While interviewing Donna Corvi,
of the Montauk Artists Association
the topic of “Mystic Messages” came up with a story Donna shares about going home and being given her first paint box that her mother kept in a box in a closet.
Opening the paint box, Donna finds her very first oil on canvas painting. It’s of a bare tree, an image she would later in life recognize she’s always been drawn to.
The subject, of finding “A Sign” and the experience of what she called “The Mystic Message” intrigues me.
Here’s a copy of the text message I sent her about it.
______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________
Thank you for coming
And being a delightful guest.
—
That experience of going back
Home to find something that you
Produced, way back when ,
Before you knew who you were
And only just starting to bloom,
To find a hint of who your are
and where your life has taken you,
In an oil paint box ????
Waiting in the back of a closet,
Holding a treasure message,
That you sent out to the world ,
Or possibly to yourself,
a long time ago,
Like some Divine, Life Foreshadowing.
A hint, from your first oil on canvas
that reveals that somehow you knew all along , and now witness yourself as the fulfillment of who you came into this world to be,
Begs the question,
How soon is the dye cast?
Or do we come into this world
With the mold and story already in place ,
And life is the magic, miracle place
Where we come to articulate it?
——
“ The Mystic Message”
I hope you don’t mind if I adopt that.
Fits perfectly.
I get those,
In places and in times you’d expect,
Like emptying out the house after my mother passed on,
And going through all your childhood things.
you’d expect to find things there,
But in places I could never have expected, and I also encounter them in clusters,
Not that often,
But I love when that happens.
And two degrees removed,
When I see something
that stands out like a snapshot
When you spot it,
though I’ve never laid eyes on it before.
But it triggers
A specific reference
To its likeness that I’ve already
Been acquainted with before,
Or a conjugation of words or
Way of wordsmithing,
whose idea and formulation I produced And wrote down in a marble covered composition book,
way back in earlier schoolboy days.
That thrill you get from that sign,
and revelation that it’s all connected
In Noel Coward’s play
“Private Lives”
Amanda calls it
“That Cosmic Thing-A-Me” ????
We could do a whole show on
“The Mystic Message”
Thank you again.
