The Sixth Lagoon On Dialogue, Discourse, and Metaphor
John Kluge, our patron, who flew in with Carlo Amato every year to see how we were doing, had just made his first 2 billion dollars. (Rupert Murdoch had evidently called him for a meeting, walked into his office, and without much palaver offered John 200 million dollars for his 20 television stations—in other words, 10 million dollars a station. Kluge sat smiling for a while, then looked up and replied, “Rupert, you left a zero off.” Murdoch said, “You want 2 billion dollars?” and walked out. Some months later, he offered the two billion!) The subject matter for the Sixth Lagoon was the Colorado River watershed. We were scaling up: The Fourth Lagoon had been a proposal for a fish farm by the shores of the Salton Sea, with a small section of the sea itself as visual field; the next step was the Fifth Lagoon, which took the whole Salton Sea as a visual field, with the water production of the All-American Canal as the subject matter. In the Sixth Lagoon, the Salton Sea shrinks and the whole Colorado River watershed becomes the figure; the violation of the river is the subject matter. The Sixth Lagoon was going to be a comparison between the Colorado River system, its water use and water policy, and the Sri Lankan river systems and their use and their policy (the subject of the First Lagoon). So we asked John and Carlo if we could do both the Sixth and the First Lagoons simultaneously. MetroMedia agreed, though a little reluctantly. They preferred getting one lagoon at a time, sort of like getting one episode of All in the Family at a time. We had recently taken a break from the time-consuming task of creating lagoons in order to do the Sacramento Meditations. That work gave us the lens through which to look at both the Colorado River and the Sri Lankan water systems, and compare them. The Colorado did not fare well in this comparison. To design the imagery, we used satellite photography for the Colorado and then made a drawing by hand of the whole river system, 2.4 meters tall. We had Bob Bucknam fly the Colorado River and photograph every dam and diversion, then compared what modern industrial engineering did to the Colorado and what the 2 000-yearprevious Buddhist influence and Roman engineering did to the Sri Lankan river systems. It was astonishing to behold. So much forgetting had taken place; so much arrogance had infected modern design processes. Ethics and empathy for place had disappeared, replaced by a vast evolving system of resource extraction. Sri Lankans had created flood control, water conservation, and water distribution systems by digging canals parallel to its rivers, and storing extra waters during flood time in depressions in the land (called tanks or reservoirs) utilizing earthen dams. It was labor-intensive. Buddhist monks controlled a system whose object was the well-being of the communities they served. By making one river behave as two rivers (through the canals), ecological values were doubled. Conversely, the Colorado had been dammed and re-dammed, its ecosystems marginalized. So much water was taken from it that it no longer reached the Gulf of Mexico, negatively affecting the estuarine life there as well as the Mexican habitat that survived by grace of the river along its way. We had subtitled the work On Dialogue, Discourse and Metaphor but had only a moderately clear idea of what a metaphor was. Then George Lakoff showed up on our doorstep. He was a linguist from Berkeley and was studying metaphor; he said, “What better place to learn about metaphor than from artists who use it all the time?” (After he visited with us he went up the hill a bit to visit with Eleanor and David Antin, and after that headed to Solana Beach to meet with the poet Jerome Rothenberg.) We talked about the way artists use metaphor and became friends, following each other’s work ever since. Meanwhile, in our morning conversations, the Witness had posed the question in the Fifth Lagoon: Were we to flush the pollutants from the Salton Sea into the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, who would flush the ocean? Who would flush the gulf? The Lagoonmaker, now understanding that singlepurpose mega-technological solutions bring unintended and often catastrophic long-term outcomes, evolved his character in such a way that from the Sixth Lagoon forward, the Lagoonmaker and the Witness speak in one voice. Nonetheless, the Sixth Lagoon ends in a somewhat complex back-and-forth discussion of the cost of belief, which in its own way becomes a metaphorical cascade.
John Kluge, our patron, who flew in with Carlo Amato every year to see how we were doing, had just made his first 2 billion dollars. (Rupert Murdoch had evidently called him for a meeting, walked into his office, and without much palaver offered John 200 million dollars for his 20 television stations—in other words, 10 million dollars a station. Kluge sat smiling for a while, then looked up and replied, “Rupert, you left a zero off.” Murdoch said, “You want 2 billion dollars?” and walked out. Some months later, he offered the two billion!) The subject matter for the Sixth Lagoon was the Colorado River watershed. We were scaling up: The Fourth Lagoon had been a proposal for a fish farm by the shores of the Salton Sea, with a small section of the sea itself as visual field; the next step was the Fifth Lagoon, which took the whole Salton Sea as a visual field, with the water production of the All-American Canal as the subject matter. In the Sixth Lagoon, the Salton Sea shrinks and the whole Colorado River watershed becomes the figure; the violation of the river is the subject matter. The Sixth Lagoon was going to be a comparison between the Colorado River system, its water use and water policy, and the Sri Lankan river systems and their use and their policy (the subject of the First Lagoon). So we asked John and Carlo if we could do both the Sixth and the First Lagoons simultaneously. MetroMedia agreed, though a little reluctantly. They preferred getting one lagoon at a time, sort of like getting one episode of All in the Family at a time. We had recently taken a break from the time-consuming task of creating lagoons in order to do the Sacramento Meditations. That work gave us the lens through which to look at both the Colorado River and the Sri Lankan water systems, and compare them. The Colorado did not fare well in this comparison. To design the imagery, we used satellite photography for the Colorado and then made a drawing by hand of the whole river system, 2.4 meters tall. We had Bob Bucknam fly the Colorado River and photograph every dam and diversion, then compared what modern industrial engineering did to the Colorado and what the 2 000-yearprevious Buddhist influence and Roman engineering did to the Sri Lankan river systems. It was astonishing to behold. So much forgetting had taken place; so much arrogance had infected modern design processes. Ethics and empathy for place had disappeared, replaced by a vast evolving system of resource extraction. Sri Lankans had created flood control, water conservation, and water distribution systems by digging canals parallel to its rivers, and storing extra waters during flood time in depressions in the land (called tanks or reservoirs) utilizing earthen dams. It was labor-intensive. Buddhist monks controlled a system whose object was the well-being of the communities they served. By making one river behave as two rivers (through the canals), ecological values were doubled. Conversely, the Colorado had been dammed and re-dammed, its ecosystems marginalized. So much water was taken from it that it no longer reached the Gulf of Mexico, negatively affecting the estuarine life there as well as the Mexican habitat that survived by grace of the river along its way. We had subtitled the work On Dialogue, Discourse and Metaphor but had only a moderately clear idea of what a metaphor was. Then George Lakoff showed up on our doorstep. He was a linguist from Berkeley and was studying metaphor; he said, “What better place to learn about metaphor than from artists who use it all the time?” (After he visited with us he went up the hill a bit to visit with Eleanor and David Antin, and after that headed to Solana Beach to meet with the poet Jerome Rothenberg.) We talked about the way artists use metaphor and became friends, following each other’s work ever since. Meanwhile, in our morning conversations, the Witness had posed the question in the Fifth Lagoon: Were we to flush the pollutants from the Salton Sea into the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico, who would flush the ocean? Who would flush the gulf? The Lagoonmaker, now understanding that singlepurpose mega-technological solutions bring unintended and often catastrophic long-term outcomes, evolved his character in such a way that from the Sixth Lagoon forward, the Lagoonmaker and the Witness speak in one voice. Nonetheless, the Sixth Lagoon ends in a somewhat complex back-and-forth discussion of the cost of belief, which in its own way becomes a metaphorical cascade.