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Chess players and golfers might benefit from an early, singular focus. Most people don’t.

On this week's Sunday Morning Matinee, Matt and Adam talk skateboarding, family, brokenness, and Bing Lau's incredible film Minding the Gap.

The doctors say
we are all terminal.
We swallow pills,
navigate blood-soaked terrain.

The Reaper pokes his head in
to ask directions.  We lift
our lanterns, stare out startled
into the dark.

Our bodies will enter earth and fire,
the dust from which we came.
We fall into the mouths of old lovers,
ride the wings of dragonflies.

We seek one last embrace,
the taste of an apple,
the comfort of an old coat,
a page from an unfinished book.

Books, printed pages, lines of calligraphy, and single letters are raw materials for Massachusetts artist Sandra Bowden. Her fascination with the visual aspects of language comes out of her experience as an artist growing up in a conservative Protestant faith community where words took primacy over images and was deepened by her study of biblical Hebrew and the Dead Sea Scrolls. This collagraph print, created from a plate with textured materials on the surface, includes passages from two foundational Hebrew and Christian “in the beginning” narratives about the origins of the universe.

The evangelical satire also offers insight and empathy.

“A serious fiction writer describes an action only in order to reveal
a mystery. Of course, he may be revealing this mystery to himself
at the same time as he is revealing it to everyone else.”
                              —Flannery O’Connor

Two new collections add to the landmark volume The Habit of Being.

Blinding white, the sudden wings beat
in front of my windshield, as if
the gull had dropped from a horizon
of sapphire sea and chalk-bright cliff
instead of this dreary March sky
hanging low over a parking lot edged with a Dollar Tree, a Taco Bell,
black-crusted snow.

I watched him ascend, dazzling white,
such as no fuller on earth could bleach. . . .
wings that might have flown straight from the womb
of the first day.

Matt and Adam talk mental health, literary theory, superheros, and Todd Phillips’ Joker.

For 40 days an empty lot in a Detroit neighborhood was the site of an installation titled Wind, by husband-and-wife artists Billy and Sarah Mark. It is made up of three flagpoles, a “flag” (a hoodie with 20-foot sleeves), a rope, a pulpit, two benches, copies of the psalms, and a journal. At designated times of sunrise and sunset, someone would read one of the psalms. People in the neighborhood were invited to engage the work by putting on the hoodie and raising the sleeves with the rope. When the space is not inhabited, the “flag” is filled by the wind.