'Waiting' with Hendrick Corneliz. van Vliet (1611-75)

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Can you enter this place ... will you ... will you embrace it as surely as you may feel the expanse of space between you and the far entry? Can you feel/sense your presence here within this liminal space in your perception of the scale differential between the nearby column next to you and the figure opposite you in the distant door?

“Behold” in the ambiguous narrative implied by the random movement through this interior space of the many figures you see and by your own “movement” into this space: and moment:

... stillness ... silence beyond sound ... beyond narrative ...beyond change ...

Can you feel by way of contradictory contrast an intensified awareness of the sudden, quiet and unexpected “interiority” of your own subjective presence here, now? Has a new, stilled void replaced crowded confusion, conscious separation, fragmentation? Do you dare ... will you allow yourself to enter this pictorial moment ...

Detail of the empty bench

Look at the empty bench ... Contemplate it ... Then approach it ... Let it be the place of your “Waiting” ...

Overall painting with frame

Release yourself into the thrall of this painting and its “image”... as you contemplate, with this painting as your guide, be aware of your breathing. Breathe in and breathe out. Imagine your breathing as the measure of your projection into the world ... as well as into and through this illusory space ... Become aware of a corporeal engagement with this space and with this constructed “image.” Imagine yourself into this interior ...

Now, triangulate your presence ... actually feel the illusory space (not as an observed simulacrum of space independent of you, but as a constructed experience of space). Come to know this space. Be there. Engage the descriptive details of the moment. Let them become the constituents of your own embodied presence: the angled, accidental, random perception, carefully and effectively and deliberately calculated for you by the artist who would share his “Beholding” with you. Feel the full force of the intersection between the “heavy” horizontality of the stone ground—earthbound, mortal randomness—and the powerful vertical ascent of those massive columns that give colossal, immutable scale to the unknowable magnitude of the informing light that now penetrates this space; this envelope of “interiority.” And ... that now fills you, the living, as you observe the open grave and recall the monumental tomb of William of Nassau, called the “Silent.” Look carefully ... attend to ... Be open to the descriptive light that defines this space pictorially and carves it out as an illusion, even as it enters the window from above and comes to rest at the “center of pictorial gravity:” the bench where we might have been “Waiting” ... with Hendrick van Vliet ... for this moment of transcendent awareness.

In contemplating any or all of the precisely orchestrated contradictory pictorial possibilities that comprise this “image,” we might have come to this place of “Beholding.” By entering into the thrall of relational forms and by admitting our vulnerability to them, we might actually have come to a new “place” in which our own incarnate subjectivity intersects with that of the artist. At this threshold of inter-subjective being, our habitual sense of conscious separation might give way to a momentary, but fully palpable intimation of seemingly seamless wholeness. Were we to stand, or perhaps “sit” in this threshold of attentive awareness, we will have allowed this painting to stand guard over our solitude. At this precise moment of a disciplined “contemplative knowing,” our shared experience would be filled with the sound of bells, other people's muffled conversations, echoed across the stone floor, the smell of damp earth ... and an irresistible in-breathing of light from the outside that fills us every bit as much as it does this church interior. This “Beholding” will have brought you through the pathway of your thinking into the presence of wholeness ...of Love beyond longing.

If you were to “Wait” quietly ... long enough ... with Hendrick van Vliet, you might perceive the impossible, yet universal, mystery of Christ's most poignant words to Martha and the miracle of his raising her brother Lazarus from death: “I am the Resurrection and the life ... he who believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25). As something of a homecoming to us all, these words, in the stillness of this place, are a bridge that reunites all separate solitudes. If you were now able to accept your own breathing out as the corporeal equivalent of the illusory depth of this “image,” you might, more fully than you had imagined, breath in the exterior light that enters this space through the clerestory windows behind the column on the right side of this painting and comes forward (visibly/pictorially) even as it descends toward the empty bench at the “center of pictorial gravity” of this painting.

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