Author: ikeh

Thomas Merton inserted the following paragraphs amidst others in the chapter entitled “Pray for Your Own Discovery” in his New Seeds of Contemplation. After traveling through passages of prose, the reader suddenly come upon these strings of poetic language. It’s like hearing someone lecturing and suddenly breaking into a song. This is a prayer written as poetry, or vice versa:

“Justify my soul, o God, but also from Your fountains fill my will with fire. Shine in my mind, although perhaps this means “be darkness to my experience,” but occupy my heart with Your tremendous Life. Let my eyes see nothing in the world but Your glory, and let my hands touch nothing that is not for Your service. Let my tongue taste no bread that does not strengthen me to praise Your great mercy. I will hear Your voice and I will hear all harmonies You have created, singing Your hymns. Sheep’s wool and cotton from the field shall warm me enough that I may live in Your service; I will give the rest to Your poor. Let me use all things for one sole reason: to find my joy in giving You glory.

Therefore keep me, above all things, from sin. Keep me from the death of deadly sin which puts hell in my soul. Keep me from the murder of lust that blinds and poisons my heart. Keep me from the sins that eat a man’s flesh with irresistible fire until he is devoured. Keep me from loving money in which is hatred, from avarice and ambition that suffocate my life. Keep me from the dead works of vanity and the thankless labor in which artists destroy themselves for pride and money and reputation, and saints are smothered under the avalanche of their own importunate zeal. Stanch in me the rank wound of covetousness and the hungers that exhaust my nature with their bleeding. Stamp out the serpent envy that stings love with poison and kills all joy.

Untie my hands and deliver my heart from sloth. Set me free from the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when activity is not required of me, and from the cowardice that does what is not demanded, in order to escape sacrifice.

But give me the strength that waits upon You in silence and peace. Give me humility in which alone is rest and deliver me from pride which is the heaviest of burdens. And possess my whole heart and soul with the simplicity of love. Occupy my whole life with the one thought and the one desire of love, that I may love not for the sake of merit, not for the sake of perfection, not for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of sanctity, but for You alone.

For there is only one thing that can satisfy love and reward it, and that is You alone.”

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions Paperbook 1091, 2007), 44–45.

I was going to write this post as a memorial of  Lynn Shelton, who died unexpectedly at 54 on May 2020. In the process of writing it, though, I realized that it was impossible to write about her while taking me out of the picture, because I knew her as she related to me and interacted with me. Processing the shock and grief of hearing the news of her death took me back to my very early adulthood, during the time Lynn and I met in her classes at The Art Institute of Seattle. This was when she was only making her first feature film. So I knew her not as the filmmaker the world at large knew her to be, the role she played for the last 15 years or so of her life. I knew her as a teacher and a mentor. A rarely, if at all, mentioned part of her life history was her years teaching at The Art Institute of Seattle, and I don’t know why the media hardly ever mentioned this. Because as a teacher, she had the same gift of caring about others that she brought to directing movies, and I am sure I was only one of the many students whose lives were touched by her attention.

I was around 19 when we met in one of her classes. She became the teacher I worked most closely with, one to whom I came to bounce off  my developing thoughts about art, design, career paths and life choices. She knew my hopes, ambitions, disillusionments. She saw my good qualities that I didn’t see for myself, and believed in me and was very supportive of my aspirations, never even once giving a hint that I was too idealistically naive and green. She took time introducing me and recommending my work to others, pointing out opportunities, and doing what she could to get me a break in Seattle’s art scene. She was welcoming. I would send her emails about my confusions and struggles for discerning a path to follow,  and she would write back saying, “You sound tortured and sad. We need to have a conversation. Call me.” All these she did amidst the busyness of caring for her hearing-impaired son, teaching, and exploring herself to find her own artistic expression. This was during the time she was working on her first feature film, We Go Way Back. Still, she let me  come to her to discuss my interest at the time, the opening scenes of movies. When she found out that, having explored the territory on my own all the way to California, I returned to Seattle arriving at the same conclusion about it as she had–––that “opening” titles containing the names of principle figures of the movie should be at the end of the film, not at the beginning–––she was even more excited to have me see that film, where she did just that. Alas, I couldn’t be there for the screening, because I was called home due to my dad’s illness and subsequent death. I was 21 then, and expressing her sympathies, she wrote to me, “You are too young to loose a parent.” Her son is now 21 when he also lost a loving parent. My deepest sympathies to Milo.

In response to yet another email of mine mulling over thoughts about what it meant to make art and to live authentically, she wrote me a guide to living a creative life:

March 5, 2005

Ike:
I enjoyed your thoughtful email very much.

I definitely think that you need to do what you outline in the second
to last paragraph, i.e., “do what you believe in” and let others
think what they like. The trick of course is to do this and also be
able to take and use criticism to make your work better. This is
particularly difficult for a developing artist/designer who is still
finding her footing and her voice. But it can be attained.

So, in short, I believe that you need to:
1) realize that every artist/designer has their own philosophy of
art/design and approach to work;
2) develop your own philosophy of art/design;
3) passionately create work however you believe it should be created
(for instance, in your case, with total intentionality);
4) be prepared for the fact that you will not be pleasing everyone
with your work (something that I still wrestle with–––I’m such a
people pleaser!!);
5) and you also need to be able to separate out the useless criticism
from the really valuable criticism.

The last step is the hardest. One thing that helps with it is to be
very specific about who you show your work to while you are working
on it…. Start to cultivate a small handful of friends/colleagues who
“get” what you are trying to do and will help you get there.

Does that make sense? I hope it helps somewhat.

cheers,
Lynn

Point #1 was her trying to save me from what could develop as artistic bigotry :-). Being young with limited life experience, I had a tendency to dismiss outright those works created with different philosophy.  I’m still not accepting of all artworks and creative endeavors, and I don’t think it’s necessary to be able to accept all, but now I do see that people are on different stages in life and have different things they consider important. My search for a creative path now took me to a different place than hers. I don’t know her status in the film community she operated in, because my artistic interests now lie elsewhere, and our working worlds no longer intersected. But to me she remained a mentor in the journey of finding my own way to artistically express. So I kept her updated with various milestones in my life, and was always happy to hear her consistent happiness in hearing from me. I think we can get a feel for someone’s spirit by the language he or she uses. Lynn was the kind who would write, “DEFINITELY get in touch with me if you come visit Seattle. Please! It would be a joy to see you. Pure joy.” Pure joy. The pure and simple joy of seeing a friend, breathing and alive. Me, I’m not sure I’m aware enough of that privilege. I’m not often in touch with joy, pure or impure, in order to be able to say to someone what Lynn said to me.

Now this duckling has to learn to walk in a world without her creative mother. I did protest, “Wait! No, I’m not ready yet! I still need her!” I still want the security of knowing that she’s out there somewhere working on her projects, and I’m here doing my thing, and knowing we can get back together sharing our experiences in our common journey of finding our way back to our own self through creativity. I still want to let her know what I’m up to and hear from her. Now I can’t do that.

A friend told me, “Honor her existence and influence by being the person she supported and loved.”

Lynn, rest in peace. May your guide help those desiring to live an authentic, creative life. Let your sudden passing be a memento mori for us, leading to the art of dying well.

episode March 2020

On that first Sunday following the coronavirus-related announcement to limit social gatherings I was supposed to sing with my choir at an Episcopal service. In less than a week all choir groups I belonged to suspended their activities indefinitely. No in-person worship, no choir. Being an introvert who “fears people, not ghosts,” as an old friend once described me, I thought I would find nothing but relief to have a break from social activities. I did find relief, but not in the way I had expected.

Often liturgy and music clash in my mind. I grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition, and though I am currently doubting and even disagreeing with many of the widely-accepted Christian tenets, there is still in me a loyalty to, or a nostalgia for the Catholic Mass. At the beginning of this school year, however, I found myself changing allegiance to a church on the basis of music, not liturgy or theology, which makes me feel promiscuous and unserious in matters of faith. In my mind a spiritual homesickness should be the main reason for participating in worship, and a strong affinity with a church’s theology should be foundational for where I choose to do so. But my action betrays a different rationale. Despite their surface similarities, I feel distant from the Episcopal practice and miss something-I-know-not-what of the Catholic Mass, yet I ignore the feeling and choose to sing with what I consider the tighter choir at the Episcopal church. I find myself prioritizing my artistic need, and using liturgy to fulfill it. I am willing to eat untransubtantiated bread at the Episcopal service in order to sing music that agrees more with my artistic sensibility. I eat this bread while just a short walk away the full transubstantiation deal is on offer at a Catholic Mass, which I have earned the right to take. Although I don’t actually understand what transubstantiation means and what it does to one, and do not find the taste of the Episcopal communion bread any different, still the calculative merchant in me questions whether I have chosen wisely. Am I singing while my sick soul is burning, too oblivious of my limited time on earth to give it the best manna?

More troublesome than my unfaithfulness to external ideologies, though, is my unfaithfulness to myself: I border on thinking that worship is tomfoolery when I don’t know whom I’m worshipping. I do not even say the Creed, because to say I believe it would be uttering a lie right in the liturgy. Yet there I am in the service, volunteering my energy in the collective effort of delivering messages I’m not sure I believe or even like, as beautifully as I can, posing as a worshipper. What business do I have participating in worship when I don’t accept the idea of Christianity as Jesus’s rescue mission for us? Liturgy happens to utilize music with care and respect, especially in this Episcopal church, and I happen to care about music, and that’s why I’m there. Not really knowing who requires my justification, I nonetheless feel like an unidentified flying object in a worship service, denominationally, religiously undeclared.

In such tumult I ushered myself to choir rehearsals and worship services, a tumult that had become so continuous that it appeared as a muffled annoying rumbling only half noticed. That Sunday morning I attended a live stream Catholic Mass at home. Watching in my shorts, relaxed and invisible, the rumbling subsided. It was poignant to see the pews empty in this popular church that would usually be full, and the Mass celebrated only by the priest with a single communion he ate by himself. Self-consciously I spoke and sang my responses to the greetings and invitations, hearing my unaccompanied voice in the room. Empty spaces suddenly emerged and called my attention from the world beyond my living room, that normally busy world with which I had had so much difficulty engaging, made even worse because I was never convinced I loved it enough to want to learn. I hate the buzz that usually fills it to the brim. But that Sunday, in the absence of other people’s audible voices and the usual mental noises of my wrestling with doubt, suddenly one specific way I had been engaging with that world stood out: singing with others. So this frightened person does, after all, know how to engage. I am able to. I even seek it out. It’s just that this understanding, this desire has not needed an articulation. Why should it? It has always already manifested in action, in my very singing with others. Plants turn toward the sun without having to discern the desire, learn where the sun is and how to turn to it. To add that the plants “know how to” turn toward the sun is redundant.

I sing in the choir because I desire to sing with others. It’s so anticlimactic, so tautological, you can argue it is hardly a revelation. But revelation has so far never been an addition of new knowledge to my daily life. It’s simply a clearing away of dross that allows me to see what’s more natively and solidly planted there. And that Sunday morning in that clearing this desire stood bare, childlike, apparently never needing to wait for me to define my religious identity and demonstrate tidy integrity of thoughts, words, and deeds, in order to sustain it. I don’t believe that music is a universal language that should make sense to everyone; it happens to speak to me and I don’t know why. Making music seems the only channel in which I thoroughly connect with others, or at least the most noticeable on account of those unusual moments of entering into rapport with them. This I have not experienced elsewhere, not even when falling in love. There were moments during singing with my previous choir, when I suddenly could not hear my own voice, no matter how loudly I sang. Instead of individual voices I heard a unified one. We were not high caliber singers, but even in a sea of mediocrity magic happens, too. Or when improvising on the guitar in a jam session with a stranger, suddenly the division between our minds seemed gone, and I could no longer tell who was sending and who was receiving messages, who was leading and who was following. Or when, after finishing our last lesson for the semester, my organ teacher and I stood there thanking, almost bowing to one another, passing credit back and forth between us in wonderment at the bond that quietly developed as we spent each Friday talking about music. We must have sensed that we, those two individuals standing in the practice room, didn’t stand as the two ends of the bridge. We were sidestepped, though not dismissed, and thus gesturing toward one another in our inability to point to who was responsible for the closeness we nonetheless witnessed. Moments of consciously failing to find where one ends and the other begins are true marriage, and it is not the glorious unification between self and other that I often imagine from reading mystical writings. It seems communication happens most authentically, and hence connection most genuinely, when two––or three––people attend to and express thoughts that do not belong to them but originate from a source unparticularized. Again, these moments are rare. Most of the times I grumblingly drag myself out of my hiding place to a choir rehearsal, practice singing in tune with others, notice nothing extraordinary, and come home unscathed and simply glad I went. Perhaps doing it will never bring me to depths, heights, or enlightenment. It may never strike me dumb with the wonder of existence. It may never heal me from depression and transform me into a new person. But there I am physically out there, no longer connecting  merely mind-to-mind, heart-to-heart with dead or distant authors and performers in the safety of my fortress. I do not dare, but despite my natural reluctance––fear––music has the power to make me walk on my own two feet to mingle with other warm bodies and make myself one of them, accountable to them. Regardless of the positive emotional payoff, for this particular personality making music with others is simply healthy on a basic––cellular?––level, just like drinking water hydrates my body, and something in me knows to drink it, even when I don’t feel markedly refreshed afterwards.

As a matter of faith I did not choose, a faith that pulls my heart and moves me into action, instead of a faith that I actively work to believe and practice, music is my denomination. I seek it in worship insofar as the liturgy provides a context beyond individuality, an attitude of reverence, and plain but all-important regularity. On Pentecost the Holy Spirit came down to the apostles and enabled them to meet people from diverse cultures in their native tongues. In my case, too, there may have been a spirit deigning to lower itself to speak to my mind about life beyond the only one I saw then. Not an afterlife or an otherworldly realm, but simply a life oriented to a purpose beyond one’s personal reward, including salvation. The spirit speaks in a language my mind instinctively understands, musical delight. “I will sing and make music to the Lord,” we sang this Psalm one Sunday. The melody so beautiful the line stays with me. I sing not for the glory of the Lord, wishing to get splashes of that glory having pledged allegiance to him, for so far I refuse to accept a lord I do not know. But in singing it I get to brush shoulders with the possibility of something other than me that has absolute worth, something utterly true, that whether or not I profit from it, I can’t resist loving it and desiring to praise it. To live in a conscious state of praise is the highest form of living I can imagine at the moment. In practicing singing this Psalm with my choir in our routine Thursday evening rehearsal, I enacted my ideal aspiration in plain ordinariness, from my current state, without needing to first undergo a dramatic conversion. Religious truth may be other than aesthetic experience, but if religion has to do at all with going out of oneself without concerns of personal gain, not because one is such a saint or martyr, but because it’s the only viable way to live—-in other words, if utter love has to do with religion at all—-then the lesson would be entirely lost to me without art.

’Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
’Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gain’d
To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d.
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come ‘round right.

How groundedly true these words from the hymn “Simple Gifts” now are, a ground I cannot normally touch because I’m in the air all the time, blown around by complicated thinking. It’s a relief to no longer be at odds with myself, to recognize my tangible, worldly desire for singing with others without demanding that it has a weightier import—spiritual, existential, and moral. To recognize where I am, to realize that it is where I ought to be, and then to come down here is enough. From my actual home base I can then advance, if there is a further way forward, but without acknowledging it, I will forever merely fly into fantasies. My true mind is perhaps simpler than what my deep persona likes to think of it. After all, my mind tends to be miserable when it’s deep. To spread, not penetrate, to be able to love and delight, is just enough for now.

– Ike Harijanto

“You will surely say I am old and crazy to want to produce sonnets, but since many say I am in my second childhood, I wanted to act the part,” said the Italian artist Michelangelo, half-jokingly, in his 70s to his biographer, Vasari.

The ‘Bach’ used in this site’s name is the namesake of J. S. Bach, the well-known used car dealer. Kidding. I am referring to none other than the German musician the world knows. His name on this website is an homage and memorial for a turning point in my life. To this day the journey continues.

More than decade ago a friend introduced me to Bach’s music. Having been born and raised in the East in an environment that could not care less about Western classical music––my childhood was before Mozart-for-Babies craze––my scant knowledge of this music was thickly obscured by prejudice: such music was boring, rarefied, irrelevant, serving functions such as a telephone-on-hold music or the signal of the garbage truck coming.

An Indonesians proverb says, “What you’re not familiar with you don’t love.” It’s true in this case. I was never able to clearly hear the music until I was put in a particular mental and emotional state. That state was a severe depression that I one day just woke up into, as if I had fallen into a deep, dark pit during sleep. Yes, there were moments of depression before, and the death of a parent, but this one were to last for the next several years. In crisis and so much pain, I became increasingly, morbidly self-absorbed. I was unable to lift my eyes to see anything other than my personal story, even when it was unpleasant to look at. Personal anguish does that sometimes, turning one’s life into a Greek tragedy that entranced one’s eyes, especially because you became the very special main actor. Different, isolated, abandoned, disconnected from others, as if an ejector seat had banished me to the outer space. The outside world became impersonal: cruel and hateful.

Racing thoughts had become so unbearable that they felt physically painful. Unsuccessfully I tried every method I could think of to stop them. Everywhere I turned I seem to meet the drama of other humans, especially in art, music including. Unfortunate to my case, art likes to glorify human suffering, as if it were a more worthy source of beauty. Up to that point I had thought art to be the reservoir of human sentiments, and the more dramatic the emotions displayed in a particular work, the “deeper” or more “artistic” it was. I could not see another possibility; I was trapped in human drama.

Cut to another scene, one day I took a listen to a set of piano pieces known as the Well-Tempered Clavier (WTC). The music did not stir me emotionally, it did not dazzle me; nonetheless its friendliness, its accessibility surprised me. Nothing more, nothing less. It completely overturned my hidden assumptions about “such music.” For behind my former prejudice was the belief that I was never going to be good, smart, sophisticated enough for it, and therefore going to forever be denied a chance to get to know it. I had also presumed that when “such music” spoke to us, it should have been “loud,” an exalted experience. But here I was feeling simply invited. This is not even an accurate way to say it, for it didn’t actively usher me in. The gate between us was simply and unnoticeably opened and left opened.

No grand revelation. It did not tickle my heart. I did not hear a showcase of Bach’s personal cries and bliss. I did not hear humanity’s longings and sufferings confirmed and glorified, or even acknowledged at all. It was mind-stopping, not mind-blowing: personal stories, mine or others’, simply stopped running in my head. Despite anguish that continued for what felt to be much too long, when listening to the WTC I found my mind completely engaged in it. I found myself loving it, and for a moment, to my relief, I stopped being a drama queen. And even though my musical knowledge was minimal, with titles such as, Fugue no. 13 in F# major, I understood that this set of music was about the different keys. In other words, I heard something impersonal.

I think it was less the music itself that had such a powerful effect on my mind, but rather, the possibility that through it was introduced to me. A possibility I desperately needed to sense at the time: that the impersonal is not identical with the cruel. That the impersonal could be beautiful, and instead of opposing me, the personal, it could simply transcend it. I saw that this friendly impersonal could innocently show its glory in a way that was not dismissive and belittling to a person, who, though ignorant and immature perhaps, was nonetheless genuinely suffering. I suppose religions and pure science and philosophy have tried to show us this possibility, but then, for some reason, Bach’s music was my personal path to it. I found myself loving this music, not because I was a such a great human being with a special power for loving or listening. In fact up to that moment I thought I had lost the capacity to love at all. The way I see it, I love it, because it is loveable by nature. I think I was able to hear the music, because somehow I was lent a different pair of ears, not mine.

What I share here is a personal love story, not an argument about the power of music. My experience with love could have manifested differently, through an unusual interest in beehives, for example. But in my life, love makes itself known in and through Bach’s WTC. It marked the beginning of a life lesson about love, what I had been told since childhood in church but failed to learn. It made me think that love is willing to stoop down and speak in our individual terms and work with our individual personality. It made me think of love as grace, that we are by nature not able to love much less to create it, and yet miraculously, able to know and experience its workings in our lives.

The investigative drive I’ve written about visited me again several weeks ago, and with it a tune, a motif, for a song.

One way I’ve often seen the function of my artistic expression is as an outlet to say things I have difficulty saying otherwise. Not so that I can say it in a more round-about way, as if cladding and hiding my true feelings in poetic words; on the contrary, it is so that I can say it more directly, emphatically, to the point. As I am in the process of writing this song, though, I get more clarity about what making art does for me. Creating often turns out to be my way of clarifying my thoughts and sorting out my feelings. I would begin by feeling bothered about something without knowing what the trouble really is, and only in the process of writing does it become clear.

In this case I started with the desire to confront the problem that has plagued me for as long as I remember: my life and death. As I’m writing further, quickly I discovered anger. Anger at finding myself alive with fear of death, but seeing that I have to die. Anger at feeling the senselessness of this experience I call my life, not knowing its purpose, and what more, needing, needing, to know without knowing how I can really find out. My anger, in short, is that of a helpless victim.

As I’m working on the last part of the song, though, I discovered a longing. I recognize this longing to be the heart of the song––anger only its mask. I long for a beloved from whom I feel separated. I long not for a particular person or anything I know. Could this be a longing for God? This unanswered longing often shows up as anger. I do not know God, I have not seen it, yet strange how I could feel such a longing for it.

A couple of months ago a close friend introduced me to Meera, a Hindu poet-singer,  with these words: “her life, songs, poetry are all expressions of her love of Krishna.” With only this description I fell into a deep admiration for her. At the time I have not even read any of her poems, but my friend’s words evoked a sense of such beauty I saw in Meera that I thought she was a goddess.

It is not her love for Krishna that attracts me to her; I am not familiar with Hinduism and its gods. It is her unwavering love for something other and bigger than herself. Love must be such a powerful drive that it drove her to offer her life for Krishna. Oh yes, my suspicious mind thought her out of her mind, delusional, ill, just like the way Spanish Inquisitors and many of us today viewed St. Teresa of Avila’s ecstasy. But at heart, I wanted her devotion. I felt an aspiring envy toward her. What better way to live my life than how she did?

Her words are simple, direct, ardent, and real. From what I read in her poems, I learnt that loving was painful for her. It was a longing love. Meera saw her life as an experience of separation from her beloved, and thus a torture.

“I came for the sake of love-devotion;
seeing the world, I wept.”¹

“Love shows no external wound.
But the pain pervades every pore
Devotee Mira offers her body
As a sacrifice to Giridhara for ever.”²

She lived her life and wrote her bhajans not only to express her love, but more so as imploration and demands to Krishna to end her separation, i.e., her very existence. She told us:

“I am mad with love
And no one understands my plight.
Only the wounded
Understand the agonies of the wounded,
When the fire rages in the heart.
Only the jeweller knows the value of the jewel,
Not the one who lets it go.
In pain I wander from door to door,
But could not find a doctor.
Says Mira: Harken, my Master,
Mira’s pain will subside
When Shyam comes as the doctor.”³

Apparently, her love-driven lifestyle made made her high-status family upset; some even tried to kill her. In several poems she wrote about this disapproval:

“Parents and
brothers
all call a halt.

Prise out, they say,
this thing from your heart.
You’ve lost your path.”⁴

She responded:

I will fasten the bells of his love to my feet
And dance in front of Girdhar.
Dancing and dancing I will please his eyes;
My love is an ancient one.
My love is the only truth.

I do not care about social norms
Nor do I keep my family’s honour.
I cannot forget, even for a moment,
The beauty of my lover.
I am dyed in Hari’s colour.⁵

The saffron of virtue and contentment
Is dissolved in the water-gun of love and affection.
Pink and red clouds of emotion are flying about,
Limitless colours raining down.

All the covers of the earthen vessel of my body are wide open;
I have thrown away all shame before the world.
Mira’s Lord is the Mountain-Holder, the suave lover.
I sacrifice myself in devotion to His lotus feet.⁶

A stranger to shame, daringly she lived her life. I think her lack of fear was not a personal quality she possessed; love made her immune and unable to care about social conventions.

Meera’s death is surrounded with myth. As well, the story of her life. That matters not at all to me; I’m not a scholar debating whether brontosaurus existed. Through my friend I’ve heard of her; in her bittersweet longing I recognize mine. This sense of existence that I fear losing is at once the root of my pain. Because to exist for me is to be separated from my beloved.

I do not know the relationship between love and truth; how valid is this feeling of longing for an unknown? The fact that it happens perhaps make it as valid as any other experiences. Was Meera’s lifelong wish granted? Perhaps it was, and she wrote about it, too, in her poems. But with longing still unanswered, I cannot recognize it. Can this longing be consummated, and how?

In my art making I have gone through stages. Perhaps ‘stage’ is not an apt word, for I do not think that one stage stops cleanly before the next begins. However, I discern several causes that at different stages in my life primarily drive me to create. The earliest was art as an escape into fantasy from a reality I somehow could not accept. So I created my own. Then there was identity building; my focus, instead of on making art, was on being an artist, on presenting a particular self-image to the eyes of others and most especially my own. Nowadays creating is my way to investigate the question of my death and, necessarily, of my life. These driving causes are not something I think up beforehand; I discern them in retrospect.

As a kid being faced with the possibility of my own death––an experience not uncommon, I believe––I had my first taste of existential angst. The only dimension or worldview that was then available to me, the one I was living in and thinking from, was one of a continuous conscious state with differences in colors, as it were: living on earth, a negligible little break called dying, and then existing in either heaven or hell.¹

One day it suddenly occurred to my child mind that existing forever, even when it was happily in heaven, was horrifying. Faced with a problem so much bigger than me. My world broke and the next thing I remember was a blackout. Thus began a lifelong journey which I for the moment describe as a journey of reconciling myself with death.

Nearly twenty years after, I discovered a poem printed on a poster to a meeting.²

When I read it I thought, “it’s exactly my question.” To this day this poem speaks to me like none others:

Truly do we live on Earth?
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Like a painting, we will be erased.
Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.
Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,
That precious bird with the agile neck,
We will come to an end.
He goes his way singing, offering flowers.
And his words rain down
Like jade and quetzal plumes.
Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?
Is this the only truth on earth?

from 1491 by Nezahualcoyotl, Aztec poet-king (1402 – 1472)
translated by Charles C. Mann

Why is my investigation in the form of art making? This I do not know. Again, this was unplanned. My childhood journey started with devotion to an unseen higher power I called God. If there was a problem bigger than me, then there was a problem solver bigger than me. As I grew older and the intellect, but mostly pride, developed, and my problem still unsolved, I pursued intellectual knowledge (looking back, knowing intellectually for me included rationalizing involving unexamined postulations.) This course I followed till I felt I came to the limit of reason and found myself in a dead-end. I felt lost, believing myself running out of all available methods, although perhaps it is clear to those who know what would come next. I think it was Ludwig Wittgenstein who said that beyond philosophy is poetry.³

Perhaps I have not deviated too far from my childhood method, because asking personal questions that I feel is beyond my tools to answer, is to me what praying is.