"A Vigil of Time" by James McCorkle
At once tactile and sensual as well as allusive and metaphoric,
Wlodzimierz Ksiazek's paintings and encaustic works are powerful
evocations of time and memory, retrieval and reverie. Seeing his
paintings for the first time late in 1985, 1 was struck by their
richness of illumination; what traces of representation and figuration
that Ksiazek had allowed to remain were transmuted into color and
light. Viewing these paintings, I found myself seeking to retrieve
what seemed lost or trying to reach, as Seamus Heaney describes
the intention of poetry, "something lying beneath the very
floor of memory." Indeed, Heaney's metaphor of digging and
recovering lost histories informed my experience of viewing Ksiazek's
work. The paint itself was rich and complicated as the earth. This
was a painter who sought out history and illumination without irony
but with some provisional hope, fully aware of the dangers of such
an endeavor. Layers and fields of paint, varied textures and forms,
all begged to be considered, analyzed, and responded to. Conceptually,
his paintings are complex but not obdurately obscure, and difficult
but not impenetrable. The tactility and fragments of representations
elicit the necessity to read his paintings as if reading a lyric
poem. And like a lyric poem where closure is always another opening
or rebeginning, Ksiazek's paintings always invited closer examination
and sustained contemplation. But above all, his paintings are beautifully
painted.
Looking at his paintings for over a decade, it is the vitality
of the painting that is most immediate and striking. The condition
of the material itself-the paint-is thoroughly explored. These are
often vast paintings in their sheer size. But they are also monumental
in their richness of painting and allusiveness. We find thin veils,
viscous globs, impasto moldings, drips and streams, thin wavered
lines, deep strokes and incisions, spottings, and coursings of paint.
It is liquid, pliant, or hard: some surfaces have been worked while
the paint was still wet and other surfaces worked after having dried.
Painting in all its variousness becomes metaphoric of life and generation.
The painter seemingly has swept across the canvas like weather which
is always with us, yet always leaving its traces.
From the sheer presence of the paint's rich vocabulary comes illumination.
In Ksiazek's work, we face a wall across which history and all the
elements have moved. Walls are constructed to separate us, to protect,
or to offer revelation. They are also the site of the earliest of
paintings. While a painting makes a wall both apparent and transparent,
walls reveal how we organize ourselves as beings. A recent 80"
by 100" oil on canvas suggests a wall which houses four golden
windows, icons, or openings to a golden light. Yet upon closer examination
the whole painting seems to verge on opening into this goldenness,
for there is golden light that filters through the heavy accumulations
and excrescences of paint. Although time's corrosion is evident
in this painting, its illuminative openings offer epiphany. The
canvas becomes monumental in its embrace of time.
Looking at Ksiazek's paintings done ten years ago, we find the
nascence of his vision of illumination and monumentality. Turning
to a monumental encaustic done in the mid-1980's, an architectonic
ordering can be seen unfolding as a means not only to present the
full vocabulary of color and handling of pigment, but as an exploration
of being and time. Trained as a biochemist, Ksiazek depicts in this
encaustic the abstract model or equation of a molecular structure.
This work, while belonging to an earlier series, points to some
of Ksiazek's immediate concerns. Central here is his concern with
the way structures in their abstract forms condition our perception.
This work, as in his most recent works, do not force the viewer
to accept a single interpretation; like bonding elements in molecular
structures, visual forms accrete our interpretations and memories.
Thus the equation becomes a series of windows leading to provisional
revelations. Untitled, both this early experiment in the encaustic
medium and the most recent paintings and encaustics allow us to
conduct our own excavations and meditations; though suffused with
gold light, we face not an obliterating transcendence, but the humanizing
revelation of our own ephemerality and the necessity to rejoice
in the generosity of that moment.
With Ksiazek's paintings, the possibility of vital, authentic painting
becomes real again. These are works in which the work of the painter
remains present: the very layering and density of paint signals
the painter's own dwelling in the work. This gesture of intimacy,
that we too could dwell in this painting, is unlike the work of
other experimental painters who are his contemporaries, and indeed
suggests a way of renewing the act of painting, which many critics
and visual artists had declared dead. Ksiazek's painting, as well
as his encaustics and installations which are centered around painted
work, does not simply offer a final possibility against the despair
of the institutionalization of self-expression. In such a view,
expressed for example by Thomas Lawson, painting is reduced to serving
only as an alternative or ideological choice. In a radical, paradigmatic
shift, painting could, as Ksiazek's work demonstrates, negate these
issues and offer through its re-visioning of time sites of being
and reverie.
Ksiazek's work should be considered a significant contribution to
the debate about the fate of painting and abstraction. To a large
degree, Ksiazek refutes postmodemist accommodations-however ironic
they may bewith the discourses and power of dominant culture. His
work seeks a revitalization of a modernist ethos. This ethos has
as its primary ground the autonomy of the painting-or poem, dance,
or music. Such autonomy does not entail a distancing or isolation
of the painting from the audience, but a participation which can
best be described as reverie as noted by Gaston Bachelard: "The
communication between dreamer and his world is very close in reverie;
it has no 'distance,' not that distance which marks the perceived
world, the world fragmented by perception." In this autonomous
space and time of reverie, the dialectic of subject and object vanishes.
A sense of being emerges as does habitation and a provisional community.
Ksiazek's paintings give us residues of memory which we seek to
make seamless and whole.
In On Modern Art, Klee writes that the artist "places more
values on the powers which do the funning than the final forms themselves."
Abstraction allows the painter to foreground the energies that go
into the structuring and creating of the painting rather than having
those processes subverted by mimetic concerns. As Charles Altieri
writes, "abstraction makes that [those energies] emphatic by
enabling artists to propose their constructions as literal sites:
The art is not offered as an interpretation of experience, but as
a pure state, which the audience can enter and explore." This
does not mean there is an absence of significance: the artist's
methods depend upon a relinquishing of traditional perceptions.
Although it is a radical process, abstraction is also didactic
in that it proposes new ways of seeing which are not dependent on
the traditional limits of subject and object. Again, Altieri's reflections
on abstraction are helpful when considering Ksiazek's project: on
the one hand, "abstractness leads us to imagine the motions
and elements of mind, and the immediacy of our emotional investments,
as starkly external and visible: If there is to be a sense of spiritual
powers, it can no longer be based on the intricacy of an inexpressible
'buried life.' " On the other hand, the concreteness of abstraction
"is asked to support claims to a radical inwardness, an insistence
that the visible or the speakable become intelligible only in the
recesses of radical acts of reflection attempting to adapt themselves
to the essential qualities of an emotion or state of mind."
This is not to argue that abstraction correlates to the artist's
emotional or psychological state, but to suggest new ways to apprehend
the familiar as well as the liminal and transpersonal.
The continuum of painting is acknowledged throughout Ksiazek's
work. Painting endows space with a sacredness: this may be surmised
from the caves of Lascaux to Renaissance cathedrals to the Rothko
Chapel. Sacredness creates an autonomous time where our gaze maintains
its critical sensitivity but paradoxically we also sacrifice, bloodlessly,
our contravening egos. With painting we do not experience transcendence
as a departure from the world, but rather the sacredness painting
offers is that of presence or of being with the world. Painting
presents its own matter and material to us. Whether viewing Ksiazek's
large canvases or his exquisite encaustics, what is immediately
discerned is the celebration of the material. What the painting
is composed of, the actual materials, is sacred in itself. Indeed,
what his painting's sacredness implies is the sacredness of life.
Similarly, Klee's White Blossom in Garden (Weisse Blute im Garten,
1920) illustrates this sense of sacredness: it is the harmonics
of color and the physicality of the pigment that elicits the sacral
in Klee's work rather than the iconographic. The pigment is not
a metaphor for life or creativity, but it is the very presence of
creation.
Like Klee, Ksiazek does not privilege figural depictions. The figure,
whether of human form or of architectural design, is part of an
overall meditation on harmonics, time, and revelation. Unlike Klee,
Ksiazek does not depend on the instructive line: Klee's paintings
are often partitioned, or disciplined, by the use of inscribed and
painted lines, perhaps stemming from his early interest in etching
and allegorical illustrations. Nonetheless, when we see a painting
by Klee, we enter an autonomous time of being, where one and (an)other
reciprocate. This intimacy, perhaps partially created by the scale
of the paintings and their minute detailing, avoids rendering the
painting into an object and ourselves into mere "viewers"-a
ten-n that conveys tourism and consumerism.
Living in what seems increasingly like the erasure if not the ending
of time, there is an acute need to offer some imprint or record
of our presence. Against apocalypse and de-personalization, Ksiazek
works to retrieve history so as to stay time's erosions and to reveal
the plenitude of time. Ksiazek's paintings, encaustic work, and
installations of the past ten years share a concern with archaeological,
architectural, and textual retrievals. Importantly, they offer a
temporal opening for reverie-reverie that is not a condition of
escape or daydreaming, but is an acute awareness of being, without
the interference of the ego. Paradoxically, we also face the painter's
physical movement toward reverie and against the erosions of time.
These demands upon the artist are monumental. To create the space
for reverie, as Wallace Stevens, states, requires the force of imagination:
"It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence
without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure
of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to
do with our self-preservation." To face painting is to acknowledge
the painter's will or desire; one may not necessarily be mastered
by that desire, but if the painting engages us, we participate in
its eros of being. Here eros denotes intimacy and contact, which
can only emerge through the course of time. Art is the fundamental
representation of this ongoingness or this desire for eros, the
desire for being.
Leaving Poland at the time of the suppression of the Solidarity
movement, Ksiazek's work vitally eschews the harnessing of art to
a particular ideology. Untitled and usually undated, Ksiazek's paintings
elude the critic's easy chronicling and assessment of an artist's
career. In refusing to catalogue his work by date or title frees
Ksiazek's work from periodization and cornmodification. Time is
deployed by institutions to govem us just as architectural arrangements
govem our movement through time and space. A radical suspension
of time or transmutation of disciplined time becomes necessary for
any sense of liberation or individual illumination. Importantly,
Ksiazek's work exerts its own time and history, thus providing us
with the possibility of illumination or freedom. This disengagement
from a disciplining (and I use discipline in Foucault's highly allusive
use of the word) of time offers another consideration of timelessness
that parallels or complements the sense of digital timelessness.
Thus, what we see in Ksiazek's work is the time of the painting,
its endurance, and the record of the painter's presence. The painting
further records our own presence; in viewing his work, we too become
part of this vigil of time.
Perhaps the most stunning work of Ksiazek's are those that suggest
archaeological recovery. Painted and shown during the early and
mid 1990's, these works are oils on canvas, wood, and metal. These
paintings have evolved from his earlier work which broke the canvas
into a mosaic o thickly applied or accreted pigment, in which each
tessera or shard of pigment balances the others. No one shard is
a pure or monochromic tone, rather each contains the stains of history's
colors. The mosaic is fragmented, yet rather than adding up to a
mimetic representation of a whole image or narrative, the fragments
create a harmonic in their discontinuities. The stained, impure,
malleable fragments suggest that paint itself is utter matter, not
an aseptic or distilled medium. Harmony is made through the impurity
or heterogeneity of time and matter.
From these mosaics, with their interrupted lines and collections
of odd and irregular rectangular forms, Ksiazek shifts toward the
larger fields of paint still anchored by ruins of geometric forms.
The paint in these more recent works is built up layer by layer,
often in thin washes. This time-consuming process has as its effect
that of accumulations of whole paintings. Each layer itself composes
the history or archaeology of the painting's ongoingness. Such accumulations
create subtle modulations to be discovered upon detailed inspection.
The geometric pattern, much like diagrams of the foundations of
buildings or cities, is created through the wash of paint; inscribed
pigments are used to resist the wash of painterly time. In his 80"
by 100" oil on canvas work, the perspective is an aerial one:
we seem to be looking down from above at a lost ruin that seems
mired in deep fecund greens. The liquidness of the greens-paint
drips run down the canvas complicates the pictorial space by asserting
the canvas remains vertical and abstract and not reductively a mimetic
representation of a field. It is this complication or doubleness
that allows for reverie. The foundations include shimmering rectilineals
of blue, which map large rectangular spaces. Set on diagonals, these
ruins do not suggest that our vision has been ordered and re-presented
to us, but rather that we are at the threshold of discovery. Indeed,
we seem to be coming upon them as if flying from the lower quadrant
to the upper left.
To be flying is to be in reverie. To approach something is to cross
a threshold into new knowledge. To move from one's daily time into
aerial time-literally suspended-requires a disengagement of our
selfhood. In such a state of suspension, the very stability of oil
paint appears threatened. Seemingly always at risk in its application
is the paint's chemical stability and its physical adherence to
the canvas. The paint, like a topography, changes with the shift
and play of light. The thin washes of paint create a depth to the
surface; the brush strokes themselves seem prismatic. Color is never
pure or refined, but rather always stained with other colors, for
reduction and distillation are contrary to time's process, and indeed
contrary to the processes of life and perception. Thus, Ksiazek's
paintings, despite their fragility, ultimately speak of the obdurateness
of materials and their monumentality.
In his 30" by 40" oil on metal work, Ksiazek has depicted
a cantilevered series of beams, diagonals and triangles. This formal
composition creates a sense of sublime stability. The architectural
composition of these embedded rectilinear lines has a verticality
not often present in other works of his. The rectilinear lines exist
in space: paradoxically they seem to be pushed forward in spite
of their shallow negative reliefs. Light seems to seep from these
cantilevered beams-white pigment spills from them, staining the
dark surfaces. Here the reverie is a reverie of motion: it is as
if we are moving through space and crossing a threshold to see this
composed figure existing in time, enduring the accretions of time.
In the poem "The Unveiling," Phillis Levin asks "What
can we do if nothing in us sings /And nothing shines?" Ksiazek's
painting is an unveiling of a composition lit from within: that
we approach it, crossing into the shared time of painting and seer,
answers Levin's fear of the extinction of the individual and the
imagination. Painting is the construction of our own seeing; in
the presence of painting comes revelation.
In another of his architectural compositions, an oil painting on
wood measuring 35" by 45", Ksiazek has created a vertical
form where we seem to be moving toward and then, through a gate
or arch. Ksiazek has created a complex painting where abstraction
and figuration merge: pictorial space is created through illusion
or the representation of the arch; yet this painting is also an
abstraction where depth is defined as the layering of pigments rather
than by representational illusion. Hence, the liminal drama of movement
is most pronounced. The arch or gate itself is an opening, for the
blue is celestial and spacious. The arch is perhaps the most primary
of architectural inventions: it reflects human anatomy and its capacity
for bearing weight, it symbolizes passage and the attendant rites
involved in transformation, and it dichotomizes by creating interior
and exterior worlds. A weight bearing lintel allows for vertical
structural expansion as well as creating a span to connect and enclose.
Quite literally and yet also metaphorically, we might take this
as a gesture toward spanning the demands of pure painting with pure
figuration. The painting moves spatially inwards, through the illusion
of depth; we also move across the celestial arch or bridge; and
finally we traverse the field of paint, with its drips and runs,
washes of cobalt, depressions and runners of color, betyl-like smears
of gold and rain-laden gray-blues.
As a gateway, this painting also suggests the Orphic condition
of simultaneously beholding the beloved and suffering the beloved's
loss. It is at the luminous moment where sky and underworld meet
that recognition and loss are sited. Such a condition or siting
describes the work of the artist. As Maurice Blanchot writes, Orpheus's
work is to "bring it [both the origins and limits of art] back
into the daylight and in the daylight give it form, figure and reality"
(99). We are placed in this metaphoric chain of seeing; hence we
experience a certain intimacy through this reverie on limit and
origin. This painting, like so many of Ksiazek's works, allows us
to participate in the gaze of Orpheus: it gives us access to that
time of gazing as well as providing the literal frame or gateway
for the gaze. To gaze, writes Blanchot, "frees the sacred contained
in the work, gives the sacred to itself (104).
The painting's palette furthers such a phenomenological reading.
The painting creates a balance between the aerial blue of the architectural
components, the darker, oceanic blue of the background and the radiant
efflorescence of yellow golds. The painting, like all of Ksiazek's
work, demands a close inspection of its surface. The color is saturated,
for the paint has been applied in many layers and in some areas
with differing opacities. The surface has not been skimmed of its
heterogeneity: form, as in the example of the arch, arrives only
out of and due to this richness of the painting's surface.
Here too, the brush stroke remains evident: this is a created surface,
the effects of the application of the paint are intended. Thus the
painting remains a record of the painter painting. The painting
makes visible the presence, or the record, of the painter. Painting
14 thus acts as a witness to the individual whose hand made that
object. This insistence on the intentions and agency of the painter
is a resistance to the tradition of the ready-made, assemblages
of found objects, or productions that seek to erase the hand of
the individual maker and collapse the various modalities of time
into a single depersonalized present moment. In this insistence
on the agency of the painter, Ksiazek's paintings maintain a complexity
of time.
Parallel to brush-work, the value of the grounds or foundations
for Ksiazek's application of pigments is important to consider,
for the type ground will influence the illuminative properties of
the pigment. Ksiazek's work might be compared to Klee's work in
terms of their use of different materials as the grounds for the
application of pigment. Klee is known for utilizing papers, fabrics,
wood, and canvas in varying combinations to create differing layers
and textures. Ksiazek's encaustic and oil works display a similar
penchant: his 16" by 12" encaustic on plastic and wood
is an example of this layering of grounds. Masses of gray-blue-green
build upon he whites, which are only most apparent at the margins.
The plastic creates translucent layer that creates a sense of suspension.
The massive application of the roiling gray-blue-green pigments
conveys the weightlessness of rain-laden storm clouds. Ksiazek creates
a tension between the weight and mass of pigment and the illusion
of depth and atmosphere which recalls pictorial representations
of the sky in landscapes, but is purely resolutely abstract.
Each work tends to meditate on a particular tonal palette, thus
each painting develops a way of seeing a specific range of tones,
as well as the harmonics a particular tone may invoke. In his 48"
by 58" oil on canvas, Ksiazek has created a meditation on blues
merging to grays in a liquid flow of paint. The whole canvas is
a register of this liquid movement. Yet, here the painter's gesture
in time is still made present, for the surface is punctuated with
varied moments of white: drips, runs, smears, impasto smudges a
whole vocabulary emerges describing these moments of the application
of white pigment. Each of these gestures could be the paint at the
verge of forming an image: we are present at the realization or,
perhaps, remembrance of an image. At play against this flow and
these punctuated moments in this painting, are the thin, almost
marginal lines that register usually a deeper blue and act as forms
of eroding stasis.
Ksiazek's geometries allude to foundations and the cognitive processes
that we engineer and define ourselves by. The architectural schemas
are records of cultural and personal organization. These schemas
are the plans which govern construction as well as the records of
what may now be in ruins and otherwise lost to memory. Existing
in the realm of the two dimensional, these plans or foundational
geometries imagine a three dimensional world. Ksiazek's 80"
by 100" oil on canvas invokes this foundational complex. Here
is a monumental work of a field of painting in which are embedded
the ruins or foundations of community or shared knowledge's. In
this painting, the spiralling forms recall Cretan ruins and English
mazes as well as architectural diagrams of foundations and walls
and archaeological plots of excavations. Ksiazek's painting develops
a palimpsestic process and invites overlays of our associations
and memories.
This is not to argue that Ksiazek merely replicates an architectural
form: this painting invokes a reverie upon the community such fon-ns
seek to inspire or impose. Yet, the painting's vigil does not end
there. It proposes a meditation on the properties of space, particularly
public space, and the effects of architecture's ordering of the
human world. The very scale of Ksiazek's painting makes such proposals
possible as well as necessary. In this example, as in all these
archaeological paintings, the painting constitutes a site. In this
particular painting, we seem to be presented with all the extant
foundations. Ksiazek's vision would propose that we reenter these
ruined foundations to reconfigure a community that has an authentic
and integral sacredness. In so doing, he also implies that painting,
particularly abstract painting, is central in this process of re-visioning
a shared space because painting allows space and time to open for
the audience.
The monumentality of this painting does not demand the audience
step back: the work is not a mastering of the viewer. Instead, the
painting invites close inspection. The density of paint, the subtle
shifts of color, and the intricacy of the embedded forms draws the
eye nearer and necessitates interpretation. There is an ecological
sensitivity at play for what one comes upon is the variousness of
color and the abundance of matter. This is not a privileging of
detail, but a meditation on the complex latticework of the elements.
Whether in the thematic meanings implicit in his use of architectural
geometries or the formal virtuosity of brushwork, Ksiazek's painting
offers a renewing vision of the world as well as the conditions
of painting.
Ksiazek's paintings, despite their often large scale, are fragile
works. There is an ironic condition to their monumentality: the
paint could easily be dislodged or damaged. In this sense, no aesthetic
experience or object is permanent. There is no idealized condition
or state-of-being. To participate in reverie one becomes part of
an enduring time, but not a timeless time. The painting strates,
to read back through our own approaches to space and form, to archaeologically
retrieve the representations of mazes, Cretan ruins, or Byzantine
churches, is to provide a narrative of our spiritual and physical
habitation. Time becomes monumental in that we realize and participate
in its duration.
It is our participation, that is our reading or interpretation,
in a Midrashic fashion, that so radically shifts the sense of monumentality
as Ksiazek is coming to express it. The retrieval of representations
of the past is fraught with difficulties. Suzi Gablik writes that
the
"issue at stake will be how to determine which artists are
merely scavenging the past and which are seeking, more actively,
to influence and transform the spiritual vacuum at the center of
our society. Ours is a culture in which, as the sociologist Theodore
Roszak has pointed out, the capacity for transcendence has become
so feeble that when confronted with the great historical projections
of sacramental experience, we can only wonder what these exotic
symbols really meant. After more than a century of alienation and
a negative attitude toward society, art is showing signs of wanting
to be a therapeutic force again. There is no doubt that a new process
has started asserting itself; but the problem remains of sifting
out that which is largely sensationalism geared to the media-machine
from that which carries a genuine potential for developing a more
luminous culture."
Such a "luminous culture" is created through, as Gablik
argues, the "capability of art for transmitting patterns of
conscious ethical value." While Gablik seems to point to a
prescriptive, idealistic, antidotal art, one that fashions itself
against the forces of modem mass-culture and consumption, Ksiazek's
art is not so didactic. Perhaps this is the distinction between
art and criticism, but it does reveal that art if it is to be sacramental
and luminous, it will have to avoid critical didacticism. Instead,
to be luminos an artist must allow for opening and light: indeed,
knowledge comes through that ability to open and receive.
Such luminousness in Ksiazek's paintings has often been predicated
upon the use of gold light. The use of golden light, however, risks
being overwhelmed by conventional referents. Ksiazek's most recent
paintings, like his encaustic work, explore the luminosity of the
creamy grays and whites, which suggest sea-beds, flotsam, liquidity,
opacity, the generative endures and our continuing contact with
it, hopefully, endures if it is monumental. Our own fragility is
figured in the fragility of the depictions and the fragility of
the medium.
Monumentality also describes a temporal condition: our culture
has come to associate the term with the Aristotelian idea of the
spectacle, where sheer size and visual excess dominate and the viewer
is forced to surrender the interwoven capacities of analysis and
reverie. Such a spectacle negates time, empties history, and replaces
the condition of the spirit with ideological expediencies. In Ksiazek's
work, monumentality is radically re-visioned: to be monumental the
work must endure through time by offering a plentitude of readings.
As the poet Ronald Johnson writes in his long poem Ark, we must
be "in ecstasy of palimpsest." As the painting in plate
seven demon-fluids of bodies. In his 80" by 100" oil on
canvas and his 59" by 63" oil on canvas exemplify this
newer palette. The archaeological plans in these two paintings are
swept under the sifting grounds. The paintings suggest an erasure
through time of history, hence they become elegiac in their expression
of the process of loss. Yet, these paintings also offer the grounds
for reconstruction: the seeming emptiness of the off-whites, creams,
and grays may not dictate closure but an vital openness where we
may imagine the reformation of our sense of being. Ksiazek re-visions
the possibilities of light throughout his paintings, for as Czeslaw
Milosz writes, "All tangible things-material things, as people
used to say-change into light and their shape is preserved in it."
Ksiazek's paintings are stunning, virtuosic expressions of human
optimism and survival through which we retrieve the capacity for
reverie and the capacity for eros, for greeting another. While Ksiazek's
paintings seek to recovery the potential for illumination, our endeavors,
Ksiazek implies, remain disciplinary and cruel: we incise, extract,
catalogue, and exhume. The painter, thus, occupies a crucial position
in our culture at this moment. The painter's role is not to serve
only as witness, but as one who must, as Ksiazek does, offer us
generously time and space. His vigil is our reverie.
Monographic Publication: Wlodzimierz Ksiazek: A Vigil of Time.
Marisa Del Re Gallery, New York, NY, June/July 1997. Published by
Marisa Del Re Gallery, New York, NY Essay by James McCorkle.
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