Medium: B Pencil?

Medium: Pencils 2B and 2H

Max Monday

"His premonitions were as uncanny as they were accurate. After recording his vision of the brutal murder in the Night, he looked outdoors, and used a similarly agitated composition for the Synagogue in Frankfurt, a painting of the building that would be burned to the ground seventeen years later, during the infamous Kristallnacht, while scenes similar to the Night took place all over the city of Frankfurt..." --Peter Selz

Galleria Umberto, By Max Beckmann

"Modern artists generally avoid anecdotal subjects. Occurrences that happened only once are shunned as thematic material. History, once the lifeblood of academic art, is not as popular with twentieth-century painters.

"We know that Mussolini was killed on April 28, 1945, by Italian partisans, and subsequently hung by his feet in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. But do we wish such gruesome "great moments in history" to be immortalized? However, this scene was painted by Beckmann twenty years before Mussolini's death!

"Erhard Gopel, an art critic who often visited Beckmann in wartime Amsterdam, gives the following account: "When, in 1925, he promenaded through the Galleria Umberto in Naples, he saw the flood of fascism rising, he saw carabinieri saving drowning people and a body hung upside down by ropes. He saw this in broad daylight. When Mussolini's fall was reported, he fetched the painting from the closet and showed it in his studio. He considered it a vision even before he knew that he had also foreseen the manner of the dictator's end - hanging head down."

"Galleria Umberto contains many odd features, the strangest of which is the crystal ball hanging from the glass ceiling. Did Beckmann have clairvoyance in mind when he invented this translucent globe? Consciously, he probably wanted only to satirize the Italy of 1925. The fascists' murder of Matteotti was widely interpreted as a storm signal just then, and Beckmann feared that gay vacationland Italy' symbolized by the mandolin, the bather, and the tootling blonde, might be swamped by political repression. An Italian flag is drowning already in the foreground.

"Expressionist art offers several examples of this uncanny "second sight," the most literal being Ludwig Meidner's views of bombed and burning cities painted in 1913. Beckmann pictured the Frankfurt synagogue in 1919 with its walls slanting as if they might topple at any moment. But we need not really ascribe supernatural powers to artists. Fantasy, in itself already a miraculous faculty, suffices to explain many predictions, such as Tennyson's when he "Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,/Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales ;/ . . . and there rain'd a ghastly dew/From the nations' airy navies...." Tennyson, who died in 1892, did not see his prophecy come true. Beckmann did." --Stephen Lackner

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Beckmann was in the U.S. for only three years before he died in 1950. He painted Falling Man when he moved to New York in 1949:



Note the burning building with billowing smoke.

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Throughout his life, Beckmann kept an unfinished painting of his (which he never finished); an image of the resurrection of the dead:



Peter Selze writes of it:

"The sun is an extinguished black disc and there is little light to brighten the pallid gray of the scene. Elongated figures reminiscent of El Greco emerge from the bursting pavements. Some of them are actual portraits: we recognize the Beckmanns and the Battenbergs on the lower right. Higher up are ghostlike figures who are distorted in their foreshortening as seen from below. These specters in their war bandages and the winding sheets of the dead stalk across the ruins. As the eye follows the linear intertwine across the ever-shifting planes, we move from scene to scene and are again reminded of the frames in a film. But the montage Beckmann has prepared for us seems to look ahead to the total destruction of cities twenty-five years later.

"Beckmann worked on this picture for three years, from 1916 until 1918, when he left it unfinished. He kept it standing upright in his studio in Frankfurt and facing outward, so that he and his visitors constantly saw it. It serves as a major source for the dramatis personae of his later works with their flying, foreshortened figures, stylized gestures, hooded garments. Ambitious in size as well as meaning, preoccupied with death and transfiguration, but enigmatic in iconography, it is the prototype of the triptychs [Beckmann's later triptych pieces]. When Beckmann had to leave his large studio in Frankfurt in 1933, he took it off its stretcher, rolled it up, and carried it to Berlin, Amsterdam, St. Louis, and New York; he would doubtless have liked to be commissioned to complete it."

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In a letter in 1915, Beckmann wrote:

"Last night I had a wonderful apocalyptic dream again. Now probably just about my twentieth.

"The two of us [presumably him and his first wife] were on a wide road, something like a mountain pass, that seemed to run along an endless ridge. We were in hasty flight from something or other. In the infinite vault of the sky, strange raylike white clouds, unbelievably huge in size and dense, compressed in form, could be seen against a sky that glowed metallic white and was illuminated by some unknown light. These white clouds had strange, black cores that spun incredibly far away. From these, the rays emerged that illuminated weirdly, unspeakably remote spaces. These were then broken down more by deep shadows.

"Everything seemed as if it were dissolved in a sensation of "the new."

"My candle is flickering and reminds me to go to bed. The singers have become silent as well. The second day of Pentecost is at an end, and the Holy Spirit once again has been poured out over peaceable lands."

Good Drum Cover

You know that drummer neighbour a few doors down who likes to practice his talent to the edification of the rest of the neighbourhood? We've had a few around here from time to time.

If I could choose that person, I would want this man to drum in the neighbourhood. Just awesome; not just his drumming, but his get-up too.

Beowulf and the Sea Monsters

Medium: B Pencil

The wind blows where it will

The line is often hard to discern - perhaps especially along most of the west coast (for health pathologies do not by any means end at the Californian border) - between an ordered care for bodily health, subsumed in the recognition that all good things are given from above, and a terror-inducing fixation on bodily health as a means by which one is supposed to live forever, subsumed in the delusion that living forever is entirely at the behest of one's efforts: the idolatrous conception of one's own body.

The latter shows itself not so much in the larger things, but the smaller things. People do not consciously think they are going to live forever (though I would not be surprised to find it otherwise among a large number) but the monomania that "health" seems to inspire in them makes it fair to say that they act, and talk, as though they will.

So it is that I fail to be interested in healthy eating; but I am interested in real food. Just as I am not interested in "sustainable living" (a term that annoys me for some reason); but I am interested in living in a way that is more and more radically subordinate to the fact that God sustains all life. As Michael O'Brien has said, to paraphrase: "Our foundations are from above."

I think it's very true that if one were to live forever on this earth, one would not enjoy it. One of the undeniable things about life as a gift from God, a gift which is on loan to be given back as freely as it was given, is that the weight, the prerogative, the ex nihilo contingency of the blessing is out of one's own hands, away from them - and that is awesome freedom.

Someone who is diagnosed with terminal cancer finds the incomprehensible grace to live, even with thanks to God, in the moments of one's life; and someone who lives without any major pains and is in good health does not enjoy or recognize the blessing of the fact, but rather gets into a tizzy about anything and everything, like those on the west coast who a few days after the Fukushima news came out, started freaking about the credible speculation of radiation sailing over the pacific from Japan, and flooded the pharmacies for iodine pills, or whatever it is one takes to strengthen the immune system against radiation. This world is absolutely hilarious.

You have weird doctors writing insane articles on the web about how people need to now grow their gardens strictly in greenhouses because of radiation coming from Japan in the rain. (That's about the, what, second sentence now that has the words, "coming over from Japan"? What about those in Japan? As long as the radiation doesn't come over here, it's all dandy - is that it?)

That is not a flippant dismissal of the danger of radiation sailing over the pacific nor a criticism of peoples' fear of it, per se; but a picture begins to resolve when attempting to weigh things in a larger whole: how fears, no matter how connected to real scenarios, are inherently and wildly disproportionate to our real priorities and place in life, which is why one reads in scripture that it would be better to fly sin than to be afraid of death. Fear is pride under fire: one commits the sin of disproportion.

Even if actual dangerous amounts of radiation started coming over from Japan (there it is again!) - the point is that this world is not only temporal, but highly imperfect, even when it seems at its most perfect: this realization is for the Christian a consolation. Our joy seems to be subsumed in sadness, but it is really the other way around. At some point, one must arrive at the old cliche, "Life is too short", or that well-worn smoker's disclaimer (which actually has a well of wisdom behind it), "Everyone dies of something," and throw up one's hands, and go to confession - and there discover the eternal kernel of joy that is in fact greater than all this world has to offer. What horrid, sopping weight of tragedy must be felt by those who win the lottery.

Some might guffaw at that last sentence. So much for it: eternity may be having a big guffaw at our ideas of the good life. A Salesian priest that I know once spoke in a homily about an old lady in Italy who was dying. Having lived for nearly a century, and now on her deathbed, she said her whole life up to that point was like a bird flitting past her window.

In the scope of eternity, that image is no exaggeration.

Football Throwing in Iowa

Biff paints...

some pop art that I can like.

The Catch - By Tom Wilson





Loop the Loop - By Tom Wilson





His website: Big Pop Fun

Medium 2B Pencil

Because Belfry Bat Asked

Medium: Micron pens

Two Poems

Substance
By Owen Swain


Wisdom in me is weakOh for the folly of God,
the strength in me fails

Hope works in me to prevail
the substance of the most odd,
Spirit’s kiss upon cheek.

My thoughts on wind, like leaves
tiny cyclones of clutter
rattle the sound of breathing.

Mercy, mercy, am I leaving
the truths Wisdom uttered?
My faith on thin wonder cleaves.

If You can save me
from myself…
it would be all I ask, to

eat the host, drink the flask
then with Spirit stealth
turn, turn, myself to Thee.


The Black Tree
By Pavel Chichikov


Closer to God is closer to the cross
But closer to that is much too close
To real blood, real flesh

The cross is high, from the stones to the sky
And yet there is no snow, no ice
On the high cross-pieces

The church of the walls will shatter, fall down
The plaster and pews spill to the wind
But the cross will remain

We all must be scattered, the form must die
All follow others, you and I
Until none of us are left on Earth

But the cross will not be shattered or moved
It is the black tree of suffering, love
And these are immutable

The cross is self-conscious and sentient
It can weep the dark blood of the innocent
And all must be of it

Now on the day when God was killed
We kneel and kiss the death that he willed
And walk away for a while

Two boxes

Two white boxes are sitting here, both full of my Granddad's writings. He was quite prolific, and I can see by an initial glance that he worked at it, marking out meters and corrections in pen on typed pages, retaining every draft of poems, stories and articles, and stapling the pages of progress of each work together with the final draft on top. Rejection slips, and I assume acceptance slips (since I know he was published here and there), and various correspondence seem to be all included.

Opening the lid of the top box I pulled the first stapled bunch of papers out, showing on its first page this poem:

Snowfall in the Prairie Night
By Arthur Stilwell

Steadily out of the silent all-dark,
Huge flakes emerge white into my struck gaze,
They enclose me in slow hover of unceasing legions;
Gone of a sudden the tedious clotted earth,
I am in a ballroom floating with the waltz
Of a powdered cloud of sprites and spirits;
Next I enter the jewelry of the milky way,
Dislodged to this new-found place.
For a visionary tremored halt of time,
Vanish bewilderments and questionings.

Down in adoration falling...

I have been an "apostle" for the Holy Thursday Mass foot washings four times now. In the latter two I was snatched up by a priest who doesn't plan the washings a week beforehand, but goes around the pews before the Thursday Mass and finds men who have come early, and sort of says to them, "You can be one of the apostles". Thus at this parish I have learned to come just as Mass is beginning.

There is nothing wrong with selecting men that way (and I'm quite pliable and don't resent it; but I'm a back-pew sort of person); no more so than finding men a week before. Actually, I think it's better. Sort of like the way Jesus seemed to choose His apostles: hey, come with me.

That way also seems to make the actual feet washing ceremony less extravagant; just something to be done quickly. I remember one large parish in which I was asked to be an "apostle" some weeks beforehand. There was a practice before the Mass, and the actual washing was more extravagant. I even recall there was someone taking pictures of the whole thing. And we "apostles" all received chocolates afterward, which was nice.

But I do not think the washing of the feet should be so emphasized - not to the detriment of Holy Thursday being the Lord's institution of His Eucharist. We have the feast of Corpus Christi, but we also have Holy Thursday. Or maybe that should read: we have the Institution of the Lord's Eucharist, and we also have Corpus Christi.

At that large parish mentioned above, they had exposition of the Blessed Sacrament after that Holy Thursday Mass until midnight, for those wanting to keep vigil with Jesus. It was beautiful, kneeling there on the hard floor, in the dim light. I had had my feet washed.

Jesus said, "If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you."

He did not say, "I have only given you an example." When Jesus washed His disciples' feet, He was washing them of their sins through sacramental absolution, and likely not for the first time.

It's pretty clear what Jesus says in the reading, and the ceremony of the priest washing the feet of the men should speak for itself. We don't need to hear in the homily about what it means to wash our neighbours' feet. By this way, the social-justice, above-the-left-and-the-right lefty liberal would detract from the Institution of the Lord's Eucharist, and from the fact that if it wasn't God Himself who washed those apostles' feet (among them the feet of Judas) imparting to them first and foremost absolution of their sins (to which Judas was not disposed), then all the talk in the world about washing our neighbours' feet, indeed, all action taken to "wash our neighbours' feet", is worthless.

And that's not even to mention what He instituted: the ultimate service, sacramentally pre-manifesting the service of His death on the Cross.

Have people even had their own feet washed first by Jesus?

Medium: B Pencil and possibly others...I really need to write down what pencils I use when in the woods...multiple visits and whatnot...I forget them...

The portion that is left "unfinished" had all these ferns growing...that was the last time I was in this spot...now the area is covered with Osoberry saplings (Indian plum), which is among the first to blossom in late winter, now their leaves filling out...I look forward to eating some.

Medium: B Pencil