On the Way to WorkRichard Soberpaintings

(Let us now rest in Ryder’s moonlit cove, in the shadow of the empty boat, in the simple form and stillness of that imagined evening more than a hundred and forty years ago, cracking with age and too much oil on the reverse side of the canvas, let us take our repose there where a man engaged life on his terms and was called eccentric for it, sky, water, and land all one in Ryder’s striving for another world inside this one, or perhaps below this one, music without words, a house of travelers. The silence of that imagined moment is easily ignored in a world increasingly intolerant of or impatient with a slower, philosophical, unpretentious yet magnetic image. Ryder left a familiar world to explore elsewhere, then he fell away, reworking what he’d made, in love with his medium making an equivalent emotional landscape, an unanswerable body of work, as alive now as it was then, alive and strange, because now it moves and is felt in a world digitized, atomized, balkanized, and suspicious. His work still disarms, reminding one of the Earth that inhabits us, dreaming us, despite ourselves.

One leaves one’s country and remains a citizen. A citizen of a place one no longer lives in or sees. One arrives in another country one is not a citizen of, nor is one a tourist there. The word “refugee” conjures someone on the run from disaster or a life untenable, capsizing boats in the Mediterranean Sea. The word “immigrant” conjures an image of someone arrived from somewhere else and living between worlds because he or she is newly arrived, is still coming in, unsettled, born inside one border, crossing borders into a new land, even if that land is very old. One is displaced, but not reborn. One is not a tourist and one doesn’t feel like one is on an adventure or a journey as these words conjure something romantic, a fantasy of someone with money and leisure, a young man or woman tracing their curiosities on the streets of Paris when the wet streets reflected soft skies of possibility, when it felt like the good guys hadn’t lost yet. An immigrant experiences much loneliness, having migrated from everything called home, to everything called strange. One speaks and stumbles over the sounds of new words, tripping over new pavements and paths, rounds corners that hold no familiar sounds or smells, no promise of running into anybody one knows, the same tomorrow as today. The food is different and the way people walk down the street is different. One doesn’t expect letters or words from friends. The news one receives is distant and unreal as if a story from a future Middle Ages is fed into the past that can’t catch up fast enough to stop the story from becoming a new reality. One walks along the sea and it is indeed, the sea, but the sea and shoreline of a different music, a separate time and place. Darkness descends upon buildings holding histories one is completely ignorant of, but a matter of fact for the inhabitants who grew up where one suddenly finds oneself a pedestrian in what feels like a permanent liminal space, transposed into a new world. As the days pass by, one notices a country where leaves love to stay on their trees, when someone won’t forgive or forget you, they will give you a question that does not expect a quick answer. The question is a gift, so seldom asked in the sad zoo that your country became. The sky is green and the sea is yellow, defined by the architecture above and below and the language used to describe it, in its profound indifference. One is a shadow of one’s former self, a remnant, but more than that if one stops for a closer look. One may expect to be made fun of, a joke at your expense, a fool among beasts. But these feelings pass, the hours slowly become more comfortable and if you are able to love deeply enough, an unfolding presents itself, as it will, whether you are present or not. To be somewhere at a particular time, to drop in on the lives of people who are strangers is both a struggle and a miraculous circumstance, a matter of timing without a clock. Your boat is abandoned on the moonlit sand, the person that hauled it onto shore is nowhere to be seen.
The people you see live in their own apartments or houses, have closets full of clothes, shelves with books, walls with paintings or pictures, furniture they selected, friends they meet, family they share meals and time with, the people you see are recognized by acquaintances and shopkeepers, they do not think how to ask for anything when they are in a coffee shop or store, at the doctor’s office, when asking directions, they will know where they are pointed, they understand actors on the screen, the names of things, of places, of food, the color of the sky, the rising and sinking of the sun, the cycles of the seasons, how to say what they feel and be understood in the saying. Nonetheless, one is on an adventure, one becomes lost in the going and one does not know where one is. The certainty of tyrants is left far behind and the uncertainty of life comes up to be embraced. One will not find consolation for long in weekly internet pep talks designed to help one live through difficult times. A person finds oneself in the land of uncertainty and comes to be at home, which is always everywhere when one takes the time to look around, to be alive where one was standing. One speaks in the past tense, because if anyone reads this the life that was imagined will be over, a message in a bottle from another time and place. One can walk away, as previously mentioned, but one can only walk so far without looking back and once you look behind you, you risk either making yourself into a pillar of salt or what you are looking at or trying to look at, changes shape and form, recedes from view even further, in fact, may disappear into the pits of hell never to be seen again either in the imagination or what one imagines is reality. One can also just walk away, looking back or not looking back, and just walk away. One wants to conjure images of what one has known in the past to keep those things alive that were dear, to keep them recognizable, though the moment one walked through customs one entered an unrecognizable world on either side of one’s life. Above the cove is a world familiar to everyone, for a moment the cove is a shelter.
This is no sweet warning (no warning at all, there is nothing to warn anyone of, the worst has happened, oops, too late) for anyone wanting to leave home and live somewhere else because home is no longer what one thought it was. Neither is the place one is leaving for. Happiness exists or doesn’t exist, exists for someone else, or takes its turn person to person, for a moment, and moves on and back again or never returns, how-do-you-do. Maybe this is just a heckler from the balcony of a theater in disrepair. An afterthought becoming a middle thought. An unwelcome guest paying too much attention. One, as has been mentioned time and again, can always return to where they came from, but cannot return to the same place they knew. Traveling is more difficult than it was fifty years ago. There was no TSA, no Homeland Security, there were no Biometric Identification Systems. The world is peculiarly less free, the steady sustained stride toward authoritarian governance and the sharp decline in the belief in “democratic values,” the conformity of people, even those who consider themselves part of a “resistance” or of a more spiritual bent, all seem to be moving into a claustrophobic space that causes the soul to scream in anguish. This is not to say that life was any easier fifty years ago, but at least the word “hope” hadn’t become a political slogan everyone knew was a joke marketed by people intent on destroying the sentiment. A whole world was constructed on hope, now the word “hope” is part of a dance that is constructed on an argument that insists that world wasn’t worth having. People forget what they hope for. You may say cynicism lives behind these words, but it’s only disappointment asleep in this quiet neck of the woods. Cynicism lives inside those who’d rather not see you or I alive. It carries the masters of the world around in private jets and keeps them at a great distance. The more power the further away the desk, the vaster and colder the hall.
The deceivingly simple forms, the apparent solidity of Ryder’s painting, the moon’s quiet halo illuminating a stranded shore, the transient visitors trudging off the edge of the painting for a foreign place where they are unable to explain their presence, their yearnings, their secret tongues whispering into the ears of a season without a name, waking to a pale sun…)

RS/2026