Half Winged / half imprisoned

a little history on Paul Klee & an installation about everything

"The contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged — half imprisoned, this is man!"

This quote comes from the Pedagogical Sketchbook (Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch) of Paul Klee (1879–1940) a Swiss-German artist whose work moves across Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and abstraction. If you, like me, can never remember how to say his last name, Klee rhymes with “day” and “clay.” Paul taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau through the 1920s alongside Wassily Kandinsky, and his lectures there became the basis for his Notebooks — two volumes of writing on form, color, and pictorial theory. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they dismissed him from his teaching post and labeled his work "degenerate." An honorable, but why-did-that-even-happen-in-the-first-place terrible feather in his cap.

As I composed this choral cantata called Half Winged, a setting of Matthew Ritchie’s text- combining the writings of Paul Klee, W.E.B. DuBois, and John Milton in mashup form- it’s a struggle to say what this work is about. I know Matthew doesn’t want the piece to be about one thing. It’s about everything, I think he would say. But today I’ll pick one thing the piece is about.

Here’s a snippet of the title track sung by the beautiful countertenor Daniel Bubeck and the 2021 University of North Texas treble choir.

One of Klee’s recurring contemplations is on movement and the arrow. “The father of the arrow is the thought: how do I expand my reach? Over this river? This lake? That mountain?” We can think our way into infinite space, yet remain bodily in place.

We have imagined our way to create such beauty, the microscope! the telescope! quantum physics! endless song and dance! … and also destruction. Imagined our way to incredible computational power, yet our repeated collective denial, the attempt to subordinate the other very real half of our condition- is our great peril. We are organic bodies with needs. We are part of nature. We exist because of the river. This river is not something we can ever truly expand over. We are not separate from the lake, nor the mountain. And our desire to escape this shared truth is war, domination and existential threat.

I’ve come a long way from the biblical indoctrination I grew up with- that Adam and Eve were to subdue the earth. The translator who chose subdue rather than using the word steward could have saved species. I’m working on healing my own relationship to body and nature. To change ones self, is to change the world. One vector, one choice at a time. The work is inside and outside. We are not powerless.

What to do? @realblackgirlpolitics has a good list of to-dos to support those most harmed by these acts of domination in New Jersey. We must continue to protest. Support NJ families here, hunger strike leader Martin Soto’s family here. Detainees commissary & communication fund here and K.I.N.D. lawyers for children here.

Where to rest? You might visit a meditative space at Wasserman Projects in Eastern Market in Detroit & listen to 75 minutes of a choral cantata that contemplates our pattern of building and destroying. The exhibition is open Wednesday - Saturdays 12-5 every day and it’s free through August 15th.

Here’s a picture by Paul Klee for you. It’s about everything.