Late July

A sea of periwinkle moves

across the south pasture towards the timber.

The wild chicory has spread triumphantly

with taut stems which hold fast to the baked clay

of late July.

In a season of drought,

here is water of a different sort:

a quench of blue stars

undulating wildly in the brown breeze.

Spring-fed from a deeper source

it is that thing you call upon

when dust dulls you

and you sleep, dreamless, in small corners.

That place you go

when you must gather your children behind sod walls

and sing the songs of spring

your voices, lovely specters, rising

from the stubble around you.

This is water with no volume,

no hydrogen or oxygen.

But it flows just as surely,

cascading in ancient pools

from which we all drink

and through which the sun shatters

into prisms of life.

Seasons of Angst                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   for Collyn and Gracyn (and other fellow angsters)

Worry grows along the banks of the furrows

which run decidedly along your brow.

Darkness is not your friend,

and it often comes

in a single, suffocating rush—

a hothouse of angst.

You are the exquisite recipient of genes that rise,

eager to leave their fermented husks,

destined to torment.

But what a lovely façade!

Freckles which spread like constellations

across a sky of milk-white skin,

wisps of ash blonde hair which fall

in single strands across one azure eye

and then another.

Who would see the shards of doubt that threaten—

even in the glow of a bedside lamp,

even in the happily-ever-after of a favorite book?

Who would feel the prick of night

ever present, ever eager to fracture

all that is innocent and good?

Oh that I could take them back,

these genes that have passed too assuredly

from generation to generation.

But failing to–like those before me–

I can only offer trembling hands

which hold the glittering pieces

of love.

Let it be said that I am a master of angst. And lately, the prospect that I have been an unwilling genetic donor of this brokenness has put my angst into overdrive. Angst is that feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general. 

Oh, there are those with acutely focused anxiety and dread about the state of the world today. All you have to do is tune into any talk radio program or turn on the television, and you will get an earful of this sort of dread. But the unfocused type often lies just below the surface of all that appears to be lovely and innocent, all that seems to float heedlessly like a brilliant buoy across the turbulent sea of life. This sort may appear tightly and individually focused, but in truth, these worries are but metaphors which have razor-like edges that cut more deeply into the general grain of our humanness.

One of my sisters recently lamented the fact that our mom was often unavailable to her for the hour (hours?) after bedtime because she was consoling me for yet another worry or transgression. I once worried for nights about my fear that I may have given my fifth grade teacher an “unpleasant look” as she walked through the aisles during silent reading time. And there was my mom sitting at the foot of my bed, reassuring me for the hundredth time that this act was undoubtedly imagined, not real, and that I had nothing to fret over. This may appear like an eleven-year-old worry, something fleeting and altogether insignificant, but it was not. It was the awkward beginning of a lifetime of brooding over my position–and then the human position–in the universe.

Angst of my sort often morphs into something uniquely terrible. Without boundaries, my angst can suffer from attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Dread scatters like water drops into a skillet of hot oil. Here to there to there to here. . . ad nauseam. This is angst on amphetamines. When I forgot my dentist appointment last year, did I call immediately and beg forgiveness? Or did I wait for them to call me and act duly penitent then? Will Home Depot still mix paint colors that they haven’t had in stock for a decade? And what if they don’t, what then? Why can’t I remember the new science teacher’s name? Why don’t I really listen when I’m introduced? This is the real me, isn’t it? And this is the nature of humans–that we default to self-consciousness when we should be looking outward? I should’ve been paying closer attention, but I was looking at how white her teeth were, and–and I really need to check to see when my dentist’s appointment is. Have I missed it already?

Tragically, angst is a pervasive cancer which finds fertile ground in sensitive souls. So it was no accident that I found kinship years later with confessional poet Sylvia Plath. Plath was–and is–perhaps the truest poster child for angst. From her novel The Bell Jar, she develops and emerges raw in all her splendid self-consciousness and angst. She describes this condition:

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

And later, she reveals her fears that she would never grow out of this condition and into something less angst-ridden:

But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?

Stewing in my own sour air–this is some good (and really bad) stuff, Sylvia! You nailed it, hit the soft target of angst squarely. And as if all this stewing weren’t awful enough, the prospect that it could, and probably would, descend again? This is surely doubt worthy of an even thicker stew.

In her book, Ariel, Plath writes:

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

As I watch those I love, those who have unwittingly inherited my angst-genes, I find myself living vicariously as they wrestle with this dark thing, its soft feathery turnings, its malignity. Indeed, there is room for two or three in such bell jars. And once there, the sour air grows denser and more poisonous from generational worry.

Still, I take incredible solace in the words of Ernest Hemingway who wrote:

We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.

It is ironic and sad that both Plath and Hemingway took their own lives, ultimately being unable to bear their brokenness and to tame the dark thing. Blessedly, light did seep through the cracks of their broken lives at times. And when it did, they lived and loved, they wrote stories and poems of enduring beauty and wisdom. They brought light to others even as it waned and was finally extinguished in their own lives.

If our brokenness lets the light in and if that light is wondrous yet sporadic, so be it. In that splendid light, its rays refracted exquisitely through the glass of the bell jar, there is respite from angst.

Walking through the architectural splendors of Italy and France, I turned to my friend and repeated the same words, over and over again. I just don’t understand. I sincerely don’t understand how men could envision and design such structures: the Coliseum, the Vatican, the Church of Santa Maria del Fiore, St. Mark’s Basilica, Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur. For one who is blown away by a stand of Queen Anne’s Lace or an aging Iowa barn, standing in the presence of such splendor was almost more than I could take.

After returning from my European trip, so many people have asked me what my favorite site was. Hard-pressed as I have been to identify a single site, I have to admit that Florence holds a special place in my heart. This city, the birthplace of the Renaissance, is home to the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (Saint Mary of the Flower), which has been nicknamed the Duomo because of its impressive octagonal dome. Impressive is a pathetic understatement, indeed. This is the largest church in Italy and the third largest in the world.

Construction on the Duomo began in 1386, but it remained domeless until 1436. For more than a century, the east end of the cathedral remained open or was covered with a flat, temporary roof. The problem? No architect or engineer could figure out how to design and build an octagonal dome of that size. Italian architects understood the design of a round dome, like that of the Pantheon in Rome, but such domes were constructed of concrete, and the recipe for concrete had been lost in the Middle Ages. The Parisian Notre Dame–and other Medieval gothic cathdrals–relied upon flying buttresses to support their weight. But Florence had banned the use of buttresses, and the Italian Renaissance architects wanted to return to the clean lines of their Roman past.

And so for a century, one could only imagine the magnificent dome–one destined to be bigger than that of the Pantheon–a dome that was intended to be the crown jewel of the Basilica. That is, until the genius of  Flippo Brunelleschi. 

There are times when genius, a flash in the pan, bursts upon the scene electrifying all in its midst. Other times, however, I believe it is more of an overwhelming, persistent passion to fill a vacuum. A passion that belongs to a man or woman who fails forward, shelving all that is incomplete, inadequate, and ill-conceived. One who wakes each day bent to the task–no to the love that drives and fills each moment.

Imagine Brunelleschi standing before the span of Florentine air that was to be the greatest brick dome the world had ever seen. In Marginalia, Edgar Allan Poe wrote:

The true genius shudders at incompleteness — imperfection — and usually prefers silence to saying the something which is not everything that should be said.

A true genius, Brunelleschi would have abhorred the incompleteness before him. It would have gnawed at his soul. It would have threatened to unravel the core of a deep yearning to complete, a yearning which had come to define him. His genius was multifold: artistic, technical, mathematical, and practical. What his eye could see, his brain could calculate. What his brain could calculate, his understanding of available materials and the human body could compensate. To lift the 4 million bricks needed to complete the dome? Brunelleschi invented a new machine that was capable of hoisting the necessary masonry. To advance and ensure the physical labor of hundreds of masonry workers? He reimagined former labor practices by keeping the workers on the job during breaks, bringing food and drink to them, and keeping them from the exhaustion of going down and up the hundreds of stairs constructed for the project.

Completing the Basilica’s dome, the apse, and the cupola would be the majority of Brunelleschi’s life work. Because a modern understanding of the physical laws and mathematical tools needed for calculating stresses were hundreds of years in the future, Brunelleschi relied primarily on his intuition and what he could learn from building large-scale models. He left behind a single model of his dome–intentionally incomplete to ensure his complete control over the project–and no formal plans or diagrams. There is something inherently genius about a design and construction which remained a mystery for centuries.

American writer and novelist Pearl S. Buck writes:

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

I imagine Brunelleschi to have been most alive when he was creating and overseeing his creation come to life. The fact that this took the majority of his life makes me think he lived fully and deeply, relishing the placement of each row of bricks as his dome reached ever skyward. Some might say that it doesn’t get much better than this.

Others might look at the magnitude of such a project that spanned a lifetime and question if this was genius as much as it was persistence. Michelangelo–a genius in his own right–claimed that genius is eternal patience. The genius behind the Pantheon, the Coliseum, and the great cathedrals of Europe give testament to the role that patience has played. In a world of fast food, quick news, information and entertainment at the touch of a button, it is difficult–if not impossible–to conceive of those who devoted most of their lives to single, magnificent endeavors. But how these geniuses and their creations continue to bless us!

In his essay, On Liberty, English philosopher John Stuart Mill writes:

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow.  

How do we preserve this precious soil? When utility and profit rule the day, what can we do to carve out those necessary plots for geniuses? Clearly, I don’t have the answers. Still, I am convicted that we must encourage this small minority to continue to grace the world with their unimaginable gifts. There must be infinite seasons of genius. Of this, I am certain.

St. Mark’s Square, Venice

The Coliseum, Rome