I recently completed a new painting after a few months’ hiatus while I finished a book I hope will be published soon. As with many of my paintings, it was inspired by a text that struck me with great force, a teaching by the 18th century Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, a founder of Hasidism. Rabbi Twersky was also known by the name of his most famous work, Me’or Einayim (Light of the Eyes).
The painting depicts the writer and musician Patti Smith set against an unforgettable sky I saw one day here in Northern New Mexico. It will take me a minute to explain why.
In Me’or Einayim, R. Twersky explores why our sacred texts are full of stories. Why not just a collection of rules and guidelines for how to live into holiness? His answer turns in part on the celebration of Passover. People sit down to a leisurely meal guided by the Haggadah, the little book that retells the story of the exodus from enslavement. It is said that everybody should experience the telling as if they had been present themselves, as if the liberation had included themselves. And R. Twersky makes the point that the Haggadah says it is a mitzvah—a blessing and an imperative—to tell the story, and the more you tell it, the more worthy of praise you are. So it is with every story of liberation, especially since for many people such stories and talk about them are more uplifting than studying ancient texts. “That is why,” he concludes, “we must always speak of the Exodus…. Whatever it is that we speak of, the Exodus should be present in it. And that is why ‘the more one tells’—not only on Passover, but constantly.”
The version of this teaching inscribed on the face of my painting reads this way: “Every utterance should be an act of liberation from enslavement of the body, mind, and spirit.”
Every Utterance: Patti Smith, oil on panel 2025, 36 x 48
I constantly take pictures of the sky. Because our elevation is 6500 feet, it is easy to feel we are living in the clouds. The sunset is at eye level. On even an ordinary day, the sky is a cloud encyclopedia: creamy billows set against shimmering curtains, looming dark masses and gossamer streaks. Sometimes I make myself dizzy gazing upward at the thousand shapes—animals, faces, landscapes—the clouds make before they move on, shifting as they go. My phone has hundreds of cloud pictures and I can’t bring myself to delete any.
The sky in this painting amazed me. Layers of dark gray at twilight, streaked with sunset, and above them, a formation that resembles the scales of a great fish, a white-hot sun pushing through at its head. When I had my words and images, I began to think about who I could paint to add weight to them. I don’t like the idea of painting someone generic. I am interested in what can be learned from an actual human face, showing what the world has given and done to a person and that individual’s response.
Thinking of Patti Smith made me very happy. I greatly admire and enjoy her music and writing. Lately, I love watching video interviews and blog posts by her because of the simplicity, humility, and self-evident truth of her words. She doesn’t claim to be speaking for anyone else. It isn’t as if I see everything the same way or agree with every observation. But there is no question that she is speaking her truth, and I have no doubt that every utterance is an act in service to awakening and liberation. To me, hers is the perfect face for this painting. I looked at many photos and videos capturing her image at many ages, and chose this one, not quite now but not long ago. I hope it speaks to you too.
This is such a trying time that words like “trying” don’t begin to do it justice. As I write this, an egomaniac who fancies himself king is mobilizing the vast public resources he claims to control to destroy civil liberties; to foment violence against those living into the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression and assembly; to put public institutions in the control of appallingly stupid, self-serving, and evil minions whose only qualification is loyalty; to hand our commonwealth to the highest bidder; and more. Protest is mounting, and I yearn that those who place hope in public protest, courts, and elected officials that haven’t surrendered their integrity will find that hope justified.
I am guided by Vaclav Havel’s great 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” which explores the nature of state power and the ways those who wish to be free can respond. (You can download many formats at the Internet Archive.) At a time when it was extremely dangerous to protest in Czechoslovakia, before Havel—an artist as much as a politician—went to prison, before he was released and lived to be elected the last president of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993, he turned his heart and mind to the question of what could be done.
He begins by laying out the nature and conditions of the Czech political system, clearly very different from our own. He describes the gestures of submission ordinary people perform to get along in that society, something we are seeing quite a bit of in the US these days. He describes the way ideology supplants reality. And then he says that “It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie.”
It’s a powerful essay that must be read in its entirety. But there’s just one passage I want to quote right now, which refers to Prague Spring of 1968, a popular reform movement suppressed by the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact partners:
“[S]omewhere at the beginning of this drama, there were individuals who were willing to live within the truth, even when things were at their worst. These people had no access to real power, nor did they aspire to it. The sphere in which they were living the truth was not necessarily even that of political thought. They could equally have been poets, painters, musicians, or simply ordinary citizens who were able to maintain their human dignity. Today it is naturally difficult to pinpoint when and through which hidden, winding channel a certain action or attitude influenced a given milieu, and to trace the virus of truth as it slowly spread through the tissue of the life of lies, gradually causing it to disintegrate. One thing, however, seems clear: the attempt at political reform was not the cause of’ society’s reawakening, but rather the final outcome of that reawakening.”
Every utterance should be an act of liberation from enslavement of the body, mind, and spirit.
Patti Smith, “People Have the Power.”