Author: John

Looking at Art

~ John ~ Leave a comment

My new year’s resolution: look more closely.

My favorite writer John Berger said: “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.  Each evening we see the sun set.  We know that the Earth is turning away from it.  Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”  LOOKING at something, afresh, as though it were the first time we’d seen it, explodes our preconceptions and challenges our assumptions.

This is why I love to travel.  Tourism, by definition, places once in unfamiliar surroundings and gives one license to gawk.  I’ve just had the enormous privilege of three weeks traveling in Europe, the first such trip since I was in my 20s.  As one does, we saw a lot of famous art under very crowded conditions.  We jockeyed for position in front of Rembrandt’s “Night Watch”; squinted to see Van Gogh’s brushstrokes obscured by our own reflections in the glass that now protects the paintings from vandals; mooed and lowed in a great listless herd through the Sistine Chapel.  Florence at Christmas was less of a zoo; we had a breathtaking, quiet interview with Michelangelo’s David.  And then, at the Uffizi Gallery, a painting of Judith slaying Holofernes slew me.

It’s the image to the left, done in 1621 by Artemisia Gentileschi — a name I’d not heard before.  I was expecting to be wowed by what I already thought I knew: Caravaggio.  But whereas Caravaggio’s version has Judith meekly decapitating Holofernes as though he were a roasted pig, this one at the Uffizi is all violence and brawn.  Judith and the other woman have him pinioned by the hair and throat, and he’s fighting for his life as the sword severs his jugular.  The spurt of blood, to which this reproduction does no justice, is in the original a great roostertail of crimson gore, worthy of Quentin Tarantino.  I thought, who was this painter, and how many people did she arrange to have executed in her studio in order to get the work right?

It turns out that Gentileschi was initially a follower of Caravaggio and a protégée of a guy named Agostino Tassi, who raped her, promised to marry her, and then reneged on the promise.  Her family brought charges, and during the trial she was tortured with thumbscrews to “prove her truthfulness”.  Tassi was found guilty and sentenced to banishment, but the sentence was never carried out.

In the painting, Gentileschi painted herself as the avenging Judith, and the rapist Tassi as Holofernes.  I went into the Uffizi expecting Madonna and Child.  I’d come out with Thelma and Louise.

While in Florence I caught a nasty cold and spent Christmas in bed.  So I made a little drawing, as I often like to do when we’re on vacation when I have time and space to really look at something.  When I do, I realize the apples and oranges are not round, but have strange bulbous shapes, and the tassels of a shawl are rarely straight.  I especially like trying to draw fabric, in the way light hits the folds.

Berger again: “Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through whatever it is one is scrutinizing.”  That rebounding energy has been described in many ways: the divine, the muse, the light of inspiration.   When I look at art, I try to find, in that point of intersection between the artist and the subject, a burst of energy, like the green flash at the end of a sunset.  That’s where the painting comes alive.   It’s usually in the eyes of a person, a face.  It happened in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where I got tired of crowding around the Rembrandts and Vermeers and instead focused on some small portraits by Jan Steen.  One, the “Baker Oostwaert and his Wife”, filled me with simple, openhearted joy. 

On my return to the States, I became immediately sucked back into the vortex of the known.  Work obligations and household tasks stacked like unwashed dinner plates.  Shrapnel from Trump’s latest detonation hit close to my heart.  By yesterday I had careened back into seeing exactly what I expected to see.  A Facebook row with a conservative friend was turning sharp – and before turning out the light I sent a last reply, calling him racist and ignorant, hesitated, and then punched post.

But this morning the New York Times gave me a little buried gift in this quote from Georgia O’Keefe: “Nobody sees a flower – really – it is so small it takes time – we haven’t time – and to see it takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”  I opened Facebook to see that my friend had amended the words that had sent me over the edge, and I amended mine in return.  He’s a hard friend to have, given the gulf between us.  I haven’t really seen him yet.  But maybe this year, if I look harder, I will.

After Charlottesville

~ John ~ Leave a comment

I spent last Sunday reading condemnations of others’ racism after Charlottesville.  I read few investigations of self.

I’ve just returned from a road trip through Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming – country I’ve traversed, and loved, for years.  Impassable red rock craters and spires.  Rigid fields of irrigated potatoes.  Windy plains evoking Mongolian steppes, dotted with antelope.

And every fifty miles or so, a town – sickening, dying, or dead.  I’ve watched these little towns over the years, stopped in their gas stations and eaten in their cafes.  I’ve seen how the movie house closed because it couldn’t afford a digital projector.  How the musty old hotel restaurant, where you could get a steak under the stare of a stuffed buffalo head, has become a Denny’s.  How a grocery store’s converted to an antique shop, as the keepsakes of a rural community bleed out through its last open orifice.  How the diner we used to stop at because of the row of pickups out front is now empty, its windows painted over with dust-covered bald eagles and American flags.  How it doesn’t take long, once the last business goes, for the buildings to bleach like bones.

Of course this is hardcore Trump country.  Businesses are festooned with “Make America Great” signs.  People’s country courtesy comes edged with resentment.  I’ve always been an outsider, and I’m still a customer.  But I’ve felt increasingly like an enemy.  This trip, a motorcyclist passing the other direction flipped us off – I guess just for our Colorado plates.

Still, even after Charlottesville, I carry these people in my heart.

It goes deeper.  My mother’s family came from northern Virginia.  They owned a large farm, worked by slaves.  They lost it to foreclosure around the Civil War, and two separate battles were fought near their land.  The night Richmond fell, a boy of sixteen – my great-grandfather — guarded a dry-goods store with a pistol against fire, Union troops and looting locals.  The landscape lay devastated by combat, the white social structure morally ravaged by slavery.  Its people faced a terrifying future.  My great-aunt wrote, in a memoir depicting our family’s struggle out of that awful shadow: “As a race we were afraid of negroes.  That is the truth.  The talk of keeping them in their place was merely a way of saying, ‘We’ll make them scared of us, so scared they won’t try anything.’”  My great-uncle beat up a black man he’d been friends with as a child — at midday in the town square — because the man refused to call him “mister.”

Outwardly, I am none of these things.  A professional, progressive Boulderite, I harbor no ideologies of racial separation or superiority. I have no trouble condemning the KKK.  But we do not live in the world of Indiana Jones, where good guys punch out cartoon Nazis.  The racism we must confront is not merely the tiki-torch variety.  It’s our own in-group out-group hard wiring, overlaid with the history, power structures and acculturation of our regional, familial, and personal roots.  By this standard, of course Donald Trump is racist.  But so am I.  When I meet a person, among the first things I notice is their race.  Also, a quick flash of wariness.  It has always been there.

The great damage wrought by Bannon and Trump is that they align such deep-rooted racism with our often legitimate sense of economic loss and cultural fear, and meld them into tribal resentment.  People thus incited do not experience themselves as haters.  What they feel is allegiance and safety.  So they deny being – or at least feeling — racist.  But the hatred and violence engendered are no less real.

Humans as a species are universally vulnerable to race-baiting like Bannon’s.  Democracy’s defenders should condemn and confront it.  But we — especially people of privilege — should also be honest about ourselves.  The therapy for racism is not righteousness.  It is understanding: of other, of self.

One morning last week we set out before dawn on Highway 50.  The Great Basin opened up ahead, a carpet of black sage stopping at silhouetted cliffs, thrusting to indistinct peaks and ridgelines and tumbling bruises of cloud, dark grey, burgundy, pink — then suddenly breaking into orange fire.  What had been a wash of soulful gloom abruptly turned every color, green, yellow, lavender, each proclaiming its particular self.  Oncoming headlights faded to twinkles, like morning stars.  Mary Chapin Carpenter crooned:

Oh my darling, oh my love,
The things that we are made of.

The Rapists Among Us

~ John ~ Leave a comment

“Were you ever raped?”

It was a terrible thing to shout from the back of the middle-school auditorium to the beleaguered spokeswoman trying to calm a frightened and angry crowd, assembled in response to the notification that “sexually violent predator” Christopher Lawyer has been released back into Boulder.  But the question touched on an emotional reality missing from the various official efforts to reassure us that his current residence at the Boulder Shelter for the Homeless is the least bad option available.  Under the fear, dancing like electricity down the crowded aisles, breathed something heavier: some members of the audience themselves survived sexual assault.

I’m one of them.  One summer afternoon in 1966, I was raped by a man who worked for my family.  Hurt, scared, and ashamed, I never told my parents. The man quickly disappeared and was never confronted or caught.  I can only assume he assaulted other kids.  I was five.

That day privately but profoundly configured parts of my life, as the experience of rape at any age will do.

Thus, the label “sexually violent predator” gets my attention.  But the work I’ve done to reconstruct my own history and heal my own trauma makes me especially aware that Mr. Lawyer is not simply a “predator”. He is a human being. Certainly complex — probably damaged, probably ill, hopefully struggling with remorse for a crime beyond cruelty. Assuming the best of him, he is no longer a rapist-in-waiting, but a man wanting a chance to begin anew.  Assuming the worst, he will always be, as his label declares, a violent predator.  The State of Colorado has put him through a process indicating the former.  The community fears the latter.  Like many, I do not understand his release.

Where do we go from here?  The hard choice is the right one: we should accept him.  By accept, I do not mean to forgive, or condone, or consider him “OK”.  I do mean that we should realize, or remember, a few things.

First, beyond the danger he may individually pose, Mr. Lawyer’s presence among us symbolizes a more diffuse monstrosity that no public meeting can expel.  The urge to rape blights the souls of men in many stations of society.  It may stem from their own victimization, from mental illness, or from something else we helplessly call “evil’.  Some rapists are sociopaths and perpetrate without qualm or remorse.  Others battle against their secret selves with outward achievement and selflessness.  Some rapists are homeless.  Others are Ralphie-handlers, choirboys, star athletes, teachers or priests, whose cases we find “inexplicable.”  Almost none announce in advance that they are “predators.”  We can try to cast Mr. Lawyer and his label from our midst.  But the rapists among us – and the sicknesses they carry — remain.

Second, the presenters at the community meeting were right: it is better to have Mr. Lawyer in a known location, with his ankle-monitor charged and his check-in bed established, than it is to have him calling in every night from a payphone at an intersection, only to vanish.  That’s what one of Boulder’s two other sexually violent predators currently does.  Yes, we do have two others, and one of them is homeless, location unknown.  I find that scarier than Mr. Lawyer’s situation, and yet there’s no uproar about it at all.

Third, he is a human being, and he has a legal right to exist. Each of us has the right to decide, based on our own history, how we feel about him today.  But personal feelings should not dictate whom we include within our legal community.  Christopher Lawyer is from here, and the law decrees that upon his release from custody he be returned here.  A person whom the state has granted liberty has the right to exercise it, and a community that respects human rights should respect the rights of all.  All means all.

I consider how I will feel, having published this, if Mr. Lawyer rapes again.  The thought sickens me.  I think of people who work in law enforcement and criminal justice, who face such prospects every day.  In Mr. Lawyer’s mugshot, he is smiling.  Perhaps it’s the vacant grin of a sociopath.  Perhaps he’s hoping that a smile will persuade us that he’s committed to no longer being the person his label proclaims.  Either way, he’s embarked on a journey back into the world.  For all our sakes, I wish him success.