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

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III. Contemplation:

In turning now to Contemplation, the third part of “Beholding,” following Preparation and Meditation, the “contemplative knowing” we are seeking requires that you sustain contradictory possibilities and embrace them rather than choose between them or attempt to reconcile the unreconcilable. As in any embrace, the invitational gesture to “Behold” is only the beginning, not the end. Unlike habitual art historical behavior that stands back from such a counter-productive embrace as “scientifically” unobjective, remaining content with endless debate concerning formal and/or iconographic interpretation, “Beholding” offers an opening beyond the dilemma of competing and contradictory “solutions” that inform this familiar discourse. Accordingly, you may respond to the “pictorial gesture” of Hendrick van Vliet's Interior of the New Church at Delft in any way that resonates with you at the moment of your embrace with it. Your response will inevitably vary, not only from moment to moment, but also from occasion to occasion. “Beholding,” unlike “scientific” art historical decoding of meaning, is an opening of dialogue rather than a contentious and increasingly exclusive narrowing of possibilities reaching toward a fictitious truth. What follows now are several contemplative possibilities embodied in this painting that offer visual and artistic interaction with another person. Each will provide entry into the powerful embrace you are being invited to engage. Although any one of these contemplative possibilities can bring you to an occasion of “Beholding,” by multiplying them, you may amplify the possibility of a shared moment of “Beholding.” as we proceed, feel free to embrace this opportunity as you will. Again, our purpose is not argument. It is love.

Try now to be in Thoreau's “woods.” Remember why Thoreau went to those “woods” in the first place: “ I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ”

Can another way of knowing ourselves, the world and each other take us beyond the “city limits” of our habitual, neutral observation of all things, rational analysis and self-fulfilling interpretation? Is it possible that our own artistic displacement from ordinary experience into extraordinary contemplation in silence (from “Concord” to the “woods”), guided by this painting and its “image,” might begin to inform our deepest sense of “interiority” and of “Waiting,” not to say our own perceived reality of living “deliberately” within our accommodation to the unarguable truth of our own mortal solitude? Will you allow this painting, this museum object, to release its “image” so that it might shine forth in the darkness of this room as an occasion of “contemplative knowing;” of “Beholding;” and, perhaps even as a brief intimation of self-transcendence? Do you dare let this kind of “contemplative knowing,” this “Beholding,” become the subtlest kind of thinking and being you can manage? At the end, all you will need to do to make it all disappear is to blink and you will be back in your all-too-familiar surroundings; safe and sound ... but still “Waiting.” Will you take another step?

Continued >>