities, they retain their profoundly good intentions.

    And then there are the inhabitants of the planet Ixchel, where Meg is taken to recover from the near-death trauma of Tessering through the Black Thing. These huge furred creatures understand the world completely through sensitive tentacles, and communicate without words. Instead of nightmarish, Alien-like insectoids like those encountered in Starship Troopers and Ender’s Game, we’re given many-limbed beings with the enveloping tactile and emotional ambience of the mother-infant bond, as Meg is regressed and re-raised by an individual she names “Aunt Beast.”

    No wonder publishers didn’t know what to do with L’Engle’s manuscript at first. The human characters (Meg and her mom) and the supernatural characters broke the gender barriers of their time. Two archetypal extremes are embodied as female: the celestial, sky-flying, far-seeing witches, and the feelingful, earth-connected species of Ixchel (the planet was named for the Mayan goddess of healing and childbirth). And there are no man-eating monsters among them. If A Wrinkle in Time has given boys something new to chew on in these recast archetypes, that’s great. On behalf of stargazing girls everywhere, I’m grateful to Madeleine L’Engle for letting her imagination fly.

  • An elegy for Tesla

    An elegy for Tesla

    Elegy for Tesla, installation by Jeanne Jaffe at Rowan University Art Gallery, detail
    Elegy for Tesla, installation by Jeanne Jaffe at Rowan University Art Gallery, detail

    Jeanne Jaffe’s ambitious Elegy for Tesla is a high-tech, dreamlike and heartfelt meditation on Nikola Tesla, the legendary scientist and inventor. Jaffe’s multimedia installation fills the Rowan University Art Gallery with videos and sound, 3‑D printed models of his iconic inventions, and animatronic, motion-activated figures of Tesla that move and, in some cases speak.

    Tesla stands as an avatar of massive creativity, with his hundreds of patents, and basic breakthroughs in alternating current, radio, robotics, and even computer circuitry. Jaffe pays homage to his achievements, while embedding them in the medium of a life that had strangely mythic elements. She’s particularly sensitive to the poignancy of the older Tesla, the eccentric loner who fed and cared for pigeons, whose limitless imagination had run up against the limits of the public’s reception of his work.

    This aspect of Tesla is part of what drew me to work with composer Jon Gibson on Violet Fire, an opera that tried to capture the inner life of Tesla in all its strangeness through music, movement and video. So I was delighted to be asked to write the catalogue essay for this exhibit. One part of the Tesla mythos is the white pigeon he befriended, and who triggered in him a vision of blinding light. Jaffe, who has cared for birds herself, surrounds Tesla with a flock of tenderly modeled pigeons; for me, they can be seen as carriers of his ongoing inspiration, and markers of his intense, intuitive connection with the natural world.

    Elegy for Tesla, gallery view
    Elegy for Tesla, gallery view

    But Tesla, in the form of his motion-activated doppelgangers, steals this show. Curator Mary Salvante coordinated an NEA-funded collaboration between Jaffe and students and faculty in Rowan’s Engineering Department to create the systems that animate her sculptures. They stand, and move, in a perfect salute to Tesla as “magician” of wireless electricity.

    I’ll be at the reception on Thursday – if you can’t make it, the show will be up through January 30.

    Elegy for Tesla, an installation by Jeanne Jaffe

    Rowan University Art Gallery/West, Glassboro, NJ, through January 30, 2016

    Reception Thursday, October 8, 5–8 pm, starting with artist presentation and panel discussion at 5 pm.

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