A Convergence
of Convergences:
A Contest.
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For more information
about this contest,
click here.
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Contest Winner No. 17.
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Clothesline Raising
Over Carlisle, Indiana.
By Charlie Hopper
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My uncles, who were World War II veterans, are joined by my boom-baby cousin
in this shot showing the installation of a clothesline post at my grandma's house sometime in the '50s or early '60s.
I've always thought the "rhyme" (to go all Weschlery with my vocabulary) of this photo and the iconic Iwo Jima flag-raising was unmistakable.
From the heroism of war to the postwar domesticism of side-yard chores, it's a two-photo mid-20th-century history lesson.
P.S. I know I already won once, so you don't have to send me a book or whatever. I just love this Convergence too much not to send it.
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Weschler Responds.
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Another winner, this one, from the victor of our very first contest, Charlie Hopper, showing himself once again as adept at finding Convergences among his forebears (albeit somewhat more recent ones this time out) as he is at finding them among his heirs. (And let that be a goad to the rest of you prior winners: we are not done with you; we want more, MORE, MORE!)
Now, in this case, as it happens, the great midcentury American assemblage moralist Ed Kienholz in some ways beat Mr. Hopper to the punch (or, anyway, more or less tied with his war-veteran uncles) with his own version of Suburban Iwo Jima, a truly wrenching 1968 jeremiad he dubbed The Portable War Memorial, a detail from which is shown below (from the cover of a German catalog—that country, ironically, being one that found Kienholz's angrily grim take on American patriotism particularly to its liking).
Kienholz's version, as it happens, is in some ways truer to what actually happened atop Mount Surabachi that now-iconic morning, February 26, 1945, near the outset of the gruesome six-week battle that would come to claim the lives of nearly 7,000 Americans along with almost the entire 22,000-man Japanese garrison defending the strategically crucial island. Kienholz's flag, at any rate, is much closer in size to that of the actual first flag raised atop the dread volcano, the one deemed not photogenic enough ...
which, in turn, had to be replaced, under heavy fire (there's even a photo of the one coming down and the other going up) ...
so as to occasion Joe Rosenthal's decidedly more resonant (if slightly posed) classic image.
(See Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall's bracingly revisionist 1991 take on the fate of both the photo and those who happened to be captured in it, Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero.)
Now, a question arises as to why that specific image, of all the hundreds of thousands shot during the war, proved so uniquely resonant for those millions who immediately prized it back home at the time and for so many of the generations thereafter. And here I think our friend Mr. Hopper, or maybe his uncles, are on to something.
For the entire island-hopping campaign that came to characterize the Pacific War must have come to seem, both to those back home and to the thousands of ravaged, bone-weary Marines who actually undertook it, like so many Stations of the Cross, and that terrible mountain like some species of Calvary.
Whether or not that specific association was in the minds of the five Marines who posed for Rosenthal's photo, or even in Rosenthal's own mind as he shaped and snapped it, I can't help but suspect it was at the back of the minds of the photo editors back home who, all around the country, were drawn to that specific image (out of all the others that were also sent back from that roll) and featured it on their front pages the next day.
For, of course, that pose has a history, from Danish medieval
through Florida Spanish missionary,
with high points in both Rembrandt
and Rubens (twice!).
It has continued to occasion a wealth of subsequent associations, sometimes decidedly darker, beyond the Iwo Jiman, such as in this veritably Kienholzian painting by Claude Clark, from 1977.
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OTHER WINNERS.
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1. Evolving, Evolved by Charlie Hopper
2. Primal Forces, Basic Colors by Andy Hunter
3. The End of the Beginning by Holly Dunsworth
Intermezzo by Lawrence Weschler
4. This Is Not an Ad by Jimmy Chen
5. Catskills Vagina by Dan Clem
6. The Antipodes by Chris Zic
7. Self-Made Constriction by Sam Gaskin
8. We Are the Son by Danny Erker
9. Painfully Unaware by Dan Park
10. Gutshot by Jason Torchinsky
Weschler's Second Interlude
11. Love and War by Kim Wood
12. Inside and Out There by Lena Webb
13. The March by Emily Marvosh
14. Feminine Divine Triptych by Margit Christenson
15. Time's Deliberate Convergence by Steve Denyszyn
16. A Rousseau/Hirshfield Convergence by Adam Webb
Beirut/Warsaw by Lawrence Weschler
17. Clothesline Raising Over Carlisle, Indiana by Charlie Hopper
Carnival of Convergences
Weschler's Fourth Interlude
Aftersquib to the Foregoing
18. Pelvises All the Way Down by John Peter Rickgauer
19. Ovary Night? by Maya Muñoz
20. Christ in Space by Jonathan Shipley
A Pair of Convergences Off of Tina Barney
Another Carnival of Convergences
21. Moral Confusion: Iraq, Munich, and Vietnam by Donald Rumsfeld
22. Seeing the Tree for the Forest by Walter Murch
An Addendum to the Foregoing, and a Visitor Challenge
23, 24, and 25. Far Out by Michael Benson, Brian Christian, and Walter Murch
26. Jewish Bunk Beds by Monica S. Bland
Those Damn Swedish Trees, Take 3: Convergence of the Blogs
27. Degenerate Boogie-Woogie by Lisa Lee
Carnival of Convergences No. 3
28. Sand and Moon by Alison Cornyn
Actaeon: An Ovidian Impromptu by Lawrence Weschler
29 and 30. Hoods and Veils by Vero Testa and Lauren Redniss
The Onion/Bickle Convergence by Lawrence Weschler
31. The Lone Figure Against the Armored Swarm by Michele Siegel
32. Muscle and Flow by Benjamin R. Cohen
An Addendum to the Foregoing: Cities, Brains, Orchestras by Lawrence Weschler
Saint and Princess by Lawrence Weschler
Beauty Queen and Baghdad Hummer by Lawrence Weschler
Carnival of Convergences No. 4
Laughing, Clapping, Constantly Forgetting: A Trill of Readerly Associations by Lawrence Weschler
33. Lithographica by R.A. Villanueva
34. Papal Fire (Papa Lux) by Nick Feia
Addendum to "Laughing, Clapping ..." and, More Specifically, to the Stalinist-Applause Anecdote by Lawrence Weschler
35. Disseminations: Internet, Dandelions, Flight Paths by Sarah Daegling
36. Black and White and in Color by Walter Murch
Carnival of Convergences No. 5
Lee Friedlander's Visionary Trees: An Addendum to the Last Chapters of Everything That Rises by Lawrence Weschler
37. Shipwrecked Desperation by Charles Mudede via Matt Haber
38. Life Forms by Ariel Winter
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