I’m moving away from Houston in about 10 days. It feels a little bit like the world is falling down around me, like I’m Han Solo screaming out of the death-star fireball. Probably that’s just what it feels like to leave somewhere. But between Ike, my now near inhospitable house on Bonnie Brae, the stock market, getting rid of most of my belongings, Kate’s back injury, etc. it’s hard to not assimilate new dramas into that narrative.

After 5 years of a ho-hum relationship with this, the third largest city in the country, the home of the energy industry, NASA, Townes van Zandt, Bush 41, zoning anarchy, rude drivers, cavernous arteries, breathtaking overpasses, unending suburbs — certain places are blazing with the significance of impending loss. Here’s number one on that list.

I’ve been so fortunate to spend the last 3 years within a block of my favorite museum on the planet, The Menil Collection. The Menils were inspired by Marie-Alain Couturier, a Dominican priest who worked to bring modern art into Catholic liturgy and sacred space. The gallery is as much church as museum — the art is hung with minimal distraction, almost no text, lots of white space, all naturally (but indirectly) lit through Renzo Piano’s clever system of hidden skylights. The Rothko Chapel and Byzantine Fresco annexes are even more oriented toward contemplation and purgation. I most love the Cy Twombly gallery. It’s almost impossible to say why. (I miss the green room, and will sadly be gone by the time it returns from London).

The Menils believed in art the way I believe in art.

In high school chapel I gave a homily about Arthur Dove’s “Me and the Moon.” I can’t remember exactly how it went, but I probably talked about Jacob’s Ladder / agape and eros (up and down flow) / God is a current that requires a completed circuit, how the contemplation of art can diminish our resistance, can open us up to more flow in — but only if we’re willing to let more flow out. This is the groundwork for the only case for modern art that I don’t get cynical about.

(detail)

I know I brought in Dove’s painting this way: Joseph Campell talks about a method of training performed by Arctic shamans on both sides of the Bering Strait. A novice would be left for weeks alone in a shelter full of masks. He was to take each mask in turn and stare at it for days — imitating the mask’s facial expression. It is both a practice of aggressive empathy and induced schizophrenia; the novices had experiences of becoming those characters, visions of living through them. Imagine if you spent a week trying to make the face of this moon! You would be changed. Imagine if you listened to Morton Felman’s Piano and String Quartet nonstop for a week! Or Monster Ballads 3! You would be a different person.

(Thanks to Claire S. for lots of things, including Me and the Moon).

The trope goes like this — the public complains that modern art is incomprehensible. Believers work hard to explain, justify, write good program notes, curate clear narratives, etc. etc. But we should defend the incomprehensible itself (without resorting to quantum physics please!) And it’s not as if ‘middle America’ can’t handle the incomprehensible — they go to church every week!

I told my parents once that I wanted a religion about which there was nothing to say. You already have that! they said. And I go to the Menil to practice it.