I sit with my legs crossed at the bottom of the rusted steel drum. When I thrust my leg out, my foot bangs against the side. It makes a deep, reverberating boom that thrums up my tailbone and into my chest.

I am small, cramped inside an echoing chamber of scratched-up metal that digs against my shoulders.

Music plays from tiny holes in the drum, a lilting scrap of surf and gulls, then a deep, mournful cello.

A conch shell is suspended in the space high above my head, I imagine holding it to the curl of my ear and hearing the music.

And then the cello gets louder and amplifies inside the vessel. My private moment that should stay mine, alone, ricochets uncomfortably.

The sculpture is Radcliffe Bailey’s “Vessel”, a representation of a slave ship from the 1700s on a crossing to America. It imagines what an African slave might have experienced in the depths beneath board, lying down flat, chained, one to another, in the bottom of the hold.

They do not see light, only blackness. They tap out rhythms to communicate with one another because they speak different languages. They sing bits of verse, call and response-like.

They can only imagine the sun and the ever-raging ocean all around them, sickening, storming, killing them by the thousands.

They have no sense of where they are headed. They are certain they will die.

A good number of them break free from the shackles to run for the upper deck, to throw themselves overboard. They give up their bodies to the open sunlight, to the shimmering waves. To die free.

I sit inside this installation and cannot imagine even a fraction of the horror, the debasing and de-humanizing cruelty that they endure.

It is Good Friday, and I think about these things.

I ponder the dark, I curl up in the silo of sadness.

These days we are staying indoors, sometimes bound in echoes of anger, rumination and fear.

Like spending time in this steel barrel, the confinement can bring security and introspection and a comfort that is necessary and familiar.

We introverts can stoke our spirits, nurture our imaginations and keep on doing what we do.

We can also feel caged, frustrated, extremely anxious and depressed.

We are vessels. We are a world within ourselves, and also of another. But like the ghostly whispers in the conch, for me, I’m not always sure what is real.

So on the days when I am able, I look up. And I try to block out the noise of the media, the chaotic panic and the shallow strivings of my useless ego.

And sometimes I can see a circle of sky within a holy apse. It is cradling the moon, or a dusting of stars, or a puff of cloud.

And today, I pray beneath the dome, for things I don’t even know. For hope, for health, for family, maybe for light in the darkness of the chambers of my broken heart.

 

 

 “Vessel”

Radcliffe Bailey at The Nasher, Duke University