What's on My Mind

I have become pensive, you may say, lately. Painting is taking over my mind. Frankly I am a little surprised by the urgency and encompassing force by which it has gripped me lately. At times I wonder if I'm letting work overshadow more important things. I find myself pausing in midday to catch up on the daily readings. I haven't said a rosary in a long while.

In a way, Lent, the season partially dedicated to meditation, has forced me to re-think about priorities in my life. In the center of all this is the vocation of being an artist. I ask myself what that exactly means, and how different it is from having a simple hobby. The demands of a vocation weigh on one's soul, it asks for more than what I have been giving it. There's no doubt that I have been given the talent, facility, and material means, not to mention a doting husband who would do anything to see me happy. There's simply nothing holding me back from advancing this vocation.

What I don't have, it has become ever clear to me, is devotion.

Devotion isn't something bitter, dour, to swallow and to occasionally choke on. Too often people look at a disciplined, structured approach to life as a negative thing. I don't remember who it was (Pope John Paul II?) that challenged the Catholic youths to strive for excellence. Why settle for mediocrity, when you can be excellent? He asked. Excellence is impossible without devotion. It so happened that art is given me as vocation, an indispensable thread of my being. It follows that I cannot run away from the excellence to which I'm called. The reason I find Flannery O'Connor such an inspiration is how she lived her vocation as an artist, and how utterly devotedly and fearlessly she went about serving the good of her work.

And just to make one thing clear, I've never seen the need to make my artwork religious. I don't, and never will, see myself becoming a "religious artist." I don't want to dwell on the subject because it's just too complicated to be made clear by a few words, at least not by someone like me. You'll have to consult theologians, or aestheticians like Jacques Maritain, whose theories on the subject was crucial to validate O'Connor own thoughts on her vocation as an artist (see also Maritain's book Art and Scholasticism). I, in turn, have found validation to my own feelings in both Maritain, and O'Connor.

Now back to my current re-thinking of being an artist. In the past, my work has been guided by a mechanical production, and by, I'm ashamed to say, deadlines. Needless to say, there was deeply embedded passivity of that type of routine. What's now I see clearly, is the need to break through the comfort zone. I've been in it too long. No artist who sees his work as part of his being is content with repeating himself. The analogy in spiritual life would be the advancement through the chambers of Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle.

Again, art as vocation is not the same as art as hobby. If my work does not mirror what I am, and how essentially I relate to the world, to Creation specifically, then it isn't a vocation. Although I have not treated my work as a hobbyist might have, but I'm far from tapping into the soul of and source of the wellspring of it. Art is utterly unique in that it lays lofty demands on both the intellect and nitty-gritty routines of the artist. Inspiration alone makes nothing. An artist is at once a thinker and blue-collar mechanic or he isn't one. As a fallen creature, my natural inclination is to take the easy way out, or not to get "out" at all. If you look at the dynamics of living one's vocation as constant pruning and cutting away a jungle, the easy-way-out, or staying in the same spot, is no way of survival. In a letter in which Flannery gives advice to an aspiring writer, she plainly calls routine as the means of survival for an artist. I put it in another word: devotion.

So there you have it, the bits of fruits of my latest navel-gazing. It also explains the slow-coming of posts on this blog. I have in effect suspended all other activities (excepting laundry and getting tax done!) for fear of dissipation of mental energies. I have succeeded in painting several crappy pictures in a row, but I'm refraining from pulling out my stealthily graying hair and sinking into moodiness. I'm not even repainting the crappy pictures, like I used to do so as not to face the embarrassment of failure and inadequacy. I'm keeping them. I want to see my own inadequacy and be sober about what lies ahead. It helps also to know that these crappy pictures serve their own parts in the bigger scheme of things, and one day I will have something to thank them for.

As my pal Jan likes to say, over and out.

Merry Annunciation!

Before I even opened today's readings in my Magnificat, I was informed by my friend Jan in her blog post that today is the Feast of Annunciation (that should give away that I open the internet before I do my daily prayers, not to say this is Lent.)

Here is a painting of The Annunciation by French painter Maurice Denis (1870-1943), one of the few Modern interpretations which I really like. Enjoy!

My Father's Oldest Sister Has Died

When I came back from Mass this morning, I found a message my younger sister had left on my Skype page, informing me that our oldest aunt, our Dad's sister, had passed away this morning (their Sunday evening).

My Dad has/had three sisters. Dad is the youngest of six. His two older brothers had been deceased, long before my siblings and I had a chance to meet them. My oldest uncle died before the 1949 Communist Liberation, second uncle died after years of beating and humiliation at the hands of the new People's regime for being from a family of land owners who employed and "exploited" poor tenants prior to the Revolution. My three aunts had better times, largely due, I think, to their younger age. My second and third aunts (that's how we address our aunts and uncles in China, by their age ranks,) were involved during their college years in anti-government demonstrations and movements when the Kuomintang (National Party led by Chiang Kai-shek) was in charge of China, therefore showed their sympathy toward the opposing Communist Party. Their involvement proved to be highly beneficial to their later social status and survival under the five-starred red flag.

Since my Dad is not only the youngest, but the only, boy who survived into the tumultuous age known as the New China along with them, my three aunts treated him like their perpetual "baby-brother" until old age overtook their maternal ambitions one by one. Not infrequently Mom and us kids resented their over-protection of Dad, even meddling in our family affairs.

My two younger aunts went to college, taught in colleges all their lives, and are among the "intellectuals" in the clan. The oldest Aunt, being the oldest of the girls, was not given the opportunity to education. In stead, she helped with household work and nurtured younger siblings. She married early, to the same man till the end, who was also college-educated and a life-long teacher. She had six children with him, and remained a housewife all her life. She was less resented by us, mainly because she was too busy with her own brood and hardships of survival to be minding the "baby-brother's" affairs. My two sisters are closer to her than I ever was, because both spent part of their high school years living with her, as a result of a convoluted series of circumstances wherein close relatives are obligated to "lift and carry" one another according to traditional Chinese filial ethics.

I don't want to give the impression that we have bad relationships with my two other aunts. Just the opposite, through thick and thin, we have stayed close and managed to never let the blood be diluted by bitterness. It helps that I have a mother whose capacity for forgiveness is truly inspiring, more thanks to her simplicity than her goodness. The thoughts of these two aunts evoke nothing short of love and affection in me and my brother and two sisters.

My oldest aunt, the one who just passed away, began to show signs of dementia shortly after her husband's death. Fortunately, she had six children who didn't find it hard to share responsibility in taking care of her. As I've said I didn't know her very well, but my limited memories of her are always of a serene, mild, smiling woman, even during her mentally reduced years. Her consistent devotion to her husband and children seemed not to have been affected by modern Feminism which was part of the Revolution. (For make no mistake, despite what you've heard about the sex discrimination and abandoned female babies, Communism embraced various ideologies which declared war to the "Old Society," including Feminism). Although she hardly ever appeared domineering, or even very talkative, she enjoyed a quiet authority and respect among her children.

To appreciate her serenity and un-assumedness, you have to know that difficult personality runs deep and wide in my family lineage, that is, on my father's side. God bless all who care and deal with my two surviving aunts, and my Dad (legendary tempers of my two dead uncles, whom I never met, lived on for years through the memories of their respective children, my cousins). For some reason, this trait seldom manifested in my oldest aunt.

(To be continued. Have company to go fly kites.)

Father Baron on True Grit:

All That I Ask For