1 Don’t know anything about it, really.

2 After four weeks of earnest effort, have not come along quite as far as I thought I had.

3 The taste again of humble pie.

It is curious how doing a thing that is worth doing exposes one to things one does not want to admit about oneself. I remember wondering to my piano teacher after a year and a half how close I was to the end and being slammed with the answer that it took 9 years to get started.

Well, there is nothing for it but to keep advancing and hope persistence eventually counts for something. Which reminds me as well of my quest to become a science fiction writer.

There are two kinds of pastor, speaking about your attitude toward your work and life in general, according to one who has pastored a long time and always worked within a plurality. They are: the ones who are earnest and always live with a sense of failure which drives them, and the ones who are more easy going about their responsibilities but don’t live with the perpetual sense of inferiority.

The wisdom here is to realize that both ends are necessary. I tend more toward the first, I think. What has brought some of the second into my life has been the aesthetic life. The leisure of it, the growing gradually of a thing well done, the realization that things take time and that only through time is time conquered–and things. The aesthetic life (should I call it that?) is about the glories of being finite and submitting to limitations in order to inquire of them, understand the wisdom, and grow.

Pero cuando una cosa seria y trascendente es caricaturizada y presentada como si esa fuera su imagen verdadera, no importa la intención que se tenga, de seguro que hará más daño que bien.

-Sugel Michelén

A good day full of rain. How I love a rainy day for living life.

My study of Luke 12 begun on Monday has yielded fruit, and I have a satisfactory Sunday school lesson. Part of the help there came from reading Baxter’s The Saints Eternal Rest this morning, and very indirect the help that.

Curious how any worthwhile reading will help. Does one need discipline in reading, or just discipline to pick worthwhile things to read in any order? Two weeks ago for Genesis it was something from Auden. And it is still yielding fruit today–the Auden–because the chap thought.

Yielding in other spheres as well. With the watercolors, my teacher wants me to discover the way metaphor is managed by that art: to interpret and not to reproduce. Auden has this thing about what is sacred: to a society and to an individual. And he talks about how the individual seeks to find a way to join what is publicly sacred with what is personally sacred–to amplify and deepen the former with the latter. Or something like that: I forget the details and maybe I’m just inventing it, but it was suggested to me by reading or misreading Auden’s words.

You see, I am learning to read the way Auden did. Anyway . . . Why, for example, do I love the sunlit sides of the green mountains, or the quiet of a walled in garden wild or tended–the privacy and really the sacredness of that privacy? When I see it I realize it is something both precious and inviolable represented there. That it is inviolable is what makes me glad about it, gives me a joy to see it. These are for me instances of something that has to do with what is sacred–in Auden’s use of the term.

And as I move toward the project of interpreting–my teacher’s word–of suggesting rather than asserting, of showing rather than telling everything (or is it telling rather than showing with painting?) with the watercolors I think of that: trying to find something privately sacred in the object and showing it in a publicly recognizable way.

It is where the challenge comes in to do something more than just color a drawing. It is to be able to handle the metaphors in such a way that what one sees with one’s own eyes others can understand, which of course also requires from them a response, which is the unending problem of an audience, isn’t it, in this fragmented age. O my Yeats and Eliot!

How, for example, can I show other people what I love in the rain? How can I suggest to them the light of glory of a slope of sunlit grass? How can their concept of what is sacred–in Auden’s sense, whatever that is–not grow to expand to all things, but become deeper and like a new dimension, affect all the rest without destroying it?

Thanks, of course, to the articulate poets. Thanks to Auden, a penetrating chap. Not sure the painters or musicians are always the ones to express it, though I’m on the lookout for some of the things they say. What does, for example, Arvo Part say? I am enjoying what John Blockley says.

She tells me to interpret–my teacher–I think, because she senses somehow something of my private vision in my teaching at church. Or senses rather, that I need the metaphor for painting that I already have for teaching. I am trying to grasp it and I am finding it takes a great deal of work. But it does remind me there are many servants in this sprawling, windy house which must at last form perfectly a complete community.

The curtains move in the wind and the shadows shift, and I hear the voice of another and sense his presence in the house, but I do not see him. You see, one of these days I’m going to either come out with a poem about it, or paint it in very pallid watercolors, like a distant mountain range.

In Genesis, and origins, and how to mount a defense against the threats–and what are threats. That’s the interesting bit, isn’t it? Now, the things I have been wanting so say and have not been able to say well, are finding their location and at last some of their expression.

It is like the watercolors. I want to do things I can’t, and I have to keep fiddling until I stumble across the occasions. Not that in teaching one fiddles, but one does what the fiddling with the paints amounts to: learns basic things on which to build.

and what it is still good for:

The story here.

The guy knows how to use the cliches and platitudes to good effect.

So nowadays I work on drawing and painting. Just painted my bookshelves.

And I meet with people and they tell me stuff and I tell them stuff. Had a mother come worried because her kid is being taught evolution and is kind of buying it. I was really pleased when she left: I had her in search of some C.S. Lewis, knowing he kind of bought into evolution too.

And I study and write my sermons and lessons. I think it is going better, maybe falling into a pattern. I am learning how to use the time of it.

And I play Lord of Ultima. Have you tried it? Free online game. Play for a while, then read. Set up some more things in my city, then draw or paint. Conquer, etc. Nice. Listen to a sermon and click around, or paint. I have found I do more listening that way.

I wish I could fade obliviously into the aesthetic life. Not because it would bring me anything; I have nothing to acquire with it, am no wizard, simply one in search of shelter. I want it so I can have it to myself. People give themselves to it still, and to the meagreness and richess of it. And yet we cannot be happy in private interests, with no demands beyond ourselves. And people know that. I suppose the thing attempted is to limit those demands.

Looking at a Sisley painting I realize that overripe summer is a season I miss. Not the overripe jungle which is rotting as it grows. I do not want it because it is what I can easily have. No, what I want is the modest, overgrown summer of deciduous trees, a luxury of innocence before the decay which winter always forestalls and cleans away. Not the capitulation of false rest, but the fulness of contradictions harmonized in a serene and greater synthesis.

And so with colors and with water I am endeavoring to suggest, to represent what cannot be caught or caged. I have simple people in the congregation and I am not sure of getting through to them. I wonder how much confidence I ought to have in what I do. Are they like people who ‘like’ Beethoven, or am I a fraudulent pretender? It is not a shock to me to realize that there is no absolute standard for preachers, but it is like a shock. Here in the dimness of this great house I would run into the servants and just notice they were servants, and I come to find there is a correspondence between the servant and his portion of this vast and windy, sprawling house.

First, that it was good again. Many years have passed since I sat in the company of a master and was instructed one on one. My piano teacher in Mexico left me with a lot of happy memories from my piano lessons. The sense of a tradition, of the discipline of an art, of demands that exceeded my abilities and required long, patient effort have all been renewed.

We began by feeling the paper I knew that was a good sign, that I was back in a similar situation and working from scratch. And the feeling of sitting side by side before the thing in question, of being guided by someone who knows after so many years was welcome.

Second, how everything was set up gradually, and then time was dispensed with. You have to take your time and you have to become absorbed with everything at hand, and otherwise you do not do it well. Like all the best things, they follow their own rules.