Increase My Bewilderment

I got The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life, by Fanny Howe at the UT library yesterday. I'll admit that I grabbed it for the title and cover layout, but there is sublime serendipity in the library. She writes about her life with bi-racial children in Boston, the creative process as it touches the mystical (in writing specifically), and her return to Catholicism.

In the first chapter she quotes a Muslim prayer that says, "Lord, increase my bewilderment." Let me wander and not know and not judge. Let me suffer and hurt. Let me emerge loving and whole.

Similarly, Eric Lee's drawings (which are now hanging at the Birdhouse) sit in the mystic middle where you are neither comforted nor aggravated, and you will emerge better, but not in the way you'd imagine. You're drawn in by the familiar: attractive fashion figures lounging in typical fashion-photography slouches. Their posturing and expressions are interrupted by Lee's deft x-acto skills and draftsmanship. The precision of his line work is reminiscent of architectural renderings and large scale Sol LeWitt drawings. A family advertising Dillard's Easter sale (or whatever) becomes a cluster of shamans and lunatics. This subversion is only level two of the drawings. Level three is the smallest stuff: orbs, astral splotches, and textured patterns that reveal the obsessive attention of their maker.

I think Eric sold/gave away at least two of his drawings: female couples laughing like drunk bridesmaids and holding a severed head like a cute clutch. I wish I'd gotten one. If you're in Knoxville in the next month, you should make a point of seeing this work before it comes down. The next music show at the Birdhouse are Ghost to Falco and Eshka Paper (Jan. 14th, 10 pm), Three Man Band with The Alcohol Stunt Band (Jan. 16th, 9 pm), and Fugue State (formerly Gresham Greene and Sapient Blaine (Jan. 23, 9 pm).