May 26: "Pianissimo," Piano Lessons, "Potato Eaters by van Gogh"

Billy Collins shares some musical knowledge . . .

Pianissimo

by: Billy Collins

At first,

I thought it meant

a really big piano.

Billy Collins knows music and jazz.  I've seen him fiddling around on a piano in videos online.  

Me?  I took piano and organ lessons for almost 14 years.  So, I know my way around music.  My mother started me when I was in middle school because, believe it or not, I was a very compulsive kid, highly distractible, constantly in motion.  My mind wouldn't stop.  She thought it would teach me to sit still and concentrate.  She was right.  

And, many years later, I started earning money as a musician in different churches.  I have my mother (and my wonderfully patient piano teacher) to thank for the extra income.  Just this morning, I played for two different Lutheran worship services.  Last night, I played a Catholic Mass.

In no way am I a gifted musician.  I'm a musician who requires a LOT of practice to sound like I don't practice.  My gift is writing, in particular poetry.  Words have never been struggle for me.  That doesn't mean I don't work constantly on my poems and stories and essays and blogs.  I do.  But it doesn't feel like work.  It feels like a homecoming every time I open my journal.

I'm sure van Gogh felt the same way about oil painting.  I like to think that the only time his restless mind and spirit settled was when he had a brush in his hand and an easel in front of him.  Mozart was probably happiest sitting at a keyboard.  And Emily Dickinson when she was scribbling away at midnight in her room.

Art (any kind) is balm in a world that just doesn't make sense sometimes.

Saint Marty always takes his daily dose of poetry.

Potato Eaters by van Gogh

by: Martin Achatz

I see a hair stuck

in the thick paint

of the canvas, wonder

if it's his eyelash,

whisker from his beard

or paintbrush, or maybe

from his landlady's tabby

prowling for mice

in his shabby room.

June 2: Delicacy and Precision, the Met, Lilacs

Merton on his godfather . . .

Then I would go back to my godfather's place, and we would have lunch in the dining room, sitting at the little table that always seemed to me so small and delicate that I was afraid to move for fear the whole thing would collapse and the pretty French dishes would smash on the floor and scatter the French food on the waxed floorboards.  Everything in that flat was small and delicate.  It harmonized with my godfather and his wife.  Not that he was delicate, but he was a little man who walked quietly and quickly on small feet, or stood at the fireplace with a cigarette between his fingers, neat and precise as a decent doctor ought to be.  And he had something of the pursed lips of medical men--the contraction of the lips that they somehow acquire leaning over wide-open bodies.  

Tom's wife was delicate.  In fact, she looked almost brittle.  She was French, and the daughter of a great Protestant patriarch with a long white beard who dominated French Calvinism from the Rue des Saints-Peres.

Everything in their flat was in proportion to their own stature and delicacy and precision and neatness and wit.  Yet I do not say it looked like a doctor's place--still less like an English doctor's place.  English doctors always seem to go in for very heavy and depressing kinds of furniture.  But Tom was not the kind of specialist that always wears a frock coat and wing collar.  His flat was bright and full of objects I was afraid to break and, on the whole, I was scared to walk too heavily for fear I might suddenly go through the floor.

I know how Merton feels.  My friends would never describe me as "delicate" or "neat."  I tend to be loud and a little irreverent most of the time.  A bull in a china shop, as my mother would say.  But it's not that I can't recognize and appreciate beautiful things.  One of the most memorable days of my life was when I wandered through the Met in New York, running into unexpected Rembrandts and Picassos and a room full of van Goghs.  It was as if I was breathing beauty. 

I've been thinking about that day a lot recently.  In the past week, we've seen humankind at its very worst (that knee on George Floyd's neck, Donald Trump's Bible photo op) and very best (African Americans marching for justice, real police officers joining that march).  It's so easy to give into despair at times like this.  Yet, so much of that day at the Met for me was about encountering the very best of what human beings have brought into the world.  Creations that made me cry because I was in their presence.

Creatures that birthed "Starry Night" and "Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies" can do better.  We don't have to accept institutional racism or a President of the United States who mobilizes the armed forces against American citizens.  We can stand up or kneel down or link arms and say "no" to all that is ugly and wrong in the universe.  In fact, we HAVE to do this, or else we forfeit the one thing that binds us all together:  our humanity.

Let me end by sharing a moment I had today.  When I got home from work, I noticed that the lilacs in my backyard were flowering.  It was a sultry afternoon, and I walked around my house to smell the purple blossoms.  As I neared the bushes, I could hear loud buzzing.  The lilacs were teeming with fat bumblebees who were obviously getting drunk on violet nectar.  I stood there for over 15 minutes, getting drunk with them.

It was better than the Met.  It was a reminder that beauty that still exists in the world, despite pandemics and racism and riots.  It was a van Gogh moment.  Monet moment.  Pollack and O'Keeffe moment.  I shared it with those bees, and it was a miracle.

For that, Saint Marty gives thanks.

A picture I took this afternoon

February 13: Pizzazz, God's Thumbprint, Quincy Troupe, "Untitled 3," Confessions of Saint Marty

Of all known forms of life, only about ten percent are still living today.  All other forms--fantastic plants, ordinary plants, living animals with unimaginably various wings, tails, teeth, brains--are utterly and forever gone.  That is a great many forms that have been created.  Multiplying ten times the number of living forms today yields a profusion that is quite beyond what I consider thinkable.  Why so many forms?  Why not just that one hydrogen atom?  The creator goes off on one wild, specific tangent after another, of millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an abandoned energy sprung from an unfathomable font.  What is going on here?  The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn't, particularly, not even inside the goldfish bowl--but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.  Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap:  and the creator loves pizzazz.

Dillard is thrilled by the wonder of creation, the intricacies of atom, molecule, chloroplast, caterpillar, and cumulus.  She doesn't see the universe as some organized and planned-out event, a divine wedding or birthday party.  No, the universe is a riot of evolutionary leaps, evidence of a Creator in love with creation.  There's God, sitting in front of His canvas, laying on the paint like van Gogh.  Thick swathes and dimples of ocher and umber and canary.

God has been busy all week in the Upper Peninsula.  Looking out the window right now, I see huge swoops and scoops of white, like some frozen seascape.  It's beautiful and humbling at the same time.  Winter storms have a way of reminding me how small and insignificant my contribution to creation is.  This post, for instance, is not going to cure cancer or stop global warming (which exists, despite Republican statements to the contrary).  Perhaps my greatest part in God's chaotic scheme is my kids.  I have taken part in life-creation.  That's God's thumbprint on my life.

I'm watching my son playing in this frozen landscape right now.  He's climbing to the top of a mountain of snow, carrying great white boulders.  He stands there for a moment, and then he tosses them into the air, watches them tumble and roll to the ground.  In some way, I think my son gets God a lot better than I do.  When I see snow, I think of shoveling and muscle ache.  When he sees snow, he thinks of sculpture and play, climbing and falling.  Wonder and awe.

Tonight is all about ballet for me.  Watching my daughter practice and perform.  Another one of my contributions to the universe.  Music and movement and youth and beauty.  And I had a small part in it.  Setting aside her teenage tantrums and stomping, she also gets God a lot better than me, although she is developing a more adult sense of complacency daily.  It's harder and harder to make her joyful.

So, here's Saint Marty's advice to anyone reading this post:  stop and look.  Recognize the work of the Mad Scientist in charge of the universe.  See the beauty and wonder.  My son and daughter do this.  So does Annie Dillard.  And the poet Quincy Troupe.

Untitled 3

by:  Quincy Troupe

birds ski down the day's inscrutable smile
wheeling, banking their diaphanous
sawblading voices, their sword-like sleek feathers
cutting through the day's upper reaches of silence
their convoluted language cacophonous
& raucous, as a lynch mob
in old georgia, the rope-rasping burning of their syllables
hangin their twisting meanings around us & these blooming
dark hours stormy with chaos april brings--
spring leaping suddenly upon us
like a black panther clawing or breath
but is filled with so rare & mysterious
a beauty, it thrills us to death

Confessions of Saint Marty

July 23: Art Students League, Van Gogh, Siv Cedering, "Sunflowers"

Thinking about Robert, Ives would always fondly remember those evenings he spent in 1948, at the Art Students League on West Fifty-seventh Street, where he took classes several nights a week.  After a day freelancing, he'd walk in and sit in the back, his sketchbook, charcoals, and pencils set out before him...

Aside from his wife and kids, Ives' passion is art.  From a very young age, Ives draws.  Cartoons.  Christmas cards.  Portraits.  He is never without his sketchbook.  After Robert's death, Ives finds solace in his drawing.  He volunteers to teach art classes for at-risk youths at a local community center.  He designs the menu for his best friend's new restaurant.  Art gives Ives a livelihood, and art gives Ives an escape at times.

As most of my loyal disciples know, I dabble in art.  Besides my writing journal, I always carry around an art journal, too.  I sketch and doodle.  Of course, if you're a frequent visitor to Saint Marty, you know that I have a weekend comic strip.  At work, I draw cartoons every day for my coworkers on the assignment board.  I enjoy making people laugh.

I am not a tortured artist.  I'm not going to cut off my ear and mail it to a poetry editor.  Rather, I post my drawings to amuse and inspire, hopefully.  Which brings me to my announcement.

At the beginning of August, I will be launching a new cartoon strip titled The Adventures of Stickman.  It's an idea I've been toying with for a few weeks.  It will be a daily comic, Monday through Friday.  I'm not sure if I have the artistic stamina for it, but I'm going to give it a shot.

Saint Marty van Gogh.  Has a nice ring, doesn't it?

Sunflowers

by:  Siv Cedering

Someone
gave me a copy of
Van Gogh's
Sunflowers,
saying:

It's a picture
women can relate to
feeling kin to a man
who could see many suns
each whirling and wild.
There are thousands
of reproductions.

But a woman, she said,
doesn't have to cut off an ear
in order to bleed.

Not bad for a one-eared guy