"invention, by its nature, can't be a lie"

"Dreams are reality at its most profound, and what you invent is truth because invention, by its nature, can't be a lie. Writers who try to prove something are unattractive to me, because there is nothing to prove and everything to imagine."

—Eugène Ionesco, Paris Review interview, The Art of Theater No. 6 (1984)

'settling down in misfortune and making it my heaven'

LEFRANC

I did what I could, out of a yearning for misfortune. 

GREEN EYES

You don't know the first thing about misfortune if you think you can choose it. I didn't want mine. It fell on my shoulders and clung to me. I tried everything to shake it off. I struggled, I boxed, I danced, I even sang, and, odd as it may seem, I refused it at first. It was only when I saw that everything was irremediable that I quieted down. I've only just accepted it. It had to be total. 

LEFRANC

It's thanks to me. . . . 

GREEN EYES

I don't give a damn! It's only now that I'm really settling down in misfortune and making it my heaven. And you, you try to get there by fraud. . . . 

LEFRANC

I'm stronger than you. My misfortune comes from something deeper. It comes from myself.

—Jean Genet, Deathwatch (1949; trans. B. Frechtman)

They wanted and yearned to see life in a certain way

Now that the ice was broken, could he not do other things? What was there to stop him? While sitting there at the table waiting for his breakfast, he felt that he was arriving at something which had long eluded him. Things were becoming clear; he would know how to act from now on. The thing to do was to act just like others acted, live like they lived, and while they were not looking, do what you wanted. They would never know. He felt in the quiet presence of his mother, brother, and sister a force, inarticulate and unconscious, making for living without thinking, making for peace and habit, making for a hope that blinded. He felt that they wanted and yearned to see life in a certain way; they needed a certain picture of the world; there was one way of living they preferred above all others; and they were blind to what did not fit. They did not want to see what others were doing if that doing did not feed their own desires. All one had to do was be bold, do something nobody thought of. The whole thing came to him in the form of a powerful and simple feeling; there was in everyone a great hunger to believe that made him blind, and if he could see while others were blind, then he could get what he wanted and never be caught at it. Now, who on earth would think that he, a black timid Negro boy, would murder and burn a rich white girl and would sit and wait for his breakfast like this? Elation filled him.

--Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) 

"His mind employed them without criticism."

Enemies of the people. That was a phrase he might omit. That was a catch phrase he would skip. That was one thing that sleeping with Maria had done. He had gotten to be as bigoted and hidebound about his politics as a hard-shelled Baptist and phrases like enemies of the people came into his mind without his much criticizing them in any way. Any sort of clichés both revolutionary and patriotic. His mind employed them without criticism. Of course they were true but it was too easy to be nimble about using them. But since last night and this afternoon his mind was much clearer and cleaner on that business. Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy.

—Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

One soul to another

First you must forgive me, though, an old priest who has spent his whole life in relative comfort, for pointing out that your problem is nothing new. I don't see why it qualifies as a "crisis of faith" to notice that formerly good men, under strain, experience a breakdown of virtue and become bitter, angry, and less inclined toward God. Suffering can indeed incline one to sin, but it can also be turned to good (think of Isaac Jogues, or any of the martyrs, or any of the mystics, or Christ Himself). 

Your attempts to bring transgressions to command attention are salutary. But as for your religious duties, remember these suspected transgressions, if real, are but the eruptions of sin. Not sin itself. Never forget that, lest you be inclined to lose your pity for human weakness. Sin is a lonely thing, a worm wrapped around the soul, shielding it from love, from joy, from communion with fellow men and with God. The sense that I am alone that none can hear me, none can understand, that no one answers my cries, it is a sickness over which, to borrow from Bernanos, "the vast tide of divine love, that sea of living, roaring flame which gave birth to all things, passes vainly." Your job, it seems, would be to find a crack through which some sort of communication can be made, one soul to another.

--Phil Klay, "Prayer in the Furnace," Redeployment (2014)

'a forest of boredom'

"Then calm yourself. There is much time. What a day it is and how I am contented not to be in pine trees. You cannot imagine how one can tire of pine trees. Aren't you tired of the pines, guapa?"

"I like them," the girl said.

"What can you like about them?"

"I like the odor and the feel of needles under foot. I like the wind in the high trees and the creaking they make against each other."

"You like anything," Pilar said. "You are a gift to any man if you could cook a little better. But the pine tree makes a forest of boredom. Thou hast never known a forest of beech, nor of oak, nor of chestnut. Those are forests. In such forests each tree differs and there is character and beauty. A forest of pine trees is boredom. What do you say, Inglés?"

"I like the pines too."

—Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The path of the living

Monastic time truly does lie close to eternity, said Elder Innokenty, but they are not equal. The path of the living, O Amvrosy, cannot be a circle. The path of the living, even if they are monks, has been opened up because, as one might ask, how could there be freedom of will if there is no way out of a vicious circle? And even when we replicate events in prayer, we do not simply recall them. We relive those events once again and they occur once again. 

--Eugene Vodolazkin (trans. Lisa C. Hayden), Laurus (2015)

'moments that were perfect in their certainty'

I began to spend more time at the Dante but at irregular hours. In the mornings I just got deli coffee and sat on my stoop. I reflected on how my mornings at Café 'Ino had not only prolonged but also afforded my malaise with a small amount of grandeur. Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards. I have watched the snow fall onto the sea and traced the steps of a traveler long gone. I have relived moments that were perfect in their certainty. Fred buttoning the khaki shirt he wore for his flying lessons. Doves returning to nest on our balcony. Our daughter, Jesse, standing before me stretching out her arms.

—Oh, Mama, sometimes I feel like a new tree.

We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother's voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don't go. Don't grow.

—Patti Smith, M Train (2015)

Nothing less.

Be satisfied with nothing less than Love....Never must any difficulty hinder you from serving people, be they insignificant or important, sick or healthy. And the sicker they are, and the fewer friends they have, the more readily must you serve them. And always bear with aliens willingly. As for all who slander you, contradict them not. And be desirous to associate with all who scorn you, for they make the way of Love broader for you.

—Hadewijch of Brabant, "Letter 24: Love through Virtues" (13th Century)

The beauty of the oft unseen love in our lives

My mom told me a few years ago that my grandfather, referring to Swaggert, had said, "If God can love an asshole like him, then I guess I'm not too far gone." He wasn't a Christian, my grandfather. At least he didn't have an altar-call conversion like I did, nor was he slain in the Spirit. But he must've felt himself hollowed-out when he heard Swaggart preach--cratered, like a demolition charge had gone off inside him.

Nobody I knew at the time believed in Swaggart. He was a joke, a hypocrite. A burned-out Pentecostal preacher. My grandfather knew all this, of course. He watched the news.

But Swaggart's words that day became a sacrament for him--presence where there seemed only absence. They stilled him somehow, and showed him his own holy, human worth. They gave him his life back.

Alistair MacLoed once wrote that "we are all better when we're loved"--loved by those present in our lives and those now gone; loved by those we see and those we do not. It's easy to know the first, to glimpse such care in smiling faces. But it's hard to see the latter: difficult to imagine what's not apparent. (How can I know my grandfather's joy when he never smiled in pictures?) That is why we need sacraments, and art: to give us the beauty of the oft unseen love in our lives.

I realize now that I've been trying to piece together what is not whole: in some fragmented way to make whole what is broken, to control it, to account for my encounter with (and through) Castellino's art. In the end, all I have is enough light to glimpse this mystery somehow present in the demolished rooms that are my grandfather's life now long gone.

And discovering this mystery is joy--joy written with light and words, Castellino's art and my memories cupped in those images, these words.

--Samuel Thomas Martin, Candy and Copenhagen, "Image Journal" (No. 86, 2015).