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In Consideration of Grace
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| I.
I really don't know that much about Matisse, about his life, his feelings, his thoughts. If my memory serves me right, he was a heavyset man with a thick gray beard and wire-rim glasses, the sort of man who probably enjoyed dark beer and steak. Black and white photos in the insets of over-priced art books show a dour man with a straw hat, a painter-gentleman who lived in a world of gardens and whitewash. Matisse was not a graceful man. II. I have never thought of myself as graceful. Grace was a word reserved for ballerinas and homecoming queens, for those certain women who could move like liquid, pouring themselves from one form into another. After all, aren't the graceful immune to the laws of physics? Aren't they living, breathing exceptions to the dictums of Newton and Copernicus? And then one evening a girl with very dark green eyes and a smile that hides behind her face asked me what I thought it meant to be graceful, what I understood it to mean. My mouth opened and closed with stillborn philosophies, sucking air like a gasping trout while my mind found that it was not quite so clever as it had thought before. III. Grace. I like the word. Say it to yourself slowly, savor it, taste it. Grace is a rich German chocolate cake sort of word, the kind you can't eat too fast without turning your stomach. Buttery and moist and delicious, it slides off your tongue and between your teeth, melting along the way. Say it. You'll see. IV. There are many ways in which a word can be abused. Few would debate whether Augustus or Alexander deserve the title "great," but I wonder, how many small-town sports reporters have mistakenly applied it to high school footballers? If we refer to a sunset over the Chesapeake Bay as beautiful, reveling in its color, its extraordinary majesty, do we really have a right to use that same word to describe our (overweight) neighbor's new (over-permed) hairstyle? And while the average man won't use the word ‘love' to refer to a woman he has dated for months or years, fearing the cosmic reverberations of the term, he has no qualms about ‘loving' this burger joint or that Top 40 song. And so I am led to wonder, how often does ‘grace' suffer these same indignities? Is a person truly graceful if they can walk with their back straight while balancing a book? Does grace require the proper genetic disposition, a skillful application of cosmetics and fashion, a knack for dancing and skillful conversation, and above all, fluidity of physical form and motion? I consider this carefully, delicately, stretching observation into observation. Yes, I say, the ballerina is graceful, her body strong and utterly subordinate to her mind. There is a beauty to her every move, an understated magnificence to her every gesture. The ballerina is the dance she performs, she is the music embodied, the spirit of the thing. I mull this over in my head, chewing the idea, sampling its flavor until I stop thinking and start typing. The spirit of the thing. The ballerina becomes an embodiment of an idea, a concept, bending the physical to match the Platonic. But is a child graceful when it dances? Can the newcomer to an art be truly graceful? I daresay not. Thus I come to the conclusion that grace is not merely trying to achieve a sort of "concepthood." No. Grace is actually doing it. Does this mean that everyone can be graceful? Certainly not. Grace is rare, I tell myself, arising only in those either blessed with one sort of genius or another or in those willing to cultivate it through diligence and trial. But then I pause, reexamining my arrogance as I consider the possibility that the average person may achieve a sort of gracefulness if they were to merely abandon their false pretenses and live as themselves. But then, I tell myself, how often are any of us actually fully ourselves, allowing our inner-selves to interact unshielded with the physical realm. Indeed, how rare is the man or woman who has honestly examined him- or herself enough to know the real geography of their inner workings? And even if we have mapped ourselves, how often are we actually capable of being ourselves? V. The Mongol herdsman stares down the shaft of the arrow, muscle becoming wood, wood blending with sinew. His mind is empty of the extraneous, void of all that is not the here and now. Only a single thought echoes in his mind, only one image reverberates through it's dark halls, calling out like a lost child in blue footed-pajamas walking alone through an empty castle: straight. VI. When an individual somehow truly manifests an idea, thought, concept, or emotion in the physical sphere, that individual is graceful. That is the conclusion these meanderings and musings have led me to. Sometimes grace is a woman in a black crushed velvet dress, lightly brushing aside her hair, her skin glowing, her eyes soft and approachable. Sometimes grace is a little boy standing up after a fight he has lost, blood dripping from his nose and his knees, his mind focused, his head still high, his fists still clinched. Sometimes grace is a musician that forgets that time and life and death and all else exist, his instrument blending into his lips and hands, the silvers and golds of his trumpet mingling with the browns and pinks of his hands as his soul and the music blend into one movement, bending the air like a blacksmith forging an invisible steel. VII. Matisse. I think of him as I turn up heavy metal music too loud to be healthy. As I mix the paint and throw it onto the canvas, making the brushes dance, making the pigments blend and bleed, scraping them with the painter's knife, I imagine him sketching, dream of him smiling slightly as his hand dances over stone with crayons. As I dance about the studio, my body completely out of concert with the music, my eyes seeing pictures yet undrawn and icons yet unpainted, I want to be Matisse, a heavyset Frenchman who understood the line of a woman's back better than anyone else and I laugh loudly at the thought of it. Perhaps someday I will be as graceful as Matisse. |
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