I am fascinated by making things. Watching our house being built has brought back memories. I enjoy watching the process. Siding is torn off the old part, trenches are dug for the footings. The concrete is poured. Walls go up - pretty soon the roof is being added - rooms are defined and I can walk around in the space, as if it were already finished. But it's not. I take photos each day, and already it's a pretty nifty gif - like the house is assembling itself.
I remember my dad working on radios and TVs. Soldering wires, resisters and capacitors, testing vacuum tubes. This was some time ago- and kids aren't always welcome looking over their parent's shoulders asking questions. But I found the pattern of the wires fascinating - and later when I saw his notes, filled with schematics - I enjoyed drawing those straight lines and right angles and circles and squares.
And I love drawing and painting. Each one is a new thing - sometimes like I've never done it before. But every one starts with a line that starts at some point. And I may have something in mind or not. Not having anything in mind is no excuse for not making something. I always discover something.
Another thing I've noticed is that if I do have a grand plan, at some point it must be abandoned. Beautiful things that show up too soon must be painted over. Even when a plan does work, the result is often stilted and unsatisfying. I told a friend, who's a musician, that there needs to be a good struggle, some sense that I've pushed against the grain, for real satisfaction. He said he'd tried that in his practice and it'd helped. I was surprised; I wasn't giving advice.
But I have to say, the myth of the talented individual who is gifted with some genius or such and naturally overcomes hurdles that vex everyday people is wrong. What I do is difficult and not something I could put aside and come back to in 6 months and pick right up. Every creating human works hard to get the results they do: practicing, taking apart and putting back together, adjusting the angles, beveling the edges, measuring and squaring up. Whether building a house, dancing, hitting a baseball - repetition and analysis are the key.
When I was young I believed this myth about myself. I'd coasted along on talent as it were, but I hit a wall. I was afraid to make a mark on a page. I was leery of criticism. But the most critical voice was inside of me. I'm averse to change - and making a mark on a white page is change. Change threatens to bring criticism. This is the allure of conservatism - at least part way: to be sheltered from critique. The threat of the unknown. To stand astride the stream of history and yell, "stop." In order to make a mark on the page though, I had to jump right in, turn off the internal critic, and go. I did not allow myself to erase. I forced myself to use the lines I made as I made them.
I now say that art is managing accidents and failures. But that's too severe a way to put it. Those are the words of my internal critic. What accidents and failures are are changes in the plan. Plans are easy to fall in love with. They look perfect - like an architect's rendering or a NASA animation. But they are sterile. The voice must fill the room; the ink must blemish the page, the ground must be broken - and when that happens the plan changes. The work is always deviating from the plan. No one goes to a concert to look at a score - but the voices and instruments are sure to vary from the score - and we can either criticize or express wonder at the inventiveness of the ensemble: because it's the music made that is beautiful.
But the world is full of plans and planning. Plans are easy to obsess over. The plan is certainty par excellence. I can't help but think of a civil war example: McClellan gathers troops and supplies and holds back; Grant and Sherman plunge forward thinking only about where they're going.
God is reckless like that: plays with dinosaurs for 100 million years; places sentient life on a tiny planet on an obscure spiral arm of a galaxy. What's he thinking? Paul says it all makes sense. In this passage in Romans 8 he echoes the creation story of Genesis. He begins with Christ made in the image of sinful humanity and ends with the spirit hovering over the abyss between speech and meaning - the Fall in reverse, sort of. At this very point where speech fails, Paul then says that all things will work out - he's not being sentimental or falsely consoling. He says things work towards the Good - capital G (not merely tasty but fulfilled) because they participate in the love that love's God and originates from God.
How do we participate in this? Because the import of this text is not that we're passive witnesses to creation - like an audience in a theater - but are actually brought on stage. We don't just witness Jesus suffering, but we suffer with him. This text has many "with" verbs like that: we travail together with the spirit, and the spirit groans with us, even as creation groans with us; the spirit bears witness with us, and we are adopted as brothers and sisters with Christ. When Paul writes we are in the spirit - he might as well be saying that we're in the river - not standing on the shore yelling stop.
And right in the middle of creation with all its futility and groaning and waiting with expectation is prayer. Not just isolated individuals praying, but all of us praying together with the spirit. And not just words that come to mind but the meanings behind the words that slip through into the abyss. What we meant to say but what was heard a different way. It's the remainder that the practice subtracts from the plan that slips into the abyss of groanings beyond speech. We planned a family but it didn't work; we planned a mission but something else happened; I had planned to go to college but I had to give up my dreams. All of these subtractions fall into the abyss and where the spirit hovers, interceding, praying with us - that we can go on toward the Good.
And we go forward by loving what we have. Love the lines you make; love the song you sing; love the house you build; love the homework you study. I must say that last one really works. We can love because God loves us and has not left us alone but is with us. Not viewing from a distance but really with us. He came and lived like one of us: a man who stubbed his toe and forgot where he put his good hammer. The early church was mocked for affirming this - such weakness was thought to be beneath a god. Zeus would never cry. Jesus was not the kind of god the emperor thought of himself as. Jesus left the comfort zone of god and man. He showed us what valuing humanity over possessions or laws or ego could be like - that it was doable. Not without consequences.
And even more incredible, Paul, who could have lived a comfortable life, preferred these consequences. The crucifixion, death and resurrection of the messiah opened up a new world. As he says here, human comfort is predicated on the fear of death. The fear of death is about sticking to the plan. And there is no love in it.
Finally love the church you're in. No one is a christian by themselves. God calls us all together, as different as we can be, into congregations. Paul's letters are addressed to congregations. Even Phileman includes greetings to all in his household - hardly a private thing this faith.
Each church witnesses to the world God's creative act and how people are called to create with the triune God. Our church here, Oakhurst, has had a long witness to the creating love of God. Plans and processes have wrung out remainders into the abyss and these are gathered up by the spirit into our prayers and issue in the love of our practice. We practice every Sunday in the way we worship. We practice in our committees and in our events. We practice in our community and in our presbytery. In the songs we sing, the sacraments we celebrate; in visiting shut ins and hospitals. In this loving practice we know the Good that God is birthing in creation.
I continue to draw, as I have for 45 of my 50 years. For the last 34 years I have pursued an approach to drawing that encourages accident and experimentation - working faster than I can think. I have had spurts of progress during this time - some regresses or black holes, but I've continued forward progress. In the words of my therapist, "drawing [myself] out of unhelpful places."
lately i've eschewed upper case. years ago i went entirely lower case, for some reason, but taking german required me to use upper case again. call it at that time a search for some singular identifying trait - now, call it a stylistic intention.
I find that I'm doing the best art of my life right now - springing from stability in my life and some maturity - some getting free of what Lacan calls "the desire of the other." The funny thing about Lacan is when I hear people talk about him in a critical theory context, I wonder, "why are you focusing on that? Where is that coming from?" - but in terms of pastoral care: he makes perfect sense - our language fails to symbolize our experience; the concept of Ego fails to account for subjectivity; our demands are counterproductive to our desires; and we have to live in an 'always wanting more' state. Life is learning to live with our losses - our griefs - a sense of lack that sends us searching - that is the slippage between the "I think" and "I am" of the human subject. In this sense it's no surprise that Lacan quotes Romans 7 from time to time.
The other day was a melancholy day for me. Whatever is inside us is complex, not just what we're conscious of. Jung, Freud, Klein, Lacan - all point to this complexity, this unknowable process at work in us, and they conceptualize it as event, timeless symbols or significations. Lacan goes the deepest of any I've read on this matter of the unconscious. He contends that our ego, that sense that I'm thinking my thoughts - and Klein's object relations construction of introjects is contained in what he calls the Imaginary: that is my own conception of an Ego is a product of my imagination. So the ego, that sense that we know what we know, is illusory - that is, it is more a sense that we imagine a sense in ourselves that knows. There is a gap in the cogito, a gap that where we would grasp our identity, we find that it slips further away. At least as long as we think that our goal is to strengthen our Ego - our sense of knowing what we know about who we are - as if our problem were simply one of being informed, and then we would live a life of stasis. Free from the demand of unmet desire.
I may do more of these, depending on how they meet my needs to visualize the mask of entrenched power. I'm fascinated by these portraits and how they serve as emblems. In the last few years I've noticed a trend toward photographs as attempts at capturing the image (reifying the reminder) of a presence. That's what these images are, among other things: past presences.. A portrait is a haunt, a haint - as my grandmother would say. "How can we convey the power," they seem to ask? Or we could say, that they question power - a reminder that any human who may have held power, discovered its presence as fleeting - and at bottom, discovered themselves as impotent. So an academic portrait displays power and impotence at once. It takes power to have such a portrait painted and to be garbed in such a way; it displays impotence in that this is all there is - a guy in a suit.
I painted this painting in oil close to ten years ago for a show at Brevard College (my first alma mater). Tim Murray had arranged for me to have a large show there and I was pleased to work up 19 paintings and 60-some drawings and watercolors. This painting, and I admit to an appropriationist streak, was a take on Raphaelle Peale's After the Bath (at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) - nude behind curtain. I added a cello and altered the color, and the drape was initially a landscape painting, and I enlarged the space of the room. Peale's work is a trompe l'oeil bit of handkerchief covering the nude (not many nudes survive from the early years of the republic: Vanderlyn and Washington Allston being rare exceptions).