Beauty as a Form of Resistance
by Mary Rakow, Ph.D.
My first years in San Francisco I lived in the Financial District. At Christmas I
loved the towering Christmas trees in bank lobbies, at the center of Union Square,
the grid of wreaths across the windows of Macy’s, the ice skaters below. The scale
and lavishness astonished and pleased me.
Then one Christmas season I was walking in Jackson Square and to my left
noticed the modest window of a small gallery. I stopped short. Because centered in
that window was a Christmas lily. Nothing else. Its one deep red blossom faced to
right, showing the trumpet shape in perfect profile. It was the most beautiful thing I
had ever seen. Beautiful because all that was not there. All the emptiness that
eagerly assembled itself around this one, gorgeous, single blossom. It remains to this
day my favorite Christmas decoration ever. Because it wasn’t a decoration. It was
solemn and commanding and powerful, and it drew me immediately to an inner
stillness, mysterious and deeply inviting.
Intimidated by the power of the single lily and the person who would have
arranged that small front window, it was some years before I had the courage to
open the front door and go inside. To my left, just inside the door, not visible from
the street, was a very large canvas primarily black with thick texture and a reddish
color emanating from underneath the black in a subtle band across roughly, the
center. That’s a horrible description. I don’t really have the words. But what I can
tell you is that I stopped. I turned to face it. And I was silent. I stood there and stood
there and stood there. Time passed. I don’t know how long. An hour? Two? Tears
down my cheeks. It seemed to tell me everything that is true. At some point, the
gallery manager offered me a chair. I sat and sat and sat. My feet, my heart, my
mind, my eyes, everything silent. All of who I am alert, stilled, attentive. It felt holy
to me. I went back. Months, years. I went again yesterday, and decided to write this
post. Because this is what art can do. All forms of art, including our writing.
We can go into the writing zone and create something as powerful as that
single lily or that canvas. Something exquisitely beautiful. And we can give that to
the reader.
And if we cannot summon beauty in some moment, or some prolonged stage
of our writing life, we can write about the inability to summon beauty. We can put
this inability into a character, in perhaps a different circumstance than whatever has
caused our work to flounder.
I did this at a very low point in my life, when writing The Memory Room.
I reached through the open mahogany weave of the headboard and held
aside the drape, wondering if the sun was going to come back. It was a real
question. It was a time of the profound uncertainty for me. Staring at the dark, I
realized most of all, for the first and only time in my life, that I wasn’t even sure my
name was Mary. That was a stunning realization.
Later that day, my husband at work, our kids at school, I went to my writing
room and wrote the below passage. It’s trimmed here, and the words in italics are
from great poet Paul Celan. It’s about the painter trying to remember beauty. My
main character, herself at a very low moment, imagines this painter and puts him in the time of the Bubonic Plague which took, from Europe, one life in three.
~~~
Perhaps it was like this–
He gets up from his bed, leaving the familiar muslin weave of the sheet, awakened by the noise of another funeral procession. Everyone wailing, holding cloths to their faces. He looks down at the priest’s weary eyes, notes the cut pattern of sunlight on the lace of his chasuble….
Next door, a woman with delicate hands tips a sister out into the street. The stench of the bile and blood rise through the air.
…two boys shake sticks at a rat they’ve cornered. Laughing, one throws a stone. No one knows that the rat carries the plague.
He wants to paint the Blessed Virgin with Christ Child….Not sure he can remember what normal skin looks like. Around him, and close, so many bodies swelled up and blackened, tumors the size of grapefruit, rank expulsions of pus.
It is everywhere. And it is not what he wants.
He examines his brushes, upright and clean in the jar, pulls bristles between his forefinger and thumb, thinks of his three sisters buried last year, his brother who ran screaming to the Carmelite monastery on the hill.
His mother sits in the kitchen below. He knows she is staring at the wall, tearing rags. At dusk he will find her slumped over and silent, rags piled around her like a nest. He will burn the rags, and the next day she will do the same.
This is not the mother he wants to paint. He wants Mary enthroned by the Moon, her cape studded with stars.
He waits for memory to bridge the gap, touching the corner of his canvas like a prayer. Everywhere helplessness. Everywhere laceration.
Reachable, near not lost,
there remained amid the losses this one thing…
Surrounded by bloated and black festering bodies,
….through its own answerlessness
…through the thousand darknesses…
this painter somehow remembers tenderness, the beauty of skin.
~~~
Let us be that painter. Let us touch the bristles of each brush. The corner of
our canvas. Let us make one small attempt to move ourselves and our reader closer
to what is ultimately true. To all that is good and beautiful. To all that spurs
forgiveness and compassion and internal peace and spaciousness. Those things that
make us walk with better posture and look ahead with eagerness. There is always,
always, beauty inside us and around us. Let us be on the lookout for it. Let us stop.
Let us notice. Let us bring it into ourselves. And then let us find a way to put it on
the page, directly or through a character or by a dream.
Let us resist the many things that daily can discourage us as citizens, as
neighbors, lovers, activists, contemplatives and let us go into a writing zone and find
in that sanctuary our higher self. Our deeper convictions. The ones that are true
regardless of our immediate circumstances.
This is what art can do.
There are many paintings that are not art at all. There are many books that
are not literature. And we know that the world does not need more stuff like this.
The world needs art. And the only way the world gets art is if artists go into their
studio and suffer with their own sense of inadequacy, and take the step to lift the
brush. Literary art requires the same. As does real architecture. Good industrial
design. A well made coat. It’s always hard. And it’s always worth it.
Literary art is only made if we have the courage to go into our writing zone
and in that space the courage to put word onto screen or onto paper. This is the
only way literary art has ever been made.
So let us encourage each other to do exactly this.
We have power as writers. We deal with the invisible as part of our trade.
Memory and imagination are two of our greatest gifts. Both, invisible. But we can
bring these invisible realities, which sometimes only we can see, into the physical
world through language. Our words unite the invisible and the visible. And when we
do this to the best of our ability, we feel joy.
So let us imagine creative people everywhere now trying to get into the zone
that heals us as a human family. That brings us closer. The zone where we
experience our own goodness. Where we remember again that we are noble. And
we come out seeing, with eyes that are new, the nobility in others. Let us have
courage, so that we can become who we already are. When we do this we change the
world, and for the better.
This is our calling. Our privilege. Let us do this!! Because we can.
Hugs galore,
Mary
© Mary Rakow 2025
