Timeless Beauty

Although I have yet to find someone willing to pay me money to write for them, I have made plenty of connections to people willing to exploit me.

Happily!

I freely write anyway. Why not write for free?

My current unpaid assignment is for Tikkun Magazine in Berkeley. It is to write a profile of an artist named Mark Dukes.

Dukes is an iconographer. He recently finished a project he has been working on for ten years.

The project is a wall mural depicting 90 dancing saints, joined hand-in-hand, circling the massive, domed ceiling of St. Gregory’s Church, located in San Francisco’s Portrero Hill neighborhood.

The art world is strewn with remnants of entire careers that didn’t span ten years.

Dukes spent ten years on a single painting.

For comparison, it took Michelangelo four years and seven months to complete his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

If time is something to be measured and tracked, it may seem that Dukes spent a disproportionate amount of a finite substance working on something essentially ethereal.

But time is an illusion.

Elements come together and collaborate in the creation of things. For anything to come into existence in this world, steps must be taken. Formulas must be conceived and adjusted. Ideas must percolate. Style must be established then abandoned then reworked until finally the thing can be.

Everything, all of it, the buildings, the subways, the cars, the clothes, the bicycles, it was all once just an idea in somebody’s head. How long did it take to invent buildings? How long did it take to make clothes?

Creation takes as long as it takes and that’s how long it takes.

Process reflects only an image of the maker, not what is made. Many a thing goes through a process of creation that seems to be conflagrated, nothing but a series of random disasters, but somehow in the end becomes something beautiful, useful, even vital.

Earth is the ultimate example. Earth is art.

The story of the process is irrelevant. All that matters is the beauty, the usefulness, the vitality.

Every wasted argument over evolution vs. creationism vs. whatever other process supposedly got us here only ultimately offends.

Evolution doesn’t make me love. Creationism doesn’t hold my feet atop the ground.

Love itself calls me to it. The ground itself lifts me up.

We products of earth, each of us, are creations, collaborated upon. Each of us is a work of art. We exist independently of time. We are never complete for long.

If we only contemplate petty measures of each other’s worth based on immature concepts such as the passage of minutes and hours and days, we not only confuse our value and mistake our purpose but we defy our nature, and become liars.