Rooms of Christina's Heart

Sometimes, I like to sit on the floor of my living room with art books spread all over the carpet.  The carpet is black and white - an exercise in sharpness of modernism.  I still don't know whether art has a calming effect on me, or whether it lights more fires in my mind, or perhaps, whether it is a combination of both states of being.

There is a small book of Andrew Wyeth's paintings, among El Greco, and a book of Medieval manuscripts.  I know of Wyeth's painting, Christina's World (1948), and so I look for it.  I slow down on purpose, touching the pages, sensing them.  "Go slowly," I tell myself.  "There is no reason to rush."  "What kind of life is lived when we rush?"

Ah, there it is!  Christina is seductive.  I always thought of her that way.  Christina's thinness is frightening and grotesque and ideal.  What about her face?  What is she trying to do?  There is no object to seduce.  A house?  A meadow?  Hardly.  The earth does not care about our attempts at seduction.

Sometimes, it's not a bad idea to read the back story of great paintings.  Her full name is Anna Christina Olson.  She was born in 1893 and she died in 1968.  Wyeth had a house which he spent summers in and the Olson family were his neighbors.  He befriended them and was intrigued by Christina.  She had a muscular disease, most likely polio, and one half of her body was paralyzed.  

One day, Wyeth looked outside of his window and saw her crawling toward the house.  Her world was slow, her body did not allow for swiftness, and it was a struggle to get from one place to the next.  Her world was limited by her suffering body.  Her world was limitless by her suffering body.  Like the landscape, the boundlessness and the uncertainty of human body and heart interrupts our thoughts and restlessness. 

Christina, in fact, was not trying to seduce us, or anyone else for that matter.  She was not indifferent to us either.  It was us, who looked first into our own interiority and found insecurities and rejections.  "Turn around!"  "Let me see your face!"  But more importantly, "Look at me!"  But there is something else hiding behind the insecurities, which are just illusions anyway.   There is a need to be seen, to be recognized.  By desiring to be recognized by Christina, we find  something wholly outside of ourselves - her being is an imposition, a call, which must be answered.  Or are we going to turn around and go into another direction toward another vastness of the landscape, where there is another desolate house, whose interior is unknown to us?  But the house is inanimate, isn't it?  The space of the house can be controlled, maintained - the imposition comes from us.  Christina's interior and the rooms of her soul are unknown too but the uncertainty is coupled with a constant possibility of surprise.  The rooms may be locked, may be open, some might even miss a door, some might have creaky doors. Who knows what the vastness of human heart will bring?