Unbearable Beauty

A long time ago I ran across a writing that has haunted me for years.  I could not remember who wrote it, but what I took from it touched me.  It spoke of a writer's admonition against needing to capture beauty, or, at least, that is what I took from it.  It touched something primal in me and theretofore unexpressed by anyone I knew or anyone I read.  Over the years the idea expressed in that piece has come to me as I try to photograph something too beautiful to lose; as I commit the beauty of sunsets, plants or creatures to memory for when they can no longer be beheld by my eyes.  In short, when I have tried to own beauty before it passes away.  

I recently found the haunting passage, and the author was (of course) Etty Hillesum:

"It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with the light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting.  And then I knew precisely how I had felt in the past.  Then all that beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart, and I would not have known what to do with the pain...But that night, only just gone, I reacted quite differently.  I felt that God's world was beautiful despite everything, but its beauty now filled me with joy.  I was just as moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow I no longer wanted to own it."

Along a similar line Hillesum painted the following words:

"Last night I felt the almost unbearable beauty of the rose-red sweet peas standing there amidst my books. Had I but the gift of adequate words (and fortunately I have not), then I should have sat myself down to write an aesthetic treatise. And with it I would have cast off the weight under which that beauty had nearly crushed me. But I lacked the words, and so I wrote quite blandly: beauty, too, is something one must be able to bear."

Being a person with inadequate words, all my life I have said of music or images, "it is so beautiful it hurts."  Being a person who has not yet learned to bear the ephemeral nature of beauty, I am only now learning to taste, swallow and release the energy of that which is only a gift and not mine to own.  In the meantime, Hillesum's words make my soul the wiser despite nearly crushing me.

Quotations from Etty. The letter and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943, edited by Klaas A.D. Smelik, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans (transl.).

Poor Little Flowers

“Like the blossoming of the hyacinth and tulip – which seems to take place spontaneously, but really is the result of organization which had been going on through the Fall and Winter months – the emergencies of virtue, attainments, mastery over the weaknesses of the flesh and conquests over evil inclinations, will be represented in the moment of general resurrection…The plant of righteousness in many may not have seemed to grow or flourish; but as the poor little flower was exposed to the inclemencies of the weather, yet bloomed upon the mountain side, had accomplished more and was worthier of being prized than the magnificent plants nurtured in the green or hot house, so all who emerged from the terrible difficulties attending gross animal nature and lack of opportunities would be found of greater value in the sight of God than more favored Christians…He likened this process of spiritual resurrection to that which goes on in the development of the plant from the seed. Every time a truth is established either in taste, love gentleness, neatness, or kindness in a Christian he has emerged from the flesh and was getting toward resurrection.”

The New York Times describing a sermon by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher on the Resurrection Applied To Daily Life, published April 6, 1874

Marking Borders

"Mammals mark their territorial borders with their excrement.  Human beings have long done the same thing with that particular form of excrement that we call their scapegoats."

Rene Girard and James G. Williams
I See Satan Fall Like Lightening

Middle-aged Furies

Sylvia Plath folded a dishcloth upon which to place her face deep in a gas oven on a cold winter night in 1963.  She died there while her small children slept upstairs.  

According to Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negrev in A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Tragic Death of Assia Wevill, Plath's friends inevitably blamed her husband, Ted Hughes, and his affair partner, Assia Wevill.  Assia and Ted became involved when Assia and her husband visited Sylvia and Ted's home.  Prior to the visit Assia boasting to her boss that she would seduce Ted.  And seduced him she did until she and Ted publically flaunted their affair.  Days prior to Sylvia's suicide she and Ted had conversed. 

Following the suicide Ted and Assia moved into Sylvia's apartment to care for the children.  Assia pilfered through Sylvia's  things, slept in her bed and, in stereotypical "other woman" style, complained that Plath killed herself to destroy her and Ted's happiness.  She complained that "It was very bad luck that the love affair was besmirched by this unfortunate event." 

How inconsiderate of Sylvia. 

But Assia's lack of conscience and failure of empathy came home, eventually making her into "The weak mistress, forever in the burning shadows of their mysterious seven years."  She came to mourn the loss of her "third and sweetest marriage… What insanity, what methodically crazy compulsion drove me… to this nightmare maze of miserable, censorious, middle-aged furies, and Sylvia, my predecessor, between our heads at night."

As Ted worked toward publication of Sylvia's writings, Assia wrote that "Sylvia [is] growing in him, enormous, magnificent. I shrinking daily, both nibble at me. They eat me."

She wrote "She (Plath) had a million times the talent, 1,000 times the will, 100 times the greed and passion that I have. I should never have looked into Pandora's box, and now that I have, I am forced to wear her love-widow's sacking, without any of her compensations.  What, in five years' time, will he reproach me for? What sort of woman am I? How much time have I been given? How much time has run out? What have I done with it? Have I used myself to the hilt already? Am I enough for him? AM I ENOUGH FOR HIM?"

When Hughes began dreaming of Plath, he referred to the phenomena as "dream-meetings with Sylvia," and these images found their way into his poetry.

Assia asked one of Sylvia's friends "Do you think Ted and I can be happy together?"  The friend replied  "Look at him. Sylvia's spirit will always stand between you."

In 1969 Assia died, taking her daughter with her, on a mattress in a kitchen where she had taken sleeping pills, sealed the door and windows and turned on the gas stove.    

Assia was evil at worst and stupid at best.  Incapable of comprehending the human toll of her folly extracted from another soul, she eventually found the price of human suffering in her own soul.  The woman who was determined to seduce Ted Hughes did not know that love unfinished is a spiritual energy with consequences.  

25 or 6 to 4

I heard one of my all time favorite songs on the radio yesterday - "25 or 6 to 4" by Chicago - and I turned the volume so loud it shook the car.  Hard rock fans will know what I mean when I say that hearing a song like this is an auditory orgasm.  Oh my, there is nothing like the sun beating down, the road rolling by, the wind in your hair and the trumpets of "25 or 6 to 4" swirling around your head.  

For anyone too young to know the song, since the 1970's there has been a debate over what the title means.  Is it a drug song, or is it just a reference to the time (25 or (2)6 to 4 a.m.)?  I opt for the time reference (after all, just past 3:30 a.m. would fit with "waiting for the break of day").  Besides, I used the song in my first wedding (yes, I really did), and even though I and all people did drugs then, I would not have used a drug song for a wedding.  We had standards even in the '70's.

The lyrics:

Waiting for the break of day
Searching for something to say
Flashing lights against the sky
Giving up I close my eyes
Sitting cross-legged on the floor
25 or 6 to 4

Staring blindly into space
Getting up to splash my face
Wanting just to stay awake
Wondering how much I can take
Should I try to do some more
25 or 6 to 4

Feeling like I ought to sleep
Spinning room is sinking deep
Searching for something to say
Waiting for the break of day
25 or 6 to 4
25 or 6 to 4

Big Red

Parker Duofold Big Red was produced from 1921 through the 1940's. 

A fountain pen is a beautiful thing, and the Big Red is one worthy of being pampered and driven.  The owner of a pen he cherishes does not want another to write with it because a stranger's hand can alter and distort the angle of the nib.  When the owner writes with the virgin pen he and the pen share an alchemical energy that is like no other.  How can this personal stroke be described?  The hand and the pen become part of the same flow through a highly creative and intimate type of expression.

If you have ever owned a virgin pen, you know the value of such a flow. 

In The Arena of Archetypes

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”  Theodore Roosevelt

This quotation by Roosevelt brings to mind a fellow I once knew in church.  He was the eternal critic whose role in life was to find fault in the efforts of others.  He was a blustery guy, full of loudness and bad jokes, and he effectively shut down an entire church.  Why?  Because he signed up to be in charge of everything, but he never followed through, and he seriously resented people who did.  Many in the church enabled him through a dysfunctional institutional co-dependency; then again some of the old steel magnolia matrons sent him out to be their attack dog to keep under control the uppity women who were not "their kind" (as we so archetypically understand The Mother to be in small southern towns that have not progressed beyond 1963).  He was the archetypical Sinister Clown, a buffoon posing with The Mothers as a gigantic fish in a very small pond that had dried up long ago.  No life, no life.  And no valiant striving.  Entitlement doesn't even remotely resemble valiant striving.  Likewise there is nothing marred by the dust and sweat and blood because all that dried up with the pond, and Mother is very happy. 

I believe Jung was right about the collective conscience and living out the unconscious as archetypes.  All places have their archetypes, and we can become caricatures of humanity through the incestuous interrelating that happens when people do not think, do not face their own dark sides and do not grow.  I would say that this is a product of failure to travel and exposure to new ideas, but that is not the case.  Some of the Mothers of whom I speak travel with frequency to places above and beyond their power trips.  I doubt, however, that they have very good reading material.  And the Clown probably reads only what reinforces his garish role as ineffective masculine "big daddy" patted on the head by Mother.  Poor thing.  He doesn't know that they are one step away from changing his diaper.  Sadly Christianity sometimes reinforces these dark archetypes with such emphasis on trivialities that do not require an inner journey to look for the kingdom.             

Image & Spirit

Episcopal Church & Visual Arts (ECVA) has moved its art blog, Sketchbook, and renamed it Image & Spirit.  In the new format I will be working on the blog with my friends, Brie Dodson and Robin Janning.  This blog was originally created to provide a community spot for artists, and a place to celebrate the liturgical seasons.  Artists will be invited to contribute work, so let us hear from you.

The logo above is from the Image & Spirit header which I designed. 

JBC

This is a paperweight from a time when my initials were JBC.  Initials change in the human world all too often, but they remain constant in little treasures like this.

What Brings Us Home

When I was in law school I had a little upstairs apartment that was something of a dump, but charming nonetheless.  In the diningroom window I placed this lamp so that I could see its warm glow when I came home at night.  I recently found it while cleaning out cabinets, and, for once, I was glad I didn't throw something away.

It's funny how the small things help us remember who we are, and sometimes those memories keep on bringing us home.