The Danube at night

In an earlier post I referred to my interior reality, a phrase that Jami took off with. Yes, I have an interior reality, we all do, and I have an exterior reality, as do we all. I was thinking though, regardless of my own interior reality, as a nation, we need a "department of interior reality". This "department of interior reality game show" would cultivate a feeling of "department of interior reality game show scandal sheets to the wind less is more" that would lift our country out of its frightening brush with reality (which is really limitation: un-reality is a belief that there are no limitations), which threatens to deliver us to sanity (wherein we learned to live with our limitations rather than deny them). The frontiers are closed; our limits are set. For a country that is in denial about the closing of the frontier we are absolutely certain that we need to tighten and enforce our borders. This concretizing of borders is an odd attitude to take, if indeed the frontiers are still open to us. But what our nation might be afraid of is that others now see our land as our ancestors once saw it: a place to move into. We are now on the other side of the frontier-we-are-in-denial-about's closing. We fear the intrusion of others because we know what the intrusion of others means: we are afraid that we're the new Indians. An absurdity! But our country's narrative is about manifest destiny, the intrusion into the land of our laws and religion, and whoever's here, and whatever they hold dear and believe - the hell with them and theirs. And because we are the children of these people who did this, we have internalized this action, this polemic of intrusion and conquering as god-given right, and it has brought to the surface of public discussion our bad conscience. And so voices are raised against the influx of the immigrant (has they have been since the 1820s) because we project onto them our desires: they want what we have just as we wanted what was had before us. Girard's myth of the scapegoat plays out in our current debates about insider and outsider. And our interior reality (which believes that there are no limits) doesn't match the exterior reality (where limits abound).

Train a'commin'

One of the nice things about my studio, one of the pleasurable things; one of those things that don't figure in settling on some place, but that afterwards, when I've settled in, during the course of living there, I discover and take pleasure in: one of those nice things is that the rail road tracks are near by and that trains still travel on these tracks. I enjoy that while I am painting I can hear the blare of the horn, the dissonant interval announcing the arrival and passage, of a freight. When I hear this I can walk out of my studio, and since my cubical is right near the door, I can walk out and witness the mighty engines pulling the heavy cars: pulling sometimes coal, sometimes metal, sometimes unknown materials - but I suspect highly secret materials: perhaps remnants of a UFO crash; perhaps secret government labs run by animal/human hybrids, who are even now engineering the defeat of global capitalism; perhaps relics of a lost civilization (not lost the way America is lost, but lost in the sense of being misplaced by time). When I hear these trains I put down my brush (actually I carry my brush outside with me) or I put down my book, my Kierkegaard, my Barth, my Ricouer, and I venture outside to stand on the hot concrete and watch this train pass on through town. I watch as cars take the short cut for the trestle. I watch as I realize trains today no longer carry a caboose. I remember cabooses. I remember when passenger service still thrived, when people took a train from the depot in Covington for jobs and shopping in Atlanta. All the depots I know of have been transformed into restaurants or left to shambles. Even hobos have no place on modern trains. What a sad people we've become. We've become a sad people who have sad trains: and no amount of indignant protesting will change that: we've become a sad people ruled by our greed. Our trains are witness against us. They are now bland utilitarian affairs, sawed off from their history, and they travel through our cities like a punch in the gut. Even the vagrants no longer call them home.
My dad worked for the railroads in that section that became Railroad Publications: it was called Southern Freight and Tariff Bureau when he started work there in 1969. He told me that they called it Southern Frightened Giraffe Bureau at the office. When he began they had offices in San Francisco, San Antonio, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Roanoke. Over 200 people worked at the Atlanta office. When he retired around 2000 all operations had been consolidated into Atlanta and there were less than 50 people working there. Now I think all their work is done on a computer in some back room by two guys. Deregulation and automation: what grand things. And of course the world is better now: I should say it's more predatory now. A stock market over 13000 is a sign not of our goodness as a nation, not of how ennobled with mercy we've become, not of learning the "lessons of Vietnam" - but it is a sign of how much we value predation, and it is a sign of how far we have to fall. How can I be so pessimistic? Well no where in scripture does God reward a nation so proud of itself as ours with anything less than destruction, calamity and exile. It's coming. Not in a Left Behind kind of scenario but more in an Ozymandias kind of desolation: Look on ye capitalist and despair. Even if we didn't have scripture the weight of history is against us now.
One last thing about trains: when Jami and I visited her folks up in Cleveland, TN, we slept upstairs. Her niece slept in the other room. Grace is three and wonderfully expressive. In the middle of the night she came into our room, crying "aunt Jami, I heard a train." Jami claims that Grace was referring to my snoring, as if my nasal intonations attain a high decibel level, perhaps comparable to a train. Well you can hear a train from their house. When I told Jami that I could hear a train and that perhaps Grace was not frightened by me but by the distant echo of the Norfolk and Southern, she just laughed and laughed. She railed at me, "Aunt Jami, I heard a train."

Madona and Smoke

I've got to get back to the studio today. Here is a madonna with blunt, casually leaning on the gunnells on the storm tossed sea. I've been working and re-working this image for some months now. Even this moment is different as I've enlarged the baby [not pictured]. I plan a post in the future that will show some of how this image has evolved. The smoke's staying.
I'm reminded looking at this how glorious it is to build up the paint surface. An image is more than the fact of its color relationships - it's also a product of its surface handling ( a fact that is lost to us through an over dependence of photographic reproduction). This is the very reason people should have original art on the wall and not reproductions. Even a real etching has surface qualities (even though it technically is a reproductive medium), as does a dry point. So go out and buy a painting or water color.
I also want to direct people to Jami's comments on my "fountain filled with hemoglobin" and "Today's beautiful smile" posts below.

Paint

Both photos are from my studio. The top photo is a box of squeezed out paint tubes and the bottom photo is my palate - or rather the underside of a mass of paint I sliced off my palate. Note the wonderfully psychedelic array of color, how it smashes together and how various symmetrical patterns are asymmetric to each other. These are all painting byproducts: oddly assembled dried paint and empty tin tubes. Other painting byproducts not pictured are brushes used to the nub, paint splattered floors and tables, odd scraps of canvas. The studio space itself is artifact.

Today's beautiful smile

This weekend we went to the Decatur Arts Festival. Here's Jami looking like Monica Vitti, all elegant and Italian. One of our continuing conversations is how she's at heart Italian and, as she claims, that I am at heart English. All because I ordered steak at an Italian restaurant in London. Since then I've tried to make the case that steak is a perfectly traditional Italian meal. I've since had a Tuscan steak at a restaurant here, and I've made the inference that "my it might certainly seem that steak is common in Italy after all, and that Tuscany would be the Pampas [a reference the steak producing area of Argentina] of Italy." [at which point Jami whacked me on the head, almost as if she were exasperated at the lengths I've attempted to protest any resident "Englishness" I might be said to possess] What I've tried to maintain is that back in the "old country" where I grew up [a land not unlike present-day north-central Georgia] that it was common to have steak as an extension of an Italianate [what we'd once observed that an Italian ate] identity. This may be an argument that has no real resolution. Certainly I have a fondness for meat that might seem to belie a typical Italian proclivity for sea food and pasta. Certainly Jami, who's actually been to Italy, might be considered to be more of an expert on Italy and what constitutes an Italian sensibility than me. Still my own interior reality requires that I continue to state my own standing-togetherness with Italian culture, even as I order a nice steak.
Still it's difficult to argue with someone as beautiful and intelligent as Jami.

My Shirlie Guthrie painting

This painting is currently on display at the CTS bookstore and it is at such an angle that I didn't get a good picture. The top picture captures more the richness of the color and the bottom picture captures the sense of the composition. Guthrie was the latest in a line of theological personas to in habit Columbia. He studied under Barth and marks the passing of the old, conservative guard typified by Green and before him Thornwall and Girardeau, to a more modernist tack on theology. I was fortunate to have him in a couple of classes which he taught even though he was then an emeritus and needn't bother with new students. I had already been reading Barth when I came to Columbia, but in speaking with Shirlie, Barth's more important issues became imprinted on my mind. To me I have to remember that human beings trump ideology and that Jesus' concern was and continues to be with humanity and not the procrustean patterns of thought and answers that are continually brought up as universal solutions. And also, that in attending to the living word, Jesus, we realize our vocations and rediscover our vocations in our limits. Well that's certainly badly stated. Let me just say that theology has the possibility and recognizes the necessity for change. Before Barth (and Tillich, who I haven't studied very much at all) theology modeled itself on the definition of God in the Westminster catechism: infinite, eternal, immutable in all aspects of its being. And Reform theology was the apex of this perfection - especially Reform theology as voiced by Calvin through the scholastics like Turrentine and into the last century by Bavinck: the reiteration of God's eternal decree as trumping all human effort (and even any effort of God that might be contrary to God's eternal decree - some strains of calvinism actually worship the "eternal decree" and not the eternal decreer [but don't tell them that; it'll only upset them]). That's how I felt about the Reform theology I began with, Berkohf's: that it was an ultimate system that was very proud of its ultimacy. But that's the danger of any kind of scholastacism: that the system answers its questions (questions which are chosen to provide the opportunity for the very answers given) with finality and aplomb - all enemies being shown to be heretics, misguided, enemies of the faith, callow, calumnous, apostate, victims of illogic. Such a system can be wrapped around the soul for comfort - as long as there is no pain, or grief, or difficulty, or existential lack. The illusion of such a system is that one only needs Jesus for his salvific effects. Is it any wonder that this conservative Dutch reformed theology sanctions the worst evils of capitalism, and particularly the worst evils of racism, apartheid? But that is the beauty of worshiping the "eternal decree" and not the decreer: the power to steal and enslave and call it good comes from above - therefore my greed which issues in power and enslavement of you is God's perfect will. Barth repudiates all this. He points out the docetism inherent in such conservative theology and he goes back to scripture. He holds to the person of Jesus as the embodiment of scripture and exemplar of love in faithfulness, while claiming that we can not go beyond Jesus, that Jesus is more than a means of salvation, or that salvation is something separable from life in Christ, and therefore, costly discipleship. More importantly Barth says that we must be wary of imprisoning God in categories of omnipotence. That God's freedom is a freedom to limit and direct God's own activity, and that while the decree maybe eternal, it is at once working in real changeableness. That when the Old Testament speaks of God changing God's mind, that this metaphor is indicative of God's act qua act and not some play-act put on for human limitations. What Guthrie Got from this is the sense of theology has changeable: that the truth we have is a penultimate truth (which is a thought more prevalent in Brueggemann perhaps), and therefore theology is always discovering some new avenue for understanding God: feminism, liberation, process - these are all conversation partners in theology as a learning experience.
So my painting, with its deep green background and sky blue foreground, is the setting for a Lucien Freud take on the portrait: where threads of orange and blue and green weave together and knot into a likeness. It is a good enough likeness.

fountain filled with hemoglobin

Rembrandt has a painting of Saskia (I think) wading into a stream and she's lifting her robe just like this. I've always loved this image and this is about the best that I can translate it into my own idiom at this time. Yes, the water is red, bloody. There are some wonderful cool violets that don't show up in this photo. I may have to shoot some details. In southern revivalist christianity we grow up in the cult of blood. We sing "his blood" "a fountain filled with blood" "power in the blood" et cetera. As a child I remember sitting in ill fitting clothes, in a sanctuary paneled in knotty pine, alongside my grand mother and grand father, myself drawing on the back of a pew envelope, as we broke up the turgid holiness of the prayers and loud exhortation of the sermon with hymns about blood. Somehow blood figured in why we were all dressed so much better than during the week. Somehow blood figured in why we were so stiff and formal, almost like we were afraid of ourselves. And blood figured in the sweat and the smell of sweat, sweat mingled with perfume and old spice. Blood and sweat and the acidity of our stomachs mingled in the air and rose as strange incense with our voices, through the heat of this compact frame structure, and later, as we stood on the sandy soil outside, it all lingered among the pines and oaks as the sun beat down on our heads. "This is holiness, " I told myself, at dinner with my grandparents after church "to sing about blood and then to take the long prayers and the screaming of the preacher away with us to this little catfish place out by the lake." And as I gnawed the fried cornmeal crust and skin off the bone, and ate the hush puppies, I was filled with holiness; I tasted holiness. And there on my plate the salty fries with the blood red ketchup greased upon the plate and napkin were soon reduced to crumbs and bone.

Two Views of CTS home

Above is a photo of how the seminary home in Lexington looked last Spring, and below is how it looked in the publication Colored Light, a book about the seminary's history published in the 1930s. Though the photo on the bottom is blurry, a product of my bad digital camera, you can make out architectural features and changes. The rear rooms are gone, as is the porch. And the chimney is different. It is the chimney, the fact that it is a central chimney that cinched this building and not some other as the building in the photo. Also there is a big placard on the building claiming that it is the seminary's home - but the building is in such delapidation that I found the placard beyond belief. It amazes me just how much a structure can endure before it collapses in a shambles. The soil underneath this building is 200 years old, as far as it being undisturbed soil. When this soil was covered over by flooring the Creek still dominated the area, or had only recently been removed. This is soil that last saw sunlight when Georgia was the frontier. If this building lasts another ten years in its current state I will be surprised.

adoration

Louise, our cat, the one that loves Ocean Fish flavor more than life itself, who makes many different and strange ululations, is splayed out here, on the floor in our dining room, before my painting of a nude, pregnant, female Christ figure. Can it be that our cat is seeking release from the cycle of needs and wants that rules her life, the demands of napping and swatting at the other cats (her kitten pals in Christ), by developing her spiritual side?

At the habittat site in Budapest in Jan 2005

I have an idea for a further Harry Potter, and not in the vein of fan fiction, although any derivative work is liable to slip into that category. Something on the order of Harry Potter and the Sickness unto Death: wherein walks a more Kierkegaardian wizard, whose very use of magic fills him with despair and whose very evasion of magic fills him with despair. How can he be authentic? Who is he behind the mask of what he does? How is his interpretation of the world clouded by his projections of desire and fear? Can he comes to terms with otherness and limitations on apparent freedom?
If anything I suppose that it's fan fiction based on Walker Percy's The Movie Goer, although I might want to extend the story with elements from the Second Coming or the Last Gentleman.
Sample text:
"No sooner do I point my wand and incite the incantation, than despair floods my soul. Is there no other way to deal with this monster? And the monster's words of mockery - how typical, almost as typical as my action here. And I can't get away from it. I've tried and my search continues. But the pleasure of repetition and irony only garners me small reprieve. The very moment I believe that I am acting in freedom, I find that I''m constrained on all sides: obligations to friends, to the school and my teachers, even to my enemies - as I present myself as The Hero. I tried yoga, but that too is an evasion: the very lotus of despair."

Cleo from 5 to 7

Cleo is our shadow cat. She exists on a different plane from our three other cats. Cleo is not a slave to the dinner bowl, even when ocean fish is on the menu. She has maintained a lithe, supple exterior, reminiscent of a panther, prowling the jungle, springing from limb to limb, flying among the leaves of the upper canopy. She meows like a goat: mgnaoooooooaaaaaa! I've never heard a cat like this. It's a remarkable sound .
In the top photo Cleo is behind a curtain. She is atomized in air.
The second photo is Cleo re-enacting Man Ray's photo of Marquise Casati - note the doubling of the eyes.
The bottom photo is Cleo's normally intense expression as she creates her own reality through force of will.

more kitten pals

In honor of Thelma and Catelina (pictured above) and Louise and Cleocatra (not pictured now but later): this little ditty to the tune of the Tallis Canon

Which bird this is I think I know
It warbles in the bush below
It will not see me lurking here
Nor feint away a fatal blow

This fatal blow that might come soon
Is naught of kitten anger born
But more in keeping with my grasp
Of when to eat and when to mourn

I mourn this little helpless bird
Its motherless and plaintive cries
tug at my heart and give me pause
And with my paws a heavy sigh

This heavy sigh that fills my soul
Conforms to my ex'tential lot
In lieu of birds perhaps a vole
Will lapse into my cooking pot

Three blurry photos

My camera is capable of extreme out of focus effects. Here are three pictures I've taken over the last three years. At top is a photo of my homiletics professor, Anna Carter Florence (we were outside these baths in Budapest and we were waiting on the rest of our group to show up); in the middle is a photo from Troy Bronsink's ordination (I think Jami may be the figure in the background with the pink top and white skirt); and at bottom is Marc Quinn's marble statue on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth of Alison Lapper, an armless pregnant woman he depicted nude (his rationale being that there is an underrepresentation of disabled people in art - a move on his part that I applaud. The BBC News quotes her as saying it was a tribute to "femininity, disability and motherhood.").
The blurred image provides us with mystery. A sharp focus image privileges our notion that we know what is going on in the space around us, and, by extension, in our souls. The blurred image questions our perception of space and calls into question our memory of events. Where the sharp image says, "here is definitive verifiable evidence, " the blurred image calls into question all attempts at certainty: what is solid is suddenly ephemeral, transitory, evanescent.
The blurred image is therefore more true, more existential, more open to reexamination. The sharp image is open to falsification: it is too easily emblematic of solidity and gives the viewer a false sense of certainty.

blurry photo of love

My digital camera takes some very blurry pictures. As autofocus becomes more automatic in the future, I will retain this camera for its ability to snap the shutter just after coming out of focus. Actually painting out of focus requires some work. Gerhard Richter, the most well known practitioner of this technique, achieves it, at least in the one case I've observed, by making horizontal striations through the still wet pigment. Out of focus representation is a 20th century phenomenon: until camera use became widespread there was no convention about seeing out of focuse. Unfocused seeing was wrong seeing and, even though 19th century photographers might have been conscious of it, they avoided it in their work for presentation. It could be that earlier users of the camera obscura also knew of this phenomenon, but they also avoided it: with perhaps the exception of Vermeer who used some out of focus effects such as sharp highlights and gauzy outlines. Steichen and Steigliez used soft focus in their early 20th century periodical, Camera Work: perhaps drawing on influence from Julia Cameron. Cameron is the earliest practitioner I can think of who left central aspects of her finished work unfocused. Medardo Rosso seems to use out of focus effects in his sculpture and he would be late 19th and early 20th century.
The first person to leave things flagrantly out of focus I can think of would be Man Ray and after him the surrealists. I should clarify that when I say out of focus I'm not referring to the phenomenon of blur. Blur is related and is common in photojournalism; I'm thinking of the blur we see in photos of the d-day invasion and in sporting events. Advances in technology have almost lost that effect for us. Advances in technology are almost returning us to the pre-modern visual convention where everything, even things far away, are in sharp focus with defined edges and recognizable details.
That said, I love the blurry woman pictured above very much.

millennium ramble

And then I saw a city made without walls coming down from heaven. Its roads were obsidian and its sidewalks were a special polymer that gave when you walked but retained shape and durability. And the Traffic lights of the city were all in sync and none stayed on too long or too short. And pedestrians filled the sidewalks and there was plentiful street parking. And drivers drove cars made of high strength metal and with care to each other and to pedestrians and cyclists. And the streets were filled with cyclists and rickshaws and carts of myriad shapes and divers sizes. And there were parks where people strolled safely and played and walked pets. And the air was clear as crystal and as pleasant to breathe as spring breeze. And there was no night there, the streets being lit with a bio-luminescent form of plant life. And people were reading books and speaking with each other as if the other were important simply for being a human being. And there was no church or temple or mosque or reading room or kingdom hall anywhere in the city. And the people were happy. There were unhappy people, to be sure. The people who were outside the city were unhappy: these were people who insisted that culture and happiness could not exist without the absolutes provided by religion; that without a singular moral authority issuing from irrevocable heights and mediated through a tradition and by the authorized spokespeople of that tradition, where people ordered their lives around ritual and taboo, accepting draconian punishment for abstract transgressions of divine law, that chaos and lawlessness would reign, an epoch of anarchy and misery would ensue, death, plague and poverty would be the lot of humanity. But it didn't turn out that way at all: though the people outside the city insisted that it would - although the people in the city were quite happy and had persisted in their happiness for many years. Happiness however was not restricted to the playing out of absolutes - no matter how old or absolute; nor was happiness found in correctly crafting syllogisms that demonstrated God's existence or humanity's depravity or whatever the syllogism crafter wanted to prove: appeals to authority and appeals to logic simply increased the frustration of those leveling the appeals: the people in the city remained immune to ideology. They knew that humanity trumped ideology, no matter what the intentions of that ideology: that for instance, going to war for "liberation of a people" was trumped by seeing the people targeted for war as individuals: they new that it's not terrorists or infidels that are killed but mothers and fathers and children, friends, lovers, people who have dreams and take joy in simple things like any one else. Therefore they did not kill nor desire the death of anyone.
Whenever an ideology was promulgated that promised "better living through chemistry" or "nation building" or "social engineering" the people in the city were not taken in: they recognized rhetorical attempts at dehumanizing others as inhumane. The apocalypse is this: that we, like those in the city, recognize when great evils come dressed in the veneer of good - that this good is often stated in terms of an ideology that demonizes another group of people (immigrants, homeless, hippies, commies, et al) for the power and greed of a few. This is why Jesus teaches us to pray for enemies and give to people who cannot repay, that we see them as people like ourselves and not as annoyances or obstacles (an objectified other); he tells us to do this because that is how God, his father and ours, is. When Jesus says, "be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect", he is not enjoining us to be moral goody-goodies but to participate in God's project of creation, a project that heals and restores creation, especially the image of God - and we all (capitalists, terrorists, poor, homeless, foreign, crazy and sane) are that image.

From our honeymoon

We stopped at a pub in Hampstead after clamboring about the Heath and had some of the local ale. Jami, elegant in the first frame, watches me as she drinks her pint; I, perhaps a bit winded from walking around the Heath's slick muddy fields and grass, am a bit blurry at first, but after my first sip, I've become solid and in focus again. It's a wonderful beer that restores vertical hold to the world. Yet here I am, now, all concrete and defined, and I've continued to be concrete and defined since. Was this some magic potion that I imbibed that day? Sure. Here's what I think happened. When we visited Keat's house earlier in the day, I noticed in the hutch that one of the glasses was missing. I think that the glass I'm holding right now is that glass. Am I implying that this glass, if it were that glass, has some kind of magical property? Maybe. Let's look at the facts. ******************************************************************* If that doesn't satisfy a critical inquiry I don't know what will.

At the hour I heard hearing

And then I saw a linoleum floor, made up of red and blue squares set obliquely to the wall. The floor was nearly but not exactly square and bounded by molding and wainscoting. Opposite the front door was a window and to the left of the window, on the wall perpendicular to the window wall, was another door. Crown molding went around the top of the wall, and the ceiling was smooth. In the middle of the ceiling were two exposed light-bulbs. One bulb was out. The walls were painted a faint yellow and the ceiling was white. The window was an old casement window with four square panes on the top and bottom half. This window was slightly open and a glass of water was on the sill to the left side, near the door on the wall perpendicular to the window wall. The front door was open, which was how I knew what the room looked like. I was walking down a hallway about two and a half people wide. I had just walked up to this floor from the floor below and taken about ten steps down the hall, to the right, as I left the stair landing. I was in a hurry down the hall and would have missed the room if I hadn't caught it from the corner of my eye as I was lifting my glance from my watch. It was 3 pm. I thought, "it's not often that the time is exactly on the hour like this." I was late. This building had been abandoned for a few months and was going to be demolished. In its place was going to be a newer building with cleaner offices and bigger; with larger windows and more floors; with central heat and air; with that neutral smooth carpeting that infiltrates institutional buildings now, and over head fluorescent lights. This space that I'm in right now will no longer exist in this way. This space will be part office and part hall and the floor will likely be where my knees are now. This building itself replaced an earlier building from a time in the last century. That building did not have more than one floor and was really more a cabin - a dog trot cabin with an open breezeway. This would be unknown except for an earlier photo. That building had burned down. When they excavate this site workmen will find a layer of ash. As I exited this building I looked behind me. I was walking down a path through an arboretum but I turned before entering and had the chance to see the room with the glass of water on the window sill. It was still there and I could see it well.

res ipsa loquitur

The building at the top of the page, which is the building in the foreground of the bottom picture, is the building where the first classes met for what is now Columbia Theological Seminary. It is in Lexington, GA. Last Spring John Richardson and I drove from Decatur to check it out. There are some photos of this building in earlier days. One photo, on display in Campbell Hall at the Seminary, shows this building with a porch and wisteria. The porch was where the concrete steps with pipe hand-rail are now. The porch stretched across the front of the structure. The inside of this building has no original flooring. The current flooring is some kind of artificial board and plywood. I entered one room and my feet began sinking into the floor. The material was sodden and reacted to my weight as rubber might. I didn't stay on it long enough to see how far it could be stretched. The building has a top story but this story is inaccessible: the ladder/steps leading up to the top are in the room with the questionable flooring. This building is now being used as a Sunday School room/clubhouse of some sort. There is a kitchen. A massive stone fireplace remains in the middle of the structure and might be original to the building. As near as I can tell this building is beyond restoration - at least on the interior. It has suffered years of neglect and materials have been scavenged for other houses from it. I think that this is what happened to the porch.
John and I marveled at the building. We were glad to be able to walk inside and look around. At first we couldn't believe that this was the structure we were looking for. Even though there was a large sign on one side of the building, we had difficulty getting around how little it resembled the photo from earlier in the century. But as we walked around the neighborhood we had to conclude that this sad structure was indeed Columbia's first home.
Right next to it is a marvelous Presbyterian church. It has pointed windows and promised quite a wonderful old interior. We weren't able to get inside of this building, but a friend of mine, Cheryl Gosa, preached there as a student and told me that it is indeed old and quaint inside. Outside in the graveyard are the graves of early Georgia governors. Lexington was a busy place 170 years ago. Not so much now.

A Rooster, symbol of protestantism

And then I saw a metal rooster against a gray sky on a cold day. It was stylized, with pointy wings and a raised back head, and it was fabricated from metal. I was with my classmates on a trip to Hungary, and we were now in a church yard for a theological institute in Slovakia waiting to go inside the Institute's library for a discussion on the Church and church life after the removal of Soviet troops. The Rooster is the standard symbol of the protestant church in Europe. Perhaps because of its association with Peter's moment of recognition when he hears the cock crow: "I'm a betrayer," he suddenly realizes. The Reformation was an aha moment like that: "we've been going the wrong way, but that can be corrected." In a nutshell, that's what the protesting was about - the values of the Church had been betrayed: the Church had sold out to the state, to being like the Empire that persecuted it. Of course the Church that protested proceeded to be like the state and exonerate the protestant state's oppressions, land grabs, wars. When I think about it, the Church's distressing abandonment of its principles (having all things in common, bearing each other's burden, loving neighbor and enemy, being a voice for justice, visiting prisoners and advocating for them, etc - all that stuff in the gospels that make us uncomfortable and just has to be spiritually interpreted because they're so impractical) for the security and approval of whatever state or culture comes along is scandalous. Whenever the Church has had the opportunity in history, whenever the big state has said, "hey cutie: How'd you like to hang out, help me do some things," the Church has said Sure and left all it stands for behind. What would it be like for the Church to respond to the overtures of the state, "No. No I don't think so. I'm perfectly happy where I am, hanging out with the people I'm hanging out with. I don't like your resort to violence, your dependence on fear and threats. I'm not going to lose myself in you." What would it be like for Christians all over the land to realize that the flag, any country's flag, but for us, the US flag, erases the Cross. Put a flag and a cross in front of the sanctuary - these are two different symbols, with contradictory meanings: the (so called) triumph of good intentions by violence vs the triumph of love over death by non-violence. The marriage of Church and State is like the most "in denial" of all abusive marriages: every day the state comes home, drunk, demanding to know where its dinner is and why the living room is a mess and why the children are the way they are and threatens, emotionally if not with physical force, to mess her up. And does the Church leave this relationship? One day - we can all pray.

Remember your baptism?

This painting has been re-stretched, and now the fold in the upper left corner is fixed. I painted this painting in 1993 before I left Athens, GA for Middle-of-Nowhere, NM. As may be imagined this painting calls forth passionate opinions: some of which surprise me.This painting like the Lucretia is a painting that I've had a difficult time finding a home for.

Perhaps I'm over reacting about Lucretia

Here's a photo of my friend Davis Hankins. He's setting the world of Old Testament studies ablaze with an extensive critique of text using Marx, Zizek, Lacan, Spivak and a host of others, including his own razor sharp mind. I was going through some photos and came across this: It's fragmentary yet incisive, containing an explanation of the person but leaving much to the imagination. I think that Davis owes me a beer, but he'd probably also like his Spivak volume back from me.

Lucretia

Who knows if this painting will ever find a home. It is the story of Lucretia, raped Roman wife of a general, who over throws the Etruscans, in vengeance of his wife's rape and suicide, and then establishes the Roman republic. I liked the paintings by Rembrandt (in Minneapolis and the National Gallery in DC) and wanted to produce my own version of the event, but how I hate having to explain the story behind this painting. She's in pain. OK.
This could be the painting with the most emotional impact I've ever done, and it's pretty much homeless. Too painful to hang in someone's home or in the library. There are some fine passages around the mouth and hands - as pretty much for the entire painting.
If there's anything discouraging at times about being an artist it is the suspicion that all my best work can be had for a small sum - and my very best work is unwanted.
But who doesn't feel that way - it's part of the creative enterprise. The world is filled with creative people - or people creating something. I remember once, in New Mexico, at a bed and breakfast, being corralled into a conversation with someone who was very excited about what he had learned to do. He elaborated his technique to me, how intricate and involved. How it satisfied some inner ache of his soul - and how he thought it could be profitable. When he finally showed me what he was doing I was speechless: he was doing those howling coyote in silhouette pieces - works indistinguishable from what I had seen in tourist kitsch stores all over New Mexico. He had simply copied the design and done them in some material that was used for spackeling stucco or pool installation. yet he was very proud of what he was doing; I could tell he had a real enthusiasm for the process, and yet I felt a despair plunging inside me like a weight dropped into a maelstrom from a great height. I realized that we were going after two totally different things.
One dilemma of creating things is that you're just a single bit in a very large pool of creators. All you can do is try to make what you do as singular and full of quality as possible, displaying a dexterity of imagination and a depth of feeling, and a willingness to try something unknown, to work with courage. For the most part the world of creators is dense and the thought that your tiny boat might negotiate its way among the tankers and freighters, the shoals and ice bergs, to some successful rendezvous is overwhelming. Might it happen? Sure. Should you be upset if it doesn't? no. To me that is a difficult no. I feel that with the Lucretia I painted a large yes that has received a large no.

I interrupt my apocalyptic ramblings

I have to interrupt this rambling of mine to put up a picture of the most beautiful woman on the planet. I took this photo last summer when we were walking along the Art Loeb trail above the parkway. We were with Tom and Suzanne and their daughters Jane Margret and Elizabeth. We're still having fun and she's still the one.

And I saw a plain

And I saw a plain filled with idiots. They were driving large cars and living in houses with more room than they needed and filling their time with appointments. And they loved Jesus and hated gays, blacks, feminists, liberals, the French, Palestinians, Arabs, "terra-ists", ecologists, and really an exhaustive list of anyone that wasn't like them, and they didn't like themselves all that much either. But they were adamant: they loved Jesus. And they were adamant that the worst thing in the world would be some teenage girl in Chicago or rural North Dakota getting an abortion. This was far worse than their not having health care, or a job, or an education for their children. And they rejoiced that the CEO of a company that lost a billion dollars earned a 100 million dollar bonus, because the real enemy was not this hero of capitalism but the "illegal immigrants" who were taking away the jobs of "working Americans." And they loved Jesus as more people were locked away in prison, as more of their rights were taken away, as more poor and homeless people were banished from the city. They loved Jesus because they constantly said, "we love you Jesus." They loved Jesus because he was going to take them away up into the clouds before destroying the gays, blacks, feminists, liberals, the French, Palestinians, Arabs, "terra-ists', ecologists, and all who were not like themselves.
And an Angel came to me and spoke and asked, "Daughter of Man what do you see?" And I said, "I hate to say this but I see a plain full of idiots. I mean they say they love Jesus but it's almost like they've never actually read the gospels. Doesn't Jesus excoriate the wealthy and embrace the prisoner, the poor, the outcast, women, those who society has turned its back on? It seems that this Jesus is just a projection of their own fantasies of escape and denial." And the Angel said, "Sure. Watch this though." And as I looked at the idiots on the plain there was a great trumpet blast, and then from every corner the idiots began to levitate up into the sky. They left behind houses, cars, clothing, pets, soccer balls, iPods, and paraphernalia of all kinds. They levitated towards the clouds singing "yes Jesus love me" and angels were descending to meet them with golden crowns. Then just as they reached about 20000 feet they started dropping like flies. One after another just started hitting the ground like sacks of cement. For an hour, another hour and a half hour and another, the idiots quickly de-levitated back to the ground with resounding thuds. And the thudding of their thuds thundered thunderously back across the plain. And I said, "That was unexpected. Why'd they all come falling back to earth?" And the angel answered me and said, "let's ask this scientist whose articles are published in peer reviewed journals and who doesn't accept money from corporations or conservative think tanks." "Are they the only ones who can speak truth, "I asked incredulously? And the angel responded, "so you'd think."
Then the angel called out to the scientist, a bespeckled woman carrying a clipboard and wearing a smock (and the whiteness of the smock was brighter than the sun, whiter than any fuller can clean them), "hey you, what is the reason for the declension of the idiots?" And the scientist looked up at us and responded saying in response, "it appears they passed out from lack of oxygen and pretty much died when they fell back down to earth." And her voice echoed like a whisper, like the breath of the Spirit, and hovered over the face of the plain.

And then I beheld

And then I beheld a beast speaking to a vast multitude. It had two heads and 5 horns, a trumpet and a trombone. He spoke with accordion several things, but its meaning was sax and violins. He played an old organ, pumping his language with augmented intervals of bombast; he played his organ, grinding monkeys writing Shakespeare and holding court. And the multitude cried for more. Lie to us they begged. Tell us what we want to hear. Tell us we are an innocent nation. Tell us we are God's chosen. Tell us our cause is just. And the multitude painted their faces with stars and smiley faces, and each wrote an accusation on the back of their neighbor: Kick me. And they sang to the beast, "we get a kick out of you." And the beast told them to take all their jewels and all their wealth, all their love and all their dreams, and fling them down a hole. And the hole is called Patriotism. And the beast lead the people in worshiping the hole.
Holy Hole, Moley Mole
Save us from our fears
Save us and provide for us
Harbor for hopes
Hopes for a past so good and clean
Hopes for a past where a man is a role to live
Hopes for a past where a woman is a blank slate
Hopes for a past where we're all in suits, and we all know our place
Hopes for a past where children remain children
Where none grows up and death is a kindly uncle
Holy Hole our Wholely Whole
Our holey soul
Our Soley hole

It was morning in America and I saw a city on a hill. Around this city they built a wall and around that wall they'd built another wall. And I asked the angel (who previously the reader'd no idea existed) and I asked asking, "Angel what is the meaning of the two walls?" and the angel answered me answering and saying, "The inner wall is against all mirrors that they may not be invaded by seeing themselves as they actually are, and the second wall is against the future, that all remain as it was in a past that never existed." And I said to the angel, "That doesn't seem very apocalyptic, in that it's a bit transparent don't you think? And a bit tenditious too. Where's the fire and cataclysm? The vapor and smoke? Where's the horsemen of death, pestilence, famine, and that other thing - war? Isn't there supposed to be a lamb in all of this?" And the angel looked at me, and a great silence fell upon the earth for a time, time and a half a time and half a half a time and again a time; and the angel said, "you people are never satisfied."

Write this

Write this to the Church in Sardis, said a voice. "Do you really need a gym? Does it seem a bit excessive. I know that the other churches have big education centers and gyms of their own, and you're thinking, 'wouldn't we get a bunch of youth to stay in our church if we had a gym?' But let me tell you - that's unlikely to happen. Have you thought about just inviting people in from the neighborhood? Does it seem odd to you that the congregation on Sunday morning drives in from out of town? What's up with that? About the gym again, really when you're raising money for these things don't quote verses about tithing to build the temple - I guess that's what really tees me off. See this is what is most irksome: the very content of the gospel is what you evade with an almost evangelical ardor; building great big hardwood caverns and putting yourself in debt for 20 years - that's what you've got a hard on for. Get a clue. So says the one who walks among the lamp stands and kicks around the playground. "

And Then I saw

And then I saw two people walking along a beach: a man and a woman. They were wearing shorts and over-sized t-shirts. On one t-shirt was an image of a heavenly banquet and on the other t-shirt was an image of a great beast. As they walked along the beach the man was trying to explain the balk rule and was doing so badly that he was confusing himself. Around them children played in the surf: frisbees, surf boards, beach balls, kites all bounded from one body to another, filling the air. Dogs romped up and down the wet sand, large ones with lots of hair, while smaller dogs were on leashes yipping at the surf tickling their paws. Under large beach umbrellas sat men and women reading books and drinking beer. Some were sleeping, emulating the color of lobsters - perhaps for a pageant later that evening. Radios blared, but all sound was engulfed by the sound of the waves crashing and the wind blowing.
I went back toward the beach house. I showered off my sand caked feet and my sunscreen irritated eyes. How hot my head was. I went inside the house. It was dark and cool and I became aware that the TV was on. On the couch was a half-finished New York Times crossword from Sunday. I could not remember what Wilde might have said in the Literary Review. I thought that I would just grab a Corona with some lemon and then head back out to the beach. I remembered that I hadn't come to the beach to stay inside all day. As I looked back out toward the ocean I saw a fishing boat, a charter, and I remembered a picture of my grandfather, standing with a catch of Snapper, eyes glistening with life, on Daytona Beach in 1956. Fish would be good. I pushed the lemon into the Corona and took my first swig. Happy I walked back across the wooden walkway and onto the hot sand. Over head flew a large white kite with an image I couldn't make out.

A further vision

I opened my eyes and I could not see. I opened my eyes and I saw for the first time.

chapter the second

And then from the trees of the forest arose a cascade of voices, each bringing issue against the frozen lake and against the city imprisoned in it. And the air was choked with the sound of the birds and insects. And their song echoed across the lake.
Holy Holy Holy Lord and maker
giver of life and parent of us all,
She who is the Father of light,
The Son and offspring maiden,
Who dwells in unapproachable splendor,
Who walks along the solar arc and measures the galaxy's span,
Heal us
Heal us
Seal us in your faithfulness
Seal us in your Holy Spirit.

And when they finished the sound of their song was like the diminution of thunder. When I turned around to see the trees and to see the birds, all was quiet and still. And a voice said to me, "look out onto the lake, over the ice. Tell me what you see." I turned from the forest back toward the lake and I looked. I spoke and said, "I see a leopard sitting on a throne and smoke ascends from its lips. It presses a goblet of pearl to its lips and in its ear are jewels, gold, jasper, and sapphire. " And the voice said, "this is the fear of life and the lust for death. She holds all the world captive. People sacrifice what they love in return for the promise of safety." And I looked closer and saw ravens devouring her. Before I could speak, the ground shook and the earth melted. I reached to break my fall and I fell, faint.

Apocalypso chapter eins

I was in the middle of nowhere on the Lord's day, because of the testimony and because of the witness. The sky above me contained a single cloud and the land around me was all waist high grass bisected by an empty draw. All around me was silence but for the sound of distant thunder. And I thought I would lie down and sleep. And a voice spoke to me saying, "mortal, can you see beyond the sky?" and I answered that I did not know. Startled I looked around and could see no one speaking to me, but the wind picked up across the grass and formed a path, and the voice said, "walk here." And I walked. As I was walking I became aware that the grass contained many living creatures: insects, lizards, birds, rabbits, snakes and suddenly, as I reached the empty draw, there was a deer. The deer had two massive antlers with fifteen points each. It's coat was gold and silver. It's eyes were emeralds and its hoofs were teakwood. It smelled of incense. I stood in awe of it. It looked at me and spoke with a human voice, "Son of man, pay attention to what you are seeing here for it is a vision of what must certainly happen." And as soon as the magnificent deer spoke, the grass separated and water gushed down the draw and it would have swept me away but I was snatched up into the air and brought to the shore of a lake. The lake was solid ice but all around it was a verdant forest alive with sounds and fecund with growth. When I put my foot on the ice I saw that frozen within its sheet was a city of men and women, each was frozen in the business of buying and selling. And as I looked at them my heart was heavy with sorrow.

How beautiful you are

Almost a year ago, the morning I was graduating from Columbia, I took this photo of Jami, and I'm almost certain she didn't like it, what with the chin being cut off and the slight distortion of the camera angle; but for me, every time I see her smile and hear her voice, my heart is strangely warmed.

The primrose path

What would a new apocalypse look like? Apocalyptic was a common genre in ancient times. We read Revelation today and think, "how weird and unusual." Back then a reader might have thought, "not this shit again." What do you need for an apocalyptic? you need beasts: dragons, chimeras, goats, bulls, sphinxes; you need visions: women clothed with the sun, women running through the desert, etc; you need fire and smoke; you need angels and trumpets and bowls and scrolls. Repeat the phrase, "then I saw ..." Remember this: a vote or two going the other way and our bibles end with the Shepherd of Hermas: a wonderful apocalypse that begins with an episode of voyeurism: "I saw her bathing in the river."

eschatologically banqueting

When we read the apocalypse, I believe it is a mistake to read it as a history of the future. I think that for its time, such a reading would be unlikely: these people believed in the immediate return of Jesus - as well as fearing the recurrence of Nero. What the Apocalyptist writes about is about the Christian Church's current situation. The Church is already confronted by the beast and the beast is already judged. The beast is the empire, or any world or local system, that the individual finds herself in. From systems theory we know that the individual is in thrall to systems - that the only way to beat a system is to leave that system, and the only way to change a system is to be a more differentiated self. You can't change a system by directly confronting it or generating force. The weapon of the system is itself force and violence - that you are under a threat. Jesus changes the system, or offers a way to change the system, by being faithful to himself - and more over, faithful to God's intention for him and for all humanity: that we pray for enemies, comfort the mourning - in short, eschewing the methods of the beast. Whatever the beast is, we are called to not be that way. The most the beast can do is crucify us.

Musings on Narrative

Is is possible for me to write a narrative account of a person's search that comprises a lengthy arc of development, with believable characters, human, flawed, yet sustaining interest, with a supple attention to language? The model for such a thing for me has always been Walker Percy's The Movie Goer. In many ways because I feel I am Binx Boling, movie goer, reader of Kierkegaard, scion of decayed southern yeomanry, facing my own limit experiences: or having faced such things as death, unemployment, disappointment, despair and having grown up in the American South with its own built-in limit experience - loss of The Wah(r) - having faced such things and having emerged out the other side, a sane, calm individual who is learning to take things in stride and not see being cut off in traffic as a throwing down of the gauntlet, an impingement on my honor. But such a narrative I might craft would have to take a different tack all together. No damn southern cliches, or else explode them altogether.

Last Spring at Six Flags

Last Spring at Six Flags, Jami won a large Tweety Bird for her niece, Hattie. We kept it at our house for a few months, until we drove up to Nashville. While Tweety was in our house, Louise made friends with it.
I originally went to this file of pictures for a roller coaster picture. I didn't take any. I was hoping to use the caption "roller coaster of love" a song from the 70s. Jami was singing it the other day. When she was a young girl, she apparently memorized the lyrics to the top 40 playlist. It amazes me.
I have a bad memory for lyrics. I listen more for melody, probably resulting from my years as a trumpet player. I remember thinking, in certain pieces of music, "I wish these people would quit singing so we could play some real music." In some music it's just nearly impossible to tell what the lyrics are. Certainly when I'm listening to Puccinni's La Boheme I'm not brought to tears by the lyrics, which are in Italian, but by the rise and progression of certain arias.
The very first time I heard it, I thought Elton John was singing, "she's got electric boobs." I can hear why people think Hendrix is singing, "skews me while I kiss this guy." In many ways it's a more interesting visual picture than his potential "touching the sky." And I, and Jami, who actually knows most lyrics, think that Nicks is singing "like a one winged dove": a more visually interesting picture than the actual lyrics.
When I hear the lyric "one winged dove," I am reminded of an etching by Paul Klee, done early in his career, of a one winged hero. I think of this etching often. Sometimes, when I've indicated an arm on a figure, I toy with adding a wing. I will sometimes leave a figure with one eye. I do this I suppose because I have only one good eye. I am like the cyclops. I am sympathetic to the plight of Polyphemus in the Odyssey: eye-gouged blinded hurling boulders toward the sea and the fading taunts of Wiley Odysseus, crying to his concerned neighbors that his grave wound was inflicted by no-man. The Polyphemus episode is probably the historical genesis of the joke we see on the Simpson's where Moe, the bartender, is holding the phone and calling out, "Is there an Amanda here? I need Amanda Holden-Kiss." You may need to say that name fast: Amanda Holden-kiss.
And that reminds me of one of Jami's favorite jokes. Termite goes into a bar and asks, "is the bar tender here." That beautiful woman holding the Tweety bird with her niece, Hattie, comes up with jokes like this. She might have you believe that she leaves the field of bad puns as a place solely for me to romp in, that she is untainted by frivolous word-play of the groaning variety - but she more than willingly joins me there. She comes up with very bad puns and she laughs about it while maintaining an air of mock-dignity.
I love her.