The Litany of the Great River
Steinfels, Margaret O'Brien
BREATHING UNDERWATER THE LITANY OF THE GREAT RIVER Meinrad Craighead Paulist Press, $18.95, 76pp. 30 color illus. Margaret O'Brien S t e i n f e l s n a former life at a previous magazine, I...
...Weird is "suggestive of the supernatural, unearthly, eerie, uncanny...
...of an odd and inexplicable character, unusual, strange, fantastic...
...her life, outer and inner, at Stanbrook Abbey in England and more recently in the desert mountains of New Mexico...
...they stir the psyche / without being psychological...
...Not long after the cover appeared, a friend (and subscriber) called to say, "that's one weird picture...
...The Litany of the Great River continues the pattern...
...and a Benedictine nun, "Stars" was painted in deeply muted colors barely distinguishable from the gray background and the contrasting whites of a wimple and bird feathers...
...Margaret O'Brien S t e i n f e l s n a former life at a previous magazine, I published one of Meinrad Craighead's paintings, "Stars," on the cover...
...Not in their heavenly vault, but seen from the earth in the morning and in the evening, from inside the artist's imagination with birds and animals and organic forms, a mask (of God...
...The paintings and text recount, evoke, and memorialize the memories, dreams, and experiences of Craighead's childhood in Little Rock and Chicago...
...The pictures and their accompanying stories are personal, but not private...
...The subsequent soul-stirring induces in the viewer a reverie that is uncanny in calling up similar and related images from dreams, memories, and meditations of one's own...
...He was not wrong according to the dictionary...
...I understood what he meant...
...Best to read before sleeping and see what happens...
...Words cannot convey the powerful imaginative pull that draws one along through these pictures as through some watery, but breathable atmosphere of dreaminess and acute consciousness...
...his tone implied--"far-out" or"I don't get it...
...The visual cannot be reduced to the verbal...
...17May 1991:343...
...Even so, though t too found Craighead's pictures weird, that is, "unearthly, strange, fantastic," I also found them wonderful, awesome, and, to be truthful, deeply unsettling...
...But he meant more, or other, than just weird...
...And, though they are images of God the mother, they do not pose theological questions, but induce theoeikonic reflection...
...Stars" was from The Mother's Songs: Images of God the Mother(Paulist, 1986...
...they are religious and liturgical, but not devotional...
...Something weird...
...Here, the litanies in the prayerbook of her grandmother (Memaw of The Mother's Songs) and the litanies she chanted in parish processions as a child become the starting point for her litany of the earth and the heavens, of the living and the dead, of the animals and the humans, of all of creation, seen and unseen...
...In one painting, the invocation ("O Alma Mater, name us, we beseech thee") opens her imagination's weaving of the personal (her mother's death, the cottonwood tree planted at the gate in her memory, the figure in a dream carrying roses in her cape), and the religious (Mary, here perhaps as Our Lady of Guadalupe, the snake, old life and new...
...No actual stars, of course, but their morning and evening light suffused the images and the barely discernible colors...
Vol. 118 • May 1991 • No. 10
