When here and now cease to matter

After the swearing in, I feel a little T.S. Eliot is in order:

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

James is having a birthday this month. Do hope you are able to come celebrate at our home from 2:00 onward to the curfew hour--the name of one of James's favorite paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder. James discovered this painting in the secondary storage at the Met while he worked there. Ask him about it.  

I cannot really speak in depth about James at this point in his recovery. He is too tender.  James is among us now and curious to know what I have written about him. Friends have approached us mentioning the blog as a medium that allowed them to experience our lives in a real and meaningful way. I am glad for it but it feels a little strange to me--this unexpected intimacy.

James begins his cognitive therapy this next week. He's almost complete, physically speaking, but the amorphous lacuna of his mind will be the tricky bit and that is what makes it difficult for me to share my experiences with James currently in this open medium.  We are now at the point in which James will discover how much of his self he will recover--the thing that makes James, James. It is too emotionally tenuous for me to expose--it is riding on the back of the white whale about to descend into the depths.

We also have some pragmatic family reckoning that is evolving in our home--the three of us--this new dynamic that has occurred in which a father has become something other.  It is too much to bear at times.

James is preparing for the spring when he will teach a workshop at the 92nd Street Y and hang a show of his work in the space near the painting studios.  It is a significant challenge for him.

So, this open house in two weeks will give James the springboard to share his work with you and return to a sense of self that you will recognize.  

I have been reading up again about the temporal lobe of the brain in an attempt to aid James's neuropsychologists in the work that lies ahead for the next few months.  I am feeling positive about his future and the inevitable change in his work process, his capabilities of perception, and the physical process of painting which is really, his life.  I am curious to see as his recovery reaches its completion, how James will emerge from his chrysalis. 

American history will move along as it does--we should not feel downhearted about the present.  

Matterlightblooming--a term created by George Saunders in his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, that describes the transitional moment in which souls are released from a state between life and death.  I like to think that matterlightblooming occurs even while we are living--in the process of making art or being present, rising above the petty ridiculousness of the machinations of humankind.