Number 59: Flowers for Aquinas,"The Dumb Ox." (November 12, 2020).
The painting is "for Aquinas" because of its displaying a certain (for me) vivid crudity of which I am currently and joyfully in pursuit. The "Dumb Ox" Aquinas reference comes from G.K. Chesterton's brilliant study, Saint Thomas Aquinas:The "Dumb Ox" (Image Books, 1959). "Saint Thomas was so stolid," writes Chesterton, "that the scholars, in the schools which he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce" (p.21).
Chesterton also observes that "The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote" (p. 23).
Number 55: Lafcadio Hearn (January 12, 2012)
Writer Lafcadio Hearn sailed to Japan from New Orleans in April of 1890, beguiled in advance by a vision of "Fujiyama's white witchery," of a beatific Japan "with its magical trees and luminous atmosphere....and forty millions of the most lovable people in the universe."
--Christopher Benfrey, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics and the Opening of Old Japan (New York: Random House, 2003), p. 222.
Number 54: Dove (January 16, 2011)
This dove--though the drawing in my notebook is only a few inches high--strikes me as somehow immense. But of course as an emblem of peace, a dove needs all the heft it can muster to minister to our queasy and tattered planet.
Number 45: The Red Pitcher (or The Ampersand Wagon), May 9, 2020
being hauled from place to place."
Number 42: Dr. Sax (June 10, 2011)
Dr. Sax is masked--as we all are now--but Dr. Sax, the amiably eerie, ordering presence in Jack Kerouac's 1959 novel, has been masked all through the 1940s, like his fictional and cinematic forerunner, The Shadow. Dr. Sax is the essence of boyhood mysterium: "His laughter," writes Kerouac, "is hidden in the black hoods of the darkness where you can suck him up with air, the glee of the night in kids is a message from the dark...."
Number 27: Insect or Bat, March 17, 2020.
The poem scribbled under the watercolour painting reads:
Insect or bat
upside down,
its weightless chic
the talk of the town,
possible jackhammer,
needle of sickness,
odd in something
that has no thickness.
The creature hangs around
like a locket,
small enough
to put in your pocket
When will we know
who it's right to fear?
the distant foe
or the one right here?
No. 21. Utterance, February 19, 2020
During my idler moments, I have taken to decorating the pages of some of the most relentless books I own--in this case, Marjorie Perloff's Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (1987). For me, the little marginal painting looks like a weary world's emitting a cosmic-sized cry of distress and exhaustion.
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