Daily Archives: May 28, 2011

Art and Culture

Artists Speak

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Beltane                                                                                     Waning Last Frost Moon

Loving art requires time and attentiveness, just as any relationship does.  An additional, more important impact of my visit to the Walker struck me after I finished the last post.

In the encounter with a work of art we can bring any level of ourSelf.  The Walker, at the moment more powerfully than the MIA, allows me to visit objects with what Paul Ricoeur calls second naivete. I can visit them with the knowledge I’ve gained over the last 10 years at the MIA, yet experience them fresh, with beginner’s mind, yet, even with beginner’s mind I also have the other, more experienced me accessible, too.

This creates a wonderful frisson, a magical moment in which the artist speaks to me through the work, not through its content, but through its creation, and in that act of creation emboldens me to create, to stretch out, to confound my highest hopes by yet higher ones, not for fame or money, but for expressive power, for a work that can do for another what these works did for me.

So, I come away from an afternoon like this with energy borrowed from these artists and transformed within me.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics

A Sucker. One Born Every Minute.

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Beltane                                                         Waning Last Crescent Moon

So.  Last Wednesday I drove into Minneapolis for the last regular legcom meeting of this year.  We’d been going at it since January, once a week, with all the prep work and other matters (legislative hearings, visits to legislators, conferences, boning up on the issues) and everybody would, I know, be ready for a rest.

First, though, I had to pick up Wanda Davies at Victoria and County Road C in Roseville.  In my rush to get out the door I oriented myself toward the street I knew that intersected with County Road C, Snelling Avenue.  That was how I ended up waiting in the parking lot of the Holiday station.

While I was waiting, a woman in a disheveled Whiskey Sour Notes t-shirt approached me.  Her car had blown a tire on the road.  The trooper gave her two hours to move it and she needed to get a can of the stuff that inflates your tire.  She’d found somebody to take her out there after she’d bought it, but the total was $50.00.  She had skin lesions on her face that in retrospect may have been meth craters, though her teeth looked good.

Anyhow I reached in my wallet, gave her the $50 I had plus my name and address.  She said she’d repay me.  When I told Kate, she said, “You’re always a sucker for a hard-luck story.”  Yeah, I am.

As I’ve reflected on it now, her anxiety, which was real, might have been a drug jones as much as worry about her vehicle.  I don’t know.  Even so, I’d rather risk being wrong than refuse an authentic plea for help.  It’s only money.

Oh.  Yes, I did pick up Wanda after a phone call or two and we had the meeting.  And were glad to be finished with the session.