Hopeless in Gaza? Part 5

Against Cynicism: "The Canary that Sings on the Skull"

Growing up with the civil rights and peace movements in the 1960s, I believed heartily in progress.   “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in numerous speeches, including one just days before his assassination.  He was rephrasing a formulation articulated by abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker in the 1850s.   Later, Barack Obama requoted Dr. King and liked the expression so much he had it stitched into a rug in the Oval Office.

Rev. Parker was right—slavery was abolished.  Dr. King was right—Jim Crow ended.  President Obama was right—more people have healthcare.   But how are things going for the people of Gaza, Sudan, Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Guatemala, El Salvador, Niger, Ukraine, Libya, Syria, the West Bank, northern and southern Israel?   How are things going for folks in depopulating rural areas and inner cities in the U.S.?  

Is it possible to ask these questions and still believe in a “moral universe?”  And that “it bends toward justice”?   

It’s easier to see injustice as a permanent feature of the world, protean in that it is always assuming new forms, piping down in one place, popping up in another—but never going away.  

Those of us who yearn for a cease fire in Gaza, for synergy and equality at home and around the world, must wonder what kind of country we live in when U.S. senators and representatives give 50 standing ovations to a leader directing the mass killing of civilians.

Men, women, and children died yesterday, and even more died today.

They will never receive “justice.”

Are ideals just pipedreams while evil rules the world?

All of us have moments of cynicism—disillusionment, exhaustion, despair, self-centeredness—but cynicism is not a stable state for most of us. We humans have always sought ways to grapple with the problem of evil.

Traditional religions envisioned supernatural forces battling against each other, Good against Evil, as for example Renaissance Christendom’s depiction of saints against demons:

“St. Michael Defeating Satan” by Titian (Tiziano Vicelli), ca. 1590

Religions still strengthen many by providing protocols to affiliate with Goodness (as those religions define it) and resist Evil, but today in the U.S. no single theology structures cultural attitudes.  Instead, common ground is found in secular empiricism, i.e. specific observations of nature and social relations. 

We find ourselves in a culture focused on the material world—but still unwilling to give in to cynicism. We have before us our own version of the ancient human task—how to find goodness in a world where evil persists.

Several 20th- and 21st-century artists blazed paths for us through their presentations of a particular image, specifically created to combat cynicism—”the canary that sings on the skull.”

Nature writer Annie Dillard, for example, acknowledges the pervasiveness of cruelty. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she describes a water bug eating a frog alive, an example of the ubiquity of predation which raises questions for her about the meaning of human life.

A Giant Water Bug eating a fish.

She writes:

“Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery:  the inrush of power and delight, the canary that sings on the skull.” 

Did Dillard originate this image? (If anyone knows of a previous use, please tell us about it in Comments!) Even if original in its specifics, the image comes to us freighted with allusions to previous depictions. One clear source is a report from Nikos Kazantzakis that Dillard cites elsewhere in the same chapter of Pilgrim:

“Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had a canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing. All his life, wandering the earth, he felt as though he had a canary on top of his mind, singing.”

Kazantzakis’s vibrant memory was a charm he carried everywhere with him—exuberant loveliness surmounting whatever else he saw in the world.

But Dillard replaces Kazantzakis’s “globe” with a “skull,” bringing in other, darker associations. Indeed, a bird on a skull alludes to the memento mori (reminder of mortality) of classical and Christian philosophy—only the bird of memento mori is not a sunny canary but an all-black carrion-eater, a raven or a crow. ¹

“Crow on a Skull.” Contemporary rendition of a Gothic memento mori.

Traditional Christian memento mori reminded viewers that human life on earth was transitory, death-destined, with souls liable to perdition—and no light anywhere in the picture except the implicit promise, well known to Christian viewers, of supernatural salvation through God, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Dillard’s image replaces this other-worldliness with a brightness that is of this earth—a canary, singing. “Remember life,” the image seems to say. “Remember beauty.”

After Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was published in 1974, the striking image of “the canary that sings on the skull” became common currency, picked up by others.

For example, Toni Morrison in 1976 “quotes and riffs on Annie Dillard,” as noted by historian Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.² In “Moral Inhabitants,” Morrison accepts the persistence of cruelty in nature but then explores the special nature of human cruelty, because humans have a moral sense. Nevertheless, humans in her country, as demonstrated in one example after another from history, wove cruel racist violence into the fabric of the United States.

But like Dillard, Morrison refuses to accept evil as all-defining. “Riffing” on Dillard’s words, she writes:

“Of course there is cruelty.  Cruelty is a mystery.  But if we see the world as one long brutal game, then we bump into another mystery, the mystery of beauty, of light, the canary that sings on the skull. Unless all ages and all races of man have been deluded…there seems to be such a thing as grace, such a thing as beauty, such a thing as harmony…all wholly free and available to us.”³ 

Artist Mary DeVincentis captures this “grace,” “beauty,” and “harmony” in a lovely painting entitled, what else, “The Canary that Sings on the Skull”⁴:

“The Canary that Sings on the Skull.” by Mary DeVincentis

While the human skull looms large in this painting, it is in the background; it is the canary that claims pride of place. The skull may remind us of mortality, it may hint at past suffering, but in this moment it is a perch that holds up a bird lifting up a song. The focus is on a single moment in this world. No matter what has happened in the past, no matter what the future holds, it is singing that claims the present.

Can we learn from Dillard, Morrison, and DeVincentis to expand our understanding of reality, to include canaries as well as skulls?

How might we, like Kazantzakis, carry singing with us?

If we want to make the world better, we might do well to work with the world and not ignore what it has to offer.

In the next post, I will describe one example of a social justice warrior who does exactly that.

1. This modern rendition of a Gothic memento mori is a photo of artwork available for purchase and shipping from TigerHouse Art and artist/proprietor “Dave.” https://www.etsy.com/listing/70525450/crow-on-a-skull-gothic-macabre-art-print.

2. Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2024. p. 156, Note 30. Glaude comments on Morrison’s use of Dillard’s image.

3. Quoted by Glaude, Emphasis His. Ibid., p. 123.

4. https://www.artspace.com/artists/mary-devincentis