I have been measuring time, for the last couple of days by how long it’s been since I was in the swamp. I tell myself this morning–two days ago I was waking up in the swamp– to attempt to connect this life to that one. The swamp was so dreamlike it takes some effort to believe I was there.

This week I was a lucky participant in a canoe trip up the Roanoke River Estuary with biologists from the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and a representative from the Albemarle-Pamlico National Estuary Program. Our destination was a site deep in the swamp where we camped on platforms, ate hearty, looked around in amazement, and studied the ecosystem.

Surrounded by dark water and trees with conical trunks, I was mesmerized by the way pollen landed on the water’s surface and created marbled patterns.
At night, so far from civilization, the stars were brilliant but in competition for viewing with the leaves on the trees. It seemed like there were stars visible all the way down to the horizon. The Milky Way was apparent in tiny snatches between clusters of leaves.

Sitting on a platform after a great dinner, dusk falling, we identified birds by sound. The cover of leaves prevented our seeing the birds, but we learned to isolate one call at a time. Our wonderful guides, Melissa and Mike, pulled out their ipod which was full of bird calls instead of music and played some for us. They pointed out an interesting behavior of the barred owl. The barred owl has an easily recognizable call, but for reasons unknown to scientists, occasionally several barred owls will get together and indulge in a group song of raucous random noises. I likened it to the soundtrack of an out-of-control frat party. There is no pattern to it. It is wild, loud, aggressive and unpredictable. In the dead silence of the night while we slept, their street fight broke loose just over our tents.

I learned the difference in a brown water river and a black water river. I studied a bottomland forest. I learned that the Roanoke is called the Amazon of North Carolina and carries more water than any other North Carolina river.

I saw my first Prothonotary Warbler, watched a water moccasin sun himself, saw dozens of turtles dive off logs. I saw the tiniest crayfish. It looked like a half inch long lobster. I watched reflected light travel up tree trunks like stripes on a barber’s pole. The background music was the rustling of leaves and the splashing of fishes. The precussionists were woodpeckers.

And in the night, even my dreams opened out to me. My mind relaxed in its place on earth, both there, and on the two nights since I slept there, my dreams have been open books, as vivid as my waking life, and a good deal less otherworldly than the swamp.

I stepped out of my comfort zone and into the future when I visited CAM Raleigh last weekend for the opening of ID:Entity at the Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh. The exhibition features interactive work by artists and faculty associated with the NC State University Departments of Art+ Design, and with the Ph.D. program in Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media. I was there, particularly, to see a piece by my oldest son, David Millsaps. David is a digital media consultant and interface designer and over the past several years has created several large scale digital works of art either alone or collaboratively.

His wall piece, Routine, mimics a version of Raleigh, gridded with streets, which, when touched by the viewer, morphs into more developed, or less developed– with more trees or less, and more buildings or fewer. The viewer makes decisions about the way the city should look. A cluster of fireflies working from a flocking algorithm becomes an icon representing humankind and its interaction with the built environment. He imagines the fireflies as having a “hive mentality” like mankind connected by technology.

A week later I had a chance to sit down with David and talk late into the night about his experience making this work. It was interesting to compare traditional media to the way artists in digital media work. The news release about the show refers to the artists as “pioneers in new media arts”. In talking to David it was clear to me that indeed he is exploring a new continent. What I do in my studio is a variation of the same processes that artists have used for thousands of years. What David does is, by comparison, to step out into a kind of wild jungle of unexplored, unmapped territory.

He talked to me about the difficulties he found in creating this work. He related how the properties of a software application are able to be replicated. But they change based on the tools they are running on. He talked about how it is new science and how it is thus impossible to estimate the time it will take to achieve a goal. David lamented that he can set a goal and he may or may not get there. In the case of Routine, he created the work on a computer that was more powerful than the equipment used to transmit it, and ended up having to ratchet down the parameters of the piece to fit the presentation tools available.

David also expressed surprise in observing the way people interacted with the piece. The piece has a sign inviting the viewer to touch the screen. He found people reaching out to touch the sign instead of the piece. This illustrates, for me, a bit of the disconnect between people like David who are at home– I mean AT HOME, in a digital world, and the rest of us who live in a world more like the previous thousand years.

When I stepped into this ephemeral exhibition, loaded with wall projections, constantly moving and morphing, I found myself longing for the fatness of paint, the grain of wood, the traditional visceral, sensual materials of the past. People like David, so accustomed to the digital vocabulary don’t have that sense of loss.

McArthur Freeman seemed to me to bridge the divide with his series of small heads. A brilliant draftsman and painter, McArthur has, of late, been exploring the union of his traditional images and technology. In ID:entity the characters he has created have been generated by technology that renders a three dimensional object from a drawing. The heads are laminates of many planes assembled to create the final image. The heads have a voluptuousness and presence that loops back to traditional art.

I started to make a case, in my late night talk with David, that this technological art was somewhat removed from human emotion. I wanted to spin a line of reasoning that it was cold and detached, born as it is from a machine, without evidence of the human hand. But I only got a couple of sentences out before remembering that I had found the exhibition, as a whole, to be very senusous, in its own way. Much of it projected onto a screen or wall, bearing a stronger resemblance to a movie or television program than to a painting, it had a kind of subtle sensuality, arriving from some mental place instead of from the sense of touch. It bore the mark, as does any good work, of thought and intensive labor, of energy concentrated in a vehicle set out for our contemplation. Only in this interactive exhibition, over and over, the viewer was invited to enter into the work and become a part of it.

This was published a year ago under the title “Beth”.  It recounted a wonderful friendship.  Yesterday Beth began her journey into the great mystery, from complications of a 15 year battle with breast cancer.  Her place in my heart is secure.  She travels now, inside me, and many others.

Beth is one of my friends from college days.  She’s been there with me through a lot of interesting experiences.  She was a bridesmaid in my wedding.  She is godmother to my middle son.  She and I have stood before thousands of paintings and talked about what we saw.  We have looked at the ocean together for hours with or without conversation.  Not since Chapel Hill days have we lived near one another, but that hasn’t kept us from staying connected.  Some of my favorite Beth memories are from the times she lived in Maryland near DC.  We would sometimes stay at her house, and sometimes in the city, abandoning our children to other people’s care so we could go to museums all day, seek out adventure-dining and funky thrift shops.  I’ve forgotten more days than most people have lived, but it seems like I remember all the times I ever spent with Beth.

This entry is in tribute to Beth’s influence on me.  One of my earliest memories with Beth is one afternoon in our early twenties when we took a blanket and some snacks out to the reservoir in Chapel Hill.    We found a remote spot beside the water and sat there enjoying the fall day, the lake and  sky.  Beth produced a notebook in which she started writing.  In my memory it was a book about ideas, goals and inspiration.   I was so moved by her purposefulness.  She was the first young person I’d ever known who even at twenty-something was living an examined life.  That’s probably where my adult notebook-keeping habit came from.  Now many years later I have several well-worn volumes I use to give myself organization and direction.  

Beth and I have just returned from a weekend at the beach.  It was a perfect beginning of November experience.  It was sunny and warm enough that we sat beside the ocean for two days– almost all day long.  The cooler weather had inspired the wildlife and so our entertainment was schools of porpoises cutting through the water.  At times hundreds of birds converged on shallow areas in the surf . There was a dead octapus on the beach we could examine at our leisure.   We were small and the vista was large.  We were quiet and it was loud. We kept the doors open so we could hear the surf all night.   I picked up blue crabs at the fish market because I will pay to watch Beth eat a blue crab.  After years of living in Maryland she is semi-professional.  If I think about it for more than a minute, I can be back there with Beth, examining our lives under the big blue dome of the sky.