2018.08.12 Art Is Memory

"Art is memory. It is the excavation of so many memories we have had - of our mothers, our best and worst moments, of glorious experiences we have had with friends or films or music or dance or a lovely afternoon on a sloping, green hill. All of this enters us and, if we are artists, must be shared, handed over to others. This is why it is so important to know what came before you. It is also important to understand that things will follow you, and they may come along and make your work look pedestrian and silly. This is fine; this is progress. We have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  Martha Graham, modern dance artist (1894-1991). Photo portrait by Yousuf Karsh, 1948.

We are in Nantucket, a place of memory—over 50 years of it. Everyone’s memories are different. Everyone’s creative expression is unique. Everything passes into memory. Nothing will ever be the same. Graham calls this progress. I call it the way of the Spirit—creating, re-creating, re-membering, over and over and over again in multiple shapes and sizes.

Isn’t this what the art of Scripture is—re-member, re-create, re-call, re-invite?  Nothing is new and everything is new, generation by generation of interpretation. Know where you came from and hand it all over to others. That’s how it lasts. Graham sank into a major depression after she left ballet. Her wisdom came out of this darkness; she re-created her art and her life in choreography until her death in 1991. 

Is this what Mary of Nazareth did when she found herself pregnant? She raced off alone to see her cousin Elizabeth. What woman would set off on such a difficult and arduous journey in that vulnerable condition? Wasn’t Joseph available? Oh, that’s right he didn't know yet. This unbidden state of affairs had to be frightening. We don't know if Mary was depressed, but the story tells us she felt a familiar spiritual assurance before she fled into the hills.

I remember a time when I thought I was pregnant and wanted to flee like Mary. I was in high school. I was going steady with the man who in time became my first husband. We shivered in fear—together. He would call me every single day to check on my menstrual status. Our code was: “Are there carp in the H’s pool?” Really! No meant I had not gotten my period, and yes that I had. If I answered yes we planned to sneak into the H’s pool, a neighborhood rarity in the 1950s, and take a big fat illegal bloody swim—quietly in the dark.

That’s how crazy we felt at the prospect of our tender young lives being possibly over, or at least so disrupted that we would be rent asunder by parental rage, or worse, divine wrath. My mother caught me sobbing, so I confessed my fear. She sent us to the local GP who told us the facts of life—again. Then he suggested that our fears had caused us to imagine a scientific impossibility. (We hadn’t even had intercourse, just got overheated, and imagined the worst, something like the sin of the biblical Onan who spilled some sperm, but in our case we imagined that such spillage could defy the law of gravity and travel upward and into my womb.) 

The kindly doctor might as well have been God, because his word alone dispelled our fears, and, miraculously, induced my menstrual blood the very next day. Mary of Nazareth discovered that Joseph would marry her, and that her elderly cousin had an irregular, postmenopausal, pregnancy.

My story isn’t the same as Mary’s, but I re-membered hers and re-created it in my own. As Graham wrote:  “Art is memory. Artists have to work with what life presents to us, and we have to work as well as we can while we can.”  That’s what God the Artist does.

Scripture is art, and art is memory, and memory keeps us alive and dancing.

2014.08.31 A Musical On Steroids

If you stop and think about it, what goes on in someone’s imagination is naturally completely chaotic, full of color, and with enough explosive creative energy to be a reprise of Creation itself.

We just saw Finding Neverland at the A.R.T. (American Repertory Theater) in Cambridge. It’s a romp, a kick, a hoot, a virtual riot of dance and song—sheer fun, but not without the painful shadowing of death, loss and grief.  

It is the story of J.M. Barrie (1860-1937), Scottish dramatist and the the creator of Peter Pan This play is about how Barrie got out of what we might call writers’ block with the help of children and a grieving but fun-loving widow who shared Barrie’s determination not to let the “valley of the shadow of death” overwhelm joy, laughter, and mischief.

Barrie looks like a dour Scot who rarely smiles, no? But what went on inside this man’s imagination was electric, delightfully naughty. He made fun of stiff British manners. The play’s writer, James Graham, wanted to capture Barrie's spirit of playfulness and British cheek: “To be cheeky is to charmingly undermine the status quo—something we’re naturally adept at as kids, but chicken out of as adults.”

Peter Pan, named after Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the children in the family Barrie befriends, is particularly bent on being sensible, realistic, and keeping his feet firmly on the ground at all times. It’s how he contains his grief. Barrie is bent on flying. He believes in magic, wishes, fairies, and cheek. It’s how he manages his own grief at the loss of a brother and his beloved. These two ways of managing the pain of the human condition carry the tension of the drama. The duets between the adult Barrie, played by Jeremy Jordan, and Peter, played by Aidan Gemme, elegantly articulate the impasse. Out of the tension pops Peter Pan.

Peter Pan is well known to most all of us, and isn’t it true that most of us at some point in our lives would wish for never-ending youth, existence in the never-never land of never never growing old and dying?  I remember that mid-life clarion call, that assumption even, that I might stay young and vital—if I just ate this, did this and that with my body, had a spiritual practice for my soul, followed the best and most up-to-date health rules. I failed of course, and, in addition, the rules for my wish-prescriptions changed every other day. I’m old now, and happy.

My favorite line in the show was delivered, with wry but not sardonic wit, by one of the actors who, when asked if he believed in fairies, said, without a smirk: “Of course I do, darling, I’m in the theater. I meet fairies every day.”

My only critique of this amazing performance, is the venue. The pace, volume, and drumbeat dynamism, in music and dance, of this production almost overwhelmed the space, stage and hall, in which it was performed. It almost overwhelmed the audience as well. However, the goings-on in the human unconscious mind, including its raging battles with the villain we all have within (Captain Hook) have no nuance. Therefore, the play, especially Act I, perfectly reflects this phenomenon. It was like being inside Vesuvius.

My favorite moment, of course, was when the audience was invited to clap if they believe in fairies. Their clapping will keep Tinker Bell alive. By then most of us were thoroughly in touch with being a child; we clapped and cheered like mad. (Except for the couple next to us who never moved a muscle throughout, although I saw one smile slightly.) Our exuberance succeeded; the fairy lit up her light and lived on to great cheers.

I whispered to myself, "The light of Christ."

Some days I wish we Anglocatholic Episcopalians could raise up such a rumpus for Jesus. Still, it isn’t our style, and God doesn’t want us to fake our praises. But maybe just once?  Someone will remind me now that God is not a magician. But how do we know?

Leaving the theater, I felt delightfully manic—slain in the Spirit, you could say, and a better high than any drug. We walked to the T station, took a bus, and walked home from our stop. The stars twinkled. We all are made of stars. As one bit of lyric went: “Just take the last star on the right and follow it home.” We walked home—not on the sensible sidewalk but down the middle of our one-way street, holding hands.

I thought I would never be able to sleep. We relived some good moments, did not talk about the Church, and slept like babies.

"Always be a little kinder than necessary." J. M. Barrie. 

Finding Neverland will go next to Broadway in NYC where  a venue up to its stamina will take it on. It is in Cambridge till September 28. Don't miss it. 

2012.05.30 Necessary Drunkenness?

One of the scornful accusations leveled at the people in the pentecostal parable in the New Testament, in which hundreds went ecstatic and spoke and understood in many languages, was that these religious nuts were drunk! 

Excuses were quickly made by Peter: “No, no they can’t be drunk. It’s only 9 a.m.!”  When that story is read in church everyone usually laughs— out loud.

I’ve often made excuses about my spiritual experience, even though I’m not the ecstasy type. Anglo/WASP/New England, you know.

Not long ago we went to New York's Museum of Modern Art to see a special exhibit  featuring Willem deKooning’s  paintings of Woman and a major work, Excavation, his largest painting up to 1950. 

We liked Excavation but found it somewhat colorless, drab, and overly gray.  I felt guilty. This man was acclaimed. I remembered liking his work somewhere in my own ancient history, like college. Maybe it was because we were getting old and graying ourselves.

As we moved through the exhibit the paintings took on more color, flamboyance. And more abstraction. Nary a nose or a big eye to let you know there was supposed to be a person—and no outsized nippled breasts either! 

And we loved it!

Later I told an artist friend we’d been a bit disappointed by the work that had been touted as his best. She gave a wry snort and said something like “Well, the colorful stuff was painted when he was drinking more and more.” We laughed.

“Hey,” I told Dick. “The de Kooning stuff we liked the best was his alkie stuff!” 

Of course I know sobriety is a better bet, but there’s a reason why the Bible remembers the grandiose biblical story of collective spiritual ecstasy at Pentecost.  It wasn’t the first appearance of Spirit but this one was a big splash—rushing winds, tongues of fire.  They were speaking about God and God’s mighty deeds so I suppose anything could happen—and it did.

Peter’s attempt to explain it away, but certainly not as morning-after “drunkenness,” was funny.  

 About as funny as our preferring the alcohol-inspired work of a great artist.

I think everyone is an alcoholic at some level and some time, or at least we all go through necessary drunkenness to break into the divine outer, even for just a day or a minute or for the sake of a couple of blow-out paintings.