"Seeing in the Dark"..........an Exploration of new Paintings

"Persephone" 2023

 

"Deeply I go down into myself.  

My God is Dark, and like a webbing 

made of a hundred roots that drink in Silence."

........... Rainier Maria Rilke

I found the above quote by Rilke while navigating through my files, and it has become a poem that inhabits my imagination these days.  Roots, the generative Dark,  the Webbing to all that lies under the appearances of things, below surfaces, the pentimentoes of life, the unseen union that we must learn to see "In the Dark"...........

I am trying to return to my first love, Painting.  With AI,  I guess I and my colleagues are truly obsolete - who could compete with what that Monster leering at us on the horizon can do?  (I guess that shows that I am very concerned about what has so thoughtlessly and blithely been unleased on humanity).  

Regardless,  I have always found painting the most difficult of arts, and the most extraordinary dance of form, light and shadow, and the joy of color. To see those colors emerge from a tube, become alive on a canvas............ It's not easy for me to paint,  I guess I always feel intimidated until I begin, and then I just become emersed in the making.  

Strangely, although it is just past the Solstice and High Summer now, I  seem to have an interest in the dark, in noir, in buried and invisible Roots.  I guess I can thank Rilke for that, and before me sit a collection of intimidating, blank, very black canvases on which to create worlds.  The painting above is the first so far.

But I see that this theme has haunted me before..............

"Seeing in the Dark"  2009

"Solitude" (from The Rainbow Bridge Oracle) 

'Hecate" 1997

"Past Desire, Hope or Love, I Rest in You a Seed" (1993)

"Rooted" - Rainier Maria Rilke

If we surrendered

to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we must begin again
to learn from the things of World,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left.

This is what they teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

"How Surely Gravity's Law" by Rainer Maria Rilke, 
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

A River Runs Through Us

"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "

Norman MacLean, "A River Runs Through It"

These years I support myself with a successful AIRBNB/B and B.  I am now busy in ways I never imagined I would be.   "Home" used to be a van with a travelling cat, and in the complexity of my life now there isn't so much time to "call for vision" as I once had...........and when they do come, it too often seems  I have to put them at the bottom of the laundry list. 

I may have finally reached an age where I don't  inquire any longer about "the purpose of my life".  I reflect that if I have a "purpose"  at all, it is the sometimes  gathering and transmission of vision, the effort to communicate it.  I do feel that this is the sacred job of artists, although many would argue against that rather mystical idea.   We are all many layered, the world speaks to us in a multitude of ways,  and our depths run dark  and invisible most of the time.  And  a "river runs through us".  

I have a good friend who recently left me  a long message on my answering machine.  Almost 65, she wondered if we came into the world with a destiny, and if so, she is going through that threshold where she wonders if she might have "missed"  hers, not done whatever it was she was supposed to do, leaving behind her a wake of dissatisfaction.  To me she is an extraordinary, beautiful, accomplished woman who has led an adventurous and creative life.    How can I respond?  Why does it seem we no longer live in a world where such a profound conversation can be had over a cafe table, and a bottle of wine, deep into the night, instead of squeezed into 2 minute answering machines as we each rush, rush, rush through our ever complicated and busy lives?  I think I finally understand the Chinese curse:  "May you live in interesting times."    Sometimes I think distraction and busyness is the curse of  "today's world" and I determine to change that as I now fully push the  borders of old age.  

"Dreams.  They are never where you expect them to be."  

                                                                                                              ........From "Shirley Valentine" (1989)


Thinking about that conversation, I wanted to say that I no longer believe in "destiny".  We Americans are so materialistic, and grandiose, that the idea has come to mean some "great thing" -  so  if you aren't having a retrospective at the Met, or running an orphanage in Uganda, or in the Fortune 500, or married to a movie star, people somehow feel they've "failed", discounting all the glorious, beautiful, soul deepening experiences they've had. 

Perhaps a real soul  "Destiny" was to learn to love someone very  hard to love, a difficult child perhaps, or to learn to have patience with yourself.  Perhaps you met your Soul Mate, and your destiny was not to be together, but to experience the gift of loss.  Perhaps suffering was even one's destiny, so that empathy and compassion for others was deepened, the template of a healer.   Perhaps "destiny" is to do something difficult, and fail, never knowing how many lives you touched and enriched in the process, and not knowing until much later how you were  evolved by it.  Perhaps it's to connect with others through the mesh and warp and woof of synchronicity, never knowing consciously what gifts you've given each other, what waves and ripples of creative force you've sent out into the world.  We're dreamers and dreamt, and ultimately "a river runs through us", unfathomable, ineffable, splendid.

The quote at the top of the post  has always been so beautiful to me that I wanted to meditate on it for a moment, take a look into the depths of these waters.  It is from the novel that became also a movie, "A River Runs Through It", and the quote occurs in the end of the movie, as the lead character, now an old man, is fly fishing alone in a beloved river.  Perhaps Norman Maclean is speaking about what  storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes * called "Rio Abajo Rio, the river beneath the river of the world". 

Perhaps "El Rio" is also what Jung called the Collective Unconscious, I don't know. But Estes' speaks of the great River of Story, the universal waters flowing beneath the surfaces of all things, an image that moves me to imagine the deep underground rivers of the planet, and of our lives.

In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves *** she writes,

"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them."*

"Endarkenment", Lauren Raine, 2009

 Why must we evaluate the value of our lives, our "destinies",  in such material terms of "accomplishment" and "achievement"?  I have tortured myself mightily with those magic words, rushing, rushing, rushing to do the "great thing", and meanwhile, missing so many tender and miraculous moments.  What a tyranny! 

Even in terms of  "enlightenment",:  as if there is some ultimate and permanent state of spiritual "light" and  "accomplishment" we are supposed to reach.  And if we don't, we are failures?   Why not think also of what has been our deepening   "endarkenment", the field of creative unknowing we have drawn our lives from?  Whether tapping, if only briefly, the wellsprings of El Rio in grief, creativity, meditation, or through the sudden psychic upwelling that can happen when the so-called ego cracks and splinters, it is always a blessing when the waters are revealed, for they remind us of the greater life. 

In her book Meditation Secrets for Women, Camille Maurine writes,  

  “The realm of the soul is not light and airy, but more like mud: messy, wet, and fertile. Soul processes go on down there with the moss and worms, down there with the decaying leaves, down there where death turns into life. Deepening into soul requires the courage to go underground, to stretch our roots into the dark, to writhe and curl and meander through rick, moist soil. In this darkness we find wisdom, not through the glaring beam of will, but by following a wild, blind yet unfailing instinct that senses the essence in things, that finds nourishment to suck back into growth.” (p. 211)

If the river of story has a voice, it's a voice that contains all voices, human and planetary, and the song it sings may be Om, may be "Nameste", I am Thou.  What we ultimately bring to that song cannot be measured or valued in any terms we might try to wrap words around, try to put into some kind of list, some kind of materialistic order, heirarchy, or, heavens forbid, monetary  value.  If there is anything such as a "destiny", it might be found,  as Estes (who is a Jungian psychologist) believed,  within our instinctual participation in the Great Web of being, and in so doing, the ways in which each of us can open a channel,  a well spring, for others.

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts."

Perhaps the individuality of each one of us, our uniqueness, is a gift we can only experience in the embodied here and now, a great adventure that occurs like a bubble on the surface of the River, shimmering in the sun, then merged again with source,  the  River beneath the River of the World.

 "The deep parts of my life pour onward, as if the river shores were  opening out.

   It seems as if things are more like me now,  that I can see farther into paintings.

   I feel closer to what language can't reach." 

             Rainier Maria Rilke

Untitled, Lauren Raine, 1972

* (p.30, below)
** (p.96, below)

*** Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Hardcover, 560 pages, Random House Publishing Group, 1992

A Rumi and Rilke Moment........

Georgia at White Sands (2015)

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors,
and keeps on walking,
because of a church
that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. 

And another man,
who remains inside his own house,
dies there,

inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children
have to go far out into the world
toward that same church,
which he forgot.

Rainer Maria Rilke  (translated by Robert Bly)

Spring at White Sands (2015)

When grapes turn
to wine, they long for our ability to change.

When stars reel
around the North Pole,
they are longing for our growing consciousness.

Wine got drunk with us,
not the other way.
The body developed out of us, not we from it.

We are bees, and our body
is a honeycomb.
We made
the body, cell by cell, we made it.

Rumi (Translated by Robert Bly)

Winter Solstice 2015

luminaria on Serpent Mound

You, Darkness

You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything –
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! –
powers and people –

and it is possible 
a great presence is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.

Rainer Maria Rilke

December Moon

Before going to bed
After a fall of snow
I look out on the field
Shining there in the moonlight
So calm, untouched and white
Snow silence fills my head
After I leave the window.

Hours later near dawn
When I look down again
The whole landscape has changed
The perfect surface gone
Criss-crossed and written on
Where the wild creatures ranged
While the moon rose and shone.

Why did my dog not bark?
Why did I hear no sound
There on the snow-locked ground
In the tumultuous dark?

How much can come, how much can go
When the December moon is bright,
What worlds of play we'll never know
Sleeping away the cold white night
After a fall of snow.

May Sarton

Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
      of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
      one ecosystem
      in diversity
      under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

Gary Snyder

Pilgrims.........

My pilgrimages are among my most treasured times,  those times and places and synchronicities and numinous "conversations" that have occurred in the liminal time and place of intentional pilgrimage.** Truth be told, we are all Pilgrims.

PILGRIM

I bow to the lark
and its tiny lifted silhouette
fluttering  before infinity.

I promise myself
to the mountain
and to the foundation
from which my future comes.
I make my vow to the stream
flowing beneath,
and to the water falling
toward all thirst, and

I pledge myself
to the sea
to which it goes
and to the mercy
of my disappearance

and though I may be
left alone or abandoned by
the unyielding present

or orphaned in some far
unspoken place, I will speak
with a voice of loyalty

and faith
to the far shore
where everything
turns to arrival

- excerpt from "Pilgrim" by David Whyte

 Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors,
and keeps on walking,
because of a church

that stands
somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him
as if he were dead.

And another man,
who remains inside his own house,
stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children
have to go far out into the world
toward that same church,
which he forgot.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

Shrine at The White Spring, Glastonbury

The Chalice Well, Glastonbury

**In his seventh volume of poetry, David Whyte looks at the great questions of human life through the eyes of the pilgrim: someone passing through relatively quickly, someone dependent on friendship, hospitality and help from friends and strangers alike, someone for whom the nature of the destination changes step by step as it approaches, and someone who is subject to the vagaries of wind and weather along the way.

Rumi and Rilke, a Moment

 When grapes turn to wine, they long for our ability to change.

When stars reel
around the North Pole,
they are longing for our growing consciousness.

Wine got drunk with us,
not the other way.
The body developed out of us, not we from it.

We are bees, and our body
is a honeycomb.
We made
the body, cell by cell, we made it.

Rumi (Translated by Robert Bly)

 

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors,
and keeps on walking,
because of a church
that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man,
who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children
have to go far out into the world
toward that same church,
which he forgot.

Rainer Maria Rilke  (translated by Robert Bly)

Rilke

 

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems as if things are more like me now,        

that I can see farther into paintings,
I feel closer to what language can't reach.

Rainer Maria Rilke