Kerstin

 

November 19, 2021

Sang for Kerstin’s memorial service at the Cathedral. She was one of ten or so full and solid artists I’ve known in my life, and a saintly person as well. Her daughter said she had great respect for me. Her beautiful banners and vestments thronged the sanctuary. 

Two young bears crossed Biltmore in front of me. They must have been on the hospital campus. They made it, but just barely. I wonder if we could build those wildlife bridges for them over the busier city streets, or teach them to use the crosswalks.

L says if J’s dad doesn’t die in the next two days they won’t be going to Israel. They’re the ones who ensnared me into the whole mess. 

Long-haired Dave from AT&T was here a 8:30 to, once again, address my Internet outage. When I got home from church it was fixed, or at least functional for the moment. Fear will go with me in this matter until I am out of the country. 

Rittenhouse not guilty on all counts. God have mercy.

As I drove to church I listened to a radio program about Asheville writers who work with children in the city schools. Children were reading the poems they had written as part of the class, poems introduced by the gushiest superlatives available to the language. The poems were, to a one, to a line, awful. My comment would have been, “How is this a poem?”  Dancing is my happy place. I like to dance, because I do that when I’m sad. My life has been hard, so I dance and I can feel better about everything. Perfectly legitimate conversation, but not on the same continent as poetry. I would have fired the “teachers” for failing to present even the most rudimentary principles of literary art. Yet the enthusiasm in the instructors’ voices was genuine, and no voice on the radio interrupted with “Now just wait a minute—”. I grew up convinced that art must be judged on its developed qualities, how good a poem is it, how skillful, how illuminating: does it increase the sum of human understanding? Is there a moment of surprise or recognition? None of that mattered to the people on the radio. They were judging poetry on the basis of the person who wrote it. Every child is genuine and needing to be encouraged, so every poem that comes out of them must be considered beautiful and brave. They didn’t say that considerations of craft or depth or metaphor were elitist, as some do; they didn’t mention them at all. I realized furthermore that I could not, at that moment, make an objective case for my side. I BELIEVE that only mindful and crafted art is worthy, but I couldn’t think of a way to prove that to a person who believes that the genuine expression of any soul is, perforce, art. It’s a faith controversy. One side says art must be good as a theorem is good, that it must prove its point; the other side says that art is automatically good if a person presents it as the testimony of his soul. I’m glad that at this exact moment I do not have to fight that fight. 

Received undelivered mail that I sent out on June 30.