"Moments" the Fade, Love that Abides in Tina Howe's Painting Churches

Howe wants to remind us that ongoing processes are just as important as blissful moments. For instance, Mags Church believes that all Boston girls must eventually "get away," at some point during their full life-processes, from their firsr life-phases as youths in Boston (Painting Churches 47; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 157). Gardner Church muses that both poets and critics need to take far more time than a mere moment in order to choose the absolutely proper word (Painting Churches 50, 67; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 160, 172). We can also sense a subliminal message when Mags and Gardner juxtapose quotations from two Theodore Roethke lyrics. The static "pencils, / Neat in their boxes," of Roethke's poem "Dolor," seem far less vital than the depicted process-oriented heroine of Roethke's "I Knew A Woman." Described as "lovely" even "in her bones," she in process "moved, ... moved more ways than one" (Painting Churches 67-68; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 173).

Finally, Painting Churches is as much a play focused on the power of enduring love as it is a work saddened by the inevitable dissolution of life's most lustrous moments. In fact, one very intriguing image from the play, which recalls Fanny's memories of sledding with a younger Gardner on Boston Common, integrates the concepts of a "locked" stasis and a simultaneous moving: "... clown we'd plunge like a pair of eagles locked in a spasm of lovemaking" (Painting Churches 30-31; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 145-146). In so rich an experience as love, evidently, both the radiant moment and the wider-ranging streams of process-time must blend.

Significant to the final thematic emphases of Painting Churches is the fact that the most obviously admirable character, Gardner Church, almost constantly affirms life and love despite being the physically frailest character in the cast and, therefore, the personage we would most expect to hear grumble and whine. Gardner regularly voices love borh to Mags, whose painting always elicits from him a tender-voiced litany of compliments (Painting Churches 80-81; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 182183), and to Fanny, for whom it would seem he has been reciting, for decades, what she calls "every love poem in the English language!" (Painting Churches 56; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 165). He recites multiple snatches of such love-ardent verse within this play (Painting Churches 56, 57, 68; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 164-165, 173). He also expresses fervent filial (philia) love for such old friends as his poetry book editors and the poet Ezra Pound (Painting Churches 34, 40; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 148, 152; Lewis 58-59).

It Wordsworth was "surprised by joy," Tina Howe seems regularly to be "surprised by love." Truly in Painting Churches, memorably presented in Mags's tears, at the play's final curtain, which express her deep familial affection (to the Greeks, the type of love called storge [Lewis .31]). Gardner repeatedly evokes the romantic love for a mate that the Greeks called eros (Lewis 91) - as in the scene where he recites the words of Yeats's character Wandering Aengus, who would ever go to "find out where she [his beloved] has gone, / And kiss her lips and take her hands" (qtd. in Howe Painting Churches 56; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays ). To be sure, Fanny's love, by contrast with those of her husband and daughter, does not regularly appear to glow. Yet she reminds Mags that love, to a great extent, consists of bearing with a mundane day-to-day process of grinding struggles (such as those she has long been enduring with her mentally degenerating husband). Although I have long felt chiefly negative about Fanny, it chastens me to perceive, in her devoted (albeit bickering) service to Gardner, a rather firmly unconditional love, a surprisingly secular sort oí caritas (Lewis 128). Fanny is definitely compelling when she protests, to Mags, that the deepest sort of love does not exist in those, like her daughter, who "come ... to see [folks] when the [mere momentary] whim strikes" (Painting Churches 73; Coastal Disturbances: Four Plays 177).