God

 

"There are moments when music is to me the very presence and magnificence of God. Pure ecstatic being flows forth, an ethereal fount to refresh the weary soul. My tattered spirit drinks with gratitude this morning, as fog billows through the towers of Midtown.

How is it that I am so blessed to be able to sit here contemplating the mystery of being, as I hear this purifying music, in the elegance of this high office? I hope my meditations will one day offer others recompense for this Epicurean Ataraxia. "

Journal 42: December 15, 1990 

(Written in the Library of the High Museum, which I designed, and decorated with furniture from the Decorative Arts collection, five flights above Peachtree Street, facing the Richard Meier building. It no  longer exists, alas.)

After viewing several art gallery openings with Darryl in Manhattan, I wrote,

"The best show by far, better than the contemporary art, was the show of Egon Schiele watercolor, gouache, and crayon studies of himself, his wife, other portraits, and children. The emaciated, powerful, multi-colored  figures, many nude, stared from the gallery walls with a presence missing from the works of the contemporary art we saw.

January 13, 1991

Reading my Journals from the early 1990s is more moving and rewarding than I expected. It is stepping back into the world then, stepping back into my prior person to experience him with all the immediacy and the passion. I post the two short quotes above for a reason; then, I was so aware that if god had any meaning, we find it not in church, but in art. I think I still believe that, god is manifest in gorgeous music, in painting, in literature, in dance. God is not some bearded old man full of judgment, not even a he or she, but rather the enduring beauty, the sublime manifestation of our collective spirit in, say, Mozart's 24th piano concerto, or Egon Schiele's self portraits. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5umKzcLwHPQ

Mozart's 24th played by Glenn Gould.

Red Glove

Darryl and I had this print of Schiele's study of himself in our living room for many years.