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: : : Higherglyphics : : :Text for Three Sections of The Erie Art Museum Annex Stairwell Project by Todd Scalise ...an abandoned work by Rick Lopez |
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"We all start here ... All souls begin on the mineral level."
—TS, the sketchbooks
I — WE ARE LAKE ERIE
1st Level Rosetta
Unwinding the strands of territorial DNA, the traces of geological ancestry.
The way land-forms and physical surroundings shape our vision.
The way we see. What we see.
The spirit world, an all-permeating membrane that ties together all above to all below.
The unidentified flying objects / The unidentified swimming objects.
Vibrant swarms of unnamed gar pike and walleye.
Nebulous clouds of unseen minnows and perch.
Spirits pushing masses of air into wind, spirits pushing water into waves.
Their invisible hands animating particles and molecules and substance.
The coded helix, the doubled ladder, the bubbling meandering waterways,
the swirling chemical stew of life, the fish crawling onto land.
The coming cultural DNA.
The entwined logarithmic spirals, the fish crawling onto land.
The waves through the unfurling years...
The glaciers, those huge ancient cat's paws, scraping and clawing out the beds of finger-shaped lakes,
trundling across the breadth of the great lakes, refining their outlines. Rock carving rock.
First, the waves of migrant marine life surround the field;
then, the furred land animals scuffling amid the hedges
The beaver and rabbit and deer. The cats. The raccoons.
Perhaps... wait now.
The night is Black; the day is White; the interstices are awash in deep, animal-blood Red.
The upright arrive, struggling through an archaeology of consciousness.
The epochal small-step development from the mythologizing dream-state,
to awake, observing, and deciphering their filtered reality.
The neo-man dreams of giants, speaking to the sun and moon in tongues and gestures, standing at forest's edge in an agitated state
of abject terror and awe-struck wonder, gradually coming apart from its surroundings, separating out—the physical sensation of that,
the realization (the bliss, the horror) of becoming Other. I name, I separate, I objectify. I move out and away from the ensnaring web.
I pass through endless millenia confused by my inability to grasp the difference between experience and dream. I create spirits and gods
to explain the mystery of all this astonishing and inexplicable movement, this wind in my face, these beasts humming in the dark, this blood
pouring through my veins. These waking dreams that fuel this strange world I am imagining. I hallucinate towering versions of my self.
I seek their counsel. They console me as they take my hand. I soar through the bright air. I mix blood and milk and smear my face with clay.
I lift my hands to the sky. I wonder, and I wonder, and I wonder.
Moss and soil and twigs beneath my feet.
I fashion razor-sharp arrow-heads from stone, tell redeeming stories to the bones of my prey,
apologize to them, thank them, weep with empathy while I assimilate their flesh.
I offer sound-poetry and stick figures to the eagles watching me from above.
I feed beads and snail-shells to the water snakes.
My throat, my tongue, my lips devise sounds.
With these sounds I create all of the unnamed things.
Among all of these unnamed things, I live this life.
Here.
Soon enough, I will be stupefied by the white man. I will find them gaunt and waxen and starving by the creekbed,
wrapping their dropping teeth in small bits of cloth. Many of them will leave the god-fearing misery of their early encampments
for the matronly havens of our villages. Once there, they will become acclimated. Having tasted this beautiful wild and left behind
the frail trappings of their civilization, they will not go back.
These opening salvos will be accompanied by a malevolent and cross-bearing forcefulness. They will be lined up, each subsequent group
larger than the last, each carrying a larger portion of their steely arrogance and cloaked intentions. Since I offer them everything, I cannot,
I simply cannot comprehend their greed. In my dreams I see enormous piles of smoking bones awash in thickened blood and ashes.
B&W+Red.
There are thrumming villages and fertile fields and towering forests and hallowed burial grounds, all waiting to be turned under.
From dust you came, and to dust you shall return they tell us, as they turn us back to dust.
There are ancient ships wrecked and drowning, hollowed out logs and large bark vessels rotting at the bottom of the lake.
Someone has come calling. Someone has named the water after a disappeared Native tribe.
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"Native American art seems to be formatted (geometrically) to awaken consciousness. This, to me, is the ultimate technology. I realize that there is a loop occurring between what we would call ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’. Contained in both are binary forms of visual communication." —TS letter to RL, 2012.11.20 |
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II - RACCOON NATION
There is a lure in the alcove, a section of spiraling DNA just outside the entranceway. It is a spinning length of ribbon
tied to the back of a raccoon, and it ascends into the star-laden sky. An invitation to Cat Nation (Chat), to Raccoon Nation.
The originals: "Let us stay. Here."
As you enter, you stand below
The Pleiades, known since antiquity to the Sioux and Cherokee.
The Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, seated in the constellation of Taurus.
The Pleiades, the "sailing ones," a suspended cloud of doves.
There they are, golden and glowing against the bronze patina of the Nebra sky disk,
Sterope, Merope, Electra, Maia, Taygeta, Celaeno, and Alcyone, the children of Atlas and Pleione.
The Hecatompedon (the pre-parthenon parthenon), and the Parthenon proper, were both oriented to the ascendance of these Sisters.
Afloat in an ocean of associated cosmic dust, hovering for 115 million years.
All moving in the same direction across the sky, at the same gait, affirming their relations.
The cluster, slowly moving toward the feet of Orion. (That haven.)
They will not remain tethered to one another forever. They will jostle against other stars; they will be pulled away
by the tides of gravity and pushed apart by molecular clouds, and in some hundreds of millions of years they will be gone,
along with every other aligning post we rely on.
Recurving the Sand Spit.
Below this starry sky, the land (animal) curls out and around in the form of a peninsula, forming a safe (water) harbor,
the curled paw of the cat/raccoon seen as protective, enfolding—a macro-world embrace
by a mythologized and animated world of nature.
In vast geological time-frames, the peninsula moves along the shoreline like a tumbling inchworm. First as it is, then the slender stem
being eradicated by the tides, the sand from the miles-long beaches being driven to curl around the arm's end, where its deposits
form the next stem (now on the far current-side eastern tip, dragging the peninsula behind it). Then the entire body is reconfigured
—sandgrain-by-sandgrain—as a rolling disc, until the once-eastern stem is left behind in the west. And repeat, very slowly.
And do it again. For thousands and thousands of years.
These were the attractions then.
The coastal plains; the high ridge just off of the shoreline; the peninsula and its safe-haven bay; the teeming wildlife.
A cornucopia, this gift, an overflowing horn of plenty. Here.
The indigenous Natives, the cloaked mysteries of the original inhabitants.
Where they came from, who they were. Whence they had disappeared.
Secondhand only, from Jesuit missionaries, relaying stories told by the Huron.
All clouded, obscured, unknown. Altered as told and retold. The endless versions and extrapolations.
Probably / Possibly / Perhaps
They came from the west, an offshoot of the Iroquois, probably.
They were remnants of various scattered tribes, who came from the south, possibly.
A mix of Sesquehannock and Perch, perhaps.
A mix of Ohioan and Owl.
A mix of Shawnee and Raccoon.
Foam off the caps of waves and shards of elm-tree bark.
Perhaps.
The thing is not, and never shall be, the thing named.
Eriez / Nation du Chat / Yenresh / Kahkwa / Rhagenratka / Black Mingua /
The Iroquian "Erielhonan" = "long tail" = "Nation du Chat" (Cat Nation) = "The Panther People"
... and it goes on and on.
White men saying the native lingo for wildcat was "Eriez." Stupid white men, mistaking raccoons for wildcats and wildcats for raccoons.
White man Le Baron de Lahonton, in the late 1600s, found the Errieronens had gone missing from the Lake, "exterminated by the Iroquois."
(They are still here.)
The Iroquois were determined.
the blades, the truncheons, the scalps, the arrows,
the necks, the eggshell skulls.
the hatchets, the femurs, the warm entrails,
the cracking, the blades, the blood in pools.
the blades, the truncheons, the scalps, the arrows,
the necks, the eggshell skulls.
the hatchets, the femurs, the warm entrails,
the cracking, the blades, the blood in pools.
the relentless wheel turned over,
until the deep tribal engravings of the Eriez had been erased.
The triumphant Iroqouis preserved their victim's genetic memory. It was the least they could do. And so the vanquished must have come
from somewhere else, they must have. Blown off course while traversing the heaving lake waters, the outstretched (comforting/cradling)
arm had gathered them in, saved them. Thus did the conquerors reconstruct the Eriez' narrative for the inquisitive invading white men.
The south side of the lake post-genocide was inhabited by the Iroquois, or the Six Nations, originally a confederacy of tribes
—the Onondagas, Cayugas, Senecas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. They roamed from Vermont to the northern end of Lake Erie.
Along the Allegheny, along the Susquehanna, and along the Delaware Rivers. Weak each on their own, they feared that they might
disappear into darkness, and so they banded together. There they are, their leather bindings, the arrows (the tribes) laced together.
Making them as one.
Frightened by the French, The Six Nations hoped that they would be shown a measure of mercy.
The Natives inquired: Will the whites arrive hatchet uplifted in war, or lowered, to establish tranquility?
Governor-General Duquesne on the expedition: "When he marched with the hatchet, he bore it aloft, in order that no person
should be ignorant of the fact, but as for the present, his orders were to use it only in case he encountered opposition to his will..."
—from "Duquesne to the Minister" Aug 20, 1753.
But as for the present...
"Like most Americans, my ancestry is rather foggy (forgotten), so I always identified with the indigenous peoples of America.
(My first goldfish was named Tonto. Not that it matters.) My time spent in the Southwest was valuable because I could see
the native culture living, as opposed to erased, as it is here."
—TS letter to RL 2012.11.20
We pay no attention, we look away, we are masters of forgetting.
But they are still here.
"The corner of 23rd and Cascade was revealed to be a burial area when housing was put in during the late 1920s.
There was an Indian burial ground on the northeast corner of Buffalo Road and Water Street until it was plowed over
in the late nineteenth century... It is now home to a Dollar Tree store. East Avenue's east side, from 25th to 28th Street,
was the site of a massive Indian burial area that was looted by local curiosity-seekers and children throughout the late
nineteenth century. On the old Scoullier farm, which lay south of 28th Street between Elm and East Avenue—directly south
of the Warfel farm—there was a large Indian burial graveyard with many mounds... The mounds were desecrated and looted
regularly by young settler boys; by the 1880s, the mounds had been plowed down... On Old Ridge Road (26th Street)
east of the city, burial grounds covered the area from the Ebersole farm to State Street... A large burial area that contained
hundreds of bodies was also found by railroad workers as they lay the tracks that now cross East 6th Street and the Bayfront
Parkway; the remains were tossed into a nearby ditch."
—Warner & Beers' History of Erie County (1884)
—Ellicot's History of Erie County (1884)
—John Miller's A Twentieth Century History of Erie County Pennsylvania (1909)
—John G. Carney's Tales of Old Erie (1958)
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III - FLEET IN THE WILDERNESS
As with all things...
There are the waves, and there are the troughs between the waves.
There is the scorching heat of summer, and the joint-racking cold of winter.
There are times of peace and their profound silence, and times of war and their terrible thunder.
Searching for a place to build warships.
Buffalo, 100 miles to the east, population 500.
One-hundred frame houses and stores, but uncomfortably close to British Fort Erie and Fort George.
Cleveland, 100 miles to the west, population 47.
It barely exists, with "No industry... No supplies."
Erie at the ideal center, population 400-500, plus 200 "floaters."
Forty-seven clapboard houses, a single saw mill, a blacksmith shop, a tannery—these all made quite recently,
fewer than two decades having passed since the Natives had ruled this land and no settling had been possible.
Large oak trees and forests growing to the water's edge.
Most importantly, a peninsula, forming a safe (water) harbor.
Erie was also within reasonable distance of Pittsburgh, an actual city with a population of 6,000.
"With foundries, cotton mills, glass works, metal shops, and steam mills."
Three days away by the Old French Road as far as Waterford, and the rest of the way by boat.
Autumn.
You walk a deep-furrowed road to the bluff high above the water.
To your left is a forest of massive oak and pine, the dark and impenetrable wilds.
To the right is a cluster of gray shanties, small buildings and tents all huddled around a lane rolling downhill toward the bayfront docks.
Turn about, and there are patches of clear-cut, fields of stumps and fallen trunks. Piles of stripped branches on the fringes.
Ropes and chains and a chaos of hoofmarks in the mud.
Clouds of steam rising off the spiked, ruffled hides of work-horses.
Mallets and chisels and boxplanes throwing wood chips into the air.
Landowners, clutching their leather purses, sell their trees for a dollar each, the going rate for a day's work.
Winches and roller-logs and wooden sleds.
Hauling timber to the mouth of Lee's Run just west of the main docks, and to Cascade Run, where the hulls begin to take shape.
The black-oak keels, the three-inch oak planking, the white-pine bulwarks.
A few hundred craftsmen have been brought from Philadelphia and New York on the Atlantic coast.
They will help the locals transform these lengths of green timber into vessels fit for war.
There is no time to season the wood—the planks will expand to close the seams filled with lead caulking.
The rare iron nails are augmented by wooden pins.
There is no real industry within 100 miles.
Everything—every nail, every length of rope, every canvas bolt and iron ball and keg of powder—comes trundling north
along the Indian trails.
Winter.
The slog. The winds whipping across the frozen bay.
Three dozen 32-pound-ball carronades being dragged east for 30 days from Georgetown to Pittsburgh.
Then north from there through the snow-laden Pennsylvania forests.
Another three dozen cannon from Sacketts Harbor near Buffalo.
The wagoneers and their teams of horses and oxen, their labored breath a frozen mist.
Lead is used for ballast, canvas sails are sewn up in the large rooms of the City Hall off Central Square.
Spring into Summer.
Oliver Hazard Perry is ordered to command the squadron.
The entire settlement is mobilized to the task at hand. Essentials are rationed, profiteering is right out.
The Lawrence and Niagara, two identical ships both 30-foot wide by 118-foot long, take shape in the Cascade shipyard.
The tock-tock-tock of mallets driving wood into wood.
Six ships are built in eight months, and launched between April and early July.
A handful of smaller, converted merchant ships arrive from Black Rock at the northern end of the lake.
Thunder clouds hang darkly along the horizon.
During the first days of August, the Lawrence and the Niagara are lifted up and over the sandbars at the mouth of the bay
and eased into the great lake, a process which takes several days.
The British fleet is a mere seven miles distant, off Long Point across the way.
They are unaware, and fail to take advantage.
From where they float, a low haze catches the sun from the south, and the pine forests across the peninsula
and the cliffs along the southern lakeshore with their masses of tall trees obscure the vessels' masts
as they come together in the open waters of Lake Erie.
These were ours then:
The Lawrence, The Niagara, The Caledonia, The Scorpion, The Ariel, The Tigress, The Porcupine, The Somers, The Trippe, The Ohio.
One-thousand-six-hundred-and-seventy-one ton; 54 guns and 532 souls under Oliver H. Perry.
These were theirs:
The Detroit, The Queen Charlotte, The Lady Provost, The Chippewa, The Hunter, The Little Belt.
One-thousand-four-hundred-and-sixty ton; 63 guns and 502 souls under Robert H. Barclay.
While Perry's fleet tested its sails and mentored its inexperienced crew in the navigational arts, the officers reconnoitered at Put-In-Bay.
September 10th, 1813. Noon, the high sun seeping through billious white clouds.
The opposing fleets are under sail and converging at the far western end of the lake, the Brits coming north out from Fort Malden,
Perry's squadron coming off anchor from West Sister Island to the south.
The Detroit, with only 19 land guns got from the confines of Malden, begins the deadly conversation shortly after noon
at a distance of one-and-a-half miles, the heavy iron balls exploding from the long guns and falling short of their targets.
The Niagara now holds back as the other American ships forge ahead to engage the British. Detroit and Queen Charlotte
pummel the Lawrence for over two hours, destroying its enemy-side guns and disassembling its timbers and its crew.
The gunboats Ariel and Scorpion join with the Lawrence, slowly whittling away the armaments of the Detroit.
Splintered waftboards, shattered bulkheads, shredded cordage. Broken cross-jacks swinging from the masts.
The purser drags himself across the decking, a chain-shot tourniquet spun around his right thigh, tightened to the bone.
The whirring of heavy rope wheeling thru pulleys, the crack of small-arms fire, wood splintering in the sun,
stantions toppling in twisted bundles of canvas, the waves lapping gently at pitted wooden hulls.
There are lenghtening stretches of unsettling quietude,
the clusters of cannon-fire thinning as the guns on both sides are decimated.
A boatswain stands wavering in chalk-faced shock, a tangle of wet red ribbons dangling from his sleeve.
It is not yet 3:00 in the afternoon. The Lawrence lies battered and broken, a disaster of cable bridles, swivels, pendant chains, and claws.
Presuming victory, the British drift quietly for too many moments, dropping their guard. During the lull, Perry prepares to abandon
the crippled Lawrence. Perry's good friend, Captain James Lawrence, had been aboard the Chesapeake in late May when it had exchanged
blows with the British Shannon near Boston. "Don't Give Up The Ship," his last words as he lay mortally wounded, had been embroidered
in white upon a dark blue standard which had been lifted high on Perry's Lawrence to announce the beginning of this day's action.
He now lowers the flag and slips into a longboat that carries him to the Niagara behind the line.
The Detroit goes aloof, tacking about and trundling haphazardly board and board into Queen Charlotte, tangling the two largest enemy ships
in a clumsy and sedentary embrace. Pennants and colors unfurled and tattered, rope-bands and robins raining from the yards.
The Queen Charlotte's helm, snapped off clean like a matchstick, slowly sinks into the dark water.
A seaman, bleeding quietly in a mangle of rope and wood shards, wonders who will go 'round to feed his dog.
Then comes a terrible thunder, the Niagara suddenly under full sail, cutting diagonally through the line of enemy ships,
laying into Lady Prevost and Chippewa at close range on the starboard and unloading the Niagara's full course of larboard guns
into the immobilized Detroit and Queen Charlotte. Iron and lead tearing through wooden armaments,
the decks slick with blood, blood dripping through hatch gratings, blood splashing into water.
An entire gun crew is swept away by a swarm of misshapen lead and iron canister-shot,
tumbling off the deck of the Niagara and settling, side-by-side, on the muddy lake bottom.
The Charlotte is first to succumb, her useless block and tackle dangling in the wind, her ropes and nettings frayed and torn,
shrouds limp and ruffling in the breeze. The Detroit can barely return fire, most of her guns now useless and thrown clear of their carriages.
Iron balls keening overhead, shot raking across the sunlit deck, the rumbling of ballast shifting and sliding between the beams.
A young sailor hangs halfway down a scuttle into the ship's hold, arms outstretched to prevent the fall,
his cheeks split and blackened by the passage of red-hot metal.
These were ours then: 22 killed, 96 wounded.
These were theirs: 41 killed, 94 wounded.
The battle had ended, death now done with its reckoning.
"We have met the enemy and they are ours—two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop."
—Oliver Hazard Perry, who dies six years later of yellow fever near Trinidad on his 34th birthday (Aug 23, 1819)
The townsfolk, busying themselves fashioning legends and tales of bloodless heroism, forget to feed the dog.
—Battle of Lake Erie: Building the Fleet in the Wilderness, Radm. Denys W.Knoll, USN, Washington DC Naval Historical Foundation, (1979)
—Sea power in its relations to the War of 1812 Volume 2, Alfred Thayer Mahan, Little-Brown Boston, (1905)
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My early connection to The War of 1812 : : :
I spent my 1962-63 school year in a fourth-grade classroom at Perry Elementary. It was the year of the Erie Sesquecentennial,
a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the end of the War of 1812, and specifically of Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry's underdog
victory over the British fleet outside the protective shelter of Presque Isle's bay.
I don't recall exactly how it happened, but my ten-year-old self was assigned to head up a mural project on this historical event,
a colored chalk "painting" of tall ships engaged in battle that was to fill the entire four-foot-high board that ran the length
of our classroom. I was responsible for creating the original drawing, devising a scaled grid-work that would transfer
onto the thirty-foot long chalkboard, organizing my classmates into apprentice teams that would tackle the various subject matter
and areas of the grid, and doing all of the final touch-ups and color work.
All of this formative activity, exactly fifty years before being asked to create a text piece centered on parts of a mural that had
this same event's importance to the region expressed not only as one of its main sections ("Fleet In The Wilderness"), but also
implicit in the work as a whole, from its foreshadowing of the industrial stamp of the region, whose beginnings were founded
in shipbuilding and the natural port, to the prescient lure of the cradling arm of the peninsula and its protective bay,
which allowed for the construction of a fleet of tall ships out of sight of the enemy.
—RL
Addenda : : :
In 2013 Todd Scalise asked me to create text for a proposed publication on The Erie Art Museum Annex Stairwell Project.
The short form of how that unfolded and then folded up went like this:
—I dove in headfirst and began creating five sections of text, one on each level of the stairwell mural.
—I then began to ask about his previous work and how it had evolved into its current "Higherglyphics" form.
—I dove headfirst into his complete oeuvre, and began writing texts covering his years of artistic evolution as seen in his sketchbooks and paintings.
—Time passed. I had quite a lot of sprawling text by January of 2014, when I received a phone call from jazz great William Parker,
who tasked me with turning my online research on his life's work into a published Sessionography by June of that year.
Higherglyphics got set aside.
—Then vertigo hit. From autumn of 2014 through almost all of 2015, I was dizzy and waylaid, and by the time it had passed
I had become unattached, uninvolved, and unable to finish Todd's project. The three stairwell sections above
are a representation of what we were trying to achieve.
—RL / 17.08.25
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