Work in Progress

The painting I'm working on:

Sunday Love Letter

Beloved,

I could write You so much. I have "topics," big, small, cute, full of Izy-profundities. But to do that I would have to dig in a little, to reach in, and, out for words, for flow, for a way for words to hold hands, all the while keeping an eye on grammar, in a language called "second" to me.

I'd rather think of You, then, in thoughts wordless. Or, better yet, in fugitive mental pictures. Sometimes they also reach in, and out, to one another, to the me who's often outside of me. Then I could watch all this as if a kind of spectator sports, amused, astonished, or afflicted. Somehow their ghost-like filaments, also reach in and out to form flows, constrained by a grammar and gravity all of their own.

There's an aching to all this, swelling, palpable, and literal in my chest. I remember Saul Bellow in his Anderson the Rain King, said something to the effect that when Anderson sensed beauty approaching, his teeth ached. How well I know that feeling! I used to have to flee the library when suddenly struck by an un-named force out of some words I had read, to pace clumsily all over the campus; round and round till the tide in my chest receded and exhausted. There was no one to tell, no one to make sound to. It came and went silently, in the greatest gush of solitude. Pain resembled ecstasy. Yet without a name. The closest word I had for the whole thing was beauty.

My heart ached then, as it does now. Back then I didn't know what it was aching for; now I am made to understand, so sometimes I weep without tear, or sound. My heart defies the constraint of silence, it leaps up, up, to Beauty, to its Beloved.

To You.

Then, I know once again that word fails, or cracks. What I wanted is a love song, but I'm the poorest soul for poetry. I searched and searched and came to settle for Chesterton's engagement letter to his beloved fiance, on these words, bouncier and sturdier than what could have been my own:

There are four lamps of thanksgiving always before me: 

The first is for my creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. 

The second is that I have not with all my faults gone after strange women -you cannot think how a man's self-restraint is rewarded in this.

The third is that I have tried to love everything alive,
a dim preparation for loving you. 

And the fourth is but no word can express that: here ends all my previous existence
Take it, it led me to you.

Unlike Chesterton, I have, in a manner of speaking, "gone after strange women."  Grateful thus more, I am, that I have been Pardoned.

Love, Izy

For Jan

My friend Jan has been down on her back, twelve days in all. You gotta pity a woman when her only feasible entertainment consists of taking pictures of her own knees and feet. Might as well. With that much time on one's hand while down on one's back, not to mention whose back we're talking about here, I fear for those who find themselves in close proximity, and pray that peace be with them. May the lady of the house not act like she is drinking gasoline and spitting fire, like this woman seems to being doing:

Willem de Kooning, Woman I

As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure that my pal Jan doesn't drink gasoline. She seems to prefer rum or Bailey's Irish Cream. Can you spit fire by drinking rum? 

I just don't believe someone with pretty legs like these, and who wears socks like these, would drink gasoline (or rum for that matter) and spit fire. But I'm pretty sure that someone with pretty legs like them, and who wears lovely socks like them, not only would, but also deserve, to have some shoes like these:

A couple of notes: Willem de Kooning is an artist I like. There's a large hard-backed poster of that very image can be seen in the hall way of the art department where I teach. Hence the association. 

The shoes are the handiworks of Andy Warhol, the enfant terrible, or darling, of the art world, depending on your taste. But I have a tender spot in my heart for Andy. I can't help it. After all the guy is said to have lived and prayed with his mother often, went to mass almost daily, served the poor with monks at a soup kitchen, and left to be found a crucifix and rosary at bedside after death. I came across and bought a little book called Ho Ho Ho by him in a used book store last week. All Christmas drawings, utterly childlike and beguiling. Among them one showing two angels making acquaintance of each other, one rather bashful looking. On opposite leaf a quote of Warhol: "And they get to know you better, and they start to like you." That's the one I wanted to put up here to cheer the spirit of my pal Jan, but alas, the scanner does not work with my Mac, like, a lot of stuff don't work with Macs. Steve, you could have stuck around to get around fixing that. 

Sleep, as comfortably as you can manage, Jan. And I'll see your socks tomorrow.

The Seven

...if you find yourself obsessing on someone, on some physical injury, or on some painful conversation, you risk becoming a bitter person obsessed with revenge, which is the sin of anger. If you let your soul feel total contempt and loathing for someone, and if you're always insulting and censuring them in your mind, you're living with envy. If you give in to a feeling of malaise and exhaustion, that's laziness. On the other hand, if you find yourself entertaining ideas so pleasant that you could rest in them forever, only to realize that these thoughts are all about your own natural goodness, accomplishments, intelligence, talents, position, or beauty, this is pride. And if you dwell on your wealth and what you own (or want to own), then that's greed. If you're preoccupied with lots and lots of food and drink and only the best will do, you know gluttony. And if you're seduced by an inordinate love for giving or receiving flattery and by a deep-seated need to be liked, or by sexual pleasure, this is lust. 

- from Chapter 10, The Cloud of Unknowing 

It has been almost two months. In these past two months, I find myself gradually adapting into a new routine:

• two days a week, I spend six some hours among people half my age, talking, instructing, motivating, sometimes scolding. All this is done in a room full of easels, taborets, spot lights, broken chairs and trash cans, smells of oil paint and paint thinner and linseed oil, among youngsters in torn jeans, flipflops, purple or pink or blue hair, tattoos and nose rings, etc. And I am developing a feeling resembling affection for all of them - including the easels and the trash cans. 

• one evening a week, I go to RCIA at my parish, as sponsor to a woman, whom I shall call D, that I met in an art class I taught two years ago. D was talking to other people in the class about having a blue heeler dog to give away, a stray she had kept and taken to the vet for heart worms etc. I overheard. I inquired. A couple of weeks later KDM and I paid a visit to her house and came home with the blue heeler, whom we rechristened Scooter. A few days later in class D was yet again chatting with another woman and mentioned that although she was Baptist she had wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl. I overheard that too. I inquired. Two months later, she started going to mass at my parish. Two years later, at present, I'm her RCIA sponsor. 

• We're getting used to our new pastor. Father K would fill in at RCIA when the lady-in-charge is sick or for other reason can't show. Father K is from Africa and laughs very hearty and baritone laughs. When he speaks of God and Christ and prayer and pure silence you have something like goose bumps on the back of your neck. You become aware that something real is here. 

• Ever since Fr. K told us that upon awakening he gives his first hour of the day to the Lord, I've been up to speed on my daily readings. I confess that I understood, intellectually, the importance of the morning prayer and offerings long before Fr. K's discourse on it. Yet I did not put it into practice. I was lazy, undisciplined. So many other things got in the way or took precedence: coffee, checking email, getting dressed and ready for whatever, doing dishes left over from the night before, you get the picture. Now I'm shamed into action. God does not need that first hour of my day as God needs nothing; it is I who very much need it sanctified in order to live, rather than sleepwalk through, the every hour thereafter. 

• One morning a week, as has been for the past six years, KDM and I spend an hour at the little chapel of Perpetual Adoration, the Happy Hour. I don't think it's something I can ever stop doing. This past Friday a young Hispanic woman came in, a new face to us regular adorers. Shortly after we heard sniffing and what sounded like soft sobbing from where she knelt. We tried not to look her way, feeling bad that the chapel was too small and shabby to afford her the privacy she obviously needed. Clearly something happened to her, and she wanted to be alone with the only One to whom she could bare her soul and its burden and grief.

• I've almost finished reading the much-discussed book by Father Robert Barron Catholicism. Reading the book, attending RCIA, wrestling with aversion for human interaction, coming face-to-face with conflicts both interior and exterior... have all been rocking my inner world towards a direction I would not have foreseen a merely two months ago. Simply put, I find myself so helpless in so many circumstances that I'm utterly dependent on my Catholic faith. I'm beginning to have a glimpse of what the saints must have meant by Love. And that disturbs, even pains me. I've always considered myself quick in perception and insight. Why, I've been sitting up in sofas and in pews alike reading, hearing, contemplating, analyzing the meaning of Faith, Hope, and Love, yet it is now being revealed to me that I know next to nothing about being in Love with God. Is there any other need in this life than being in love with God? 

• I remember at one time or another wondered if  by picking Saint Therese "the Little Flower" as my patron, I had made a commonplace choice due to her popularity. Of late I've come to see more and more clearly how providential the choice has been. As Fr. Barron relates in his book what a brilliant French Jesuit friend concluded about her: "the Little Teresa is really the Big Teresa!" My beloved Little Flower, saint of the Little Ways, do teach me the way of Love. Pray for me that for the rest of my life, I will want no more, no less.