Jamuna, pure pigment on canvas, by Natvar Bhavsar (Image: Asianart.com) Political language is a tongue, one that is optimally designed to infiltrate both thinking and feeling at the same time. Sarah Hurwitz, speechwriter for Michelle Obama, is a master at getting words to work at all those levels at the same time. Oratory brilliance takes me straight […]
Transcendence
It’s a Multiverse
Detailed views of some recent paintings that I hope suggest a layered and complex reality *** Science has always wrestled with the idea of an immaterial will, or agency, at work in the universe, and for centuries it was thought to be expressed through the “laws of nature.” God might be dead, but he rules […]
- Music
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White Light
Portion of an image by Anna Hepler from her show at the Portland Museum of Art this summer ____ This unexpected report from the New York Times: Jane Moss, vice president for programming at Lincoln Center, talks about her ideas behind the 3 week long White Light Festival, an event that is explicitly based on […]
- Transcendence
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Translucent Awareness
The most profound shift I have had in weeks: Reading the weekly email message from my friend Andrew. Fresh from a journey to Peru under the tutelage of his shaman Don Diego, his message to me this morning transmutated some part of his “beyond language” experience into a form I could breathe into and recognize […]
Hiroshi Sugimoto: Take Me There
The work of Hiroshi Sugimoto cannot be comprehended without having been experienced in the flesh. Every artist believes this about their work, but in some circumstances it goes beyond optimal and moves into the imperative. So it is with Sugimoto’s photographs. (I have included this reproduction as an indicator but not the thing itself.) The […]
- Poetry
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Even to the Boulder
I’ve been thinking a lot about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon after having renewed my relationship with their poetry this weekend (See the posting below, The Third Thing.) I posted a poem by Hall yesterday that he wrote during her illness, but thought Kenyon deserved a few of her own too. As Donald Hall wrote […]
Admit Them, Admit Them
Thank you, collective mind. And in this particular case, thank you friend Sally Reed. In response to my posting below entitled Talisman, Sally sent me the following: This brings to mind another less acute, but still astute, evocation of grief as a dog. It’s by Denise Levertov. Talking to Grief Ah, Grief, I should not […]
OOTBCIP (Out of Town, but Checking in Periodically)
I leave today for England, followed by a visit to Italy to see my daughter Kellin. The first part of this trip will be spent in the Lake District in Northern England, just south of the Scottish border. I will be staying at the Lodge, in Ivegill, a place that has been masterfully magicized by […]
Clearing the Decks
During a time when I am still sitting in the silence—in the thinking and feeling rather than the doing, making, manifesting—my thoughts have been drawn to examples of significant disruptions in the flow of artistic output. Not just my own, but others. Probably the standout example from the recent past that is pointed to most […]
Mast Sleeping
The Unbeliever He sleeps on the top of a mast. – Bunyan He sleeps on the top of a mast with his eyes fast closed. The sails fall away below him like the sheets of his bed, leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head. Asleep he was transported there, asleep he […]