The King is in the Color Field

So already, this morning, I enthusiastically turned the pages of all of my calendars* to September, part of my ritual reorientation of myself to the end of summer as someone who has generally spent a lifetime going to school the day after Labor Day. It's very strange not to be going to school tomorrow. It doesn't feel wonderful, as I hoped it would. I've simply replaced a familiar anxious feeling with an unfamiliar one. The good news is that both varieties of anxiety share elements of hope and possibility. The bad news is that "hope and possibility" keep alternating with little jabs of "terror of the unknown."

But the other good news is that another new month has just recently begun: 1 Elul on the Jewish calendar was last Wednesday, August 27. And so, as I did last year, I am beginning to prepare for the Jewish High Holidays with the guidance of 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays by Simon Jacobson.**

Some Background
All of that said, the real purpose of this blog post is to share a spiritual experience I had the other night while my husband Scott and I were out in Berlin, New York at our cabin. So my more immediate reason for talking about 60 Days is some of its content is significant for my night-time tale. So is the fact that on the day of that night-time experience, Scott and I visited the renovated Clark Art Institute. A word about each of these official contexts.

In 60 Days' introductory materials, I came across an idea that comforted me much last year: Elul is "the month when the 'King is in the field and receives all people pleasantly and with a smiling countenance'" (Jacobson, 5). Since I continue to struggle with how to talk to G-d, the fact that G-d is especially inclined to listen helps me continue to try. As the Chabad web site explains,

"In Likkutei Torah [footnote #5], the Alter Rebbe describes the tightening of the bond between G‑d and the Jewish people in the month of Elul with the following parable:

Before a king enters his city, its inhabitants go out to greet him and receive him in the field. At that time, anyone who so desires is granted permission [and can] [footnote #6] approach him and greet him. He receives them all pleasantly, and shows a smiling countenance to all . . .

". . . In going out to the field, the king makes himself accessible to his people. It is the people, however, who take the step of turning to him."***

The Clark Art Institute has been redesigned to take advantage of the museum's setting on its hilly, beautiful natural "campus" that offers a large reflecting pool adjacent to the new building and a number of walking trails that, for all intents and purposes, leave the museum behind. The two "special exhibits" we saw, one in the brand new Clark Center and one in the slightly older Lunder Center at Stone Hill, were especially moving and memorable because of the way they take advantage of the museum's natural setting, offering exterior views and supplementing artificial light with natural light when doing so "does right" by the works so lit.

In fact, Scott and I saw many of the paintings in the Clark Center exhibit, "Make It New: Abstract Painting from the National Gallery of Art 1950-1975," in Washington D.C. two years ago, but they didn't speak to me then as they did last week. Why I felt personal narrative crying out this time when last time all I saw was passionate technique and experimentation, I just don't know. The adjacent Frank Stella painting, "Delta,"**** which

wasn't at the National Gallery, especially called out to me: perhaps because its repeated shapes seemed to form a candelabra, even a menorah, a symbol of liberation from darkness; perhaps because its repeated shapes also seemed to form a corrugated iron fence, a dark image of oppression, and I've been feeling in a dark place; perhaps because "Delta" often symbolizes change, and this year has been about desired but uneasy change. 

All of that said, if I'd seen this painting at another time, I suspect I would have wondered silently, "Why did the artist want to do this?" That's the question I always seemed to ask about paintings that seemed to be just about pattern or just about color. But this time I saw nuances in both color and pattern and felt engaged rather than put off.

And now, my night-time experience
Last Friday night, I woke up in the middle of the night, and knew immediately that I was wide awake and was going to be up for a while. 

Despite Scott's and my having had such an inspiring visit to the Clark Art Institute, I was feeling uneasy, strangely homeless, alienated from my usual comforts and purposes. As a result, I couldn't conjure the images and fantasies that sometimes get me through at least some part of a "dark night of the soul": my usual images and fantasies seemed to belong to someone else's life, not mine. 

The problem was that once I jettisoned those images and fantasies, I was left with nothing but blankness--not so much the stark whiteness of a page, but a kind of floating neutral not-light, not-dark grayness. Confronted by that grayness, not threatening but not inviting, not cold but not warm, just there in all its nondescript neutrality, I just felt flatly, powerlessly sad, incapable of any kind of escape, incapable of generating anything that might distract me from that matter-of-fact, steady grayness.*****

Then I heard the owl--maybe it was the orange-headed owl that had startled me that afternoon when it took flight from the tree closest to our cabin's front door. It was somewhere in the valley: maybe at the far end of our field, maybe across the brook, maybe perched in any one of the trees across the road and up the hill. It floated its "hoo-oo" five or six times across the faintly humming darkness that is Berlin, making me newly happy with each calm, measured repetition. Scott moved, and I became aware that was he had heard the owl and had enjoyed hearing it, too. I also understood that my sadness could vanish in an instant.

I stayed up for a long time after that. With my eyes open, not my usual sleepless practice. I looked up at the open window in the wall above our bed and could see night--from my perspective, a smoky gray-brown trapezoid, framed by an darker, more opaque gray-brown window frame and wall. The two distinct gray-browns, the soft edges of the lighter trapezoid and its frame, the faint luminosity of the window, and the slight variations in the dark gray-brown of the wall reminded me of the "color field" paintings I'd seen at the Clark earlier that morning. So I just kept staring at the gray-brown-against-gray-brown above me.******

Suddenly, I saw the Helen Frankenthaler purple- and yellow-dominated painting******* that I'd seen that morning hanging on a wall in the Clark as an exemplar of "Color Field" painting. In my mind's eye, the painting was hanging on a white wall next to a large floor-to-ceiling window with a view of trees--like the windows in the sculpture building in which David Smith's circle sculptures, some or them placed as he had placed them on his Adirondack farm, were on display. At the Clark, these sculptures were inside, but everything about the exhibition space itself--its plentiful natural light, large windows, and wooded views--and the arrangement of the sculpture and paintings in it suggested that we were outside. 

But it wasn't a painting and a window alone that I was seeing in my mind's eye. In addition to those Clark-inspired elements, my imagination conjured a long, bare wooden table, resting on which were a pad of paper and the forearm of someone poised to write on it.

In its sparse harmony, its orientation outward, its pristine quiet, my image felt expressive of me. The person to whom the forearm belonged was alone, and view, or views, from the window pointed toward the expansive and infinite, not toward the centered, the drawn-in and finite, that's often associated with "hearth and home." 

Curious about this "looking out" propensity I often feel, I remembered how much I had liked several Sylvia Plimouth Mangold paintings that I saw at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts many years ago, so much so that I bought a book so I could keep looking at "5 A.M. in January, 1979" and "Untitled, 1979" (pictured here********). My favorite Mangold paintings evoked dawn on winter's coldest, stillest mornings and reminded me of how much I liked waking up early in Cambridge and looking at the apartment building across the street where one illuminated window told me a fellow early-riser was already beginning the ritual of the day, though the sky was still blue-black. So many of my homiest images are of the individual, alert and awake and purposeful, while the rest of the world does what it does somewhere else. Such comfort in the cold, alone stillness; hardly a Hallmark moment!

I thought again about the owl, who'd been silent for a while. Or maybe he'd gone elsewhere. In my mind was the field in the still night and the owl somewhere, alert and watching. Like the King in the Field, watching, listening. In the beautiful sunlight of late August, I easily think of our Berlin field as a place G-d could be standing, waiting, listening, crowned in the gold of all the goldenrod, cooled in the lengthening shadows of the trees. But I wasn't used to thinking of the King being in the field at night--and there wasn't any reason that He shouldn't be. And maybe the King was in the color field.

So I began looking at the muted gray-brown of the open window, imagining  the owl somewhere at the edge of the field or the valley, and G-d out there, the King in the darkened field, the King in any field and every field, all day and all night. 

I thought to myself, "Well, if he's out there, I should try to pray." But I'm not good at praying. And I was struggling to remember all three things 60 Days directed regarding prayer.********* I could remember that I needed to have courage, and I could remember that I needed to express my feelings, which could mean asking for what I really needed, really wanted. So I kept my eyes open, looking at the open window, and I found myself saying that I needed to know where to direct my heart. I was surprised I asked about my heart, but I knew immediately I'd actually asked the right question. This was about the heart, about the inclination of my heart. I had moved away from asking "what should I do with my time?" to asking "what should I do with my heart?"

The minute I said it, I began to think more about Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor. Actually, I had already been thinking about it because I had made a deliberate decision to keep my eyes open and see the dark, but I now focused on Taylor's discussion of James Fowler's ideas about belief, faith, and trust in Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning. The inclinations of the heart are so important. The Talmud calls prayer "service of the heart."********** But knowing and speaking our hearts isn't easy.

The saying goes that "home is where the heart is." But homes are only places if people don't bring their hearts into them. Which doesn't mean that homes can't help to cultivate hearts or to restore them when they're injured or broken. Perhaps home is that toward which the heart yearns, or maybe home is the yearning heart itself if all it can do is wander the world. Given that I come from a religious background in which exile and wandering are chronic experiences, I believe that on some level, home and heart can be portable. The world has too many highways, paths, dark corridors, and darker streets***********; and is too filled with refugees, wanderers, homeless people, exiles, and other displaced and marginalized persons and peoples for it to be otherwise. That said, we all do better when we have someplace that's home, even if we spend more time looking out of the windows than immersed in a perfect sense of belonging around the hearth.

Since Friday, I've been keeping my eye on fields--color fields, natural fields. The one at the right, photographed last Saturday, borders Route 2 in Williamstown, and proclaims in every season that Creation is spectacular. But after my experience of watching darkness deliberately and having the courage to pray, versus almost pray, I'm reminding myself that the King is in the field. Still feels funny to hear myself say that, but I'm saying it, and I'm getting more used to saying it.

And one more thing: I've promised myself to remember how, on that night of flat, calmly expanding grayness, when I felt sad but not scared, the call of the owl banished my sadness completely and filled me with joy. I know owls are nocturnal hunters, but given my experiences of last Friday night, I'm now thinking of the Berlin owl as my "bird of pray," a reminder that some kinds of sadness may be habits rather than unshakable feelings. Luckily, I rediscovered in my cupboard a small ceramic owl and positioned him in my bedroom window for future sleepless nights. There will be some!

* Screen shot of <http://www.amazon.com/Appalachian-Trail-2014-Wall-Calendar/dp/0789326264>
**Jacobson, Simon. 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays. 2nd Revised ed. New York: Kiyum, 2008. Print.
*** From the Chabad web site:<http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/155856/jewish/The-King-in-the-Field.htm>
*(4) Screen shot of blog post: <http://mattmignanelli.tumblr.com/post/23481863018/frank-stella-delta-l-m-arts-nyc>
*(5) Screen shot of <http://d2085470.u310.surftown.se/images/gray04.jpeg> 
*(6) Screen shot of <http://www.burningsmile.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/jodyeyes1.jpg?w=300

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*(7) Screen shot of Helen Frankenthaler's "Wales": <http://cdn.artsnapper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/helen-frankenthaler-wales-1966-national-gallery-of-art-washington-dc.jpg>
*(8) Screen shot of "Untitled, 1979": <http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu/images/full/1985.3682.jpg>
*(9) Jacobson,161-163.
*(10) <http://iyyun.com/teachings/prayer-service-of-the-heart>
*(11) Screen shot "Heart of Darkness" by Scott Ketcham from <http://www.scottketcham.com/post/96305011977/44-heart-of-darkness-2000-2009-40x46-oil>