Makers by Nature: Bruce Herman on Art, Beauty, and the Call to Create

Brian Williams: Hey, folks. This is Brian Williams, host of Forged, the podcast of the Humanitas Institute about forging lives of discipline, delight, craft, calling. Our goal on Forged is to have honest, unhurried conversations about timeless ways of living that draw tradition wisdom into our contemporary times. Today, I'm recording from the studio of artist Bruce Herman in the seaside town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Thanks for letting me invade your studio, Bruce.

Bruce Herman: It's a pleasure to be with you, Brian.

Brian Williams: Delightful to be with you, and welcome to Forged. Bruce Herman, to my mind, is one of the most significant Christian artists of the last fifty years. Bruce taught for almost forty years at Gordon College, where he started their arts department and was the La Florian distinguished chair in the fine arts. And Bruce has mentored generations of of painters and artists. His work has been exhibited at hundreds of shows, nationally and internationally, and he's the author most recently of Makers by Nature, Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art.

And he's the coauthor of Through Your Eyes, Dialogues on the Paintings of Bruce Herman. So really delighted, to be here. Bruce, wonder if we can start. Can you reflect on your first memory of beauty? When you think back to as a as a kid, what what moment or image comes to mind when you think one of the first, like, arresting experiences of beauty for you?

Bruce Herman: Well, thanks, Brent. Yeah. Actually, the truth is my earliest memory, period, is about beauty. Of course, that may say a lot about why I ended up becoming an artist. So I'm I'll speak in the present tense because it's still very fresh, believe it or not.

So I'm probably four years old, thereabouts, and it's springtime, and our back I walk out the back door, and our backyard is carpeted with seemingly thousands of perfect white globes. And I just thought, what is that? And I walk out into the yard, and there are these thousands of little flowers that are perfectly spherical, and they're and I look closely, and and the spheres are created by these hundreds, maybe thousands of little gossamer threads that they come out to the surface and form this perfect sphere, and I breathe on it, and it dissipates. It just these little gossamer threads take off. Of course, I know now that they're seeds, but at the center, at the top of that stalk is another globe.

It's the same shape as the perfectly white gossamer globe that had once been there before I breathed on it, and I just started weeping. Oh. But I started weeping not because I was sad, but because I didn't know I didn't have a a vocabulary or emotional vocabulary to countenance what I now know is beauty. Yeah. And it's the thing that in retrospect that's most astonishing to me is that this is the most common weed.

It's a dandelion flower.

Brian Williams: Right. That's exactly right. Do you remember? Because I have a I have a similar moment, not with dandelion, but what what were you feeling? What were the emotions of four year old Bruce Herman in that moment?

Was it was it sadness, wonder, awe? What was it?

Bruce Herman: Probably all of the above, but I don't think it was any sadness. It was more longing than sadness, but I think that the delicacy of those beautiful mean, now I have language like gossamer, but those beautiful little threads that go down to the core of this other sphere, then come out and perfectly arrange themselves into another sphere, and I remember thinking in that moment, the moment that passed after that, that this is like I'd just been looking at pictures of the Earth, and and of the sun, and of the moon, and the stars, and they're all spherical. And I was a curious kid. I think all kids are curious until it's either beat out of them or embarrassed out of them. But I felt a combination of wonder and longing and ecstatic joy that resulted in weeping, which I And the way I now understand it in retrospect is the human body has a limited vocabulary.

It reacts the same way to a roller coaster ride as it does to falling in love.

Brian Williams: It's also why we laugh at a joke, and laugh in tragedy. Right? Because we have a limited range of expressions, and and it's different different the same expression.

Bruce Herman: But beauty has been, from the time as far back as I can remember, kind of the lifeblood of of all that I care about.

Brian Williams: I had a similar experience. I remember mom waking me up, probably four or five years old. We had a big backyard that backed onto several 100 acres of woods. They weren't ours, but they were woods there. And mom grabbed me and my older brother, got us out of bed, and in the back, in in my mind, was fog there.

There were two bucks, you know, kinda going at it with their antlers. And for me, yeah, they they were bucking, they were they were butting heads, and there was antlers. And I mean, I don't even need to close my eyes to see it. I see that scene, and there is a sense of magic, wonder, awe. But then the the longing is an interesting word that you used.

Keep Longing for what? I mean, I think that would that's a word that might surprise people to to see something beautiful, to just have an encounter like that with something, and to feel longing, which says longing for something you don't possess.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. Don't know. I think maybe a year or two later, I had begun seriously getting interested in art. So my my interest in art goes way back to five, six years old. So I think the longing may have been connected with a desire to express something that would not necessarily capture the feelings and the visual qualities of those perfect spheres.

But along the way, other things began to grab my attention like that.

Brian Williams: Do you know C. S. Lewis' I mean, C. S. Lewis had similar experiences as a kid, and he he calls them, in retrospect, he used the German word.

He says, like, once he was reading as a child, Squirrel Nutkin by Beatrix Potter. And at the beginning of it, she describes this fall scene that created this, like, ache in him for that like beautiful moment. And he describes seeing the Y River Valley one time, and he said he was just so moved by the beauty of it. And he comes to call these Beatrizan experiences riffing on on Dante thinking this is these were for him, these were ways that God was drawing young Jack Lewis to God's self through these moments of beauty that he he wanted more of, and that was the kind of longing. So he uses his German word, which is kind of this longing for sweetness, but it's just like aching, like, just want more of this.

Yeah. Was it something like that?

Bruce Herman: Oh, yeah. And, you know, I just recently reread Wordsworth's Miles Above Tintern Abbey, and he mentions the River Wye, and he mentions the same sense of encounter with nature that creates in him, stirs in him this sense of incompleteness, and at the same time a longing for completion. And Lewis, of course, riffs on that later, you know, a hundred years later. He's writing about and connecting the dots between that encounter with the beauty of nature that then stirs in us this longing to we don't really have the language of it, but to participate in that beauty in such a way that it's in us and we're in it such that and he starts then thinking about heaven and about the ultimate reality which we will someday inhabit in which all that is beautiful we will be full participants in, but we aren't at the moment.

Brian Williams: Yeah. I think it's a similar kind of thing that we experience after a wonderful dinner party, right, with friends, and then you leave, and you're like, I'm deeply satisfied by what I just experienced, but yet there's this ache for for more of that. Tintern Abbey happens to be one of my favorite places in the entire world. I I've probably been a couple different couple dozen times, and I just keep getting drawn back to that that wonderful place that does the same kind of thing that creates that kind of aching longing for for more beauty. Did that stay with you, that image over time?

I mean, did did that like did that that moment with those the kind of gossamer dandelion globes, did that stay with you? Or did you just remember it as an adult?

Bruce Herman: No. I I think it stayed with me. The next memory I have is similar. I'm homesick again. I'm in first grade.

I'm homesick again. I was I had to miss a fair amount of school, and it's the same thing every time. You know, hard hard to breathe, coughing, sputtering, respiratory Okay. Distress. Yeah.

And I hated missing school.

Brian Williams: Oh, Did you love school as a kid?

Bruce Herman: I loved school.

Brian Williams: Okay. My daughter, the hardest days of her week are Saturday and Sunday, because she's not at school. So my little Maeve loves school as well. Okay?

Bruce Herman: So I'm home sick from school again, and I'm I'm lying on the living room floor using my cat, KK, as my pillow. This is a cat that had this is a cat that had no self respect.

Brian Williams: Apparently, if you're using it as a pillow. Yeah. Any self respecting cat would have, like, stalked away and looked at you with disdain or something. Right?

Bruce Herman: Either bat you with his with his claws. But Kiki, was perfectly happy and purring, and I'm have my head resting on her and just sort of in a reverie of sorts, and mom comes into the room, and she says, Bruce, are you okay if I go next door and have coffee with Mildred? And I said, sure. So mom says, okay. I'll be I'll be right next door if you need me for anything.

She opens the door and closes it, and stirs up the dust in the room, and the dust particles start swimming in this shaft of light coming in the in the window, and I was completely arrested by this, like I was with the with the the dandelion flowers a couple years earlier, but I had the thought because we were studying the planets in class, and the solar system, and I had the thought, the dust specks are just like, they're like the stars or the planets floating in God's light, and as I had that thought, I felt swept up into an ocean of light. I don't have any other language for it. Liquid light. Light that I was kinda swimming in, lost consciousness of my body, the room, of a cat, anything else, and just felt such love, such immense comfort and joy and love, and I didn't hear any words. I didn't hear God speaking to me, but I knew it was God, but I had this definite sense that God was saying everything everything is going to be good.

Everything is gonna be fine. Everything's gonna work out. It all resolve into perfection, and I of course, I didn't have that language. I'm six years old, but I just felt tremendous joy. And then the next thing I knew, I was there with my cat, and as though no time had passed.

Brian Williams: It was it was just like you had this moment. Oh, it was because of seeing these part yeah. You lost your your self kind of ecstasis.

Bruce Herman: Thirty years later, I found out I'm deathly allergic to cats and and dust.

Brian Williams: Oh, that's that's why I was sick

Bruce Herman: all the time.

Brian Williams: Is that right? Because of the cats and the dust. But yet but yet, that was the moment of God maybe a biatrician experience of God drawing a little bruce.

Bruce Herman: You know, again, another thirty years goes by, and I get a letter from my niece who's 19 and dying of cancer, a very aggressive fast moving cancer, and she sends me a photograph of herself, and written on the back is just the numbers. Second Corinthians twelve nine, and if you're not familiar with that verse, it's it's when Paul said, I asked the Lord three times to remove this thorn from my flesh, and his answer was, my grace is sufficient unto you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness, or my power is made perfect in weakness. And she sent that to me because she was going through I don't know if she knew she was dying, but she was very weak. And so I look back at the experience of closeness to God, realizing it was in the weakness. It was in my susceptibility, my vulnerability to to dust and cat dander.

Brian Williams: Yeah.

Bruce Herman: And I still love cats. I don't love dust, but

Brian Williams: but but we are dust. Yeah. Exactly. That's true. Yeah.

Sometimes when I dust the shelf, I'm like, that's little bit of Adam right there. And that might be a little bit of Isaiah or something like that.

Bruce Herman: We know that it's it's it's skin.

Brian Williams: Yeah. That's It's

Bruce Herman: skin particles that have been released and float around there.

Brian Williams: So Bruce, I know I've heard you reflect a couple different times on the what I think you've called the the myth of the kind of isolated genius artist, kind of self made artist, the person who, you know, lives on their own and is kinda sui generis, we might call it just self generated artist. For you, when did you start to realize you were an artist, and were there people that helped you realize that? I mean, there people in your life along the way that affirmed that or helped you understand that I am somebody who makes I am an artist who's either sense who's both sensitive, but also has some abilities.

Bruce Herman: Well, it's funny. I grew up in a family of athletes. Okay. I had three brothers, or four of us boys, and we were all you know, my dad was an athlete. My mom was athletic.

So poetry, and painting, and and fine music and so forth were not really part of our life as a family, but it was part of my life for the time I was little. Like I said, I was I couldn't stop thinking, and I I drew and suddenly I probably drove my parents crazy asking for new kinds of drawing materials and paper and stuff like that. But they were very encouraging. They just didn't know how to I never got any special art lessons, or I got plenty of golf lessons. Oh, is that

Brian Williams: right?

Bruce Herman: Got plenty of baseball lessons, football lessons, everything.

Brian Williams: But they didn't discourage it. They let little Bruce, like, teacher Bruce draw.

Bruce Herman: At one point my dad asked me, what do you want to be when you grow up? You know, everybody gets asked that. I said, well, know, dad, I'm I'm gonna be an artist. He said, oh, okay. And and then years later, I'm 14, and he says, so Bruce, have you given more thought to, you know, directions in your life and what you wanna do Which

Brian Williams: sport you're gonna go pro in?

Bruce Herman: And I said, dad, we've already talked about this.

Brian Williams: Oh, is

Bruce Herman: that right? Okay. Gonna be I'm an artist. I am an artist, and I'm gonna continue to be an artist. Oh, I I know, but how are you gonna make a living?

He said, gonna be a cartoonist or an illustrator? And I said, well, you know, I don't I'm not against that, but I'm not worried about how I'm gonna make money. I'll I'll make money. I'll do something. And I left home when I was 17.

Yeah. And I learned how to be a carpenter. I built houses. Learned a lot of skills. And I figured I was gonna keep making art my whole life.

I wasn't worried about selling my art particularly, although, you know, that did eventually come along. So I never had any real doubt.

Brian Williams: You didn't. You didn't. Well, but I mean that's also, there's teenage hubris there too. Right? Because the number of teenagers that I coach were like, wanna be a professional soccer player.

And I think, actually you're not, so let's figure out what you are gonna do. Right. So I mean, was so you had you had confidence even as a teenager.

Bruce Herman: I had confidence from the time I was six years old. Yeah. And and the confidence wasn't in me. In fact, that same day that my dad asked when I was 14 when he said, so what do you think you're gonna be? Actually, before that moment when he asked me again, what do you think you wanna do?

I had brought down this four foot high, two and a half foot wide giant charcoal drawing of of a a sculpture of the prophet Isaiah that was I drew it from a photograph from the the Well Of Souls, Klaus Slaughter's Well Of Souls, and it was the prophet Isaiah, and I showed it to my dad. I said, dad, I just finished this drawing, and he looked at it, and he just shook his head. He said, that is amazing. You should be very, very proud of yourself. I said, no.

You don't understand. I I didn't actually I didn't do it well, did do it, but I didn't actually do it. I couldn't say what I was trying to say. But I I said, the painting the drawing made itself, And the dad said, I don't understand that, Bruce. And I said, well, that's what I experienced.

Brian Williams: Is that right? This is as a 14 year old. 14 You're experiencing

Bruce Herman: Yeah.

Brian Williams: I'm drawing, but it's but it's not it's not me. So you weren't going to dad looking for praise. You weren't looking for dad to say, hey, well done, son. That's a great little drawing.

Bruce Herman: Right. So I think from the time I was pretty little, I had the sense that this thing was a gift. It was funny, we talk about artistic people as being gifted, but I think it's literal. Really good artists know that it's not about them. I mean, seriously.

And they don't have to be religious people. I I had a friend in Boston who is a very accomplished artist, one of the best painters in Boston, honestly. Died of ALS about ten years ago. Rough, rough thing, Lou Gehrig's disease, but John Imber was his name, and I once asked him. He had a one person show at a museum in Boston at the Brandeis Art Museum.

It's called The Rose, and I came up to him after I said, you know, John, these paintings were astonishing. Where did you get these? And he said, well, I'm just really, really lucky. Oh, that that's great. And that, you know, he was not a religious person, but that's how he expressed

Brian Williams: it. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's how he experienced it. That's how he experienced it.

The same thing. This is this is this is lucky that I that I have this. So were mom and dad pretty supportive of of you as an artist?

Bruce Herman: They were supportive, but like I said, I never got any special lessons or anything like that. And it's probably a good thing that it didn't.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Because my next question will too. I mean, if if you had a 14 year old who said, I'm gonna just make art. I'm not gonna worry about how to make a living. What would you say to them?

Bruce Herman: I would say, great. And you know, you'll have to learn something to make money. I think my dad, you know, since I left home when I was 17, it was not under bad circumstances. I just told my dad I was ready to go, and he he tried to challenge me, but then he he let me go. And he said the door's always open if you need to come back.

But I very quickly learned how to make it in the world.

Brian Williams: Yeah.

Bruce Herman: Because I I had a kind of can do attitude. I was curious about everything.

Brian Williams: Well, and I would say as an artist, because my wife is an artist, and materials make sense to my wife in a way they don't make sense to me. Like, just matter. Wood, paint, dirt, whatever it happens to be. And so the fact that you develop some skills as a carpenter, that that just makes sense to me as somebody who's on the periphery of the the world of artists is for the for you to go, yeah, know how to use wood and to make stuff. I mean, Kim more than once has seen has seen something in a store, thought, I'm not gonna pay that.

I'm gonna make one of those, and then she'll I go make

Bruce Herman: don't really have much time for I haven't had really any time for hobbies or anything because I, you know, taught full time, and I was a full time artist. So I kept two professions alive for forty years and retired from teaching about three years ago, so now I've just got this one profession that I'm doing. But I'm actually now have a little bit of time for avocational stuff, and my go to pastime now is woodworking. Oh, that right? Yeah.

Okay. My favorite project, most recent project other than obviously the artwork that I make, was an apple tree fell down on my son's property up in Maine during a nor'easter, which is a terrible storm that hits New England and does a lot of damage. It took down this 120 year old apple tree, and it was a very tall tree because it hadn't been pruned or cultivated for a hundred years. So it's huge, and he was gonna chop it up for firewood because he hates his house with wood. And I said, no, Ben.

I'll pay for you to get firewood. Let's let's let's log it, and let's take it to a sawmill and have it planked so I so I can get the lumber.

Brian Williams: Why? Because apple apple wood is

Bruce Herman: Because I thought it would be really cool to make something out of that tree. Yeah. Because that's the tree that my grandchildren played in.

Brian Williams: Oh, right. Sure.

Bruce Herman: And actually figures in several of my paintings that are meditations on Elias' four quartets. My grandson is actually featured in one of those paintings.

Brian Williams: I know that I know that painting.

Bruce Herman: In the tree. Yeah. Okay. That's the tree.

Brian Williams: That's the tree. Okay. Oh, very

Bruce Herman: So I had Ben and I, you know, loaded it onto his trailer and dragged it to a sawmill, and the guy looked at us like we were crazy because it was kinda gnarly and twisted, and but he he produced the sawmill, gave us a pretty sizable stack of lumber out of that tree. I dried it and seasoned it for about eighteen months or two years, and then I made it I still have a lot of it left, but I made it into five really nice wooden boxes, each about about that big for each of my five grandchildren, and it's finger jointed, and it's the the figure in the grain is incredibly beautiful, and you open up the lid of each one of these boxes, and it has their name engraved, each one of their individual names in their favorite scripture verse, and then in the bottom of the box is a children's book that I self published, hardbound children's book about the tree.

Brian Williams: Oh, that's beautiful.

Bruce Herman: So it fits in the box.

Brian Williams: That's really lovely. Hey, so most of your work as an artist, though, is is in painting. So is there a difference in the way you experience painting versus woodworking? I mean, is it like working with the materials or seeing the three d object? Do you relate to them differently, or is it just the same kind of experience for you?

Bruce Herman: No. It's different. I mean, if I had another lifetime, and I well, let's put it this way. If I'd been independently wealthy and never had to work for a living to make put bread on the table for raising my kids and family, I probably would've done both sculpture and painting. But you can't really be proficient or highly skilled at both unless you can give it your undivided attention, and I couldn't.

Brian Williams: Because you had to teach.

Bruce Herman: I had to teach, and I was building an art department and all that stuff. But probably if I live long enough, I might get pretty good at woodworking. I think these boxes turned out really beautifully. I mean, I had the time, I might do some more carving. But yeah, think there's the same kind of hand eye coordination stuff goes into painting that goes It's fine tuned hand eye coordination, but I think it has a different spirit.

You you work with clay, or you work with wood, or you work with metal, it's very different than paint. Paint is very fluid. It's all about color. It's about very subtle differences of texture with slippery soft smooth paint, or kind of stiff impasto, they call it in Italian, the thick, brushy kind of paint, like Van Gogh. Think of Van Gogh.

So paint paint's very expressive, but it's very different than wood or clay.

Brian Williams: Oh, yeah.

Bruce Herman: So the materials have their own life that

Brian Williams: you do What is it? The materials have their own they have their own rules. They, I mean, they they almost they almost dictate to you how they wanna be used, don't they?

Bruce Herman: Well, you dance with it. I mean, it's a dance. You cooperate with the materials. You learn you learn to move the materials in ways that are meaningful. The difference between painting for me and say, making something out of wood, building a house I built this house.

I built this studio. Building something with wood is fundamentally different for me than painting. Painting is image making, unless it's completely abstract painting, which I've done some, and I know painters who that's their as the French. They want to just no. I temp I typically I'm an image maker.

Yep. And images are complex and multivalent, and they mean in different directions, and so and we were talking about this earlier today about interpretive strategies for how you approach an image, and I've said this a million times, I'll say it again here. I make a painting, and then I let it loose in the world, and then you have to decide what it means, or at least you have to have to be the interpreter. You the viewer. Because it's like music.

Music is great, but it it needs a pair of ears. You need to have a listener for the music to be complete.

Brian Williams: So let me let me tease something out here. I'd love to hear you reflect on this. We're surrounded by your paintings in your studio right now, and we just had a show of yours with Ed Nippers at at the Merriman Gallery in in Templeton Hall where I teach. And we had one of the general contractors for this new building come through, and he said, I don't get it. He said, I just I don't know what it means.

So for for people who are listening who, you know, might have that same kind of feeling, what what do you say to them? You know, somebody who sees like a Kandinsky or a Mark Rothko or just any kind of quote unquote modern art and doesn't get it. I mean, they're they're asking the question. I think there's a meaning here, but it's embedded. But I'm not included.

I'm not included or it's opaque or it's hidden from me, and I just I don't get it.

Bruce Herman: What's the code?

Brian Williams: What's the code or what's going on here? And because it it seems so distant and and, inaccessible to them. What what do you say how do you help somebody, if you will I don't wanna say get it, but how do you help somebody encounter a work of art like that, an abstract work of art or some of some of your pieces?

Bruce Herman: Well, I mean, I first of all, my feeling is that they should be welcomed first and foremost, not made to jump through hoops or to have to, you know, do a lot of reading or cogitating to get to the point where they can have a meaningful response to to the painting. So to try to figure out how to put them at ease, like, I told this story when I was down visiting you at at the show, but a former student of mine brought her boyfriend over here to the studio one day, and she wanted me to meet him, and because she we had a kind of a special relationship, and she wanted both Meg, my wife, and I to meet him, and he came to the studio door over there, over in the corner there, and he stood on the threshold. He wouldn't come into the studio. He was just kinda shy, and I said, come on in. He said, well, I, you know He didn't say it, but he was acting like I'm not qualified.

Brian Williams: And that's what a lot of people feel. Right. I'm not qualified to like even encounter this stuff because I

Bruce Herman: don't Exactly have like your general contractor. And so I invited him in. I insisted he come in, and then he said, well, okay. I said, well, any questions? He said, well, yeah.

Could you explain this could you explain this pain to me? And I said, sure, but first, just tell me what you see. And he said, you mean literally? Just what I see? And I said, yeah, just literally, what do you see?

And he said, okay. He started looking and saying what he was seeing, and he did a brilliant interpretation of this painting. And, you know, five, six minutes later, he stopped, and he looked at me, and I said, do you think you need me to explain that painting? He said, probably not.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Interesting. Okay. And so what was it? Was it him just in a way giving himself to the painting, giving himself the opportunity to just like look and name what he what he sees?

Bruce Herman: What it was is that he felt he felt welcomed.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Okay.

Bruce Herman: And so I really view I view art making itself, and by art making, mean poetry and music and painting. Art making is a form of hospitality. It's welcoming people over the threshold of your inmost intimate self and saying, you're welcome here. I want you to see this. I want you to hear this.

I want you to feel this, this thing that I have felt. If I could infect you with what I felt that day when I saw those dust particles swimming in that shaft of light, and was swept up into that joy, this inexpressible joy, that would be to me, that would be a great thing to be able to share that with you, and and for you not to feel like, oh, you have to learn some special

Brian Williams: interpretive code that you've embedded in it, that you've embedded it, that they have to, like, sort of like be Sherlock Holmes to kinda

Bruce Herman: It figure out. It it's inevitable. You The funny thing is I don't think self expression is in itself interesting. I just think it's inevitable. It's like, you you look at six people walk along a road, and they're all walking slightly differently.

In fact, if you know someone really well, you can spot them a quarter of a mile away, and you don't even know what they're wearing today, but you know that's who it is. Why? Because self expression is inevitable. You can't get away from it. So I tell I used to tell my students, don't worry about a style.

Don't worry about self expression. It's it's gonna happen. So then another thing is, well then, what is it about if it's not about self expression? And I think it's about this mysterious arc that exists between the artist and the viewer, or the the artwork and the viewer, that that space between that gets energized and something new happens. And that new something is that space between.

It's the liminal space, what Charles Taylor calls interspace, or what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the inscape. It's the it's the is the French say. The thing you can't say.

Brian Williams: So let me ask a follow-up question about thinking about it as hospitality. I wanna follow-up on what you said in a second. But on the hospitality piece, I think some people feel when they approach poetry, you know, TS Eliot, your favorite, Ezra Pound, and some works of art, the artists have not been very hospitable. Right? They've not been hosts that have easily welcomed you in, that sometimes it seems very difficult to encounter the the work.

Bruce Herman: Almost like they're saying you have to do calisthenics I before you come

Brian Williams: mean, so so what degree does the artist really need to play host to be like hospitable to make it easy for somebody or e easier for somebody to to access their work. Does that make sense? I mean, it's almost like it's like, I'm welcoming you into my home, but you've gotta jump over the barbed wire fence and go through the tunnel and slog through the mud before I welcome you into my home. I mean, I think that's how some people feel like artists some artists are less hospitable than they could be, perhaps. Probably true.

Bruce Herman: I mean, think the best kind of art criticism, the best kind of literary criticism is, we use the word criticism, and people think right away this is about a review, that someone's gonna pass judgment. That's not what criticism is. Literary criticism is basically clearing away obstacles for you to encounter the poem or encounter the novel. And art critics, good art critics, play that role. They clear away obstacles to make you feel welcome.

Right. And like for example with Elliott, you brought up TS Elliott. I mean, he's notoriously difficult. Yes. And maybe his his magnum opus, Four Quartets, is the most difficult.

Brian Williams: That's why I spent all my time with Dante's comedy because it was easier than the Four Quartets.

Bruce Herman: But here's the thing. I, you know, I've been reading four quartets since I was 20, and I'm 73, so I've been I've invested some time in that poem, among others. But here's the thing. I I've told people who say, yeah, I don't really get it. I say, well, do do this if you want to get it.

Maybe you don't want to get it, but if but if you do, here's my advice. Go alone somewhere quiet where you're comfortable, bring the poem, and read it aloud from beginning to end without stopping. Don't stop to try to understand, comprehend, you know, get it. Just speak it as best you can, and listen to your own voice sounding, and and the words in your own body resonating, and I think you'll get you'll take 10 steps closer to this poem. And then you might have to do some a little bit of spelunking.

Like, you might need to read some Dante. You might might need to read some Cicero or Virgil or any number of others because it's all in there. You might read the the Old Testament and the New Testament. You might need to read and and acquaint yourself a Celtic tradition and, you know, a whole bunch of other stuff, and some geography, and even some science is in there.

Brian Williams: And it's worth it because you you kinda rely on the testimony of hundreds of years or, you know, tens of thousands of other people who've said, oh, this one's this is worth the effort. Right? This is worth the effort. So I I mean, I think I do something similar with my students with poetry that you're you're describing with the work of visual art. When we read a poem or memorize a poem, I'll just ask them, what do you notice?

Close your eyes. Let's do it out loud. What images do you see? What what just what do you what do you notice? And just and they'll tease stuff out, and then we'll just do a little bit of this at a time.

And so so with your recommendation, I mean, I I think for for people listening, maybe who who don't have as much experience engaging visual art or poetry, to just say, open yourself to it, encounter it, experience it, and don't be worried about like getting it right away.

Bruce Herman: Well, back to the art critic and the literary critic for a moment. So if you're if you're wanting to gear up to climb Everest, in the first fifteen minutes of reading about such an endeavor, you you come up immediately against the requirement that you have a Sherpa. Also, lot a lot of preparation. You gotta you gotta work your butt off for years to get ready to do this thing of climbing Everest. And then there are no guarantees once you start climbing, but you need a guide.

And so it for me, the the literary critic, the art critic, even some artists who are willing, like I'm one of those artists who's willing to give you a leg up. Yeah. It helps. Yeah. And the same thing's true in any any good endeavor.

I mean, if you wanna be a good golfer I mean, I said, you know, I told you, I came from a golfing family. My dad was an expert golfer. He would literally hug me from behind and put his hands over my hands and gently move them into just the right position at the end of the shaft of the golf club, and then he would he would say, now that's how you hold the club. Now stand back and watch me. And he would get the club, and he'd swing, and it looked like almost looked like watching a ballet dancer.

It was so beautiful. Oh, interesting. And then he said and I you know, he didn't I didn't have the language at that time to say, dad, that was beautiful, but he could tell that I thought it was beautiful. I said, you know why my swing looks so beautiful? It's because I got myself out of the way.

It was like listening to a Zen master. Well, but that's how a real teacher works. They welcome you into the experience, and then they show you the rudiment. They don't give you too much information, because if he had told me everything about what you have to think about, like, you know, keeping your your weight on your instep, and you gotta, you know, keep your elbow close into your side when you're on your back swing, and it there's a 100 things to think about, and then you get you just fall apart.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Okay. So this is interesting. So I I would imagine a lot of listeners have this experience whether they're, you know, athletes teaching their their sons or daughters how to play a sport. Right?

Or or how to do a craft or how to handle the chainsaw or I mean, what you're describing is it's not that much different from reading a poem or learning how to engage a work of art. There's kind of apprenticeship that goes on there. I mean, you just described, I coached soccer for for years and years, and what you just described is what I would do with my players with respect to different, know, moves or whatever it happens to be your skills. And there is a sense of like, oh, I need to learn how to engage a work of art is what I hear you saying.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. You learn how to engage a work of art, and you also you can I mean, Lewis talks about this in one of his essays? I can't think of the name of the essay at the moment, but he he talks about how if you want to learn Greek, initially they would give you candy letters, Greek letters, you know, when you're just a little kid. Yeah. And they they introduce it to you through, you know, through candies.

We all know that you're not gonna keep eating those candies your whole life. Eventually, you're gonna learn to read great Greek poetry or whatever, great Greek oratory, but you don't get there instantly. You take baby steps.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Hey, question. Why do you think it's important for us as human persons or or generally for us to encounter works of beauty or works of art? And what what do what do we miss in our lives if we don't have regular practices of encountering, you know, a great novel, poem, theater, music, you know, visual art? I mean, because for many of us, our lives are super busy.

We've got family. We've got work. You know, we've got a lot of TV to watch, a lot of Netflix to watch, or whatever happens to be. What do we miss as humans when we don't regularly practice encountering works of art and beauty, do you think?

Bruce Herman: Well, the whole time we've been talking, Brian, I've been thinking about who the potential audience is who might be tuning into this podcast, and I'm thinking about

Brian Williams: It's my mom and dad. Beyond that, I really don't

Bruce Herman: Yeah. Well, hi mom. Hi

Brian Williams: dad. Exactly.

Bruce Herman: What I was gonna say is I I keep thinking about those folks, whoever you are out there, and I keep thinking, it's not so much that I wanna frame it such that this is what you're missing. I guess I want to say that our very nature is attuned to beauty, to the beautiful. It's how we were created. We were created for this, And someday, I believe, in the ultimate, in the kingdom of God, when things are fully realized, we will be, you know, completely participating in beauty. The same way that when God said let there be light, it was light, and he said it's good.

I think that that's what's gonna happen, and I think we were made for this. And so if we don't participate in beauty at all, I think we feel impoverished. We we feel diminished.

Brian Williams: Because we were made We were made for to it. We were made for it.

Bruce Herman: And it's not so much that I I would never put a guilt trip on somebody and say, well, you should be going to museums and looking at art. That would be horrible, because that's not how you approach it. It's like saying, you should be falling in love with that girl. And you say, get out of my face. You know, no one's gonna accept that.

So what it is, I just try to again, I try to be a good host in a sense of clearing away the things that prevent people from knowing that this is built in.

Brian Williams: Yeah. We

Bruce Herman: were made for this.

Brian Williams: Yeah. The other thing that you talk about in your in your book, which is right in front of me, Makers by Nature, not only are we made to encounter beauty and works of art, but we're made to make stuff. I mean, that that's that's that's your argument, right? That we are makers by nature, so so that part of our human nature is like we were made to to to make stuff. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Like what what you what you have in mind?

Bruce Herman: Yeah. Mean, and they're they're the two things are related. Our propensity or our desire, our longing, our our fitness for the beautiful is related to our being made to be makers. We there's nothing more satisfying. I know this.

There's nothing more satisfying for a human being than to make something beautiful. It's more you know, forgive me if this crosses a boundary here, it's better than sex.

Brian Williams: Okay. That's quite a claim, to make something. I mean, because that that's one of those powerful experiences of of human person. Right?

Bruce Herman: So The best part of sex is the self disappearance that happens in in the the in true intimacy, when you're really intimate with another human being and can let down your gargapillion without your clothes, etcetera, what's happening is you're giving yourself away. That's the whole reason we do it.

Brian Williams: I mean, that's ecstasy. Ecstasis to stand outside of oneself. Getting outside

Bruce Herman: yourself. Yeah. And and the reason why children come from this act is because you've given yourself away, and they're now you've discovered that yourself is not this limited little thing you have to protect. It's actually something expansive and amazing. It's like the Lord's saying to Abraham, you're gonna have so many children it's gonna be like the sands on the seashore, the stars in the sky.

You won't be able to count it. Is an expansive Life wants to live, and so I think I think making things and making beauty come into the world is the most gratifying thing of all, and I think it's because it's when we are most exercising the image of God. We were made for this. We were made for making beauty, for making, for creating.

Brian Williams: And what's that what's that look like for people? Because some people might think, okay, yeah, you're Bruce Herman, you're a professional painter, you're a master painter, that's what

Bruce Herman: you You took all these years to acquire this.

Brian Williams: Took all these years to develop this. You studied this. You taught this. Not everybody can do that. So what do you say to somebody who's like, I'm I'm not gonna be a master painter because you know, I'm an actuary and I'm actually like doing work around numbers or I'm an, you know, whatever I am.

Bruce Herman: Well, mean, a really good actuary is gonna tell you that there's such a thing as a beautiful spreadsheet.

Brian Williams: Yeah. I'm sure that's the case. I I yeah. I don't know why I chose actuaries.

Bruce Herman: I know mathematicians who say they're a beautiful equation.

Brian Williams: Oh, no. Well, that's absolutely. But I'm just thinking of somebody who's know, they're they're going to work. They're they're doing their job. They're they're bringing food home for the family.

Bruce Herman: They don't love their job?

Brian Williams: They don't love their job, and they're thinking, well, how am I a what do mean I'm a maker?

Bruce Herman: Right. Well, mean, here's the funny thing is my son Dan is a medical doctor, and he loves his work. But when he comes home, what he wants to do is be with his family, and then he also likes tinkering. So he he's restored like three different boats. He's he's restored automobiles.

He likes working with mechanical things, and it gives him a certain kind of pleasure. It reminds me of that great line from Chariots of Fire where Eric Liddell says, God made me fast, and when I run, I feel his pleasure. Imagine feeling God's pleasure, and what it is, you're living into the thing that you were meant for, but that might be that thing you might be meant for. It could be something as simple, and also as profound as making a beautiful loaf of bread for somebody. And they taste that bread, and they go, oh, man, this is good.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Absolutely.

Bruce Herman: I know a guy that makes wine. I know another guy that makes he distills spirits. He makes bourbons and stuff like that. I mean, you can make anything, and you can make, you know, make music. One of the things that used to happen at our house every Sunday was people would just come over here, they'd pick up guitars and start singing and playing, and it was a blast.

Brian Williams: Yeah. I was at a Saint Lucia party last night where one of our philosophy professors was he he's become a master of mixed drinks. And it was they were good. And he was making drinks for everybody, and it's interesting that he was he was making something and got great delight in making it, but then got great delight in giving it away and and you enjoy Same the pleasure, this pleasure that it So that it I mean, I guess the argument would be that if we were all makers by nature, and somehow we're like fulfilling our human nature when we make. And therefore, not only is it worth making the effort to encounter the beauty that others have made, but trying our hand at at making ourselves.

Yeah. I mean, do wonder, and I'd love to get your reflection on this. The malaise that so many of us sometimes feel, but I wonder how much of that is tied to being pure consumers and not ever producers or makers. Right? I mean, we have reduced ourselves or been reduced to like pure consumers, and we just buy everything.

We consume everything, and probably fewer and fewer of us actually make things.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. It's a it's a problem. And I I think there, we all know, if you've studied any history at all, there's plenty of civilizations that have gradually wound down and collapsed, and we may be in one of those moments. I don't know. I hope we're not, but we may be in one of those moments where our civilization is collapsing, and I think consumerism is a sign of that.

The fact that people no longer make things.

Brian Williams: Like music. Right? So like, I mean, you know, love the radio, and I love whatever my iTunes. I can get whatever I I wanna listen to, But there's a kind of de skilling that goes on because to have music, I don't actually have to make music myself. I can just turn on the stereo or something like that.

Right? So it's like I can get anything I want, usually delivered in twenty four hours if if I want. But yet, we've lost it seems like we've lost something about what it means to be human, and also our our understanding of the the world in which we live.

Bruce Herman: The one thing Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his book Tipping Point, in which he talks about how there's a point beyond which the work starts to come into being, but to get to that point where you begin to make something significant, it takes ten thousand hours. He said it's Yeah. Remember right. I worked that out. That's a forty hour week for five years.

That's that's the kind of investment it takes to get started. So if you wanna do something well, whatever it is, if you wanna play tennis well, you wanna play golf well, you wanna bake be a good baker, you can be an okay baker and start out, and maybe you're happy with that. That's enough. You don't you don't wanna get fastidious about it. But people that really get into baking, they get into certain kind of crusts and flaky material and popovers and, you know, croissants.

I mean, you can do baking is an art form.

Brian Williams: Yeah. And my my my oldest daughter is going that direction, and I'm fully supportive of it because I get to try everything that she makes. Exactly. Yeah. And there's real satisfaction, isn't there?

And like and not and even if you're not mastering something, but putting the time and effort into a single kind of art or trap.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. I I think the only thing I would say to our listeners here is it almost doesn't matter what you make as long as you're making something. You need to be making something. You cannot just become a consumer, because that's a form of illness from my point of view. It's a spiritual illness.

But if you want to make art, it's not only going to take years of skill acquisition, but then you've also got to acquaint yourself with the tradition. I mean, we were talking about Four Quartets a few moments ago. Elliott, that that poem is it's an homage to the Western tradition, to all the great literary works that came before, including the Bible, and it's also his testament of devotion. It's his testament of of faith, but it's it's literally his magnum opus. He never wrote a poem after that.

Brian Williams: Is that right?

Bruce Herman: It was his last poem.

Brian Williams: Oh, didn't know that.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. He wrote some plays. He wrote some lightweight, kind of humorous plays, like the cocktail party and stuff like that. But the other thing that happened to Elliot after he was done with Forged Cortez is he met and married Valerie, and she made him happy. He was happy for the first time in his life, and and he stopped making pumps.

Brian Williams: Wow. And I'll just I gotta give a shout out here. So TS Eliot was from my home state of Missouri. Thank you very much. Saint Louis, but TS Eliot would come up here to this to Gloucester.

Right. And sometimes in the summer as a kid. Right? You and I went to his the kind of the either boyhood home or whatever it was. You had just down the road from here.

Yeah. That's that that's remarkable. So Elliott is good at this, and I think you're good at this. Elliot, you know, in The Wasteland or The Four Quartets, I mean, he names an artist maybe do this well for us. He he names decay as decay.

Right? I mean, it's called The Wasteland, and and he he he is name he's saying there's something there's good in the world. There's nothing wrong in the world, and and and he names it. This new body of paintings you've been working on, in some way, they are attempts to to name the kinda chaos and disorder that that that you see or or that you feel. But do you think that in the the religious tradition of art, is there a tendency towards downplaying chaos and disorder?

Downplay, and you know, and and kind of like leaning into kind of sentimentality or like wanting to make all things, you know, easy and good?

Bruce Herman: No. I mean, well, certainly there is always sentimental art and poetry and music that people make, and I have nothing against sentimental work, but it's not No one mistakes a sentimental ditty that one sings. No one mistakes that as being on the same level as, say, some great choral work that is about the worship of God and God's majesty. You don't mistake those two things. I mean, there's there's a place for for the little ditty that one sings when you're clinking beers together or something, you know, some beer hall song.

What's really interesting is that a great artist like Jan Sebastian Bach can take a beer hall song

Brian Williams: and turn it into an oratorio. Well, Mozart did 12 variations on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and I've heard them all perform, and it's pretty amazing, you know? Yeah.

Bruce Herman: I mean, there's almost something a little perverse in that, but the great artists wanna do that. But I also think it's a way of saying, you know, look, everything is worth our time, but it's you you you need to understand where things fall. And back to your question of order disorder, I think great works of religious art in poetry, music, and and visual arts, etcetera, great works of religious art will always take into account sin and suffering, chaos, cruelty, violence, but they don't leave you there. They move you through it and into a place of resolution at some point. And the classic Greek drama structure is something like exposition and complication, rising action, climax, resolution, those five that arc of the drama, classic Greek drama, and I think there's something fundamentally human in that, and I think that's what the Bible is.

Ultimately, you can see it. Every good story starts out as it's just getting going, and then something goes wrong. Complication. Exposition, complication, rising action, climax, and resolution. What went wrong at the beginning in Genesis?

Adam and Eve broke faith. They betrayed their trust, the covenant, the trusting relationship with God, but that's not the end of the story. You don't leave them there, you know, exiled and out in the darkness, you know, the victims of Satan's lies and deceptions. No. It doesn't end there.

In fact, it all begins there.

Brian Williams: Yeah. But we do want, I think, as certainly the Christian narrative and as artists to to not bypass that too quickly either. I mean, it's like getting to Easter without good

Bruce Herman: Oh, I mean, look at the rest of Genesis.

Brian Williams: Yeah. That's exactly right. That's what I was gonna say. It gets darker. And sometimes artists need to depict, like, kinda Genesis three broken fall, but they can do that in a beautiful way.

So if you can do a beautiful depiction or storytelling like a Flannery O'Connor of of chaos and disorder. Right?

Bruce Herman: Right. I mean, the whole time we've been talking, the painting that's behind us by the way, this is going to live with Brian. He's acquiring Yeah. But this painting behind us is a family who are walking through they're on a pilgrimage. It's called Peregrini Pro Amore Dei, Latin from Saint Brendan of wanderers for the love of God.

They're moving through some ruins. They're moving through the chaos, a broken down ruin, but also seemingly being rebuilt. There's scaffolding there, but it's a scaffolding of blood, you know?

Brian Williams: With an image of who's hovering here at the corner too?

Bruce Herman: It could be a Christ figure. The builder something. But he's the builder. He's the master builder.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Hover hovering over over the scene. That's right. That's the bit of hope you're saying.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. I just think you're gonna find in religious art, you're gonna find a frank admission of error and chaos and sin and suffering, but you're also gonna find elements of hope, elements of light breaking into the darkness. You mentioned before we started that you wanted me to quote from a poem. I don't know if you wanna go there yet.

Brian Williams: Yeah. We can go there. I have a couple other things to ask you about. Talk to me about your your your marriage with Meg, if you would, as an artist. So artists are sometimes not known as being the most kinda grounded, earthy people.

Meg seems very grounded and and very earthy. What How have you each kind of allowed the other one to pursue your own particular vocations?

Bruce Herman: Well Meg jokes about it. She says, I hold Bruce's kite string. She says, but imagine what my string would look like if there were no kite at

Brian Williams: the end of it. Okay.

Bruce Herman: How foolish I would look.

Brian Williams: Oh, that's great. Oh, that's great.

Bruce Herman: Which, you know, that's a clever thing she says. But she basically, when we met, she was in art school, but she was there half heartedly. She didn't really wanna go. Her parents get this. Her parents forced her to go to art school.

Brian Williams: Okay. You wanna know That's unusual. Yeah. Why? She You need be a physician's assistant or something like that to make some money.

Bruce Herman: Because she was talented.

Brian Williams: Yeah, okay.

Bruce Herman: And they just assumed, I think wrongly, that because she was talented that she was called to be an artist. I taught painting and drawing and art theory for forty years, and I can tell you right now, I taught some incredibly talented people who were never gonna be artists.

Brian Williams: Okay. Why not?

Bruce Herman: They have other other things in mind.

Brian Williams: That's not what they wanted

Bruce Herman: to do. They have other desire.

Brian Williams: I mean, I think that's what it is for some of my students too. There's this I I could do this. Mom and dad might want me to do that, maybe I can make money at that, but that's that's not what I care about. That's not what my calling is for.

Bruce Herman: What she really wanted to do, she had been accepted at Goddard College, and she wanted to go into the animal husbandry program. And photography. She's a very good photographer, but they would allow her to do a double major in photography and animal husbandry, which seems like an odd mix, but that's her. But her parents said no, they didn't have the money for Goddard, and they wanted her to go to art school because that was where her real talent lay. Yeah.

And I met her at that time, and she the way she puts it is she when she realized that we were gonna get married, she said, one artist in a family is enough.

Brian Williams: I often say that with academic families. I'm like, the dual academic family is tough. So one academic oh, and you're saying one artist in the family. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Bruce Herman: But the truth was she just wasn't motivated Yeah. To be an artist. Yeah. She just happens to be really talented. Yeah.

Actually, I'm a little jealous of her talent. Like, where does she get all that talent? You know? If she's not gonna use it.

Brian Williams: Oh, that's great. That's great. Does and so what does Meg do now? Meg, you you have there's a horse? I mean, you guys have had horses

Bruce Herman: over We've always had animals.

Brian Williams: Yeah. That's what I thought.

Bruce Herman: She's, you know, she's a multifaceted person. She's a very good writer. Her her big thing lately, the last several months, has been organizing protests against the the chaos in our government, etcetera. She's very effective at that. She did a great job, and, you know, you can ask her about it.

She's very motivated to do that, and and so I've joined her. I've been her man Friday, basically schlepping stuff around because she she hand painted about 30, close to 30 signs, both sides that people were hold, and she stationed them along a road 30 feet apart, and these signs build making a case that there's a problem here, people.

Brian Williams: Okay. Amazing. Okay. Okay. Does does Meg come into the studio much and comment on your your work?

Bruce Herman: Not much, but when she does, it's always it's always germane. It's always spot on. She's got a very good eye, and she came down with this new body of work. I was a little perplexed by it, to be honest.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Yeah.

Bruce Herman: Because I'm willing to dive and then wonder how deep the water is after I'm halfway down.

Brian Williams: Well, that's how it is as a writer. I'm like, I need to ride it out, and I can only go, oh, is that what I actually think? And if I don't, then I'm like, no, I gotta throw that away.

Bruce Herman: It's like that character in that Ian Forster story where she says, how do I know what I think until I see what I say?

Brian Williams: That's exactly right,

Bruce Herman: yeah. But she came down, I started this bodywork sometime in March at the beginning of Lent, as a kind of Lenten discipline, and then it just kept going. And she came down around late April, and she said, oh my gosh. What are we gonna do with these things? And then the next thing she said was, no, you're supposed to make

Brian Williams: these. Oh, amazing. Amazing. Is that

Bruce Herman: She's affirmed these paintings. And then she said something rather funny because she's got a little knowledge of art history.

Brian Williams: Yeah.

Bruce Herman: Do you know about the degenerate art exhibit in Nazi Germany?

Brian Williams: Yes. I do, actually.

Bruce Herman: Hitler put on these these two exhibits. One was the official Nazi exhibit. It was all realism, and then the modern art was the degenerate art exhibit, the Entarte de Kunst. Yep. Degenerate art exhibit.

And she she looked up at these base and said, I'm proud to be married to a degenerate artist.

Brian Williams: Oh, that's great.

Bruce Herman: And I said, so you're hoping they'd deport me pretty soon? Because they deported all those artists.

Brian Williams: Exactly. Exactly. Well, they fled. That's right. Oh, you're a good fair.

Hey. So one of the things we reflect on in in this podcast are the practices that sustain our life. You know? Albert Borgman, a philosopher of technology that I like from Montana, he has this concept of focal practices, and these are the the practices that structure our lives. The the the hearth in the in the Roman times was called the focus.

I mean, that's the actual word for the hearth, the fire around which we organize our family life because that's where the heat is. So the idea is, you know, you might have a wonderful, like, dinner party with some friends and love it, and it never happened again. And you might think, well, so so because it hasn't become a focal practice. So rather than just having these kind of moments and, you know, letting them happen haphazardly or one offs, the idea is what what what are the focal practices I can build my life around, the structure of my life? You and Meg, what comes to mind when I ask you like, have there been focal practices for you and your family that have sustained you over the years?

Bruce Herman: Yeah. I mean, both Meg and I, when we first got married, we had nothing, and we literally had to work work rent exchanges to pay for our rent. Yeah. And we both had some skills. I had carpenter skills.

She had some house painting skills. So and then we learned wallpapering together, and we I think we moved 13 times in twelve years, but we we renovated a lot of apartments, and we had a lot of landlords that loved

Brian Williams: us. Okay. I thought you were maybe one step ahead the law there all along the way. But

Bruce Herman: we got really good at that kind of thing together. That became a focal practice, is renovating, and then we built this I mean, I built this house. I designed this house and built it with a handful of carpenters, and you know, Meg didn't actively work on the building of the house, but she was very much a part of the design. She's got an astonishing pattern recognition capability and design ability. And then during COVID, at the beginning of COVID, our daughter and her husband and their little boy, our our grandson Tristan, came to visit us for two weeks at the beginning of COVID because New York City was going through a lockdown.

That was six years ago that they came to visit, and they're still here.

Brian Williams: Yeah. That's right.

Bruce Herman: That's right. So we had to eventually adapt, and I Meg and I designed a new kitchen for ourselves because we wanted Sarah to have our kitchen because she's a serious cook. We're kind of not serious about cooking. But Meg pretty much designed this Okay. This thing, and I built it.

And so we've got that that's kind of something we do.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Okay. We like to do that project together. Yeah. That's great.

Alright. So four quick questions, and then I wanna get to, the the poem, a poem that has been significant to you. So The Forged attends to the disciplines, delights, craft, and calling that sustain a a well lived ordinary life. So let's go through those. What's what's a discipline you have pursued that has sustained you?

I mean, obviously painting. What else comes to mind? Like a disciplinary person.

Bruce Herman: Oh, I mean, every day, almost without fail, I rise at around 5AM, and I make a coffee and a piece of toast or something, and I sit down with the Bible, and I read the daily lectionary. It's the common lectionary that all the churches have accepted. And then I take off my glasses, set aside the books, turn off the light, and I pray for usually thirty five to forty five minutes in complete silence. And I practice that discipline. I've been practicing this.

It's been a long time, and it always is aimed at moving me closer into the presence of God, and I know God's presence. I think I'm so grateful that I know God's presence because otherwise I might be just wandering in darkness, but I have a homing signal for God's presence, and I move into that space through simple techniques, but there's no technique that can actually do that. You need to just become vulnerable. You need to open yourself up to God, but there are ways to make yourself more open, and so I have those practices and disciplines. You know, working out, swimming is a discipline for me.

I swim. I haven't been swimming three days a week recently because I just haven't been able to work it in, but two days a week working out with weights. Just physical fitness disciplines. Reading is a discipline. Writing is a discipline.

But my main my main discipline is painting.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What about what's what what do you especially delight in, Bruce Herman?

Bruce Herman: Well, delight in what we're doing right here.

Brian Williams: Which we were doing for a couple hours before we started recording ourselves anyway. So, yeah, you seem to delight in conversation.

Bruce Herman: And I delayed in in other people's thinking. I'm curious about other people. That's why I I loved teaching the years that I did. I would have done it for free if someone else did the grading. You know?

Brian Williams: Yeah. Know. Hear. Hear. Okay.

What about a craft? What what's a a a craft you have pursued? Obviously, painting. We've we've said woodworking.

Bruce Herman: Woodworking. Yeah. Yeah. I think primarily woodworking. Okay.

Sailing is Yeah. A craft.

Brian Williams: Oh, you live you live lived here by the water for decades. So you got you have a sailboat somewhere. Right?

Bruce Herman: I have a little sailboat.

Brian Williams: Okay.

Bruce Herman: I don't like I don't want a big sailboat. I want a sailboat that's big enough to be comfortable and stable in the water, but small enough that I can navigate through these tiny little estuary waterways here in in in Essex and Gloucester and be able to sail around little islands in the in Essex Bay, and the estuaries have these sometimes a piece of water that's not quite as wide as this room, and the wind is coming in the wrong direction. Yeah. So I love this I love the challenge and the craft of sailing to figure out how am I gonna do this? Because I have to get over there, and the wind's coming from that direction.

It wants to push me in the opposite direction, and there's just not enough room here to do the usual thing. So it's it's it's a challenge, and I like that. That's a craft.

Brian Williams: Yeah. That's great. That's great. And then finally, and I think I know how you're gonna answer this, but but I'll ask it. What is your calling?

Recognizing that sometimes our callings and our careers are two different things, but when you think of what what has Bruce Herman been called to do in this world, how do you answer that question?

Bruce Herman: That's interesting. I I I think my primary calling in terms of active life is to be a a good husband and father, but I do believe that I'm I've been summoned by God to be an artist, to to make art. There's no question in my mind from the time I was a child, so that's my primary calling. It's also been my career, and that's an incredible luxury and gift that I've been able to keep doing this. Because, you know, I know I know people who wanted to be artists and didn't manage to do it.

They they got derailed from doing it, from vicissitudes, you know, various kinds of

Brian Williams: Or they had to find a way to put bread on the table, and the art wasn't going to be Right. Doing it. I mean, I think of even like, you know, Charles Williams. He was like copy editor, and I think TS Eliot was a bank clerk for a while when he was writing.

Bruce Herman: Then he was a publisher?

Brian Williams: Yeah. Then he was a publisher.

Bruce Herman: Yeah. Yeah. Mean, most poets have to find some other means of financial well-being. And when my dad asked me when I was 14, well, how are you gonna make a living? I said, I'll figure that out.

So I've never had the thought that I needed to make a living as an artist, but I did. It is my calling.

Brian Williams: It is your calling. That's right. That's right.

Bruce Herman: But but my my wife once asked a really good question to a friend of ours. This is worth telling a story. She called us over. She and her husband called us over to have dinner, and then they they they said, we've called you for a reason. Tonight we wanna discuss some career things.

And her name is Elsha, and Elsha had three professional possibilities that were laid in front of her, all of which were pretty great. And and she was talking about the financial arrangements and negotiations and stuff, and then they asked us what we thought, and I said a few things, which I thought were smart and wise, and then they asked Meg, so Meg, what do you have to say? She said, well, I just have one question. What makes you think you should get paid for what God calls you to do? Mhmm.

Because they they kept framing it in terms of what is God calling me to do, and all this money stuff was intermixed, and that was just a showstopper. What makes you think you should get paid?

Brian Williams: Paid for what God's yeah.

Bruce Herman: What God's called

Brian Williams: you to do. And that's where I think it's helpful to think, you know, I I might be called to things that won't be my career, and I might pursue a career that is not aligned with my calling, and maybe God calls me to is calling me to do some things and not get paid for it because that's what he needs me needs me to do. Hey. So just finally, I'd love to hear, sound like a poem. I'd love to hear a poem that has been significant or meaningful to you over over the years, and just have you share it with us, and and then, comment on it.

Bruce Herman: Well, there's a bunch of them. I quoted one earlier to you, Fragmentary Blue by Robert Frost. Another one by him, Tree at My Window. Both of those have been important to me, but probably, you know, if you wanted one that's really been significant, it's been four quartets. Okay.

And in particular, I'm not sure why, a couple of passages. So I don't know which time we got.

Brian Williams: Let's them.

Bruce Herman: These are both short.

Brian Williams: Yeah. Let's hear them.

Bruce Herman: Each one of the four poems is broken into five sections, subsections, which is conscious on Eliot's part. The four poems, each one has a dominant one of the dominant four elements, earth, air, fire, or water, the medieval elements that the whole universe is made up of. But the medieval mind also had this fifth element, which they called the quintessence, the fifth essence. They called it the ether, not to be confused with the gas ether. But the four poems each have five subsections.

So there's a quintessence Oh, within element within the four Within

Brian Williams: to the four.

Bruce Herman: Quartets. So there's a fifth something there. I mention that because I'm gonna quote the fifth part of the last of the four poems, but I'm also gonna quote from the second part of the first poem. The first and each one of poems has a geographic location. The first one is Burnt Norton, which was a a manor house that burned to the ground.

And the the poem starts with this really strange meditation on time. If time present and time past are both contained in time future, perhaps excuse me, this very philosophic kind of meditation on time. But then he immediately goes into talking about the grounds of the manor house, the garden, the dry pool, etcetera. And then he shifts gears to the second section of that first poem, and he says this. Really rich imagery.

Listen for the musicality of it. It goes like this. Garlic and sapphires in the mud clot the bedded axle tree. The trilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars appeasing long forgotten wars. The dance along the arteries, the circulation of the lymph are figured in the drift of stars.

Ascend to summer in the tree. We move above the moving tree in light upon the figured leaf, and here upon the sodden floor below, the boarhound and the boar pursue their pattern as before, only reconciled among the stars. At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is. Neither from nor towards, neither flesh nor flesh. Listen.

He goes on. But where he's talking about garlic and sapphires in the mud clot the bed of actually you should listen for the musicality of the language, not try to figure out what he's saying. If you think about it for half a second, it doesn't take long. A clove of garlic is pretty much the same shape as a typical piece of polished sapphire, and a sapphire, often called a star sapphire, is like a beautiful blue sky with a star in the middle of it, a twinkling bright light. A clove of garlic and a sapphire in the mud.

You know, he's basically saying heaven and earth. The stinky

Brian Williams: Oh, yeah.

Bruce Herman: Tasty garlic sapphire, glimpse of heaven in the mud, clot, the bedded axle tree. An axle tree is, you know, in a in a carriage or a a wagon or a car is the the axle that connects with the drive shaft that is the actual tree, and it's it's stuck in the mud.

Brian Williams: So why does this resonate with you? Why does that passage resonate with

Bruce Herman: you in particular? It's where it goes. It says, the trilling wire in the blood sings, you know, in the mud, the blood. Yep. The trilling wire in the blood sings below inveterate scars appeasing long forgotten wars that dance along the arteries.

The circulation of the lymph are figured in the drift of stars. He's talking about the human body, the vascular system, the lymph system being like a tree. The line is, ascend to summer in the tree. We move above the moving tree in light upon the figured leaf, and here upon the sodden floor below the boar hound on the boar pursued their pattern as before, but reconciled among the stars. There's the stars again.

He's talking about this kind of connection between our bodies and the movement of stars, and heaven and earth being fused in us. We are like a tree. Our vascular system actually looks like a tree.

Brian Williams: And do you feel that? I mean, is this why this resonates with you, do you think, this passage? Yeah. This connection between earth and heaven and radiating through the body's immaterial world. Right.

Bruce Herman: So the tree, the vascular system, a set of rivers and tributaries, it's all the same shape. It's the same thing I was getting with the globe of the dandelion flower, the web. Next passage I wanna quote is from the very end of the last poem. It's the fifth section of the fourth poem. The fourth poem's called Little Gidding, which is also a geographic location.

It's a little village. It was a retreat, a prayer community that was founded by Nicolas Ferrar, who was a close personal friend and classmate of George Herbert, who's probably the most important British poet in history. But Herbert was like Emily Dickinson. He didn't publish any of his own work. He hid it.

He was a pastor of a church, and it it was Ferrara that published his poetry. So the reason we know about George Herbert is because Nicholas Ferrara, and he he had formed his prayer community in Little Gidding, this little chapel there that shows up in Eliot's poem. Anyway, Little Gidding is the last of the poems, and in it he he does his most introspective kind of self examination and self criticism, and he moves from that into this final bit. At the end of the fourth section he says, and he he was writing this during the blitz when the Nazis were bombing London, and he was everybody had a job, and he was a fire warden. So he knew about fire, and he knew about the bombing, the bombs coming out of the sky, and he says this.

He says and he conflates the bombers with the dove of the Holy Spirit. He says, the dove descending breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror, of which the tongues declare, the one discharged from sin and error. The only hope or else despair lies in choice of pyre or pyre, to be redeemed from fire by fire. Who wove this shirt aflame? You know?

Yes. Love. And then towards the end, now this is the very final stanza of the entire four quartets. It goes like this. With the drawing of this love and the voice of this calling, we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time through the unknown remembered gate.

The last of Earth left to discover is that which was the beginning at the source of the longest river, the voice of the hidden waterfall, and the children in the apple tree, not known because not looked for, but heard, half heard in the stillness between two waves of the sea. Quick. Now. Here. Now.

Always. A condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. And all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are enfolded in the crowned knot of fire, and the fire and the rose are one. And the fire there is the same fire that's been said in the last section where he says the dove descending breaks the air with flame of incandescent terror. The only choice is pyre or pyre, to be redeemed from fire by fire.

That fire at the end is the fire of divine love, and the rose is the multifoliate rose of Dante. It's the symbol of the church, Mary, and it's basically the union. It's the final communion and union of God and humanity.

Brian Williams: Do you know what I felt when you were doing that? Longing. Right? Yeah. I mean, that's that Zane Zug, that's that longing, that's that aching.

I want that wholeness that you described at the end.

Bruce Herman: That condition of complete simplicity costing not less than everything. Wow.

Brian Williams: Well, thank you.

Bruce Herman: My pleasure.

Brian Williams: Thank you for sharing that, and thank you for spending time with me here. And friends, you've been listening to Forged, the podcast about discipline, delight, craft, and calling that draws the tradition wisdom into our contemporary times so that we can pursue well lived ordinary lives in this time as such as we've been given. So again, thank you so much

Bruce Herman: cares. It's great to be with you, Brian.