The feeling of returning home—or what used to be home—is a particular one. It’s almost uncanny. It is a feeling (if you are lucky) of belonging, of being among your people, and one of displacement at the same time since this is no longer your home. Everything is familiar and foreign, especially if you have been away for some time. You wish both that you could stay longer (to extend your escape from everyday life) and leave earlier (to end your exile) at various points during the trip.
There truly is no place like home for the holidays.
—Micah Mattix
Greetings from that amalgam of liminal zones that has for me always defined the Holiday Interregnum: crowded airliners shuffling across icy tarmacs lit up with points of periwinkle like hungry android eagles circling over a field of electric Onderdonk bluebonnets; the precious moments of slow unfolding conversation that can only break through around hour five of the hypnotic drive through corridors of snow-sagged spruce; holiday homes both welcoming and strange with the adornments of ancient rituals and the ghosts of imagined innocence; the adrenaline of many couches and unfamiliar beds and waking up disoriented and free and suddenly very sad in the dark; the fear of time passing and the fear that it will come to a standstill and leave you finally trapped; the whirlwind of beloved faces and the ache that you have never known how to keep them close or love them well enough; the vertigo of a year and a life seen for a time from a distance, as a whole, and the questions that raises and the questions it leaves behind; and of course the pleasures of feasting, pineappled hams and butterburgers and triple-berry pies and the gifts for babes in manger and all around the warm crescendo of lighted candles announcing the advent of a new thing in a tired world and the trustworthy promise of new life. All wrapped up at the end like a bow with the loneliness and relief of returning home and confronting the blank white pregnant page of another year.
Last year around this time I was rather occupied with how I should be dividing my creative efforts. I felt scissored between the demands of painting and the demands of writing and the demands of deciding where and how I should live. Demands all fully self-imposed and charged with the fear, sometimes generative but mostly constrictive, of one more false step in a life of traps and stumbles and sins. I can read now in my words the exhaustion charged through with compensatory manic energy.
Nothing has resolved but I feel to my surprise a little bored by such deliberations now and maybe, as a consequence or a cause of that, a little more liberated from them. I feel myself a little more able to act intuitively or according to whim—making experiments and taking or leaving their fruits, acknowledging the anxious urge to categorize and evaluate but letting it drop from my red-clenched hand into the river of life as it passes below. The lesson, I think, is that I don’t need my creative work to save me. It took me a long while to see that’s what I’ve always expected of it and even longer to start to suspect it can’t bear that weight and doesn’t need to. My job is just to make space for it. A hard enough job, but freeing. I often lack this courage of nonattachment but some wise people have told me that it is like a muscle that gets slowly built up and I think they’re mostly right and so I am trying to act like I believe them until I do.
I have never not felt lost in life but I begin to see a bit more clearly that some of my worst impulses have come not from lostness but from trying too hard to force an end to that state prematurely. Whatever it has to teach me remains somewhere out front in the whiteout futures of blowing snow. Straining to see too far ahead feeds demoralization and confusion and, worse, the dangerous illusion of farsight.
This year I did honor my last year’s resolution to stay put, though I did a bit of traveling about. I wrote about some of that in these pixel pages. Other episodes I kept to myself to drop like one more deposit into the inexhaustible interior vault to later bubble up as images, phrases, or colors according to inscrutable stirrings I only dimly perceive and control not at all. I like leaving home very much less than I once did but find I rely on the shift of headspace it provides more than ever. Much of the year’s work was begun or at least conceived in those unsettling weeks away from my bed and books and garden, in a happy, if tense, dialectic with the routine that grants me the space and calm to execute.
In the painting life there were happy accidents, most notably the serendipitous discovery of a studio class and the introduction to a community of artists here. I have been well served by my tactical alliance with autodidacticism but it is humbling to experience the unforseeable leaps that can come from even minor exposure to a good teacher. I’ve gone at everything on my own for a long time and sometimes it’s the best choice and it’s always a useful skill to have in back pocket but it’s also at some point maladaptive. It is clear I have reached and then exceeded that point. In the coming year I’ll have to have some good thinks about what to do about that.
Links.
I finally got to Middlemarch this year—I would say I wish I had sooner but yet very likely I could not have received it any younger in my life. Sarah Clarkson reflects on Eliot’s vision of marriage.
I’m a sucker for writers on writing. Atwood on writing novels, Saunders on reading and writing fiction, and this year I also read Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird after finding it waiting patiently in a dimly-lit basement bookshop. This last has helped me greatly.
Molly Magai’s portraits of industry and infrastructure.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew on the dangers of intertwining faith and nationalism as on display now from Moscow: “In this landscape of collapsing materialist ideologies, the spiritual is making a strong comeback. However, this return can constitute a danger, if it is not expressed according to approaches integrating the wisdom of religious traditions drawn from the heritage of the great civilizations of the past.”
In all that awakens within us the pure and authentic sentiment of beauty, there, truly, is the presence of God. There is a kind of incarnation of God in the world, of which beauty is the sign. Beauty is the experimental proof that incarnation is possible.
—Simone Weil
Playwright Will Arbery’s response to American polarization: the discipline of deep listening.
A bit out of season now, but—Ross Douthat’s lovely reflection on the ambivalence of the Advent revelation:
In Advent we can be caught between these two anxieties. On one hand, the fear that the world will not be redeemed, that it will just go on sinking into twilight, that winter is coming for us all, the cold and frost and the skull beneath the skin. (“Nothing can save us that is possible,” Auden finishes. “We who must die demand a miracle.”) On the other, the fear that any great change or revelation will be an apocalypse for our comforts and expectations and existing way of life—that it will require too much, cost too much, change too much, unmake too much.
Revisting poet and critic Dana Gioia’s 2013 essay on the state of Catholic arts and letters. The whole book is good.
A year’s work.
In addition to the monthly roundup, I published a smattering of other things with varying degrees of success.
I wrote about what reading Rushdie taught me about literature and life.
And about some important trees.
I made a foray into travel writing with this post on Portugal.
I ejected some poetry, the most successful I think were this, this, and this.
A work of art is a product of the creative capacity of the human being who in questioning visible reality, seeks to discover its deep meaning and to communicate it through the language of forms, colour and sound. Art is able to manifest and make visible the human need to surpass the visible, it expresses the thirst and the quest for the infinite.
Indeed it resembles a door open on to the infinite, on to a beauty and a truth that go beyond the daily routine. And a work of art can open the eyes of the mind and of the heart, impelling us upward.
—Benedict XVI
May the snows and rains of winter generously water your silent roots and may the tumult of the year dissolve into a dark that is not a suffocating dark but the respite of cozy dimness, contemplation, rest, restoration.
As ever,
J