Did Mary Evelyn Harju have leave, if she were so inclined, to be a cynical person? In many ways, she did. Raised, as I was, as part of a generation exposed to the fangs of a media-pop culture juggernaut, with walls of flash-in-the-pan nonsense stuffed down our throats as though they would last, Mary stuck to her guns and painted what she wanted to paint. And she did like the cover of the Layla album, and it was one of our albums which we leaned on, night by night, in Logan Square and West Philly. But I want to make the case, very specifically, as I did in this Letters piece, that Mary was an earnest person. She tended to mean what she said, in an earnest way, and was untouched by the rigors of hardcore cynicism. This meant that our time together was always about the idealism of trying to give each other as much as we could, artist to artist, lover to lover. It was not for Mary Evelyn to be jealous of other artists, or to covet worldly status over anything else. The part of Mary that was sublime, was superbly levitational over ambitions which were not either interior, or had some hinge to interiority. Mary's brutishness, when it manifested, was scales-of-justice brutishness, meted out to those who had done or been evil in the world. And Mary did appreciate ironies, like any other intelligent, educated human being. But when it was us, Mary at her best could not have been more bleeding heart, nor could I. When her manipulative streak flashed, it was always just a gambit to keep control of her life, to not get too lost in a marriage to understand what she needed to do next. I forgave her, then and now.
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