Not every woman is believed,
Not every man’s a lout.
But bend the narrative and lie
And then you’ll have some clout.
Science is not prophecy
Wisdom’s not for sale,
And you can smell the bias
In every journo’s tale.
A watershed has happened
A seismic shift’s at hand.
Wake up and pray the coffee
Or weep throughout the land.
Groupthink’s not forgiveness
Only God gives right.
So while you breathe you’d best wise up
And come into His light, for:
The Spirit and the Bride say come.
In a New York magazine I recently read this statement: “We remain human beings… and we orient ourselves in time, looking forward to the future. When that future has been suspended, humans come undone.”
And this report is even sadder.
I will say here what the writer of the first article said, and what the Doctor in the 2nd article surely felt: “I began to loose it this week”. I echo his words; my heart grieves. The time is getting long and longer. You know it also; it weighs on all our hearts.
Several years ago, August 2011 to be exact, I was sitting in this very same house when a rolling quake went up the entire Appalachian chain. And, with incredibly no loss of life, it yet put a visible crack into the pinnacle of the Washington monument, 400 miles away. A few weeks later after that quake, in a remarkable set of unplanned circumstances, I was to stand in front of that monument, observing with my own two eyes the crack on its top. For me: the quake experience and that subsequent sight was a serious sign. When my house jolted, when my ceiling fan started to wildly wobble, these words of Jesus came fast into my head: “But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs”
Birth pangs. I remember when I was in my own first labor, when a nurse on the next shift came in and pronounced something about her expectation as to the length of my transition. My body hadn’t done this before; we did not know. But this nurse’s glib assumption, turned out to be incorrect. The signs were obvious, but the timing was not. And here’s the substance: the birth did happen; and in the end, that was what mattered. A couple years later, when labor commenced with our second child, the early signs were now familiar. Previous experience had prepared me, but it was no less ominous — for once that progression started, I knew I would not be able to stop it, no matter how long it took. That recognition was the worst part of the entire birthing — more than the physical pain, was that sense of control loss. The process was hard; the result was sure. We’re in a time like that now and I recognize it.
Labor is a sign, and signs are only that: they point to something else, which is much more substantive. Signs signify, but they are not the true event: only the preparation for it. A red hexagonal metal stand with the letters STOP is not the intersection but rather the warning before that place. Small earthquakes are not “the big one” but rather an indicator of others coming. Labor pains are not the birth, but the necessary movement toward that event. Are my eyes on the prize or on the pain toward getting there?
We’re all in a certain labor, and many feel it worse than I do. But I had a sense of the weight of it this week; it put me under for some hours. It reminded me of the glib words of the nurse who did not know my time and made a false prediction. When it comes to whatever is ahead, best be sure, and that’s why Jesus’ words catch my attention. I feel we’re on a moving train, like a progressing labor, and we simply can’t get off. Something is coming ahead, and being prepared is only wise.
JRR Tolkein said “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one.” But hold this in your heart: the dragon is not the Signifier. That Signifier we await has authority over the dragon, over any virus, over my sinking heart.
What is settling out as newly evident to you as you hold this tension, as lesser things hold less value? What is it you are trusting?
For me, it does not end here. My future may be somewhat certainly suspended, but temporal expectations are not my end; I am loathe to make something tangible here my end. I am going to hang on until the promised birth, if God gives me the grace to do so.
I image an older piece here entitled “The Valley of Achor” taken from Hosea’s words for holding on and for looking ahead. The prophets all spoke of the Signifier.
Most our lives we’ve moved right along to “the next thing”: school assignments, testing dates, graduations, interviews and invitations. Labor pains have led to births, births to nursing, to raising, to cheering and teaching, then finally to letting them go. Then doing that again alongside others. Both my husband and I are “to do list” people, and so this stay at home order has been good for getting simpler things done which have long missed our lists. We’ve taken walks on the empty campus near our home and marveled at the sprouting of spring. He has taught himself how to tie his own flys between zoom calls, and I have created an online story time with two of our grands as part of their homeschool. The attic has been cleaned out, and now my studio. Never in 70 years have we had to consider what to do with paused time. How has it been for you? We are mindfully grateful that we are not stuck in an apartment in some dense city, nor in the Congo where our friend tells us people are much more scared: where hunger at home is challenged by danger outside. Being older, we’ve been urged by our daughter who works in a hospital emergency department to “stay home!” But all of us, around the globe, no matter circumstance, have been given poignant pause to weigh “what do I do now?”
Pauses have a way of reaching us where the pace of normality never did, and never could.
I recently taught a Bible study on Revelation, and it is startlingly noteworthy that midst the horrors that sequence through that prophecy, there are valuable pauses. All heaven seems to wait while those on earth decide what it is they are going to do. In that I find a great sign of mercy. The time we have now is mercy. We’re all quite good at numbing ourselves through things just to get to “the next thing”; maybe that’s a mercy too, but easily we miss a lot that’s important when we do.
I highlight a famous Baroque painting by the Italian dramatist Caravaggio. We studied this up close at the National Gallery in London in 2012. I had always wanted to see it, for it portrays in theatrical fashion the moment when Jesus (yet unrecognized by his fellow travelers) breaks bread at the table. They’ve been clueless as to who it is they have been traveling with in their distracted sorrow. Try to get past the early 17th century garb and the insipid looking Jesus and place yourself at that table as Caravaggio intended. There is a place for you there. And it was only in that pause — in the tearing apart of what was common and basic, that the strangers finally understood who was sitting right there next to them. The real Jesus is still looking to join you where you sit too. Will you take the pause you have and allow Him?
“The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding; and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly, as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky.”
Quoted here is a section from Flannery O’Connor’s 1st novel “Wise Blood”, in which the writer uses her weird characters as darkish foils to prod the reader into considering timeless things. O’Connor was a brilliant and lonely critic of secularism’s vacuity; she considered modernism naïve. And like Jesus, her harshest stories called out religious emptiness. How would she be illustrating the bigger story for us now? O’Connor would be a good one to read if fiction is a way into your heart, for our world is changing and we need to get a grip on what it is that is truly mooring us.
You wont find what anchor’s your soul in the material world. How can I make such an assertion? I’ve lived enough life; I’ve read the best “good book”; and I know how it ends. If non-fiction is a better way in for you, this is time tested. Meanwhile the National Geographic arrived this week. It is expensively produced, in a ying/yang edition titled “How We Saved the World”, or from back to front “How We Lost the Planet”. Take your pick; they’re giving us only two options. One would think such an organization committed to the earth would offer a few words of acknowledgement to earth’s Maker. But no. And, they admit: they don’t know the future. Only the One who hears prayer does.
The image I post today fits right along with O’Connor’s description, as she teases the imagination higher. Here’s another look-up for you. I’ve had the texture and the hues on this oil panel for some months, but I could not resolve the whole satisfactorily. Then suddenly I realized I needed to give it a window beyond the morass of the now. Voila!
The cries are reverberating out the windows of tall apartment buildings in Wuhan. And video is filtering out worldwide. Their pleadings are meant to be encouragement to fellow Chinese in this quarantined city of 11 million people. “Add more oil!” is a figure of speech, immediately understood in a culture that excels in creative stir-fry. One always adds oil to enhance the dish and to keep the vegetables from burning. “Add oil” is similar to what we would mean when saying in English “hang tough”, or “you can do it”. Can we? Can they? Is a shouted pep talk into the air enough?
What does one do when locked in at home, when supplies including oil and everything else are dwindling, when the hospitals are filled and dangerous? I am not frightened. I am rightly concerned. And I have been thinking for a while now about how to help newbies learn how to pray. For we need to know.
Here’s one true statement: Everyone prays. At least once in each life there is a desperate instinctual cry that goes up into thin air. Don’t tell me it’s not true. You already know it is. And if you don’t know this, you will.
Here’s another true statement: Not every prayer is effectively ‘talking to somebody’. Some cries are hopeless castings to the wind. Would you know the difference?
Still reading? If prayer is what we do, even if last resort, would it not be important to take time now to learn to do it effectively? Are random shouts out a window accomplishing much besides some attempt to hearten other citizens? Is there such a thing as really talking into God’s ear? And if there is, how does one do that even with just a whisper?
There is warning that Jesus told about this very thing. It has to do with adding oil.
After a concerned listing of signs, detailing what the end will be like before His return, Jesus eases the gravity of the situation by switching to a couple stories to emphasize their need to “be alert”. In one he paints with words a familiar Judean scene of maidens awaiting the bridegroom. The time gets long into the dark night of Jesus’ story, and when the groom finally arrives the maidens arise from sleep and trim their lamps. But the critical point of the story gets revealed at this point. Only some of the maidens were prepared with oil. In the immediacy of their need, certain ones cry out to others: “give us some of your oil!” But the prepared maidens give answer: they cannot share; they must not. Instead they instruct the unprepared maidens to go to the source for oil themselves.
In this is the first secret of prayer: Go to the Source for the oil, and start out now.
In both the Hebrew and the Greek Scriptures, oil is a reference for the protecting, softening and sustaining spirit of the living God. He is the oil. He is the source.
The image in my post is of the Ophthalmologist who first warned of the virus which now ravages his city. He has already succumbed, but according to his own testimony, he had oil for his own lamp.
“We’re living thru a period in which we’re de-facing things…” said Oxford Philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, “we no longer see the light of the soul shining in things”. In many of his writings, Scruton argued that as cultural materialists, we’re no longer valuing ourselves (and therefore others) at the core because we don’t look face to face. “What core?” says the careless atheist. Scruton, recently deceased this month, would have countered that the immaterial part of each of us is the real lasting story. What is entirely unique in each face is a reflection of a deeper substance: the soul–which is self-conscious, multi faceted, freely distinct and making decisions even to the end of physical life. Scruton also posited that we never become real with ourselves, or known until we face another right in front of us. And further, he surmised that when one comes before the face of God, without a barrier between, that we become finally ‘in touch’ in the deepest of ways. The face is the front forward of the being, and to hide from another’s face is to devalue that one.
His words made me think of this painting. This was accomplished by an artist friend using various dilutions of coffee and crayon. The fugitive media she selected to describe her mother is itself a poignant counterpoint to the lasting depth she expresses! This was a real woman, caught in the heaviness of later life, before she passed away. Every line and wrinkle is only a marking of the deeper whole behind the skin. And because the artist faced her mom, honestly and directly, it is easy to imagine how she loved her.
This drawing may be one of the more beautiful things I have ever seen. The faces of my babies were certainly most beautiful in their purity, but this face shows the struggle of time. There is something accomplished here in the drawing that stops me. Scruton described it as: “The arrest of the self by the confrontation of beauty, the significance of tragedy…we’re taken up by it”
My work, and my skill sets are entirely different than what this artist accomplished. But Scruton’s words challenge me about elucidating some way into beauty, combined with the truth of tragedy in a way that takes others up also. It’s a matter of facing the Face.
I’m noticing the direction and the repeated rhythms in line work. Because, where my arm wants to go with marking tools reveals where my heart has been simmering. Years back, when studying instinctive 1st marks on a surface, I realized I was chopping with vertical slashes. I was angry then, and impatient. I’d had it with waiting. I was trying to bring the action down. (Woe to anyone who got in my way, aren’t you relieved I’m not God?). And interestingly, at the very same time I was finding how important, how necessary the horizontals were also: for rest, for balance, for compositional completion. You can see one example of a horizontal which remains in the background of my entire website.
The direction of line work is the skeleton of a piece; it informs. The line work tells something about the aim or the mood of the work. Lately, for me, 1st marks are often diagonals. Now if I make this into a formula, or a pre-planned aspect the work will suffer but there is something really interesting in the tension that diagonals bring. In any work diagonals suggest potential or possible instability. Such marks seem fitting for the time we’re in. I insert here a segment of a recent work called “Boone Lake Down” so you can see one example.
Especially when considering non-objective, non-literal work, the direction of the lines give clues as to the artist’s intention. When literal words can’t express, the lines offer calligraphic hints. Someone named Ali I encountered on Instagram says on his bio clip that “As the world becomes more scary, art becomes more abstract.” Indeed. We reach for the mystical when what is around us cant be named. In fact, the birth of Abstraction in the Western art world came out of the publicly revealed horrors after World War 2. There is a direct tie. We could no longer remain naïve. Pretty pictures were now trite. Os Guinness says in his book Unspeakable, that Auschwitz put an end to enlightenment assumptions that the world on it’s own was becoming something better.
So, given that, how are we to live in any time that we have? How to yet make meaningful work that can still hold hope? How to rest and play with those we love? It is at least by not denying, or skipping past the hard and excruciating things. But, for me hope comes when getting in sync with the rhythms heard still in our darkness. If cicadas can sing in the dark, we should be listening to what it is they are responding to, for “night unto night reveals knowledge”.
Often, I am on some kind of necessary lookout, like being a watchman.
When entering any new space, the first thing I need to see is the view through the windows and beyond the confining walls. Since I was young, the wonders in landscape have drawn my eyes outward, peering horizons. In later years, the perplexities in living have moved me to abstracting what I’m seeing and thinking. An artist I’ve encountered named Ali says on his Instagram bio that “as the world becomes more scary, art becomes more abstract”. You can see the same in the trajectory of Art History. What interests me is better expressed in simplified gesture than any ‘perfected’ semblance can communicate. This is true in all my work, no matter the media. Poetry gets closer than prose.
Just yesterday I got notice that a monotype I made in 2006 got accepted into a national juried show in Cincinnati. This museum quality gallery, called Manifest, allows earlier work submissions, saying “we do not believe great art has an expiration date. Furthermore we believe that older work gains new meaning when contextualized in a new space alongside different works by different artists. Why should an exceptional work of art cease being experienced by the public once it is just a few years old? In fact, why should it ever stop being experienced? While most work submitted to our exhibits has been made within the past five years or so, sometimes works are submitted (and accepted) that are older.”
Fortunately for me, this older piece fit their current theme nicely and got selected into a small grouping of 24 pieces out of 421 entries.
My monotype, from 2006, was made with ink and solvent painted on a sheet of Plexiglas. Rice paper was then carefully placed on top of the inked Plexi, blanketed and cranked through the pressure of a flat bed etching press. The result once the paper was peeled off the plate was a reverse image from what I had laid down. It’s a landscape, obviously, but it is also abstracted and constructed with mood even in a single color. The added element of surprise as to what the press would do to the ink, and how the composition would read in reverse was part of the risk. It was a look-out moment. The drama of the result reminded me of a favorite poem by Emily Dickinson:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—
And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—
I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.
Blasted rock face breaks off according to the composition of the material being forcibly disrupted. Some rock just crumbles at impact, like so much hardened sand. Other rock, having been deposited by volcanic flow or metamorphic heat reveals these jagged architectural planes and lines when blasted. The visible cuts un-bury the evidence of long-term history in the making of the substrate.
I have a good number of wonderful (to me) photos of cut-faces as we recently drove around Lake Superior. Since a little kid, these broken faces have always drawn my eye. All I could say was “these are beautiful!” to the casual glances of others. Now I am trying to understand why these have so magnetized my attention.
From burst photos taken in the car, then on site: en plein air, I have been drawing and begun painting — not to replicate, but to discover. This posture takes the pressure off, and opens doors for freed up investigation. For it’s not about the rock/lines/planes/color though that has captivated first. I use those as jumping off points. It’s more about the nakedness of the cuts and the beauty therein exposed. Oh to be able articulate that! It’s like this solid rock thing with its cut contrasts is a signifier of something else being expressed to me.
In his dreamy, harsh, philosophical novel “The Island of the World”, Michael O’Brien says early on that “people always seem to fall in love with the image first, never the substance…”. It’s pictures that draw us originally, but if we get hooked and we want to know, organic things can lead us so much further.
A good number of artists spend time endeavoring to go deeper, like cave artists. And ‘going in’, underneath, behind the surface of things is where so many spend dogged time. For example, the subject of “beauty” has long been recognized by artist/thinkers as having a component of fear attached to it. It’s strange but sure. It’s something really important to discover.
“Poets are dreamers, Josip. They scribble their subconscious onto paper in order to connect with food sources.” O’Brien brings in characters to help his protagonist Josip along in this search. And that’s exactly what I am doing here: connecting to some food sources of a deeper hunger.
I recently finished an autobiography of a little known Canadian artist: Emily Carr, entitled: Growing Pains. Emily was Canada’s equivalent of Mary Cassatt, at least in terms of era, European training and singular focus. But Cassatt never left us with such an articulate journaling of her struggle. I learned of Carr when in the Northwest of Canada last year. I’d already loved the amazing modernist landscapers of the Northern wilds called the Canadian Seven; but Carr’s name, or her work, is not usually included in general groupings amongst them.
To have come from the provincial west of Canada, not far removed from pioneering times — to endure the scoffing of family and the pursuit of suitors for her singular desire to study — then to travel to San Francisco, London and Paris so that she could get art training — and to live through Victorian attitudes, poor housing and bad health while working hard is Emily’s life. She was spirited, rebellious, sensitive and diligent and for a good portion of her mid-life she fell back in discouragement, running a boarding house back in British Columbia. It was later in life when she was recognized and included by Lawren Harris. He was one of the Seven, and insisted on including her in some exhibits back in eastern Canada. More important is the record of his thoughtful mentoring of her progress by mail. Her own articulate words tell this tale.
She says early on, having discovered her love of the woods as important to her voice: “sketching outdoors was a fluid process, half looking, half dreaming…as much longing as labour…these space things asked to be felt not with fingertips but with one’s whole self”. Then later after Harris’ encouragement: “…help was a little notebook I carried in my sketch sack and wrote in while intent on my subject. I tried to word in the little book what I wanted to say…I stopped grieving.” Lawren responded: these “represent vital intentions…unusually individual and (are) soaked with what you are after more than you realize…then we approach the precincts of Great Art—timeless—the Soul throughout eternity in essence.”
So, mentored myself by her words and his, I have started easing back into what I’m after in my own onging sketchbook. Here’s one recent entry.
It comes down on Monday, but if you are near Kingsport TN this weekend, there is still time to see a very good show at the Renaissance Center. The Appalachian Art Show for 2019 was juried by the Art Department curator at ETSU. She likes my work so I kind of expected to get in. But only one of my entries made it. The show this year is strong with a number of examples of really fine regional work. I was heartened that I got even one piece in once I took in all that did get selected.
What is striking in this year’s collection is the number of pieces that are ponderous and dark, with titles like “Premonition Destruction”, “A Blood Black Nothingness” and “Beauty Sleeps”. One landscape was a deep roiling sea with a lone raven searching for land. The best in show winner is Michelle O’Patrick-Ollis’ “Stage 4-Ressurecting Mama”. Her mother’s face is heavy with wistful thought, almost pressed right at yours on the picture plane. This is both honest and true, expressed with fugitive materials (coffee, conte and pastel) while recording the depth of hope that lives beyond this vanishing threshold.
Not all the work spoke so confidently. In fact, there is despair in the room. I feel it also out on the airwaves, and in hearts that I pray for. No wonder the artists are showing us this. Our days are hard and there is a foreboding sense, like a gray fog, which is moving in. Only the brave speak of it. Artists are brave ones. And sometimes they are like weather vanes, sensing the change happening before others can articulate it. Many artists seem to know “that the world is an uninhabitable place, temporary at best, the delicate balance between eternities…” as poet laureate Dana Gioia writes in The End.
Search his work and others who are not afraid to speak what they are pondering carefully while still offering the viewer some thoughtful hope, showing “what still matters”.