i love you much(most beautiful darling)

Today is my mom's birthday and I can only borrow the words of another to express the ineffable depths of feelings for her. If I were with her, I would take her small hands into mine. She'll tell me that her hands look too old now and I'll smile and deny the truth as I smooth over wrinkled skin with my short caresses. And if she could stop asking what I am praying for of late or why I'm not sleeping enough, I would recite this poem to her in the silence:

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love - e.e. cummings

Marshmellow World

oh the snow...how I had waited for it every abnormally warm december evening, but when it finally arrived, I was unfortunately driving. Mind you contrary to popular opinion, this (me operating a vehicle) doesn't always mean something hazardous is about take place, but in this instance I guess it did because I ended up doing a 360 spin in which I miraculously avoided colliding with a big fat tree and a white suv headed straight toward me.

I can't imagine that anything I've done in the past, like play super mario brothers or avoiding perms from zealous hairdressers, could have prepared me to stay calm and coherant in the face of danger, but in any case, by God's grace and my amazement, I'm alive people. And as far as baby, not even the pink flower stuck on the antenna was harmed.

Boaz and his Escalade

Oh that crazy Mark did it again...making me look like a crazy as I shook with laughter like a total dork listening to one of his sermons online at work. Check it out for yourselves in his newest sermon series called Redeeming Ruth. You'll hear about Ruth, Boaz and his Escalade with rims and that oh so memorable line..."she's hot, but so is hell" that still had me laughing as I drove home.

"And what does God do for you?"

Perhaps it was the combination of Yann Tiersen's music scores and Dostoevsky against the pale backdrop of today but I could not help the idle tears that seemed to flow as I read:

"'So you pray to God a great deal, Sonia?' he asked her. Sonia did not speak, he stood beside her waiting for an answer. 'What should I be without God?' she whispered rapidly...

Raskolnikov turned and looked at her with emotion. Yes, he had known it! She was trembling in real physical fever. He had expected it. She was getting near the story of the greatest miracle and a feeling of immense triumph came over her. Her voice rang out like a bell; triumph and joy gave it power. The lines danced before her eyes, but she knew what she was reading by heart. At the least verse 'Could not this Man which opened the eyes of the blind...' dropping her voice she passionately reproduced the doubt, the reproach and censure of the blind disbelieving...

The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together the eternal book." ~Dostoevsky

"The Countess"

Tonight having returned from the play "The Countess" by Gregory Murphy, my mind resounds with some of the powerful themes implied by the dialogue of this true life tale. In it, John Ruskin, the brilliant intellectual (art critic, poet and writer), is the husband who will not consummate his marriage to the beautiful Effie Gray because he finds that she does not live up to his expectations of what a woman's person should be when compared to what he sees in art. Effie Gray is the woman who is ironically loved by all of society because of her spirit and physical beauty but believes she is deformed and diseased because her husband constantly tells her she is not how a woman should be. And John Millias is the man (a visual genius himself) who falls hopelessly in love with her for the woman she is despite the fact that her husband is his mentor. You can't make up stuff like this.

All together I was impressed at how the play delievered so much more than just the mere facts of the lives of these celebrious individuals. I found it fasinating to think how even in the strict mores and milieu of victorian society, here was a man (Ruskin) who had so feasted on the idealized beauty portrayed in art, that he could no longer be excited in the form of the real woman he had married. Or as Millias says in the play of Ruskin, he is "forever theorizing about lovely things and yet looks at the practical woman before him with contempt." It reminded me very much of the insightful article in New York magazine called "The Porn Myth" by Naomi Wolf. As I continued to watch the play, I realized of course that this was not just a problem of this man wanting the perfectly beautiful wife or even all men desiring the idealized beauty but that this was the trouble all mankind encounters when carrying something of the created realm and placing it into that of the divine. Perhaps that is why Ruskin remarks that "all bachelors marry goddesses, but husbands live only with women." Perhaps he forgot that he was also not the god that his wife married and that she too had now to live with the mere man.

One of the more humorous lines of the play was another line from Millias to Ruskin as they touch upon Ruskin preference or excitement for younger women or girls and Millias asks him how he could be "looking to acorn for shade when the comfort of oak is before him." Obviously this was not the 'I love lucy" funny, it just reminded me of a high school friend mentioning to me over Christmas break that he could never see himself marrying a younger woman because he had observed one too many of his colleagues having to go to music concerts filled with the olsen twin dopplegangers to appease their younger wives. I had laughed but I remember feeling a little disconcerted when I suddenly recalled that two of my most favorite movies last year weren't even targeted toward the teen crowd but the pre-teeny boppers who still dream about making eye contact with their crushes not sleeping with them. I know sometimes I have wished in my heart for simplier times when beauty wasn't about comparison to idealized photoshop creations on magazines or having yourself displayed immodestly to attract attention, so if nothing else, this play was a great reminder to me of the nature of sin during any time period to corrupt the good thing that God created and also the amazing truth that even if no man on earth sees, God sees past the external and into the heart of what true beauty is.

"Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight" 1 Peter 3:4

la condition humaine

Much to the vexation of Jane et al., I have been quite immersed in Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment." There seems to be a strange delight in reading it again for me, especially in the height of winter when I feel a silly yet distant affinity with Dostoevsky who wrote the novel after his return from exile in Siberia. I imagine that like my hands that will not warm even as I hold and flip the worn, old pages, his icy hands would forever bear the residue of the Siberian winters as they wrote.

I imagine too, Raskolnikov, in all his arresting intellectual arrogance holding a guitar and singing about the "sin to know and feel too much within." I think of Sonia Marmeladov, "who lay down down on the bed with her face to the wall; ...and her body ...shuddering..." and men who sing ballads of women who beg them to keep them from the foggy dew.

If after all this, I needed to reinforce the certitude of fallen condition of humans, tomorrow night I will see "The Countess" about Ruskin, John Millias and Effie Gray. I can't help thinking of the ironic juxtaposition of the pre-raphaelites' microcosm of utopian ideals on pristine white canvases with the muddled palettes of their actual lives.

"Quelqu'un m'a dit"

La voix trise de Carla Bruni me rend témoignage aux specters effrayants … et à mon âme timid et faible à ce moment.

Ce soir je me souviens encore d'un ami ancien, Neruda. Celui qui j’ai reconnu à Toulouse parmi les soirs éclatants et éphémèraux. Peut-être j’ai perdu ma tête car j’ai envie de lire Dostoevsky et Neruda au même temps mais c’est un hiver foncé et j’ai besoins .... quoi?...je ne sais rien . Mais j’ai décidé qu’il n’y aura plus de Dylan, plus de Rilke…plus de la silence qui ne rêve que à toi.

"Ici je t’aime.
Dans les obscures pins se démêle le vent.
La lune phosphorescente sur les eaux errantes
Des jours égaux passent en se poursuivant…

Ici je t’aime et l’horizon en vain t’occulte.
Je t’aime encore parmi ces choses froides.
Parfois mes baisers vont sur ces bateaux graves,
Qui vont par les mers vers où ils n’arrivent pas.

Dèjà je me vois oublié comme ces vieilles ancres.
Les quais sont plus tristes quand le soir jete les amarres.
Ma vie inutilement affamé se fatigue.
J’aime ce que je n’ai pas. Toi tu es si distante…

Les étoiles les plus grandes me regardent avec tes yeux
Et puisque je t’aime, les pins dans le vent
Veulent chanter ton nom avec leurs feuilles de fil de fer." (XVIII)

I ain't lookin' for nothin' in anyone's eyes

The gray hues and the silent white sky of today all remind me that my time in the country with my sad eyed lady of the lowlands will soon be over. Stories of her people during the war, her glances as I paint, games of her one room childhood, the face of the man she has picked out for me, all oscillate in the muddy puddles outside the door as the steady rain falls softly. Tomorrow the red syrup of pomegranate seeds that runs between my fingers like they did when I was five and sat on the tiled courtyard in a desert will be wiped away and I’ll make my way out of the door frame of a shaking house that I cannot hide in anymore.

Mercedes Sosa sings “Gracias a la Vida” in my mind and like the first time I heard her singing it, laying on the dark hardwood floor in the room above the art studio at Westover in the Connecticut winter, I wish I could understand Spanish and that red wine could actually warm you up. Gvansta and I are laughing as I ask for the gazillionth time to translate each line of this much covered folk song…

“Thanks to life which has given me so much,
It gave me two eyes that when I open them,
I can distinguish perfectly black from white,
And in the high heaven its starry background,
And in the multitudes the man I love.”

I don't know what God has in the year to come or what looms in the multitudes, but I know I can trust the loving Father and thank him for the life I've been given.