Week 3: You Are My Sunshine

Pencil, gesso, and collage on paper. 9" x 9".

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine/
You make me happy when skies are grey/
You'll never know dear, how much I love you/
Please don't take my sunshine away.

This singalong that's played out at millions of church camp campfires, this lullaby that's been sung to untold numbers of small American children, has a darkness lurking under its surface. Like America itself, the song is about love and joy, but simultaneously also about fear and obsession.

The song writer, Jimmie Davis, speaks of having a dream in which he holds his beloved, only to wake up alone, surprised not to find her there next to him, and sprinkles the remainder of the song with suggestions of the despair that the loss of this person has brought about for him:

You told me once dear, you really loved me/
And no one else could come between/
But now you've left me and you love another/
And you have shattered all my dreams!

I'll always love you and make you happy/
If you will only say the same/
But if you leave me to love another/
You'll regret it all some day.

For this week, Tony emphasized that we should connect our personal streams of thought and feeling with the cultural. Whereas my post last week was pretty personal, this time I felt the need to drill into a reading of the song that is about our broader situation here in the United States.

The photo mounted on the drawing that I made this week was taken in the mid-20th century here at UC Berkeley. I found it on a poster hanging in the architecture building, which was advertising an event being hosted here in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the invention of the atomic bomb. The men in the photo are nuclear physicists who are manipulating some sort of control panel. When I found the photo, I was taken with these guys' wonderful grins, particularly that of the guy on the right. 

With the benefit of hindsight, reasonable people living today can agree that discoveries in nuclear physics have helped bring about immense suffering. Depending on when this photo was taken, these men may or may not have understood the enormity of what they were doing. Whatever they knew, this photo suggests that they got some serious boyish delight out of their control panel. It was their sunshine.