Last night I watched my recording of Lifetime!’s 2009 TV movie, Georgia O’Keeffe, directed by Bob Balaban. The interplay between Joan Allen as O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and Jeremy Irons as Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) is as scintillating cinema as the story of O’Keeffe and Stieglitz’s affecting 30-year relationship is fascinating drama. And as far as I have been able to tell, the actors were successfully cast for their physical resemblance to the principals.I was arrested by a short scene in Taos, New Mexico (about 1929 perhaps). The local artists are enjoying some native dancing and O’Keeffe asks Tony Lujan (the fourth husband of her friend Mabel Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan, 1879-1962, the creator of Taos’s little artists’ colony) what the dance means. I didn’t write down precisely what he says, but the gist of it is that the dance expressed that we humans are “one” with other living creatures—neither above nor below them—and with the very Earth, the same concept, perhaps, as that expressed by my daughter’s bumper sticker quoting Chief Seattle: “The Earth does not belong to us, we belong to the Earth.”
Apropos of nothing...
ReplyDeleteWhat would Chief Seattle say if he were alive when we colonize Mars?
We're not going to colonize Mars, so it's a moot point.
ReplyDeleteBut if the question were, "What would Chief Seattle say if he were alive and we were to colonize Mars?," then I'd have something to think about and possibly be able to imagine what he might likely say that would be consistent with his worldview. I can already imagine that he wouldn't think that colonizing Mars made any difference whatever. As Carl Sagan pointed out in Cosmos, we are not even made specifically and exclusively of Earth stuff, but of star stuff. That is, not only does Earth not belong to us, neither does Mars nor any other entity in the Universe belong to us, we belong to it all.
Yes, Sagan has it right. On a semantic note, the concept of X belonging to Y is primitive and a bit odd when it comes to anything other than car keys and cell phones. X is part of Y works, for what it's worth.
ReplyDeleteIt's a trivial aside, but I'm struck but your certainty that Mars won't be colonized. Perhaps you're refusing to look into the future more than 100 or 200 years.
Ken, sorry to take so long to acknowledge your comment.
ReplyDeleteWhat's your source for your semantic note? Of course, Chief Seattle was a "primitive" relative to European culture, I suppose, and the philosophy of the "Indians" who lived here before 1492 was primitive.
But "belongs" seems to be used with much wider latitude than you claim. People belong to a church or to a nation, for example. Or, to get closer to home, you and I might be said to belong to the out-group of atheists (relative to popular American culture).
Answers.com even gives your "be a part of" as its fourth meaning of "to belong": "To be a part of something else: These blades belong to the food processor."
Of course, my daughter's bumper sticker's quotation from Chief Seattle, "The Earth does not belong to us," seems to use "belong" in its possessive sense: The Earth is not our possession, we are the Earth's possession. Hmm, that seems anything but primitive to me. It's rather sophisticated, in fact.
As for whether Mars will or won't (ever) be colonized, neither of us knows, and let's split the difference between our respective certainties....
While that sentence has a nice final ring to it, I'll spoil the effect by going on to say that I find it extremely hard to imagine that beings evolved for life on Earth would agree to go live on Mars. Robert Frost's swinger of birches may have "like[d] to get away from earth awhile," but "then [he'd want to] come back to it and begin over / ...Earth's the right place for love: / I don't know where it's likely to go better."
By the way, speaking of "final ring," I have long admired your writing style, and I think I've just discovered a reason for its (your style's) distinctiveness. Your writing has that carefully crafted patina (like your photographs, perhaps) of being the final word.