The Dawn Wall of Human Insight

Winter                                                      Settling Moon

 

The Dawn Wall climb completed by Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell yesterday collided with some reading I’ve been doing in a book by Arthur Danto titled, What Is Art?

In a later chapter of the book Danto referenced this work by Piero della Francesca, painted in 1460, “The Resurrection.” I knew the painting so the image immediately floated into consciousness and attached itself to Caldwell and Jorgeson emerging at the top of the Dawn Wall, a climb realized by using only their hands and feet. Ropes attached to them were there only to prevent a fatal fall, otherwise this was a human powered, human body only effort.

In Francesca’s painting the human body has failed the guards placed at the tomb. They were there to prevent grave robbers from stealing Jesus’ body and declaring him resurrected. But they fell asleep. Even with the guards asleep it takes a supernatural force to circumvent the tomb.

This all occurs, as we can tell from the pale light creeping up over the hills on the painting’s horizon, at dawn. Countless are the number of sunrise services held to celebrate just this moment.

Coldwell and Jorgeson started at the base of El Capitan on its face that has greeted that same rising sun for aeons, at least 100 million years. Imagine their climb as the literal embodiment of the human spirit rising, on its own terms, to the top, to the summit, of this wall that celebrates the rising sun, the first time this wall has been climbed using hands and feet in 100 million years.

Now imagine El Capitan as the sheer rock face of our human attempt to understand this absurd world into which we were thrown at birth and let the summit represent adequate insight into that question, adequate to guide a life.  Supernatural metaphysics posited that we humans must hoist ourselves to the top using pitons and ropes supplied by the supernatural being of our choice. In this analogy Caldwell and Jorgeson represent the humanist, the pagan free-climbing the Dawn Wall of human insight, using only the tools granted to them at birth.

It was this notion that flashed across my mind when reading Danto and considering their feat. Their emergence at the summit of the Dawn Wall overlaid Francesca’s beautiful painting, putting these two climbers in the place of the risen Jesus while blinkered humanity lay asleep below or clung to the cliff tangled up in the ropes of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity.