Friday, December 5, 2025
Thursday, December 4, 2025
A Retrospect (1869)
My grandmother looked past me today, her gaze fixed on the far corner of the room. “Do you see the little boy?” she asked, her voice soft but assured. There was no little boy in the physical sense, yet the certainty with which she named him carried a kind of gravity I could not dismiss. Later she asked my brother about the little girl, and the night before she told my mother she had seen her older sister, the one who died in 2001, standing quietly at her bedside. These moments, though bewildering at first, began to feel less like confusion and more like glimpses into a space where memory and presence were becoming indistinguishable.
As I sat with her, I found myself thinking of Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Past, that strange, luminous figure who appears to Scrooge “like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man,” a presence both near and receding. The Spirit embodies the very quality I was witnessing: memory taking on form, time becoming fluid, old relationships and long-buried feelings emerging into the light. In Sol Eytinge’s engraving A Retrospect, the Ghost stands behind Scrooge, pointing into the darkness not with authority but with a gentle, illuminating insistence. It is memory as guide rather than judge. Sitting beside Grandma, I felt the same sense of soft revelation, as though the past itself had stepped forward with a lantern.
Her sister’s appearance seemed to confirm this sense that something more than random neural fire was unfolding. Grandma was one of more than a dozen siblings raised in rural Missouri. It was a world of chores and crowded bedrooms, hand-me-down dresses, and unspoken loyalty. Amid this lively constellation of brothers and sisters, one relationship carried special meaning: the older sister she went to live with when she first left Miller to work in Carthage. I imagine her stepping off that bus—young, nervous, determined—and finding shelter in her sister’s care. Years later, when that same sister suffered a stroke and became disabled, Grandma visited her daily in the nursing home, tending to her needs with the kind of devotion that is more lived than spoken. In this sense, her sister’s presence now feels less like a hallucination and more like a final gesture of reciprocity. The one who sheltered her early in life returns to shelter her now, a quiet echo of Dickens’s Fan embracing Scrooge with “Dear, dear brother!” That greeting carries the same tender recognition I imagine Grandma is experiencing.
Yet even more revealing than her sister’s appearance are the children who populate the edges of her awareness. The little boy. The little girl. They come and go like figures stepping out of lamplight, patient and unthreatening. Their presence makes a kind of profound symbolic sense. My grandmother spent more than forty years teaching Sunday school, guiding generation after generation of children through stories, crafts, songs, and lessons that were as much about kindness as they were about Scripture. She cared for the children of friends, treating them with the same affection she showed her own family. And she cared for me and my brother with a tenderness that settled into the very marrow of our childhoods. Caregiving was not an activity for her, it was a way of being.
As I reflected on this, Dickens’s scene with Fezziwig came to mind, when the Ghost suggests that Fezziwig’s generosity is a small matter. Scrooge objects: “The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” My grandmother lived that same moral arithmetic. Her influence came not from grand gestures but from countless small ones: steady, gentle, and reliable. The children she sees now are not random remnants of brain chemistry; they are emissaries of her vocation, embodiments of the tender work that defined her life just as surely as the many cookies she baked and gave away.
Thinking about these visions led me further into the phenomenology of dying itself. As the body weakens and metabolic processes shift, the mind often loosens its attachment to linear time. Memories are no longer sorted in chronological drawers but rise according to emotional significance. Loved ones who formed the early architecture of identity often appear first; the figures who shaped a person’s deepest expressions of love come next. Philosophers call this threshold consciousness: a state in which perception becomes symbolic, relational, and meaning-driven rather than literal. Dickens captures this beautifully through the Ghost’s glowing forehead: “a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible.” Not the light of reason, but the illumination of inner truth.
Returning to the bedside with this understanding, I began to recognize the coherence in my grandmother’s visions. Her sister comes from her beginnings, the children from her middle years, and the family gathered around her now from her final chapter. Rather than unraveling, she is gathering her life into a single field of meaning. The figures appearing to her are not fragments. They are the essential threads of her story rising to meet her. Dickens’s reminder that the scenes shown to Scrooge “are but shadows of the things that have been” feels apt here. These shadows, these memories made visible, do not diminish her. They reveal her.
This recognition brings me unexpected comfort. My grandmother is not being pulled into darkness; she is being accompanied by the very relationships that shaped her life. The sister who sheltered her when she was young returns in her moment of vulnerability. The children she taught for decades gather like small lanterns around her consciousness, embodying the love she poured into so many. And the family she raised and tended in her final years sits beside her, bearing witness.
Her past is not haunting her. It is guiding her.
It stands behind her like Eytinge’s Spirit, pointing gently toward the illuminated landscape of her own life.
She is walking toward a light she spent a lifetime creating, a light made from every act of care, every whispered prayer in a Sunday school room, every unseen and unknown kindness that rippled outward from her steady hands.
And as I sit with her, as she looks into corners where I see only air, I understand that she is not alone. She is accompanied by memory, by love, by the bright clear jet of light that belongs to those who have lived lives of quiet devotion. She is being led home by the very stories she helped shape.
And in the warmth of that light, we both find comfort.
Witness My Act and Deed (1881)
There is a way in which Paton’s kitten speaks directly into the emotional weave of my life right now. The painting’s charm lies not merely in its humor but in the delicate truth it reveals about how love often carries mischief as its shadow. How closeness, especially after absence, sharpens both affection and play.
My own cats enact this truth with almost ritual precision. After days away, days that stretch long in their quiet, empty rooms, they greet me with an intensity that borders on ceremonial. They follow me from room to room, as though re-mapping the geography of their world with me as the compass point. Their purring becomes louder, their bodies press closer, their play becomes more exuberant, almost frantic. It is as though they are trying to compress every missed moment of companionship into a single evening. Love, for them, is never abstract; it is kinetic.
And then, of course, there is mischief.
The way a cat will identify an object on the counter and then look you in the eye, deliberately, challengingly, just before pushing it off. It is impossible not to see a kind of existential dare in this gesture. A test of the world, a test of you, a test of the relationship. Paton captures this liminal moment perfectly: the kitten’s paw, light but decisive; the inkpot teetering; the blot already spreading across the carefully ordered page. Mischief has already occurred, yet the cat’s body still thrums with the possibility of more.
This is not villainy. It is assertion. It is presence.
Psychologists who study companion animals observe that mischief is not simply random chaos but a behavioral expression of secure attachment. In this framework, the cat is not undermining the relationship but strengthening it. Mischief becomes a kind of emotional experiment: Are you still here? Will you respond? Are we still us? It is playful transgression, what Winnicott might call a “creative gesture," testing the reliability of the environment and the caregiver within it.
Lately, I have noticed my capacity for irritation shrinking to something nearly invisible. There was a time when a cat knocking over a cup might earn a startled shout or a sharp sigh. But these days, with grief and anticipation sitting heavily around the edges of my life, such small disruptions feel trivial, almost welcome. My emotional bandwidth has reorganized itself. I find that when confronted with mischief, the only reaction I can muster is warmth. A wry smile. A drawn-out exhale. And then, inevitably, what I like to call “punishment snuggles." It is the affectionate consequence that teaches them nothing but reassures us both.
The anger I used to access more easily feels distant now. My life’s landscape has changed its scale: the ink spilled across the desk is not a catastrophe but a reminder that life continues even in the midst of uncertainty. My cats, unaware of the weight I carry, continue to knock things down. They continue inviting me, in their own way, to rejoin the tangible present. To hold something that is alive and near. To laugh at the small things because the big things loom so large.
Paton’s painting, and my experience of my own cats, suggests a kind of domestic theology. Mischief interrupts the illusion of control. It disrupts the tidy narrative of human order. Yet the disruption is not destructive; it is enlivening. The ink spill is both a mess and a reminder that the world is not static. That something other than us has agency. That life presses in where we least expect it.
There is, in this, a quiet resistance to despair. The kitten refuses to behave according to the script. It reintroduces spontaneity into a world that appears tightly managed. And perhaps this is why I find myself drawn to this scene in this particular season of my life. Death, grief, and caregiving have their own rigid structures: timelines, medical routines, the careful navigation of emotional thresholds. They invite a seriousness that can become suffocating if allowed to dominate unchecked.
But the cats, my real ones and Paton’s painted one, refuse to let the world stay too orderly. Their mischief reanimates the mundane. They insist that life is still happening in small, ridiculous ways. They spill the ink so I can remember that not all messes are tragedies.
In the painting, the ink spreads across a formal document, obscuring its legal precision. The cat’s pawprint becomes a mark of unintentional authorship. This makes me wonder: how many times in my own life have I left such markw, accidental or unintended, but ultimately revealing something true about myself?
Mischief, even when unplanned, leaves traces. These traces become part of the narrative. The ink that mars the page becomes inseparable from the document’s story.
And perhaps this is part of why the painting resonates now: I am living in a moment where the ink is spreading across the page of my days, where the forms and expectations I thought were fixed are being smudged and rewritten by circumstances outside my control. My emotional reactions are different. My priorities have shifted. I am softened in places I did not expect.
In Paton’s scene, the human is absent but implied. Someone will return to this desk and discover the chaos. Someone will wipe up the ink, right the bottle, pick up the glasses, and perhaps even laugh.
In my own home, when I walk through the door after days away, my cats greet me with the full range of their presence: affection, need, curiosity, and mischief. Their disruptions pull me back into the living world. They remind me that even now, joy and play insist on returning. Life demands to be touched, to be knocked slightly off balance.
And in that delicate imbalance, I find something that feels very much like the grace I need to give myself in this moment.
Wednesday, December 3, 2025
Tuesday, December 2, 2025
Chaudron et prunes (1905)
Still-life paintings often become quiet portals. Appearing as small, staged arrangements that open into the deeper architecture of memory. Returning to Alfred-Arthur Brunel de Neuville’s Chaudron et prunes, I recognize that familiar sensation: the way a single object can call forth entire seasons of one’s life. What draws me in is not merely the painter’s skill with copper or light, but the vessel itself. The copper appears warm, luminous, and evocative stirring memories of a time defined by sweetness, ritual, and early marriage.
My wife and I had been married only a short while when we rented an apartment above a small candy shop. During most of the year the owners ran a brunch café, and I often baked for them. Things like pies, cakes, and other small pastries that felt like offerings of domestic goodwill. But at Christmastime, the café transformed. The air filled with peppermint, sugar, and anticipation. Their candy canes were locally famous, and the day I was invited downstairs to help make them felt like initiation into a seasonal mystery. The thrill was almost childlike. It felt as though I had been welcomed behind the curtain of a winter ritual.
The copper pot in the painting recall those heavy vessels we used to boil the sugar. The massive kettles that radiated heat and shimmered with the same reddish glow de Neuville captures so faithfully. The alchemy of candy-making unfolded in stages: the boil, the pour onto marble slabs chilled to an almost arctic cold, the labor of pulling and folding the molten mass until it turned glossy and firm. The sensory details return as vividly as scent: the sweetness in the air, the snap of cooling sugar, the rhythm of hands working in practiced coordination.
Psychologically, such memories inhabit a space Bachelard described as “intimate immensity,” where small domestic experiences expand into emotional landscapes. That year above the candy store carries this expansive quality. It was a time when so much felt malleable: early marriage, creative work, the forming of our shared rhythms. Like the sugar we pulled on cold marble, life could be shaped, stretched, twisted into something enduring.
As I return to those memories, I am struck by the vivid symbolism embedded in the candy canes themselves. The red and white stripes are more than festive coloration; they are visual metaphors. Red, with its warmth and vibrancy, suggests vitality and celebration. White, crisp and cool, evokes clarity and stillness. Psychologically their pairing creates a chromatic dialogue. They create an energy braided with purity, exuberance intertwined with restraint. The colors announce the season long before taste or smell can, and they echo, in a quiet way, the emotional dualities of Christmas: joy laced with remembrance, festivity bound up with nostalgia.
And then there is the iconic crook. Forming that bend by hand was always the final gesture, the moment when the straight rod became something recognizable, even emblematic. The curve has accumulated meanings over time, the shepherd’s crook, the initial “J," but for me it signifies something more personal: the truth that sweetness rarely travels in straight lines. The most enduring joys of life, whether the hope of marriage, rituals, or community, bend and arc and accommodate. The hook at the end of a candy cane is a reminder that delight often emerges where the line changes direction.
Returning to de Neuville’s painting, the copper cauldron becomes more than still-life subject. It becomes a metaphor for resilience and receptivity. They become the psychological vessel that carries warmth without being consumed by it. The plums scattered across the worn tabletop evoke the quiet ripening of life’s seasons. Their presence reminds me how sweetness, even in emotion, develops slowly, sometimes haphazardly, and how memory preserves the fragrance of such ripeness long after the season has passed.
We lived in that apartment only a year before buying our house, but for many Christmases afterward I returned to help make candy canes. Each December the ritual revived itself: the heavy copper pots steaming, the sting of peppermint rising in clouds, the laughter and warmth shared in the back kitchen. These memories have acquired a patina not unlike the copper itself glowing, worn, and deeply human.
So when I look at Chaudron et prunes, I see more than a vessel and fruit arranged in a painterly triangle. I see a return to that early chapter of life: the sweetness of forming traditions, the delight of learning a craft, the small domestic joys that become anchors for memory. The still life becomes a threshold through which past and present meet as a visual echo of copper heat and peppermint air.
And I am grateful. Grateful for the labor that once felt like play, for the warmth stored in memory, and for the way art can draw those recollections to the surface with the gentle clarity of a cooling sugar rope. In the muted glow of de Neuville’s copper cauldron, I feel the season again: bright, crooked, sweet, and shaped by hand.
Entering the Season of Advent
Advent begins in the dark, but it is not the kind of darkness that terrifies. It is the quiet dark of early morning, the moment before the first thin light begins brushing against the horizon. This year the season arrives not in a sanctuary, not in a carefully prepared liturgy, but in the dim front room of my grandparents’ house, where my grandmother lies resting under the soft weight of hospice blankets. The blinds are half-open, letting in a gray, wintry light. Time feels slower here, suspended in a way I can’t quite describe.
I keep thinking of the 1662 Collect for the First Sunday of Advent, words I have heard for years but never felt in my bones the way I do now:
Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life…
The phrase “in this mortal life” catches me. It feels different when spoken beside a fading breath.
Pause I
Advent’s purpose is to teach waiting without illusion. It asks us to acknowledge the world’s dimness without pretending it is deeper than it is. It reminds us that light emerges slowly, almost imperceptibly, and that the heart must learn to be attentive enough to notice it. The season does not demand belief in the metaphysical sense; it asks for readiness—ethical, emotional, existential.
This year, Advent’s call to watchfulness finds its echo in my grandmother’s breathing. Every shift in her chest feels like a new stanza in the season’s liturgy.
A Lesson from the Prophet Isaiah 2:1–5
Later in the afternoon, after getting on work, after the nurse leaves, I sit beside my grandmother and read from Isaiah, not out loud but quietly just for us, letting the words drift through the room like something remembered rather than spoken.
Many people shall go and say,
Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD…
and he will teach us of his ways.
The prophet sees peace not as a result but as a direction. People walk toward the mountain before the world is healed. They walk because the faintest glimmer at the summit is enough to move their feet.
I look at my grandmother’s hands. They are soft now, thinner than I remember, resting gently atop the blanket. She is walking too, though she is no longer aware of the path. And we walk with her, guided not by clarity but by presence. Isaiah ends his vision with an invitation:
O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the LORD.
It is a present-tense command: come, walk now. The light may be far, but it is real enough to turn toward.
Pause II
There is something about hospice that sharpens one’s sense of direction. Not in the physical sense—no one is going anywhere—but in the emotional landscape. Every gesture, every whispered memory, every moment of silence takes on the quality of movement. We are walking her home, step by step, breath by breath, with only the faintest illumination guiding us.
Advent feels like the season designed for this kind of journey.
A Reading from Psalm 122
That evening, before dinner, my parents gather in the room. Dad adjusts her pillow. Mom smooths the blanket. They leave and my brother joins me. We sit together, watching her chest rise and fall. The room grows quiet with the intimacy of shared vigil.
The psalmist writes:
I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the LORD.
This “house of the LORD” is not simply a structure. It is a place stable enough to hold the weight of human hearts. A place “compact together.”
I realize, sitting here, that the vigil room has become that house. Not because of theology, but because of nearness. Because love is thick in the air.
The psalm continues:
Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.
It becomes a whispered prayer for her:
Peace be within these walls. Peace be upon this body. Peace be in this final threshold.
Pause III
Advent peace is not the absence of sorrow. It is the courage to remain together within it. The psalm gives me language I did not know I needed. It teaches me that peace can be architectural, made from bodies gathered closely enough to create a steadying structure around someone they love.
Grandma exhales—a long, slow breath—and I feel the room tighten with attention. This, too, is peace: not serenity, but presence.
A Lesson from the Letter to the Romans 13:11–14
Later, in the quiet hours after dark, I sit alone at her bedside. The world outside is silent. I open to Romans, feeling the familiar urgency rise from the page:
Knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep…
Paul’s call is not to theological certainty but to clarity. To awaken to what is real.
The night is far spent, the day is at hand.
I cannot help hearing those words in the cadence of hospice. The night deepens, yes, but the day is also drawing near. Not a day we can see or map, but a day that belongs to her now, as she moves gently toward whatever waits beyond her final breath.
Paul urges us:
Let us put on the armour of light.
The “armor” is not protection from grief but commitment to presence. It is the resolve to stay awake even when the heart grows heavy.
Pause IV
All week my senses have been sharpened: the soft rhythm of her breath, the slight coldness of her fingers, the way time gathers differently around the dying. Wakefulness becomes a pious discipline, an Advent discipline, and a human discipline.
Remaining awake becomes a way of loving her.
A Lesson from the Gospel of Matthew 24:36–44
Earlier today, the house is especially still. We begin to suspect that things have changed. Though no one can say how close, we gather together. Each of us has grown quiet, patient, and tired. Grandma more than any of us.
Jesus’ words return to me:
But of that day and hour knoweth no man…
Watch therefore…
This watching is not waiting for an event. It is attending to a life. It is refusing to turn away in the final hours, even when the mystery is larger than anything we can hold.
Hospice is full of unknowns. Advent is full of them too. In both, the task is not to predict but to stay within the mystery.
Pause V
Something sacred happens in the overlap between the liturgical threshold of Advent and the threshold my grandmother is crossing. In both, time loosens. The edges between past and present blur. The heart strains toward a light it cannot yet see.
We are keeping watch not to catch the moment, but to honor it.
Coda
As the first week of Advent unfolds, the Scriptures form a pattern that mirrors the vigil itself.
Isaiah teaches us to walk toward a far-off light.
The psalmist teaches us to build peace from presence.
Paul calls us to wakefulness.
Jesus teaches us to watch.
The Collect gathers these threads:
Cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light…
Here, in this quiet room, the darkness has not lifted. But it has become softer. It has become inhabited. And into that inhabited darkness, a single candle burns. A lighthouse in a sea of darkness.
This year Advent has become the vigil.
And the vigil has become the place where I learn how light first emerges from the dark:
slowly, tenderly, almost hidden,
but unmistakably there.
Monday, December 1, 2025
Testament (Homage to Walt Whitman)
Testament (Homage to Walt Whitman)
By Erica Jong
–WALT WHITMAN
I trust all joy.
–THEODORE ROETHKE
I, Erica Jong, in the midst of my life,
having had two parents, two sisters,
two husbands, two books of poems
& three decades of pain,
having cried for those who did not love me
& those who loved me – but not enough
& those whom I did not love –
declare myself now for joy.
There is pain enough to nourish us everywhere
it is joy that is scarce.
There are corpses piled up to the mountains,
& tears to drown in,
& bile eough to swallow all day long.
Rage is a common weed.
Anger is cheap.
Righteous indignation
is the religion of the dead
in the house of the dead
where the dead speak to each other
in creaking voices,
each arguing a more unhappy childhood
than the other.
Unhappiness is cheap.
Childhood is a universal affliction.
I say to hell with the analysts of minus & plus,
the life-shrinkers, the diminishers of joy.
I say to hell with anyone
who would suck on misery
like a pacifier
in a toothless mouth.
I say to hell with gloom.
Gloom is cheap.
Every night the earth resolves for darkness
& then breaks its resolve
in the morning.
Every night the demon lovers
come with their black penises like tongues,
with their double faces,
& their cheating mouths
& their glum religions of doom.
Doom is cheap.
If the apocalypse is coming,
let us wait for it in joy.
Let us not gnash our teeth
on the molars of corpses –
though the molars of corpses
are plentiful enough.
Let us not scorn laughter
though scorn is plentiful enough.
Let us laugh & bring plenty to the scorners –
for they scorn themselves.
I myself have been a scorner
& have chosen scornful men,
men to echo all that was narrow in myself,
men to hurt me as I hurt myself.
In my stinginess,
my friends have been stingy.
In my narrowness,
my men have been mean.
I resolve now for joy.
If that resolve means I must live alone,
I accept aloneness.
If the joy house I inhabit must be
a house of my own making,
I accept that making.
No doom-saying, death-dealing, fucker of cunts
can undo me now.
No joy-denyer can deny me now.
For what I have is undeniable.
I inhabit my own house,
the house of my joy.
“Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”
Dear Walt Whitman,
horny old nurse to pain,
speaker of “passwords primeval,”
merit-refuser,poet of body & soul –
I scorned you at twenty
but turn to you now
in the fourth decade of my life,
having grown straight enough
to praise your straightness,
& plain enough
to speak to you plain
& simple enough
to praise your simplicity.
The doors open.
The metaphors themselves swing open wide!
Papers fall from my desk,
my desk teeters on the edge of the cosmos,
& I commit each word to fire.
I burn!
All night I write in suns across the page.
I fuel the “body electric” with midnight oil.
I write in neon sperm across the air.
You were “hankering, gross, mystical, nude.”
You astonished with the odor of your armpits.
You cocked your hat as you chose;
you cocked your cock –
but you knew “the Me myself.”
You believed in your soul
& believing, you made others
believe in theirs.
The soul is contagious.
One man catches another’s
like the plague;
& we are all patient spiders
to each other.
If we can spin the joythread
& also catch it-
if we can be sufficient to ourselves,
we need fear no entangling webs.
The loveroot will germinate.
The crotch will be a trellis for the vine,
& our threads will all be intermingled silk.
How to spin joy out of an empty heart?
The joy-egg germinates even in despair.
Orgasms of gloom convulse the world;
& the joy-seekers huddle together.
We meet on the pages of books & by beachwood fires.
We meet scrawled blackly in many-folded letters.
We know each other by free & generous hands.
We swing like spiders on each other’s souls.
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