Fry’s Lament

I live on Fry’s Mangrove, an estuary on Elbow Cay with mangroves all around it, the nursery where all the little critters grow up. Turtles come into the cove at dusk, resting with their fin tips and heads just out of the water, breathing, before they settle on the bottom to sleep the night. Then a hundred-foot freight boat came in and started dredging, clearing the way for a long row of docks. The pain and disappointment and fear of watching that is what I brought into the studio, and this painting is the lament that came out of it.

A red sky, the cove in blue, the mangroves, and me with my arms thrown up, the way you throw them up when something is being done to a place you love and you cannot stop it. And falling through all of it, marks I never planned. My therapist named them for me. Glyphs, she said. A glyph is a mark that stands for something, the same word as hieroglyph, a sacred carving, and petroglyph, the marks the Lucayans pecked into cave walls in these islands a thousand years ago. Painters have made marks like these for a hundred years. I had never seen them fall.

A year later I was watching NASA’s feed of the Artemis capsule coming back through the atmosphere, and I froze. There they were. The same marks, red and teal and blue, raining down through black space. Physics made them. My hand made them. Neither of us was trying to make a symbol.

I still don’t know what it all means. I know I did not make the glyphs. They came from somewhere else and fell on everything, the mangroves, the turtles, the woman on the shore, the way fallout drifts down a long way from the blast. The dredge was the bomb. I was watching the fallout.

“The soul has an absolute, unforgiving need for regular excursions into enchantment. It requires them like the body needs food and the mind needs thought. Yet our culture often takes pride in disproving and exploding the sources of enchantment, explaining away one mystery after another and overturning precious shrines, dissolving the family farm that has housed spirits of civility for eons, or desecrating for material profit a mountain or stream sacred to native residents. We have yet to learn that we can’t survive without enchantment and that the loss of it is killing us…”

Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life