The most surprising thing that I learned while writing Swimming With Wings, was the common ground I found with Benjamin Paul Akers, the true life sculptor of "The Dead Pearl Diver” a statue that fascinates my main character, Lark Jennison.
In addition to being a sculptor, Akers was an art critic for The Atlantic Monthly during the 1860’s and his musings on literature and art resonate with my own. He proposes that artistic expression is a co-creation, the artists communion with the universe, or what many call God. I found this to be a very progressive, even New Age-like idea for someone in the 1860’s. What made it most surprising was that I discovered this after I had already written most of the novel which addresses this idea.
Aker’s ideas about art are present in his most noted piece, "The Dead Pearl Diver” housed in the Portland Museum of Art in Portland, Maine.
Aker’s Dead Pearl Diver is a statue of a young man reclined across an embankment at the bottom of the sea. A finely sculpted fish net drapes across his lower torso and in the unseen negative space around the youthful figure is the “water” into which the viewer is momentarily allowed to enter. The statue is rendered so lifelike that while standing there next to the young man, one might imagine that he is still breathing. But all at once you realize he can't be breathing because he is under water, dead and a statue A paradox hits you. It's as if he has drowned and yet it is this very realization which gives life to the marble.
I believe that everything I feel when I look at "The Dead Pearl Diver" is exactly Aker’s intended effect. The sorrow for a fallen young man who sought nothing more than to retrieve a beautiful pearl from the ocean floor is a common reaction to the piece, but a transcending message lingers with the viewer. The artist’s conveyance of this expression can only be achieved through the art, but if words came close to doing so then consider this excerpt from Aker’s article published in the January 1860 issue of The Atlantic Monthly: “the foremost purpose of an artist should be to claim and take possession of the self.” He later says that “genius (artist) is exquisitely fastidious, and the man whom it possesses must live its life, or no life.” "The Dead Pearl Diver" is considered to be Akers crowning masterpiece and in it I see his own sacrifice for art. Indeed I imagine that the statue is actually Akers himself, who indeed died as a young man before he had yet to achieve even greater co-creations with God.
Lark Jennison, a main character in Swimming With Wings, is very much defined by a similar experience of discovering herself through art. Much of her make-up is tied directly to having lost her father in a drowning accident, but it is her obsession with “The Dead Pearl Diver” that hearkens to her greater, human struggle to determine her spirituality. The title Swimming with Wings is a play on this idea as if to say that we are truly winged spirits mired in the waters of being human. While this struggle is literally displayed through the religious polarity between Lark and her love, Peter Roma and also in the symbolic Jennison mansion which hides the truth about their father’s death, “The Dead Pearl Diver” takes the central spotlight in this theme. When one looks deeply, though it is mentioned in but a few passages, the statue resonates with these same themes and thereby plays a role as predominantly as any one of the living characters.
3 comments: