By Michael F. Duggan
My favorite nineteenth-century American painter is Winslow Homer. Perhaps more than any other visual artist, he marks the arrival of a mature and distinctive American aesthetic after a protracted and derivative adolescence. His seascapes are especially powerfully—nobody captures the amoral fury of the sea like Homer.
There is one painting of his however, that I had not cared for but which I now see as a powerful metaphor, a metaphor for a future Homer could have not have foreseen. This is his The Gulf Stream from 1899. To me it always seemed too busy, an overly dramatic piling-on of threatening elements—like the drawing of a child trying to include too much into one scene. The painting is of a black man stripped to the waist reclining on the deck of a de-masted, heavily listing sloop, apparently resigned to his fate.
Recently I saw the painting again, and it spoke to me powerfully realized as a metaphor, a prophecy come true for the current human predicament: the man’s artificial environment—the derelict vessel—is a barely floating wreck, subject to the chaos and caprice, the whims of the ocean. It is a temporal speck of flotsam, of human artifice, about to be reclaimed and assimilated back into nature (as with all of the human extended phenotype, the boat is not “artifice” but “human-altered nature”). Nature threatens in other ways ways: circling sharks in the foreground, attracted to blood in the water. On the horizon is a waterspout. And then there is the encroaching sea itself. The title of the painting provides another element: the Gulf Stream, a current—a river in the ocean—that is controlling the course of the sinking sloop, further denying humankind agency over its own fate.
Also in the distance is a faint and fleeting chance of salvation by human hands, a fully-rigged sailing ship on the far horizon heading past the unseen boat and apparently toward the storm, as the man on the boat looks unaware or uncaringly away in the opposite direction. This is where we stand, or recline, today.
Of course the metaphor is not a perfect one—no metaphor is—nature is not depicted as degraded or altered, as it is in our time, only primal and threatening, and unlike the man in the painting, so many of us today are either unaware or in denial of our predicament. Where the man looks away from the possibility of salvation, we look away from the threat itself either in ignorance or apathy rather than in hopelessness of our situation. By contrast, much of civilization superficially seems to be going strong, whereas the boat is little more than a hulk awash in the shark-swarming brine.
The relevant questions framed by the painting are: are things too far gone for the man and his situation, and are things too far gone for us and ours? Is there still hope for us and our world?