Category: Creative

In October of 1859, the abolitionist John Brown led a band of 22 men on a raid of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia (now WV). There was a government arsenal housed there, and Brown had hoped to arm slaves and abolitionists in a sweeping battle of southern slave liberation.

They succeeded in seizing the town, but were quickly pinned down and suppressed by Marines under the command of Robert E. Lee.

Brown was arrested, and, several weeks later, hanged for treason. His life was a spectral portent of our nation’s imminent collapse into civil conflict and prompted Henry David Thoreau to pen the following:

Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

The poem, “John Brown’s Body” became a Union marching hymn.

A free black man named Lewis Sheridan Leary was one of the men who lost their life under Brown’s command during the ill-fated raid. His widow Mary would later remarry Charles Langston. Their daughter Caroline would then have a son, and he would receive her maiden name as one of his two middle names. His full name was James Mercer Langston Hughes. The world would know him as the famed Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

Hughes was born in Joplin, MO, but lived most of his childhood in Lawrence, KS. In early adulthood he lived everywhere: Mexico, France, England, Chicago. He died in New York City in 1967 at the age of 65.

He was a proponent of the embrace of black identity and of a clear eyed view of our complicated national story.

Nowhere is the latter more ringing than in his poem, “Let America Be America Again.” I think you’ll find its theme very timely; both searching and amazingly resilient its longings.

Here it is.

The brilliant Gabriel Garcia Marquez would have turned 90 this month. He was a Colombian-born author who wrote such staggeringly beautiful works as One Hundred Years of Solitude & Love in the Time of Cholera. His writing has been described as “magical realism“, but it is, above all, intoxicatingly delightful.

He described his tone during an interview with The Paris Review:

It was based on the way my grandmother used to tell her stories. She told thing that sounded supernatural and fantastic, but she told them with complete naturalness.

And he offers us a trick.

There’s  a journalistic trick that you can also apply to literature. For example, if you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you.

I was introduced to Marquez through this marvelous short story portraying the comical clumsiness with which the world and the church mishandle the sacred. (And maybe some of the clumsy ways in which the sacred enters our existence, too.)

It’s all over the internet, so I believe it to be public domain. But, if I’m mistaken, you can link to a PDF. The above illustration comes from the talented illustrator Charlotte Riley.

Please enjoy! Continue reading “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”

Art often seeps from the gaskets of culture imperceptibly as fluids from an engine. Not until we note the surface-level slick they’ve left do we remark to ourselves, “So that’s what flows around in there!”

The above vase, pieced-together by gilded seams, is a ceramic work by the Korean artist Yeesookyung. It is part of a series she calls Translated Vase.

These pieces are assembled from the discarded shards of Korean-style ceramics.  “She acquires her ‘ceramic trash’ directly from an elderly Korean master potter, who intentionally breaks and discards vessels that he feels are imperfect.” [per the museum label at the Smart Museum of Art]

She says of her work:

…what I am trying to do is literally ‘translating’ the … pieces of broken vases and mending their ‘wounds’… The crack, which symbolizes the wound, is emphasized with gold.

Yeesookyung describes her process as being intuitive; she does not impose any predetermined form, but, rather, works in unison with the pieces allowing the form to emerge naturally into its own unique creation. The finished works achieve for themselves a captivating asymmetry. Continue reading “Translated Vases (Yeesookyung)”

Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 and died in 1886 at the age of 55. Though considered one of the most important of American poets, she never published a single poem in her lifetime.

Upon her death, her family discovered 40 notebooks containing over 1800 poems. Many were of metaphysical themes—she’d attended some seminary. Dickinson was known to use non-conforming dashes and slashes and other punctuation, making it hard to print her work.

I think often about the poem below, probably through some vague acquaintance with Eugene Peterson’s book of the same title.

I believe truth to be on the mind of many these days, so too must be truth-telling.

I’ve heard you can sing her poems to the Gilligan’s Island theme song, but I’ve found it doesn’t always work.

TELL ALL THE TRUTH BUT TELL IT SLANT

by Emily Dickenson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

When I first laid eyes on the above painting I thought, “Whoa, I guess Bob Ross had a dark side!”

Not quite.

The above piece is titled “Shattered Tree” and it is by the German painter Otto Dix.

Dix was part of a cultural movement-cum-art-exhibition called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), which rejected the Romantic sentimental outlook of expressionism.

Understandably.

While many artists, thinkers and spiritual leaders fled Germany during the instability of the Weimar era and the rise of National Socialism, Dix joined others who described themselves as “inner emigrants“—opting rather to live as ostensible immigrants within the boarders of a nation that was becoming increasingly foreign to them.

I happened upon this painting last week at the Art Institute of Chicago and snapped the picture. I’m indebted to Janis Staggs (Curator at Neue Galerie New York) for featuring the piece on her site (as I didn’t initially write down the details). She writes:

…he was classified as “degenerate” under the Nazi regime and went into an “inner emigration” in southern Germany rather than leaving the country. Dix continued to paint during WWII but focused subjects with a non-overt political nature, such as this 1941 painting entitled “Shattered Tree.”

This piece reflects Dix’s thoughts and feelings about the state of his country. It is gloomy. There are signs of death and decay. What appears to be a once-regal tree is now fracturing; cleft by brutal, destructive forces.

And I find myself resonating with the notions of inner emigration, which mirrors St. Peter’s sentiment of living as “aliens and strangers in the land” (1 Pet 2:11), connoting that one can feel like a foreigner or alien within one’s society. The term “stranger” could be translated sojourner, exile, pilgrim or even refugee. 

If we ask art to fit into our lingual categories or to say something explicitly, we will often find art loath to accommodate our demand.

Art says those things we cannot say; because they cannot be put cogently into words, can find no hearer on which to alight, and, in some cases, are strictly forbidden (streng verboten).

In this way, art can be a lonely, prophetic business; the voice crying in the wilderness! And yet art also has power to ping the cosmos; to transmit though space and time the message, “You are not alone!”, and, perchance, to be pinged back.