OBLIGATION

Like my literary hero Michel de Montaigne, I am interested in observing my flaws with an attentive and critical eye and noting them down when I find them with as much honesty as I can muster. In the past few days, in meditation, I have been focussing on my sense of obligation as one of the sources of suffering in the way in which I have chosen to live my life. I do things, too often, grudgingly, because I think somehow I ought to, when I could instead embrace them as acts of generosity and sources of pleasure.

Take yesterday, for instance. Ellie asked me to join her in an excursion to a couple of galleries she wanted to visit, because the exhibitions interested her. In part because of the still-pervasive epidemic, it has been easy for me to surrender to my reclusive instincts--a kind of laziness that prompts me to stay home and get on with my work (so I tell myself, anyway) rather than venture out into the world and discover new things. So somewhat ungraciously, I'll admit, I agreed.

We set out. The experience of driving in Los Angeles, these days, is not a particularly pleasant one, and this was a rather long drive through city streets clogged with the usual Saturday crowds. It did little to improve my mood. Ellie offered to do the driving but I declined. I am a bad passenger, I reminded her, and am more comfortable in the driver's seat. Our destination, when we reached it, also looked unpromising; all closed up and shuttered with barred steel gates. We tried a neighboring gallery, where my worst fears were confirmed: more boring art. 

By dint of dialing the phone number given on a note on the door, we managed to gain access to the show we had come to see--an exhibit of 160 square monochrome paintings by our friend Marcia Hafif. Lined up on three long white walls of a vast gallery space, they document the gradual, nearly--well in fact totally--imperceptible progress of grays from black, at one end of the scale, to white at the other. Their surfaces, when studied up close, are not actually monochromatic. Composed entirely of short, vertical brushstrokes, they seem to allow light to travel through, suggesting surfaces below surfaces below surfaces. Standing close, the difference between one painting and its neighbor is detectable only in its tiny surface flaws, not at all in its color. To notice the subtle change in color you need to stand back and look at a row of eight or ten paintings, ranging from dark to ever so slightly lighter. Stand back further and the progress becomes more obvious. Stand in the center of the gallery and turn slowly and you can watch the whole progress: black, through countless shades of gray, to white. Or, if you so choose, the reverse: light to dark.

It's a remarkable, obsessive and eventually monumental work of art, this sequence of paintings, involving unimaginable labor to create all these near-identical paintings with meticulous attention to detail, for our friend Marcia a two-year long meditation on the ever shifting relationship between light and dark. For the attentive and willing observer, it's an engaging and rewarding task to follow this artist's peculiar and demanding vision. I found myself moved not only by the work, but by the memory of our extraordinary friend.

Our outing turned into a gallery tour, with an extension to a handful of the few galleries that still remain in the area of southern La Cienega. To my surprise, we were treated to at least a couple of interesting shows, one a reminder of the old hard-edge pre-World War II tradition of Southern California; the other an exhibition of the jaunty, expressive and engaging abstract paintings of Tomory Dodge at Philip Martin Gallery. We stopped on the way home at David Kordansky Gallery where we had fun with the (mostly) large, florid canvases of "Plants and Animals" by Jonas Wood. And finally enjoyed a good turkey sandwich lunch at the Sycamore Kitchen, a few blocks north on La Brea before heading home in an unexpected rain shower.

My fears and resistance notwithstanding, it was an enjoyable and rewarding day. As I sat for my meditation this early morning, my mind returned to re-examine that old sense of obligation I have been observing, and the suffering it brings not only on myself but, worse, on those around me. I think to find its origin in what I heard so often repeated in my Christian childhood: "We have left undone those things we ought to have done; and we have done those things we ought not to have done." The words come from the Morning Prayer in the Book of Common Prayer, and I must have heard them hundreds if not thousands of times. They lodged in my consciousness and have remained there ever since. They still resonate with grim accusation.

It's the "ought" that I act upon. Which would be fine, I suppose, if it did not carry the weight of obligation and arouse, at the same time, my natural, instinctive spirit of revolt. It came clear to me this morning that I would suffer less from this old pattern of behavior if I learned simply to substitute for that burdensome sense of obligation a different spirit: that of generosity. I may still not "want to", but I will do this thing--whatever it may be--not because I ought to, but because I choose to be generous rather than self-serving. Which accords, of course, with the Buddhist teachings to which I aspire, and in which generosity is one of the "six perfections", the paramitas. A goal to work for, then. Still so much to be done...