1- Tallulah "Tallu" Fish Scott

Jekyll Island's first historian and archivist, she grew up in Waycross, a small town in southeast Georgia. She is the first editor of the Democratic Women's Journal of Kentucky after graduating from journalism school. "Indian Mound Cottage, once owned by William Rockefeller, was declared a museum in 1947 by the Georgia State Parks Department. However, it was not without Miss Fish's determination that the museum came into its own in 1954. She has been the founder and curator of the Jekyll Island Museum until her death in August 1971. Her contribution to the extraordinary dimension of this island is truly considerable.  https://www.jekyllisland.com/magazine/holding-on-to-the-magic/ 

​

2- Martin Luther King (1929 - 1968)  

Born in Atlanta, the capital of Georgia, Dr. Martin Luther King came from a family of pastors and benefited from a rather favorable social background. In 1954, he became a Baptist minister in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1955, he led the movement in support of Rosa Parks (his female alter ego), who had been arrested by the police for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. He called for a boycott of the city's bus company. Despite intimidation, the boycott lasted a year until the Supreme Court ruled against the bus company.

The media impact of this victory led Martin Luther King to found the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) with other leading black figures, and to become its president. An advocate of non-violence, he decided to extend the struggle for black civil rights to the whole of the United States.

Inspired by Henri-David Thoreau (1817-1862), author of Civil Disobedience, and an admirer of Gandhi (1869-1948), Martin Luther King travelled to India in 1959 to deepen his knowledge of Satyagraha, Gandhi's principles.

In 1963, he led major campaigns for civil rights, black suffrage, an end to segregation and better education. He was arrested on several occasions. In his "I have a dream" speech on August 28, 1963, to 250,000 people, he called for a country where all men would share the same rights in justice and peace. The violence of the police and the harassment of segregationists in the face of peaceful struggles generated a wave of public sympathy for the civil rights movement.

In 1964, Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, making him the youngest recipient ever. Most of the rights he campaigned for were passed into law with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1967, he declared his opposition to the war in Vietnam, believing that the United States was "occupying the country like an American colony". He became involved in the fight against poverty, organizing the "Poor People's Campaign" to tackle issues of social and economic justice.

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​
 

Martin Luther King was assassinated by a white segregationist on April 4, 1968 in Memphis while supporting a garbage strike. Equal rights, freedom of expression and the brotherhood of peoples are under assault and jeopardized by a handful of corrupt enemies who have won their power through money, their absolute goal. Isn't money the worst and most dangerous of all human inventions, when it is no longer a means to an end, but the end of all things? Humanism remains a virtue to be constantly nurtured. We, the people, are an immense force not to be underestimated when we are not divided by material contingencies and lies disguised as truths. Freedom is life, security is survival.

​

3- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) 

Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935: "All modern American literature comes from a book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." According to Howells (My Mark Twain - 1910), Twain's significance was ostensibly social - the humorist spoke to and for man and woman, ordinary Americans; he emancipated and honored the speech and manners of a class of people largely neglected by writers (except as objects of amusement or disapproval) and largely ignored by genteel America. A humorist of great repute, but also a public moralist, popular artist, political philosopher, travel writer and novelist, he is definitely unmissable.

​

4- William Blake (1757 - 1827)  

Time has done justice to this British genius who, long considered a madman, was the immense poet, engraver and visionary we know - an eternal child, as much as an eternal "primitive" whose imaginative ardor, lyricism and violence condemned him to posthumous fame. A self-taught man, Blake denounced the tyrannical reason of the philosophers and was passionate about revolution. His admirations are as significant as his rejections. He prefigured some of the main thrusts of Romanticism, and had a taste for some of its great intercessors: Swedenborg, Shakespeare and Dürer. A powerful inner life and a mysterious, disarming simplicity guide his arm. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), a prophetic work in which he proclaims the unity of Good and Evil with the question of the role of "energy" animating each of us - "energy is eternal joy", he writes. He attacks prudence and calculation in the name of self-fulfillment, reconciling desire, wisdom and reason. Since both love and hate are necessary to life, it is the clash of opposites that gives rise to the creative force and progress of the individual being. He thus contrasts reason with intuitive vision, which he prefers.

William Blake was born and died in London. His father, a modest hosier, didn't force any primary education on him, but taught him drawing at an early age, followed by the engraving trade that was to remain his for the rest of his life. In 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, an almost illiterate young woman whom he introduced to his profession, and who remained a patient and devoted supporter to the end. In 1787, he lost his beloved brother Robert. It seems that Blake never resigned himself to this death, and that it triggered in him not only hallucinations, to which he had been predisposed since childhood, but above all a prodigious creative and visionary power that was never to abandon him. His first poems, Poetical Sketches, were published in booklet form in 1783. Beginning in 1788, he engraved his texts and illustrations himself, coloring them one by one with his wife as orders came in. But buyers were few and far between. Blake thus found himself stubbornly doomed to solitude and poverty. Day by day, and thanks to the solicitude of a few faithful friends, he provided for himself and his wife (the couple remained childless).

Heir to the non-conformist tradition, Blake spent some time in the pro-revolutionary circles of Paine, Godwin and Priestley, and never betrayed their ideals, despite history's denial of the impetus behind his First Prophetic Books.  In the second half of his life, he withdrew further into his inner world, exploring it in depth in his Second Prophetic Books, definitively relegating to the category of myth the apocalypse he had thought he glimpsed in the American and French revolutions. During his lifetime, he received the recognition of only a few disciples, who commissioned his last great graphic works and preserved the memory and spiritual legacy of their master. It was in the next generation that Gilchrist's biography of Blake (1863) and Swinburne's enthusiastic study (1868) succeeded in arousing an ever-growing interest in this singular genius" (quotes Robert Paul), as witnessed by this magnificent address:

"The Blake aster sparkles in that secluded region of the sky where the Lautréamont aster also shines. A radiant Lucifer, his rays cover the wretched and glorious bodies of men and women with an unusual brilliance", écrit si inspiré et reconnaissant André Gide.

"Blake's thought is entirely oriented by the vision of a lost unity to be reconquered, capturing man in his dual identity as creature and creator, in the tension between the finitude of his existence and the divinity of his being. Blake's man is freed from the moral guilt of his fall. If he is fallen, a prisoner of his senses, of space and time, it is because the world is itself fallen, because the Fall was nothing other than Creation: the fall not of a man but of God, or rather of the God-Man. For Blake, God exists only in and through man; he is human in essence; and man is only a god who wanted to be God alone, imposing on himself the solitude and shackles of divided existence. It is up to man to open himself anew to the fullness of the divine that he carries within himself" (...) quotes Robert Paul.

"The essence of his doctrine: the will to reconcile man with his desire, revolutionary politics and libertarian morality, the critique of rationalism, the valorization of the oneiric mode of thought and the "inner model" in art, and above all the hope of reaching, through the unlimited exercise of the imagination, that "supreme point" where opposites "cease to be perceived as contradictory", wrote André Breton. 

​

​

5- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson is not only the leader of an original school of thought: transcendentalism, which holds that man can transcend himself through contact with nature. He is also considered the father of American philosophy. Born in Boston, the son of a long line of pastors and a future pastor himself, he settled in Concord, Massachusetts, after studying at the young Harvard University, and freed himself from the intellectual heritage imposed by the English and the Old Continent to develop an original philosophy.

Three journeys to Europe, fruitful encounters with English authors such as the poet Thomas Carlyle and the philosopher John Stuart Mill, strengthened his conviction that American thought must become autonomous. He set about sharing this conviction, giving over 1,500 public lectures during his lifetime, which took him as far afield as California and Canada. In his best-known work, Nature (1836), he invited his contemporaries to base philosophy "on intuition and not on tradition", experiencing "the joy of an original relationship with the universe" - this is precisely what I feel to have experienced on Driftwood Beach - Thanks to its immense landscapes, America offers the opportunity to take a new look at the world, once you realize that "none of them owns the landscape. There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet." But you have to learn to experience this view in solitude, by getting "out of your room as well as out of society". This advice was soon put into practice by Emerson's most famous disciple: Henry David Thoreau (who also inspired M.L.King), who isolated himself in a cabin for two years to experience the untouched wilderness that industrialism is bent on destroying. But if Emerson, like Goethe, whose works he appreciated, believed that nature is silent under torture and must be admired in order to be understood, he was not content to preach isolation in the woods in the manner of the Romantics. In a famous speech, The American Scholar (1837), he sketched the portrait of the "American intellectual", urging young people not only to love nature, but to cultivate themselves and, above all, to have the self-confidence to forge their own style. To do this, they must not hesitate to take action, to explore "the familiar, the common because colleges and books only imitate the language of fields and lands."

Immensely cultured, a pleasure to read, an admirer of Montaigne and admired by Nietzsche, who loved his "benevolent, witty gaiety that disarms seriousness", Emerson sought to embody a certain ideal of wisdom based on the simplicity and joy of existence. An ideal he pursued until his death, despite the trials of life - such as the loss of his first wife and then of his son, who died of scarlet fever in 1842, a brutal event that inspired his essay Experience (1844), or the fire in his house, where some of his writings burned. In the United States, he was nicknamed " The Sage of Concord." Extrait de https://www.philomag.com/philosophes/ralph-waldo-emerson

​

6- Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

She defends a universalist conception of humanity and feminism: 
Why are men and women so different? After all, we're all human beings, with the same questions and doubts. Both sexes should therefore relate in the same way to the world, to things, and to the people around them. Yet this is not the case. This is the question posed by the woman whose father said as a child that she had "a man's soul", and who remains one of the major figures of French existentialism and feminism. 

Born into a middle-class family in 1908, her childhood was marked by a strict, catholic and conformist upbringing, which confined her to her role as a girl, and an irrepressible thirst for freedom and knowledge, which she quenched with brilliant studies, particularly in philosophy (at the age of 21, she became the youngest "agrégée" in France) - of which she became a professor. By the time she left teaching to devote herself to writing, she had already published several essays and novels. She never stopped writing fiction, and in 1954, she won the Prix Goncourt for her book Les Mandarins.

Simone de Beauvoir's work is often associated with that of Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she had a legendary lifelong relationship as lover, friend and intellectual. Beauvoir achieved worldwide fame with the publication of Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949. In it, she produced an almost encyclopedic analysis of the situation of women through the prism of existentialism, drawing on literary, historical, biological, sociological and even medical references. Her initial observation is simple: while man is considered an absolute and necessary being, woman is defined as a relative and contingent being. " Extrait de : https://www.philomag.com/philosophes/simone-de-beauvoir 

She so aptly declared, "a free woman is exactly the opposite of an easy woman."

 

7- David Lynch 

Born in Montana in 1946, he became a director, scriptwriter, producer, actor, musician, photographer and painter. His obscure, offbeat, abstract and unconventional style began to assert itself in his first black-and-white feature, Eraserhead (1976), a nightmare film in which the central character sees his partner give birth to a deformed child. David Lynch has declared: "All my films are dreams." His message is that as long as dreams exist, cinema continues to exist. "Where are we?" and "Who are we?" appear to be the two omnipresent questions the director asks us, and which encircle his entire filmography. Lynch plays with conformist codes and slaps American self-righteousness in the face. As a student, he traveled and lived in Europe, notably Paris...

The first Twin Peaks series (1990-91) propelled me into a cinematic universe denouncing the hypocrisy of a decadent society. Flowery facades and puritanical morals hiding unmentionable facts and things. And it was his approach and artistic approach that influenced me most of all. Lynch deconstructs, always in a dreamlike process, to build something resembling our reality, stuffed with fantasies - which are carried around in the heads of neurotic people. He has created a tension in the unfolding of his films that is unmistakably his own. The musical production he creates, with his privileged partner, the composer Angelo Badalamenti, gives enormous meaning to his stories. Not forgetting those ever-present noises, such as the crack of a match at transitory moments - in a deliberately loud volume - that make his films more interesting to watch and feel. 

​

7- Paul Auster

A prolific American writer, born in 1947, he is considered a central figure on the New York cultural scene and a benchmark of postmodern literature. In 2006, he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for his body of work, and became "Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters" (french reward) in 2007. 
Paul Auster, a great Francophile, wrote articles for magazines, debuted the first versions of Voyage d'Anna Blume and Moon Palace, worked on an oil tanker, returned to France for a three-year stay (1971-1974), where he made a living from his translations (Mallarmé, Sartre, Simenon), and wrote poems and one-act plays. He published a detective novel under the pseudonym Paul Benjamin, Fausse balle.
His first major work is an autobiography, L'invention de la solitude, written after the death of his father. Smoke and Brooklyn boogie was published in 1999 and celebrates the art of living together in what the author calls "the Great People's Republic of Brooklyn", where you see any kind of races and social conditions with the tensions it can produce. 

​

​

8- Dante

A major poet of the Middle Ages, he was born in the spring of 1265 into the Florentine Alighieri family, who belonged to the Guelph faction (favorable to the Pope and opposed to the Ghibellines). This faction would have played an important role in the life of the city. Unfortunately, little is known about Dante's childhood and education. His mother died when he was 13, in 1278, and his father four years later, after having a new partner and two new children.
Dante Alighieri, known as Dante, is the author of the Divine Comedy, considered by many to be the greatest work written in Italian and one of the masterpieces of world literature. He worked on it from 1306 until his death in 1321. The "father of the Italian language" recounts the imaginary journey of the narrator who, at Virgil's invitation, enters the afterlife and travels through hell and purgatory, ending up in paradise. During his journey, he encounters numerous characters from mythology, ancient philosophers and contemporary personalities. This masterpiece is at once the story of Dante's personal journey, a manual of Christian theology, a novel of ethical and moral value, and a reflection on the search for eternal salvation. 

I found this imaginary, spiritual path on the shores of Driftwood Beach. I tried to recreate it according to the selected photographs and other Greek and Blakian mythological references.