[A challenge for 2017: write 500 words using as a prompt the the clue from Sunday’s Times crossword puzzle, 3; down]

I’ve always felt a certain affinity for the curmudgeon: strong and free; not susceptible to the fits and starts of the trending or flashy.

Merriam-Webster’s definition seems unnecessarily negative
:  a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man.

I prefer Wiki-How’s approach in “How to Become a Curmudgeon.”
– Become an independent thinker and go against the grain.
– Be a leader, not a follower of trends.
– Focus on the greater good.
– Develop a sense of humor.
– Stay traditional, even when society changes around you.

I’ll always take a curmudgeon over a Pollyanna: wisdom over naivete; engagement over acquiescence.

And yet, perhaps because I am sympathetic to such a disposition if not actually embody it, I fear we’re becoming a society that in our pursuit of strength and efficiency, fears the curmudgeonly.

Consider a couple comments recently written on my Facebook page:

“It appears to me that you will argue with someone and correct them and tell them how wrong they are until they simply stop responding. Why can’t you just accept that other people have opinions that are different than yours instead of trying to wear down everyone who opposes you?”

“For too many years we conservatives have been shut down by the liberals, not allowed to speak without being put down as somehow not as smart. It’s time for us to speak up even if you and other liberals don’t like to hear it.”

There’s a lot of fear and pain in these comments that I acknowledge I have perhaps for too long been too insensitive to, but what strikes me most is that the complaints do not appear to be the quality of my argument, but the simple fact that I’m choosing to argue in the first place.

For in my mind, the pursuit of engagement is not either/or, A or B, conservative or liberal, but both/and; what new truth can we reveal to each other? How can we grow and change? How am I supposed to learn anything if the response to my invitation to struggle is that I’m mean and you’re entitled to your own opinion, which I’m not allowed to challenge?

Which all brings another, and at first blush seemingly un-curmudgeonly, word to mind: agon.

The ancient Greek word for contest or struggle. Think: wrestling, Olympics, youth, virility.

Economists and philosophers use it to describe the clash of opposing forces necessary for progress.

The apostle Paul used it in his letter to the young missionary Timothy in far-away Ephesus exhorting him to continue to “Fight the good fight of the faith” (I Timothy 6:12).

In this context, the curmudgeon, I’d argue, is not the great god gearing up for a mythological battle, but the mere mortal who has been there and done that, been stung by struggle, bore witness to victory, and seen it all play out this way and that, time after time.

She’s now retired from the amphitheater, but still can’t resist the biting bon mot, the seering op-ed, the succor of a good skirmish.

And so while Pollyanna jeers “crabby!,” our curmudgeon thinks to herself “delicious!” as she readies the butter for a satisfying feast.

[Next week’s clue: Place for bows and strings]

Come summer, as temperatures rise and my patience for enduring them wears thin, the cool blues of an impressionist seascape can almost refresh as effectively as a cooling sea breeze itself, if I’m desperate and imaginative enough.

This summer, if you haven’t escaped to some upper New England seaside locale, you too can can wallow in those metonymic blues at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum where more than 40 of the American impressionist Childe Hassam’s greatest oil paintings and watercolors of the coves, inlets, ledges and expansive seascapes of his beloved Appledore Island, will be on view through Nov 16. [There’s also of course the undeniable cool of industrial air conditioning.]

For thirty years, beginning in 1886, Hassam, the earliest American champion of the Impressionist movement, regularly visited Appledore, the largest island of the Isles of Shoals located off the coasts of southern New Hampshire and Maine.
There, year after year, inspired by the Atlantic breeze as well as the garden of poet and local celebrity Celia Thaxter, Hassam created painting after painting, often depicting the same locations, altering the perspective or framing, with the same commitment and imagination as Monet and his haystacks.

For this exhibition, an innovative, interdisciplinary team of art historians, marine scientists, and geologists teamed up to interpret and map Hassam’s island as expressed in his paintings. I assume the team’s findings are useful to their individual scholarly communities. But, as a lay visitor, I’ll confess to not really understanding how all that mapping and naming enhances my understanding of American impressionism or the artful, imaginative experience I expect to have when visiting an exhibition of the same.
In the same way, while 12 contemporary black-and-white photographs of Appledore today by Alexandra de Steiguer offer a different perspective of the island at a different time in a different medium, their relevance to my experience seems secondary. I understand why they’re there, but they’re not why I’m there.

My favorite section of the show was the last, where we see Hassam himself altering his perspective and medium. Late in his career, after a visit to Paris, Hassam returned to Appledore and sought out new locations to paint in watercolor rather than oil. I found these works to be more emotionally adventurous and aesthetically moodier than the earlier more stereotypically impressionist work.

They raise questions for me: what changed? Why? And whether those changes were carried into other parts of his life.
By extension I can’t help ask the follow-up questions: are there locations just adjacent to those I tend to return to that have the potential to radically alter my perspective and experience? Are there unused tools that extend my current skill-set and open up new possibilities and opportunities?
I’ll confess to not really knowing who Childe Hassam was before previewing this show. Nevertheless, I can imagine we’re going to enjoy a number of hot summer days together.

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American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isles of Shoals
through Nov 16, 2016
pem.org

The following was offered as a meditation at Grace Church, Salem’s Celtic Service on Sunday, June 26.

Those of you who know me well, might find it surprising to hear that as a child I was an extremely picky eater.

This is not to say I had allergies, or dietary restrictions or even that I was uncomfortable with extreme textures or flavors.

No, my issues, in hindsight weren’t gustatory at all. They were spiritual. I was afraid and proud.

In all honesty, there were more things I wouldn’t eat than I would. Every sandwich had to be deconstructed into its constituent parts for individual inspection, every menu parsed for offending ingredients. It was virtually impossible to eat at someone else’s home.

We all deal with food everyday. Whether we’re rich or poor, strong or struggling, good or bad, or more likely negotiating the spaces in between, we’re all making choices about what and how we feed ourselves.

And I believe these choices reflect our values, our aspirations, the communities we identify with and by omission the communities we do not.

All our hopes and fears are right there on our dinner tables, seven days a week, 365 days a year.

I don’t want to draw too broad or literal a stroke on this point, but as the circumstances of my life broadened. As I crossed borders – both literal and figurative – made myself vulnerable to the hospitality of strangers, and found myself in the position of offering hospitality to proverbial friends not yet made, my personal preferences ceased to be relevant.

If this thing has been called good by another, and is being offered to me as the same, who am I to reject it and call it unacceptable?

There are any number of extreme meals I could draw upon at this point to illustrate my meaning – goat’s head in Mongolia, elaborate feasts in France, simple suppers in Salem, a sip of water on the way to Santiago.

The meal, instead, I want to talk about is a fairly common one. In fact, it’s the one we’re all about to share together: the great thanksgiving, holy communion, the Lord’s Supper.

For a long time this was a meal I was not comfortable with. I did not understand its appeal. I did not view it as my own. I worried about the propriety of its execution. I feared its effectiveness even as I doubted its authority.

From my seat as disengaged voyeur, these were easy judgments to make. I hardly needed knowledge or experience, only preference and argument.

Once I removed myself from that self-imposed place of isolation and scarcity, though and finally accepted the invitation to come to the table itself and taste and see, my judgments, differentiations, “pickiness” ceased to be relevant.

And what I’ve found is true in this sacred space is also true out there in the “real world.”

When we accept the invitation to get up and go, to try something new, to make a stranger, a neighbor, a friend. Transformation is inevitable. In ourselves, in the world, in the elements that brings us together and sustain us.

Indeed, transformation is fundamentally what food does and how we relate to it; we change it and it changes us.

Through claiming and sometimes simply renaming the fruits of the earth as “food”, we make ourselves vulnerable to creation’s transforming power: chemically, relationally, spiritually.

To close I’d like to read a poem by the 17th century Anglican priest and poet, George Herbert, whose work was influential in my own journey away from pickiness. Officially, the poem’s called “Love III,” but I like to think of it as the reluctant dinner guest.

LOVE bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back,
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning
If I lack’d anything.

‘A guest,’ I answer’d, ‘worthy to be here:’
Love said, ‘You shall be he.’
‘I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,
I cannot look on Thee.’
Love took my hand and smiling did reply,
‘Who made the eyes but I?’

‘Truth, Lord; but I have marr’d them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.’
‘And know you not,’ says Love, ‘Who bore the blame?’
‘My dear, then I will serve.’
‘You must sit down,’ says Love, ‘and taste my meat.’
So I did sit and eat.

There’s a problem I’ve noticed when foodie folks start talking about the future of healthy sustainable eating.

We’re not always using consistent language.

The conversation usually starts with food in the context of a fundamental element as necessary for life as air, water or sex.

But then the discussion quickly moves to policy or health benefits or social identity and the meaning of the word “food” seems shifts too. No longer is it simply an essential and life-giving thing that all of humanity shares, but a highly marketable thing that all of humanity can be sold.

We often call out the big multinationals making big investments in food science for transforming our most popular comfort foods into cost-effective edible chemicals, but I’m noticing the same thing is true for the kale and quinoa set.

Instagramming foodies lobbying for listicle placement to fill their restaurant, get a book deal, or perform an aspirational identity for the whole wide world are using the universal, humane appeal of food for their own financial/social benefit as well.

There’s of course nothing essentially wrong with that, especially in the context of a capitalist society like ours.

Except perhaps when one considers that our society is now starting to confront the consequences of some pretty serious food-related issues: chronic obesity, food insecurity, skyrocketing health costs.

Our relationship to food culture, I believe, both reflects and affects the most significant issues facing our species: income inequality, social solidarity, the very future of the species. . .

What if when we started talking about how to eat healthier we didn’t immediately shift the conversation to name-brand diets or rare so-called super foods? What if when we talked about the pleasures of food we didn’t just talk about extreme taste or expense?

What if food that is good for you was also just simply good and impossible to avoid?

I’d like to think 2016 is the year we start to make some headway in shifting this conversation, and I’d like to think it’s going to have a lot to do with the United Nations naming 2016 the year of the pulse (e.g. lentils, beans, legumes etc.)
http://www.fao.org/pulses-2016/en/

Imagine if all those Instagrammers got inspired to capture the diverse beauty and possibility of lentils in all their varied forms.

And if big multinationals put all their supply channel planning behind making sure thousands of legume varieties are  available to us wherever and however we shop.

The only possible problem I foresee with this transformational moment is that pulses are cheap and therefore useless for social differentiation or profit engineering.

That’s not going to stop me from eating as many meals of beautifully nutritious and delicious pulses as high-priced tasting menus or value-priced convenience meals.

Maybe you’ll join me?

Culture

: the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time

For many years now, around kitchen tables and cocktail tables, I’ve been hearing about the Dutch in Asia and how and what to present to modern audiences of the far-reaching influence of that luxurious golden age.

Luxury

: something that is helpful or welcome and that is not usually or always available

I even went to Amsterdam over the holidays in part to see installed at the Dutch national museum the nearly 200 superlative works of art – paintings, ceramics, silver, lacquerware, furniture, jewelry and books – eventually collected in “Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age” that reveal the transformative impact of Asian luxuries on Dutch art and life in the 17th century.

Golden

: very happy and successful

Founded less than a year apart – in 1798 and 1799 – the Rijksmuseum and the Peabody Essex Museum are caretakers of superlative collections inextricably linked to early international trade. They also now serve themselves as personal ports for my own engagement with our wide and fascinating world. 

Age

: the time of life when a person does something or becomes legally able to do something

Ostensibly, the objects collected in this exhibition show us how the dutch perceived and valued imported luxuries from Asia, the lengths to which they would go to acquire them, and how they incorporated them into their lives, but they also challenge all of us to imagine how far into the Other we can journey and to what extent we might allow the Other to change our daily lives.

It’s interesting to think about our own personal golden ages. To what ends we might go to cultivate them, and what affects those efforts might have on ourselves and others.

+++

“Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age”
on vies at PEM February 27 – June 5
pem.org

The subject of the email read “immersive experience in an historic house” and went on in the body to quote “‘this ‘aesthetically visceral, intellectually challenging and emotionally unafraid original work’ sounds right up your alley.”

Indeed, over the past years I’ve had opportunity to experience a number of these immersive performances, where the action takes place all around, often unexpectedly, in non-traditional performance spaces and involves/requires a certain level of audience participation.

Researching the background of “All at Once upon a Time” the new work in question to be staged in the Peabody Essex Museum’s historic Gardner-Pingree House, I learned that some of these experiences even shared a pedigree, tracing their origins to New York based stage director Giselle Ty.

Upon reflection, I’ve come to think that much of the appeal of these happenings [to appropriate the newly voguish 60s euphemism] lies in the anticipation of the unknown. What will it be like to experience a dramatic performance in a domestic space? What will be required of me?

Once you’ve been there and done that though, then, well, there’s not a great deal of mystery to anticipate, except perhaps the particular narrative into which we’ll be thrust.

I happen to always enjoy time spent in new and interesting domestic spaces, and all the better if those spaces are grand and/or historic. After all, a home is our first and most frequent stage, the place where we first learn to perform the roles of family, gender and social hierarchy. Imagining the rich and varied propagation and subversion of those performances over time in a space is a beloved personal past-time.

So, I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never before been to the Gardner-Pingree House, [Yes, I know there are regular guided tours] but was delighted to have an immersive happening as excuse to do so.

I had no idea the narrative I was committing my evening to, but after affirming some house rules (e.g. “I promise not to stroke or steal other human beings, but I understand that gently nudging and physical contact might be part of the experience.”) and depositing my mobile in a PEM-branded muslin bag,  I eagerly and knowingly followed our expectedly mute guide’s wan directing hand to a seat on the floor of the grand house’s front parlor, transformed for our theatrical purposes by moody lighting and an impressionistic forest of trees constructed of raw lumber.

A school girl runs in and begins telling us in dense and scholarly language about the Northwest Coast, forests, and totems [reminding me that I really need to finish writing up those notes from PEM’s new contemporary native fashion show].

Before I have a chance to create context for this uncontextualized avalanche of images and multi-syllabics [post-performance research suggests the text comes from photographer William Reid’s 1968 exploration of decaying totems in British Columbia, “Out of the Silence”], that familiar wan hand guides me mid-soliloquy to an adjoining room where I’m eventually joined by four more of our party of 15.  

This room too has been unrecognizably transformed. Papers are everywhere: clothes-pinned to strings strung across the ceiling, scattered across the expansive table. Some are handwritten; some have been typed on a typewriter; some printed in familiar fonts. Some are in English, others are not. A handwritten card invites us to find a text that speaks to us, copy it, and share it with someone later. We’re here for awhile — no words are spoken though lots of words are read and written, and I struggle to make connections among them, hardly a discrete image let alone narrative of any complexity, so much stimulation! so hard to commit to focusing — until eventually our familiar guide returns with another note inviting us to meet her upstairs.

Totally and blindly committed to the guidance of our mysterious leader, we follow to an upstairs bedroom where another note placed upon a pile of strips of toile invites us to “unravel me,” revealing a ballerina in fetal position who begins to come alive with a violinist’s playing. Taking the ends of organza(?) tied to her wrists, we each are given the power/influence to manipulate her actions. A quick shake or graceful swing is reflected in the kick of a leg or wave of an arm. That sense of “control” or even co-creation is a misdirection though as it must be acknowledged our ballerina chooses and interprets each action at her will regardless of our action or desire.  

Eventually the violin player stops playing and therefore the dancer can no longer dance, and it’s time for us to be guided into another room.

Here we find proper seats, and a portable stage curtain, and a man running a soundboard. It’s almost like a traditional performance space, except of course we’re in the upstairs room of an historic house. We also discover that our presumed singular guide comes in multiples. She’s a twin! And then the curtain moves revealing more of our original group twinning us on the other side of the room. Now newly rejoined in an approximation of what we once we were, we together watch our guides dress as monkey and bear and perform an interpretive dance with bananas to a ragtime recording, the significance of which is honestly wholly lost on me. Are these archetypes? stereotypes? simply an absurdity? Definitely racial overtones. . .

The rest of the groups that splintered from our formative forest in the front room, rejoin us in this newly appropriated theatre. The ballerina and violinst are there. A lute player too. And others I don’t recognize. There’s a dance party! (I worry about the bouncing of the historic floor) and balloons!

And then a return to the room in the back of the house where we started for hot cider and snacks and conversation.

How different all of our experiences were! And so many questions about what we just experienced, where it came from and what it meant.

I suspect it’s this post-performance conversation that is intended to be the substance of “All at Once Upon a Time…(or Variations on the Theme of Disappearing)”. A time for us to make meaning from the rich material that’s been collected for us and presented to us.

Perhaps not much different the meaning-making that’s been being performed in the Gardner-Pingree’s dining room and parlor for centuries?

My calendar reminder read, “Wear Clean Socks.”

I don’t remember typing those words, though I do remember agreeing to attend at the same time an immersive dance performance at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art,  “Thank You for Coming: Attendance.” Assuming these events must be one in the same, I went ahead and made sure my feet were shod with store-new crimson stockings, just in case.

“Thank You for Coming” is a series of new works by the choreographer Faye Driscoll, heralded by the New York Times as a “startlingly original talent,” which explores the question: “How do we perceive ourselves as participants in the co-creation of our reality?”

Performance notes read:

“Performed in the round, Attendance [the first in the Driscoll’s three part series] opens with a tangle of five dancers communally bound by their reliance on one another.  [. . .] Taking place on stage with a limited-capacity audience, the work also invites viewers into the “weird” and wonderful universe of this “postmillenium, postmodern wild woman” (critic Deborah Jowitt), as they become participants by wearing or holding the offbeat objects that also serve as the dancers’ props. Throughout the performance, the joyful intimacy mounting on stage envelops the audience as well, creating a beautiful shared identity.”

Interesting. . .

Indeed, upon entering the theatre we’re asked to prepare ourselves for a new kind of experience.

“Please remove your shoes and jackets before going on stage and sit as close to the platform as you can.”

Thus liberated of our constraining affectations of humanity (or cunningly stripped of our protective armor?) 120 of us sit on the stage, some on risers, some on the floor, circling a bare raised platform, the unused seats of the audience before or behind us, and wait, school assembly style, wondering who and what and how and why and when. . .

The performers, recognizable not so much by their bare feet or comfortable street wear but their fluid movement and toned muscles, circle and observe.  I suspect they go unnoticed by most, until they file into a row of empty seats in the darkened audience space and sing to us about the fire exits.

Attention then moves to that central platform, where the performers construct with their bodies complex, grotesque, beautiful, unexpected, interconnected forms. Twisting and straining from one structure to the next, feet serve as platforms and handholds and crowns; mouths are by turns sensual and violent.

My seatmate says it reminds her of the immigration crisis raging across Europe: connections formed, strained, broken, and reformed with force, regret, fear and ecstasy.

And just like the arbitrary national borders of Europe, the arbitrary borders of the performance space are no match for the writhing life within. Eventually the performers, connected in a human rope hand to foot, roll off that dedicated performance space and literally into our laps. Even my new clean red socks become part of that living form, as a performer reaches to grab my foot, pulling me in with his outward looking motion.

And while I and others are pulled in, and the boundaries of us and them and this and that are being transgressed, the now unnecessary platform as performance space is disassembled from underneath, revealing benches, on which various portions of the audience are encouraged to rearrange themselves, jockeying for position, heightened only by the distribution of props (plastic flowers, golden shower caps, black lace). By the time I’m contemplating what heroic act the mysterious, no doubt phallic?, wooden mace I’ve been handed will  indict me to, I realize the performers have changed clothes before our eyes are now gasping for breath. Dying little deaths their once insatiable virility never suggested possible.

But then there’s more.

The strains of a guitar resurrect a new act. The “stroboscopic” stepping of the dancers suggest a club? They greet each other with joy, intrigue, disgust and fear. And what are the words the guitarist/sound technician is singing? Adam, Puna, Heather, Jon a tha aa n. Chris. Chris. Chris. Our names! One hundred and twenty of them forming the lyrics of the song, animating and enlivening not just the performative action at the center, but our own reaction to its substance as we are it.

Then a new act making use of those pre-distributed props. There’s chaos and confusion. Rushing and grabbing. Are those veils and formal formations of humanity representations of ritual? “I need the flute” a performer asks my section of the audience. A few beats until I realize she’s asking for my mis-identified wooden phallus. Whew! It’s only a flute.

Ropes are threaded from this side to that, separating the golden shower caps from the plastic flowers. Dividing space, creating boundaries and structure where once there was only freedom and connection.

Then darkness as action moves to the ground and the performers act individually from the margins of the space, straining towards the middle their clothing falling way, their stockings stretched from here to over her head.

A nucleus forms. There’s a lightening of a kind. That intersections of ropes once used to divide begin to rise from the floor, creating a canopy under which the dancers begin circling in a simplified contra style. In and out and round about, with each opening of the circle an unarticulated invitation to join, until, of course, a hand is extended in an explicit invitation, and members of the audience join one by one and then more and more, until, is it true?, the performers have removed themselves completely, standing to the side, as those who started the night thinking themselves members of the audience inhabit and perform the central creative act.

I think I’m going to start wearing clean red socks everyday.

Thank You for Coming: Attendance
Oct 9-10
8 pm
icaboston.org

Reluctantly, I made my way to the press opening for Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum.

I had grown skeptical of the hype that brought an estimated 15,000 gawkers to a preview of Theo’s kinetic “dream machines” at Crane’s Beach and the shallow awe that so often accompanies adjacency to unexpected functionality (i.e. “It Moves!” a la Frankensein’s “It’s Alive!”).  

Assuming I was girding myself for the apotheosis of the equivalent of an engineering dissertation by a grand old institution desperate for adjacency to techie cool, I sated my intellectual curiosity in advance with the recently arrived fall issue of Cowley Magazine, dedicated to the theme of Creation.

And so it was, that as I took my first sips of press-sating wine in the Asian Garden I was thinking of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”), and pondering anew what it means to be created, to create, and for creation and creator to be in relationship with each other.

This would be the first time I’d hear the artist speak for himself. The first time I’d see the beests move. The first time to see the creator in relationship with his creation.

And lo it came to be that it was good!

If Hopkins’ world is charged with the grandeur of God, Jansen’s is charged with compressed air held in “lungs” of Belgian sparkling “SPA” water bottles, also imagination, a lot of math, and unapologetic hubris.

Jansen’s goal is nothing short of creating an entirely new species, and the vocabulary he uses to describe his creations reinforces this premise. The beests on display at PEM are “fossils,” extinct specimens from the beest’s long evolution which is chronicled in a family tree occupying an entire wall of the gallery.

Over time the beests have developed various kinds of feet, even “sweat glands” (a means of lubricating joints while in motion), but most striking of all, they’re now procreating! as Jansen has made available online their mathematical “DNA” and encouraged engineering students the world over to tinker, adapt, and 3-d print.

The natural world is more than the sum of its parts and so too the Strandbeests are more than PVC piping and zip ties. Though the beests move without will or even necessarily power of their own, they strut and swagger with such personality one can’t help but smile in that way a toddler learning to walk reminds us of the joy of discovering where our legs might take us.

The Franciscan monastic Richard Rohr has written regarding creative output: “We don’t need a reason for art. Beauty is for beauty’s sake. Art and music are not simply objects, but an experience of opening to mystical awareness. “

Indeed, Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests are more than simply beautiful objects. They remind us of the power of the creative impulse, the joy of creation, and the complexity of life.

But can their creator ever give them life?
Or is their power, like Frankenstein’s, to remind us of what it means to be created to create.

+++

Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen
On view at PEM through January 3, 2016
Exhibition travels to Chicago and San Francisco
pem.org/sites/strandbeest

It’s rare, wandering Salem’s world-class Peabody Essex Museum, for me to have a feeling of familiarity. Indeed, becoming familiar with the far away and/or long-ago is part of the reason I wander those halls in the first place.

So, it was especially strange to encounter references to my hometown in the labels for “American Epics: Thomas Hart Benton and Hollywood,” the first major exhibition of the Kansas City artist in 25 years.

In my childhood, I had known Benton as an epic muralist, prominent in downtown banks and department stores, but his World War II propaganda, representations of the American West, and commercial work for Hollywood were all new to me.

At the press opening, when I’m usually thinking about what intellectual connections I can create to make the faraway and/or long ago nearer and clearer, I was drawn instead to the social connections that might be possible, bringing together in the faraway, communities once known to me by their nearness.

I also have a special affinity for extending invitations, seeing in that vulnerable act of generosity the seed of creation, and in the acceptance of said invitation the assumption of the risk imperative to its possibility.

So, after the press opening, instead of typing up notes and thinking deep thoughts in anticipation of writing a “review,” I took steps towards planning an “event:” Benton and Missourians in Salem.

Myth-making is a central theme of the show, with multiple explorations of stories we create for ourselves about where we come from and where we’re going. Epics are, after all, about journeys, expanding one’s home turf, interacting with the other. There’s risk, and possibility, and attempts to make sense of difference. 

I see this active myth-making most acutely in the propaganda work, where caricatures of Japanese and African Americans eschew any beauty or humanity, focusing instead on dangerous threats of an unknown outside.

When confronted with the otherness of the landscape of the American West, however, Benton seems to exaggerate the beauty of its foreignness; opportunity outweighing threat.

And Hollywood? Other than Delphi and its oracle, has there been a more successful mythmaker in the history humankind?

“Benton developed a modern cinematic painting style to communicate epic narratives as memorably as the movies of his day,” says Austen Barron Bailly, PEM’s George Putnam Curator of American Art. “He wanted to capture the feel of motion pictures on canvas: the illusion of three-dimensional space, rhythmic motion and the glow of projected light.”

I too had grand dreams for my “event,” harnessing the movement of people across a land, capturing affinities of nearness in the land of the other.

And yet despite extending far-reaching invitations, I fear, in the end, fear won. We were a mere handful of classmates and cousins, risking little more than sharing a morning filled with beauty and opportunity.

Perhaps when “American Epics” opens at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City on October 10 some of you based there will extend an invitation to an-other to explore a beautiful epic?

As frustrating as it seems, especially in the moment, life must have challenge, especially if you, like me, like to tell stories about it.

Most often we hear about the challenge of the writer’s block, the fear of failing to improve with our primitive markings the purity of the blank page (cave wall), or committing to a story that might not turn out to be ideally suited to achieving our dreams.

I haven’t written anything for a long time, though I don’t think the reasons for this are the above. Instead, the trouble’s been, I’ve been so busy accumulating stories I just haven’t had a chance to write any of them down!

The backlog goes back at least to the humanistic seder I hosted on Good Friday. It includes dinner parties featuring peking duck, Dutch poffertjes and a banquet inspired by a soundtrack of pre-Khmer Cambodian rock and roll. I attended an extraordinary world premier by the classical music world’s current wunderkind, Matt Aucoin, and made a cross country culinary pilgrimage to dine at the trailblazing Chez Panisse. I was inducted into the Fellowship of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist and spent a weekend in rural Vermont leaving cocktail parties in chicken coops in my wake.

Indeed, I’m writing this paragraph from a shady Montreal garden where an immigrant DJ is ensuring my Fourth of July has more French EDM than yours. Shouldn’t I engage someone in conversation? Make a story, rather than privately muse on the challenges of storytelling?

It’s a long-held writer’s creed, that a story doesn’t count if you don’t write it down. Eat everything you kill. By this estimation the past several months have been pretty indulgent? Self-serving? Profligate?

By choosing not to write for whatever reasons, I am in some sense diminishing these experiences value.

And that’s not because I’m failing to publish them, and personally benefit from dozens of you being convinced of my very unique life.  The problem is I’m not honoring these stories nee experiences, failing to reflect upon and draw connections among people and happenings, imbued with the potential of radical change.

In this way, the accumulation of stories for the purpose of personal entertainment is akin to accumulating hats, or magic tricks, or rabbits: a wasteful illusion.

A story, on the contrary, should not be a mere gimmick but an innately honorable repository of meaning and a vehicle for revelation and revolution.

And so, on this day celebrating a revelation of independence, I choose to break from the chase and do the work.

Vive la revolution!