Questions For the Moon-At West End Gallery in October
Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Do not now seek the answers…
Such a counterintuitive and wise bit of advice that Rilke passed on to his young poet friend. History and mythology are filled with characters who stand before the void, frustrated and grieved with life, pleading for answers to come out of the nothingness before them.
Answers seldom come.
But the questions remain. These questions and concerns become ingrained to the point of almost being unnoticed in the seeker’s life and being.
And one day, if they are fortunate, they realize that that the question itself was the answer and that it was always within them, ready to reveal itself when they have lived and dealt with that question in their life and finally came to this realization.
This realization is earthshaking for some and mundane for others. For others, it is both.
The point is that there are seldom easily obtained answers to the existential questions that plague us.\
Only time and life can turn these questions into answers. And some questions are such that the answers may well be beyond our living or recognition. Those answers remain a mystery.
Maybe the ultimate question here is how well we cope with lives filled with such mystery.
That is my first take on this new small painting, 8″ by 8″ on panel, that is included in my October solo show at the West End Gallery. I call it Questions For the Moon.
I’ve been on a lot of roofs in my life, having been a chimneysweep for several years, and, more importantly, have been on the roof depicted in this painting, sending out questions whose answers I was not yet ready to recognize within myself. I know the frustration and pain in that moment of questioning as you teeter on the roof’s peak.
In that moment, the only answer is to get off the roof in one piece and move on, accepting that this might not be such a bad answer. One day further down the road, if you’re lucky and have let those questions fade onto the deep recesses of your mind, almost forgotten, the question might once more show itself as an answer that has meaning for your life as it has been lived.
And you understand in that moment that this was the only way it could have been, that it took the pain and toil of life to get to where the question could be answered.
That’s a lot to ponder for a little painting.
Here’s song in that vein from the always charming Iris Dement. This is Let the Mystery Be.
Redtree Times 