The Iconographer

 Set 1

(The Iconographer is an extended monologue in three sets. The images of the icons on the wall later in the sets must pour through the “window on the world.” The last Icon to be seen is a Mother of Sorrows. The actor who plays Jason must not permit himself to be misled: Jason is a man who is happy. A twilight lit studio in a retro-fitted mill in Hartford overlooking a park. Light pours through a window throwing colors on a wall opposite. The reflection, though diffuse, has the appearance of a stained glass window. This mirage later will become various icons. Jason, a painter, sits at a table upon which are a bottle of wine and two wine glasses. Throughout, Sorlée is represented by a disembodied voice.)

Jason: Socrates said “know thyself,” and ever since people have been dreadfully confused, artists more than others.

The modern age, God bless it, is in despair over its essence. But this has always been the case. This expression – ‘the modern age’ – is fluid, right? One might almost say it’s not very expressive. After all, in the 19^th century, the impressionists, who now seem to us old-hat, were modern, very cutting edge. They were displaced by the abstractionists, as I call them. And pretty soon artists were throwing slops against the wall, hoping some of it would stick. These in turn were displaced by a whole series of absurdists – conceptualists, for example. Conceptualists have murdered art; they have done away with the art object -- the painting, the sculpture, the piece of music, the conveyer of beauty. Art is to them subjective, an interior slice of life, a passing fancy. The idea’s the thing; art for the idea’s sake.

(Waving his hand dismissively) Never mind; this chase after the modern is very wearing. Let’s face it; to be modern is to be “like us.” We are the moderns, those of us who are accidentally alive.

The modern artist is the man in revolt, the anarch-artist. He does not want to satisfy your aesthetic sense, your yearning for beauty. All that is incomprehensible to him. He wants mostly to arouse an emotion in you, to scrape his fingernails on surface of your soul until you screech, “LEAVE… ME… ALONE!” There are ways of doing this; truly, most ways of making money lead downward.

You’ve got to give it to Sorlée though. She was a great screech inducer, a true modern. A few years ago, an idea popped into Sorlée’s fertile brain. Well, you know, that head was a plowed field, waiting for seed. Artists were hungering for their next victim. Who would it be? The God-bitten already had been trussed and dressed; after Mesmere, they had become inured to insult.

Mesmere was the genius who smeared mud –though later it turned out to be brown paint-- on a replica of a Mother of Sorrows icon. Insult art, you know. After all, considered as an emotion, what is the delight of beauty when compared with resentment?

The highbrows were amused; the lowbrows, some few badgered old ladies and priests still clinging to their outworn faith at a cathedral where the holy icon had reposed unmolested for years, were moved to sorrow, very different from resentment. Mesmere was nonplussed. What’s all the fuss about anyway? The icon’s a replica, not the real thing. Even the mud was fake.

A museum refused to include Mesmere’s insult art in a show. This assured his notoriety. Queries began to pour in, followed by money. And before you could say death to beauty, he was rolling in commissions.

Other artists took notice. Who can we insult now, they wanted to know? And the hunt was on for the next hapless victims.

Sorlée decided it must be the artists themselves. No one had yet so much as touched them with a feather. They were spotless, virginal, placid, unmoved. This was intolerable. And so she began to produce icon-like paintings.

Well! They shrieked at this retreat into the Dark Ages, this inexcusable retrogression. Icons? Icons? Are you mad?

Excuse me, my throat is dry for some reason. (He pours out and takes a sip of wine. Looking out the window) I wish you could see this view. Viewed from the heights, it is  beautiful… (Laughing)… that word again. This studio in a retro-fitted mill in Hartford is my window on the world.

My first window on the world overlooked Petrin Garden in Prague. That is where I met Sorlée. Now, you must know this about Sorlée: She is beautiful, beautiful in the classical sense: hair black as a raven’s wing, high rolling cheekbones, expressive sable eyes, a nose not perfect, blessed, I would say, with imperfection, full lips and a smile that lights up the world.

Personally, I can tell you, that smile did it for me, the way it transformed her mobile face; that and the diffident, catlike way she moved, And she is intelligent too, which makes her all the more alluring. (Takes a sip of wine)

My doctor says red wine is good for the arteries. Scripture says “take some wine for thy stomach’s sake”…

Yes, why not icons? Have you noticed the word has been overused in the modern period? Madonna is said to be “iconic.” (Laughing) Oh, dear, I suppose we shall have to distinguish between icons here. Madonna the singer is said to be iconic. Of course, the Blessed Virgin Mary, that Madonna, always was iconic. In the modern period, chronically unable to make proper distinctions, everything – and nothing – is iconic.

Did you know that buildings are now iconic? Yes, buildings… and soccer players. Anything that represents anything else is iconic. The word has been horribly debased. In the so called dark ages, the icon was a sign of holiness. In our age it has become a meaningless appendage.

Chagall incorporated iconographic elements into his paintings. In fact, it was Chagall who led Sorlée to icon making. Like many pre-moderns – and remember, anyone preceding us is a pre-modern – Chagall liked to eat; which is to say, he liked to make money, for him always a means to some nobler end. In those days, it was still possible to think of an artist as a sort of priest called to a vocation, dedicated to his muse.

You know the Rockefellers of course -- the redundantly rich Rockefellers? It appears that some of them were humane. They wanted to celebrate the good things their family had done over the years. So, when their father and mother died, David Rockefeller and his wife Peggy decided to memorialize them by commissioning an artist to make a stain glass window in the Union Church in New York where their family had worshipped. David’s wife persuaded Matisse to do a single window, his last art project before he died. While in Paris, she had seen an exhibit in stained glass done by Chagall, and – BANG -- something erupted in her soul. Chagall did a window in Union Church on the theme suggested by the family, the Good Samaritan, and it was only much later, after Chagall had completed other windows for the small church, that David realized there had been a previous Rockefeller-Chagall connection.

Chagall was a Russian Jew who had settled in France. In 1940, he fled Nazi occupied Paris to Marseilles, where he was plucked from what the Rockefeller’s understatedly called “an increasingly desperate situation” by Varian Fry of the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group charged with snatching artists and intellectuals from the iron jaws of totalitarian regimes. (Takes a sip of wine) It always seemed reasonable to me that Chagall would not relish getting stuffed into a crematorium.

David was surprised to discover that the Rockefeller Foundation, headed by his father, funded the effort that brought Chagall through Spain to America. Chagall had illustrated a Bible, and his life experience had opened his heart to the beauty of the parable of the Good Samaritan. (Another sip of wine, and the glass is finished) Just a bit more (He pours a half glass. Transfixed, as before, by the scene out the window)… That winding stream, that blue sky, would delight any artist in the service of beauty; the leafy green of the trees, a splash of yellow, a splash of blue, there a woman in a red dress and a child together curled like a serpent by a bed of flowers, dark roofs, life moving and shimmering outside the window… Try to imagine all this color and beauty caught in window itself, and the images too… (A sip of wine). There you have the windows of the Union Church, and a story, as well, of pursuit, sanctuary and redemption.

An odd thing is art -- that could catch all this joy and fear and rescue in a window that, at certain times of the day, pulses like a heart with light… (Takes a sip of wine. Light floods through the window and throws on the wall an image of an icon – the Mother of Sorrows)

I fell in love with Sorlée. Have you noticed – one always gives oneself permission to fall in love, yes?

It happened one morning at the Kavarna Slavia in downtown Prague. I hadn’t seen Sorlée in a long while – two years – and then, suddenly, she was there before me, quite alone in the hubbub of the cafe, nursing a coffee… There is weightiness about some people, a too solid, almost unbearable mass. That was Sorlée, nothing ephemeral about her… Or maybe it was me; it may have been my fitful fall into love.

She was wearing around her neck a small cross on a slight chain, spider web thin, that would have been inconspicuous on anyone other than her. As an artist, you know, she was used to sending messages. We all are. And I thought, (scornfully) “A cross?” Among artists, gestures like this shout.

Here she was in a tourist café – she who despised tourists -- far from her usual haunts, small cramped places full of intellectuals and aspiring artists, I almost said “aspiring atheists,” wearing a cross. Well, you know, among our kind at that time, this was a provocation. If you are going to step into a nest of vampires, it’s best to leave the crosses at home.

I thought to myself, “Why get excited; it’s only jewelry.” So, I brought myself and my coffee to her, and noticed almost immediately that something had changed, though I didn’t know what it was until much later, when it was too late.

In those two years, Sorlée had been a witness to suffering on a grand scale. I tell you, the stench of death changes one in subtle ways; one becomes more reflective (searching for exactly the right word) … perfected.

(Sorlée’s voice is rendered here in italics. Though not personally present in the play, she is a presence, through her voice)

She said, “Hello, Jason.”

(He sits at the small table. On the chair opposite, is one of his icons propped against the back of the extra chair. There is a full, second wine glass on the table. He will not drain this until the end of the play. For him, the icon stands in the place of Sorlée, and he talks to it)

Those sable eyes, that canopy of hair -- still, I thought, the glory of a woman, that hair. Later, she wore her hair short.

“I haven’t seen you. You’ve been hiding, eh?”

“In a way. I’ve been behind enemy lines..”

“That couldn’t have been too pleasant.”

“No.”

(He takes a sip of wine) “Your cross is pretty.”

“More useful than pretty.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.”

I wanted to get a rise out of her. “I think you know that here crosses cannot be too useful.”

“Yes, here. It’s good to get away for awhile; you know, see something of the world, break out of this dead end. It broadens your perspective. The cross” she fingered it lovingly – “is a sign of hope in suffering.”

And now, decades later, how I wished I were that cross.

“Well, one generally wants to avoid suffering, even at the risk of abandoning hope.”

“Yes Not everyone is so fortunate. Where there is much suffering, one finds hope. There are many crosses in the suffering East. The underground churches are full.”

And with that the laugh – or rather the generous smile, because there was no mendacity in Sorlée, ever – was on me. She was referring to an earlier conversation we had had, about Job and suffering and empty churches. Prosperity in the West, she had said, had emptied the churches.

Even people who know nothing about scripture know Job, artistic agnostics too. They are always shoving Job in your face. “What about suffering? Why does God tolerate it? What about Job? If I were God, I’d be a little more compassionate, I can tell you” (He laughs). Poor Job; he has become a sharp stick to poke Christians with. He used to be a man. Now, he is little more than a reproach.

I remember Sorlée’s take on all this. Suffering is one of the paths to God. Those who do not suffer do not need God. The rich, the self satisfied, those who have never tasted suffering, those who are full, are destined to go away empty.

How easy it was to murder all this… (The light from the window is fading)… The light is going. (To the audience) You’ve been so still, so patient. Really, you’re a saint, to sit there all this time, a silent witness to all this. (Fade slowly to black).

The Iconographer Set 2

Do I sound like a professor? Sorlée said that to me once: “You sound like a professor.” And now look, I’ve become a professor, happily retired. But who would have guessed I would have turned to iconography.

(Looking at one of his icons) These things, you know, are difficult to make. Luckily, there is a place in Connecticut off the coast of Mystic – evocative name there – where one can learn to write icons. At Ender’s Island, a master icon maker pointed me in the right direction. And an orthodox priest in New Hampshire, Father Andrew Tregubov, introduced me to the work of Gregory Kroug. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then in exile from Russia after he had exposed the Soviet Union’s vast Gulag Archipelago, found sanctuary in his church. 

Kroug’s trajectory was that of a falling star. He was born in Russia in 1909 and immigrated to Estonia after the 1917 revolution. Later, he found his way to the Academy of Art in Paris. There he was joined by a brilliant group of Orthodox theologians, lay people and monastics, who bore within themselves what has since come to be called the Russian religious renaissance. Together they restored the art of icon making of Holy Mother Russia as it had been before Russia’s “western captivity.” Their work of love was interrupted by the violent religious persecutions of the communists.

Violence is nothing new to revolutionaries. Revolutions destroy utterly what they replace. During the French revolution, several nuns were led to the scaffold. One of them asked to pray before she died. “Shut up,” she was told. “Die.”

Artists, who murder and create, are also revolutionaries; or they consider themselves such. But the revolution this time was burning in Russia, where icons were being ground underfoot, and Paris, the city of light, ironically became a refuge for the rebirth of Russian iconography. Imagine! A couple of centuries earlier, Parisian revolutionists had made a cow barn out of Notre Dame Cathedral.

Kroug became a monk, imposed upon himself the yoke of poverty and asceticism, and died in 1969 in the Skete of the Holy Spirit, a small hermitage near Paris. In the course of his life, Kroug wrote 550 icons and wall paintings. He was very active.

Paris again; it opens its arms to Chagall and Kroug, to émigrés in which the spirit lives and works its wonders.

And it was in Paris I met Sorlée for a second time.

Can you guess why she was there? (Big smile) As fortune would have it, she was there to visit Noisy-le-Grand, Montgeron and Mesnil-St-Denis to see the icons of Father Kroug.

Life has some surprising twists in it.

It was raining. A friend had been kind enough to let me use her apartment while she was on business in England. The rain drew me to the window, which I noticed had not been cleaned. The pelting rain was beading up on the soiled window, making little meandering tracks of dirt. An image flying past the window stabbed me in the eye. Across the street, I could see a woman in red move by. Immediately, I knew it was Sorlée. I ran down the stairs, breathless, flew out the door and shouted,  (He shouts out the window) “Sorlée, for God’s sake, Sorlée!”

But she had disappeared. Then there was a profound silence, an abyss of emptiness. She stepped around the corner.

“Jason?”

“Yes, it’s me.”

I could feel the warm rain on my face. My heart was dancing.

“How did you know it was me”?” I asked after I had led her back to the apartment. (He sits at the table)

“The voice is a signature.”

Imagine! People are present even in a voice, little more than a puff of wind. She was uncomfortable in the apartment, I could see, so we went to a small café.

“You still cradle the coffee with your hands.”

“Some things don’t change.”

“I’m glad to see you.”

She smiled her world conquering smile.

“I’m glad to see you too.”

“Is there someone for you here? Is that why you were uncomfortable at my invitation?”

“No. There is no one.”

“I’ve been reading about Jonah and the whale.”

She laughed.

“You have this way of continuing conversations as if no time at all has passed since we last saw each other.”

“We are alive and young. We leap over time.”

“Yes. What about Jonah?”

“Where is your cross?”

“It’s raining. I have it under my blouse. What about Jonah?”

“I said that to catch your attention.”

“Why are you in Paris?”

“Do you know the icons of Father Kroug?”

She laughed heartily and rolled her eyes.

“Why do you laugh?”

“Know them? I’ve lived in them for the past year. And how do you know Father Kroug?”

“Through an orthodox priest in New Hampshire, Father Tregubov. Don’t tell me you know him.”

“No.”

“The coincidence is astonishing. So then, you’ve seen the icons?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you think?”

“They are beautiful. Works of love. Little pieces of heaven fallen to earth. But they are disappearing. Father Kroug was a poor priest; he used inferior paints.”

“Why don’t we get married?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s impossible.”

“Will you show me the icons?”

“Yes.”

(The Icon of Christ Pantocrater appears on the wall)

Amazingly, we were alone in the chapel of Noisy-le-Grand, both of us looking at Christ Pantocrator, a familiar image in iconography.

But Sorlée was looking through the icon, as earlier I had looked through the soiled window and saw her, a splotch of red moving swiftly down the street.

“There is much ennobling suffering here. This little chapel was once a barn owned by a poor Orthodox nun in Paris, Mother Maria Skobtsova. Do you know her?”

“No.”

“She tended to the poor and the homeless. She had very little money, yet somehow she was able to acquire this farm, her retreat from a bruising world. One of the sheds she turned into this chapel. She died the death of a martyr later in a German concentration camp; she went to the crematorium in place of a woman with a child. The script in the open book of this icon is a verse from Mathew: “Come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

“Why won’t you marry me, if there is no one?”

“Please,” she said, and with such passion…

I make my pilgrimage, whenever I can, to Noisy-le-Grand. Not too often, because retired professors are not rich, you know. I go first to Paris, and hope for a cleansing rain, then to the chapel. Father Kroug lavished much attention on these icons. They are brilliant, just brilliant. Here is the light of Christ – here, and no where else, for me – caught in the writing of these icons. You see it, peeking through the transparent wash of paint, a celestial light, otherworldly, arrows of light dancing on Christ’s brow, there in the white of his eyes, in the slivers of golden light piercing his shoulder – the first light, the light of creation.  I was in love here. And everything was strangely mixed up, this ferment in my heart and soul… this (he raises his glass of wine) … wine, this fruit of the vine (as he sinks in to a reverie. He walks to the window, looks out) I wait, in joyful hope, of your coming. (Fade to darkness)

The Iconographer Set 3

(The twilight stage. Intense light pours through the windows, and we see on the wall opposite a clear reflection of a Mother of Sorrows icon. Jason is still looking out the window) But she never came. I met her brother here in Hartford…

I have my view. I’ve always insisted on a view. This one overlooks a slice of park, a large weeping willow, a duck pond befouled by Canada geese. No one seems to know how to rid the park of these unwelcome geese. They are not native to the area and drive out the more desirable native species. Everything has been tried. Someone stuck a stuffed hawk in the willow tree. This worked for awhile. But soon the geese were back, bad habits with feathers. Dogs were let loose in the area, but then the park administrators began to fear they might be sued if one of the dogs bit a child. Believe me, nothing is so rabid as the bite of a lawyer. And so finally, having exhausted every stratagem to rid the park of these menaces, the park administrators began to see some virtues in those geese. But the pond is now polluted, and it is hoped that the geese may move on…

I have the patience of Job (laughing to himself)… Job again. We never get far from Job… I was waiting – for hope to come and swarm in the empty places in my heart. Then, one day, a letter arrived. It was from Sorlée. She mentioned Jonah. It was a friendly letter…

I’ve since burned it. She was right – it was impossible. I nursed the memory of her in my heart. But she was fading, like the icons bleaching into the walls at Noisy-le-Grand.

Finally, a messenger arrived in Hartford: her brother.  I could see a resemblance. But this was decades later. When I had last seen Sorlée, both of us were young. Her brother, younger than her by a dozen years, had spikes of gray in his hair.

“And your sister Sorlée, how is she?”

“Gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“She just disappeared. We thought—an accident... Such things happen. I came here because we found your letters. I’ve brought them to you.

I burned them. When you get to be of a certain age, nostalgia is a deadly companion; hug her and, like a vampire, she’ll suck the breath from your mouth in a fatal kiss.

In our time, there are many Leviathans, many Jobs.  So then, something had opened wide its jaws and swallowed my beautiful Sorlée.

The Sorlée I knew, at least in the early days, was an ardent rebel. She once told me she admired the early Russian anarchists, Dora Brilliant, a member of the terrorist Combat Brigade, in particular.

“Dora Brilliant, a pseudonym?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t know. Dostoyevsky, at some point, became involved in the socialism of the day. Some extremists, though not those in Dostoyevsky’s group, were serious atheistic regicides. They  wanted to strike through the mask of Czarism to kill the God that supported the king. Dostoyevsky’s imprisonment was a bureaucratic error. His involvement in the Petrashevsky circle was hardly revolutionary. After suffering much in prison, the artist discovered the God hidden in the pleas of the poor and wretched, and he turned in another direction. Others, less worthy, came later to complete the work begun by the terrorist brigades – Stalin, for instance, whose mistakes were intentional and deadly. By that time, the purity of Dora Brilliant  had been corrupted: A murdered Christian God was replaced by the deadening hand of the god of history, at whose alter we still worship.”

 I can tell you, Sorlée had many friends. She was in rebellion against everything, everything. And then an inordinate love of beauty led her by the hand to icons, and soon she was lost to us. Pretty much everyone turned against her. Not me. Because I loved what she loved, for the love of her.

And so here I am – an old man, at the butt end of September. Soon, winter will come. I have my icons. I have my window on the world. I have my wine. There are not many pleasures in this dessert of modernity worth the bother; most of them leave the taste of cardboard in your mouth. With this (he holds up the wine) I toast the revolution to come. Wine has become my only sacrament. That and the beauty of icons is enough. Sometimes, I wander towards the window and imagine other vistas. Sometime a shot of red goes by and I think -- my deliverer lives. I am happy to think I may someday expect a visit. In this demonic human comedy, stranger things have happened. It pleases me to think Sorlée is alive and moving about in the world. I have never since met anyone so joyful. And I am joyful too. It is my vengeance on a world that has taken her from me. (He drinks the second glass of wine. Fade to black)