A Mind of Winter, 2010
Oil on canvas
48 x 48 in.

When I wake in the night in fear I regain the knowledge that no child lacks: the world is alive and in dread; it is, as the ancient Greek philosopher Thales claimed, “full of gods.” The time is invariably between three and four in the morning. I sleep fitfully until a little after five, when I get up and walk a four-mile loop, part of which is along the Arroyo Seco, a dry riverbed that begins to the north, in the folds of the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles. I never want to get up, and every morning revisit the same tired argument about why I could—and should—stay in bed, but I do. Anne Carson said that “the poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people.—But at a certain point he feels a lack, . . . He is provoked by a perception of absence within what others regard as a full and satisfactory present.” I am a painter, but this same lack drives me out into the morning dark . . .

Thank you for visiting. To read more of what’s above, and hear about the painting to your left—a work titled after and entwined with Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man,” please see my essay “A Primitive Mind,” which appeared in the January 2011 issue of Poetry, by clicking here. For a few words on painting and memory, please see “Immaterial Witness,” which appeared in the Summer/Autumn 2010 issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, by clicking here.