Counterlight's Peculiars: Jack the Dripper Counterlight's Peculiars "Art is a lie that tells the truth" -- Pablo Picasso

Monday, August 2, 2010Jack the Dripper After all these years, I finally saw that Ed Harris movie about Jackson Pollock on the teevee last night. I was impressed.

It was a bleak and unromantic look at a very romantic man undone by his own galloping insecurities and destroyed by the alcoholism that afflicted him most of his life. The long sequence where he falls off the wagon for the last time after 2 years of sobriety (and his most important work) is really painful to watch. Its also probably close to the truth. The movie paints a very sympathetic portrait of Lee Krasner, his wife, who eagerly follows his rising fame, and who also suffers the brunt of his cruelty, self-absorption, his infidelities, and his alcoholic rages. She finally leaves him for a long trip to Europe to protect herself and her sanity. Lee Krasner took a lot of abuse at the time of Pollocks death, and for many years after, with many people blaming her (very unjustly) for his untimely death. The movie makes us wonder that she put up with so much from Pollock for as long as she did. The movie very candidly shows Pollocks very complicated relations with his own large family, his sometimes dissolute and feckless father, and his competitive and resentful four brothers. The movie also shows Pollocks difficult relationship with the art world of that time, a tangled mix of high-minded ambition and show biz. He was the very complicated star of an art world dominated by reductivist criticism and thinking (as personified by Clement Greenberg in the movie). Jackson Pollock loomed very large in the imaginations of art students back in my day, especially among young men. I dont know if that is still true today (in an age of star video game designers and graphic novelists selling movie rights, I doubt it). Jackson Pollock himself in his studio in Springs, Long Island in 1950 He was the sad bad James Dean of art; not as pretty as Dean, but more brilliant, more macho, and more troubled. We loved all the old stories about Pollock getting into fist-fights at the Cedar Tavern on 8th street, and pissing in Peggy Guggenheims fire place during a party. The movie puts a very different spin on those antics, less the defiant acts of a hero than the acting out of a really bad drunk. Pollock was a troubled brawler all his life. He was expelled from school twice for fighting. He probably began drinking in his early teens, and was already a serious alcoholic under treatment in his twenties. His death in a car crash sealed his lost hero James Dean credentials. Deans death was a catastrophic accident at the beginning of a brilliant career. The movie implies,

as have many others, that Pollocks fatal crash (with 2 other women in the car, one, Judith Metzger, died; his mistress, Ruth Kligman, survived) was a murder suicide. Booze and madness do only one thing for an artist's career, they end it. Pollock had already stopped painting in 1955, the year before his death at age 44. The Abstract Expressionists were probably the last great romantic painters. They were all misfits and alcoholics. Two of them died by suicide (Arshile Gorky and Mark Rothko). Most of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants (deKooning was an illegal immigrant, jumping ship into the USA when he was in his teens). In 1950s America, not fitting in came at a very high price of unofficial alienation and poverty, and official suspicion and legal sanction. The Powers That Be were eager to dampen the expectations for social transformation awakened by the Second World War. Those expectations would stir anyway and finally destroy the thin anxious crust that was the legacy of Victorian America. In that anxious and xenophobic age, the largely Jewish and foreign sounding names of these artists aroused a lot of suspicion. Pollock was not Jewish or foreign with a name that sounded like a hero from a teevee western. What is more, he really was born and raised in the West, from Cody, Wyoming. Instead of the son of Belorussian Jewish tailors (Rothko) or Armenian refugees (Gorky), he was the son of cowboys (actually his father held a variety of odd jobs, including surveying). Pollock himself carefully cultivated that image of the cowboy from out West riding into New York to show them all how its done. Jackson Pollock in southern California, circa 1927 The small nascent modern art world in New York greeted his arrival with relief. Modernism could finally establish all-American creds, and dispel some of the xenophobia and anti-Semitism that surrounded it since the Armory Show in 1913. Pollocks work, just like the work of the rest of the artists in that group, came out of the sometimes friendly encounters, and sometimes hostile clashes, between American artists and the large community of European artists driven out of Europe by Hitler. They came together in Greenwich Village. The ideas of the old and new worlds met and clashed in that neighborhood, and out of those conflicts and collaborations would come the American culture that dominated the world until the 1990s. The artists met in each others studios, and together in local bars like the now famous Cedar Tavern, the dive where Pollock made himself persona non grata. Artists in the Cedar Tavern in 1953 Pollock was not the first artist in the history of the world to fling paint. Max Ernst and Andre Masson dribbled and flung paint while Pollock was getting expelled from school in Wyoming. Artists in China and Japan spattered paint for centuries. And yet, Pollock seemed to live out Ruskins accusation leveled at Whistler, that he flung a pot of paint into the face of the public. The public was predictably outraged and fascinated. Pollock didnt begin splattering paint until late in his career, not until 1947. By then, he had been painting for almost 20 years. His work already had a kind of cult following long before he dripped his first drip. It took me a long time to warm to Pollocks drip paintings, but I felt no such

reservations about his earlier work from the 1940s. Pollock, The Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, 1943

Pollock, The She Wolf, 1943

Pollock, Mural, 1943, one of Pollock's first essays in centerless over-all composition Almost every modern painter in New York (not a large group) was doing a form of late surrealism heavily informed by the writings of Jung, especially his ideas of a shared unconscious. The whole point of surrealism was to tap the creative power of the unconscious, of the primordial id. The American version of that was less Freudian and more Jungian, less interested in sex and more interested in myth. At the end of World War II, there was a desire to begin history again, similar to the desire that drove the modern movements that came out of the First World War. Only now, the driving emotion was more sorrow than anger. The exiled European Surrealists in New York, and the American artists, wanted to somehow go back to the primordial beginnings of all creativity and begin again. Pollock, like all the artists in these groups, made paintings based on a combination of automatism (putting ones conscious mind in neutral and letting the unconscious take over as one drew, a much more serious form of doodling) and Jungian ideas of collective symbolism. All of these artists were influenced by the work of Picasso and Miro. Pollock added the sense of scale and the dramatic grandeur of the great Mexican muralists that he admired. He turned his own doubts and frustrations as a painter into virtues, making his struggle to realize the image part of its drama. The result is the busy, crowded, and very grand paintings he made around the end of the War. To my eye, these are much more aggressive paintings than his later drip canvases, with their sharp forms and constantly edited out, and edited back in passages of painting. Pollock, like a lot of artists since Kandinsky on the eve of the First World War, wanted to make painting itself carry all the expressive and narrative weight of art. He wanted painting to be its own tragic story, to make it speak directly to the emotions the way music does without narrative and without imagery. This played right into the expectations of modernist critics like Clement Greenberg who championed a Hegelian idea of reductivism, that all painting was destined by History to be refined down to its most basic essences, and ultimately to become pure expression unhindered by the social constraints of imagery and story telling. Im not quite sure thats quite what Pollock wanted. DeKooning insisted (rightfully I think) that all painting tells a story, whether its about the Fall of Troy or about Green and Red. He said that all painting is ultimately an image, no matter how abstract, and that all imagery is ultimately an abstraction no matter how realistic. Like deKooning, Ive always thought that the old abstract vs. realist conflict was a red herring. I suspect that Pollock may have felt the same way. His desire to create an art of pure expression was possibly not about getting rid of imagery and story telling so much as taking them to another level, about re-inventing them.

I think its that search for a way to re-invent painting that led Pollock to the drip in 1949. Pollock, Shimmering Substance (Sounds in the Grass), 1946, an all-over field of nuances applied with the brush. I've always been fond of this painting.

Pollock, Cathedral, 1947, one of Pollock's earliest drip paintings The movie makes his drip paintings look like a serendipitous discovery. I suspect that it was not. Its not hard (in retrospect) to draw a straight line from Surrealist automatic drawing to flinging paint. Pollock long had a fascination with Navajo sand painting. Navajo Sand Painting A shaman or medicine man would dribble out colored sand while chanting an incantation, making an elaborate design on the ground. He would then place the patient on top of the painting, inevitably destroying it. The healing power of the image comes in the act of making it. Its power can only be released when the image is destroyed. I think this gave Pollock his idea for his drip paintings. The act of painting became as important as the finished work. He always painted on the floor of his studio, but now he took off the stretchers. He unrolled a bolt of canvas and began walking around it with buckets of fluid paint (usually cheap house paints that have given conservators nightmares ever since) using his brushes as sticks to fling the paint. Sometimes he poured it out or splashed it out of smaller cans.

Pollock at work in his studio at Springs, Long Island, 1950 These paintings made Pollock immediately famous, and got him a feature article in Life magazine in the August 8, 1949 issue. The press dubbed him "Jack the Dripper." The Life magazine spread on Pollock in the August 8, 1949 issue. This changed his life. He started out as a very marginal figure with a cult following borrowing money for rent, groceries, and booze. Now, he was off the booze, taking interviews, and thinking about purchasing land out in eastern Long Island. The public reaction to his work is best summed up in Norman Rockwells gentle satire originally titled Abstract and Concrete, but today mostly known as The Connoisseur. Norman Rockwell, Abstract and Concrete (The Connoisseur), 1962

Rockwell does his own version of a Pollock painting. Rockwell sees Pollocks work as a chaos of colors and a flurry of uncontrolled paint. Pollock insisted that there were no accidents in his work, that his methods were very controlled and precise. When we compare the painting within Rockwells painting to an actual Pollock painting, we can see what he meant. Pollocks colors were not random. Pollock chose his colors carefully, emphasizing some while letting others play a secondary role. Blacks and grays dominate Lucifer livened up by ropes of green and spots of orange and red.

Pollock, Lucifer, 1947

Pollock, Lucifer, detail Black, white, and tan dominate Autumn Rhythm, set off with small spots of turquoise blue. The more we study a Pollock drip painting, the less random it looks.

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, 1950

Pollock, Autumn Rhythm, detail Something else appears in the Rockwell that we never see in Pollocks work, runs. Arshile Gorky and Willem deKooning loved runs and let their paint run all the time. Pollock hated runs because they brought an unwanted reference to gravity into what were supposed to be centerless directionless fields of what seem to be electric sparks. Pollocks drip paintings, like Monets huge water-lily paintings, are vast uncentered fields of nuance. Pollocks nuances are charged and electric, busy and anxious, compared to Monets consoling calm strokes of color. Unlike Monet, Pollocks nuances have nothing to do with light or with any observed experience. They are their own thing, their own separate world, a new creation; something Leonardo 5 centuries earlier said that every painting should be. The public was outraged, but the reaction from other artists was more complicated. Pollocks old teacher, the Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton always supported Pollock even as he bashed New York modernism. I sometimes wonder if Bentons anti-modernism really came out of conviction (he began as a Cubist painter in Paris), or out of his own bitterness and anti-Semitism. The artist Robert Beverly Hale, now best known as the author of a number of books on drawing technique and anatomy for artists, was a champion of Classical figurative art in the very powerful position of curator of American painting at the Metropolitan Museum. And yet, it was Hale who made the case for purchasing Pollocks Autumn Rhythm to a very hostile Metropolitan Museum board of directors. I think the textbooks once again oversimplify things when talking about the controversies of this era.

Autumn Rhythm today in the Metropolitan Museum in New York

Here is Hans Namuth's 1950 film of Pollock at work.

Lee Krasner was much more than Pollocks long-suffering widow. She was quite an artist in her own right. Pollock, to his credit, always encouraged her work. If anything, her work is a lot tougher and more aggressive than his with its jarring colors and sharp forms. I've always loved her work.

Krasner, Sun Woman II

Krasner, Gothic Landscape, 1961

Krasner, Left Bird, Right Posted by Counterlight at Monday, August 02, 2010 5 comments: Grandmre Mimi said... Counterlight, I can't believe that you, an artist, are just now seeing the Pollock movie for the first time. It's powerful, and was, for me, difficult to watch. Growing up with an alcoholic father, I'm not inclined to cut drunks much slack for their outrageous behavior while under the influence. I know alcoholics are wounded human beings, and they have their reasons, but still.... Ed Harris is one terrific actor in nearly every role he plays. With you, I admire Pollock's pre-drip painting more than the later work. However, once I saw the drip style in the flesh, I liked the paintings more. It's amazing how art comes to life when not seen through the filter of a camera lens - some artists' work more than others. Lee Krasner's paintings are extraordinarily good. I love them. I don't know why she put up with Pollock's behavior for so long, but my mother did the same. Thanks again for the excellent art history lesson. August 3, 2010 10:59 AM Counterlight said...

Grandmere, I've heard about the movie for 10 years and just never got around to watching it. As I get older, I like Pollock's work more and I like him less. It was the other way around in my art student days. You're always welcome. August 3, 2010 11:25 AM Leonardo Ricardo said... I studied Fine Art (Watercolor emphasis) starting in the Fall of 1961)...Pollock was a inspiration to me, one of the freedom givers, who allowed me to breakout of my own fear of being mediocre (a joy I still nurture)...I too was very active as a alcoholic but got to the falling off place at 35...later, after a career in retail and wholesale/product development, I started painting again (for money), interestingly, at least to me, I paint wildly vivid action painting as underpainting and then do pointillism on top...the action undershapes are so alive to me...they literally take me where I think I need to go...Im lost in the shapes, the depth the textures on textures...the building process that sometimes includes spraying too. Thank you for my revist to Pollock...I know drunks, I am one and he and them make sense to me (even dry, I identify and can follow the insanity of it all). Mil gracias, Len August 3, 2010 5:23 PM Gran Koch-Swahne said... A bit beyond me, but thanks! I think the Krasners are fascinating as are Pollok's earlier pieces. And I did think of Leonardo ;=) August 4, 2010 12:35 PM philip king said... Thank you for this thoughtful appraisal... I too am an artist who recently watched the Pollock film after putting off watching it for many years assuming that it would have a certain sentimentality.. I was wrong and came away impressed... His murderous self-destruction is vividly and objectively captured in the film. the reductionism you so rightly decry has been so limiting, and I was interested in your take on the more traditional artists and curators who supported Pollock. I personally feel Pollock's sense of himself as an international artist with shared transatlantic concerns is not generally stressed enough, Dubuffet, for example is key... Thank You. Phil King Oakland CA December 5, 2010 4:11 AM Post a Comment Links to this post Create a Link Newer Post Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Counterlight's Peculiars Saint Luke, our patron, by Guercino Click on the image to find out why I write this blog.

Help Japan click on the pic to find out how. Aidez Haiti! My Art On Facebook Click on the picture to go to Facebook Albums of my work. Who Am I? My name is Doug Blanchard. I'm an artist in New York. I keep a studio in the Lower East Side (one of the few artists left in Manhattan). I paint figuratively in oils. I think of myself as a kind of history painter and aspiring classicist. I teach art and art history at a CUNY community college (no PhD, so I'm a discount professor). I live with my partner Michael and 2 cats, Willy and Betty, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. I was born and raised in Dallas, and lived in the Midwest for a number of years; first in Kansas City, MO, and then in St. Louis. This blog is about whatever pops into my head at the moment. I can be contacted at: counterlight@earthlink.net

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Words of Wisdom Here being built by the Sidonian queen Was a great temple planned in Junos honor, Rich in offerings and the godhead there, Steps led up to a sill of bronze, with brazen Lintel, and bronze doors on groaning pins. Here in this grove new things that met his eyes Calmed Aeneas fear for the first time, Here for the first time he took heart to hope For safety, and to trust his destiny more Even in affliction. It was while he walked From one to another wall of the great temple And waited for the queen, staring amazed At Carthaginian promise, at the handiwork Of artificers and the toil they spent upon it; He found before his eyes the Trojan battles

In the Old War now known throughout the world-The great Atridae, Priam, and Achilles, Fierce in his rage at both sides Here Aeneas Halted and tears came, What spot on the earth, He said, What region of the earth, Achates, Is not full of the story of our sorrow? Look, here is Priam. Even so far away Great Valor has due honor; they weep here For how the world goes, and our life that passes Touches their hearts. This fame Insures some kind of refuge. --Virgil, from the Aeneid, translated by Robert Fitzgerald Great masters who have shown mankind An order it has yet to find, What if all pedants say of you As personalities be true? All the more honor to you then If, weaker than some other men, You had the courage that survives Soiled, shabby, egotistic lives, If poverty or ugliness, Ill-health or social unsuccess Hunted you out of life to play At living in another way; Yet the live quarry all the same Were changed to huntsmen in the game, And the wild furies of the past, Tracked to their origins at last, Trapped in a mediums artifice, To charity, delight, increase. Now large magnificent and calm, Your changeless presences disarm The sullen generations, still The fright and fidget of the will, And to the growing and the weak Your final transformations speak, Saying to dreaming I am deed. To striving Courage. I succeed To mourning I remain, Forgive. And to becoming I am. Live. --WH Auden, from New Year's Letter, 1939 Art still has truth, take refuge there. --Matthew Arnold from Memorial Verses We have art in order that we might not perish from truth. --Friedrich Nietzche Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladders gone I must lie down where all ladders start, In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart. --W.B. Yeats

The camera cannot compete with a brush and canvas, as long as it cant be used in heaven and hell. --Edvard Munch Invention, it must be admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. --Mary Shelly, Introduction to Frankenstein The artist is a dreamer who consents to dream of the real world. --George Santayana To see is to understand. --Leonardo da Vinci The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves. --Willem de Kooning Now do you not see that the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world? It is the lord of astronomy and the maker of cosmography; it counsels and corrects all the arts of humanity; it moves men to the different parts of the world; it is the prince of mathematics, its sciences are certain; it has measured the heights and sizes of the stars, it has found the elements in their locations... has generated architecture, perspective, and the divine art of painting. Oh most excellent thing above all others created, what peoples, what tongues shall be those that can fully describe your true operation? This is the window of the human body, through which it mirrors its way and brings to fruition the beauty of the world, by which the soul is content to stay in its human prison. --Leonardo da Vinci The artist begins to communicate before he is understood. --TS Eliot But what, after all, was humanism if not a love of humankind, and by token also of political activity, rebellion against all that tended to defile or degrade our conception of humanity? He had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form. But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity --Thomas Mann from The Magic Mountain ...what would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? After all, shadows are cast by objects and people. There is the shadow of my sword. But there are also shadows of trees and living creatures. Would you like to denude the earth of all the trees and all the living beings in order to satisfy your fantasy of rejoicing in the naked light? --Mikhail Bulgakov from The Master and Margarita The Piazza Signoria is too stony to be brilliant. It has no grass, no flowers,

no frescoes, no glittering walls of marble or comforting patches of ruddy brick. By an odd chance -- unless we believe in a presiding genius of place -- the statues that relieve its severity suggest, not the innocence of childhood nor the glorious bewilderment of youth, but the conscious achievements of maturity. Perseus and Judith, Hercules and Thusnelda, they have done or suffered something, and, though they are immortal, immortality has come to them after experience, not before. Here, not only in the solitude of Nature, might a hero meet a goddess, or a heroine a god. --E.M. Forster, from A Room With A View To be an Error and to be Cast Out is Part of God's Design. --William Blake Eternity is in love with the productions of time. --William Blake Faith our outward sense befriending, makes out inward vision clear. --Thomas Aquinas Truth rests with God alone, and a little bit with me. --Yiddish proverb Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it. --Mark Twain Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to. --Mark Twain Humanity is a parade of fools, and not only am I in that parade, I'm carrying a banner. --Mark Twain In a world full of caterpillars, it takes balls to be a butterfly. -Anonymous Tranny. Peace is more than the absence of war, it is the presence of justice. --Martin Luther King Jr. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. --Martin Luther King Jr. Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions. -- Thomas Paine Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is a duty. -- Oscar Romero, January 7, 1978

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The best live by legends. The average live by ideology. And the worst live by conspiracy theories. --Hannah Arendt Laws, like the spiders webs, catch the small flies and let the large ones go free. -Balzac If you had enough courage, you wouldn't need a reputation. --Rhett Butler to Scarlett O'Hara Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle. --attributed to Philo of Alexandria

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges. --Anatole France The sound of the Gion Shja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sla flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind. --opening of the Heike Monogatari, 13th century Japan The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him. --Pascal There's a Christ for a whore and a Christ for a punk, There's a Christ for a pickpocket and a drunk, There's a Christ for every sinner, but there's one thing there ain't, There ain't no Christ for any cut-price saint. --James Fenton, from "Cutthroat Christ" Men never do evil so willingly and so happily as when they do it for the sake of conscience. --Pascal Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be of one final victory. It could only record of what had had to be done. and assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive to their utmost to be healers. And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city. --Albert Camus, conclusion of The Plague Faith is never identical with piety. --Karl Barth Oh God, If I worship Thee in fear of hell, burn me in hell; and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, withhold not Thine everlasting beauty! --Rabiah al Basri

Live this life and do what ever is done in a spirit of thanksgiving. Abandon attempts to achieve security, they are futile. Give up the search for wealth, it is demeaning. Quit the search for salvation, it is selfish. And come to comfortable rest in the certainty that those who participate in this life with an attitude of thanksgiving will receive its full promise. -- St. Benedict of Nursia (480-543 C.E) IF I were but mere dust and ashes I might speak unto the Lord, for the Lords hand made me of this dust, and the Lords hand shall re-collect these ashes; the Lords hand was the wheel upon which this vessel of clay was framed, and the Lords hand is the urn in which these ashes shall be preserved. I am the dust and the ashes of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and what marble is so precious? But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul. --John Donne Christ has no body now but yours No hands, no feet on earth but yours Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world Christ has no body now on earth but yours. --Teresa of Avila Again I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all. -Ecclesiates 9:11-12 What shall I bring when I approach the Lord? How shall I stoop before God on high? Am I to approach him ith whole offerings or yearling calves? Will the Lord accept thousands of rams or ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my eldest son for my own wrongdoing, my children for my own sin? God has told you what is good, and what is it that the Lord asks of you? Only to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? -Micah 6:6-8 Divine folly is wiser than the wisdom of man, and divine weakness stronger than man's strength. My brothers, think what sort of people you are, whom God has called. Few of you are men of wisdom, by any human standard; few are powerful or highly born. Yet, to shame the wise, God has chosen what the world counts folly, and to shame the strong, God has chosen what the world counts weakness. he has chosen things low and contemptible, mere nothings, to overthrow the existing order. And so there is no place for human pride in the presence of God. You are in Christ Jesus by God's own act, for God has made him our wisdom; he is our righteousness; in him we are consecrated and set free. -1 Corinthians: 25-30 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me; he has sent me to announce good news to the poor, to proclaim release for prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind; to let the broken victims go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. --Luke 4:18-19 Because I live, so shall you live also --John 14:19-20

A Prayer Attributed to Saint Francis Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen. Metta Karuna Prayer Oneness of Life and Light, Entrusting in your Great Compassion, May you shed the foolishness in myself, Transforming me into a conduit of Love. May I be a medicine for the sick and weary, Nursing their afflictions until they are cured; May I become food and drink, During time of famine, May I protect the helpless and the poor, May I be a lamp, For those who need your Light, May I be a bed for those who need rest, and guide all seekers to the Other Shore. May all find happiness through my actions, and let no one suffer because of me. Whether they love or hate me, Whether they hurt or wrong me, May they all realize true entrusting, Through Other Power, The Prayer of Eleanor Roosevelt Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.

Blog Archive 2011 (120) May (10) Osama Bin Laden is Dead The Hit The Morning After. Rejoicing in the Death of Sinners Congratulations President Obama! I'm Glad He's Gone My Inner "Conservative" Beatifications "All The World Cries Out For Peace, Freedom, and a... Robert Grant April (29) Bootstraps Apocalyptic Assholes Britney Spears Never Looked So Good Nice Kids Alabama Schadenfreude It Ain't Easy Being Queer and Christian America Now Open Studios And For All of You Who Are Already Sick of the Roy... Easter The Seven Sacraments of Nicholas Poussin What The Frothing Rage of the Right Is All About Trofim Lysenko Lives! Florence: Some Commentary and Sources Power versus Authority Revolutionary Music For John Galt That Mysterious Man in the White House ... America, No We Can't! 150 Years Ago Today The First Person Ever in Space Fluffy Bunnies Jesus So Lowly Speaking of Fun House Morality ... "Am I My Brother's Keeper?" The Mystery of the Mona Lisa Solved ... Maybe The Last of the Magic Realists Normal! Normal! Happy! Happy! March (30) American Christianity Cold Spring Florence: Building the Cathedral The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 100 Years Ago Today "For This, For Everything, We Are Out of Tune" The End of Religion? A Bloody March in New York Beethoven Japan Needs Help Japan Science! February (29) January (22) 2010 (409)

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