I am starting a new series, ‘Authors I Love’, a companion to my ongoing series ‘Artists I Love’.
OLD AND NEW
I love reading big old books. The longer and older the better. Why? For one reason, it allows me to travel. I was explaining this idea to my wife today after I finished ‘Middlemarch’ written in the 1870s by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). She asked if it made me want to live in the Victorian era in Great Britain. I said, yes and no. Yes, because reading the book was like traveling to a different time. You know how when you go to a new place you see so many things that are familiar but not? There are buildings like at home, but different. Food like at home, but different. Humans like home, but different. The same is true of literature from the past. It is familiar but different. Then again, no. In Middlemarch the language is so rich and vocabulary so extensive that it is like going where they speak English in such an unfamiliar way that you feel like you are hearing it for the first time. Not old from a different era, but new, like a revelation of what could be.
Selected Works by George Eliot
MIDDLEMARCH
‘A Study of Provincial Life’ is the subtitle of the book. And indeed the story is about the goings on in the provincial town of Middlemarch in England in the early to mid 1800s, right in the heart of the Victorian era. The story starts and ends with Dorethea, an intelligent and unique woman who wants to do good in the world. Her only avenue for this it seems is to find a husband who is contributing to the betterment of the world in a big way and help him in that task. She does find this man and fully expects her marriage will lead to the future she envisions for herself. It does not go according to plan.
Eliot sculpture in her hometown of Nuneaton, UK. The town also has a hospital, hospice and school named after her.
Meanwhile, others in Middlemarch are trying to make their way in the world, either through marriage, if they are a woman, or in the church, business, politics, farming or other areas of commerce if they are a man. Much of the story revolves around women both pushing their way into areas that typically are the realm of men and demurring to the men and staying in the background. I said ‘both’ instead of ‘either’ because all the women do both. The tension of who they want to be and who they feel restrained to be is palpable in every chapter and drives much of the novel.
It is also about young people chaffing at the bit of tradition and ‘the way things are done’. Pushing up against that is the height of bad manners and a number of the younger characters suffer career and life setbacks because of their attempting to move forward in science, medicine, politics, society and religion.
Middlemarch book cover illustration
I love her crafting of words to create character, mood, environment and more. Here is an example –
“She was glowing from her morning toilette as only healthful youth can glow; there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck and cling down her blue-gray pelisse with a tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the outdoor snow.”
Middlemarch book cover illustration
And here is another, this one delving into the psyche of humanity.
“She sat tonight revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fools’ caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lap they alone were rosy.”
You can find more quotes at the end of this post.
Here is a link to a more thorough and thoughtful appreciation than I can give. The Genius of Middlemarch
Hand cast of Eliot’s hand
Eliot, being one of the most famous writers of her era, had a death hand cast made instead of a death mask to honor and highlight her accomplishments as an author.
Here is a photo of her. She looks surprisingly like Oscar Wilde, don’t you think?
George Eliot
Oscar Wilde
SILAS MARNER
I have heard the name most of my life. I knew he was a victorian character but I wouldn’t have been able to tell you if he was created by Dickens or Dickensen or any other author. Once I got this book I knew of course. I bought it to read Middlemarch and it wasn’t planning on reading any of the other stories, at least not right away. But I was not ready to be done with Eliot and I have always wanted to know who Silas Marner was in literary history so now was my opportunity to find out.
from 1985 film
The full title of the book, ‘Silas Marner – The Weaver of Raveloe’, tells you who he is, at least professionally. Like Middlemarch this book shows a slice of provincial life, but with the focus on one particular character. Marner is a solitary man living along on the edge of town. He weaves linen that he then sells through various stores or directly to some of the wealthier women. He is seen as an eccentric man with whom good society would not entertain a relationship. They would however buy his product as he is a meticulous weaver who does excellent work.
book illustration
He saves his gold coins religiously and obsessively counts them at night. Through a series of horrible circumstances he has those coins stolen from him. He, nor anyone else, knows who stole the coins. Meanwhile through another series of horrible circumstances he becomes the caretaker of a baby who is not yet able to walk.
book illustration
This conjunction of loss and gain is at the heart of the story and at the heart of Marner’s transformation within himself and within the community. There are good and bad people throughout but in all cases the personalities are complex and subtle, rich characters who are not cliche cut-outs of virtue or vice.
book cover illustration
The story is ultimately uplifting and inspiring but it is never cloying or pandering. It’s a great place to start reading to get an appreciation for Eliot’s work.
from 1916 film
Once again she has some astute quotes that show her insight into human nature.
“A dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.”
“The yoke a man creates for himself by wrongdoing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.”
Brother Jacob
I thought this was probably about a monk but it wasn’t. It is a short story about a greedy man, David Faux, who steals from his family and sets off overseas to seek his fame and fortune as a confectioner. He leaves behind a brother who is an ‘idiot’ (Eliot’s term, not mine). I think now he would be seen as neurodivergent, perhaps with Down Syndrome. The story then fast forwards many years and David reappears under another name in a nearby village where he runs a successful confectionary shop. His bright future in marriage and business is dependent on it never being found out his real name and place in the world. Suffice it to say this does not go according to plan.
One of the best plot devices Eliot uses is the man who has it all planned vs the messiness and unpredictability of real life. While she allows it to happen to most everyone in all her stories, it is especially satisfying when it is combined with the underlying moral failures of a character.
The Lifted Veil
This amazing short story is a departure for Eliot in that it is about the supernatural. The protagonist finds he is able to hear peoples’ inner thoughts. Everyone that is but his brother’s fiance, on whom he has a crush. His mind has to imagine what she is thinking and because he is completely enamored of her he creates a deep and rich inner thought life for her. That drives him into even deeper love.
The story is about what happens when he no longer has to see her from a distance and suddenly is able to hear her thoughts as well. Are his hopeful conjectures of her deep inner life proven true or are they dashed? It’s worth reading to find out.
More Middlemarch Quotes
“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
“But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt…had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.”
“A man vows, and yet will not cast away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.”
“Fear is stronger than the calculations of probabilities.”
“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think it’s emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”
“But even while we are talking and meditation about the earth’s orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is the stable earth and the changing day.”
“For the egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.”
“Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.”
“Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.”
“I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest – I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much.”
“There is nothing more thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured by a political hocus-pocus.”
“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”
“The truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.”
“Philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.”
“Her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.”
“When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.”
“Solomon’s Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.”
“Selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world.”
“There is no religion to hinder a man from believing the best of a young fellow, when you don’t know worse. It seems to me it would be a poor sort of religion to put a spoke in his wheel by refusing to say you don’t believe such harm of him as you’ve got no good reason to believe.”
“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others.”
This idea caught me by surprise. I had never really thought about how the contemplation of eternity or the afterlife is a form of leisure. I think it is a pretty broad definition of the word leisure though since there are people who are employed and working hard to think on these things. Nonetheless, it isn’t the primary creative purview of people laboring to survive at an existential level. It’s for those who have the time to contemplate it, right?
Interesting secondary thoughts
is this true of all aspects of religion, not just the afterlife?
The Hurt Bird This morning I heard a bird hit our front window. I got up from my chair and went to see if it was hurt. There was no bird but there was a hole in the snow and a light wing flapping pattern around it. It obviously had been stunned but not badly and had flown away on it’s own. If it was still there I was going to go get my work gloves and get the bird to see if I could help it. Have you ever found a hurt bird in your yard? When you pick it up you have to hold on to it tight enough that it can’t jump out and hurt itself but not so tight that you suffocate it, right?
Holding It Lightly That is a handy metaphor for questions and answers in life. I need to hold on to ideas (questions and answers are just different manifestations of an idea after all) that seem important to me, but I can’t hold on to them so tight that they can’t breathe.
Nurturing the Idea What that means with the bird is yes, there is a chance it could get away with how lightly you are holding it but there is a greater chance it won’t escape and you can nurture it back to health. When it comes to ideas this is also true. An idea grows and changes as it ages in your mind. It might become more clear, towards a more firm answer, or it might become a bit more muddied, so you have more questions about it than before (neither direction is better than the other). But the thing is, whatever the direction, you don’t know it in advance. All you know is you have to keep it alive so you can enjoy your relationship with that idea.
Living with Uncertainty And what that means is that it is good if you can live with uncertainty. If you can’t you will demand an answer to every question even if there is no answer that is true or helpful. Then you will hold on to that answer as if your life depends on it, so tight you kill it. It will no longer be alive, able to grow, mature, modify, expand. It will be dead.
Desperate Soil In religion it will lead to legalism. In politics it will lead to hyper-partisanship. In relationships it will lead to unhappiness and isolation. In all cases it will lead to desperation and both questions and answers aren’t nourished well in desperate soil. Where they grow best is in free, loosely packed intellectual soil, rich in nutrients and other ideas, nourished by a loving gardener who takes the time to let both the questions and answer grow into everything they are supposed to be.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”, said Freud, or Marx (Groucho that is). If you say this quote you are also saying sometimes it’s not a cigar, it’s a symbol representing a penis. That is what complex looking is all about, seeing what is there and seeing what might be behind what is there; maybe an intent, a joke, or a hidden agenda.
For example, there is a hand gesture that I recently learned has not one, but two meanings. It’s your index finger touching your thumb to make a circle. It means everything is A-OK and until this year that is all I ever knew it to mean. But I’ve been told it also means white supremacy. I am not sure of the history behind it becoming a symbol of that but it is now something that can be interpreted to mean that, especially if it’s displayed upside down.
Sometimes it isn’t visual, it’s verbal. A politician says ‘Nationalism’ and it doesn’t JUST mean having pride in one’s country. It also means they want to preserve the existing power structure that they feel is threatened by outsiders. Which outsiders? Well, according to our current President, those outsiders are not Norwegians. They are Mexicans, South Americans, people from ‘shithole’ countries in Africa and Muslims from countries in the Middle East. They are the outsiders that are threatening our nation, not the good white people of Europe.
It behooves us to always LOOK clearly at what is going on underneath the obvious.
I posted this drawing 10 years ago today. Still true. I did the drawing in 2002, and another one just like it, and put them in my daughters’ lunches to bring to school.
I love this quote. It reminds me of a road trip. Destiny is the driver and Fate is the friend in the passenger seat saying ‘turn here, go straight, take the on ramp, take the back road…
The Orange Man Sat on his golden throne and thought for a second. Then he went out into the world and said, “IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMEIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII”. The End
I drew this 16 years ago to put in my daughters’ lunches and I posted the drawing to this blog 10 years ago today. Still true.
I liked using these napkins to spark my daughters’ thinking about various ideas (they were in High School at the time). They would pass the napkin around their lunch table and a conversation would often develop as a result.
Many years later I had friends of my daughters tell me how much they enjoyed having the napkins come out each day and the conversations they would have as a result.
Makes me feel like I did something good.
Here is the original text that went with the post the first time.
So, if this is the case, what are your unbeliefs? And once you tell us that, how did your beliefs, blind or otherwise, create those unbeliefs? Or, maybe you don’t believe this quote about unbelief?
Drawing in church (or anywhere) is not restricted to drawing something or someone I am looking at. Here are 5 examples of the range, from starting with a real person but adding a made-up background to doing something abstract that has no connection to a world outside itself.
The Violinist’s Hand
The drawing is of a real person…sorta. She is the violinist in church that I draw frequently. But I am not being hired to draw her portrait so I am not particularly concerned about it looking exactly like her. I have certain parts that I hope I get right and I work at that, but just like an author will tell you, sometimes the character takes on a life of their own. In the artist’s case, the lines made and the colors chosen have reasons, some known some unknown, that go beyond a likeness to the individual and into an idea, feeling or mood.
The background obviously isn’t from church. I created it to build on the idea of her looking off in the distance and hoping for help. After I drew the background I came up with what she might be thinking. I penned that in and was going to leave the last word off but then thought it would be interesting to finish the quote with a visual instead of a word.
The Stained Glass Singer
Here is another example of starting with a person, in this case a choir member. This time it looks like I went even further away from a standard portrait but it didn’t start that way.
That happened later, when I was in my studio studying the drawing. That is when I started to see the facets in her face and thought about defining them. I have done that many times before over the decades and it’s always a fun exercise to work on.
But what made it special this time was realizing that building those up could turn her into a stained glass window. It seems like a perfect thing to do.
Sad Girl
The only thing remotely connected to a real person here is a general shape of the face, but even that is exaggerated. It was just a shape I saw and remembered as I passed someone in the hall of the church.
The rest of the drawing I wasn’t looking at anybody or thinking about anyone in particular. The initial line drawing of the shape gave me a melancholy feeling so I drew the rest of the portrait to match that.
I chose the blue and yellow stripes of the hair first. The shirt was a solid at that point but I felt one solid block of color would be too heavy at the bottom. I liked the idea of something bridging the two sides of her so I added stripes to the shirt. It also allowed me to create a sense of volume to her body.
Sometimes a situation arises that causes you to make a decision you otherwise would not make. I started filling in the pink background on the left and slowly realized the marker was running out of ink. In most cases I would just refill but I didn’t have any refill ink. So, I had to consider what could I do on the opposite side if I wasn’t going to use the same color. I liked the idea of using a cool color to break up the symmetry of the image and to cast a different mood to the two different sides so I went with a pale green.
At the very end I did not like the big blank space between her eyes and her mouth so I decided to add her blushing. It seemed just the right finishing touch to the image and her melancholy.
The Aliens
Sometimes the distance between what you start with and what you end with is light years away. I ended with a couple of goofy aliens landing on earth. But what I started with was a breast.
I had this idea, yes while in church, of a nude woman floating in the air. So, I drew a breast to start. I realize two things at this point. One, I made the breast too big to make my idea of a whole person floating feasible and two, church might not be the best place to draw this image even if it did fit.
So, what to do? I contemplated what I had and saw a possible space ship. One shaped like a flying breast it’s true but I figured I could make that not so apparent.
And of course a space ship has to have aliens so I decided to make them look like bumbling boobs, just for fun.
Spiral #7
Sometimes I am completely in my head at church, not looking at anything. This is the case with this drawing of spirals, one of a series I have been doing lately.
While it is completely abstract (meaning no reference to anything beyond itself) that does not mean I am not considering the possible ideas that might come from the drawing.
In this case I was very deliberate about having the four quadrants be mirror images of the diagonal quadrant and to have the colors be the same. At this point my thoughts are about how the colors are reflecting groups of people and how they interact – tribes, colonies, and yes churches.
That doesn’t mean I expect someone looking at this drawing to see that, or to see anything at all. It’s just where my mind meanders as I am creating these sorts of images.
The great thing about art, and in particular abstract art, is that everyone is right in their opinion. There is no absolute truth in art. What you want it to mean, it means.
Here is a partial list of the things that might enslave you or me (if you think of others, feel free to let me know in the comments).
Alcohol / Drugs
Insecurity
Depression / Anxiety
Phone / Social Media
Change
The scale
Rules / Society standards
Perfection
Control
Shopping
Work
Guilt
Sex / Porn
Expectations
Responsibilities
Sugar
I have personally have dealt with or still deal with at least 5 on this list and if I include my family and close friends then I have dealt indirectly with almost every single one to some degree. I expect if you are old enough you have too.
The Hard Part
Here is the hard part. Knowing we are enslaved isn’t enough. If we are more interested in overcoming than polishing then we must ask and seek the answer to this question:
Why do we polish our chains?
Here’s why we need to ask this question. Saying you hate something about yourself or your situation is only looking at half the issue. The other question we have to ask is:
What do we gain from it?
Because knowing what we gain from it is key to figuring out how to let it go and pick up something else that isn’t as destructive.
What are your answers?
Drawing and Commentary @ 2019 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Quote by Marcel Mariën, 1920-1993, Belgian Surrealist
When I first drew this I was anticipating having word bubbles for each of the people, each one saying something that would clue the viewer in to who was understanding and who was misunderstanding.
But I was streaming the drawing of the image live and the people watching the broadcast had different answers to this question. At that point I realized it would be much more interesting to just have the viewer make their own choice as to who is seeing things clearly and who is not. I decided the word bubbles weren’t needed.
And so I ask you, who is understanding little and who is misunderstanding a lot? By the way, just in case you are the type that worries about this, there is no right answer. Your choice is valid, as are your reasons. So, let’s hear them!
