To Ascend the Jagged Peaks

Feb 27

Air so skinny you’d swear you can see molecules straining to brush up against one another

Sound meanders lackadaisically up here,its waves palpable as they echo and undulate through the atmosphere

Your feet, aching and sure, firmly planted on unlikely earth

From your perch, the pulse and rhythm of the world belowdances in patternstopography and design laid bare and glorious

Happy New Year!
あけましておめでとうございます 2020!

I realize that already wished everyone a Happy New Year a pair of posts ago, but since the Eto pieces are, in part, about new beginnings, I feel obligated to wish again. The hitch is that it is not January. Or even the beginning of February.

After a little research, I have discovered that, during the middle ages, some European calendars rang in the new year on March 1st (and still others, March 25th) for…reasons. As a pragmatic free thinker who is loathe to admit mistakes, I’m going to pretend that celebrating on 3•1•2020 was my plan all along.

I was well served by this obstinacy when working on To Ascend the Jagged Peaks, the ram (or sheep if you prefer cuddly to rugged perseverance) for my Eto collection.

A digression.

It seems that there are a bunch of animal-inspired synonyms for stubborn: dogged, bullheaded, mulish, pigheaded. I think the curly-horned, cloven-hoofed, mountain peak-scaling critter deserves an adjective. Don’t even talk to me about “sheepish” - one with a positive connotation. Something that reflects its determination, its sheer inability to accept defeat, whether it be from the angry elements or a hard-headed adversary.

Another Linguistic digression.

In both Chinese and Japanese, there are separate characters used to indicate the zodiac sign 「未」and the corporeal animal 「羊」. In the Chinese language, these characters don’t differentiate between sheep, ram, goats, or even gazelle, although the country seems to lean towards goats. Japanese, however, does, with 「羊」”hitsuji” being a sheep and 「山羊」 ”yagi” being a goat (literally a “mountain sheep”). So, the Japanese zodiac character is unequivocally a sheep. Quite often an adorably fluffy sheep. I’ve chosen the ram because…I like it. Sheep felt too cuddly for what I wanted to depict, and I just don’t feel any kinship with goats. I’m fascinated by the travails of translating between languages and cultures. Without intent, meaning twists and transforms because the cultural underpinnings of one language don’t exist in another. I’m fairly convinced this phenomenon exists on the individual level, within the same culture - even a word as basic as “green” conjures different shades in my mind and yours. And that’s without even getting into the physiology of how the human body works to interpret the world. Anyway, that’s a rabbit hole to dive down another day. This site walks through the etymology better than I can hope to.

When sketching, I was drawn to the animal’s perseverance and resilience. Along with that ruggedness often comes solitude, the yearning to be alone, even when that disconnect can hurt.

I imagine this particular ram at the very pinnacle of the world, the crescendo of all terrestrial creation, calmly observing the flurried movements far below.

The horns echo this rhythm, the crescendos and troughs of sound, music, blood, life. The flow of all things. They are inspired by visualizations of sound waves, and EKG patterns, and the astonishing number of things that reverberate throughout our atmosphere at any frequency.