LETTER FROM LONDON: 1/17/25

FROM A to Z's: RICHARD ROHR, SOREN KIERKEGAARD, MYFANWY PIPER, LEE HARRIS, & A WOMAN FROM PRAGUE WHO PRESIDES OVER IT ALL WITHOUT KNOWING SHE PRESIDES LIKE ART DOES WHEN IT IS RATHER OVER IT ALL TOO

The photo above is a selfie I took on Sunday at the Tate Britain Museum as I shouldered this adage from a 1992/93 photograph by Gillian Wearing titled “Everything is connected in life …” It, in fact, hovers there over this shoulder of mine on which underneath yet another of my black turtlenecks is tattooed EVERYTHING CONNECTS. It is one of my mantras. I often write it at the end of posts which once appeared on Facebook and Instagram but now appear here at Substack’s Notes and at Bluesky. Encountering this Wearing work was itself an everything-connects moment, a meta one without the need any longer for Meta. My other mantra is ONWARD. It is tattooed on my other shoulder and is also something I often type at the end of a social media missive, as I do at the end of so many of these columns. So onward into this everything-connects one which this moment at the Tate, totemic in its tapping me on such a shoulder, pointed me toward this week.

On the tube ride the other day from Kilburn on my way into the West End to get a cheap ticket to Cabaret when Marisha Wallace and Billy Porter join the cast as Sally and the Emcee at the end of this month and then to get an apple tart and coffee at my favorite West End cafe, St George on St Martin’s Lane, I began to read The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See by Richard Rohr who founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in New Mexico. Rohr began his preface, which he titled Why I Am Writing This Book, with a quote from scripture:

No man can say his eyes have had enough seeing, his ears their fill of hearing. - Ecclesiastes 1:8

“I have been told,” he went on to write, “that I have a fixation for trying to see almost all things as both/and .. or as a ‘collision of opposites.’ It feels as though it is written in my genes - my worst mistakes come from my not self-balancing.” Reading Rohr’s work has always been rather prayerful itself to me. At the end of each of my daily actual ones, I ask of whomever does not have ears but is filled with hearing, “May it be about the balance and not the battle.” Now if I could only figure out what the “it” is. Not define it. Just be present in … well ... it. Both/and - come to think of it although thinking has nothing to do with it - is another way of claiming everything connects. An incantation: both/and. Both/and: an amen.

Rohr dates his writing of the Preface at its close with a March 20th which is my younger brother’s birthday - as it is Rohr’s I discovered when I was being led to dig deeper not wider in my everything-connects research which I think of as vertical not horizontal. I smiled at that date - a kind of amen itself - and checked the last text I had sent to my brother where he is an OB/GYN in Mississippi. We had a bit of a falling out over a decade ago - the reasons for that will privately remain part of our complicated love for each other - and an integral ingredient of our rapprochement has been bonding over art, texting about it, discussing it, disagreeing about it without having any fallings out over our opinions for he is also a talented and respected and rather well-known artist and sculptor who was mentored by Andy Wyeth as I was in my career by Andy Warhol when I began it at his Interview magazine, the two Andys the both/and of modern American art having somehow become seminal figures in two little orphaned Mississippi country boys lives as we grew up and apart and then found a way through art to come back together and connect. One of my favorite ways of reaching out to my brother is indeed when I am strolling through a museum, like I did while at the Tate the other day and sent along photos of some of the art from the Turner Prize exhibition I had specifically gone to see before strolling deeper into its widening rooms until - sorry King Solomon or Kohelet, a son of David, if either of you really wrote Ecclesiastes, or whoever the conduit was who refused to claim credit for it - my eyes grew tired of seeing which I have come to refer to as museum fatigue.

After checking my texts, I found that my last one to my brother had been about the above bust which stopped me at the National Portrait Gallery the other day. I knew he would love it and be as intrigued by it as I was. There is a roughhewn refinement to it that I assumed captured its subject’s own, a both/and balancing within this manifestation of whoever his woman might be. I was drawn to her so I read the identifying narrative next to the bust on the wall which informed me of her life and its both/and qualities. The bust is of Myfanwy Piper who died in 1997. It was sculpted by her neighbor Clive Duncan, in Oxfordshire where she lived with her husband, the painter John Piper. “Myfanwy Piper was an art critic and writer,” I read, “who played a leading role in the British avant-garde. Soon after discovering abstract art in Paris in 1934, she founded and edited the art journal Axis. Her collaboration with the composer Benjamin Britten began in the 1950s. She wrote several libretti including The Turn of the Screw.”

After seeing this text of the bust that I had also sent to my brother, I decided to click on Myfanwy’s Wikipedia page to see if there might be more of an everything-connects aspect to her work and her life. There was. There is. She was born on March 28th, which is my own birthday. “No way,” my brother texted back while taking a momentary break from his medically focusing on body parts when I wrote him about our birthdays having matched my first two entries in this week’s column. But there is always one, a way, and I keep finding that it is narratively connective in the mindfulness of my spiritual practice as he does biologically in the specificity of his medical one even though his Christian faith is as important to the ecclesiastic constructs of his life as Richard Rohr’s is to his. My own faith ceased to be ecclesiastic and even Christian when I walked the Camino in the nascent days years ago of my living, I know now, this pilgrim’s life. But my brother and I seldom talk about religion. We stick to art.

I read further into Myfanwy’s Wikipedia page and discovered she had also written the libretto for Britten’s opera based on Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice as well as a lone play, The Seducer, which was based on Søren Kierkegaard’s The Seducer’s Diary. I had heard of neither the play nor the Kierkegaard work so I continued my vertical dive and read the Wikipedia page about Kierekegaard, the 19th century Danish theologian and Christian existentialist who more than walked the pilgrim’s path that Richard Rohr in the 20th and 21st centuries has continued to walk on his way toward stillness and simplicity. When I wrote a cover story on Jessica Lange for Vanity Fair back in the 1990s, I ended it with what she had taped to her refrigerator at her farm in Minnesota and one of the things that she had taped there was a quote from Kierkegaard. “Above all, do not lose your desire to walk,” it began. “Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.” The pilgrimage for Kierkegaard to his words being taped by a movie star on her Minnesota fridge began in 1843 by his humbly using a pseudonym for his first published writing and choosing A, a beginning itself, as the name he signed to the essays for the two-volume journal he edited under a second pseudonym, Victor Emerita (Latin for “victorious hermit.”). The journal’s name was Either/Or and was about how to combine the hedonistic life with an ethical one. Either/or is another way of saying both/and which is another way of saying everything connects. My second memoir, I Left It on the Mountain is all about my quest to combine the carnal with the spiritual, the hedonistic with the holy. That is the memoir’s through line in its narrative. It remains mine. I think it was maybe Myfanwy’s too since she spent so much of her life pursuing pleasure and steeped in art but her paternal grandfathers were both ministers which I read about in her obit in The Independent, one Welsh-speaking in Tenby, and the other a Congregational Minister at Louth. Here also is a lovely appreciation of Myfanwy and John Piper in The Guardian titled “Golden Girl” by Frances Spalding who wrote a biography of the couple. It evokes their busy salon of a farmhouse where artists and writers made their own pilgrimages to revel in the rarified country air with other sybarites and sup with academics, a ramshackle home where they danced and sang and debated and cooked. There were a few fallings out followed by rapprochements centered on art.

John Piper’s work and Myfanwy’s mission early on in the 1930s was a shared immersion in the abstract movement where they were a kind of both/and presence. He created; she championed. But the approaching war and its threat to their country turned them toward a layered sense of place and history as elements to be pursued in art instead of the flat surfaces of abstract works that belonged to no particular country so served as a way to connect them all because the work had no particular national character. Piper was attacked as an apostate and traitor by some of his fellow artists in the abstract movement but he would not back down and found ways to utilize both the modern and the traditional in his paintings of English life. Below are two works that show his pilgrimage from abstraction to his sense-of-place paintings that still held realism at bay with his rather mystical way of seeing the world around him. The first painting was done in 1934 and is titled Construction/Intersection. The second work is titled Horham, Suffolk and was painted in 1975. They are in the collection at the Tate. Piper also designed stain glass windows among his other artistic pursuits which included designing theatrical sets and book jackets and tapestries. And he painted a lot of churches which made a kind of abstract sense when I discovered there is an American John Piper who is a theologian and pastor in the Reformed Baptist tradition, and is best known for his book Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist. Kierkegaard would have approved of that title.

On Tuesday night all these connections were swimming about in my head as I walked along the Thames to the River Cafe where I was going to attend a birthday dinner for my friend, screenwriter and producer Margaret Nagle. The last time I was to meet someone at the River Cafe it was for a lunch and I got so lost that I ended up being over an hour late and he had had to leave for other appointments that afternoon. I sort of had PTSD about that day so I gave myself plenty of time to reconnoiter my way there on the long walk from the Hammersmith tube station. I arrived about 90 minutes early so had a coffee and piece of cake with apricots folded into it at the restaurant’s cafe located to the side of it where I worked on the first of this column as the connections swimming about swam to the shore of it. Margaret’s British husband, music business lawyer and executive Richard Rowe, booked the private dining room over in the restaurant for the gathering and after we all arrived Margaret went around the table introducing all of us to each other in an everything-connects soliloquy that she, claiming her privilege as a writer, renamed “the currents of life” and how we all find ourselves in the interconnecting flow of them.

Margaret and I initially bonded over our being faithful readers of each other’s posts on Facebook where her voice takes on political overtones as it often does in her work. She won the WGA Award for her HBO series Warm Springs about FDR’s battle with polio and is currently developing a series about the life of Winston Churchills’s wife, Clementine. We finally met here in London over lunch at the Charlotte Street Hotel several years ago and fell naturally into a friendship and marveled at the discovery of our connection to writer Winnie Holzman who was just nominated for a WGA Award herself for her screenplay adaptation of her book for the musical Wicked. Winnie and I were once actors and we appeared in several readings and then an off-Broadway production of Body Parts by Paul Selig. I played a stripper and hustler on Times Square and she played the sister of the boy who stripped next to me. Margaret was once an actor too and appeared on the series My So-Called Life which Winnie co-created and for which she wrote many of its episodes. We both adore Winnie. I think our friendship flowed so easily into being because Winnie was the current we shared. It was, in fact, Winnie who told Margaret that she was a writer. We are lucky that she believed her. And I am lucky that she is my friend.

I made another friend with another writer at the birthday dinner - Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Berre who currently has a series running here in London, the crime drama Ellis, which stars Sharon D Clarke as the cop at the center of its narratives. We bonded over our takes on the film Babygirl. I had been wanting to talk to a woman about the film since I saw it last weekend. I understood it on one level as a gay man who tries to balance the carnal with the spiritual because it spoke to trying to understand that your secret outre sexual proclivities which are embedded in your psyche and can become ritualized are not what are shameful but instead the behavior that surrounds them which enables you to experience them. I thought it was more a movie about shame than a woman’s need for a certain sort of sex. Sian agreed and told me that she went to an early screening of the film which was introduced by Nicole Kidman’s costar Harris Dickinson who said he felt ill-equipped to make such an introduction so had asked the film’s director, Halina Reijn, to tell him what to say. She told him to say that the movie was a comedy of manners. Sian said that that gave them permission to laugh, and laugh she did - not at the film, but with it. The night I saw it with a sold-out audience you could feel people not knowing exactly how to respond to the film - was it in fact a comedy or an erotic thriller or a drama about a woman’s midlife crisis that really didn’t have to do with the sex at the forefront of it all. There were nervous giggles and knowing laughter and periods of shocked silence. Sian told me that she found herself thinking of The Philadelphia Story while she was watching it. I did agree that Harris plays the top as Jimmy Stewart might have. And then we talked about Nicole Kidman’s face and how hard it’s becoming to light it. Nicole is both a remarkable actor and a mannequin of her own making. She is her face’s top.

We also talked about something I had seen at the Aldrych Theatre on Sunday at the invitation of a friend from Hudson, photographer Tanya Malott, and how I didn’t know how to react to it either. Tanya was in town as part of the support team around Lee Harris, an energy intuitive and channeler, for his sold-out live event at the Aldrych. She had invited me to the event but I had not focused on the invitation and just assumed I was being invited to an art opening of some sort since Tanya is a photographer I associate with galleries. I had never associated her with an intuit and a channeler. I only figured out what I was going to see a couple of hours beforehand without really figuring it out. I did text Tanya as I was taking my seat that if I didn’t respond to the first half then I’d probably depart at the interval.

Harris is quite personable and compelling and can be funny. There was music. He sang. He told those of us who had no idea what we were attending that it was not a cult. There were both nervous giggles and knowing laughter at that. I participated in the guided mediation with an open mind and heart. I did not sit in judgment. Harris cannot say that his ears have had their fill of hearing for he has been channeling his spirit guides that he calls Z’s for around 24 years. He even led us in an exercise to hear our own guides by writing down whatever came to mind in a brief allotted time. I didn’t write down what came to me and that was the moment that I felt a bit guilty about being in a seat in the center of the stalls because of the kindness shown to me by Tanya since I was worried my slight skepticism was a disruptive bit of energy in an evening all about energy when all around me folks were blissing out at the blessing of Harris’s presence in a live event as part of his “Big Love Tour” because so much of his work is in book form and videos and live streams. But that was some of what was bothering me, the performance aspect of it all. Harris at one point even said “when we perform” when referencing his sideman, musician Davor Bozic, and what they were doing up on the stage. And at times it all had the performative feeling of being in church, and I don’t like being within the construct of being in church. I began to debate whether it was ruder to stay and possess the wrong energy in the middle of the audience or the more mindful thing to do would be to leave at the interval. I visited with Tanya during the interval and told her I was going to leave but thanked her for including me. She was surprised and disappointed that I wasn’t going to stay for the channeling of the Z’s in the second portion of the event. I told her that an old friend of mine, Paul Selig, who wrote the play that Winnie Holzman and I were in all those years ago, became a renowned psychic and channeler of guides and an author of guided texts so the subject matter was not new to me. She was even more surprised - shocked really - that I knew Paul Selig because he and Lee are the two biggest names in their field. '‘Everything connects,” I told her.

That was the day when I had earlier been texting my brother photos of some of the art from the Turner Prize exhibit at the Tate Britain. The photo above is of actor Penelope Wilton taking in some art in a room we were later sharing there. I do wonder if art ever feels over it all when it tires of being looked at and misses all the mistakes and do-overs and restarts of its being created. I miss all the art I once had hanging on my walls when I lived a life that had my own walls in it. I miss living with it and how at some point it begins to see you. You feel seen by it. I never tired of that. At the moment Wilton entered the room and I recognized her and she recognized my recognition of her - does she ever tire of being looked at? - I heard a voice somewhere over to the side of me saying my name with a question mark attached to it. I wondered later sitting at the Aldrych if that was what it was like when Paul Selig and Lee Harris hear and channel their guides. I turned from recognizing Penelope to being recognized myself, and felt seen. The woman who had said my name as a question was from Prague and had read me for years on Facebook and now here at Substack and at Bluesky. She said she was hoping to run into me in London but knew that the chances were slim. And yet I had turned a corner at the Tate at the precise moment she was standing there. The construction of our currents was part of some greater intersection. We had a brief but lovely conversation about Prague and Vienna where I had been before arriving here in London. She told me, however, that she misses my posts on Facebook and the moment-to-moment aspect of my pilgrim’s life. “Yeah, our running into each other and meeting would have made a great post in that regard,” I said. “But maybe I’ll write a column about it.”

We said our goodbyes.

I wandered into the room where the Gillian Wearing photo was hanging.

When I got home, I had an email from writer and teacher Mark Matousek whom I replaced at Interview magazine when he began his own pilgrimage by quitting his job at The Factory and heading to Tibet to sit in an ashram where he began to change his life. The email was about his latest course titled “Journey to the Sacred: A Six Week Writing Pilgrimage.” Week Three focuses on the spirit and the soul. “These two qualities are complementary approaches to the sacred,” he wrote. “Soul is rooted in the earth, the body, the specificity of self; it inhabits the horizontal dimension. Spirit is vertical, transcendent, focused on liberation.”

At the Lee Harris event when he asked us to write down whatever came into our minds as an exercise in channeling our own guides, this is what I did not write down: When you don’t then you will.

Both/and.

Either/Or.

Everything connects.

Onward.