Artist and philosopher Rockwell Kent on breaking the Trance of Near-living – The Marginalian
The point, of course, is to make yourself alive – to feel the power of being in your muscles and your spirit, to tremble at the beauty and fear of it all, to breathe the lungs of life that awaken you to the near-sightedness caused by the system of waste and the quest we call civilization.
Within the system, these opportunities for green living are not readily available – they must be sought, seized, and then surrendered.
At four o'clock in the afternoon on June 17, 1929, ten years after his reckoning with the spirit of creation and the purpose of life on a remote island of Alaska, between two world wars, an artist and a philosopher. Rockwell Kent (June 21, 1882–March 13, 1971) boarded a small boat bound for Greenland. The crew consisted of him, a Parisian captain named Cupid, and a young captain, whose father built the boat and named him. Guidance after his faith that guidance is the most important thing a person should have in life.
Kent was confused when he was assigned a sailor on this trip. But he took the task of directing seriously – along with his drawing paper and ink, he packed a notebook in which he had painstakingly copied formulas from a circular geometry book and his “pretty and precious sex,” a box that read NATIONAL PHYSICAL LABORATORY CERTIFICATE OF EXAMINATION CLASS, he was going to EXAMINATION CLASS A. A philosophy of life that resonated with the belief of an old boat builder – after narrowly escaping being crushed by icebergs, Kent will show:
Even in the worst situation you keep your eyes on where you want to be.
Where he wanted to be was unknown, guided not by a tool but by a burning desire to break free from the chains of habit, to connect with something bigger and more alive. Open it N by E (public library) – a delightful account of his year in Greenland – with that spark of a happy imagination in a picturesque setting as New York Harbor fades into the background:
The bright sun shone upon us; the lake was blue under the westerly breeze, and it shone, how it shone! the whole distant world of our thoughts. It's like a colored lens a colored gift! through it we see the forward vista of our lives. Here, at the rate with which the water rises in our wake and the strings of the heart reach almost breaking, the future of gold approaches us and envelops us, and we do it at last – how quickly! – I don't care about all things but the glamor of adventure. And while one world dwindled, dwindled and disappeared, before us a new world opened and approached us to show itself. Who can deny the human soul its eternal need to make the unknown known; not for the sake of knowing, not for ego or knowledge or wisdom, but for the need to exercise the need to know? What is that need but the imagination's hunger for new and raw material for its creative trade? Of the things and truths that have been confirmed to us, we know that we must do the best, and live with it. That humdrum is the price of life. We live for those beautiful and unreal moments of beauty that our imaginations can build upon the panorama of fleeting experience.
Ten years later, Georgia O'Keeffe would find the essence of being an artist in “making the unknown known… and keeping the unknown always outside of you.”
The unknown is somehow always beyond us because it is always inside us – that is what true solitude reveals, why it can be so clear and scary at the same time.
Kent relates this awe-inspiring experience of his first night enveloped by endless horizons on all sides:
As it grows dark and the stars come out, and the black sea seems unbroken everywhere except for the restless tumult of its plain, as the lights go out in the house, then I am suddenly alone. And almost fear grips me because now I feel alone; under the keel and above the deep, – I, covered in abundance.
In the middle of the open sea, where “loneliness is unsolvable,” Kent confronts the fundamental questions of existence – why are we here, how did we get here, what does it mean to live, to have meaning, to exercise will against the providence of the universe?
How strange it is to be here in a small boat! – and not by accident, not brought out here from disaster, but on purpose! What is the purpose, whose? And if I remember how I read about Greenland and I have longed to go there for years, how I read and re-read the sagas of Iceland and was moved by them, how I was touched by the extraordinary story of the settlements in Greenland and their sad end, with all the splendor and mystery of those events, how I followed after Leif by those countries that need to understand and find all that in America. their land, to touch the ancient stone inclosures, to walk in their seas to think that I am a Viking like them, – then I can boast that purpose again mine you would have brought me here. And yet this very moment is your contradiction. Darkness and wind! immeasurable dimensions of space and elements! My weak hands hold the farmer; my eyes gaze hypnotically at the stars beyond the tossing masthead or watch the bow wave as we part the sea. I took a lesson. I have no thought or will, I have no power to change.
[…]
Dreaming? here is the real bone-chilling truth.
N by E it's an absolutely amazing read. It includes Kent's later reflections on wilderness, solitude, and creativity taken from the nine months he spent in Alaska with his young son, and revisits Henry James on how to stop waiting and start living, Hermann Hesse on how to live more, and Ellen Bass's beautiful way of waking up from the unconsciousness of living close.
