What Are We Looking at?

He uses things we understand in America, Thanksgiving and oil. In the case of somewhere unfamiliar with the concept of Thanksgiving, it would be a duck or chicken and oil. So we get in trouble already, a big chicken . . . a coward. You a chicken? “Cluck, cluck, cluck,” we recognize that taunt in quite a broad context through the global dominance of US media.

To irritate us a little more, it could be speculated, Lewis is indeed transposing us there. Oil prices, leases, and futures are suddenly conflated with the idolized and idealized holiday when the Pilgrims and Native Americans were breaking bread and, supposedly turkeys. That story has differing versions, too. In any case, the turkey's visual dominance anchors the image somewhere in that collision. A mighty cloud with talons for lightning that seems more of a threat to itself, as in a Hindenburg disaster in the making.

Let's see what else is going on as you may be expecting at this point some lecture about sustainability, planetary resources, food inequality or, even more aggravatingly, animal rights, presidential pardons, and the need for safe energy. In some of the images we have discussed, we have already touched on this collective consciousness/awareness discourse and therefore we might consider this territory already covered.

Territory, covered—let's go all out. The continental colonization is old news, the pregnant woman redundant, the gay parade overkill, and the hippy parent in camo pants with the intercultural adopted child par for the course. So what are we looking at, really?

How Can the Image Be Interpreted?

We know a turkey is smaller than an oil well. We know that genetically modified corn, organic corn, or any corn is smaller than people and oil wells, and that people will eat what they can afford and use the energy that will transport them to the job that will put that food on their table for which they will often give thanks. Not to speak of a rare holiday, albeit one that enjoys some notoriety about being more prominently dysfunctional than other ones.

This image apparently insists on addressing the enormity of the insignificant and the treasure to be found in kindness. It conveys the power of humanity's melody against the seduction of the pain of demagoguery.

It equally pits political correctness and political greed against the need to put food on the table. It also covers the pragmatic, even painful choices against idealism and dogma. It reminds us that our own children, family, and friends will trump everything when push comes to shove. What an impossible choice to make. What may be rational, even right and just, usually goes straight out of the window when pitted against loved ones, family, or just, love.

Love is the only currency with no stock market fluctuation. Love is vaunted as the most powerful force in the universe. Love is the experience that puts people voluntarily in their graves and dooms empires. Love is the thing that slips faster through your hands than water if you try to possess it. Love will visit ugliness and pain in measures that are incomprehensible when it is denied. Love is only pure when it is selfless.

This gets confused with loving to discover a new well. This confuses falling in love with someone, only to suppress and control what caused the fall. It confuses love that is jealous, love of possessions, power, and wealth.

I suspect that Lewis did not set out to make an image about love when he set his disproportionate and contradictory components in his collages on a collision course. Yet, this dispassionate exploration of the elements brews a most passionate concoction of the elements. This hopeless recognition that we are not yet ready to figure out how we can exist without pain for others and in so doing make our own future less likely every day. In that way, to me, he speaks about love and how, more often than not, in the end, it will tear us apart. We have not yet learned how to truly live and Lewis observes this phenomenon with about as much passion as a metronome.

Conclusion

Sometimes the greatest emotions can be found in the simple accounting of facts. This leaves plenty of space to contemplate them. The solution will be different for each, as always, and when we recognize that we belong and are interdependent on each other and everything else, we may gain an understanding of how food belongs to everyone and love for a commodity-based economy can't have a real future.

Lewis' secret seems to lie in that he protests too little as opposed to too much. He mires us in sociopolitical mud until we find no terra firma to anchor one of our boots. Unlike his namesake of a hundred years ago, we are firmly left on our own to find our way back out of this rabbit hole.