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Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream, 1902
(by Joyce Carol Oates) If there is a God of the Gulf it is a God of water, not waves but water, all the globe turned water pocked ris- ing and falling tireless, for- ever. Here is your story. The Bahamas, the aftermath of a storm. On the deck of a small heaving fish- ing sloop lies a Negro, superbly muscled, doomed, bucking the waves of the Gulf Stream which are china- blue, notched like the fins, tails, and teeth of white sharks following in his wake. The sloop's mast has broken off. The waves are tinged with blood. The sharks appear to be cavorting like porpoises but we know that if there is a God of the Gulf it is a God of crazed beauty and appetite, a gut with teeth, a painted form you might say like any other. Art's great terrible truth composed in brush strokes out of so many small lies. To the right of the canvas, in the back- ground, there is a funnel of water rising dreamily out of the sea to no purpose. And though on the horizon a ship has appeared- ghostly, four-masted, story- book-it cannot save the doomed man, it is irrelevant to his story. With what composure he stares off the canvas, indifferent to his fate! As if, long ago, he'd memorized all the forms of the Gulf, now it is time to forget. (from Iowa Review, Volume 17, Issue 1, 1987) |
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream
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