o n e
Let’s begin with a bang. Isn’t that how it all began, anyhow, a very long time ago, indeed?
Consider this statement: “Images are hand grenades of meaning.” I love this phrase. I have searched for its originator thus far to no avail. I suspect they recognized the explosive power of these words and ran for cover.
This is less a traditional lecture and more of playful assault, a storming of the tower of the literal, a lobbing of images into the foxholes of reason.
I want to talk tonight about two things that are in some ways one in the same thing, or at least in the same order of things. Soil, and soul. They are the very marrow of life, and yet soil and soul are ineffable. We cannot pin them down. They laugh at those tasked with writing their definitions for Mirriam-Webster.
Which is why this topic does not lend itself to a lecture in the conventional sense, a word that from the 16th century has referred to “a discourse on a given subject before an audience for purposes of instruction.” Who can instruct on soul? Who fully understands the mysteries of the soil, that ubiquitous substrate from which so much of terrestrial life derives? We are better off with the deeper etymological roots of the word lecture: to gather and collect.
The hand grenade has existed in one way or another for nearly a thousand years, but it was just over three centuries ago that it received this enduring moniker. The grenade is so called for its resemblance to the pomegranate, from the Latin pomum granatum, the apple of many seeds, the fruit of many grains.
Like “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”, the atomic bombs that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, grenade is a darkly ironic name. The seeds of a hand grenade, of course, are not seeds at all – seeds are generative, they contain life distilled to its very essence. The fragments of a grenade do just that – they fragment, they cut, they break, they maim.
With some luck and some risk, we may find that some the images we unearth tonight contain live ammunition. How else can we penetrate the formidable armor of our modern, rational ego? But should one of these images go off, hit you with an unexpected thought or emotion or insight, pierce you with one of its many seeds, I invite you to water that seed, to nurture it, to see what wants to grow.
