Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Circling for Campus Community

So already, as a mid-1970s Harvard-Radcliffe student, I lived in Quincy House*, and I've been thinking about it a lot since October 7 when events in Israel and Gaza created grave tensions among Harvard students and members of other groups and communities on other college campuses, across the USA, and in Israel and other countries.
 
Of late, the national news hasn't been saying much about what's been happening among students on those tense campuses.
 
From my perspective, Quincy House in my day was a friendly--or at least friendly enough--house, despite the social jockeying and pursuit of individual goals that were bound to be in evidence at a place like Harvard. Many of us who lived there said hello or otherwise acknowledged one another upon coming face-to-face in the courtyard, the elevator in the eight-story "new Quincy," and the dining hall.  
 
More importantly, on those occasions when each of us went alone to the dining hall, we could sit down with people with whom we usually didn't eat--and sometimes didn't know--and expect to be welcomed and included in the conversation. There was a common understanding that the dining hall belonged to all of us.
 
This made Quincy House different from some other Harvard houses. I knew from some friends that there were dining halls where established friendship groups who ate dinner together every night were less inclined to be welcoming of "outsiders." Some people I knew even skipped meals rather than go to their house dining halls alone.
 
Even back then, I had several thoughts about what made Quincy House "different." Most important was the physical design of the house itself, a fenced-in compound containing old and new buildings accessible only through a single gate. Since we all had to pass through that same gate to leave and enter, we regularly came face-to-face with one another--and minimally couldn't avoid knowing one another by sight. In addition, the compound's central courtyard was a common gathering and stopping place that naturally supported breezy conversation on beautiful fall and spring afternoons.
 
There was also the social-cultural reality of Quincy House. Because it was a relatively new house, it hadn't yet developed the reputation for being the house of choice for particular types of students--such as classical musicians, aspiring journalists, varsity athletes, theater people and other artists, political activists--although it had gained attention for its space club and wine cellar. So its residents were relatively diverse in their interests and lifestyles.
 
In addition, it was less apt to be selected by students drawn to the traditional, iconic red-brick-and-wood-paneled Harvard and by those wanting to live where their fathers and other relatives had lived as undergraduates. 
 
Though some assigned to Quincy House would have preferred assignment to those older houses, others chose it because it wasn't the old, traditional Harvard and/or they were not legacy students--which is not to say they felt adequately comfortable, visible, and culturally seen and understood as Quincy House residents. I know for a fact that I experienced Quincy House as friendlier and more comfortable than some of them did.

So why am I writing about this now? Because I'm wondering how we mid-1970s Quincy House residents would have acted and reacted had we been confronted by the events on and after October 7 in Israel, Gaza, and Washington D.C., and on the Harvard campus. Would our House community have fractured and broken down? Would each of us have stopped talking to or even making eye contact with those around us whose views we knew--or suspected--differed from our own--and whose palpable pain was rooted in lived experiences and world views different from our own?
 
In the weeks since October 7, I have been involved in some painfully difficult conversations with some old Harvard friends. I deliberately used the word "painfully" in the preceding sentence because, as the only Jewish participant in one of those conversation groups, I've felt deeply disturbed by**** the fact that many in the group have been most concerned about the Harvard brand and Harvard's reputation as intellectually rigorous--and seemingly unconcerned about the widely reported on-campus expressions of antisemitism and other types of hatred and bias. Antisemitism anywhere concerns me.
 
To the credit of our group, we've agreed not let our robust differences tear us apart. Still, I didn't find it easy to send the email in which I explained that I viewed Harvard first and foremost as a school and wanted Claudine Gay to remain at its helm, so, as someone publicly and transparently continuing to learn and grow, she could lead and support others living and learning at Harvard to navigate this perilous campus, national, and world moment.
 
Over the last weeks, I have continued to worry about the undergraduates, even though their daily experience has ceased to be of interest to the national press. How have the students been managing to live side-by-side, face-to-face, and day-to-day in the company of those
  • whom they hate and/or by whom they feel hated, 
  • whom they fear and/or in whom their words and actions have created fear, 
  • whom they believe deserve annihilation and/or by whom they fear being annihilated, 
  • whom they believe not only cannot understand their experiences and those of people like them, but belong to the groups responsible for their feelings, 
  • whom they hold responsible for the ongoing violence, injustice, and inhumanity in Israel and Gaza,
  • whom they no longer feel they know--and/or wonder if they ever knew?
That last question may be even more important than any of the others, even though it's personal and emotional. In my experience as an educator, it's always first and foremost about people and relationships. 
 
As I've read articles and listened to cable news, I've heard questions about what is being and should be taught in history and political science courses to help students make sense of this historical moment and prepare them to engage in informed, respectful debate about causes and next steps. But I don't think what's happened on campus is only an intellectual or pedagogical problem.*****
 
Consequently, I've been thinking for weeks that the work of rebuilding safe, respectful community should happen in dormitories and dining halls, the emotional spaces of collegiate life, the places where individuals can't avoid coming face-to-face with the very people who may be angering and frightening them, and by whom they may be feeling betrayed, unseen, stereotyped, or misunderstood.
 
But until this weekend--when I read Rabbi Sharon Brous's The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World******--I had no idea what this might really look like. Now I have an idea for a house-based activity. It would have to be voluntary, and it would no doubt feel strange and even uncomfortable at first, especially for those who are by habit very private about what they feel. Some undergraduates (and Harvard others) might dismiss it as uncool, contrived, silly, unintellectual, and/or suspect because of its religious roots, while those willing to participate would likely feel vulnerable doing so--but also curious, courageous, and hopeful.
 
One of Brous's major inspirations is an ancient Jewish text in the Mishna that describes a rite performed on the Temple Mount during a pilgrimage holiday. As Brous explains, summarizing the text, 
    "The crowd would enter the [Temple Mount] Courtyard in a mass of humanity, turning to the right and circling--counterclockwise--around the enormous complex, exiting close to where they had entered.
    "But someone suffering, . . . --someone to whom something awful had happened--that person would walk through the same entrance and circle in the opposite direction [thus, to the left]. . . . And everyone who passed the brokenhearted would stop and ask, 'What happened to you?' . . . 
    "And [after hearing the answer] those who walked from right to left--each one of them--would look into the eyes of the ill, the bereft, and the bereaved. 'May God comfort you,' they would say, one by one. 'May you be wrapped in the embrace of the community.' (3-4)
Two pages later, Brous modernizes and secularizes the ritual:
  
. . . There's a stranger coming toward you, making her way against the flow of the crowd. . . . She is clearly suffering. . . . You stop and greet her with a simple, open-hearted question: 'What's your story? Why does your heart ache?'
    And this grief-stricken person answers: 'I am broken.'
    You offer words of comfort. 'I see you,' you say. 'You are not alone.'
    You continue to walk, until the next distressed person approaches.(5)
Brous then goes on to comment on why this ritual heals, or at least potentially begins a healing process.
    There is a timeless wisdom in entering the sacred circle: this is, on some fundamental level, what it means to be human. Today, you walk from left to right. Tomorrow it will be me. I hold you now, knowing that eventually, you'll hold me. Every gesture of recognition marries love and humility, vulnerability and sacred responsibility.
    . . . This ancient . . . ritual . . . has taught me the transformative nature of showing up when we want to retreat, of listening deeply to each other's pain even when we fear there are no words. Of . . . recognizing that even though we can't heal each others, we can and we must see each other. (5-6)
It was the reference to courtyards in the Mishna text that got me thinking that a variation of this ritual could be enacted at the Harvard houses. Harvard houses have courtyards, courtyards have perimeters, and the common entrances into those courtyards could serve as the entering and leaving points for those walking those perimeters. Furthermore, Harvard houses have common spaces that could be good post-circling gathering places for those wanting to continue engaging with one another after the activity.*******
 
I would change the script for the campus activity--and make it available to all students prior to the actual circling, which I would advise happen once a week for 4-5 consecutive weeks, allowing--and encouraging--all to participate at least once and ideally multiple times. I would also suggest this in recognition of the fact  that some people wait to see how such activities go for the first round of participants before giving them a try themselves.

My suggestions for the ritualized responses would be as follows.
  • A person circling to the right, upon encountering a person circling to the left would say, "Hello. Why are you in distress?"
  • The person circling to the left would say, "I have been feeling ______." Any number of adjectives could go into this blank--"sad," "misunderstood," "enraged," "fearful," "confused," "distrustful," "alienated," "endangered," "betrayed," "abandoned," "ostracized," "frustrated," "outnumbered," "stereotyped," "hated," "hopeless," and "concerned" are some possibilities. And students could share as many adjectives as they pleased.
  • The person circling to the right would then say, "Thank you for telling me. I see you and hear you."
That's all. No one would be expected to say anything else; in fact all would be directed to say nothing else during the activity. But all would be expected to participate in good faith or at least in open-hearted curiosity.
 
My inspiration for adding the hello at the beginning of the exchange was Maya Angelou's optimistic inaugural poem "On the Pulse of Morning," in particular its final stanza:
Here, on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, and into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope--
Good morning. 

Immediately following the circling activity, anyone wanting to reflect on the experience of participating in it would be invited to gather for a conversation facilitated by a member of the House staff. Guiding questions might be 
  • How did it feel to participate?
  • What, if anything, surprised you about the experience?
  • Would you participate again?
  • What, if anything, did you learn--about yourself? about our House? about others? about structured activities like this one?  
Refreshments would be a must at this further conversation!

I wonder if there's any chance that Faculty Deans (called housemasters in my day) at Quincy House or other Harvard houses would consider giving this idea a try. My own feeling is that circling the courtyard or the dining hall would be far healthier for a fractured community than circling the wagons. But then again, as a longtime teacher in a public democratic alternative school with lots of experience making groups work in schools and classrooms (thank you, Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education), I trust in structured activities that protect all participants while making their voices heard and their faces seen. Healing and community-building take time and work, but that work needs to start somewhere.

* Screen shot of an online photograph by Jeff Soongs or Jeff Songs--can no longer find it, but will keep trying.
**Screen shot of one of the header photos on the following website: Harvard Univerity. (n.d.) Quincy House. https://quincy.harvard.edu/
***Screen shot of one of the header photos on the following website: Harvard Univerity. (n.d.) Eliot House. https://eliot.harvard.edu/
**** "Blue Self," a painting by Scott Ketcham: https://www.scottketcham.com/post/110473758402/259-blue-self-2015-42-x-34-oil-on-denril
*****Screen shot of a photo on blog, filtered by me: Mitchell, M. (2016, September 22). Collaborative circle mural. This little class or mine. https://thislittleclassofmine.weebly.com/home/collaborative-circle-mural (The original unfiltered photo is pictured next to these endnotes.
*(6) Brous, S. (2024). The amen effect: Ancient wisdom to mend our broken hearts and world. Penguin Random House. 
*(7) I now have some thoughts about what might happen next, but they are for a further blog post.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Bewildered and Learning

So already, for the past month I have been taking a writing cla
ss. "Beguiled & Bewildered*: A Generative Poetry Workshop" is a self-guided month-long class offered by The Poetry Barn, and I have one more assignment to complete before the course ends in four days.
 
I decided to take the class because I felt stuck in the poetic same old same old and didn't know how to pull myself out of it. The poems I was writing seemed more apt to draw attention to me--my personal sensitivities, preoccupations (neuroses?), experiences--than to the objects, phenomena, and relationships about which I was writing. I wondered if my problem was my lack of tools or methods for getting closer to the sparks of meaning I believed were present in them.
 
A good course, I reasoned, might supply me with a new tool or method while requiring me to engage with something new, stimulating, and challenging. In addition, it would provide structure while relieving me of the need to design my own path "forward." And since I'd be spending my own money to take it--$99 to be exact--I knew I'd feel compelled to complete it.
 
And this course's title suggested something far less mechanical and craft-centered than some other course offerings I'd seen online. At its center was Fanny Howe's essay "Bewilderment." For each of the four sessions, we read approximately a quarter of it, wrote a reflection about both it and a poem by a contemporary poet exemplifying Howe's ideas and practices being focused on that week, and wrote a poem--really, did a directed poetic experiment--to maximize our chances of using and experiencing Howe's philosophy and poetic practices.
 
That "beguiled" was the first word of the course's title intrigued me, given its connotation of, among other things, deception: as a student in this course, would I be guided to cultivate some level of self-deception a means of moving toward an otherwise elusive kind of truth and poetics? Furthermore, that "beguiled" was linked with "bewildered" suggested that bewilderment could be compelling and attractive, even though so often it was associated with a state of uncomfortable, problematic disorientation. 
 
"Paired" by Scott Ketcham**
But courtesy of David Ferry's 2012 collection Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations, bewilderment already interested to me: there was just so much there in Ferry's poems, despite the haunting absences he posited and sometimes described, that I had to imagine bewilderment as a well and a source. Furthermore, when I read Katherine May's Enchantment: Awakening to Wonder in an Anxious Age this past fall, I wondered whether May understood enchantment not just as an antidote to her own and others' post-pandemic anxiety, but as a remedying response to the disorientation often associated with bewilderment.
 
Or, from her perspective, was bewilderment desirable? In fact, was it synonymous with enchantment? I wouldn't have asked that question had Howe not put those two words together in this sentence in her essay: "Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability." Would that collapse have reduced or enhanced May's anxiety? Hmmm . .  .
 
Howe's statement sent me to the Online Etymology Dictionary, even though the real problem, I already understood, was that my everyday assumptions about "bewilderment" (as lost, confused, dazed, and disoriented) and "enchantment" (as magical, delightful, captivating, and enthralling) were casting them as antonyms. Howe was already challenging me, already suggesting that language was just  . . . language, even if it is all we have as writers. 
 
From the Online Etymology Dictionary, I learned that the roots of "bewilder" as understood figuratively imply a deliberate will to lead into "wild, uninhabited, or uncultivated" wilderness:
"'perplex, puzzle, confuse,' from be- 'thoroughly' + archaic wilder 'lead astray, lure into the wilds,' . . .."**** Similarly, the medieval meanings of "enchant," as "derive[d] from Old French enchanter 'bewitch, charm, cast a spell' (12c.), from Latin incantare 'to enchant, fix a spell upon,' from in- 'upon, into' . . .  + cantare 'to sing' . . .,"***** suggest an intentional leading away from the orderly known and towards the rare, less commonly encountered, less "organized" unknown.
 
So given bewilderment's and enchantment's shared foundations in the experience of being enticed or lured away from the generally understood and experienced, why couldn't bewilderment be understood as an enchantment? Frankly, I don't have an answer to that question since Howe's ideas are still new to me. But that doesn't mean I haven't been able to experiment with them for the sake of rescuing my poetry from the same old same old.

Which brings me to what I've really appreciated about the course: the poem writing assignments for each session. Each has aimed to orchestrate an experience of bewilderment as a starting point for our writing, and then to have us write a poem related to it. 
 
Without sharing the first week's assignment--since one should pay to have access to the course--I will explain how I personally experienced randomness as preparation for writing my first poem-experiment. First, I made a set of directions for staying healthy; then a wrote a list of statements describing purpose. Then I put the two of them together so that their elements alternated, almost like I had riffle shuffled a deck of cards.
 
Next I examined the arbitrary whole I'd created for internal connections and resonances that my poem might explore or build on. Finally, given free rein to add to, subtract from, and otherwise use what I'd already generated, I wrote a draft poem, a poem-experiment that didn't feel same old same old:

Instructions for Purpose

Relish eating wisely and well
Since the animal self needs fuel
And wisely and well are a tonic for you.
 
Dance with abandon 
Since abandon may liberate you 
From purpose needing negating.
 
Sing with the sparrows,
Who don’t worry about purpose but have it. 
Or did you mean grand purpose?
 
Stretch in every conceivable realm or way 
Though you’re bound to judge
Which ones best serve. 
 
Sleep deeply,
Though dreams make vague suggestions 
Oblivious to the logic of plans. 
 
Walk even just part way 
Since street and byway scenes
Restore vision to the mind’s eye. 
 
Sit still and breathe
Since your animal self has needs
And knows how you wish otherwise.
 
Love what and who you can, 
Though loving with a whole heart 
May pull you from your purpose-- 
 
Just the kind of conflict you hate.

"Zippered Mates" by Scott Ketcham******
As the course has gone on, it has highlighted poetic techniques for creating some coherence in poems marked by the seeming randomness of their content. I think of the poems we've written each week as "collide-o-scopic"--the result of colliding elements that might not be found together in poems not guided by a poetics of bewilderment--and that, upon colliding, spark and illuminate. Both to read and to write such poems asks for openness to and even trust in uncertainty.

Dinner with Donald and Manuel
Despite my take-down of purpose above, I've enjoyed having a writing-related learning purpose
during this damp, gray January. So it seems right to be posting this on Donald Burroughs' birthday since literature and writing were so important to him as a teacher and a person. In fact, I wrote a poem for the course about a dream I had about Donald not too long ago. Maybe I'll share it one of these days.

* Adjacent graphic screen shot from the top of an essay by Lydia Wei appearing in The Stanford Daily on February 8, 2023. 
** Scott Ketcham's "Paired": https://www.scottketcham.com/post/737247742754242560/2025-paired-2023-30-x-22-oil-on-prepared-paper 
*** Etymonline (n.d.). Wilderness. In Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved January 28, 2024 from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=wilderness
**** Etymonline (n.d.). Bewilder. In Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved January 28, 2024 from https://www.etymonline.com/word/bewilder#etymonline_v_11100
***** Etymonline (n.d.). Enchant. In Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved January 28, 2024 from https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=enchant
****** Scott Ketcham's "Zippered Mates": https://www.scottketcham.com/post/737247864351309824/2027-zippered-mates-2023-24-x-36-oil-on-prepared

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Reflecting Back on Christmas Eve on New Year's Eve

So already, happy New Year's Eve Sunday. I've been reflecting a lot on change since Christmas Eve, which was last Sunday.

How much has to change before someone feeling surprised and betrayed by that change proclaims angrily or despondently, "Everything has changed"? I contend that though lots can change--including the person lamenting that everything has changed--seldom does everything change. That said, enough can change to make the world feel different and disorienting, even indifferent and disorienting--until what's changed becomes the normal and expected. For better or for worse.

I had been thinking about this on Christmas Eve day while I was taking a mid-afternoon stroll around my neighborhood. The afternoon was balmy and gray, and I suddenly realized that there had been many balmy Christmas Eve days in recent memory, a number of them gray, and that at some point along the way, I had ceased to consider them aberrations. 
 
In fact, I'd gone so far as to forget to hope for white Christmases. This even though in early December, a vigorous band of ocean-effect snow had transformed nearby Hingham and Norwell into ideal settings for every kind of holiday cheer, activity, and nostalgia.

Perhaps my failure to hope was a reflection of some of the sadder emotional adjustments I've had to make in recent years. My good friend Donald, who died in 2021, loved everything related to Christmas--holiday music, holiday movies, holiday weather, holiday foods, holiday decorations. We spent an immense amount of phone time detailing what we were cooking, listening to, and watching. I so miss those days and calls. Still, I don't think forgetting to hope for something beautiful, pleasurable, and evocative of happy times is ever a good thing, even if what's hoped for is a long shot.

As I mused on how I'd slipped into accepting the new normal of damp, temperate late December weather and Donald's absence, I recalled several other things I've adjusted to in the last few years: the knowledge that the voice I hear when I pick up my landline phone will never again belong to my father; the understanding that old, good friendships can go through phases when they feel less good and require lots of good faith effort to feel good again; the realization that the person with whom I most often need to spend more time when I'm plagued with feelings of indifference and disorientation is me--though I wouldn't act on that realization nearly so much were Scott not there to encourage me.

I was thinking about all of this while he and I were driving through the Cambridge neighborhood where I had lived for thirteen years in an apartment building next to the Graham and Parks Alternative School (which had been Peabody School when I lived there; schools change, too). We were heading to dinner in that same neighborhood at the home of a really good old friend--she and I have been confidants for more than forty years--at whose house I'd been a Christmas Eve guest at least twenty-five times.

This year, because my friend has had some health issues, her daughter was serving as both cook and hostess. It seemed the natural order of things that Christmas Eve dinner was changing in some ways and remaining the same in others: it had done so many times over the years.

At the earliest Christmas Eve dinners I attended, the only guest in addition to me was the Jewish friend of my friend's oldest daughter who, like me, understandably, didn't have family Christmas Eve plans. In the ensuing years, the group expanded, gradually at first to include a few others, and then in leaps and bounds with the addition of the recently widowed, the recently divorced, the children of both, and several others who didn't have their usual Christmas Eve places to go. Somehow, my friend always managed to make room at the inn and to keep the loaves and fishes multiplying when some invited guest appeared at the door with "someone else." 

Always, a group of teenage girls sequestered themselves in a bedroom, preferring one another's company to that of the old people in the living room. Eventually they became adults with homes of their own, and that, combined with other natural forces, caused the group to contract in size. What remained constant while my friend was the chief cook and baker, whether those assembled numbered ten or thirty, was the flaming plum pudding at dessert time. 

After saying thank you and good night at the conclusion of what had been a happy, festive, delicious, different Christmas Eve, Scott and I headed out into the night. And I thought about my old apartment building, which we'd driven by earlier. 

Most the apartments were dark, but on the top floor, yellow light shone in the windows of the apartment of a former friend of mine--if, in fact, she still even lives there. In the old days, before I moved to Quincy, she often expressed her resentment of the fact that I annually headed off to my other friend's Christmas Eve celebration while she stayed home alone. Eventually, she expressed too many similar resentments, most related to the fact that I had gotten married and then moved to a place that better suited both Scott and me. I couldn't continue a friendship that routinely punished me for the happy changes in my life. And I never looked back, though I still sometimes look up at those fourth-floor windows.
 
Sometimes, though, I wonder if she's changed over time, since people do. Maybe whoever now lives in the apartment with the brightly lit windows was hosting a festive Christmas Eve dinner for friends. And who knows? Maybe she was the person hosting that dinner. 
 
Happy New Year! May 2024 bring only the best changes for you personally and for the whole world, since it's bound to bring changes.

Friday, November 17, 2023

Luminous Darkness: Scott Ketcham's Recent Works

So already, first of all, let's just say--and say it loud--that Scott Ketcham's open studios are this weekend--yes, coming right up, on Saturday, November 18 and Sunday, November 19, both days from 12:00 to 5:00 at the Sandpaper Factory, 83 E. Water Street, Rockland, MA.
 
Let's also just say that I'm not sure what the painting above is or represents, but I am sure it's beautiful. Its explosiveness may or may not be menacing, but for certain it makes the painting undeniably alive.

Let's just say that usually the first or second weekend of November I publish a blog post that goes into some detail about Scott's latest work, especially as it reflects some emergent, unifying, compelling theme, method, palette, or subject matter that I manage to write "into a ball/ To roll . . . toward some overwhelming question." (I often quote from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in these blogs.)  This year, despite my resolve, time got away from me and no such lengthy, substantial blog post materialized.
 
Let's just say that the fact that this post pales in comparison to some of yesteryear's longer, more reflective blog posts does not mean that Scott's work pales in comparison to what he's shown in the past. Frankly, it's vibrant and very interesting.
 
Let's just say that Scott's tendency, as a person and a painter, has always been to embrace rather than to ignore or minimize darkness. He experiences it as rich, deep, fertile, and giving. Consequently, for him, it is almost always luminous. 

Let's just say that some of the luminous darkness Scott has been trying to render is literal. Scott does a fair amount of plein air painting when we visit our cabin in easternmost New York state, and one of his favorite subjects and spots is the shaded stream that runs through the woods close to our cabin. For a long time, he was dissatisfied with his efforts to convey the quality of light he experiences in the often shadowy, nearly hidden places he chooses along the stream. Only recently has Scott been beginning to feel that he's getting the light right.
 
Let's just say that when the subject of his paintings is a discernible human figure, luminosity can both emanate from it and surround it. In the drawing-like painting to the right--it's done in etching ink applied with a brush--the serene African-American woman exudes composure and certainty. Her temples and forearms glow in light from no particular source, given that she appears in no particular context or space. She holds tight to, even kisses, something wiry, delicate, perhaps formerly coiled, and most definitely mysterious. What is it? Might it bruise or tear her hands? Ultimately, persuaded by her inner light and the outer light around her, we trust her choice to love what she loves.

Let's just say when the subject is a human figure in a muscular relationship to a context or background, sometimes a space and sometimes a place, the figure often seems to be either emerging from or submerging in, even hurtling into, a darkness of undisclosed nature and origin. Often present in these paintings is intense blackness that devours light and then glows with it. But from whence comes this almost unworldly shimmering light, this luminosity?
 
Let's just say that, in part because the colors in some of these paintings also appear prominently in the images captured by the Hubbell telescope, I always  experience these paintings as expressions of the eternal and endless scheme of things and our certain place in it. Both light and luminosity come from a place where the scientific and the spiritual have never been separate. Thus, these paintings capture and radiate the numinous luminous, which holds, blesses, and births.
 
Let's just say that Scott's latest work is provocative, evocative, and downright beautiful. Come down to his studio this weekend to experience the luminous, or at least to see the his paintings, his drawings, and the light.