LETTERS FROM HOME: THE WORLD ACCORDING TO REFRIGERATOR MAGNETS

Feb. 27, 1997

Dear Pat,

Today's mail brings a package from C.C. Fish, who makes tarot cards and assorted items meant to help guide your path. Inside were three refrigerator magnets displaying C.C.'s original art and messages that I think come to her in dreams.

One reads, "When you are one with the Tao you dance through any situation beautifully."

I don't dance beautifully ever but assume C.C. is talking about more than the hokeypokey. Her drawing has lots of jagged squiggles that look like blue electrical charges against a background of pink, and in some places bright yellow atop the pink. Riding through it all in purple is a sinuous character that looks like Chinese calligraphy. Or C.C. shorthand.

This character is dancing through the surging mess the world can appear to be because it has rounded its edges, become something that flows rather than stands in one place.

The second magnet says, "Do not underestimate the value of the useless. Without the useless there could be nothing useful. Nothing is without purpose."

This is a multi-colored painting that looks like a section of stained glass or skewed patches of pasture seen from the air. It reminds me of sitting in an art gallery and looking at a huge horizontal painting that was nothing more and nothing less than the color spectrum. From violet on the left to red on the right.

What was the purpose of this painting that offered no beautiful lines or forms or objects? I don't know. But the effect was stunning, mesmerizing. For me, it was as if no other painting in the room existed but this statement that color all by itself can make us tingle.

The third magnet says: "Given the expanse of the ocean, why fuss about any one experience? All is always changing."

C.C.'s ocean is represented by more squiggly lines, these circular white ones broadening from a central point outward on a field of purplish blue. It's not a whirlpool unless you want it to be. I see an ocean at once placid and coursing with love for the moon, unfathomable and inviting,

It reminds me of the beautiful opening scenes of "The English Patient," the dunes that become pillowy waves when seen from the open cockpit of a plane. But I left the movie expressing disappointment that it wasn't more "affecting."

DC looked at me as if I'd just said something preposterous. "You blocked it," she said.

C.C. and I saw a few movies together in San Francisco years ago. She was careful to weed out anything that advertised its violence. But there are no guarantees. Once she climbed halfway into my seat when a fight erupted on screen. The astonished look in her eyes said, "DO SOMETHING!" Dumbfounded, I resorted to a cliche: "It's only a movie."

DC has similar reactions. The remote control clicks whenever the TV movie turns rough. At the show, she closes her eyes or sometimes walks out.

How can I watch the same scenes without being so affected? Is it years of conditioning, the numbing that began with watching the Lone Ranger kill bloodlessly and now is able to accommodate "The Silence of the Lambs"? And if this has occurred, what else is being numbed?

Days after seeing "The English Patient," haunting images from the movie lingered. Not the horrible burns or the torture, but the acts of a man who kills another and betrays half the world hoping to save his beloved from death.

These had affected after all. Where on my refrigerator are the words that understand?

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.