Forgiveness and Second Chances
With a motley crew of rappers, painters, chefs, and theologians
Editor’s Note: Second Chances
Editor’s Note is a regular column introducing issues, themes, and frameworks from a personal perspective.
I am writing from the train between Wickford Junction, Rhode Island, where my dad dropped me off this morning and Brunswick, Maine, where my mom will pick me up this afternoon. I was born in Maine and consider it as much a home as anywhere else, since my parents all live now in places I’ve never lived, but I still don’t make it back very much. The last time was eight years ago, when I was between projects and needed somewhere low in stress and low in cost to recollect myself. The time before that was a memorial service for my grandfather. This summer it is a memorial service for my grandmother, and I am again between projects. As much as some things change there, the smell of the air, which carries a mixture of salt, granite, dirt, pine, and seaweed, always feels like home. Home is a memory we carry around, something we try and fail to pin down to particular people and places.
Home is also wherever we feel we can turn when we have bottomed out. Last week I mentioned confession and forgiveness and that is something I am continuing to work through with Augustine and Derrida, but also Kendrick Lamar and a roster of positive psychologists. I have saved in my notes this line: “If you feel forgiven by god, you can forgive others unconditionally.” Embarrassingly, I did not note a source, nor do I think this was an original thought. Memory tells me this was part of a sociological survey that found that the people who were best able to find peace by forgiving the people around them were those with a deeply lived sense of religious forgiveness. Please let me know if you can think of where this comes from.
I mention Kendrick Lamar because the most recent season of the podcast Dissect entailed a deep dive into his conceptual double album Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers. It’s a story of reconciling generational trauma and systemic social ills with bad behavior, and the strongest part of it is that it doesn’t fully please anyone. It never gets preachy. A song ultimately about accepting transgender relatives is written from a place of innocent ignorance and casual cruelty. Eckhart Tolle features as Kendrick’s therapist as he’s trying to work through cheating on his wife, while elsewhere on the album sexual offender Kodak Black has a guest feature. This is something Kendrick has done several times: telling us that even those who commit unforgivable acts are not beyond forgiveness.
Everyone deserves a second chance, metaphysically speaking, but I don’t think it’s on any one of us in particular to provide it unconditionally to anyone else.
One of the greatest writers on forgiveness is Robin Casarjian:
“Even small acts of forgiveness always have significant ramifications at a personal level. Even small acts of forgiveness contribute to one’s sense of trust in oneself and the potential of others; they contribute to a human spirit that is fundamentally hopeful and optimistic rather than pessimistic or defeated; they contribute to knowing oneself and others as potentially powerful people who can choose to lovingly create, versus seeing humans as basically selfish, destructive, and sinners.”
Siri Hustvedt, in an amazing little story about rewriting the stories of Sinbad with her husband Paul Auster (which is collected in a book that I will write about in more detail later this year), describes their relationship this way:
“They fight all the time because they see the world differently, but then they forgive each other for being different and go back to writing their stories. But they take time out for little deaths, and for all the cuddling and jostling and slobbering that comes before their crises, because life is not worth living without those little deaths, the ones that we survive.”
After the soul searching of Mr. Morale (“I bare my soul and now we’re free”), Kendrick’s next release was last year’s GNX, an anti-conceptual banger that says once we can forgive ourselves we keep living, keep making mistakes, keep forgiving. Going to Maine is like going home in the way that smelling that air feels like forgiveness.
Icon: Anne Truitt
Icon is a regular column pairing canonical works of art and quotations from pioneering figures in the history of art and life.
“It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one’s life.”
This line popped into my mind today and I had to include it. That’s minimalist sculptor Anne Truitt in her Daybook, journals published in 1982 divulging a rich interior life stretching from home to the studio. Like Celia Paul’s writing, this was one of the ur-texts that re-taught me to read the life of the artist within and around her work.
Can you see the strip of color on top of that piece at center? I don’t know why, but something about those details in her work often makes me want to cry. Anne did not believe in fabrication; her sculpture came from her own studio.
She moved to Japan just as her career was taking off in the mid-1960s when her then-husband became the Tokyo bureau chief of Newsweek. He suffered from mental illness and they divorced in 1969, when Anne became a single mother to their three children back in Washington DC and steadily constructing the scaffolding of an incredibly profound and productive studio practice. He is best remembered for (accurately) publicly alleging an affair between JFK and the painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, one of Anne’s closest friends. The fallout cost James Truitt his job and, seemingly, a portion of his sanity. Meyer also had an unrelated affair with Kenneth Noland. I think Meyer’s paintings are underrated in the context of the Color Field school, and believe this historical episode would make an engrossing film.
Anne Truitt:
“I am more impressed by what my children have taught me than by what I may have taught them. The physical purpose of reproduction is, obviously, the continuation and renewal of genetic continuity, human survival. Its psychological purpose seems to me to be a particularly poignant kind of mutual learning and, matters being equal, ineffable comfort.”
I was disappointed to learn that Anne’s “Arundel” series of white paintings was titled after her home county in Maryland, not the town in Maine, which I just passed by.
The last volume of Anne’s journals, Yield, was edited by her daughter Alexandra and published the year she died. Here is a video of Alexandra and the brilliant historian of minimalism James Meyer discussing the work:
Book Report: The Gastronomical Me
At my dad’s in Rhode Island I spent a few long days buried in my computer working on an exhibition project in Shanghai, but then I needed something I could do in the garden so I picked a collected edition of M.F.K. Fisher off the shelf. My stepmother Judy is a fantastic cook and a gourmand. I also love to eat and love to cook and talk about food and write about food and share meals with people I love, so I had a passing familiarity with Fisher’s prose. Mostly, I had read essays from Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf. My brother, after all, is an oyster farmer, and Fisher is one of the foremost literary exponents of the oyster genre, up there with Hemingway and Chekhov. I reread both of these, as well as Serve it Forth, a broad chronology of eating that starts in the ancient food cultures of China, Egypt, Greece, and Rome before skipping across various episodes in her own life and travels. But the fourth book in this volume, The Gastronomical Me, a memoir told year-by-year in chapters, really blew my mind.
Suddenly, names and incidents and restaurants that Fisher had mentioned in passing in her best-known essays are placed into the context of her life, and her dry wit of the market and kitchen are turned back on herself. Always, Europe is the site of her culinary education, America the field of its application and diffusion, and the ships between them no less than vessels for spiritual transformation. Of her comportment as a solo female traveler on those journeys, she writes:
“More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinking, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves. And men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males. I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I "knew my way around"; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them. I know what I want, and I usually get it because I am adaptable to locales. I order meals that are more typically masculine than feminine, if feminine means whipped-cream-and-cherries. I like good wines, or good drinkin'-likka, and beers and ales. I like waiters; I think the woman who said that waiters are much nicer than people was right, and quite often waitresses are too. So they are always nice to me, which is a sure way to annoy other diners whose soup, quite often, they would like to spit in. And all these reasons, and probably a thousand others, like the way I wear my hair and what shade my lipstick is, make people look strangely at me, resentfully, with a kind of hurt bafflement, when I dine alone.”
Like JFK and Mary Pinchot Meyer, MFK Fisher (Mary) met George Dillwyn Fisher (Tim), the man who would become her lover and eventually second husband, when she and her first husband moved in next door to him. Tim was a painter and illustrator; his mother was a portrait painter, his sister wrote children’s literature, and his cousin was the painter and illustrator Maxfield Parrish, whose Daybreak was the best-selling art print of the twentieth century. Together, Tim and his sister published The Dream Coach, which you can read online.
Mary and Tim, too, wrote together, under the pen name Victoria Berne. I have not been able to find a copy of their 1939 book, Touch and Go, which seems to be a story of motherhood and stepmotherhood, but I have not yet exhausted all avenues and this may become a pressing project. My favorite episodes of The Gastronomical Me come from their other shared project, Le Pâquis, the farm in Switzerland that they renovated in a radical way so that they could garden, cook, and entertain without a live-in staff.
“Our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it … and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied … and it is all one.”
Mary’s children were born between the original publication of How to Cook a Wolf, which codifies an economical and ecological ethos for eating well in wartime, and the publication of the revised edition that was collected in my copy, and many of her notes and additions have to do with things she learned in the process of bringing up her daughters.
Tim was the love of her life. He died young with a cigarette-related autoimmune disease that resulted in the brutal loss of his arms and a leg. His death and the coming of the second world war seem to shift Mary’s tone and perspective from an eternal present tense into a more reflective mode. I know there is more on this period of her life in other books I have yet to read, like the posthumously published novel The Theoretical Foot and the memoir Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me, and I look forward to coming across them on some other bookshelf.
Somehow, Mary manages to end The Gastronomical Me, the first volume of her memoir, not with this immense loss and the ensuing grief but rather with an almost ridiculous story of an unrequited love affair between her brother and a cross-dressing mariachi singer outside of Guadalajara. It is comical and beautiful and sublime, and I cannot believe whoever said that Fisher wrote about food the way other people write about love, because clearly she could not have done one without the other.
“The note with the caviar said, ‘Pain cannot touch the loving-hearted.’”
Links: Tools for Learning, Confession and Memoir, Art Audiences, and the Lord’s Prayer
“Strategies for Learning,” in The Weird Turn Pro
This is a great set of tools for genuine learning, which has to start from a desire to learn so genuine that it drops the mask of pretending to know. Hard for adults, easy for children, definitely one area we should be learning from the kids.
“Expert Generalists,” from Martin Fowler
Kind of an application of that approach to learning, why we need to be open and curious to knowing a bit about everything and make our own personal contributions in finite areas.
“Confessing Anthropocene,” in Environmental Humanities
Part of my reading on theories of confession, this is a really moving and intense look at how we might communicate with far-future generations. The author is specifically concerned with signposting nuclear waste that will take tens or hundreds of thousands of years to safely decompose, but it’s applicable in general to how we convey the reality of our present to our children.
“Art after the Hangover,” in My Art Guides
Daniel Baumann reflects on his time leading Kunsthalle Zurich, the most pertinent bit for me being when he says that blockbusters don’t bring crowds, word of mouth brings crowds, and the audience is smart—they know when something is fresh and exciting.
“Deliver us from Evil,” in Daily Philosophy
On the need to recognize the evil within ourselves to find the good. Confession!
Lives of the Artists will be back next week with an interview with Petra Cortright, the brilliant Californian digital artist and mother of two who is preparing for a raft of exhibitions opening in Europe this fall while also resettling her family after being displaced by the Altadena fire. Until then, enjoy the long road home.