HERITAGE

Joseph Tiraco

Joe DiMaggio, in a vintage television commercial, stands on an escarpment overlooking Manhattan, and as if telling a sainted emigrant father of his accomplishments, points to the shimmering towers across the river. Choked by emotions of pride, he says softly, "look at what we've done." For an instant, the Yankee Clipper personifies an age, and the specter of history coils about his person.

Recently, I attended a lecture at the National Arts Club on the subject of Ice Age Art. Vivid images mingled with Manhattan affectations to produce a disconcerting prick at my egocentricity, mocking the haughtiness the living hold over the dead. Stone Age man took as much pride in his community as did any race derived from his ancient gene. Feeding, clothing and sheltering artists must have been a communal responsibility, because if artists were not free to meditate and develop their talents, the elegant cave paintings - and they are stunning works of art - would not exist. Through the artist, the communal ego was expressed. Modern man, viewing paintings that have passed through twenty millennium unmolested, can readily infer a sophisticated system of accomplished masters and gifted apprentices laboring in the subterranean caverns selected solely for their efficacy as galleries in which to display art. The overt message of their work was uncomplicated, "This is who we were." But the subliminal ideography teleporting through the ages was far more complex: I was receiving, "We are the wonderous instruments of our maker whose work transcends mere mortality, and elevates us to superior beings". In silent darkness with slide projector flashing visions of astounding beauty into my mind, I sat agape; Intellectually, I was bound to the Ice Age progenitors; And their greatness was overpowering.

The tides of time, stirred by the heavens, volute in deliquescent eddies, and men's lives tumble within the froth like wrack trapped in a vortex. Eons after the cave painters passed into history, Michelangelo, with no knowledge of prehistoric caves, aloft and supine on a scaffold (a structure and technique also used by ice age artists) emulated his Cro-Magnon progenitors, and painted the ceiling of a man made cave with equally stunning effect. The myriad of centuries separating the two events were a fleeting spark in eternity, but the impulses and conventions that caused the first event almost certainly coalesced time and time again to move similar beings in similar patterns. If geography plays a part in this fluviatile phenomenon, like the ripples caused by a fast-moving stream passing over stones, then the painted caves of Southern France could be the root cause of the modern French passion for art. All of France takes fierce pride in the luxuriously adorned Cro-Magnon caves, as if they prove beyond a doubt that art itself resides in the French gene. No less a stir is being created in Spain because painted Ice Age caves discovered there, much to the Spaniard's delight, seem to indicate that a high artistic culture, like that found in the French caves, once existed in the mountains of Spain. The culture loving Italians must be green with envy, and would probably surrender half of Rome in exchange for one of the magnificent prehistoric caves, if for no other reason then to fuse a 20,000 year old link between the Renaissance and the artistic giants of the Ice Age. Alas, Italian Archaeologists will have to dig a little faster, for no such cave has yet been found.

The pages of history not drenched in blood are covered with sweat, stone chips and paint. Mans duality of nature is expressed in a love of beauty, and a yearning for order; but his moods change per saltum to wanton dissipation, the obscene is embraced and in feverish shivers of pleasure, he ravages the trappings of civilization along with the greatest of all creations - himself.

During the Dark Ages, the appetite to beautify and improve laid dormant on the European continent. Banality and bondage had become ways of life. It was as if the great tides of time had ceased their restless motion to stagnate in wallows, reducing to consumptive and fetid state the indigenous life forms dependent on rushing currents. Amid the fulcrum of religious zeal, humanity had fallen from grace. Then, almost mystically, the long period of expiation and black death diminished. Time started to turn, to bubble and flow and form again into whirlpools twisting about the ancient map of the Cro-Magnon, stirring once again above the yawning fissures that had given birth to the highest expressions of human creativity. Provence, in Southern France, began to absorb the enlightened culture of Moorish Spain drifting across the Pyrenees. A resurgence of art, music, literature and above all, a yearning to improve the human condition, flourished. But traditions and spheres of influence, prejudices and rituals - those vestiges of the reptilian mind - bound the populous as if by steel chains to their hopeless poverty and self imposed slavery. Relentless conservatism threatened by the loosened mores of enlightenment, clutched at the ascending culture, and sought to drag it down to the squalid depths from which it so painstakingly arose. A brutish horde calling themselves, "Crusaders", descended on Provence intending to grind underfoot the impious heretics that practiced self expression. Ignorance dies hard. Like any long secession of savagery and war, misery is the victor and hapless refugees, the main product. A group of itinerant artists known to history as the troubadours ventured out from Provence. Roaming far and wide, they disseminated the new enlightenment, and resurrected decaying Europe. Within a century, hundreds of cities vied for the honor of being called, "Most Beautiful in Europe." Humanity was off the canvas and raring to go. Spirits and fortunes were on the rise. An adventurous Italian, flying the colors of Spain, sailed off to the Orient and bumped instead into the New World, two vast continents that stretched pole to pole. All that was needed was audacity, for he could not have missed the place no matter how hard he tried.

The New World was too far away from the European capitals for any monarch to effectively govern. Left to their own devices, men came into close contact with nature. From the monarch's point of view, their subjects of the New World were falling under the influence of a disease far more ominous then Black Death. Furthermore, it was highly contagious, everyone who went abroad contracted a dose. In only a single generation, it became inbred and totally incurable. Men with this malady behaved like savages, totally ungovernable, in fact, they insisted on governing themselves. Shocking! This touch of megrim loosened morels and spurred the mind. The dizzying agent that caused the malady, the wonderful, giddy bug, was called, freedom. Freedom! Infectious disease of the New World. Men here had one unbreakable law to which all others had to conform: make no law to restrict our freedom. Freedom is what elevated our society to the rarefied air of Olympus. Freedom is what built our cities, fueled our industry, excited our imaginations and raised our lifestyles to exalted heights. The New World encapsulated in a single word: freedom!

By it's nature, Freedom is difficult to maintain for protracted periods. Men at liberty serve their own interests, collect wealth and power and if successful at accumulating these worldly encumbrances, become threats to the very freedom that gave rise to their ambitions. The French encyclopedists, Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire, groped with this precept. Nature, they concluded was the final arbiter of freedom. Anything that interfered with the flow of nature's gifts to her children was an impediment to freedom. Natural law had precedence in all matters great and small over man made law. Man could be free only if he followed his own natural instincts. In the New World, we strive - or at least our philosophers do - to live by that code. American law derives much from European precedence, though it is a strange admixture of Iroquois procedures, American folklore, and plain old Yankee common sense. Somehow, we managed to remain free for several centuries, though, at times, just barely.

Men are gregarious creatures and collect into communities, villages, towns, cities. They have always done this and they always will. No one would dream of passing a law that forces people to live apart from one other. A severe punishment inflicted on recalcitrant prisoners is solitary confinement. We can safely conclude that the need for communal life is inherent to the man creature. As we have seen, the urge to shape one's community, and to use communal resources to express a collective will, to meld with the conjugated ego, dates back at least to Ice Age man, and again, indicates a manifestation of man's nature. Practical examples are easy to find; some towns take pride in their cathedral, others, in their opera house or school system, or monuments, or towers, or what ever. Denigrate the object of pride and you insult an entire community. Respect for a community's collective effort devolves to the individual, so the protection of communal assets is natural and should be anticipated. Instinctually, the individual gravitates to large organisms to nurture and be nurtured by the host. Walk the streets of any large city. Notice that the whole is made up of constituent parts. Every city is an eclectic mix of varied communities coexisting within its boundaries. Each community is unique, with its own objects of pride and expressions of collective ego. The New World's greatest metropolis, itself an expression of national ego, is the prime example, made up of flavorful communities; satellites of the towers, in flux about a central focus: Manhattan, the boroughs, the neighborhoods - sun, planets and moons. This is the way of nature.

Recently, I had cause to read the new New York City Charter. The old charter was ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court, so another charter had to be hammered out. The new document has not a word about human rights, in fact, it does not seem to recognize that individuals exist at all. It would seem imperious in a democracy for a political document to completely avoid any mention of personal rights or the individual. Not so. The charter is a beautiful document that strives on every page to empower communities and thus complete the individual by acknowledging their membership to the whole; the document infers that in New York City, no one is alone or isolated - individuals are addressed as a chorus, not as soloists, as an orchestra rather then musicians. In the new charter, it is the communities that have rights. What a revolutionary idea! The question is, will the Supreme Court - grandfathers of the concept - uphold the extended rights engendered in the charter? When suits brought by communities (probably incorporated communities) for violations of the newly conceived rights are set before the court, will the court recognize that the rights they themselves instigated even exist? A test might be looming on the horizon.

The communities of Forest Hills, Ozone Park, Astoria, Maspeth and I don't know how many others are being attacked by megastore developers. The mayor (his campaign heavily financed by megastore corporations) has weakened the laws that shelter communities from wanton commercial exploitation within their borders. The city council (now being aggressively lobbied by megastore corporations who are spending prodigious sums of money to influence legislation) is seriously considering rescinding all the laws that restrict megastore development. This of course flies in the face of the City Charter reducing it to mere literature instead of a ruling compact. The effect is to lopsidedly weight any transaction between equals (corporations are communities, though their sole attraction is money, and allegiances are bought and paid for; neighborhood communities are de facto corporations, and their attraction is simply kindred spirits flocking together) to the favor of megastore corporations who no longer have to seduce a community into allowing development within its borders. The corporations simply walk in and dictate terms. Here are the Indian Wars warmed over, only the costumes have changed with the communities cast as "Native Americans" and the megastore corporations claiming "Manifest Destiny". In America, when two entities have a dispute, the matter usually winds up in court. When one entity becomes disenfranchised and can demonstrate that other entities are taking unfair advantage, then this is a federal law suit, and the matter will ultimately come before the Supreme Court for determination.

Contemplate for a moment the possibility that a vain of gold ore is found beneath the painted caves at Lascaux. Some boorish brute who cares not a whit for culture purchases the property, then begins to excavate, claiming he has a right to do with his property as he chooses. Does he?

In Forest Hills, we want the right to shape our community for the future, and to avoid the disruption to daily life that will be caused by megastore development within our pale. The disturbing accumulation of long term detrimental effects would radically alter communal life, losing for us our unique identity and stripping away civic pride. The community is demanding, in Stentorian voice from the city of which we are a constituent part, the rights afforded by the ruling compact; We want a strong say over matters which concern us. As for rolling over and playing dead, We have no intention of letting some churlish cadger, because he has acquired a distressed property, dictate what the community must give up, or how to lead our lives, or dictate how we must now conform to a corporate will so to satisfy the lust for the gold beneath our feet. If we are denied the latitude to chart our own destiny, if we cannot aspire to the same rights and freedoms enjoyed by the caveman, then society has been wandering in the wilderness these past twenty millennium, and is presently on a wayward tack to nowhere.

March 6, 1996