News
Madeleine Avirov’s Essay Published in Harvard Magazine
JAI member Madeleine Avirov has published an essay in the Summer/Autumn 2010 issue of the prestigious Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Entitled “Immaterial Witness: An artist excavates the ground of memory and imagination,” Madeleine’s piece chronicles her attempt to craft an artist’s life that is both productive and transcendent. The Bulletin is Harvard Divinity School's triannual magazine about religion and public life, religious history, and religion and the arts. Contributors include poets (Charles Wright, Christian Wiman, Mary Oliver), novelists (Marilynne Robinson), historians (Karen Armstrong, Gerda Lerner, Robert A. Orsi), journalists and authors (Chris Hedges, Will Joyner), scientists and social scientists (Evelyn Fox Keller, Christopher Winship, Michael D. Jackson), and philosophers and theologians (Harvey Cox, Peter J. Gomes, Amartya Sen, Seyyed Hossein Nasr).
Click here to link to the essay. Below is an excerpt.
The drawings, the writings, were a way of gathering evidence of the unseen, the world within, a fulfillment of the urgency to render visible the invisible and to sow it across the uneven plain of my imagination. What grew there would bring neither love nor money, nor any negotiable skill, only the capacity to wait. It is waiting that teases out the intangible but durable inner aspect of all things—the deep form, wild and shy, and withdrawn from time, that stops my heart when, say, where I live in Los Angeles, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a red-tailed hawk drops out of the sky above the freeway or a coyote materializes on an empty street before dawn. In these moments I am thrown back into the invisible world that everyday consciousness resists but that insists on its centrality to any truth, any image, worth bothering with.
