So I got myself down there, to see the Wyeth, before it closed, and I don't go see exhibits as a consumerist, to check off I saw this, I saw that, El Greco, Giotto, Da Vinci.  I know what it's like to be an artist.  I know what it costs.  I know the benefits.  And here's his painting of his old man's studio and then his own.  And the Mall, the day after the day after Thanksgiving, is crowded, and yeah, I'm feeling lonely, having barely gotten myself down there, with some trouble, as if against the stream, and literally so with my mountain bike...  The exhibit is crowded.  And I know these paintings.  I've been to the old house in Rockland.  My mom has the book Christina's World.  I commune with the paintings, Wind from the Sea, and see that, yes, as they are saying, there is something abstract to them.  Even with the literal touches, the shaft of sunlight on pieces of straw in the barn, there is something heightened, deepened about the experience of the present moment, for one a freezing of time, but more than that, a deep look into the real realities of things.  There's a shadowy black cat looking up at you from the bedspread of Christina's bed on the ground floor because she couldn't climb the stairs.  Paintings of old rooms in old houses.  In one he's looking down on the Kuerner farm, past dusk, and there's light coming from a window of the farmhouse down below, and he wrote that he senses a shadow of the man's movement, and in that movement the bare spirit of him.  And the one, Spring Fed, you're looking at this trough like basin where the water pours continuously filling, and beyond cows in spring light, and the pasture rises beyond that, and the note says that Wyeth's father, N. C., died not far away from it, killed by a train hitting his car, 1945.  There's others of his toy soldiers, and that legacy of his father's work, Robin Hood, Treasure Island, illustrations....  a kid would have the imagination to position the soldiers just so, and suggest a war going on.

And then I'd had enough, I wanted to stay, but it was time to get going, groceries, ride home, get a bottle of wine and some meat and stuff, vegetables, Whole Foods.  Then home, and home alone, and that's what it felt like, so later I wandered out, called my friend Dan, ended up having a glass of wine upstairs with my neighbor, going to bed.  And the next day I had to drag myself to work, my Monday morning...  But finally by the end of the night, I'm kind of dragged into being convivial, go have a splash with the old Holmgrens who can't get up the stairs, two nice couples at the bar to talk to, taste wine with...  And I even got out at the end of it, after taking off all the seat covers to be laundered, down to 14th Street for a couple glasses of wine (Chianti, 12.5% alcohol) and a little chat, could have pursued a young lady I struck up a conversation with but had to get home...

And now I've began to digest going down to see the Wyeth...  I put my values into action, the demons came, and I faced them, and I'm thankful for that, for the book you gave me, doctor.   It reinforced me.  I've always appreciated Wyeth.

But after finishing my first book, yeah, I fell into a slump, not feeling so good about myself, you know, the usual voices in my head, and maybe not even that proud of it, because it's a bit of a memoir, and you don't want to, you know, invade people's privacy...

"There are literary people who know how to figure that stuff out.  Look at the new memoirs coming out."

Like Cheryl Strayed...

"Yes, exactly, and that's being made into a movie..."

Yeah, Kerouac changed all the names and they made him get signed release forms, something like that.


I remember a paper I wrote, my final one for my best teacher, Benjamin DeMott, and I chose a passage from Islands in the Stream.  The assignment was about cultural studies, about what was going on culturally in such an event, and I kind of missed the whole point of the assignment, pretty much intentionally, because I had a deeper point I wanted to make as if beyond contemporary culture in which I should have analyzed the image of Ernest Hemingway in popular culture.   So there I was, the last class I would ever take there, and I chose to make a study of the artist, what he does.  A man is looking up at his cat up in an avocado tree, writing that down, being fully in the present, the meaning of the cat to him personally...  but still in the present moment, going deep into it, talking to the cat...  And this is Hemingway's portrait of an artist.  The cat is doing cat things.  The man is watching the cat, in so doing being an artist.  And in this act, what the man was doing, I said, was praying.  Maybe I didn't know quite what I meant, praying.  Like, is the old fisherman in fishing praying for the big fish, which then comes, but then he must get it back to shore after catching it and killing it?  Is the prayer answered?  Is that story he wrote, Old Man and the Sea, then a prayer which comes close to the truth when Hemingway the old writer goes back to Spain for this legendary duel between bullfighters, too big a story to drag back, to edit down...

But, yes, that's it.  Prayer.  That's what an artist is doing, being fully in the present moment.  That's why we like coffee shops, because we can be out of the house with just enough stuff going on, this actually happening, a woman walking by wearing Laboutine high heels, sparrows, the proprietress of the tea shop arriving and then talking with her employee out on a bench, two guys at a table over there sketching out a restaurant menu...  That's Hemingway, being alive in the present moment, like here's what it is to be standing on the bridge looking down at fish.

And that's what an artist is doing.  That's what I did in writing a book.  You're getting at deeper reality, the meaning of things beyond the day to day events.    And this is Zen practice.  And you know all those voices can hit you, chimerical monsters coming out of past memories, all the stuff you make up in your own head, as if wanting a story line, but here you are fully in the present free of all that, observing.

Artists can be a certain way, they're generous people.  maybe not always, but Mastroianni, he was a mensch, he loved to stay up late cooking with his girlfriend.  He was generous enough to feel all torn up about Catherine DeNeuve...  Full of humanity, the guy.  And he could play a lowly waiter.  And to take up such a role, that is within the provenance of the artist, to do such a thing, because an artist is often a deeply spiritual person.

What matters about art is not the fuss about style and whether it's good or bad by some new standards, no, what matters about art is whether or not it's true, whether it's accurate...


All these young people want to write, well, that's a good thing, they want to be spiritual.  Nothing wrong with that, even if Fox News would make such people out to be stupid fools.  Be an avatar to them?  Explain what it's about?  Well, I don't know, maybe you let them figure it out, but help them along the way.