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.
Category Archives: brokeness
a moment in the slow fall
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.
in the image of my father
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.
in the mean time
I believe in the resurrection. It is the only reason I have such outlandish hope. The language itself tells the meaning: re- (again) + surgere (to rise). We sit today considering this, again. For recently we ‘lost’ to this life a baby who had a name and a very specific body. She looked so much like her mother, our daughter. Her very DNA was a unique weaving. Her toes, like all of her body were perfect and recognizable. Re- (again) + cognizable (to know from previous knowing). Her weight was significantly heavy, weighty, and substantive. Holding her felt like a beginning, not an end, though it was an end in time. It was a beginning too, for her weight held a tangible hope: that such a unique weaving was not made for loss alone, never to be further enjoyed; that her body was precious and held an equally precious soul. We knew her in the few hours we had. There was a knowing there that was sure, that nothing, even death can take away. Death is a thief, an enemy, a terribly mean robber. Death halts creation. But death does not have the last word.
In this mean time also there was once a down payment made, a rescue, a first fruits resurrection of an incorruptible life, a ransom made for my life and for hers. Jesus promised He would do this and then come again. He is the great re-maker. He is the only re-storer. He does not clean the slate and start over with better stuff; he takes what was damaged and makes it new again. This is why he is my champion. He is the creator. He is the re-creator. He was the first word, He is the last word, He came into mean time. He now has transcended it. There is not another like Him. He purchased my hope with His own blood. The very substance of it all is a sure sign of what is to come.
Past Present Future
Welcome to my new webpage. And thanks to my daughter Betsy, who understands computer meta codes, and put all this in place so beautifully for me. I plan to use this blogsite to record musings that relate to the visual work I do, and will do.
I had a dream last night, and in it I was finally weeping. My husband, oldest daughter and one of her childhood friends and I were cleaning up after a party in our old neighborhood. I was folding the table cloth together when it all hit me. Years of hard and earnest work were coming to an end. All there was to show, it seemed, were crumbs on the floor.
I am reminded as I ponder this now of a story that always moved me deeply. Jesus, after feeding thousands, asked his disciples to go and pick up the leftovers. And, it is recorded for us in all four gospel accounts, as if this accounting is important, that there were 12 baskets, each full of broken pieces. Why did Jesus instruct them to gather the fragments, what was there in this for them? I remember thinking once, while living in that neighborhood, that the greater miracle would be if each soul had been fully satisfied just as the last piece of bread and fish had been consumed. Why are there fragments? Why is there a mess on the ground? And why do they need to gather it? And why does it fill 12 baskets?
It seems to me in this telling that the event is not just about the present tense feeding to assuage physical hunger. They were definitely hungry- these crowds of people; Jesus felt compassion for them, and acted. But there was more He was doing there, and the disciples would not understand it until later. This story for me has held an aching wonder. Those piles of broken pieces, of leftovers, filled a very specific number of baskets. There is a symbol of future completion in this that superintends the present mess on the ground. He knows what He’s doing, even in things that look to me as very undone, even wasted. My work is about this wonder in the midst of brokenness. I can hardly, in fact, I cannot explain in words the deep hope that rises up in my own soul when I am fed, and my heart is again lifted to believe from this broken ground. It is a hope that is rooted in accomplished work in the past, that carries me in the present, and that will be fully realized even later still.