image

What if I told you this image was taken from a moving train as I was translating the Easter passage from 1 Corinthians, where Christ our lamb is sacrificed for us and we're enjoined to attend the festival - actually the Corinthians of ca 50 AD are enjoined: we're on the outside looking in, a condition of reading any ancient text, but especially scripture. How do we enter the text? What must this group have been like? Certainly not participants in a worldwide movement. More likely a communal gathering tangentially connected to other communities by the comings and goings of the apostles. There was no central authority - no curia or general assembly or council determining what All believed.
When I look at the accumulation of theology and confessions and catechisms over the ages, I am overwhelmed by how many blanks have been discovered and filled in - blanks that these early people could not have guessed at. But then I look at ordinary believers, who are variantly involved in the faith and they are perhaps better informed than the early believers, but they also have blanks that need to be filled in. The blanks to be filled in today are different blanks. The church today is more fragmented, less communal, individualistic, more consumerist and the product of a particular culture of violence and libido (what Barth describes, in his Commentary on Romans, as the result of erasure of the Creator/creature distinction) - especially here in the US.
For early believers in Corinth: they were called to celebrate a feast of reconciliation, a feast of sharing abundance.

lunar eclipse

The top photograph is a photo I took of the lunar eclipse outside of our friend, Joey's, home. The bottom photograph is a photo of the moon I took while eating outside at Feast with Jami last June. Both images call into question the aspect of seeing and knowing. We all know what the moon should look like. Or we aver that we do, but on reflection we are unfamiliar with it: its topography, its libration, its wanderings.
The moon travels with us at night. Ancient personifications have the moon as a woman and as the influence of the sign of Cancer.
Today we recognize that the moon is Earth's singular satellite (that we don't have none, or two, or 8, or 12 - what a confused mythology they must have on Mars or Saturn or Jupiter) and that its reflection of sunlight at night is a product of cosmological pin ball.
So we might believe that we could reduce all the cosmos to materialistic statements. These statements though cleansing on one level, fail to explain how we have come to create the cosmological narrative we have over the centuries; these statements also fail to fire the imagination.
Can it be that our brief consciousness and creative existence on this planet is happenstance? I don't think so. I do wonder at the expansiveness of the universe, the interminable distances that defy our lifespans and the unbelievable smallness of infinity that crushes our comprehension as to how much energy can be stuffed into such a small space. I wonder that humanity is not through creating mythology.
But to what end? Christ's story of a feast, of abundance and reveling, of inclusion, seems to me what must be in store.

memory

22 years ago I read Walker Percy's Moviegoer and since then I've had an experience with it that I've had with other works, a sense of being a different person. That is: I'm looking back at myself as well as the work as in a kind of mirror. I know myself now and know myself then - simultaneously. The other day when I drew with Cherl's class in High Point I had that experience again - was I once here, but now I am the old hand, the post student, the person who is conversant with how things have worked out.
Now I read Percy and I see the work as a whole rather than a series of episodes. Now I read it with some detachment rather than alongside a schematic of my emotional state. Still I find that I enjoy it more: I read it now, cognizant more about Kierkegaard, having answered questions I had then, and knowing better, as I said, the full scope of the work.
I saw a clip recently of Renais's Last year at Marienbad and that same sense of memory becoming layered obtained. The point of the work, one point that is, is that our lives are always open to interpretation - our word is always penultimate.

Billy the Kid on Mars, continued

Billy: Dhad burn it m'am. I'm just a plain cow pokey, a torrent edged gibberished poised doggie puncher misplaced on this crimson canal webbed orb soley ambitious for hoarding herded hoardings.
Unknown woman, femme fatale, big nosed kate: You are not so special to me mr. Billy Cowboy Man, without your seeks shooter; my story is far more tragic than your outlaw epiphanies.
Lenny: Muzzle Tov Sputniki.
Billy and Femme: Omigod - Buckarooskies!
Lenny: Is some red planetski here. Da?

Meanwhile in a Denny's outside of Memphis, a mysterious stranger buys a cup of coffee for a tabloid journalist---
Stranger: yeah sure we built the pyramids, and Stonehenge too: but here's something, not many people suspect this even. We built every Stuckey's between Jacksonville, FL and Richmond, VA.

Do you want that sausage?

Billy the Kid on Mars

The long lonesome Trail becomes even more barren and inhospitable.
Billy: Damn!
Unknown Woman, femme fatale, big nose kate: All right mr. Kid the Billy, you may horizontally misplace your fiery arms and standing remain resume or I will bankroll a buckshot bonanza youward.

Sunday on the grande jatte

At the Chicago Art Institute I try to incorporate people in the gallery into the scene. The image becomes "Sunday in the park with George on a Friday in the gallery with Fred." As you're viewing it right now it becomes"[your name] viewing Sunday in the park with George on a Friday in the gallery with Fred on [the date you're viewing this]." The conceptual artistic goal is to reduce the artwork itself to a nearly invisible part of the viewing experience.The attempt is analogous to reverse engineering Blake's seeing a world in a grain of sand.

Thinking of best pictures

After Titanic won in [whatever year that was] I did a series of satires on what drawing should have been done in the drawing room scene. The drawing should capture the over the top, lead the audience by the nose plotting, idiocy of the film [more aptly titled "kitschfest 1997"]. I've posed Rose cleaning her teeth after finishing her fries and coke; you can see the 'stahr odie oshun' round her neck; and behind the bed is an African mask signifying the inspiration of Picasso, who oddly enough has made no impact on the ersatz modernist inspired artist who then drew bland charcoal sketches [that somehow weathered 80 years submersion] as an expression of his grand passion. George aptly characterized this movie on Seinfeld, when he said, "so that old woman: she's just a liar isn't she?" LA Confidential came out this same year, an actual movie with plot, character development, and a good noir feel.
But then I feel a bit cranky about it. Someone might ask me where my irrational expectation that things make sense, that the powers that be and the populace at large be conversant in discerning and avoiding kitsch, comes from. Perhaps I have failed to live up to the impulse of modernism myself. And I feel that way at times, aware of what I could have done, should of done, in terms of pushing my work more toward experiment and engagement with issues of personality and identity. Could I have been more formalist in my approach? Could I have been more historically aware and conversant with issues? For instance, how could my work have been more a commentary on the Male Gaze? How could I have been oblivious to it all the years of my formation. I certainly see it in retrospect: the influence of advertizing, patriarchy, growing up in the South.
But I can't talk about it all in the past tense: the future holds much more. I feel that I am on the cusp, now more than ever, of work that is exceptional. As Jung might say, I've outgrown some of my fantasies and am now ready to embark on something new. Of course my friend Mark has heard me talk this way before - and each time, I have done something different, an alteration of my approach and change in my outcomes. So I hold out this hope that each day will bring something new in my art. Each drawing is done on a clean piece of paper and each drawing has that potential that I've learned from the past and discovered some new direction - or that I'm now ready to let myself discover the new and different and embrace them. Nothing could be more modernist.

the last judgement you'll ever need

This is a bad polaroid of a painting I did in the summer of 2001. I painted it in my office on the 8th floor of a web company. The company down the hall was closing and they had this large canvas frame, which they'd removed the painting from. I asked for it and they gave it to me. I took it too my office and stretched the canvas onto it and gessoed it. And then I painted this evocation of Greenwich Village. I had been to Manhattan that April and I loved the energy of the "City." The guy in the middle on the bottom is checking his watch - and the judgement goes on, unnoticed by most of the people, who carry on with their lives: an "end of the world as we know it and I feel fine" moment. I've wanted to transcribe that REM song into a hymn for years now. I have this image of a whole congregation singing the chorus, smiles on their faces. Avoiding a fiery judgement has never been a good reason to be a Christian. You can avoid a fiery judgement in most scenarios by being more moral, more rule guided - as if the God of Grace, for whom whatever righteousness we might contrive is filthy rags, would give a shit about what we ate or didn't eat, who we picketed or didn't picket. The religious impulse that is guided by moralism, and hence by the need for fire insurance, is the same impulse that straps bombs onto people and blows up a market, or that counts human life (life created in the image of God) as cheap, because that human doesn't agree with someone's moral list.
A good reason to be a Christian is because Jesus effected you so deeply that you feel compelled by that love to love God's creation and those who bear God's image - in short thankfulness is the guiding motive. These are the kind of people who can sing the end of the world and I feel fine. These are the kind of people for whom the judgement passes as a second hand sweeps across the dial, but for whom life is too precious and too much to be cherished to notice or to respond with fear.
This painting is now in a friend's home in McLean, VA. They've hung it in their stairwell. I hope soon, when Jami and I visit friends in DC that we can stop by and visit this couple and see this painting.
I may have a gig preaching this Easter. I can't preach often enough. And I'm excited because there are so many texts in the liturgy available. The revised common lectionary people touched all the bases: Isaiah 25; Jerimiah 31; Matt 28; John 20; Psalms 114, 118; Col 3:1-4; 1 Cor 5: 6-8; Acts 10: 34 ff, Luke 24 - dive right in! I'm enchanted by all of Isaiah 25 (not just the passages they selected) and I'm thinking of the 1 cor text - if only because it is echoed in the eucharistic celebration: Christ our paschal lamb is sacrificed therefore let us keep the feast. I love that banquet imagery: I love it because Jesus so often uses feasts to characterize the kingdom of God and because the last supper binds us all in history and over the world in Christ via the Holy Spirit with Jesus. We are going to keep a feast. We are going to be filled. This is the judgement: that God is generous but people are stingy; that God gives freely but humanity feels compelled to hoard. While we have become fixated on death, God brings to life and restores to health. In God no one dies, but we taste life forever in the presence of Christ. And how should we therefore live our lives if we believe this, if we believe that the resurrection is the hope of creation's restoration? What will knock us out of our fears? our fears that cause us to join the hoarding crowd. Is our faith so weak and miserable, so grounded in contingency, that we blanch at living out the words, at living in a world where abundance is the reality and scarcity the lie? How we've reversed the two, and it bombards us in our newspapers, our movies, our books, our politics. But the power of the resurrection is something different. It is something different than resuscitating a corpse - a parlor trick. The resurrection is a new fact of life, but a fact as old as creation, that death is not the final event and the fear of death does not lead to a love of humanity. There is no image of God in the fear of death - these two are not the same. God is sovereign over death, though death is not a created thing. Death has power over human beings only when human beings think that they exist without God. Death is a negation, a nothingness - as Barth points out in CD 3.3 and In CD 4.1. Death rules human beings when we become convinced of our own rightness and the corresponding wrongness of other. Like Schubert's Erlkoenig we would rather take by force than lose in an argument. When we think we exist independent of God, we cannot take no for an answer from another human being. We cannot tell ourselves no, and we lie to ourselves and others to maintain the illusion of autonomy.
Who will free us from this?
Jesus, whose life is the unique expression of God's sovereign servanthood, who lived out a life of obedience and love among us, who showed us the Father and gave us the Spirit: Jesus in his life death and resurrection leads us to that place of generosity, where we see and can rest in what God has given us. Where we can express the gratitude we are called into - that there is abundance, that there is enough, and that we shouldn't be afraid of scarcity.
Let us keep the feast.

The moving figure

Eadweard Muybridge made photographs of people and animals in motion late in the 19th century. To me nothing is more beautiful than the human figure in motion, and his attempts at trying to capture that motion from different angles has a completeness about it. Cubism attempts something like this in individual paintings. Associations with early movie making are apparent. All kinds of possibilities are opened up - possibilities that movie making has seldom approached. Experimental films attempt some of these things: triptychs, polytyptchs, stop motion, montage - but basically there's a proscenium that is never crossed when you watch the conventional movie.
Tomorrow I'm visiting my art teacher from Brevard who is now at High Point University, Cherl. I'm going to draw with her drawing class, a prospect I find exciting - she may have a model or else a still life. I'm already preparing to bring way more than I need.
I may have a preaching gig at Easter at the church in Smithfield, where an Easter tradition is to bring various meat products and try to reassemble the beast. They used to do this to insure a successful tobacco harvest - now they do it to celebrate fertility and the coming of Spring. Like any Presbyterian service there will be lots of covering body parts with meat and wearing of vegetables. There will also be the celebration of the keg and the tartin' of the krakens. The "wee timrous cowrain beastie" of Burns "to a mouse" will make an appearance and deliver treats to old and young alike. And the "oh little Brauts of Bethlehem" will descend from the rafters with ululations and scintilations.

Every presbytery is a peculiar institution

Today I went to my first presbytery meeting here in NC. As a minister I'm a corresponding member. I can't vote, but I'm recognized. I am still looking for a call here, something I can slip into. Our friend Joey was welcomed into the presbytery at the church in Smithfield, where they'll pay him in sausage and hams. On the stain glass window there Jesus is crucified between two brauts - one of the brauts will be in paradise that day, but the braut that remains is wurst for it. One braut looks at Jesus and says, "We're in a pickle now." The other peppered his speech with ,"I'm not relishing this." "I'm not going to grill you, " Jesus basted - remembering how he and Mary 'ad'n ate some beer battered franks the other day. This window is quite a scene: Jesus, the two brauts, the chorus of angel franks, the sea of relish, the clouds of mustard - the eschatological banquet, complete with doves stuffed with truffles, capers, cherries, with rivers of sauer kraut and lakes of beer, with mountains of rye bread, corned beef aplenty, pigs, geese, cows, fish, chicken, quail, ptarmingan. Cheese and peppers and chips and salsa and hot wings gamboling freely along the table; beers dark and amber and red and pale and brown, chocolatey and berryish and smooth; cheeses soft and hard and crumbly and sharp and mild, with peppers and nuts and wine. And all we come a cross here in this window, this image, this icon. A vision of the heavenly host, a peach tart in chocolate, swells before our eyes and transports us in rapture to a blessed realm where death is swallowed up in victory followed by a nice aperitif, a port or a glass of sherry. At this point we repair to the billiard room and knock some spheres celestial on the green felt fabric of time; we bank our shots and pocket our yearnings, and caroming we go, taking our cues and pooling our resources, cushioning our blows from snookering each other, seemingly without break. Then swinging back in a wing back a thing back in the summer sack we find a knack and cram a stack pan caked and fried our bacon homed and buttered a tale of olden times there not remembered again but spoken a token and folksy trappings extended a trio broke and windowed. Then it's time and time and half a time. But something may be put up in the kitchen, so you stumble back - who broughts a pretzel? who spied a scake? who scaled a fish? And music lofts from throats of the quire triumphant hops and barley sound tapped in harmonious keg, a barrel vault rolling called up yonder. When? Time shall be know'd more. When? The mawning breaks eee-tunnel bride and fair. When? The strummed pet of the Lord shall sound upon that otter sure. When? The called is roll dipped rejoinder eel bee deer. And that's what I stumbled down here for, the octopus salad we had last night. Just enough greens and the octopus sliced and cooked tender, not rubbery - as Christ was between too rubberys in the window. He squid and suctioned limbs, incrimina invertabrate, a trinity of hearts and beakered ink a jet made whiter than any lesser fuller might fill. In an octopus's garden in the shade.
That's all I have got right now.

Valentine's

This is our second Valentine's day together. The photograph above was taken last year in our Decatur home. This year we went to a French restaurant here in Durham (yes, a day early, but we practice a more leisurely Valentine's - as apparently do some other couples we've met) and we had soups and pork dishes. I had beets. And the most incredible thing: goat cheese rolled in pepper - tres intense. This place reminded me of the Alsace in Decatur or Violette's off Clairmont. My favorite, the South of France, is no longer in existence near the Tara- leaving the Varsity with its chilli dogs to rule that corner of the eating world.
What could be more romantic than listening to Edith Piaf's Vie en Rose, eating a chilli dog, and preparing to watch Lives of Others. Imagine a chilli dog, on a plate with cherries and shaved cabbage, little rolled up balls of pepper encrusted goat cheese, with shitake mushrooms and shallots. Pop open a Beaujolais and it's gourmand heaven.
Two years this Feb 2nd we've been together and I"m still crazy about Jami. We're still crazy about each other. What's incredible is that she listens to my ideas about food. I can tell I'm having an impact.

I missed carnival and went straight into lent

I was looking forward to carnival this year - after reading Rabelais and Bakhtin, I was all worked up. Then this influenza hit me. The word Influenza is a medieval diagnosis - an influence in the air, that affected a person when their humors were out of balance, brought about this condition. It's an influence just like the Moon's influence on tides or the Sun's on gold or Venus on copper. The ancients had a notion that everything exerted an influence on everything else - that the cosmos was in a quest for balance - but a balance of motion - since the only thing that doesn't move is God: everything revolved around the primium mobile, and the motion that moved the cosmos was love.
So I missed carnival and now I'm immersed in lent. I missed the imposition of ashes. I missed the deposition of sashes. I'm left without a sense of deciding to give up anything. One year I gave up despair - and that worked pretty well. With influenza has come a significant loss of appetite, so I've already given up significant consumption. In the protestant tradition, you'd think we would have reversed carnival and lent - and that now we'd be eating all kinds of cow and pig and chicken: just to stick it to the Roman church. Aside from Luther though, the reformation was begun by some real spoil sports. Calvin probably could have done with a decade of lent - all of life should be lent.
But I could be wrong. Calvin could have been for free love and feasting: probably not.
I miss being a gadfly. Back in Decatur I carried my Kierkegaard with me and settled down at various desks: the bar at Twains, the reference desk at the library - where I was welcome to put in my hours. Here in Durham, I've mostly been sick; and of a truth, a gadfly needs a certain audience and a certain ambiance of local culture, in order to perform his best.
Yesterday Jami played me a thisamericanlife podcast about puzzle solvers and listening to it I heard a clue as to why I garner certain reactions from some people. One of the puzzle contestants, a very smart guy, says that it dawned on him: he was informing people against their will. I thought, "there's my last cpe experience in a nutshell." I believe my last cpe did occur in a nutshell.
It's great to be free again.
But what does that mean for me in the future? Don't I have to sacrifice some of that freedom for stability?
I consider it only to be the freedom most people require: freedom to be and to be without being made to feel guilty about who I am; and freedom to work, to not be bothered with micro-managers, but to actually do my job without looking over my shoulder.
So I am free.
Carnival and lent have that goal as well: to free the individual. The goal of every doctrine in Christianity is to free the individual; if it is used otherwise, it becomes a cramped and jejune thing.

Since Monday evening I've had classic influenza

Classic influenza, as opposed to new influenza or diet influenza. I've been laid low, laid out and way laid, in all ways shapes and forms: I've been walloped by nature's tiniest microbes. I'm still limping along. On Thursday we saw the doctor (Jami has bronchitis to go along with my ailment). At least I have good drugs percolating in my blood.

imagination

This weekend we went to Jami's hometown for her dad's 70th birthday.

At Twain's during trivia night there is often a group called "evil dead poet's society", a team name I've always enjoyed. Tonight, conversing with Jami about the Manchurian Candidate, another team name occurs to me: "Diary of Anne Frank Sinatra." Wear it and be wonderful.

More Icy rain and snow falling on China

By Tuesday yahoo/weather says that temperatures should be 70 here in Durham. But today it's in the 30s. I know that winter is supposed to be cold, but I've never gotten used to it. I remember, back in 1982, in January, my first quarter at UGA, snow accumulated up to 6 inches. I went into drawing class at 1:30 and when I left at 4 the ground was covered with snow. I couldn't get my car out and I was stranded. At the time I was new to Athens and didn't know any thing about getting around the city. I was generally trapped in my room- an apartment in someone's house. I cooked soup on a hot plate. I was miserable.
Above is the last painting I did in my Decatur studio.