In April 2001 Jocelyn and I visited the Queensland Art Gallery. The "Picasso to Renoir" Exhibition.
I purchased a blank book with Andre Derain's painting entitled 'Harlequin and Pierrot' ( 1924).
This painting by Derain was attractive, enjoyable then decidedly confronting. The soundless musicians in a barren landscape. The challenge is to reach beyond this for if the One who breathes life into dead people walking AND has done so to me then where I am, a sign of that life, at least, should be. AND do I have a song to sing? At times it seems no.
This is what I wrote on the first page of this wordless book.
(Maybe in this noiseful world the only Words available to speak are the words of silence. ... Jan. 2009 )
December 2002 and I take Chaim Potok's book "The Chosen" to read at Lennox Head - a beach side vacation. .... Danny, speaking to Reuven indicates that his father would wish that everyone would " talk in silence" ... the story addresses the delights and awful pain of friendship .... the importance of the word yet the destruction words also bring.
"A word is worth one coin. silence is worth two" a note from the Talmud.
"Silence was ugly, it was black. it leared. it was cancerous, it was death" .......
"Silence talks to me sometimes .... you have to want to listen to it and then you can hear it. ... sometimes it cries and you can hear the pain of the world in it" It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to. ..." (p 259)
"The Chosen" Chaim Potok a penguin book ISBN 0 14 003094 8
