Milk or Meat

I took a deliberate break from writing on Friday to do a thing I’ve never done before – go to an art gallery – which ended up being three art galleries since the first one had none of the intimidating factors I feared it might. So I went to three art galleries – but this one gallery – this one artist – his cow paintings were the thing that grabbed me.  Now, how can I say that? I don’t know much about art – and so I can only speak out of a sense of wonder at what I felt, and give reference to his website for a look at the real paintings:   http://www.osterhausart.com/

And so, this man’s cow paintings – they captured the “cow presence” – my unprofessional opinion – and I would easily have taken one home if I’d had $3,000 or more, but . . .
this is where I think of the two women who came whirling through the gallery while I stood in silent dialogue with one cow – they came whirling through together as though on a shopping spree to find just the right scarf or shoe, or fabric or lamp – they did not stop at any one cow, but rather whirled by and around me with such comments as, “That one would bring out the yellow in your drapes” – or, “This one would accent the green lamp” – or, “You need a touch of red in that room, here it is” . . . but the main shopper, close behind, did not seem overly impressed by her friend’s “good eye” – or the cow’s – and so they whirled through and out before the one cow and I could finish our silent understanding . . .

“Milk or meat, which one do you want?” That’s what the one cow seemed to be saying to me once the women had whirled away. I could see it in those cow-brown eyes that might have come up close to a fence to share dialogue or a careful blink with me . . . and it reminded me of all these cow pictures I took when I was at the Benedictine monastery in the Shenandoah Valley last springtime. The Benedictines, also called Trappist monks, are a priestly order which dates back to their founder, St. Benedict of the early 6th century. In addition to vows of silence and poverty, they have taken a vow of hospitality – which includes hosting those of us who live in this noisy world and would like to experience an occasional week of silence in the bucolic bounty of their farmland and monastic world.

And so, as I took my long walks along the Shenan- doah River last spring, the cows would amble over to the fence with little to say or do except for the presentation of themselves. One curious cow would begin the amble – and then you’d think a dinner bell had been rung, for they’d all begin to amble as the first one had – and so, if I waited long enough, they’d all make it to the fence for a good staring session. Many animals and birds have a kind of wisdom in the eye – but not the cow. They know nothing more about me than my desire for milk or meat.

I think the cow is the most resigned of all the creatures. They have no fight left in them. They have no flight either. They have lived thousands of years within fenced lines that are monitored by maidens or dames, farmers or “hands” – and through evolutionary learning they know that they are one thing or the other – milk or meat – and so they’ve resigned to say nothing more about it.

That’s the look I got from that one cow in the gallery. I ambled on to the next cow – and though her colors be different and her snapshot painting be taken at dusk or dawn, and though her profile be tilted or straight-on – still, she had that one question in her eye about the milk or the meat. But I never got bored of looking at the same question. Each cow is like a different, but familiar, breed of motherly love that has resigned itself to always give and never take. There’s no boredom in looking at her because taking is never boring for the taker – we can take till kingdom come and always think it is novel and fresh. Only the cow herself has grown bored with the equation.

Now, as for color – all the cows he painted, even the black and white ones, had so many feminine colors in their coats – or rather, hides – pinks, lavenders, purples, cantaloupe, chartreuse, and chive . . . I can’t say how it is that I could stand at one end of the gallery and look straight into the brown of a cow’s eyes at the other end of the gallery – and swear that she was a brown cow – only to walk closer and begin to see what the two women had come to see – lavender strokes and pink swirls, a curlicue of red, dabs of green, blue, or musk – as though the artist had been cleaning off his pallet on the cow’s hide instead of painting her. And, I thought, how can all those many colors converge – as you walk backwards and away from her – to make one brown cow with the eye of one question? How can a person, working in close range to a large canvas, think to add lavender and pink and chartreuse to a cow that he meant all along to be one brown cow . . . and how do you bury that one question in the cow’s eye only by adding a small blotch of red and a slice of white? It reminds me of what Barbara Ueland says in her book, “If You Want to Write” – she calls it the "fourth dimension" of writing – a type of inspiration that pervades the sentence but can’t be found in the words themselves no matter how much you scratch at the page – it’s just there.

Similarly, as I looked at the paintings, I could almost smell the fresh growing spring grass and taste the raw milk that I remembered from my grandfather’s farm. I also thought of the Chartreuse liqueur which I keep in the food cabinet – that wonderful “elixir of life” that was developed 400 or 500 years ago among the Carthusian monks in the French Alps. They are known for their silence, animal husbandry, heritage cheeses, and this elixir made from 130 herbal extracts – described as having hints of everything bucolic: citrus, violet, honey, thyme, rosemary, jasmine, coriander . . . on and on, 130 herbs and flowers. They say only three monks are alive today who know this secret recipe, and all three have taken a vow of silence in the Grande Chartreuse Monastery in the French Alps. The websites that market Chartreuse liqueur jokingly tell us that the Carthusian monks spent 500 years sampling and contemplating this 110-proof liqueur before declaring it a perfection which “redefines complexity.”  But I think it took 500 years of looking closely into the eye of one cow to understand multiplicity where others saw only brown.