A gift

Sally Mann was a good friend of Cy Twombly, though he was old enough to be her father. They both came from Lexington, Virginia, and he lived there when he wasn't in Rome.

I have never understood what he was doing. I saw his monumental scribble paintings in Houston and couldn't see the point. She makes me want to understand him better, go back and look again. He also made photographs. Here's what she says about them:

"His photographs are hazy and casually indifferent to detail--this is not an eidetic memory; this is the way our minds recall and our hearts remember. They have a misty kind of luminosity, perhaps the mists of time or the forgiving scrim of recall. He made these pictures not with a sharp Proustian vision but with an eye veiled by the famously thick, characteristically humid southern air. Cy tapped into some flow of ancient memory: with his distracted mien, fragmented speech, and works of rapturous mythic energy, he seemed to have been born out of time."
--Sally Mann, in Hold Still, p. 84.

I've requested two books of and about his work. I will address myself to it. Meanwhile, I decided to take a Twomblian approach to this rose Sue gave me yesterday, bathed in afternoon light. An apology. I was a fool not to stop longer and try to understand. I'm off to the prison for meditation tonight.