an offering today. from one of the wisest women I know (though she too, as a daughter of Eve was being held captive. . . for a time). Here is how her heart reached for what she knew was beyond her cell:
“Estranged from Beauty-none can be-
For beauty is Infinity-
And power to be finite ceased
Before Identity was leased.
Emily Dickinson, #147
This past weekend, I was at a conference in Oklahoma City. Having never been there, I hoped there might be a chance to see the memorial at the place of the horrible bombing that happened in their downtown in 1995. I saw an image of the site in the airport, but then the rest of our time was cloistered in a hotel some distance from where the Murrah building once stood, where the memorial remains. Death and its markers both draw and repulse me. There is something very big about this always: deep, brooding meaning that requires a direct and lingering look for understanding.
But this morning, back to the airport I had to go in the hotel shuttle. I asked the elderly Hispanic driver, who has called OK City home for 30 years, what it was like for him that day. He told me where he was, and how he felt: both the literal blast and then the emotional aftershock. There was injury upon injury as assumptions and then facts came in. Rumors flew wildly in the first hours, and someone thought the bomber had to be Hispanic. “We were all very sad,” he said, speaking for every person in the city. 19 babies died that day senselessly, and 149 adults had their lives blasted away by one evil action.
I asked my driver to tell me about the memorial. He said softly “it is so beautiful. . . it is so beautiful.” I am still pondering his response. The images I have seen of the chair-like structures in the space have never struck me as beautiful, aesthetically or even as an idea. There needs to be a way to mark it certainly, and to represent each life stolen. He described how there are trees and lovely landscaping all around the site now, and at night there is light emanating from every chair base. These descriptions maybe explain his response, but I think there has to be something far deeper in what he said: “it is so beautiful. . . ”
He says it in pain and in release, in wonder and in incompleteness of understanding. What a wonder it is, that beauty can be strong enough to be a balm for grief, that it even can begin to heal after such wonton evil. This is mystery.
That nothing is entirely original has been a subject of interest for years. All ideas, all artwork, all the best of everything that we call “original” is yet derived from things that have preceded it. Every maker of things himself has a history, influences and experiences that set context, and which are partly directive toward what he does that is “new.” The materials he uses were already in existence before he picks them up. In an absolute sense, artists are really only creative re-arrangers. One teacher I had once said that the word “original” has its root in the word and the concept out of origin. Therefore, for something to be “original” it needs to come out of precursors; it is derived from something that went before. Postmodern theory has taken this face on: admitting and highlighting imitation to the point of parody: making “art” that is simply a tongue-in-cheek hogepodge/borrowing in an outright effort to mock that anything could be original, that there even could ever be such a real thing as “art.” In the purest sense, its true: nothing stands alone therefore as truly original, except the very first cause. This is liberating actually. I am a good re-arranger. I am not able to make things out of nothing. There is only One I know who does that.
A short while ago we were in a big Chinese city on Easter Sunday. That day not being any special Holiday there, we were a little out of our element, and missed what we would have been doing at home to welcome the day of original first things, of creative emergence out of death. So my husband and I got up early and walked around taking pictures of the blooming trees. We found others responding the same way. People celebrate when they know they are looking at something wonderful and new, even when it is something they’ve seen the year before. We have so many of these lovely shots, recording the display of color and emergence and beauty. The pixels only remind me of the live moment. This is not pastiche: a patched together borrowing of other things (well, the blooms are not, the building behind it, that’s another story). These lovely blooms are not parody, or the man and his friend in the wheel chair would not be finding delight on the sidewalk. This is simplicity and loveliness and it just sits there waiting to see if anyone notices.
Since I first saw some of his work several years ago, I have been interested in Arthur Dove. Then later, in graduate school I looked at him more seriously and was amazed at the confluence of reasons that explained more as to why his work would/should interest me. He was a graduate of my same alma mater, he worked in Long Island, he was gentle and like a “babe in the woods” amongst the effetes of his time, yet he loved them as well as needed them. . . the listing goes on. Yet his visual work drew me in first, before I was aware of those other things. He was an American modernist who was serious, serious in his desire to use abstract language, rooted in that which is natural, to speak to that which is way beyond the natural.
There is a piece of his I saw at the Phillips collection in DC (how I got there is another wild and crazy story, I was actually thinking I was going to Beijing with my husband that day and ended up at the Phillips collection in DuPont Circle). This piece stopped me. Maybe it was not the reason I got detoured in DC, but it became one of the reasons. Without even knowing it’s intended meaning it had a rich resonance for me. Dove called it “Rain or Snow” which confirmed what I was thinking. He was both indefinite and also clear in this title: it was some kind of falling, but it was a falling. And it is slow, measured and sadly beautiful. It was done in 1943. Think about what was happening then in the world of 1943, just pause and think about it! This also is 3 years from Dove’s own death and he was not well. But look at his gentle voice. wow.
I did a piece in 2005 that surprises me for its similarity to Dove’s work here. By the way, I can say that I am pretty sure I had not seen this particular Dove piece before this last month. It really did surprise me. My own piece is hanging right now at a gallery in Philadelphia. Mine is called “Lingering Moments.” It too is about a slow falling. It too involves pain and love, urgency frozen in a slow-motion moment.
As I write this, it is the 11th day of the 11th month at least in the way we count time.
My sense of things remains suspended like this ink work. There is beauty here (that I can say happened in spite of and way beyond intention and ability), but the beauty is wrenching and urgent. I think it is beckoning too. This is my sense of what happened on that piece of paper and what is happening even right now.
I saw something last night that caused tears to just stream down my face. It was somberly, maybe one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. The whole day was somber, the 10th anniversary of 9/11. This date is now a euphemism for what we still can hardly grasp – that our nation came under attack by 19 men, driven by some kind of hateful ideology that could justify their driving planes full of innocent men, women and children at high speed, full of fuel, into some of our iconic landmarks. I lived not too far from NYC then, I remember the incalculable shock as events unfolded quickly. I remember when the towers INCREDIBLY collapsed, and the aching realization that thousands and thousands of souls were turned to dust in seconds. This is still unimaginable to me.
Those towers were a part of my own life. I toured the 78th floor in college, wearing a hard hat with a team sponsored by the Port Authority, for a project we were doing to design the space on that floor. My twin girls dressed up as the twin towers one Halloween. My husband and I celebrated our 10th anniversary at the Windows on the World restaurant in the North tower. We would often take visitors to see these amazing buildings. If you were close to them you could not see their size for how hard it was to crane your neck directly up to see such height. One needs to understand these buildings were packed with offices and people on twin levels of 110 floors each! Estimates are that at capacity these buildings held between 10-25,000 people each on a working day. This is what I was thinking about as the towers pancaked into dust and ash. It is absolutely incredible then that the actual death toll in those two towers, not counting the firemen who came inside, was only just over 2000! We don’t celebrate this number as we do not and cannot celebrate this day, but it is important to mark it. It is crucial to try to understand what events like this can teach us. There were several things we did yesterday and contemplated yesterday that helped us to piece together some meaning from such wanton evil. Yes, evil, and we are naïve to think it could be called anything else but what it is.
What tuned and melted my heart yesterday, however, was a program I saw at the end of the day. On it was a slide show of images. Dianne Sawyer has been apparently marking each year since our 9/11 by gathering the babies born to widows, most of them the widows of the brave firefighters who ran into the buildings. Over 3000 children lost their fathers this sad day. What ABC had done was to quietly show, one after another, photos of the fathers and their 10 year old children. There on their faces is a mark of connection. These children never knew their Dads, but their faces show their Dads. This is such a picture, in varying kinds of uniqueneses of what it means to be “in the image of my father.” These Dads are gone, but their children carry them in their own DNA. It is a most beautiful thing.
My soul knew it before my mind even understood. My body responded before I knew what was happening. This was beauty, and beauty often carries such an ache of recognition and longing.
Vincent Van Gogh said in one of his letters to his brother, that ‘the greatest artist is the one who works in human flesh.’ I have often thought of this, for it is true. We can’t do this kind of art, but the One who said that we all are “made in His image” can and He does.
I have thoughts that roll around and confound me both before and while I work. (Robert Motherwell said, “When I am thinking, I am working”). And one of the things that really interests me is this illusive thing we have named Beauty.
I remember once walking along on a cold sidewalk, heading somewhere, with some plan in my head. On my left was this ordinary bush. The sidewalk actually went around it. I happened to look up at this rather obtrusive dark green thing, and suddenly was caught to a dead stop. For there were these delicate clusters of tiny silvery-blue orbs all over this thing. They were astounding, and so winsome, and they brought me to tears, right there in the cold.
Here is a photo I took this last month, while at a meal with some friends. A Chinese radish had been carved to reveal this delicate surprise. It too was winsome. And inviting, It is made of just the common stuff from a garden, and yet it has been made with care, and anticipation, and just joy! Maybe the crafting of beauty is just like this. We start with the stuff that’s just hanging around us, but there is a remaking with anticipation and delight. And the result is so much bigger than the crafter can even know.
Beauty is not the meal, but it leads me to the meal. Beauty is like an usher, a silent gentleman who offers his arm. I am at the back of some important gathering, and I am not sure that I am dressed right, or not sure where I should sit. I am worried that I have arrived too late, I am thinking about all this mundane stuff. But beauty comes up alongside me with welcome on his face, and he ushers me in.
Beauty humbles me, and yet it does not win my humility with dominating power. It captivates me by it’s profound and winsome silence. And there is this mysterious ache I am left with after an encounter with beauty, that there is more coming.