To Use the Written Word In Honor of Life
In downtown Los Angeles, there’s a thirty-five year old, seventy-foot tall painting of the actor Anthony Quinn which is referred to as “The Pope of Broadway.” Eloy Torrez, the artist, portrayed the actor in a Christlike pose, similar to when he was dancing in Zorba the Greek. The idea was to honor Quinn’s importance to the Latino community and the city at large, not only for his international acclaim in film, but as a Mexican immigrant. Torrez was able to restore the mural in 2017, after funds were raised.
If you are a Michael Connelly fan, familiar with his novels about Detective Harry Bosch, you may remember this section from Angels Flight.
“Bosch was still staring at the mural. He liked it, even though he had a hard time seeing Anthony Quinn as a Christ-like figure. But the mural seemed to capture something about the man, a raw masculine and emotional power. Bosch stepped closer to the window and looked down. He saw the forms of two homeless people sleeping under blankets of newspapers in the parking lot beneath the mural. Anthony Quinn’s arms were stretched out over them. Bosch nodded. The mural was one of the little things that made him like downtown so much. Little pieces of grace were everywhere if you looked.”
My favorite definition of grace is “unmerited favor.” That which can’t be earned and shouldn’t be expected, like the grace of God in the theological sense. Waking up in the morning to lovely photos of my two grandchildren in Sweden. A day of golden summer weather just before the equinox.
Yet, the word looks somehow cornball as I write, this morning. I wonder why? Not hard hitting enough? Not taking a stand or making a strong enough statement? Maybe too “soft” in this busy, decisive, riven and yelling world and not solving any problems.
I have an inner critic who sometimes reads my blog posts and says “Isn’t that sweet?” He accuses me of being “life-denying” and it sticks to me like a booger I can’t shake off my finger. “We don’t have time for such sentiment,” he nags. “There are major crises out there. Of course there’s grace out there, but we have practical work to do.”
I can (and do) get all personally worked up about supreme court justice replacements, national elections, global warming, terrible fires, systemic racism, riots in the street, this seemingly endless pandemic and everything else people scream at each other about on Facebook.
What I’m doing mostly, however, is drinking poison and hoping other people will die. It only hurts me. I’m howling at the moon or the ocean and the sound just dies away in the wind, my energy spent, laying waste my powers, as the poet said.
There is one choice, with challenges this big, about which I have any real say: to work on and manage my own reaction. “It’s still a very livable world,” as my college philosophy professor taught. I can pick my own best hill to die on.
Jack Kerouac wrote this in his 1951 journal —
“It may sound vain, but the act of writing seems holy to me…holy…sacred… to use the written word in honor of life, in defense of life against the forces of death and despair, to make old men lift their hearts a bit and women think (or cry), and young men pause before it’s too late for realizing to do them any good.”
Join the cacophony out there or look for pieces of grace? My choice. Our choice.
