Artist and essayist Judith Margolis’s paintings, drawings, artist’s books, multimedia collages and essays explore feminist consciousness, religious ritual tradition, and the tensions between them. The limited-edition artist book Praise Emptiness: Essays Verbal and Visual combines forty-three of Margolis’s artworks spanning fifty-four years with the debut work of Margolis’s longtime friend Philip Miller, whose twenty-nine essays, written over a period of five years, record and interrogate his decades-long, highly personal study and pondering of rabbinic texts, philosophy, and literature, a nod to popular culture notwithstanding.

Though Margolis’s art and Miller’s essays were conceived independently of one another, they share a common concern: a yearning to reconcile the prescriptive truths found in traditional religion with the descriptive truths evident in modern life. Both face this concern head on: Margolis embraces the joy and fear of not knowing in her artistic practice, whereas Miller takes a more epistemological approach, aided by “skepticism and homeostasis” (From the Author, para. 5). His essays read as a journey, part mind-map, part monomythic. It is no surprise that Miller references James Joyce—like Joyce in Finnegans Wake, Miller often begins where he ends and ends where he begins. By chance or by serendipity, Margolis’s juxtaposition of dreams and reality, like the dream world in Joyce’s novel, just may fill the lacunae Miller laments in Praising Emptiness.

YS: Philip, your idea for the title Praise Emptiness comes from song lyrics in Tom Verlaine’s The Fire. What do you see as the relationship between Verlaine’s context for “praise emptiness” and your own?

PM: I think the general orientation of Praise Emptiness corresponds with what I take as his worldview. He always impressed me as being a kind of existentialist philosopher along with being a rock musician, which I think really distinguishes him.

YS: Philip, what drew you to Judith’s art? How did you envision it as a vehicle for visual pairing with your text? What do you see as the relationship between text and image?

PM: Judith has created a self-contained artistic universe peopled with characters and ideas that interact and move from one piece to the next. Her drawing “Men at Work/Rescue” symbolizes for me Verlaine's gritty existentialist worldview. Existential imagery is what I wanted, but I didn't insist on anything. The crux of the relationship is the dialogue; the visual amplifies the words, and vice versa.

YS:  E.M. Forster said, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Whereas Forster describes writing as a process of discovery, Philip, you describe your writing as an “enterprise…an effort at clarifying what [you] think” (From the Author, para. 6). How has this “enterprise” helped to clarify what you think? Have there been any Forster moments?

PM: What's become most clear to me is that the book is about living with uncertainty. At some point I said, “don't describe me as atheist; I am agnostic.” Reveling or honoring the posture of an agnostic vis-à-vis the truths of religion—I think that is a discovery.

YS: Judith, as creative director for Bright Idea Books, what was your process for selecting and arranging the images and pairing them with the text?

JM: I created a bundle of images, and we looked at them together. Some were very abstract, some extremely sexual, in your face and provocative; some were political or newsworthy, images that never quite had a place to be. The last image in the book, “What’s holy?”, is from Pull My Daisy, which I saw in the ‘60s. Allen Ginsberg is in this loft with a bishop, and Ginsberg rants: “Is this table holy? Is the chair holy? Are you holy now?” The idea that the mundane is holy, that the everyday is holy, wasn’t discussed much in organized religion. Another piece from that time is “As Blue as Snow is Paul like Klee,” a quote from Herman Hesse’s Journey to the East that I reread every few years. That there's a place for these in this book is confirmation our lives are worth the waiting, to see what happens, or that not knowing is a very good place to be.

YS: Philip, in “Objective Pluralism 1” you speak of not holding on to anything you think, “to grasp lightly…because…an earthquake will inevitably come along that will force you to reassess what you think” (p. 20). This calls to mind the Coen Brothers dark comedy, A Serious Man, in which the tornado at film’s end, like Yeats’s “widening gyre,” points to the kind of resignation you speak of here and in “Fatalism.” When, through no fault of his own, “things fall apart” for the film’s serious man, he seeks rabbinic advice, and is directed by the junior rabbi to “just look at the parking lot,” where all we see are a few cars. You say in “Mediocrity” that you felt “doomed to work in the family business; of all things, to be a car salesman” (p. 133). In what way has having worked as a car salesman given you the kind of perspective that the junior rabbi encourages?

PM: The whole thing was a giant sink hole that consumed me. It required a tremendous amount of effort and energy. It was totally meaningless, and it was sort of easy. My father was very successful, and after falling into the family business, it became an entire, to use that word again, enterprise, or the universe, and it just sucked up many years of my life. I resented that, and was angry for a long time, but I think it made me who I am. Being involved in that kind of nitty, gritty, tough world helped things turn out the way they did. I'm not exactly sure what the junior rabbi means, perhaps to accept things the way they are, a kind of surrender, and that I learned through working in the car business.

YS: The last chapter, “Es iz schwer tzu sein a Yid,” is an old Yiddish saying and also the title of Sholom Aleichem’s 1920 play “Hard to be a Jew,” in which a Jew and a gentile in Czarist Russia exchange identities—the gentile learning through experience just how truly hard being a Jew is. What do both of you hope the non-Jewish reader will take away from reading Praise Emptiness?

PM: I would be gratified if the non-Jewish reader took away an appreciation for the strength of Jewish traditions, the bravery of generations of Jews, and some sense of the grandeur of the tradition.

JM: I would want someone to look and say, Wow! This is Jewish and this is Jewish. It's like, paraphrasing Allen Ginsberg: Is this holy, that which depicts different aspects of my life?

Get the full interview by ordering a copy here.