There is a photograph of Paul walking on a lawn and carrying a life-sized version of the cross. It appears to be quite heavy, made of wood. It can be seen to rest upon his shoulders.
This is somewhere in Germany.
I sleep now on a cot. I have giraffes over my chest of drawers and there are icons looking down at me at rest.
It is a coincidence of things and objects that should not belong together. It is the desire to bring the distant close, summon the absent to our present place.
The days, they race toward autumn, and my melancholy sets, these thoughts of parting and of death.
He is himself impassive, participating in a process where there is no distinction made between himself and all the other things that now have found their place.
It is the scraps of language that collect. This precondition for annihilating self.
I’m just a mouthpiece for these bits I’ve conjured up and glued and set to rest. I have found a different body borne by fish. And the shabby things are now becoming precious. Healing pieces of meat.
He will work with what he finds, an old crate for bottles of milk, almost an antique, worn but somewhat fancy, that he found at some bazaar, made of larch, and the lid, he went to the dumpster and he found some glass, little rectangular panes, a neighbor, it was a neighbor, he saw it from his window, was a man, who threw them out the night before, and miraculously they remain, sharp-edged, intact, his fingers have been bleeding.
It is filled with unmailed letters, filled with pictures, filled with objects, filled with notes. He refers to it as Shrine.
He takes it out from underneath his bed, this crate, he says, a crate for milk, where I contain my life, and reads, and for music we have the sea, or is it the rhythm of the sea, the sea I splatter over news in blue and pink, and feel over my body when I try and rock myself to sleep. I kept this notebook with me when I was in Rome and then on Ponza. Always on Ponza. Look at the dates. This was in 1973.
What I can offer you, he says, is the memory of church I had as a boy. What I can offer you is something that right now does not exist.
He remembers the church of his childhood as a special place where care was given to make a beautiful world. He remembers the darkness and the flicker of the candles and the incense and the beeswax, smelling it in the air. He remembers the order and the passion of the liturgy, all those seemingly simple human gestures, the processions.
His voice is very beautiful and he whispers things sometimes to me in an aside.
I sang in church. I was in the choir. I especially enjoyed the Easter songs that I could sing, though sometimes my voice would break, and I would have to leave.
This is the epigraph, I tell him, I’ve selected for the piece.
Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives a sterile life, generating and degenerating itself.
In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans: “eternal values,” “immortality,” and “masterpiece” were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift.
In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.
These are the words, I tell him, of the Swedish theater and film director, Ingmar Bergman.
Paul tells me that he met him once. I was with Karl Johansson. They knew each other from a film. Karl did some stills for Winter Light. He was a little pompous, though not entirely unkind. I was grateful. He came to see my show at the Museet.
This is from a letter to Olle Granath for the show, dated September ’71.
On or about Swedish Christmas, for a period of one week, please have 12 large candles burning in the chicken coop. Also – sticking through the chicken wire please stick sections of orange, fresh fruit oranges – and those oranges should be replaced when needed.
We are standing on the tenement rooftop. He shows me the bottoms of his feet and they are dirty. He has planted a garden here. It has been some years, he tells me. He started it with someone else. A friend, he says. I ask him who. Fenrir was his name. He says he’s dead. He was Norwegian. He got sick. But it is growing now. I tell him I enjoy the flowers. I show him the microphone and ask him to speak up. He looks down again and at his feet, and out beyond the roofs. I am recording this, I tell him, for the interview. And it will appear next year, I say, in ARTSYMPOSIA. And I repeat that this will change things. People have forgotten you but after this appears they won’t forget. He laughs and points away and toward the twins. He calls them Sodom and Gomorrah, rising up in glass and steel to blot the sky. He tells me he has painted them before. On newspaper.
I ask him about his newspaper paintings.
This is from a letter written just a month ago. It is addressed to Franz Deckwitz.
I only want to do BAD paintings, to shock and hurt them here, etc etc, but it hurts MY spirit ALWAYS to do the bad paintings, so I miss Ponza. I miss eternity.
When I come in he takes a yellow notebook out of Shrine. He opens it to a drawing of a phallic head in blue and white below a date: June 19th 1969. Here I wrote about my first encounter with the poetry of Ezra Pound. “The River-Merchant’s Wife.” The Pisan Cantos. I have chosen a dozen copies of his New York Times obituary as the ground for this new piece. It is a painting and it is also in blue, also in yellow, also in white. Pound too believed in Paradise. Before he was imprisoned, he believed that he’d been touched by God.
I ask him about his environments.
I want to present an atmosphere – an ambiance – which is so peaceful that you’re shattered when you leave.
This is from a letter to Olle Granath, dated 9th of December 1971.
I would very much like also that the inside of the pyramid should be kept fairly clean, especially the table. And the napkins should be white.
We go again downstairs. I sit beside him on the bed. He tells me he is already tired. I can go a little more and then that’s it. At least for today.
I turn the recorder on again.
Tell me about your mother.
My mother was a poet, or rather, she sometimes wrote a poem. Her lips were usually wet with drink and the poems usually rhymed. They were never happy. She read me Finnegans Wake when I was six. She liked the puns and all the curse words. She’s got a cancer now you know. In the gut. I visited her last week and watched the nurse remove her filthy drawers. She calls the whole thing “shit.”
But really, it’s an ark. That’s what I’m building. Cages into lilies. Mice. And always there are fish. Bits. Cut glass. Prayer. I am clutching a pencil. A concussion of waves. Light. This is an interior, a liturgical space. It is an offering.
Just a note: Much rushing as tomorrow I am off to Rome again. Everything here is just about finished now that the Stedelijk is down. The Mickery show will be up all summer and it is, I think, and largely due to the pear tree, the prettiest I’ve ever done.
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From Shrine: A Little Book About Paul Thek by V.H. Wildman. Used with permission of the publisher, Red Nun Collective. Copyright © 2026 by V.H. Wildman.
