“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time,” was reportedly uttered by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in response to the work of the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, Marc Evan and Chris Soria. (I am skipping his newest book published this September, The Invention of Sound, all about mortality in its most sadistic forms….)
The Brooklyn, NY-based duo has been carving pumpkins for many years. One of their approaches, carving famous works of art into their pumpkins, has been recognized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MoMa has ordered an annual pumpkin devoted to a piece from their collection for the last 7 years, so has the Whitney and the Queens Museum of Art. And now Chuck Palahniuk.
Here is a sampling of their work, done these days in cooperation with 12 other carvers, using tools from different trades, including kitchen knives, hardware tools, such as small saws, serrated knives, linoleum cutters (typically used for printmaking), and clay loops (used for trimming in pottery). (Photographs from the website.)
The pumpkins, internally wired with little lamps, can cost up to $800. That is a lot for a fleeting pleasure, and not much if you consider the skill that goes into it and the fact that this is probably a one-shot-per-year business.
To put the word immortality and pumpkin into one sentence requires some chutzpah. I cannot think of another organism widely available to observe, perhaps with the exception of sunflowers when they go dry and black, that reminds me so visibly of death and decay. Who hasn’t thought about the fleeting of existence when watching the crisp pumpkins melting into pulp and slime, on one’s doorstep as much as in the fields come winter?
On my visit to Sauvie Island yesterday, the fields were ready to be picked, the greenery already gone, the pumpkins bare for the take. It poured, I could not even leave the car, photographing out of the window. My favorite willow tree had finally collapsed under its own weight, pieces stacked along Reeder Road.
The ponds were dry, not good for November when so much traveling water fowl needs a place to settle.
As a result a universe of hunters concentrated around one of the few remaining wet spots, killing scores of ducks by the unrelenting sound of the shooting.
Mortality was on my mind, not immortality. Beauty, of course, as always is the case in nature, visible even in the stark reminders of transience.
Then again, the quest for immortality, or ruminations about it, have also created some – literary – beauty. The ancient Greek texts come to mind, or Wordsworth, but also something decidedly contemporary. Here is Brian Culhane.
THE IMMORTALITY ODE
Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys,
But ready to begin again and again and again
The first twelve bars before the drums come in,
Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening,
Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard
Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago
On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s
Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam
Failed to make it up five flights, and back then
Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass
Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side?
Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus
Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again
That we come to over and over, pushing—
Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett
Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of.
As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard
Old father shuffling along in black cashmere:
The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality,
While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd,
Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights
And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart,
Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for
“You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh
As when he first sat down, and the night is young.
And here the referenced music by Bill Evans. Stay alive for now, folks. We need to be around for the official calling of the election…..