Breaking the Glass

I woke this morning to still more thoughts about the nighthawks painting and poem I rediscovered last night (see yesterday’s blog for clarification).  The image and accompanying words just wouldn’t leave me alone, so I decided to investigate further.

Google's resources pointed out that actual nighthawks inhabit mountains and open country, but also cities and towns where they forage for insects near streetlights. These mottled black-and-gray birds are nocturnal and quite active at dusk, which fits with the artist’s renditions and the poet’s commentary. Their beaks are curved but small – not unlike the man’s nose in the painting – although those beaks belie the capacity of their large predator mouths. 

Something continued to nag at me, a wondering and compulsion to find out what others have said about Edward Hopper’s painting that inspired Samuel Yellen’s poem.  I went back to Google, and found Ed’s wife, Jo, kept a diary that explained some of her husband’s behind-the-scenes thoughts.  Other commentators have also exposed layers beneath the surface, some of whom have also quoted Jo.

Here’s a link to a commentary that contains a picture of the painting: http://www.artchive.com/artchive/H/hopper/nighthwk.jpg.html   I found this commentary informative, and quoted it below:

"Apparently, there was a period when every college dormitory in the country had on its walls a poster of Hopper's Nighthawks; it had become an icon. It is easy to understand its appeal. This is not just an image of big-city loneliness, but of existential loneliness: the sense that we have (perhaps overwhelmingly in late adolescence) of being on our own in the human condition. When we look at that dark New York street, we would expect the fluorescent-lit cafe to be welcoming, but it is not. There is no way to enter it, no door. The extreme brightness means that the people inside are held, exposed and vulnerable. They hunch their shoulders defensively. Hopper did not actually observe them, because he used himself as a model for both the seated men, as if he perceived men in this situation as clones. He modeled the woman, as he did all of his female characters, on his wife Jo. He was a difficult man, and Jo was far more emotionally involved with him than he with her; one of her methods of keeping him with her was to insist that only she would be his model.

"From Jo's diaries we learn that Hopper described this work as a painting of "three characters." The man behind the counter, though imprisoned in the triangle, is in fact free. He has a job, a home, he can come and go; he can look at the customers with a half-smile. It is the customers who are the nighthawks. Nighthawks are predators - but are the men there to prey on the woman, or has she come in to prey on the men? To my mind, the man and woman are a couple, as the position of their hands suggests, but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate; they have nothing to give each other. I see the nighthawks of the picture not so much as birds of prey, but simply as birds: great winged creatures that should be free in the sky, but instead are shut in, dazed and miserable, with their heads constantly banging against the glass of the world's callousness. In his Last Poems, A. E. Housman (1859-1936) speaks of being ‘a stranger and afraid/In a world I never made.’ That was what Hopper felt - and what he conveys so bitterly."

Wow.  With all of this said, I began rethinking the whole episode last night – how I wandered into an impersonal super-store, hungry and tired and yet grateful for the reason I was hungry and tired, to be confronted by a huge mural of this famous painting and a wrap-around quote from the equally famous poem.  Looking back, it was as if I became a symbolic traveler who stumbled into the midst of collective individuals covered by a brash, if largely unnoticed, existential blanket.  Blinding fluorescent lights and artificial holiday hype only heightened the impression.

I still can see the faces of those people who jumped out at me last night – the exhausted-but-patient man doing a good work with his active herd of bi-racial kids, but even more, the three preoccupied employees eating in the deli area who seemed trapped by inner pain as much as outer circumstances. 

As I ponder all of this, I want to grab a sledgehammer and smash whatever figurative glass might be holding them captive.  Numb loneliness is not God’s intent for those He created in His image.  But when left to our own limited understanding we can become, as the commentator above suggests, like those “great winged creatures that should be free in the sky, but instead are shut in, dazed and miserable, with their heads constantly banging against the glass of the world's callousness.”

Although I can envision myself crowded into that diner with humanity in general (for we’re all on a journey, and searching to find our true selves), I also know a better way – a way of freedom predicted by the prophet Isaiah that came to pass in the person of Jesus Christ.  This is radical freedom that transforms our hearts at the deepest level of our being, not just pie-in-the-sky positive thinking.  From Isaiah 61:1,2 (prediction in the Old Testament) and restated in Luke 4:18,19 (fulfillment in New Testament):

“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.  He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor…”

Good news.  Healing for the brokenhearted. Freedom.  Release.  Favor.   In the grocery store deli.  In the human heart, whatever its state. I have come to know some measure of this, and I want others to know it too.