Good Friday, The Suffering Servant and The Saint John's Bible

Today, Good Friday, I awoke thinking about the passage in Isaiah commonly called "The Suffering Servant." It is a long passage, so here is just an excerpt:

He was spurned and avoided by people,
a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity,
one of those from whom people hide their faces,
spurned, and we held him in no esteem.
Yet it was our infirmities that he bore,
our sufferings that he endured,
while we thought of him as stricken,
as one smitten by God and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our offenses,
crushed for our sins;
upon him was the chastisement
that makes us whole,
by his stripes we were healed.

We had all gone astray like sheep,
each following his own way;
but the LORD laid upon him
the guilt of us all.

For the full passage, Isaiah 52:13-53:12, which is the first reading for liturgy today, click here.
 
When I think about this passage, I always think of the illumination in The Saint John's Bible that accompanies it, by Donald Jackson (above).
 

I first saw it in a slide presentation at Saint John's University, and immediately when it was flashed on the screen, I thought-- that's the Door of No Return! The abstract bars that hold in the suffering servant looked to me so much like the door of no return in Accra, Ghana, the door through which slaves passed to board ships for America.

 

The image of the suffering servant in this illumination is based on starvation victims in Africa, not slaves, but for me, slavery is an apt association with this story. In fact, Holy Week has had me thinking about slavery and the general mistreatment of Africans and African-Americans in this country. After hearing the Passion story last Sunday, all I could think about was lynching. And what a horrible time it must have been to live in a country where lynching was going on regularly. Innocent people hung from trees by angry mobs. I am worried about the potential for violence, politically-motivated and racist violence, in our current society. But nothing can really compare to those decades of violence in the mid-20th century, in America and abroad.
 
There is still much suffering by innocents-- victims of terrorism, ongoing slave trade and mistreatment of children throughout the world.
 
That is a heavy burden we place on our God.

Art in the Provinces

My father just wrote to me to say how much he enjoyed Sinclair Lewis's Main Street. He thought I might find something in common with the main character, a librarian from St. Paul who marries a doctor from Gopher Prairie and moves with him out to small-town Minnesota (Sauk Centre to be precise) where she tries to influence the reading tastes of the town.

I don't find this area to be terribly provincial. People are particularly well read, and I don't get much time to read, and I read slowly, and I don't ever look down on anyone for that. I don't know much about classical music, either, but I do have some good CDs and have attended concerts in LA, Chicago and New York. And so it is that every once in awhile, I'm treated to a scene worthy of Sinclair Lewis.

One of my favorite books is Willa Cather's My Antonia. There is a wonderful scene in there where the narrator of the book, Jim Burden, and the hired girl Lena, who has made her way as a seamstress, meet up when Jim is in college in Lincoln, Nebraska. Jim begins by saying that whenever he smells lilacs he thinks of going to the theater in Lincoln with Lena that spring. At the theater they're treated to what is clearly a horribly acted, miscast play, a version of Dumas' Camille. Nonetheless, never having seen "real" theater before, they're utterly captivated. Jim says of the woman playing the lead, "I suppose no woman could have been further in person, voice and temperament from Dumas' appealing heroine than the veteran actress who first acquainted me with her. Her conception of the character was heavy and uncompromising as her diction; she bore hard on the idea and on the consonants. At all times she was highly tragic, devoured by remorse. Lightness of stress or behaviour was far from her. Her voice was heavy and deep: "Ar-r-r-mond!" she would begin, as if she were summoning him to the bar of Judgment. But the lines were enough. She had only to utter them. They created the character in spite of her."

And of the music, Jim narrates: "Between the acts we had no time to forget. The orchestra kept sawing away at the Traviata music, so joyous and sad, so thin and far-away, so clap-trap and yet so heart-breaking. After the second act I left Lena in tearful contemplation of the ceiling, and went out into the lobby to smoke. As I walked about there I congratulated myself that I had not brought some Lincoln girl who would talk during the waits about the junior dances..."

Thursday night we paid too much money to go to an outdoor concert at one of the nearby colleges. It was a performance of Civil War-era music, interspersed with Looney Tunes and Three Stooges shorts set in the Civil War. The musicians were the local faculty classical ensemble.

The music was not Civil war-era. There were two pieces by Dvorak written in the 1890s. One I knew very well, and so my ear was quite bothered by the sawing away of the cellist and one of the violinists. The very large mezzo-soprano did a very dramatic rendering of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home."

But the concert was made very enjoyable-- for me at least-- by the audience, particularly three drunken members of the audience, one a man in a cowboy hat, and two women, one more drunk than the other.

When the cellist came out at first for the first piece (ca. 1892), she began by saying she would not be in her usual spot because she was working hard to keep the instrument in tune despite the humidity. "This afternoon at rehearsal, my D string was just wild!"

To which the cowboy loudly whooped, "You G string? Did you say you lost your G string? Whoo hoo!"

She played the piece, just fine, and when it was over the very drunk woman said very loudly, "Wow. I bet she could play Chopin."

To which the cowboy replied, "Oh, you're going to hear all sorts of good music tonight, alright. All sorts of good music."

A few numbers later, a pianist took the stage, James A. The cowboy knew the man: "Piano Jim! There's piano Jim! Oh boy, he's good. Wait until you hear this."

Piano Jim was probably the best of the musicians, but he was having a bad night. He started the first piece and after about 30 seconds, cowboy said, "This sounds like something from the Wizard of Oz, don't it?" It very soon afterward left the "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" theme that was faint to say the least. The song took off, but Piano Jim had a little difficulty keeping up with it. Afterwards, despite the very enthusiastic applause, he somewhat stormed off the stage, disappointed and frustrated with himself.

There were other, less memorable, outbursts by the trio of fans during the first act. Every time one of them made noise, a very indignant 13-year-old girl in the front row with her parents would turn around and glare. She was no doubt a student of one of the musicians, and had seen how classical audiences, outside or no, were supposed to behave during performances.

After the break we moved back and I got an Adirondack chair to sit in. I was behind some very well-behaved Asian girls who may have been on campus for a camp. It was dark enough to show the Looney Tunes short, which one of the girl taped in almost its entirety on her tiny digital camera. As I watched, the three Asian girls took an average of 5 photos a minute of the performance. I would have to say their experience was almost completely mediated by their digital cameras.

By the time the Three Stooges started, the mosquitoes had arrived. I have never understood what makes the Three Stooges funny, and so, eaten alive under the darkening Minnesota sky, we decided to forego the last tune.

NYC

I think there's a very high probability that March 17 will be the best day this year. We've just come back from a vacation to South Jersey, where we had great visits with two of my childhood friends and then an all-day party/food extravaganza with my relatives so they could meet Steve, followed by two amazing days in New York City. I've always loved New York, and lived in Brooklyn for 18 months during graduate school. Steve's daughter lives there and we got to meet her boyfriend's parents, who were very great New Yorkers, sort of frustrated artists who have made films (Marjory Steinweiss) and composed music (Leslie Steinweiss) and finally funnelled their creative energy into the family business, Marjory's father's jewelry store (Julius Cohen Jewelers) which works with private clients and creates exquisite pieces. We visited their store, on 63rd and Madison, on Monday, after I had a two-hour lunch with my agent-- also an incredibly good experience with nary an awkward pause-- and we spent a few hours at the MOMA to kill time, not a bad place at all to do that.

The store was very old world, with velvet-lined tables, ancient wood floors, and jeweler equipment that has not really changed (like dentist equipment) for hundreds of years. Much like dentistry-- all the old files and tweezers and clamps and magnifiers you strap on your face, and then here and there a laser machine. Afterwards we crammed into their Honda and headed downtown for dinner at a great Ramen place. A quick trip to the Strand and then home to Catherine and Homer's place in Brooklyn.

But it was Tuesday that was the amazing day. First, Homer got us still-warm bagels for breakfast. Then we walked up to Pratt and looked at the statue garden where Catherine met us. We went to the Steinweiss's apartment a few blocks away, where Marjory had left out her student film from NYU, Open Lines, made in 1991 when she returned to school. It was fantastic. And I'm not just saying that. We were very impressed, by the story and filming and production. It had made the rounds of film festivals at the time, and got her some work editing back in New York. But when editing went to high-definition and digital, she wasn't interested anymore. She liked cutting and splicing film.

After that we headed to Dunham Records, Homer's recording studio, a sort of off-shoot of Daptone Records. They had an old Hammond B-3 organ and a guy was playing amazing music on it-- funk/soul stuff. We admired the drapes Homer made-- he even pounded in the grommets-- and then were off for lunch at La Superior, a taco place directly under the Williamsburg Bridge, that served the most flavorful and unusual tacos I've ever eaten. Then we parted ways with Homer and walked with Catherine over the bridge and into SoHo. Except for the fact that our feet were killing us by this point, it was all bliss. But hey, we were in NY, so we bought some new shoes (though as Steve said, the damage was done). I also got a great nylon bag on the street, which will replace the great bag I currently have that is at the end of its strap life. There's nothing better than buying a quality and unique project on the street! Catherine took off for class, and Steve and I looked at high-end modern furniture he was afraid to sit on. Then we picked up bread and rugelach at Dean & Deluca's and headed back to Brooklyn, to my friend Susan Mastrangelo's apartment.

They live on the 30th floor of a 31-floor high rise in Brooklyn Heights. As in, a panoramic view of Manhattan, from the Statue of Liberty (see right) (without craning your neck) on up to the Chrysler building. (Craning your neck you can see from the Verrazano Bridge to the Upper East Side.) They're almost directly over the Brooklyn Bridge. It was amazing, and I was very happy for her, because she paid her dues for a long time living in tiny studio boxes. Her partner Tom and Steve hit it off tremendously well, the dinner was good, the dessert great, and then we took a car service back to Catherine and Homer's.

So when people ask me in the future what a perfect day would be, this is what I'll say-- I had it, and it was a brisk but sunny Spring day of art and good food with my baby in New York, St. Patrick's Day 2009.

Herzog

It's still winter, and the house is still under construction, so it was a great time for a Werner Herzog film festival! I've been really engaged thinking about the whole nature-mankind-culture-Romantic-Classical paradigm, too, and so wanted to go back and watch (with Steve) the great film Fitzcarraldo. I remembered the broad strokes of the film, but couldn't really remember it's point of view-- where it came out on the whole Nature/Culture argument.

I don't think Herzog knows either. We followed it up with a viewing of My Best Fiend, Herzog's documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski. Talking about Fitzcarraldo, he says, "I knew dragging the boat over the mountain was a great metaphor. A metaphor for what, I'm not sure."

Basically, Fitzcarraldo is about a dreamer dragging a boat over a mountain. He is driven by one goal, to bring an opera house to a Peruvian Amazon town. The town is full of boorish rubber barons who don't care about opera. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, known as "Fitzcarraldo," has a Victrola and a few Caruso records. The rich barons aren't interested, but the Indian children are mesmerized, and hang out in his hut listening to opera.

To bring opera to the town, Fitzcarraldo needs money. He has had several failed schemes (a Pan-Amazonian railroad, an ice making operation), but now hits on a way to become a rubber baron himself. But to do it he needs to take a steam ship into a part of a tributary river that is inaccessible because of rapids. The way to access it, he decides, is through a narrow "pass" over a steep hill. In the process he enlists the help of Machiguenga Indians, who would clearly as soon kill him and his crew as help them. But the Indians have their own reasons. Once they've helped him get the boat over the mountain, they unleash it and it goes through the rapids. Back where he started, Fitzcarraldo sells the boat and uses the money to hire an opera cast and stages the opera on the river boat. He achieves his dream, though in a fleeting way. But he creates a spectacle of great beauty.

So what does it all mean? Even more important to me, what is Herzog's position on nature? Over and over he has made documentaries and films that show rather ordinary people going into extreme environments (on our schedule for tonight the latest of these, Encounters at the End of the World, about Antarctica. He tells the stories, most notably Grizzly Man, in his even tone with his German accent. These are stories about hubris in the face of nature, but not necessarily condemning the impulse.

What he loves, clearly, is people who want to make art. At the center of Fitzcarraldo, what has real value, is opera. A sublime that is separate from the sublime natural environment. Fitzcarraldo is not really a Romantic, in that he is not interested in bonding with nature but with subduing it through culture. In the course of his journey he does not "go native" or join the Indians, or see their way of life as more pure or anything but brutish. The natural world does not thwart him, but nature's children, the Indians, do. He is able to reconsider his goals, adjust them to the situation, and still bring opera to the village.

He lives in the tension between Nature and Culture. That is how it seems to me to be for Herzog, too. He loves people who have single minded ambitions, like Dieter Dengler in Little Dieter Needs to Fly, whose ambition to be a pilot takes him to Vietnam where he survives and escapes a POW camp, and survives the trip through the jungle, not unlike the jungles of Peru. He loves it when those ambitions engage the person with the extremes of nature. And then he lets the story unfold, seeing how the person will compromise (or not) and shape that vision to what is possible (or not).

I relate. I think the Romantic notion that we are meant to be one with nature, have fallen from innocence, and need to return to nature is delusional (see Grizzly Man). We are always "other" from nature, and need to recognize that and integrate that into our view of ourselves. What is amazing about Fitzcarraldo, and about Herzog, and Kinski, is that they do not seem overly impressed with the grand scale of Peru. Herzog is contemptuous of Kinski's "poses" as a man of nature, arriving with all sorts of alpine equipment, and venturing with a cameraman to commune with nature "about 100 feet into the jungle," but otherwise staying completely away from it. Herzog says in an interview on the set that nature is "obscene," an unrelenting series of murders. It's not really about the mountain; it's about the boat. The boat is the means to wealth-- he has no problem exploiting the natural resources. But even wealth is not as important as art, as a man-made thing of beauty. It is the same with hot air balloons (The White Diamond, 2004), with airplanes, with boats.

Also, what is great is that Herzog is open. There is no definitive resolution or interpretation. All the elements are still in play. He remains completely curious, and that curiosity informs all his films.

He also knows a good metaphor when he sees it-- even if he can't tell you what it means.

Video Links

Last weekend Gary Louris and Mark Olson performed two shows in Minneapolis. Long ago they were the heart of the Jayhawks, a Minneapolis band at the center of the Americana scene. Mark Olson left the band, that struggled and never quite broke through and that meanwhile amassed major debt with their label on the hope of breaking through with just one more record. But the reason he left was mostly his marriage to Victoria Williams, a singer-songwriter from Joshua Tree, California. I loved this band and also Mark and Victoria, who made their own music with Olson's songwriting as the Harmony Ridge Creekdippers. A couple early Creekdipper CDs were sent to me in brown manilla envelopes hand-addressed by Mark Olson. It was a great thing-- leaving the band and making music in the desert. But also, this band and my history with it can still break my heart.

Olson and Williams broke up about eighteen months ago, and now Olson and Louris just finished touring together. I am out of touch enough that I didn't know they had made a new CD together, or were touring, until the two shows were imminent and sold out. A friend did post a link to some amazing video, however. You have to scroll down to Louris and Olson, and there are 3 videos on there, all just wonderful. For the link, click here.

I spent the better part of three days at work putting together a PowerPoint to highlight the new museum show that opens next week and figuring out how to make it into a flash video and then how to get that flash video onto our web site. I wanted to get a little "player" on the web site, but that meant getting it onto YouTube, who don't accept the "flash" format. After much downloading of free converter software and finagling, I realized the clearest video is achieved by posting the file with a link. Sorry you have to do some clicking to get to it, but here's the link to the page of exhibitions at least. To view the PowerPoint, read the essay "These Gentle Communists," and other fun stuff, click here.

Hooray for technology.

Simon and Garfunkel

I don't know why MPR insists on playing Marketplace Money on Sunday night at 5 p.m., when I'm always making dinner and could go for a good show, like This American Life, or a Best of Fresh Air, or almost anything that is not delivered in a haughty and ironic tone and talking about money.

Instead I turned on my ipod, which I have hooked up to the stereo speakers, and chose Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends. I actually chose all of Simon and Garfunkel, since I have the boxed set that I copied from my father last Christmas. Bookends is first. The first song after the theme is "Save the Life of My Child," about a suicide jumper in New York City. Like all these songs, it takes me straight back to my childhood. These were among the earliest lyrics we learned as kids, puzzled over, delighted in, sang along with. My brother bought me a Collected Lyrics of Paul Simon for Christmas, a book I don't want to read but am not unhappy to have, because I honor the impulse (with my brother, it's all impulse).

Anyway, there is one significant difference between the DVD tracks in my ipod and the old record my father would play some nights while we kids did the dinner dishes. These tracks don't have a scratch. My dad's record always skipped very briefly, so I have engraved in my head (my ex-husband would say "imprinted in my DNA") this line: "Everyone agreed it-- if the boy survived." I actually caught myself closing my mouth and doing a little dip of the chin where the skip goes. Except in its place were the words clearly sung: "would be a miracle indeed." Even as a kid I knew that was how the lyric went, except for the "indeed," but now each time it's like a revelation. We adapted. Turned it almost into a dance move, a tic. By the time you could think about it you were on to the greatest lyric in the song, when Officer MacDougal arrives and says: "The force can't do a decent job, cause the kids' got no respect for the law today, and blah blah blah." Blah blah blah is a great lyric, especially in such grown up music, when you're a kid.

Of course, a song that begins with "Good God don't jump!" and ends with the boy flying away... hmmm... really? And the lovely and inscrutible refrain, "Oh my grace, I've got not hiding place" has great dramatic possibilities.

But for me it was the next song, "America," more even than "Mrs. Robinson" (although I sent my ACT and SAT scores to Berkeley solely based on having seen The Graduate and the beauty of Katherine Ross), that held me captive for my adolescence and well into adulthood. I took more than one Greyhound bus, and even kissed someone I didn't know on one of those buses after talking from 2 a.m. when I boarded in Iowa until just before dawn outside Chicago, out of pure longing for what was described in that song.

Other Artist Friends, pt. 2

Oliver Smith is another artist friend of mine. He lives in Atlanta and his birthday is also June 27, like Susan Mastrangelo's. In my opinion, people born between June 23 and June 30 are often particularly creative. I met Oliver at my second real job, back in 1987 when I lived in Atlanta. Oliver was my first and only real drinking buddy, though he later went cold turkey and stopped, which is very impressive and marked the end of a long bad patch for him. He took me to some great bars in Atlanta, with good juke boxes and cheap whiskey, and one time an honest bar fight broke out.

Oliver was the advertising artist at the Decatur News/Sun, a group of five suburban Atlanta newspapers where I was the promotions director. He taught me what I know about layout and helped me learn to use type and make in-house ads with clip art and put together flyers for sales events. Mostly, though, we spent hours talking about Woody Allen and music and art and just anything that came into our heads. Oliver was born and raised in Savannah, and dipped below the Georgia state line to attend art college at Ringling College (of circus fame) in Florida, then moved to Atlanta. He sometimes used to drive up to the little towns and farms around Athens, Georgia, to see the work of Outsider artists like Howard Finster. Unlike the gallery people who went to rip them off, however, Oliver just wanted to sit and talk to them about making art, and to walk around and see what they made.

When I lived in New York he came to visit me. He'd been to New York once before, with his friend Saul who was from there, but they hadn't really gone anywhere or seen anything. I took Oliver to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it's an experience I'll never forget. Before that, Oliver hadn't really been in a great art museum. He hadn't seen the originals of the paintings he'd studied in college. This was something that had stunned me when we first went to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. I'd expected, well, the Art Institute of Chicago. I'd grown up with a world class art museum in my backyard. The idea that they wouldn't have room after room of Monets shocked me. Atlanta was a big city, after all. This museum was written up all over the place. Art, and the presence of an inland ocean like Lake Michigan, were things I'd taken for granted up to that point. Oliver and I went to the High Museum many times, and I was always disappointed. Particularly by the exhibit of framed wood with the knots painted different colors, and the exhibit of altered photocopies of Elvis and the Mona Lisa.

I was really happy when Oliver came to New York and we could go to the Met. Once there, he could barely focus, and kept pointing and saying, "That's a really famous painting. . . That's a really famous paint-- oh look, that's a really famous painting." He stood for awhile before a painting by Van Gogh and said, "Van Gogh stood before this same canvas." He had a game for us to play. In every room we picked out the piece we would most like to have. It sounds simple, but it had never occurred to me to do that in an art museum, and it is really fun.

Although I've lived in New York, Chicago, and Long Beach, California, I hardly ever saw celebrities. They were probably around, but I just didn't notice. But I'll say this, a great place to see celebrities is in art museums. (One highlight like this was seeing Elvis Costello get thrown out of the Art Institute for touching a painting. He was in the Medieval Art with us, while everyone else was looking at the Monets.) And every time I've gone to an art museum with Oliver, we've seen a celebrity. In the Museum of Modern Art at a Francis Bacon show, Richard Gere walked right in front of me. Oliver, who thinks celebrities are everywhere in New York, was not impressed. In Los Angeles, at a Modigliani show at LACMA, we saw Peter Falk. That was cool.

We used to joke that the newspaper office where we worked would someday return to its original calling as a bowling alley. Someday, we knew, it would close for good. When it did, Oliver went back to school for an M.F.A. in printmaking. He makes prints now, and teaches part-time at Georgia State, and also does a lot of experimental work with video and film. When I visited last Spring he took me to the gallery that shows his work, and the owner was very solicitous of him. Oliver, as always, was exceedingly modest about the whole thing. We walked around and picked out our favorite in each room. We also drove by the old Decatur News/Sun, which is a South Asian jewelry store. In the old parking lot they've built an Indian grocery that was hopping the day we were there.

Last year Oliver also bought a house, in an almost rural neighborhood in Decatur. And that's saying a lot because Atlanta is one of the least rural places in the country, it seems to me. They can't develop it fast enough. It's like ring upon ring upon ring of exurbia with a flashy splash at the center.

Bob Sauro, who I stayed with during my visit, lives in Alpharetta, and is a lawyer in downtown Atlanta. He lives in a large new house in a subdivision in one of the farthest circles. Oliver lives close in, in a working class African American neighborhood. His driveway is at about a 75 degree angle, and his house is well below street level, with a creek in back. He said his neighbor across the street asked him, "How do you like living down in the Hole?" The house is adorable, and he's fixing it up, and being true to its character. The walk-0ut basement is a great studio, filled with layers of equipment and experiments. Both Bob's and Oliver's neighborhoods had the same number of vacant or foreclosed houses. But in Oliver's neighborhood, the abandoned house next door had a tree lying on the roof that no one seemed anxious to remove. In Bob's neighborhood, the vacant new townhomes had security lights on them at night.

I was working in Midtown Manhattan when Oliver visited, and he picked me up early one day from work. My boss, Alan Smith, who had been a vice president for Hill and Knowlton and now ran his own international public relations firm, was telling me something at the front desk when Oliver came in. I hadn't noticed before how strong his Southern accent was. Alan looked at Oliver, looked at me, and his eyes got large. It was not unlike my father's reaction when J.T. Berkley came to our door. But he didn't realize that Oliver is like magic, really. We left the office and went to the Plaza Hotel, where Woody Allen's movie Alice was playing in a little theater on the side that didn't allow refreshments. When the movie was over we walked across the street to the Central Park Zoo to see the seals, where one of the scenes in the film took place. Although I grew up near Chicago, with all that art and all that water, I was really a suburban girl who didn't expect to make it very far from where I started out. I knew there was more out there, but I wasn't sure I'd get the chance to experience it. That's what made and makes hanging out with Oliver special. We both knew right then and there in Central Park we'd made it somewhere we hadn't ever expected we could go.

Other Artist Friends, pt. 1

I want to post links to the work of two other artist friends who are very dear to me. One, Susan Mastrangelo, lives in Brooklyn and teaches art at The Buckley School on the Upper East Side. She has made art her whole life. When I lived in Brooklyn and would go to her studio, I always loved to see her new work and was amazed at how rapidly her work developed and changed. And I also saw the heartbreak of being an artist in New York through her. When I met her she primarily made sculpture. And there came a time when her studio, cut down smaller and smaller as rents continuously rose, was too full of work. In order to make room for the new work, she was dissembling and getting rid of old work, some of which had never been shown outside of her studio. When you live in New York City, it takes a lot of faith to make sculpture. It's not even something you can really give to your friends, whose apartments are as small as your own.

Susan's work can be seen at http://www.susanmastrangelo.com/. Her work has always struck me as quite autobiographical, and whimsical. It is beautiful and melancholy. I don't think she likes it when people say her work is sad. That has never bothered me. I have one of her prints, a portrait, which seems both sad and autobiographical, hanging beside my desk. What has kept me from hanging it in other rooms is that I messed up the framing. I had it professionally framed, but too tightly around the print. It needs room to breathe. I always feel bad about trapping the woman in the frame and I need to have it redone.

Susan was born on June 27, and I was born on June 25. We were both at Yaddo in the summer of 1990 and there was a party to celebrate the birthdays. It was more an excuse to get the serious drinking of summer started, I think, and just to have a party, than it was about us. A lot of people were in transition. Susan Mastrangelo had only been there a few days-- she was mostly there in July, and I was leaving in a few days, having been there three weeks in June. The party was held at a composer's studio that was out in the woods, in a sort of stone tower, with a bridge over a small moat. The party was as magical as everything else about that place. I remember strawberries and champagne, and dancing. But mostly what I remember was the walk back. A few of us women, tipsy and happy, walked home together and it was absolutely pitch black dark. But there were fireflies too.

In my new manuscript, I have a series of sonnets that answer questions. They are sort of opposites: "When were you loved best?" "When were you loved worst?" "What was the brightest day?" What was the darkest night?" I am playing in them on the figurative and the literal. That night at Yaddo is the setting for

What was the darkest night?

It was in the woods in Saratoga Springs,
after a party with champagne and strawberries we took
a bridge to reach, so dark we could not see
the path, our own white tennis shoes, our hands before our faces.
We could see fireflies, many fireflies, that gave
the dark a depth and height. No moon, no stars,
no light except those pulsing, love-lit tails
and the slow, languorous way they wove through the air.

Their flight was in our blood. And though
it was a month of nightmares,
the month I learned I would never take my life
and just how close I could come, I almost cried for joy
in that darkness. My laughter went up through the invisible trees
like birdsong, a flock of doves released.

I am not bothered by dark art, by melancholy art. That was a dark time for me, the spring and summer of 1990, when I was facing memories of sexual abuse from my childhood. It was also a great party, and a beautiful night, which I treasure. And once she got back in New York in August, Susan Mastrangelo made good on a promise to call me when she returned to the city, and we've been friends ever since. We're very different people, but somehow it works, and each time I see her or talk to her, I feel like no time has passed.

Jan Richardson, artist and writer

I'm adding a blog called The Painted Prayerbook to my blog list. It's written and illustrated by Jan Richardson. This is one of her collages at left, called "All Souls." She lives in Florida and is an ordained Methodist minister, but mostly she's an amazing artist and a wonderful writer. She's a member of a Methodist Benedictine monastery called St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery that has its home here in St. Joseph at the residence of Mary Stamps. Mary also works at Saint John's School of Theology, and is kind enough to always forward me the Savage Chickens cartoons when they're about poetry. Last winter Mary forwarded me a few of Jan's books to see, and I immediately bought two-- one on Lent and one called The Intimate Apocalypse about the book of Revelation. The images are amazing, and the text is rich and well-written. This is a woman who does not need an editor-- every word counts. She also must be living right because I know she has a busy schedule, and keeps herself fed and clothed and traveling as a freelancer, and yet she also lives a life that allows for regular, meaningful meditation on spiritual things, and time and inspiration to make consistently gorgeous and complex art. Last year she had a blog during Advent, and it looks like she will do it again this year. I plan on reading every entry.

I met Jan this past summer. She was in town and we met at Bo Diddley's sandwich shop-- halfway between our two monasteries (which are about 6 blocks apart). I'd been an advocate of a book she'd written that was out of print and that I thought Liturgical Press should publish. But I was no longer in a position to help (I probably never was, actually) and so we were meeting as two artists. Well, it was either a week before my wedding or a week after it. I had started my new job less than a month before. "Overwhelm" does not begin to describe my state of mind. And I was not able to talk at all about plans for my own writing in the future-- I had none.

Jan was quite generous about listening to what was going on in my life. And I was of course very interested to hear about her projects. At the same time, that meeting was a sign to me of how quickly things had turned on their head. I was not in the same place I'd been when we'd exchanged e-mails less than six months before. She also had experienced major life changes in that time. Yet I couldn't help feel that whereas mine had thrown me into chaos and unsettled me, she was calm and steady.

It might be why I am looking forward to reading Jan's blog this Advent. There is a calm, a centeredness, and a thoughtfulness. And the art is always astonishing and beautiful. If for nothing else, visit her web page, http://www.janrichardson.com/ and look around at the collages and charcoal.

Thomas Carey, OSB

These past two days as communications director at St. Benedict's monastery I've gotten a crash course in Sister Thomas Carey, a painter and Sister of this monastery who died in 1999. Her work is amazing, and I was familiar with it already. I've seen the posters in our gift shop, and there's an original oil hanging in my office. Her work is modernist, very colorful, and she painted a large number of Madonnas and Madonna-with-Child paintings. She also sculpted, Madonnas and a number of austere crucifixes. We are going to use one of her paintings for our Christmas card this year at the monastery. So I called S. Baulu Kuan who is an artist and who curated and produced a catalogue of Sister Thomas's work for an exhibition at the monastery's Haehn museum in 2004.

The image I wanted to use, she told me, was the Christmas card last year for St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul, a "daughter" monastery of St. Benedict's. They have a lot of Sister Thomas's paintings, including the one I wanted an image of, hanging in their monastery. And until the 2004 exhibit, many of the Sisters there didn't know what they had. If you go looking for examples of her work on the internet, you aren't going to find any.

S. Thomas's paintings are unsigned. And she gave many of them away, so they're hanging all over the place-- in private homes all over the St. Cloud area, and in other monasteries, and elsewhere. Which isn't to say she wasn't appreciated in her own lifetime. Blue Cloud Abbey in Marvin, S.D., commissioned S. Thomas to paint a series of Stations of the Cross that are among her best works. She painted them in the 1950s on 7' x 2' panels of walnut, and returned to do some restoration work on them in 1991-92. Blue Cloud Abbey was a very large monastery at that time, and Sister Thomas was a significant artist. And as you'll see later, in 1958 it was already brave to commission her work. She was controversial.

(By the way, Blue Cloud Abbey is a place I HIGHLY recommend you go see if you ever get a chance-- a community of men Benedictines out on the prairie near a town of 28 people. I stopped there overnight with my friend Bob Sauro on a trip two years ago, and he's still having nightmares, I believe, about the town of Marvin and what goes on there. [Bob has a website featuring his writings and great T-shirts based on vintage New Jersey sites you can find here.])

Sister Thomas had great humility. She never pushed her cause. If you read the catalogue of the 2004 retrospective, that comes through more than anything else about her. Some of the brothers living at Saint John's Abbey down the road had only a vague idea of the extent and accomplishment of her work. Brother Placid Stuckenschneider, a liturgical artist at Saint John's, wrote of coming face to face with her large body of work for the first time: "Where had she been hiding all this time?... To be sure, I wasn't ready for such a creative talent hidden behind the monastery wall." And this is truly the sign of a great Benedictine, her ability to work steadily at her art without ambition for fame or recognition. In fact, in an essay republished in the same catalogue, one feels her excitement at the great gift of her life as an artist in the monastery. She writes:

"When I came to the convent, I felt here a long-standing ... love of art.... There was an expressed hunger [in the monastery] for the beautiful, for the precious. There seemed a pervading awe for culture, the arts, for learning and the growth of worship. At that time the College of Saint Benedict was growing, along with the liturgy and the desire for liberal knowledge. We not only had a total submersion into a liturgical atmosphere and preparation with table reading and study clubs on the Divine Office, but also a terrific excitement about philosophy and the liberal arts in the college. ..

"I remember being told that if I were willing to go into art, I would not be rushed. I would be allowed to grow, and some day I would study in Europe. These were days of planting for the future. These were also the 1930s, when our world was falling apart, yet we were mindful of the liberal arts. Our focus was on learning for its own sake. Our focus was on culture. The whole community was hungry for learning.

"It seems even in our pioneer days as a community, when we would expect that survival would use up all our energy and push aside other values, we had not only the desire for culture but actually fostered its arts and its creative people as life-saving and worthy of great respect. Many have commented on what vision it took to build a virtual cathedral here on the flat lands of Stearns County, to provide an elegant chapel beyond all proportion to the rest of the visible evidence around us."

Sister Thomas wrote this essay, "Community and Creativity," in 1978. It was a happy time for her, when she was teaching in the art department at the College of Saint Benedict, brought in by college president Stanley Idzerda after he saw her work in 1968. She taught there from 1969-84, and while there, in addition to teaching and doing her own work, she collected 45,000 images of world masterpieces for the College's Picture Library. A hunger for beauty, indeed.

But her obscurity was not and is not completely a matter of temperament. The story the Sisters are quieter about-- although it is more open now as an example of "the bad old days"-- is of how Sister Thomas's work was banned, and she was suppressed. "Sister Thomas was ahead of her time," is how her friend Sister Kristin Malloy put it. "Not many people could understand and appreciate her art, including the local bishop. In 1954 she hoped that he would approve her crucifix, but disliking anything modern, he banned it. A half-century later, the same crucifix is considered by art historians as one of the most elegant expressions of contemporary religious art." The words "exile" and "officially censored" come up in conversation about her and her work. This is all the more striking to me given that it was also in 1954 that the monks of Saint John's Abbey hired Marcel Breuer, that master modernist architect, to design and build their abbey church, and construction began in 1958. As Sister Thomas was being shut down, the monks of St. John's Abbey were moving forward in ways that would make them internationally known for their liturgical vision and construction of a landmark modernist church.

A look at the chronology of S. Thomas's life shows 12 major exhibits throughout the Midwest in the years 1954-58. After this, she is teaching high school art at parochial schools, and the exhibits dry up-- a few pieces in annual Madonna Festivals, notably in Spokane, WA, far from the bishop of St. Cloud's watchful eye. It is only when Mrs. Idzerda, on the recommendation of Sister Kristin, hangs a painting in her husband's office to see if he likes it, that she is brought back to the art department at the college.

Meanwhile, she painted. She gave her paintings away. She didn't sign them. They're scattered to the winds-- who knows what is out there.

One mystery painting is this year's choice for a Christmas card. Sister Baulu, who keeps track of S. Thomas's work and brought it over for me to see, said she saw it for the first time only a year ago. When S. Kristin died, she left in her belongings a page of slides of Sister Thomas's work. Someone at the monastery passed it along to S. Baulu. In it was this Native American Madonna and child, and a few other works, which she'd never seen. We do not know where the original is. The slides are the only evidence. We may never know, unless the Christmas card reaches the owner (we send out 10,000-15,000!). As a Native American Madonna, it is outside the mainstream-- enough so that she might not have wanted to draw too much attention to it. There is another "Indian Madonna and Child" from 1958 that was commissioned by Blue Cloud Abbey at the same time as the Stations of the Cross, for the Chapel of the Oblate Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in Marty, South Dakota, an Indian mission church. How wonderful that they had that image-- and that she had the vision to make it for them.

It is not an uncommon story, the suppression of the women in the monastery-- for decades many Benedictine women's communities were not allowed to pray the Liturgy of the Hours that is at the heart of their monastic practice-- because it was believed to take too much time away from their active service ministries. Abbot Wimmer interfered with St. Benedict's Sisters on this account and from 1858-60 and 1880-1926 their prayers were curtailed to the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin.

It is also not an uncommon story, the suppression of women artists who were ahead of their time.

That Sister Thomas continued to create work, and continued to create work in this monastery (not leaving to pursue her career as an artist or over the disapprobation of the bishop), is a testament to her faith, to her love of Benedictine life, to her love of her community, and to the purity of her calling as an artist. Someone supplied her with paint and canvas and other materials, and time and space to do her work. In fact, she continued to attend summer art classes when the high schools where she taught were not in session, at Notre Dame, at the University of Minnesota, at St. Cloud State University. With the blessing of the prioress and her community.

In the catalogue, she is described in a community tribute this way: Gentle, Shy, Creative, and Imaginative. Also "Energetic: Her great talent and inner artistic conviction impelled her to unbelievable productivity foor Sister Thomas every minute counted; Resourceful: Her motto was that every difficulty could be transposed into a value, and opportunity; Happy: Sister Thomas was happy to be who she was and left her imprint in her paintings, feeling no need to sign her work. She delighted in her work and always turned out something spectacular; and Peaceful: She was a completely 'at home' personality; her being was in harmony with her art."

I know many artists who did not respond as Sister Thomas did to her circumstances. I know many bitter artists. Some have been my teachers-- well-published folks who felt their students got more fame than they did. My 85-year-old poet friend at Saint John's once called me "angry" (I told him I didn't want him to send me his used copies of Poetry magazine-- I didn't want that toxic, elitest rag in my house!), but I think he meant bitter. Lord knows bitter is the opposite of what I want to be. I want to write poetry out of joy, not hoping someone will publish it or recognize me. My intention is more and more to be a person who writes for its own sake, out of joy. The goal is to recognize that people have a hunger for beauty, and to seek to fill that need with what one makes. That is a lesson to be learned from Sister Thomas. I am trying to be worthy of it, as of so much about this place where I live and work.

At the end of Sister Thomas's chronology is this entry: "Painted angels' faces until she died on December 15 [1991] at St. Scholastica Convent." May we all be so lucky.