my name is edward van vliet

i have been reading my name is asher lev by chaim potok and i love it. it will definitely be one of the books i recommend to anyone who believes their calling is to be an artist. there are numerous great quotes about art and the artist's calling and the artist's place (responsibility?) within their own and the larger culture, but it's the relationships and conversations in this book that are truly moving as they explore the tensions between the calling of artist and the individual's cultural and religious context. i look forward to reading the sequel, the gift of asher lev. there is so much that resonated with me, and so many ideas to engage with. over the next few weeks i will be discussing some of these themes and my thoughts about them, as well as the questions they raised for me.

please join me.

some resources (for artists)

here are several resources that you might find useful if you are interested in the [visual] arts. they cover grants, calls for submissions, exhibition announcements and more on local, national and international levels. check them out. subscribe if you wish.

VAAA - the visual arts association of alberta has a great blog that lists exhibition announcements, calls for submissions, grant opportunities and more. from their website:

Visual Arts Alberta is a non-profit, Provincial Arts Service Organization (PASO) with a mission to promote and assist Alberta visual arts and artists, and provide a communication hub between members of the visual arts community and the general public. Additionally, it is the goal of Visual Arts Alberta to provide Alberta artists with current, vital information on arts opportunities locally, regionally, provincially, nationally and internationally to ensure that they are able to actively and knowledgeably participate in the broader visual arts world.

akimbo - another great way to gather information about exhibitions, lectures, job opportunities, publications, calls for submissions, etc. from their website:

Akimbo is a Toronto-based company that promotes contemporary visual art, video, new media and film locally, nationally and internationally via the internet. Established in November, 1999, Akimbo has built a subscriber base of more than 7,400 Canadian and international media and visual arts professionals and a client base of some of the country's most important galleries, museums, art institutions and film and video festivals.

AFAnewswire - the alberta foundation for the arts has the occasional email about grants and other opportunities. from the website:

The Foundation exists to fund, encourage, and support the development of arts as a valuable contributor to quality of life in Alberta, and to maintain and expand the AFA art collection as a strategic resource for all Albertans.

artdaily - an international compendium of exhibitions and institutions (and other art world activities such as auctions and new appointments). a treasure trove, really.

a triad of poems by nicholas samaras

Psalm as Frustration I Can Live With

I love the fierce wind outside my window

but know I would freeze in it.

I love the fierce wind from where I view it.

I love to wake and feel the presence of the Lord within.

I feel his presence only to lose it,

lose his presence only to feel it return.

I am seriousness which falls away from seriousness.

I control and lose control. I seize and lose my grasp,

don't see and glimpse again.

I ration the irrational. I dive into ecstasy

and love the Lord as long as I can bear,

as I love the fierce wind outside my window.

The Psalm of Your Face

Lord, let your face be lined.

Lord, let your hair be gray with patience.

Holy Father, let your cheeks be silver with long growth

as you put up with me and put up with me.

Lord, let your face be a blazon of parts

in which I can name you sufficient

to be seen in your unseen presence.

Lord, let your face be lined with the knowledge

of my sins. Let your brow be uncreased in forgiveness.

Lord, let your eyes be clear of lightning

and your foggy voice unbass itself of thunder.

Lord, let your face be lined

and your massive chest be peaceful in breathing,

the falling and rising that is my slow way to you.

The Psalm of Then

Then, the Lord heard me in the wilderness of my soul.

Then, the lost place of me became clear.

Then, I recognized distraction for what it is.

Then, I was freed from the desert of diversion.

Then, I was moved to the green oasis within me.

Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.

Then, I could cease the constant music in my head.

Then, I could move beyond myself and the noise of myself.

Then, I could hear the smallness of my own voice.

Then, the still voice of the Lord was as the depth of water.

Then, the lost place of me became clear as a cascade.

Then, I could hear the bass of my name.

Then, I heard the Lord in the wilderness of my soul.

Then, stillness and stillness and stillness sang.

Samaras, Nicholas. from IMAGE, Number 59. Seattle: Centre for Religious Humanism, 2008.

some songs of mercy

from one of my favourite books of poetry:

15.

This is the way we summon one another, but it is not the way we call upon the Name. We stand in rags, we beg for tears to dissolve the immovable landmarks of hatred. How beautiful our heritage, to have this way of speaking to eternity, how bountiful this solitude, surrounded, filled, and mastered by the Name, from which all things arise in splendour, depending one upon the other.

29.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, who made you a singer in his holy house forever, who has given you a tongue like the wind, and a heart like the sea, who has journeyed you from generation to generation to this impeccable moment of sweet bewilderment. Bless the Lord who has surrounded the traffic of human interest with the majesty of his law, who has given a direction to the falling leaf, and a goal to the green shoot. tremble, my soul, before the one who creates good and evil, that a man may choose among worlds; and tremble before the furnace of light in which you are formed and to which you return, until the time when he suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere. Bless the one who judges you with his strap and his mercy, who covers with a million years of dust those who say, I have not sinned. Gather me, O my soul, around your longing, and from your eternal place inform my homelessness, that I may bring you forth and husband you, and make the day a throne for your activity, and the night a tower for your watchfulness, and all my time your just dominion. Sing, my soul, to the one who moves like music, who comes down like steps of lightning, who widens space with the thought of his name, who returns like death, deep and intangible, to his own absence and his own glory. Bless the Lord, O my soul, draw down the blessing of authority, that you may invite me to uncover you, and hold you precious till I'm worn away, and we are refreshed, soul and shadow, refreshed and rested like a sundial standing in the night. Bless the Lord, O my soul, cry out toward his mercy, cry out with tears and song and every instrument, stretch yourself toward the undivided glory which he established merely as his footstool, when he created forever, and he made it-is-finished, and he signed the foundations of unity, and polished the atoms of love to shine back beams and paths and gates of return. Bless the Lord, O my soul. Bless his name forever.

47.

My soul finds its place in the Name, and my soul finds its ease in the embrace of the Name. I struggled with shapes and with numbers, and I carved with blade and brain to make a place, but I could not find a shelter for my soul. Blessed is the Name which is the safety of the soul, the spine and the shield of the innermost man, and the health of the innermost breath. I search the words that attend your mercy. You lift me out of destruction, and you win me my soul. You gather it out of the unreal by the power of your name. Blessed is the Name that unifies demand, and changes the seeking into praise. Out of the panic, out of the useless plan, I awaken to your name, and solitude to solitude all your creatures speak, and through the inaccessible intention all things fall gracefully. Blessed in the shelter of my soul, blessed is the form of mercy, blessed is the Name.

50.

I lost my way, I forgot to call upon your name. The raw heart beat against the world, and the tears were for my lost victory. But you are here. You have always been here. The world is all forgetting, and the heart is a rage of directions, but your name unifies the heart, and the world is lifted into its place. Blessed is the one who waits in the traveller's heart for his turning.

Cohen, Leonard. Songs of Mercy. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1984.

a crucifixion and a mysterion

Crucifixion

You understand the colors on the hillside have faded,

we have the gray and brown and lavender of late autumn,

the apple and pear trees have lost their leaves, the mist

of November is often with us, especially in the afternoon

and toward evening, as it was today when I sat gazing

up into the orchard for a long time the way I do now,

thinking of how I died last winter and was revived.

And I tell you I saw there a cross with a man nailed

to it, silvery in the mist, and I said to him: "Are you

the Christ?" And he must have heard me, for in his

agony, twisted as he was, he nodded his head affirmatively,

up and down, once and twice. And a little way off

I saw another cross with another man nailed to it,

twisting and nodding, and then another and another,

ranks and divisions of crosses straggling like exhausted

legions upward among the misty trees, each cross

with a silvery, writhing, twisting, nodding, naked

figure nailed to it, and some of them were women.

The hill was filled with crucifixion. Should I not be

telling you this? Is it excessive? But I know something

about death now, I know how silent it is, silent, even

when the pain is shrieking and screaming. And tonight

is very silent and very dark. When I looked I saw

nothing out there, only my own reflected head nodding

a little in the window glass. It was as if the Christ

had nodded to me, all those writhing silvery images

on the hillside, and after a while I nodded back to him.

Carruth, Hayden. "Crucifixion" The Best American Poetry 1990. Toronto: Collier Macmillan Canada, Inc., 1990.

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion

What our habit has attained for us appears

a somewhat meager view of mystery.

And Latinate equivalents have fared

no better tendering the palpable

proximity of dense noetic pressure.

More familiar, glib, and gnostic bullshit

aside, the loss the body suffers when

sacrament is pared into a tiny

picture postcard of absent circumstance

starves the matter to a moot result, no?

Mysterion is of a piece, enormous

enough to span the reach of what we see

and what we don't. The problem at the heart

of metaphor is how neatly it breaks down

to this and that. Imagine one that held

entirely across the play of image

and its likenesses. Mysterion is

never elsewhere, ever looms, indivisible

and here, and compasses a journey one

assumes as it is tendered on a spoon.

Receiving it, you apprehend how near

the Holy bides. You cannot know how far.

Cairns, Scott. "Adventures in New Testament Greek: Mysterion" New & Selected Poems. Lincoln, Nebraska: Zoo Press, 2002.