Essays

Thank goodness for each other. None of us alone can be all that a human being can be. We all go through our lives with potentials that are never actualized. I think this truth lies at the heart of my friendship with Lynn Randolph. Lynn became what I wanted to become but did not– an artist. She is my professional other half, as it were. We have worked together: first a few years ago with her paintings for a textbook on how to compare religions; then just last year on a big memoir and manifesto I was writing called Secret Body. In both books, I was struggling to write out a certain vision of the world. Lynn “drew that vision out,” in both senses of that expression. Her work has always reminded me that the cosmic condition of our humanity cannot be fully expressed in grammar and language, much less in technical scholarship. Truth is also carried by the image. True to their surreal roots, Lynn’s art-works “speak” to us much like dreams and visions– in symbols and narratives that we can never quite fully understand (we are dull like that), but that we can “sixth-sense” or intuit. Lynn paints us, or better, Lynn paints our deeper unconscious cosmic natures, which most of us have forgotten, or repressed, or only dreamed at night. Like a paranormal event that signals or signs but does not explain, Lynn draws and paints to wake us up, but also to call us to responsibility for interpreting, and so making real, the uncanny dreams that we all are.