Shadows of the Resurrection, Barabbas
Shadows of the Resurrection, Barabbas
Black Willow and Christmas Fog
Black Willow and Christmas Fog
Many of you on Cleveland’s east side experienced a heavy fog in lieu of snow this Christmas afternoon. As untimely as it may have been, and though the fog robbed the landscape of color, it also provided a background of beautifully diffused light that placed dark objects in high relief. This debilitated willow branch, escaping the tangle of bittersweet vine and an old crabapple, struck me as an odd but appropriate metaphor for birth and emergence on this particular day. Christmas Day, 2021
“A Dream, Perhaps, February 23, 2019”
“A Dream Perhaps”
Death came for me in the dark of an early winter’s morning. Unscheduled, the day after surgery, gently she took me along a path that led in the direction of a distant cottage. No incarnate form or hooded manifestation, only her presence nearby to lead me beside the dark, meandering and indecipherable river. Illuminated by the light of night only, the path, hard-pack, tracing the river’s contours, its waters ran smooth, almost still, slow and black but for the reflected shimmer of morning stars.
In the distance a cottage, trimmed in lichen, seductive and filled with the regret of those who had passed. And night’s end now approaching, cloaked in shifting mist, a dim carriage light aside the cottage door, faint chimes beyond, insistent. Abruptly, an unspoken urgency to return … now … come … the chimes fading, distant, fading, fading, a silent lament beyond the bed, beyond sleep, a dream perhaps.
Two and a half years after beginning a surgical odyssey I’ve finally processed an experience that has haunted me, probably because I hadn’t really tried to address it fully until now. Recounted above is my memory as it occurred in the early morning hours a day after emergency surgery (February 23nd, 2019). I recall the detail with clarity, having resolved at the time, and since, to commit it carefully to memory. It was ethereal though quite unlike other dreams I’ve had.
Now, a year after the pandemic began, I’ve wondered if those severely stricken with COVID, perhaps after being placed on ventilators, may have experienced something similar, especially upon finding themselves at another threshold.
Note: The image here is of Squire Valleevue Farm on a foggy October morning but it stirs the senses and memory of the path I was led down as I lay in a hospital bed.
“Crescent Moon, Venus and Saturn”
“Crescent Moon, Venus & Saturn”
Six years ago this week we perched on the deck of a friend’s cottage 200′ above Lake Michigan, atop the spine of sand dunes north of the small town of Pentwater. Semi-libated and fully sated beneath crystal skies and the dying fire of sunset, the slow, dramatic transition of color and form was neither anticipated nor really noticed. Sun had set at 9:30 and twilight’s scattered streaks of red and orange slowly dissolved as the celestial dome of the night sky was cast into deep, blue black. A waxing crescent moon, stars and planets, imperceptible at first, presented in growing relief, taking form against the blue and violet hues of the firmament, reminiscent of “Starry Night”.
For the first time I sensed yet another dimension of Van Gogh’s genius through his use of so many blue pigments in the painting (21 according to scholars); color transitions not unlike the sky above us that evening. Coincidentally, if not auspiciously, “Starry Night” also featured a crescent moon and Venus, though that is where the comparisons appear to end.
Having created the work during his internment in the St. Paul de Mausole asylum, elements of the painting, (e.g. vortices suggesting turbulence in a river of light) may represent the struggle and pace of an unquiet mind. By contrast, the scene depicted in the photograph here suggests tranquility, profound stillness and, perhaps most strikingly, the deep irony of three objects hanging in simplicity, radiating unfathomed complexity and mystery.
“Vortex, A Story”
“Vortex, A Story”
About an hour before sunrise, July 12th, 2012, I drove to Schweitzer marsh to commemorate my father’s birthday as I had every year since his death six years earlier. It was the first area we explored together when I was a child and it was there I realized how deeply nature had imprinted itself on him.
The marsh, apart from its impact on my youth, holds a mystic sense of place where I still go to reflect and plumb old memories. On these “birthday” sojourns, putting my own long held beliefs in naturalism aside, I’ve imagined receiving some numinous sign of his presence – a product of the magical thinking that I’ve carried well beyond my early years, no doubt. Always hoping for a sign after his death, I did have an eagle dip within a few feet of my head on one occasion; almost tripped over a newborn fawn on another and unintentionally enraged a ground-nesting redwing blackbird at daybreak one morning, but none of these really represented anything out of the ordinary or that I hadn’t experienced before. And though I usually hiked out of the marsh by late morning without the incorporeal revelations I had longed for, my hew to naturalism remained intact and old memories were invariably revived and strengthened.
This July morning mist hung over the warm waters as I made my way along the western bank in the twilight of early morning, absorbed in the reverie of time foregone. I had almost reached the tree line bounding the waters at the north end when I noticed a disturbance; less than fifty feet offshore a whirlpool, a vortex as wide as one’s shoulders, making no discernible sound. The only noise was the chime of redwing blackbirds awakening as morning’s light gave form to the preternatural. No rushing, sucking sounds of turbulence, not even the soft, sibilant gyration of otherwise languid water, nothing audible from the visual frenzy of the maelstrom. Only the disquieting chaos of the whirlpool, spinning still against the surrounding glass-surfaced tranquility of the marsh.
It put me in mind of Thomas Cole who had pioneered the “Hudson River School” movement in the 19th century, and created the idea of an “American sublime” in the spirit of Edmund Burke’s work in England 50 years earlier. Cole had become one of my parent’s favorite artists after they toured the Hudson River valley on their honeymoon. Building upon Burke’s assertions that beauty and the sublime could co-exist but were nonetheless mutually exclusive, Cole’s paintings gave rise to an American aesthetic that depicted the sublime more viscerally, as nature’s ability to provoke terrifying power and mystery through the inclusion of great storms, raging waters, overwhelming mountains and the like.
In a comparative “stretch”, and in their banal majesty, Ohio’s 21st century landscapes occasionally bestow sublime moments – this whirlpool struck me as one. The spontaneous and unexplainable vortex held at once a beautiful and primeval aspect, even the terror of nature’s unknowable. With no apparent destination, water and matter were being entrained and funneled into the white froth, circling about the surface, suspended briefly then descending into the mystery beneath. In those moments I observed the whirlpool, I was struck by the beauty of mist shrouding the distant pin oaks, ghostly, dead for generations, silently guarding secrets.
When I left the marsh that day the whirlpool was still rotating. I returned the next morning to find it had disappeared.
“Standing … Still”
“Standing … Still”
Anchored in wet earth and arrested in death for more than a century, this small pin oak grove remains a hoary reminder of time passing. A few trees still stand, naked, roots exposed, out of view at the north end of the marsh. Winter’s ebbing waters reveal the beauty of imperfection, the truth of nature’s transience.
Ravaged through the seasons; sun, wind, low flood waters, burrowing insects and foraging birds imprint their individual patterns in time. Trunks disfigured, bark stripped beyond cambium into heartwood, the pin oaks sedulously waiting.
What do they hear deep into February when the only sound is wind sweeping over sedge and ice? What do they know of solitude and loneliness, the beauty of a midday thaw or the piercing silence of nightfall?
