Waiting…

Pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve in my lower back, sufficiently badly to land me in the Sealand General ER on Monday night.  Had the benefit of sage counsel from afar to help me through it, but I pulled out the pencil and paper to help fill the time as well, and alone and cold, half-dressed, in a concrete room full of crutches and cast saws, I found her:

A bit sparse perhaps. But all in all, I’d rather be spending the holidays with her than with Raphaela McGrumpyfists down there.

Strange Portents

I have a sketchbook.

You’re supposed to have a sketchbook when you’re an artist;  the story is, you carry it around with you, and you use it to draw what you see around you, or whatever pops into your head, so that later on you can take those fragmentary pieces of art and use them in larger compositions, forge them together into some kind of overwhelming masterpiece.  I think.  It strikes me as the sort of thing that probably got its start back in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance, when “art” meant oil paintings, and you couldn’t just stand there with the brush and knock out The School of Athens, you had to put some thought into the cartoon first.  (Yes, that’s where the word “cartoon” came from.)  I rarely draw in mine.  I suck at life drawing, and usually only resort to it if I’m god-awfully bored or disinterested in participating in my social surroundings.  I fill the few pages I do with geometric symbols instead, or conceptual sketches concerning ideas I’m hashing through, iconographies.

Still, once in a while, something appears while I’m not paying attention that makes me tilt my head sidewise and pay attention again.  And today, on the bus, it was this:

Angels I have drawn aplenty over the years, but I have never seen her like before.  I can only wonder what she portends.

I have a pretty good idea why her face is hidden, though.  And I’m all but positive I had a taste of those fists once upon a time…

Two

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall:  again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

—

I have learned to mould and sculpt in matter,

And to pour the lights of the soul.

On the heights of the mountain summits

Stands the princess,

Her body moulded in marble.

All glory gleams from her sculpted eyes,

Till grace dissolves in fainting.

The sun of Jerusalem shone on her…

Terribly did I burn and yearn for her,

And I long for her still…

And she called in her pride:  “He who sings my song,

His shall I be!…”

Now I shall go, now I shall come, and say:

“I have learned your song, here it is in my mouth:

Your body is fairer than the marble of skies,

O daughter of kings,

And the radiance of your eyes than the radiance of souls;

With prayer and fasting I have discovered your secret-

Be mine!…”

-“I Have Learned to Mould”, I. Z. Rimon (translated by Richard Flantz)