My Egypt by Charles Demuth

Generating Gratitude

posted in: Culture, Society, Spiritual | 0

By now, millions of us are feeling the stresses of a new decade ahead even as we stay home in lockdown. But life goes on as usual for many. Yesterday, I went to check the mail, and saw my friend Al across the street seemingly returning from a walk. We yelled greetings over the traffic, and would have said more but traffic was so steady, we gave up. Perhaps expected to be grateful for what little encounter we had.

My primary shortcoming in this life is gratitude. Having lived a full life, I’m not really very thankful. And it’s paying off lately, trapped at home, in memories of better days, memories that are hollow offerings, as I can’t go back. I’m realizing just how much of Lot’s wife is in me that I never really knew, in attitude. Charles Demuth knew, and shared what he knew in My Egypt.

My Egypt by Charles Demuth. Property of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Here’s what the Whitney Museum of American Art has to say about Demuth’s startling piece:

My Egypt depicts a steel and concrete grain elevator belonging to John W. Eshelman & Sons in Charles Demuth’s hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Painted from a low vantage point, the structure assumes a monumentality emphasized by the inclusion of the lower rooftops of neighboring buildings (suggesting the more traditional architecture of smaller family farms) at the bottom of the painting. In Demuth’s image, the majestic grain elevator rises up as the pinnacle of American achievement—a modern day equivalent to the monuments of ancient Egypt. A series of intersecting diagonal planes add geometric dynamism add a heavenly radiance to the composition, invoking the correlations between industry and religion that were widespread in the 1920s. Nonetheless, Demuth may have intended the title to allude to the slave labor that built the pyramids, intimating the dehumanizing effect of industry on the nation’s workers. Moreover, the pyramids and their association with life after death might also have appealed to the ailing artist, who was bedridden with diabetes at the time of the painting’s execution.

But Demuth isn’t in a situation where he “may have” an intent, and the intent of the copy above which is beneath the image on the museum’s website is wrong. At least, partly. We don’t have a historical account that attributes the Hebrews as slaves in Egypt building “the pyramids” but we do have a written record of the Hebrews as slaves left to wander in the desert for 40 years while yearning for a return to slavery. Nonetheless.

That’s what Demuth felt. I was born a short distance from Demuth’s home in Lancaster, well a few miles as the crow flies, in Harrisburg, and my boyhood was spent in Pennsylvania. Even as an adult, I owned a home a few hours from Lancaster, and had a modeling agent based in Lancaster who got me jobs for more than a decade. So much for which to be thankful in just those few sentences.

Lancaster is the heart of the Bible Belt in Pennsylvania. Think Witness with Harrison Ford and the Amish. Demuth was heavily influenced by the rampant religious culture of his home, he could not help but be. Even the Whitney notes the “heavenly radiance” in his painting, which is no doubt a reference by Demuth to the “cloud by day” and “fire by night” that accompanied the Hebrews who wandered the desert for 40 years after being freed from slavery in Egypt. God shines down on Demuth’s Egypt, on the Hebrew slaves, and on my Egypt.

But God has expectations on being freed from Egypt, and desire to return is not one of them. Those Hebrews suffered in that desert, and the Apostle Paul says they did so partly so that we might learn from them. They suffered for their ingratitude, ungratefulness. Wanting to be back with the “leeks” instead of with the manna they were provided, they brought malaise upon themselves. They grew dull in that desert. Bored with living. Disenchanted.

Disenchantment. It’s a mysterious place to be. A desert of the heart. Parched, sleepy, and lonely. It’s not that nothing helps, it’s that disenchantment doesn’t care if it’s helped. It’s over it. It’s apathy run amok. Not in the sense that it’s time to break a pandemic lockdown, but in the sense that lockdowns don’t really matter. There’s nothing to break.

According to the Whitney, Demuth suffered from diabetes. He knew debilitation. He knew non-debilitation from healthier days that one would long to return to, to own again. Heaven has its perks, but the silos bursting with grains call us. Technologies beckon. We want more to pile on our more. It’s never enough.

But the problem is that we aren’t even grateful for all that we’ve had before, let along what’s coming. And that’s the rub. What was coming for Demuth, what’s coming for me, what’s coming for you, is a state of immeasurable loss. What’s there to be thankful for?

Everything. All of it. Every waking moment, every next breath. We don’t understand it, we didn’t ask for it, but we’re in it. When the memory worms in to seduce, I’m renewing my mind to be thankful I had it, not yearning to return to it. And when it’s unrelenting, bombardment of former days and great loss, I’m thankful I had those moments that led up to the loss. No, I’m not happy about loss. I’m looking for renewal. Loss leads to newness. Can I bring my dead pets back? No. Were we wonderful together? Yes. All the lost faces and relationships? Gone. But a prayer goes up for those who live yet come to mind.

Speaking of pets, this is Riley. Riley is a stray that has lived in the neighborhood for at least four years. Riley has a lump on the mouth, making eating difficult. Riley stayed on the porch for several weeks while I took care of her, unable to bring her in as we have three cats already. So Riley stays outside.

You may not see it, but Riley loves me. She’s loving me through that the gaps in her metal mesh chair. Riley is a sweetheart. She’s grateful each and every moment. I don’t give her everything she wants or needs. But I loved her back to health recently. Yes, I feel guilty not giving her an inside home.

Despite circumstances, obstacles, and shortcomings, we connect, perhaps realizing we are grateful for one another. I love Riley. Do I need her? I don’t know. Maybe I do. I’m grateful she’s alive. She’s a Godsend. I want to give her a permanent home, make her life easier.

Our neighbor cut down all the trees and foliage on his property, and that means the morning glory vines we shared between us were hacked off to nothing but a few loose vines. It was a bad decision on his part that affected others, including birds and squirrels that relied on that greenery. One squirrel, especially, has been, well, squirrely, knocking plants from the balcony and eating what it can get of the birdseed.

It’s been a few weeks, and the morning glories are back with a vengeance. Bursting forth in unison, in harmony, almost in gratitude. They learned the hard way. As did Demuth. As do I. Renewing the mind for gratitude strikes at the heart of living a wonderful life. it’s relief. And it’s worth it.

Professional Provocateurs and Their Raging Discontents

posted in: Culture, Media, Society | 0

One highly active media character who defies recognition is the professional provocateur. While the start of this character depiction in the U.S. political system can be traced back to one seminal figure in the 1980s: Newt Gingrich, who early in his televised career learned how to manipulate mass media with a mere suggestion, it’s the quiet, unchallenged sand undetected spread of the provocateur phenomenon that is a real threat today.

Two years ago at this time, during the run up to the critical 2018 mid-term election, Gingrich popped up on television screens with the claim that he had one word for the moment that was going to dominate the discourse: caravans. Donald Trump appeared in news stories at the time parroting the same rhetoric.

METHOD

1. Throw it on the table. 

2. Leave it there.

3. Never return to it.

The goal of the provocateur is not to provide answers or get into debate. The goal is to take something without question, and make it questionable by throwing it on the table. Generally, the questionable item has no viable answer, which allows for perpetual pondering and endless guesswork on the part of the receiver. 

The goal of the provocateur is not to be liked. Being liked is symptomatic and negligible. The mission is to get attention, hold attention, and expand that attention across mass media platforms by promoting rage.

FIRST AMENDMENT

2020, There’s No Place Like Home

posted in: Culture, Photography, Society, Spiritual | 1

The plague wildly crashed into Center City Philadelphia like a runaway freight train. It had no name. Only the face of fear, and tentacles of terror. Gay men living in Philadelphia were its deadly target. All we knew was that city ambulances were rushing gay men to local hospitals, by the hundreds, and they weren’t checking out. If you were a gay man, if you were in Philadelphia, if it was 1981 or had already turned into 1982, you had every expectation, on a perpetual daily and nightly basis, that at any given moment, you would go for a final ride in a screaming ambulance headed to the hospital, and would die. 

Yet, my dates are misleading. While the initial hit was the sudden shock, there were many years the plague went on unaddressed, as an unknown, largely because it was called a “gay disease” and as such, considered a death sentence only on those who were gay, and, especially, sexually active. Most of the heterosexual population in the US didn’t consider this plague a threat that could touch them, so they left it to struggling scientists and dying gay men to work their problem out in their own little world. 

Until it spread. Until hemophiliacs were dying. Drug users were dying. Dentists were dying. Heterosexuals and bisexuals who flirting intimately with the gay community started dying. Then celebrities started to die. It became clear, the newly designated Acquired Immunity Deficiency Syndrome was acquired through blood, as it received its official, medical, dread acronym: AIDS.

Just the mention of AIDS in the early 1980s raised an instant specter of fear. Societal fear of AIDS itself was expectantly justified. After all, for years, we knew very little about the deadly virus, other than, if you were diagnosed with it, you would die. For several years there was no test, so there was in a sense, no actual personal barometer, except its terrible symptoms, which were a definite death sentence. Where American society went wrong was its self-righteous judgmental attitude towards gays.

In late autumn of 1982, I moved into an apartment with my favorite cousin. Earlier in the year, I had left my apartment on Christian Street in Philadelphia, six blocks off the decadent South Street of lyrical fame, and gone home to see my parents for a bit. Young and aimless, I moved in with Gary, who lived in Thorndale, a suburban community at the end of Philadelphia’s Main Line, outside Downingtown. I brought what little possessions I had to Gary’s place, setting myself up in a lovely, little sunroom he had. The most important thing I brought to my cousin’s little sanctuary was my constant fear: AIDS.

Gary and I were only a year apart. He had a typical bachelor pad, sparsely decorated, with no serious influence from his girlfriend at the time. I took a waiter job at a restaurant. Life was even, and relatively uneventful. Except for bedtime, when I would say the “Our Father” that I learned in Roman Catholic grade school. I’d say it really, really fast because I wasn’t religious, and planned to keep it that way. But I needed someone to hear it and know I was terrified every night as I fearfully tried to sleep.

I was never a good Catholic boy. Being Irish-Italian, the religion was splashed all over my childhood. I was fortunate to leave private school for public school in the third grade. My stepfather was an Episcopalian, my mother had joined Armstrongism at the time. When I was seven, my cousin Elaine tortured me with relentless tickling. Too small to get out from under her, when I did, I threw a fork at her. She made me go to confession. A priest heard my story, asked me if I wanted to go to Hell, and that day when I left his presence, I permanently left Catholicism. But I said my little ‘Lord’s Prayer” every night before bed, trying to peacefully sleep though the high possibility and risk of AIDS in Thorndale.

One Sunday night in November, Gary was out, and I was ironing my clothes for work the next day. I turned on the TV. Every turn of the dial was nothing but evangelical preachers. Frustrated, I let the dial stop on a woman preacher I had previously passed, but in the end decided, as a woman preacher, she would have to be the least threatening of the bunch.

The preacher was Gloria Copeland. Preaching out of Hebrews 9. Her words were sharp, pointed, and clear: How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? It made no sense, but I heard in  that verse, more distinctly than anything I ever heard in my life, two words that struck me: dead works.

I sat on the sofa. Dead works. My life was nothing but dead works. I realized in that moment, I had nothing of lasting value, only residue from pleasures in life I had pursued for myself. If ever anyone had dead works, I knew that person very, very well. I called my sister and rattled on about what I had just heard, so profoundly, how amazing it was that I learned my entire life was nothing but dead works.

The next day was windy. Pennsylvania autumn windy. On went the TV. Some show called The 700 Club was wrapping up with two guys talking. The one named Ben peered at me through the screen. I prayed with him. The end of his prayer became the beginning of mine. We had a tarp on the balcony over the firewood. During my prayer the tarp whipped wildly through the air, thrashing about, throughout my prayer. I heard it, and can hear it to this day, as a mighty, rushing wind. I took a walk, and for the next two and a half hours, talked to Jesus, about everything, in windy, sunny Thorndale.

I shared my experience at work. A girl there said I had been born again. I said I didn’t know what that meant, but if it had something to do with God, let’s be clear, I’m not giving up sex and alcohol. I shared with Gary. Though I had not paid attention while living with him, he had a Bible sitting on the coffee table in front of the TV. Gary looked me in the face and said two words: “Read John.” I read John, then returned to Gary. “Read Job.” I read Job. So God loves me and I’m cast in an invisible war.

At night, I began to listen to a radio preacher out of Philadelphia. Her big thing for people who called into her show was, seriously, aloe vera juice. That was her spiritual prescription. I would not get to follow it until living in California more than 15 years later. Health-wise, she was onto something. But the specter of AIDS never left. While I had gotten down on my knees for spiritual purposes, and had begun to believe that God could heal, the mental torment of ‘What if?’ was always on a back burner.

And then it happened. I brought my AIDS terror up with God. Somewhere in my spirit, in the midst of a calm, I heard and understood: “If you’re right with me, AIDS doesn’t matter. I am bigger than AIDS.” It was then that I realized my future was in good hands, whether I were to die from the dread plague, or were I to live to hold onto its specter for dear life while someday proclaiming: I am bigger than AIDS.

That revelation helped me cope better with the personal threat of AIDS, but the disease had too many unknown variables. I left Thorndale before the year was out and moved home, where I daily read my Bible and, within six months, adjusted my self-destructive attitude and behavior. In 1983, I became a Christian broadcaster at a radio station that used Associated Press. News of AIDS was continual. I had to confront it with wire rewrites and sketchy fears they presented. Even if I could cope personally, what about my family? We knew little of its spread, even two years in. I needed to protect my loved ones.

So I went to a hospital for a test. A pastor friend accompanied me. The hospital staff said they had no test, and then proceeded per their protocol. I was sent into a bathroom for a urine sample, and can’t remember if they drew blood, largely because my concerns suddenly had a new terror dimension attached to them. The container I had been given had AIDS printed on it. I suddenly realized, in horror, that because there was no known test, anyone who showed up at the hospital with genuine concern was treated as if they had it. That person was subject to procedures, bathroom facilities, staff, treating AIDS.

The AP wire clacking away in the newsroom brought up repeated news about medical progress in identifying AIDS, and each report added to my fears. That first year as a broadcaster was tempered by my spiritual growth, yet not without its sorrows. One afternoon, I was giving my hourly newscast, and the main story coming over the wire was a multi-vehicle accident outside Philadelphia dubbed “the worst accident in Pennsylvania turnpike history.” Three people were killed in early morning rush hour traffic when a truck jumped a guardrail in severe weather conditions. One of them was Gary.   

Nearly 40 years later, the plague is back. Only now, it’s not just for gay men. It’s here for everyone.

But God is bigger than a coronavirus, bigger than COVID-19. He is bigger than all our fears. I learned nearly 40 years ago that there’s a God who can, and will, if we let him, spin our horrors into wonders. He is not silent. He is not angered in present judgment. God is grace, peace, and requisite comfort in a time of unrelenting sadness and fear. In times like these, despite the well-intentioned and caring love of our families and communities, despite our political differences and persuasions, despite our ignorance, negligence and recklessness, all Christians are called to be fearless, compassionate, and responsible. 

So history is repeating, and more so for the Church, yet now it’s closer to home. Added to the horror of dying by AIDS, and its stigma, was the decision that only ‘family’ members be permitted access to a hospitalized patient. That meant gay people in committed relationships had to let their lifelong partner die alone. This was both, a disturbing scenario in the classic Philadelphia film, and what led to the consequential fight for equal rights, or gay marriage. It’s now worse, as, apart from technological connections not present during the AIDS crisis, everyone intimately connected to a hospitalized loved one must grieve in exacerbated sorrow, as access to a hospital bedside is denied due to the contagion.

Churches are closed all around the world this coming Easter, and rightfully so. Organizations that permit public assembly for religious activities endanger their communities and spread coronavirus. If ever there were cause to responsibly apply Romans 13:1 to yield to authorities who are there for our good, this is the time. Right now, millions of people across the globe, in every nation and of every tongue, are paralyzed by fear…fear of the mystery, of a deadly virus stalking the earth that rapidly, indiscriminately selects its helpless victims. 

And right now, the God who created each of us patiently waits, with open arms, for each of us to realize there’s really only one place each of us can trustfully turn in a tragic time of calamity. And that’s to the One who gets worshiped around this sick world on Easter in word and song, yet is not resident in every heart. God found me almost 40 years ago exactly where I was supposed to be. Not in a church, but at home.

For some reason, only known to God, in the midst of what is now a tragic, catastrophic nationwide experience together, that’s where He will find all of us this coming Easter, as we stay home.

Ms. Joan Simmons

Ms. Joan Simmons

posted in: Culture, Photography, Society | 0

One of the more impressionable people I met in Savannah, before I even moved here, was Ms. Joan Simmons. What’s especially interesting is that Joan is the most photogenic person I know.  She is always ready for the camera and always remarkably expressive in that presence. I expect to add more photos of Joan taken over the years to this post as a small gallery tribute.

Bring on the Bokeh

posted in: Photography | 0

Amateur and professional photographers don’t just buy and use lenses for their clarity and sharpness. Enter the bokeh. Simply put, bokeh (pronounced BOH-ke) is the rather neglected area outside the sharp focal point. This area may be as intriguing as the intended, focused object and can often subtly enhance an already itriguing photograph.

Queer Fruits & Veggies

posted in: Photography | 0

Not everything that belongs together fits together. Yet, often, things that are seemingly, radically different may share the same stage. While not in the habit of refrigerating fresh fruit or items in the onion family, these two distant friends found their way into the same lovely bowl; if, for no other reason, a test snapshot. There’s something philosophical here, but not taking time to explore that yet.

Analog Marries Digital

posted in: Photography | 0

This gorgeous old C.Z. Jena 58mm f/2 lens retrofitted to my Nikon D200 is fabulous. All images on steve.ws by this date were taken with this exhilarating collaboration except this lens shot, of course, taken with a Yashinon-DS 50mm f/1.9 retrofit to the D200.