Yucky Art, Twisted Heart

How well God must like you—
  you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon,
  you don’t slink along Dead-End Road,
  you don’t go to Smart-Mouth College.

Instead you thrill to GOD’s Word,
  you chew on Scripture day and night.
You’re a tree replanted in Eden,
  bearing fresh fruit every month,
Never dropping a leaf,
  always in blossom.

You’re not at all like the wicked,
  who are mere windblown dust—
Without defense in court,
  unfit company for innocent people.

GOD charts the road you take.
  The road they take is Skid Row.

Psalm 1 (The Message)

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Dear Alex,

Art is smoke, neither here to hear nor there to care. It is luxury and waste, a clash of past, present and prospect.

I seem to collect ugly art, the breed my husband and daughter loathe. “Not this one, Mom. It creeps me out,” she has counseled me more than a dozen times perennially, rattling her head in disapproval. The din of discontent rattles on.

Yucky art, harrowing in gallows and rusted by rain, is suppressed anger coated with skin flakes, vitrified in kiln for permanence over changes. The artisan must endure the process of discontent and anger, even self-neglect, to re-brand his identity, risking safety and sanity, exposing his vulnerabilities on art media. Along broken tracks she shall be insulted and assaulted as surely as stink and sting are eschewed. Chew your heart and slurp in bile. Your art sucks. Your art is miracle.

Last weekend I joined a local art festival and roamed as judge and jury among the sort of old-school craftsmanship often lost in mainstream culture of sensational immediacy. These species of handiwork negotiated long, lonesome laps of time and sporadic spurts in subtle scrutiny to carve in disoriented details inescapably grueling to love with perplexity. Nonsensically rational. Functional lunacy.

A metal sculptor told me she had sold over 80 pieces since the previous day, showcasing her booth with nearly nothing left to show for after her robust sales. A jumble of worthlessness on display glinted from the noon sun: recycled coils, circular saw blades, screw nails and scrap metals welded by force and flame to re-design yuck for beauty, junk to purpose. I touched her art only to smear my hands with rust and corrosion. She was selling a concept I could not resist. This was my 3rd consecutive year revisiting her, each time carrying a bit of something she had re-created for my soul.

I saw the glassmith again. A man of light hands, he showed me glassblowing pyrotechnics at his studio on video. Molten molecules melded in momentary magic at extreme temperature to penetrate thresholds of breakage and reformation. Glassmaking is not glamorous. It is contention exacted with a warranty of ambivalence. Try twice, test thrice in this or that way and all replays may collapse in greed or gratitude. Yucky art in globs becomes goblets and goblins of intrigue.

Yesterday I ate supper with about 17 friends and strangers exchanging art in conversations about repeated visits to the local jail, hospitals and schools; prayers pleaded in lamenting through grief rather than passing over it. I saw yucky art sprayed over these narratives in splintered hope and gleaming pain. You cannot muffle or dismiss their cries offscreen because theirs are yours and mine. Art in real life sucks, rarely visible, mostly smoke. Almost 4 hours later, we closed our mouths and wounds transiently, drenched in the camaraderie of sorrow, joyous about our next meeting soon, knowing our journeys would be mostly long and lonesome, thrilling always as leaves in blossom, ghastly transparent in our falls and rising as roots of water lilies replanted.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I wonder what the Psalmist was trying to say when he wrote the piece.

Was he trying to say he's the man that God likes well (or, the "blessed man," as in older translation)?

Was he trying to rebuke the "wicked" ones, who very probably were doing wicked things against him?

Was he, deep in the turmoil of human strife, trying to warn himself against descending to the rank of being "wicked"?

Was he a blessed man trying very hard to stay blessed, verbalizing and versifying a prayer of desperation?

Or could it be all of the above are simultaneously true, that the shape of his heart morphs and shifts by the minute, at the mercy of the next circumstance, by the grace of God?

I also wonder what we are trying to say when we say to others and to ourselves what the Psalmist was trying to say.

Are we saying this is what a blessed man is supposed to look like and I suppose I do look somewhat like him?

Are we saying to others, Hey, take a look at the mirror and the sorry state that you are in and you will have no problem knowing which side of the moral stratosphere you are stuck at (and you can probably start to change that if you are to stop being so mean to me)?

Are we saying to ourselves, Well, I do frequently take long, hard look at myself in the mirror, and by now, after decades, I should have no problem knowing why I was not blessed, am not blessed, and shall never be blessed?

Have you read Robert Burns' paraphrase of this psalm?  The last two stanzas go like this:

But he whose blossom buds in guilt
Shall to the ground be cast,
And, like the rootless stubble, tost
Before the sweeping blast.

For why? that God the good adore,
Hath giv'n them peace and rest,
But hath decreed that wicked men
Shall ne'er be truly blest.

There's power in these words to untwist our hearts.

Yours, Alex