old america, new america

i have a love-hate relationship with the state of massachusetts. I hate the winter, the lack of softness, and the depression. I love the staunch, rebellious and self-righteous roots of massachusetts. I feel at home when i read about the authors of our declaration and the white guys dressed as Indians who threw a deeply subversive tea party. I could do that.

I was raised in the South, where tea parties were just that. It took awhile for me to know just how much i wanted to change the rules of engagement. Sometimes, though, it's just a little chilly up here, and I miss the daily kindnesses that are part of the air below the Mason-Dixon line. These rifts and differences cause me to drift back and forth, between old home in the expanses of Texas, where anything is possible; and the friction of the northeast, where people are watching, commenting, weaving new lines of thought in the warp and woof of our social fabric.

Today, i'm love-hating in North Adams, home of the fanciful MASS MoCA. We're going to see this awesome show by Anne-Sofie Sitel, "The Museum of the Queen of Mud." For any woman who feels a bit alienated from the main stream, and who feels she has endured a bit more emotional load than is bearable, this would be a treat. This performance artist, dressed in mud, interacts with people in the "real world" in profound and heartwrenching ways. She seems saner, in her mud coating, than do her questioners. More than anything, the exhibit causes me to feel a bit more at home as an observer, an outsider, in my own culture. She - the Queen of Mud - is coated in a special substance that will "protect her from extremes of warm and cold" so that she can travel into space and meet her destiny. Sounds wild, but not as wild as bringing democracy to Iraq through the use of armed forces from outside. America. Gotta love it.

But anyway, my partner is next to me, reading "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," the latest and greatest tome by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Lincoln's capacity for appreciation must have created so much hope at a time when so little was apparent on the surface of things. Try this on:

"On Saturday morning, Lincoln and his guests visited Petersburg (which had just been abandoned by Lee). At a certain spot, the marquis recalled, 'he gave riders to stop the carriage.' On his previous visit, Lincoln had noticed a 'very tall and beautiful' oak tree that he wanted to examine more closely. 'He admired the strength of its trunk, the vigorous development of branches,' which reminded him of 'the great oaks' in the Western forests. He halted the carriage again when they passed 'an old country graveyard' where trees shaded a carpet of spring flowers. Turning to his wife, Lincoln said, 'Mary, you are younger than i. you will survive me. When i am gone, lay my remains in some quiet place like this.' On the train ride back to City Point, Lincoln observed a turtle 'basking in the warm sunshine on the wayside.' He asked that the train be stopped so that the turtle could be brought into the car. 'The movements of the ungainly little animal seemed to delight him,' Elizabeth Keckley recalled. He and Tad shared 'a happy laugh' all the way back to the wharf." (p. 722)

I didn't start out to talk about Lincoln, really, but this capacity for appreciation has grabbed me, so why not tell it through one of my heroes? It's been my experience that in the darkest and most pressing times, life unflinchingly offers us solace, or at least a muse, so that we have the continued spark to move on.

Today's bright note centers on the art of Haram Kamrooz, a young Iranian artist also on show at MassMOCA, who makes his studio home in New York (natch). His glossy oils and ecstatic palette remind me of some latter-day Peter Max, only with a greater sense of restraint and Persian flourish. This lucid show is a cocktail of joyous spirit and refined artistry. And all of this from the sumptuous, wireless-enabled bedroom of the Porches. I'm in a cozy den, writing into a battery-operated laptop, with access to the deft gestures of Lincoln and the artistic daring of our latest and greatest, all while the fire warms my toes. It's a new world we life in, for sure.