So today I find myself in a Northern Exposure kind of groove: reflective, ironic, a little melancholy but simultaneously hopeful about what God holds in our future. It should come as no surprise that my main man is Chris - especially when he's making art or talking on the radio - and as the rain POURS down today, my heart takes me here:
How sweet. How true. How beautiful and happy/sad all at once. Remember Tim Buckley? I fell in love with his "Happy/Sad" album and used to drift off into new and untried places with it oh so many years ago. And even now his groove seems to be where my soul drifts when I'm not paying attention. My Northern Exposure man, Chris, put it like this:
Well, you know... the human soul chooses to express itself in a profound profusion of ways. What I'm dealing with is the aesthetics of the transitory. In this particular exhibition, the fleeting nature of the piece itself becomes a comment on mortality. Like the temporary installations of Christo, I'm creating tomorrow's memories. And, as memories, my images remain as immortal as art which is concrete.
And then, of course, Chris flings a huge piano into the air. It was going to be a cow but that became both cruel and too complicated - for Chris and everyone else. So... in cooperation with the whole community, his encounter with art changed. And it became better...
I was fixated on that flying cow. Then when Ed said that Monty Python had already painted that picture, I thought I was through. I had to let go of that cow to see all the other possibilities, even though that was frightening, because Ididn't know where I was headed - and I didn't know where I'd come out, see? As Kierkegaard said so well, "The self is only that whichit is in the process of becoming." Art, same thing. James Joyce had something to say, too: "Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
That's what today feels like in this northern exposure groove: happy/sad, exploring and discerning and all the rest. We are here to fling some thing, an image that bubbled up out of the collective unconscious of our community. Blessed Sabbath.
WHEN LOVE COMES TO TOWN: REFLECTIONS ON TENDERNESS IN A CHAOTIC CULTURE
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There is a story about St. Francis and the Sultan - greatly embellished to be sure and often treated in apocryphal ways in the 2 1st centur... -
NOTE: Here are my Sunday worship notes for the Feast of the Epiphany. They are a bit late - in theory I wasn't going to do much work ...
1 comment:
Wow! I couldn't dig what you are saying any more.
I loved Chris, with his "WV" upbringing feeling at home slinging out high art and low art in a steady crescendo of words until there is nothing left to do but stand in awe of the art he created. I so wanted to be Chris Stevens and I guess I really still wish I could become like him. It bummed me out later when I found out he really didn't understand what he was saying in those dialogues because the words just sing off of his lips and actions.
I read this on a day on which I came to an odd realization about my sons and myself because the mythical Chris Stevens has the same problem as us. We are creative chickens. Chickens lay eggs no matter what, they can't help it. Sometimes, they grow into little chickens sometimes it becomes breakfast but either way a chicken just lays eggs. Chris and the Merson boys have the same disease and that we just create stuff or to use the metaphor, lay eggs. It is the process of self for us all. I will admit to never having made a contraption to fling anything but I do feel good that I do have some spiritual liking to Chris. And for a 43 year old dude like me that is a good thing. Life is going in a good direction. And does this make feel like it is a blessed sabbath...man what a blessed sabbath.
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