23 May 2020. Solano Angel.
Looking at the Cimabue last week, the garments he fashioned for his angels—the most prominent element being the haloes of gold—emphasized no doubt in the reproduction, but still central to his meaning. Where in the Giotto, all significance has been transferred to the human plane—the weight of their bodies, clothing. At first you don’t notice the shift—both paintings are magnificent—but it’s here we encounter the beginning of our own era.
I’m not really sure what that means today. We learned in college to see it as an arc towards some kind of deliverance, understanding—where truth and language would see us through. Never mind the history of the last century—two grotesque wars, deemed impossible, but there they were—and now, given the choice between humanity and money, it becomes the same choice again. (“I’d rather die than kill the country.”) Call it the socialism of death—or the tenth crusade, whatever. But reason is not the point here…
So why dwell on it. Better the garments of angels, like this figure, wandering Solano after the rain. I’d seen the white tarp pulled up over his head, and glimpses of his narrow form—like someone from the Maasai reserve—and then our lives were joined for a moment when he requested a dollar.
Should I have shared my entire kingdom?
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C yesterday evening, remembering the story of Dorothy Day—her co-workers at the Catholic Worker house in New York, doubting the true neediness of some of their clients. She gestures to one such man, “He is Christ, you know…”
I wouldn’t have seen it this way—although Rabbi Citron always taught that if asked, one gives. And in Yerushalayim, at the shul in Mea She’arim, the alms-seekers were always so honored—even if this could be done with only the smallest coins…
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My grandfather, Chaim Dubowsky, in the desert backcountry east of San Diego. He was working a gold mine—this was in the 1920’s—but fell ill. My father went to care for him, managed to carry him to El Centro, where he lay feverish with pneumonia in a rented room. “I made a garment for him,” my father’s words—how they registered. A piece of canvas folded in half, sewn along one long seam. A garment, he said…
A garment for an angel…
