Chaos

The expressionist painter Chaim Soutine (1893-1943) was a Jewish painter from Belarus. While living in Paris, and inspired by classical European painting, he developed his own stylized vocabulary of shape and color.

Soutine's series of paintings of beef (Le Boeuf Ecorche)



may be an antecedent to the paintings of Francis Bacon.



But I digress. A Soutine painting (I don't know the name) caught my attention because it immediately reminded me of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I was in the city then, working with an NGO helping to rescue pets -- dogs and cats -- left behind.



Each day we convoyed into New Orleans. The city was abandoned and utterly silent. A perfectly blue sky and blazing sun greeted us. That such violence was presented with so much tranquility engendered a profound reverence, like the feeling that seizes oneself upon entering a darkened European cathedral.




Everything were devastated. Ravished. The scale impossible to imagine. House after house. Block after block. Neighborhood after neighborhood.


 

Entering each house felt like a transgression. Again the silence. Again the heat. But also a stylized chaos. Individuated. The brushstrokes of a personality still visible after the water and the wind.

And it got me thinking about the chaos we all carry within our hearts. How impossible it is to know the ecology of one's own heart, let alone another. How this breeds a certain insistence on self-centeredness. And the courage it takes to face the chaos again and again, to sort it, to order it, to attempt to make it into something beautiful.