Essays

The paintings that open each new part and chapter are all by Houston surrealist artist Lynn Randolph. Lynn and I met a few years ago, after she had read some of my work on erotic mystical literature and detected deep resonances between what she was trying to do on the canvas and what I was trying to do on the page. After I encountered her stunning paintings, I could not agree more. Like the religious imagination at its best, Lynn’s paintings are ambiguous, paradoxical, open to multiple meanings, fierce in their honesty and criticism, gorgeous in their bodies, and, above all , magically capable of pushing their viewers into a direct vision, an intuited sense, or at least a gut suspicion that the real is not what we think it is. At all. With Lynn’s help, I will be attempting something similar in the pages that follow through the brush strokes, some of them quite surreal, of my words. We paint together here.