After a very long walk on a very hot afternoon, I found myself turning a cobblestone corner in the hilltop town of Ménerbes and seeing to my surprise the locked gate to the garden of Dora Maar’s house, the troubled and very unhappy muse of Pablo Picasso, who spent the last fifty years of her difficult life in this consolingly beautiful place. The locked garden gate seemed like a tragic representational seal on a beauty imprisoned by Picasso’s artful manipulation and her own helpless inability to escape.
It set me to thinking of my own muse, the invisible one living inside me and then happily, the very visible one living with me as a real companion in the outer world, wanting the gift of artistry to be something that gave a sense of the untroubled and the untrammeled, not the experience of being captured and imprisoned, but the sense of being set free through being seen.
In the poet Rilke’s poem of the Annunciation, when Gabriel appears to give Mary the news that she is carrying a child, Gabriel is so enchanted by the clear beauty of her soul, he forgets his message and simply starts singing her beauty into the world… perhaps he could have sung these locked gates open had he visited Dora Maar, or perhaps, more likely, he did, but obsessed as she was with Pablo, she never could hear his song.
SEEING YOU I want you to see yourself the way I sometimes see you. I want you to see yourself with the self-same eyes that have me shy of telling you what I see. I want you to come across your self and see yourself, the way I did that first morning, as a beautiful incredibly kind and inviting stranger. I want you to knock gently on your own door and stand there astonished as I do unable to speak to the one who has come out to meet you. Like Rilke's visiting angel of the Annunciation who forgot his message to Mary, and could only fall back to singing her praises, stuttering and overwhelmed as he was, by the untroubled beauty of her soul. from The Bell and the Blackbird
To be seen for the miracle of life we are is an unusual experience in the world we each move in. Without agenda or ego, to regard and honor my own light, to have permission to do so, is humbling. This poem offers such permission. It reminds me if I don’t find that divinity within myself it is very hard for others to do so.
Very lovely...."the untroubled beauty of her soul". I am currently reading Paul Tillich's Spiritual Discourses and also his Sermons in "The New Being". In Sermon 20, he talks of Martha and Mary and says of Mary "The one thing needed—this is the first and in some sense the last answer I can give—is to be concerned ultimately, unconditionally, infinitely. This is what Mary was... infinitely concerned. This is the one thing needed." I am a fallen Catholic but, it seems to me, in studying these references again, at this time of my life, with a completely different understanding of "being" and what it means to be concerned...with what ? "...to be concerned ultimately, unconditionally, infinitely." A worthy meditation.