Landscape
Paintings and change
It is seasonal — the dread, the despair — that violate me.
No, I’ve never been religious — never tried to “find Jesus in my
heart”— and I have a big heart, too big. I feel even the plaque — take
the baby aspirin every other day even when the bleeding paints all
my inside colors. It’s always been a careful balance, love and fear.
In those landscapes by Rembrandt — the ones with multiple layers of
story — we can see After Diana Bathing or David’s Farewell or even the
Flight from Egypt: it’s transition and transmission that save our mortal souls. Except for me, always and forever, my soul feels that way back in someone’s horizon, that light beckons. I want to see where it is, where it goes.
There was once a car lot on Highway 31, and at night, the lights of
its showcase illuminated more than the ware — no, it was the red clay hills
behind that I saw, and when I did, I thought of the Old West, which I knew
only from Bonanza and Gunsmoke and that Big Valley, where wagons
circled and families fled, and sometimes we never saw them again.