A Wake is made from pages excised from my page project for Inscription, the British journal of art and textuality, this past June. The vintage (c. 1930) image is of a ship's wake at sea, accompanied by a few seagulls. I first used it in a series of ink drawings I made in 1987, referencing Piet Mondrian's Pier + Ocean, that were published in the poetry chapbook, On the Cape, by Reagan Upshaw. The scene has always moved me, in part because I associate it with a moment in my childhood when, looking out at Lake Michigan from a Chicago beach, my aunt turned to me and said, "Look at all that water . . . and that's just the top of it." In adulthood I recognized another aspect of the image, that it evokes Walter Benjamin's remark, in his essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History":
"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
From the stern of any ship at sea, we are all being propelled toward the future. Are the seagulls gliding near the ship in my appropriated image a troupe of angels?
