Mystery Writer
Mystery surrounds us, we live now in an eternal mystery, mystery here is endless, mystery is our meat and drink, the air we breathe, the ether we swim in – and yet it’s so easy to forget this simple fact, so terribly, horribly easy to forget it and become bored with it all. And perhaps that is the greatest sin of all.
REAL ART is not about scoring points with your teacher, setting yourself up with a fancy career, making lots of money, building yourself a comfy nest egg in academia with all your like-minded friends, nor even (predominantly) about getting yourself legitimately famous, now or later.
It’s about connecting, or reconnecting, ourselves with THE MYSTERY.
When we walk in mystery, we’re never bored. James Joyce’s epiphanies, William Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” the revelations in The Book of Revelations are all about reminding us that the world is not about “getting and spending,” as Wordsworth put it.
They asked him to tell them the ultimate truth. Buddha showed up with a single flower, said nothing, and sat there holding it out toward them for a long, long time – before he vanished in front of their eyes.
Artist of the Western Plains
“I can conceive that this is the essence, of which all other poetry is the dilution.”
– Virginia Woolf
Alone she was
Most of the time,
Hiking and sketching
With many-colored
Pencils and pens
On empty
Western deserts
And plains, under cold
Battlefield hillsides,
Searching for
Something
Spiritual.
Maybe a single, bent
Evergreen tree, three feet
Tall
And dark, on the ridge
Top.
Fully living.
Fully alive!
All alone. All by
Itself, but also with
Its friends:
The ground,
The wind,
The elk
Shadows in
The distance.
Dale Williams Barrigar, MFA, PhD, is a visual artist and poet from the midwestern USA who likes to spend lots of time contemplating the real relations between true religion and art-making. To the busybody world at large, it can sometimes sadly appear as if he’s doing nothing but lounging on the couch or in the grass with a vacant look in his eyes. Not so!
Saragun Springs 
Dale
This series of seeking art, which may be God, is brilliant.
Some day I hope to be able to easily place my positive thoughts about something I read without the awkwardness caused by avoiding deletion on WP. It causes me to lean on exclamation marks and overworked adjectives. But, simply, what you have written is good and honest. I look forward to seeing Christina again as the week rolls along.
(The physical arrangement of the words is amazing! Though an overworked word is exclaimed, it is true.)
Leila
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Leila
Your first, eleven-word sentence here describes the meaning/s of this series perfectly.
AND the words “may be God” are so crucial here!
Because I think it’s never good to be TOO clear about who or what God is. Faith is one thing, but misplaced faith and vain certitude about the Creator of the Universe are two other things that are, I think, not so good (and are all too common all over the globe).
And it’s always good to remember Milton’s symbolic tale, Paradise Lost. And to remember that Satan himself started out as God’s number one angel, right-hand man, and best friend.
Thank you, Leila, for publishing, celebrating, and explaining my work!
Dale
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Hi Dale
Great results as usual. Not nine am and you already have fifty views.
I don’t know who first said it but the soul of art and mind of God are the same thing. Maybe I thought that, even so I would be excruciatingly vain to think myself the first.
Thanks again!
Leila
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L
Thanks for pointing out the word arrangement and punctuation.
This poem was revised (reshaped) countless times in order to get all those things “just right.” And to try and make it look natural and easy, as if it just flowed out spontaneously and was not fussed over at all. (The first draft did occur spontaneously, but only after much thought about it first.) Of course, some of the lines are from the narrator and some are in Christina’s voice, either internal or out loud.
D
PS
The capital letters at the beginning of each line for these poems is because of Wallace Stevens. (It took a long time to make that decision, and much searching through Stevens’ work to figure out the effectiveness of this technique. Free verse these days usually eschews this technique and there are a few too many academic poets these days who are all about “following the rules” in poetry to a ridiculous, and limiting, degree.)
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Thank you to ELINA LYNN for being a poet and growing the tree!
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Christina’s favorite visual artists are Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Blake, Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Walt Whitman in his photos (of himself which he directed thereby creating and perfecting the photographic self-portrait 170 years ago.)
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Leila
I believe you’re right: real, true wisdom is never new; what’s new are the vessels.
Thank you!
DWB
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LA
50 and climbing sounds wonderful and thanks to Everyone who’s cutting me some slack and going with the flow on this. To any random cranks I say: Let this message transform you.
Thanks again!
The D
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Hi Dale
The mystery of real art is something to contemplate. Buddha holding the flower and disappearing is a great image. Maybe that’s how it is with art. A vanishing act and when it appears in some artistic medium–recreating it is impossible. Even impossible for the artist themselves to recapture. Real art might be a “one and done.” There is only one Jesus.
The poem goes well with mystery. It invokes the spirit of nature and the artist. “Hiking and sketching” the innocent empty spaces that yearn for the wind and elk. I’ve experienced the silence of the high plains and it’s unlike any I have before. Great piece and poem!
Christopher
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Christopher
Thanks for speculating upon and interpreting the Buddha image and retelling here. You drew out the image/tale in just the right way, showed what it is, and gave me fresh ideas about it, as well. All good poets need their interpreters (even to themselves) and I THANK YOU for being one of mine. And your qualifications for this are amazing. AND your prose about my poems is poetic in the extreme, not to mention universally positive at all times!
It does not surprise me that you’ve experienced, AND APPRECIATED, the silence of the High Plains. Many have experienced it who have NOT appreciated it. Those people are not Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Black Elk, Geronimo or any of the other great Native Americans from that section of the country. For them, the vastness and the emptiness was where the spirit was. It is both very American and very human of you to know and understand that fact.
It’s like the John Wayne quote we discussed earlier, “The mountains have been my church.”
And, of course, Jesus was known for vanishing into the desert or the hills for extended, solitary prayer and meditation sessions on a very regular basis; it was even one of his key features as a personality. (And sometimes he warred with the Devil there, sometimes not.) It was probably shortly after one such trip that he suddenly found himself able to walk on water for a little while, in order to save his friends.
Thanks again!
Dale
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