Nascent Confessions

Response to Hirokazu Koreeda's film "Afterlife"

2011-02-08T21:31:00.000-05:00

I took a course in the fall of 2010 on Japan and its interaction with Christianity. We watched some amazing films, my favorite of which was Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August; it has the most profound, glorious, tragic, beautiful ending I have ever encountered. But for our final I chose to discuss the concepts of afterlife in Koreeda's wonderful film Afterlife.

The most intriguing aspect of Afterlife is the way in which the "purgatory" depicted is in essence a metaphor or, perhaps more accurately, a condensation of actual life. I am always drawn to a work of art that tackles an enormous subject (like the variance and uniformity of all human life) by focusing on one or two key aspects of the subject that serve as signs, revealing truths about the nature of the larger whole that cannot be seen (easily) without that creative focus on the sign. Strict "theology" in a Christian or other sense honestly barely entered my mind (other than understanding that the afterlife is probably not like that depicted in the film), because of the way in which the reality (not realism—reality in the same way that Borges' stories lay bare a facet of reality) of what was depicted resonated so powerfully with me. This may seem paradoxical and likely is, considering that, while not playing an overt part, I reached this understanding partly through my Christian worldview. The distinction, however, is that this is not a worldview concerned with dichotomy or opposition, but one that resonates more with the Eastern acceptance of and even desire for paradox. The very blatantly Western form of Christianity often seems (incorrectly, I would propose) so intent on distinguishing and separating the life or world and the world to come. Instead, I see Christ's message as one for this life, as it is more about service to humanity and caretaking of Creation, and enjoyment of God through those actions—I feel that the afterlife is almost an after-thought, and is left very vague in scripture on purpose. This film does the same thing. There is no real description of the actual afterlife other than the one memory rule, which simply serves as a device for the story/truism conveyed.

There are a few key elements, then, that are in my estimation especially powerful and true in light of the above. The most outstanding is the way in which, with only a relatively few characters, the film depicts the diversity of human attitudes. The older gentleman displays the tendency to archive, the desire for categorization and a lasting mark. The old woman shows the desire to draw inward and slow down in order to concentrate on simplicity (as life forcibly adds more and more complexity for a person as time goes on). These characters and others are, through their week, deconstructed, flipped, re-marked. The permanence-seeking gentleman realizes the the moment that must serve as the sole sign of his life is one of ephemeral connection with another human being. The old woman chooses what was essentially her whole life, contemplation of falling leaves and petals. Yet her gift to the attendant of a bag of flower petals displays a striking connection to the world outside her inner sanctum. All in all, the film highlights the importance of relationships in this life (further supported by the desired but impossible love affair between the two attendants). While the complacency with death is a very Buddhist approach, the theme of present relationships between people, between people and creation, and between people and God, is fully in line with Christian teachings. Life, in this film, is ultimately discovered through death.

Upon Reading Cormac McCarthy Again

2008-10-06T16:25:00.002-04:00

I just finished Cormac McCarthy's first "western" novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, published in 1985. It is stark and bloody and long and paints a picture of the state of life in the mid-1800s. It loosely follows a character known as "the kid" and the majority of the time is spent on his life from age 15-16, with the last bit taking place 30 years later. He lives a life of wandering and senseless bloodshed and seems impassioned but not with anything he knows. The overall effect is a sense of impassioned existence and even victimization.

One of the most remarkable things about the novel is the character of Judge Holden. He is the only thing but McCarthy's language that redeems the story. This Judge Holden is simply put an incarnation of who Satan would choose to be if he could be any human in that time. He is gigantic and completely hairless and often displays his naked self in the naked desert. He carries with him everywhere a blank book in which he records the artifacts of existence around him and upon doing so promptly destroys the original.

"A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man....

But don't draw me, said Webster. For I don't want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it's writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all."

and

"The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.

Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded towards the specimens he's collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of man's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth....

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.

The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate."

In this novel it is easy to pick up elements of the following western novels. The uncomfortability with prostitutes, the centering of the story on a boy facing vast barren expanses on his own and not thinking much of it, the telling of a story within a story. The judge tells one of those and here is part of it.

"Now this son whose father's existence in this world is historical and speculative even before the son has entered it is in a bad way. All his life he carries before him the idol of perfection to which he can never attain. The father dead has euchered the son out of his patrimony. For it is the death of the father to which the son is entitled and to which he is heir, more so than his goods. He will not hear of the small mean ways that tempered the man in life. He will not see him struggling in follies of his own devising. No. The world which he inherits bears him false witness. He is broken before a frozen god and he will never find his way....

The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day."

More:

"They led the halfgrown boy to where the dead youth was lying on his back with his hands
composed upon his chest.

We don't want no trouble mister. We just want to take him with us.

Take him.

I knowed we'd bury him on this prairie.

They come out here from Kentucky mister. This tyke and his brother. His momma and daddy both dead. His grandaddy was killed by a lunatic and buried in the woods like a dog. He's never knowed good fortune in his life and now he aint got a soul in this world.

Randall you take a good look at the man that has made you a orphan.

The orphan in his large clothes holding the old musket with the mended stock stared at him woodenly. He was maybe twelve years old and he looked not so much dullwitted as insane. Two of the others were going through the boy's pockets.

Where's his rifle at mister?

The man stood with his hand on his belt. He nodded to where the rifle stood against a tree.
They brought it over and presented it to the brother. It was a Sharp's fifty calibre and holding it and the musket he stood insanely armed, eyes skittering.

One of the older boys handed him the dead boy's hat and then he turned to the man. He give forty dollars for that rifle in Little Rock. You can buy em in Griffin for ten. They aint worth nothin. Randall, are you ready to go?

He did not assist as a bearer for he was too small. When they set out across the prairie with his brother's body carried up on their shoulders he followed behind carrying the musket and the dead boy's rifle and the dead boy's hat. The man watched them go. Out there was nothing. They were simply bearing the body off over the bonestrewn waste toward a naked horizon. The orphan turned once to look back at him and then he hurried to catch up."

And more from the judge:

"And where is the fiddler and the dance?

I guess you can tell me.

I tell you this. As war become dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?

You aint nothin.

You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance."

A Poem About Sex, A Poem About Time

2008-09-11T00:50:00.002-04:00

I am taking an Intro to Poetry course here at Messiah taught by Christine Perrin, and it/she is wonderful. In the reading that we did recently I came across two gorgeous poems. The first is by Virginia Hamilton Adair, and it is the most gorgeous poem I have ever read that celebrates lovemaking.

Peeling an Orange

Between you and a bowl of oranges I lie nude
Reading in The World's Illusion through my tears.
You reach across me hungry for global fruit,
Your bare arm hard, furry and warm on my belly.
Your fingers pry the skin of a navel orange
Releasing tiny explosions of spicy oil.
You place peeled disks of gold in a bizarre pattern
On my white body. Rearranging, you bend and bite
The disks to release further their eager scent.
I say "Stop, you're tickling," my eyes still on the page.
Aromas of groves arise. Through green leaves
Glow the lofty snows. Through red lips
Your white teeth close on a translucent segment.
Your face over my face eclipses The World's Illusion.
Pulp and juice pass into my mouth from your mouth.
We laugh against each other's lips. I hold my book
Behind your head, still reading, still weeping a little.
You say "Read on, I'm just an illusion," rolling
Over upon me soothingly, gently moving,
Smiling greenly through long lashes. And soon
I say "Don't stop. Don't disillusion me."
Snows melt. The mountain silvers into many a stream.
The oranges are golden worlds in a dark dream.

This next one, by Rita Dove, is a poignant song about the preciousness of a brief moment of rest in a swirl of activity-packed life.

Daystar

She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children's naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch -
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she'd see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,
building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour - where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

"When Mephistopheles is just beneath..."

2008-08-18T10:57:00.003-04:00

I don't normally do this, but I am going to be a bit more personal in this post. I realize that the last post probably seems out of the blue and a bit gratuitous. While this would not be the case if everyone had admittance to my day to day stream of consciousness, I want to take the opportunity to explain myself a little more, in case someone reads what I write now and then.

I could do this in an endlessly prosaic way, describing the details of my recent steep ascensions and sheer drops in terms of faith in men (which, as you can see with the last post, is in a bit of a decline right now), faith in God, and faith in (at the risk of being trite)...faith. Through it all faith has remained, but the manner in which I discover it and capture it and harness it has changed significantly. I have looked beyond the steel outer latticework of doctrine, creeds, and (still mostly) firmly held beliefs, and found that they give shape to what is amorphous. Reality contains mystery.

But as I said, I don't want to explain and describe how I got here normally. Instead, I'll share a piece of writing that I did for a bogus class I took last semester. We were to write a narrative of our "faith journeys," whatever that meant; I decided to actually invest in the project. My favorite song off of Radiohead's latest album In Rainbows, called "Videotape" (I've included it at the end) inspired me and from there it was an all night project of wrestling and realization, producing something that might be very confusing but is accurate. On first read it may seem depressing; this may be because I still agree with my last post. The world is fucked, and everyone has known it since the dawn of time. Adam knew it. Jesus knew it. God created it to be fucked, but so that something greater might come from it. So I don't see this narrative as depressing; it is only one episode, and the next one might have the resolution.

The Tour

There was a spark that shone at the top of the hill, perched on a tree and looking at him. The boy was mildly interested, but the ice and snow on the slope meant slow going. He figured it would come to him eventually. Turning around, he half walked, half slid, into the darkness of his heart. Mephistopheles was just beneath, waiting for him to catch up.

“I’ve read about you,” he said. “It’s already been stolen, or taken. Maybe I gave it. But I’m not selling.”

“I’m not here for that. My head still hurts from that clanging gong of a soul. You keep it or give it or throw it away – I don’t want it. You just get the tour, down here.”

“Fine. But no gods, no Helen. She bores me, because allegory bores me. Imperfect analogies are disgusting because they’re all imperfect eventually, and it’s worse that they’re so necessary. Except this is my life, not a written epic, so keep it grounded in reality. The abstract can stay abstract, and everything will be more concrete that way.”

Mephistopheles nodded and smiled pleasantly. “Of course. Beauty will stay in its Platonic universal – Aristotle’s beloved Helen can’t be found in you. Not to worry. You are all the particular we need to see. Walk with me. I’ve looked around in here before, but it will be more fun playing the teacher this time around.”

There was enough dull, non-specific light for him to recognize that he was surrounded by darkness. There was not enough to prevent him from stubbing his toe badly. Hobbling off, Mephistopheles’ figure looked grainy, like everything was being viewed through a CRT television set placed four inches in front of your eyes. The hum of static or poor office lighting would have matched the scene, but there was none. Eventually his mind substituted it for the silence anyway. He didn’t want comfort, no matter how small, but his automatic reflexes rebelled. The limping silhouette began to narrate.

“Silence is unbearable. The hum is more than noise…you are fighting the silence of having no context. This is a place totally alien from you. But you’ve been near transformers and thought them apocalyptic, and you’ve never been away from indoor lighting for more than a week. The hum is more than noise. Noise is nothing. Your invented buzzing means safety.”

“I know it.”

“You haven’t been down here enough. You’ve forgotten what it looks like in day, and avoided it at night. Some parts that I’ve grown especially fond of you have never seen. It’s good that you’ve come for the darkness; day and night. It would be a lie to think that being asleep to the night means only day exists. Day is easy. You will learn the most in the night. If you decide to leave the night, how will noon look? Of course, it’s not up to you – leaving.

“Coming into this, you were unsure. For years you lived only in the day, and the idea of darkness would petrify you.” Mephistopheles stopped and sighed. As he caught up, his guide began to move on again without looking behind, talking into the thick void, the tired, soothing voice reflecting back. “You were so sure in the light, and then you discovered things. You discovered that there was beauty and there was ugliness, and that sometimes the two got confused. Sometimes that was a good thing. And then – here we are.”

Looking around, he saw an unchanged landscape, just as nondescript as before. He turned around and almost stumbled over the lip of a large, dark stone well. Mephistopheles chortled as he settled into a perching position on the edge, squatting like a Kenyan elder. Holding a long, thin pole, the wizened shape blinked at him. He stretched himself out on the chilly, damp ground. His discomfort gave him visions of shades coming to the well to gaze in. Each drew on a rope leading into its depths, bending far over to pull on a length. As the rope coiled next to his nose, he noticed script burned into it: C.S.L., J.J., C.M., F.O’C. He began to ask about the cursive initials but the sound ended in his throat when he looked up to see Mephistopheles tip one of the shades into the well with his punting pole. He watched, disturbed and fascinated, as shades walked up and either drew the bucket, drank, and ambled back into the haze, or were cast into the pit by a deft swing of the staff. He asked what was happening.

“These shades are an interesting or banal mix of humans who are involved with ‘the arts’ in some way. They come to the well but for different reasons. That one I just knocked in read only romance novels and The National Enquirer. Loved Thomas Kincaid. Couldn’t tell you who Scott Cairns or Fra Angelico were. Maybe Michelangelo, but she’d likely be thinking of a Precious Moments figurine. Raphael is on her coffee mug, and she never noticed. Forget about Arvo Part or Milton or Louise Glück. She goes to your church.

“This one coming up fell in love with Picasso when Picasso meant something. Even when Picasso tried to not mean anything this shade found meaning in that. But he got caught up in Picasso the man, and followed him into the whirlwind of mechanic commercialism – without discovering the irony of Warhol.”

Tip.

“What about this one who can’t lift the bucket?”

“He’s a former teacher of yours. He thinks he’s well read because he reads all the ancient classics and nothing else. ‘In them is true life.’ Alright. They’re great. They’re not the only thing. He scoffs at Salinger and Updike and Wolfe, who are far more relevant to his life than any factory orphan. But Dickens is safe; he can critique and adore Dickens at arm’s length, because everything but the universal truths has passed on. Eliot can tell him about his fractured humanity; Jane Austen can only remind him of what he already knows. I don’t need to bother with him…the bucket will tire him and pull him in eventually.”

He climbed onto the lip and grasped a rope, one hand on F.S.F. and the other on P.G.W., and began to pull. He sailed into the void, his shins knocking the conservative shade of his teacher in with him. For a moment he felt utterly invincible and confident, until the rope brushed his hand as he fell past. Panic sang out as he realized his stupidity, and he wildly flung his hand into the darkness. A course rope burned the skin out of the webbing between his finger and thumb as he slid to a halt, blood smearing G.K.C. Hanging, he pulled up the bucket and drank deeply. Arm over arm, H., D.A., W.S., G.E., A.B., A.P., R.B., he scrambled back up to blinking Mephistopheles.

“Beauty can save and destroy, I suppose.”

“This darkness.”

“Yes, it is everywhere, and you’ll never get completely used to it. But I see you’ve become better at moving through it.”

“I’ve grown to like it, maybe love it. I may depend on it; I at least can see why it’s here.”

“Contrast.”

“Yeah. It comforts me because it shows me discomfort. I know it comes from me, too. You stoke it, but it comes from me. How else could I know anything? You’re a friend.”

They walked.

They came across a crater blasted into a field of solid, cracking charcoal. Mephistopheles stopped and snorted. From opposite ends of the crater two figures were walking into the center, one small and one tall, both men gleaming with sweat. He walked out to meet them, and quickly recognized both of them as actual people, not shades. They were dressed in tatters, and a smell of burnt hair and maybe even some skin preceded them. He recoiled at the strange sensory cocktail, then swaggered up to the hunched pair. Kicking charcoal dust onto their bare feet and legs, he spat into the taller man’s eye.

“Leave now. I am the end here! You disgust me, and you are the same as I am. Don’t give me drivel about that, though. Your cracked lips oozing saliva know no real humanity. Get out of here and live with your mother the coyote. Leave now!”

A cloud of charcoal dust burned his eyes as Mephistopheles walked up to them. Using the long staff, his guide beat the now kneeling figures. They didn’t resist at all; instead, the short one looked up and smiled. He was shocked by the flash of pure white, the brightest thing he’d seen here. A second later it was gone, replaced with a bloody pulp and the blunt bronze tip of Mephistopheles pole.

He stared. Turned away.

The hard charcoal rushed up into his face, the hairline cracks and pits and tiny grits of charcoal sand scuffing it. He tried to turn onto his back and look up, but the staff pressing down on his neck pinned him there. The black ground at his eye level blurred after stretching away a foot or so; each tiny fissure was a valley, each pit a crater, each pebble a colossal menhir. He could not look up as large chunks of charcoal piled up on top of him. His eye alone was exposed, peeking out from a chink in the newly formed cairn.

A dream: video clips in red blue green of race riots, a cardboard sign propped in the street TURN AROUND OR GET SHOT, a naked child running down a dirt street, a white man killed in his home. Now: a dirty retarded man cutting in line and calling her a gentleman, an iron maiden beneath an Arab city, the sweating landscaper. The retarded man watches the fish. A brilliant white flash.

He woke up staring into two pairs of eyes at different levels. Mephistopheles helped him stand up, but he collapsed. Salt and water slipped into fractured crannies and was gone.

The tall man said, “Everyone in his own environment must strive to practice true humanity toward others. The future of the world depends on it.” The short man smiled.

Mephistopheles led him onto a plateau of ruddy earth and loam, as if a forest had recently completely decayed on top of a desert. Hundreds of thousands of people sat huddled alone, holding themselves and doing nothing. When he walked past them, they would nervously look at their knees, toenails, the sky, anything to get away from eye contact. No one looked at each other at all. He walked to the edge of the plateau and looked down on an empty carnival ground.

“You know what has happened here.”

“I know it. I have friends who go away. I live with someone who’s almost completely gone. Even when he is with his friends, they go away in groups.”

“Life cannot compartmentalize, and they cannot leave the boxes. Interaction is not personal enough, so personality dies. All they need to do is bowl, or cook, or use the carnival. It used to be hedonistic…now it would be necessary for survival at all.”

Mephistopheles trudged on. He followed. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the tree with the spark; he could not go over to it. Mephistopheles turned back and smiled. “You still have a long journey ahead. It’s ok that you don’t feel like searching for it. It will find you.”

“I know it.”

“But you and I…we know very well that it is there. You may go and look; I don’t mind. You might though.”

“Yeah. I can’t right now. I need to stay down here in the darkness of my heart. The only strength I have right now – it’s merely good enough to continue searching. There isn’t enough yet to stop.”

Videotape

When I'm at the pearly gates
this'll be on my videotape
my videotape
my videotape

When Mephistopheles is just beneath
and he's reaching up to grab me

This is one for the good days
and I have it all here in
red blue green
red blue green

You are my centre when I spin away
out of control on videotape
on videotape
on videotape
on videotape

This is my way of saying goodbye
because I can't do it face to face
so I'm talking to you before...
no matter what happens now
I won't be afraid
because I know
today has been the most perfect day
I have ever seen

Hemingway and SE7EN on a Fucked Up World

2008-07-31T22:54:00.003-04:00

I just read this on the BBC World News website, my pretty much sole source of current events/news. It made me want to vomit, and then it made me think of two conversations and a short epilogue soliloquy from one of my all-time favorite movies, the intensely honest and disturbing SE7EN (starring Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kevin Spacey, directed by David Fincher). Read the linked article (at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7535840.stm, if the hyperlink doesn't work), and then read these quotes. Sometimes the paradoxes of Christianity make one disgusted as well as joyful.

~

SOMERSET: Guy's out walking his dog, gets attacked. His watch is taken, his wallet. And while he's lying there on the sidewalk, helpless, his attacker stabs him in both eyes. This happened just last night, about four blocks from here.
CAPTAIN: Yeah, I read about that.
SOMERSET: I don't understand this place anymore.
CAPTAIN: 'S the way it's always been.
SOMERSET: Maybe you're right.

~

SOMERSET: If we catch this man, if we catch John Doe, and it turns out that he's the devil, I mean Satan himself, that might live up to our expectations. But he's not. He's just a man.
MILLS: You know, so you bitch and you complain and you tell me these things, nyaahh...if you think you're preparing me for hard times, thank you, but...
SOMERSET: But you gotta be a hero...you want to be a champion, well let me tell you, people don't want a champion; they want to eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto, and watch television -
MILLS: Hey, how'd you get like this? I wanna know.
SOMERSET: Ahh...it wasn't one thing, I can tell you that...
MILLS: Go on.
SOMERSET: I just don't think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a...virtue.
MILLS: You're no different, you're no better.
SOMERSET: I didn't say I was different or better, I'm not! Hell, I sympathize, I sympathize completely! Apathy IS a solution. I mean, it's easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life, it's easier to steal what you want to earn it, it's easier to beat a child than it is to raise it...hell, love costs, it takes effort, and work.
MILLS: We are talking about people who are mentally ill, we are talking about people who are fucking crazies!
SOMERSET: No, no, we're not -
MILLS: Yes, today -
SOMERSET: No, we're talking about everyday life here. You - you can't afford to be this naive!
MILLS: Ah, fuck off...see - you should listen to yourself...you say that "the problem with people is that they don't care, so I don't care about people." That makes no sense. Know why?
SOMERSET: You care?
MILLS: Y- Damn right!
SOMERSET: And you're gonna make a difference?
MILLS: Whatever, the point is, is that, I don't think you're quitting because you believe these things you say. I don't. I think you wanna believe them, because you're quitting. You want me to agree with you, and you want me to say yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, it's all fucked up, it's a fuckin' mess, we should all go live in a fuckin' log cabin...but I won't. I won't say that. I don't agree with you, I do not. I can't.

~

SOMERSET: Ernest Hemingway once wrote, "The world is a fine place and worth fighting for." I agree with the second part.

Excerpts from F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise"

2008-06-29T22:38:00.002-04:00

I feel a special connection with Fitzgerald. It's been a long time since I read The Great Gatsby, but I remembered how much I loved it, so when I saw this book sitting on my shelf I abandoned my reading list to pick it up. I feel as though if I were to devote my life to writing, it would come out like this...including his blunders, which I felt were almost like inside jokes. There were times when I could tell he had written a poem beforehand, and then when he wrote a section of the novel thought, oh, this would be a good place for that poem...but there were also really great parts, and lots of variety in style, from dramatic script to poetry to stream of consciousness. Here are some excerpts that impacted me:

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he pondered o'er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:
"Thru Time I'll save my love!" he said...yet Beauty vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...
- Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:
"Who'd learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his sonnet there"...So all my words, however true, might sing you to a thousandth June, and on one ever know that you were Beauty for an afternoon.

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the "Dark Lady of the Sonnets," and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live...and now we have no real interest in her....The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would read it after twenty years....

-from Book Two, Chapter Three: The End of Summer

Q. - Are you corrupt?
A. - I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all anymore.
Q. - Is that a bad sign in itself?
A. - Not necessarily.
Q. - What would be the test of corruption?
A. - Becoming really insincere - calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

- from Book Two, Chapter Five

On the Move

2008-06-16T21:23:00.002-04:00

The following is my typed out version of a small little book my mother picked up for me simply because it was written by Bono, one of my most admired contemporary artists and leaders, and because it had some nice black and white photography. I think she was only vaguely aware that the book was in actuality the transcript of a speech that Bono gave (presumably in 2006, judging from the copyright info) at one of the President's annual Prayer Breakfasts for religious leaders from across the nation.

The photography I instantly recognized as Bono's own, from a trip he and his wife took
to Ethiopia fairly early on in U2's career. That trip changed his life and the way he saw things, and focused to an extent the content of some of his songs and his work. Because of this, I had an idea of what was coming, and I eagerly read, having recently formed the beginnings of my own concern for global injustices, especially in African countries. I think the speech is insightful, especially from a faith perspective, and a relevant and sensible call to action for all.

~

If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I’m obviously not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. And, it’s certainly not because I’m a rock star. Which leaves one possible explanation: I’m here because I’ve got a messianic complex. Yes, it’s true. And for anyone who knows me, it’s hardly a revelation.

Well, I’m the first to admit that there’s something unnatural…perhaps something unseemly…about rock stars mounting the pulpit and preaching at presidents and then disappearing to their villas in the South of France. Talk about a fish out of water. It’s very humbling, and I will try to keep my homily brief. But be warned – I’m Irish.

I’d like to talk about the laws of man. And I’d like to talk about higher laws. It would be great to assume that the one serves the other; that the laws of man serve these higher laws…but of course, they don’t always. And I presume that, in a sense, is why you’re here.

I presume that the reason for this gathering is that all of us here – Muslims, Jews, Christians – all of us are searching our souls for how to better serve our family, our community, our nation, our God.

I know I am. Searching, I mean. And that, I suppose, is what led me here, too.

Yes, it’s odd, having a rock star here, but maybe it’s odder for me than for you. You see, I avoided religious people most of my life. Maybe it had something to do with me having a father who was Protestant and a mother who was Catholic and living in a country where the line between the two was, quite literally, a battle line – where the line between church and state was, well, a little blurry, and hard to see.

I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays while my father used to wait outside. One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God.

For me, at least, it got in the way. Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land…and in this country, America, seeing God’s second-hand car salesman on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash. In fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment.

I must confess, I changed the channel. I wanted my MTV. Even though I was a believer. Perhaps because I was a believer.

I was cynical. Not about God, but about God’s politics. Thin, in 1997, a couple of eccentric, septuagenarian British Christians went and ruined my shtick – my reproachfulness. They did it by describing the millennium, the year 2000, as a Jubilee year, as an opportunity to cancel the chronic debts of the world’s poorest people. They had the audacity to renew the Lord’s call – and they were joined by Pope John Paul II, who, from an Irish half-Catholic’s point of view, may have had a more direct line to the Almighty.

“Jubilee” – why “Jubilee”?

What was this year of Jubilee, this year of our Lord’s favor? I’d always read the Scriptures, even the obscure stuff. There it was in Leviticus [25:35]… “If your brother becomes poor,” the Scriptures say, “and cannot maintain himself…you shall maintain him…You shall not lend him your money at interest, not give him your food for profit.”

It is such an important idea, Jubilee, that Jesus begins his ministry with this. When Jesus was a young man, he met with the rabbis, impressed everyone, people were talking. The elders said, “He’s a clever guy, this Jesus, but he hasn’t done much…yet. He hasn’t spoken in public before…”

When he does speak, his first words are from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he says, “because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” And Jesus proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of Jubilee. (Luke 4:18)

What he was really talking about was an era of grace – and we’re still in it.

So fast-forward 2000 years. That same thought, grace, was made incarnate – in a movement of all kinds of people. The Jubilee movement wasn’t a bless-me club; it wasn’t a holy huddle. These religious guys were willing to get out in the streets, get their boots dirty, wave the placards, follow their convictions with actions. Making it really hard for people like me to keep their distance.

It was amazing. I almost started to like these church people.

But then my cynicism got another helping hand.

Colin Powell, a five-star general, called it the greatest WMD of them all: a tiny little virus called AIDS. And the religious community, in large part, missed it. The ones who didn’t miss it could only see it as divine retribution for bad behavior. Even on children. Even when the fastest growing group of people with HIV were married, faithful women.

Aha, there they go again! I thought to myself: Judgmentalism is back.

But in truth, I was wrong again. The church was slow, but the church got busy on this, the leprosy of our age.

Love was on the move. Mercy was on the move. God was on the move.

Moving people of all kinds to work with others they had never met and never would have cared to meet.

Conservative church groups hanging out with spokesmen for the gay community,all singing off the same hymn sheet on AIDS…Soccer moms and quarterbacks…hip-hop stars and country stars…This is what happens when God gets on the move: crazy stuff happens!

Popes were seen wearing sunglasses…

Jesse Helms was seen with a ghetto blaster…

Crazy stuff. Evidence of the Spirit.

It was breathtaking. Literally. It stopped the world in its tracks.

When churches started demonstrating on debt governments listened – and acted. When churches started organizing, petitioning, and even that most unholy of acts today, God forbid, lobbying on AIDS and global health, governments listened, and acted.

I’m here today in all humility to say: you changed minds; you changed policy; you changed the world.

Look, whatever thoughts you have about God, who God is or if God exists – most will agree that if there is a God, God has a special place for the poor.

In fact, the poor are where God lives.

Check Judaism. Check Islam. Check pretty much anyone.

I mean, God may well be with us in our mansions on the hill…I hope so. He may well be with us in all manner of controversial stuff…maybe, maybe not. But the one thing on which we can all agree, among all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor.

God is in the slums, in the cardboard boxes where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives, and God is with us if we are with them. “If you remove the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, and if you give yourself to the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then your light will rise in darkness and your gloom will become like midday and the Lord will continually guide you and satisfy your desire in scorched places.” (Isaiah 58:9-11)

It’s not a coincidence that in the Scriptures, poverty is mentioned more than 2,100 times. It’s not an accident. That’s a lot of airtime, 2,100 mentions.

You know, the only time Christ is judgmental is on the subject of the poor. “As you have done it unto the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40) As I say, good news to the poor.

And here’s some good news for the President. After 9-11 we were told America would have no time for the world’s poor. America would be taken up with it’s own problems of safety. And it’s true these are dangerous times, but America has not drawn the blinds and double-locked the doors.

In fact, America has doubled aid to Africa. America has tripled funding for global health. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and support, with Congress, for the Global Fund has put 900,000 people onto life-saving anti-retroviral drugs and provided eleven million bed nets to protect children from malaria.

Outstanding human achievements. Counterintuitive. Historic. Be very, very proud.

But here’s the bad news. There is much more to do. There’s a gigantic chasm between the scale of emergency and the scale of response. And finally, it’s not about charity after all, is it? It’s about justice.

Let me repeat that: it’s not about charity. It’s about justice.

And that’s too bad. Because you’re good at charity. Americans, like the Irish, are good at it. We like to give, and we give a lot, even those who can’t afford it.

But justice is a higher standard. Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties; it doubts our concern; and it questions our commitment.

6,500 Africans are still dying every day of a preventable, treatable disease, for lack of drugs we can buy at any drugstore. This is not about charity; this is about justice and equality.

Because there’s no way we can look at what’s happening in Africa and, if we’re honest, conclude that deep down, we really accept that Africans are equal to us. Anywhere else in the world, we wouldn’t accept it. Look at what happened in Southeast Asia with the Tsunami. 150,000 lives lost to that misnomer of all misnomers, “mother nature.” In Africa, 150,000 lives are lost every month. And it’s a completely avoidable catastrophe.

It’s annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren’t they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

You know, think of those Jewish sheep-herders going to meet the Pharoah, mud on their shoes, and the Pharoah says, “Equal?” A preposterous idea: rich and poor are equal? And they say, “Yeah, ‘equal,’ that’s what it says here in this book. We’re all made in the image of God.”

And eventually the Pharoah says, “Okay, I can accept that. I can accept the Jews – but not the blacks. Not the women. Not the gays. Not the Irish. No way, man.”

So on we go with our journey of equality. On we go in the pursuit of justice.

We hear that call in the ONE Campaign, a growing movement of more than two million Americans…left and right together, united in the belief that where you live should no longer determine whether you live.

Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market – that’s a justice issue. Holding children ransom for the debts of their grandparents – that’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents – that’s a justice issue. And while the law is what we say it is, God is not silent on the subject.

That’s why I say there’s the law of the land, and then there is a higher standard. We can hire experts to write the laws of the land so that they benefit us. So, the laws say it’s okay to protect our agriculture but it’s not okay for African farmers to do the same, to earn a living?

As the laws of man are written, that’s what they say.

God will not accept that.

Mine won’t, at least. Will yours?

This is a dangerous idea I’ve put on the table: my God vs. your God, their God vs. our God…vs. no God. It is very easy, in these times, to see religion as a force for division rather than unity. The reason I am here in Washington, and the reason I keep coming back, is because this is a town that is proving it can come together on behalf of who the Scriptures call “the least of these.”

This is not a Republican idea. It is not a Democratic idea. It is not even, with all due respect, an American idea. Nor is it unique to any one faith.

“Do to others as you would have them do to you.” (Luke 6:31) Jesus says that.

“Righteousness is this: that one should…give away wealth out of love for Him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarer and the beggars and for the emancipation of the captives.” (2.177) The Koran says that.

Thus sayeth the Lord: “Bring the homeless poor into the house, when you see the naked, cover him, then your light will break out like the dawn and your recovery will speedily spring forth, then your Lord will be your rear guard.” The Jewish Scripture says that. Isaiah 58 again.

That is a powerful incentive: “The Lord will watch your back.” Sounds like a good deal to me, right now.

A number of years ago, I met a wise man who changed my life. In countless ways, large and small, I was always seeking the Lord’s blessing. I was saying, you know, “I have a new song, look after it.” Or, “I have a family, please look after them.” Or, “I have this crazy idea…”

And this wise man said: “Stop.” He said, “Stop asking God to bless what you’re doing. Get involved in what God is doing – because it’s already blessed.”

Well, God, as I said, is with the poor. That, I believe, is what God is doing. And that is what He’s calling us to do.

I was amazed when I first got to America and learned how much some church-goers tithe. Some tithe up to ten-percent of the family budget. Well, how does that compare with the federal budget, the budget for the entire American family? How much of that goes to the poorest people in the world? Less than one percent.

I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing…which, to be truly meaningful, will mean an additional one percent of the federal budget tithed to the poor.

What is one percent?

One percent in not merely a number on a balance sheet.

Once percent is the girl in Africa who gets to go to school – thanks to you. One percent is the AIDS patient who gets her medicine – thanks to you. One percent is the African entrepreneur who can start a small family business – thanks to you. One percent is not redecorating presidential palaces or money flowing down a rat hole. This one percent is digging waterholes to provide clean water.

One percent is a new partnership with Africa, not paternalism toward Africa, where increased assistance flows toward improved governance and initiatives with proven track records – away from boondoggles and white elephants of every description.

America gives less than one percent now. We’re asking for an extra one percent to change the world. This will not only transform the lives of millions of people – and I say this to the military men now – it will also transform the way those people see us.

One percent is national security, enlightened economic self-interest, and a better, safer world rolled into one. Sounds to me that in this town of deals and promises, one percent is the best bargain around.

These goals – clean water for all, school for every child, medicine for the afflicted, an end to extreme and senseless poverty - these are not just any goals; they are the Millenium Development goals, which this country, America, supports. And they are more than that: they are the Beatitudes for a Globalized World.

Now, I’m very lucky. I don’t have to sit on any budget committees. And, I certainly don’t have to sit where you do, Mr. President. I don’t have to make the tough choices.

But I can tell you this: to give one percent more is right. It’s smart. And it’s blessed.

There is a continent – Africa – being consumed by flames.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa.

History, like God, is watching what we do.

- Bono

~

Bono mentions several times the ONE Campaign to Make Poverty History. You can find more info about that at www.ONE.org.

He was also the impetus behind founding the (Product)RED line, which donates a portion of the sale of products to help fight AIDS in Africa. For instance, last year when I bought my MacBook Pro, I got an amazing deal on one of the 2nd Gen iPod Nanos. I saw that they had a (Product)RED version, and so I bought it. The color is amazing, and through this deal I paid $50 for an 8Gb iPod, which I would've paid no matter which one I bought, only this one sent $10 to help fight AIDS. Other companies who have signed onto (Product)RED besides Apple are GAP, Motorola, American Express, Converse, Hallmark, DELL, Windows, and Emporio Armani (!).

Lastly, I'd strongly encourage you to purchase the book "On the Move" in which this speech is contained. Not only is it more visually pleasing than seeing it here (it's a nice display of graphic art, and of course includes some of Bono's lovely photos of Ethiopia), but the royalties from it's sale all go directly to ONE.org. You can buy it from Thomas Nelson for $12.99.

Application of Kandinsky Ch. VII to Jackson Pollock

2008-06-03T01:21:00.001-04:00

Another of the reaction papers I wrote for Professor Brenton Good's Modern Art History course in the Spring '08 semester:

In the seventh chapter of Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Vasily Kandinsky speaks on the difficulty of establishing any sort of somewhat rigid theory of painting. He says that it is not enough to simply renounce theory and permanently break all possible ties with nature, because these are merely external changes. Rather, color and form must be wielded in combination with an understanding both of their spiritual significance and of the emotion and meaning the artist wants to convey. Too much emphasis on any one part of this grouping will unbalance it and lead to dishonest art or at best only decoration. The meaning ought not be superficial, something a viewer can gather without thought. Rather, it should be naturally embedded in the art, in the same way that we understand someone when they speak without needing to ponder all the physical and mental factors at play in communication. The art should be seen with the soul rather than the eye.

Kandinsky also spends time writing about the role of emotion and its relation to color, as well as stating that the best forms do not mimic nature, they merely have their origin in it. In addition, the best way lies between reliance on geometry and pattern and subservience to the natural use of color. These points in particular, together with those above, immediately brought Jackson Pollock to mind. His large action paintings seem to be a natural manifestation of what Kandinsky was communicating, because of three important characteristics: use of color and form, use of expressive emotion, and meaning showing through the art in a natural way.

Pollock’s treatment of the “formal elements” of painting is a very close match to what Kandinsky outlines. Color and form change places and become largely the same thing: the color is only itself, swatches and splatterings, but it creates and orders space at the same time. Pollock’s method had a large part to do with this effect. The term “action painting” perfectly captures how he withdrew into himself and allowed his emotions and spirit be communicated through paint, how he gave the paint meaning because there was no way it could be meaningless when used in that manner. Internal emotion was the brush; Pollock said that he was not necessarily aware of what he was doing when he painted. Kandinsky would say that he simply spoke through the act of creating without thinking about it, as in the speech analogy. We are able to separate emotion and meaning into two separate categories, but if what Kandinsky wrote can be applied, then they are so closely related that they could be the same.

I find it intriguing that while it is so difficult to predict what will happen in art in our contemporary times, Kandinsky was not only able to project ahead what he thought would come, but also that there would be a specific artist who embodied so well most of what Kandinsky mentioned. Pollock’s theory that is not a theory on how to paint clearly covered points discussed by Kandinsky, such as formal elements, emotion, and meaning found in the work of art. By combining all of these parts as Kandinsky wrote of them, Jackson Pollock became that artist that Kandinsky predicted would someday come.

A Brief Interpretation of Clement Greenberg's "Towards a New Laocoön"

2008-05-16T21:47:00.002-04:00

Another of the reaction papers I wrote for Professor Brenton Good's Modern Art History course in the Spring '08 semester:

Upon finishing my reading of Clement Greenberg’s famous essay Towards a New Laocoön, my initial reaction was to say to myself, “Ah…that certainly explains Greenberg’s time period.” I do not yet know enough to determine whether the Abstract Expressionist paintings produced after Towards a New Laocoön were a direct result of that particular essay or if they would have simply developed into that style through the natural course of change, but I do know that what they set out to do is what Greenberg outlined.

That the natural course of change is the majority of Greenberg’s argument interested me the most. Most of the essay is simply a summary of the history of the past century in art, with a bit of theory applied to what happened. The search for purity in abstraction extended from Courbet’s dissatisfaction with the bourgeois Neo-Classicism and Romanticism through Manet and the Impressionists and on to Greenberg’s present; Greenberg postulates that the evolution occurred along an ever-increasingly tighter spiral towards true abstraction. The path that this spiral followed went through cycles of imitation, first of literature and then of music.

This tendency was driven by a desire to incorporate all the arts, or at least to conglomerate the more appealing elements of each into the others. Visual art imitated at first poetry and narrative, then the lyricism and transcendent qualities of symphonies. Music imitated artwork, as in Debussy’s “Impressionist” pieces and the increasingly atonal arrangement of music referencing Cubism or Dada. Poetry also attempted to make itself fractured, as with T.S. Eliot, or take up the Realist cause of the working man.

The key word with all of this is imitated; Greenberg says that there was no way these art forms, especially painting, could have arrived at true recognition of themselves without first fighting against their fundamental natures. They tried to find themselves outside of themselves, and only when they had completely exhausted those options were they able to turn into themselves; they had nowhere else to go. Painting denied the two things that made it painting: its flat surface and paint. Painting was originally a fight against the medium. It worked to be a picture, an illusion, an imitation, and grew tired of faking it. It became itself.

Greenberg concludes by recognizing the historical basis of his apology for abstract art. He notes that there is nothing in abstract art which forces it to be abstract. Instead, it is how it is because it was the next step, history simply brought it to itself. Greenberg sees it as the zenith, but possibly only for the moment. One must always allow for history continuing, that there will likely be another step. It is because of Greenberg’s own words that I question his necessity in order for Abstract Expressionism to take place. If he is correct, even if he had written with every ounce of intellect against abstraction, it still would have prevailed.

Reaction to Rosalind Krauss’ "The Originality of the Avant-Garde"

2008-05-08T20:07:00.003-04:00

One of a number of reaction papers I wrote for Professor Brenton Good's Modern Art History course in the Spring '08 semester.

The question of originality in art is one that has plagued me for some while now. Rosalind Krauss’ essay on the subject has paradoxically both settled and re-raised the issue in my mind; perhaps it is most accurate to say that she has pushed my thinking in another direction. I had wondered what true originality might look like in current art were I to be confronted with it. Krauss, however, using the three examples of Rodin’s sculpture, Monet’s painting, and the widespread use of the grid in modern painting, essentially says that I need not worry; originality is not found anymore.

This is not to say that art is a waste of time, or a fraud. Krauss does use the word “fraud,” but only in a very specific context, defined by the value relationship between originality and repetition. The quest for originality has been so trumped up, and the idea of repetition so spurned, that the idea the two could coexist or even complement each other is a novel one. But this is exactly what happens. It only seems a fraud when special circumstances unmask this fact because our modern minds are accustomed to esteeming what is new over what has been done before; thus, the recasting of a Rodin sculpture over sixty years post mortem seems shocking.

Repetition is not terrible. But even before any judgment is passed on its role, it ought to be recognized just how widespread it is. This is where Krauss’ example of the grid is poignant; for both ideals and aesthetic reasons, the grid entered the avant-garde in full force, hailed by many as the answer to personal originality. Here Krauss tacitly attacks Clement Greenberg’s quest for flatness as the more honest type of painting. She states that these ideas are anything but new, and not only are they unoriginal, but they also do not actually accomplish what Greenberg says they do. A grid is an imitation of the actual surface; it mimics the weave of the canvas, or even simply the shape. The canvas came before the grid. The grid is secondary. In this way, neither idea nor method is original. Krauss infers that this expands into other areas of art as well, besides those artists who paint based on a grid.

I agree with Krauss that the search for the original in the avant-garde is misplaced, since as she writes the patent on anything was applied for, received, and nullified long ago; everything since is a form of repetition. I also agree with her that repetition is not something at which to sneer. However, I do not think that ideas that conceive of themselves as new are necessarily invalidated. I believe that parallel systems of thought are possible, distinguished by macro- and microscopic scale. We can on the one hand recognize that what Krauss says is true, and the first descendent of Adam to draw right angles is the only truly original user of the grid; this is the macroscopic view. However, we can microscopically recognize that there are real developments in how the grid is employed, actually new ideas explaining what it can do. These two views are not exclusive since both give credit to different yet equally valid conceptions of originality; I do not believe that the difference is merely semantic, or that there is a problem of equivocation. Both uses of “original” are real.

Furthermore, I believe that by concentrating primarily on the ideas driving the art Krauss opens herself up to a possible misunderstanding on the part of the reader. Originality lies not only in the idea communicated by a work of art, but also often in how it looks. Ad Reinhardt and Raphael may ultimately share similar views when it comes to using the grid, yet the grid appears in entirely different manners. The idea is certainly important, but the execution is also weighty. I believe originality is also to be found in craft, at the very least because the artist is himself an original individual. Somehow this must be expressed.

High School Senior Thesis Paper

2007-07-28T00:41:00.000-04:00

As the title states, this is the senior thesis paper I wrote; all graduates of Covenant Christian Academy, in keeping with the model of classical education, must write on a topic of their choosing and defend/present it to the school board. Naturally, I wrote about art; specifically, its spiritual nature. Please bear in mind that this is a high school thesis project, not my dissertation for a doctorate. To the best of my knowledge, my research was limited to solid, truthful sources; if a part of the paper is factually incorrect, that is entirely my fault, and I would appreciate learning of the discrepancy. I would also enjoy feedback on my interpretation and analysis; if I somehow overlooked a major hole in my reasoning, by all means, don't shy away from embarrassing me! That being said, I honestly believe what I have written.

Also, because the length and more academic tone of the paper don't really suit the one-immense-column approach that Blogger has appropriated for it, you may want to paste the following into a text program like Word, for convenience.

Joshua M. Rayner
The Rhetoric Team
Rhetoric III
2 March 2007

The Spiritual in Art: Ripping Apart the Bushel

“No man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light.”
- Luke 11.33

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this, and not external mannerism and detail, is their reality,” spoke Aristotle millennia heretofore (qtd. in Sharma 58). Less than a century ago, the German artist Paul Klee breathed new poetic life into those long-dead words as an era of reawakened interest in the spiritual quality of artistic creation was emerging. “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible” (Guterman 5).

This statement of Klee’s is fundamentally true of all artists; because the artist’s internal state is that which is made visible, art contains a spiritual dimension that reflects the spiritual condition of the artist. Klee meant that art makes visible whatever is inside the artist, his “internal.” This is his spiritual aspect or makeup. The Russian abstract artist and theorist Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee’s colleague, explained it well: “The artist must have something to communicate, since mastery over form is not the end but, instead, the adapting of form to internal significance” (Kandinsky 75). *1 This “internal significance” will change, of course, depending on the artist’s alignment with God. Christians see the spiritual nature of things in more “concrete” or defined terms because of God’s specific revelation to them; non-Christians also know of the spiritual side, but their fallen natures pervert their perceptiveness of the art’s spirituality. They are aware of its presence yet are unable to objectively qualify it.

The distinctions between the perceptions of Christians and non-Christians become vitally important in this age of images. Sculptor Theodore Prescott states that, “as the visual arts have developed in the last two centuries, they have progressively assumed a religious role for art’s most devoted followers” (Prescott 130). “We live in a generation raised on a steady diet of the visual,” writes theorist William Dyrness (87). The evolution of marketing and advertising provides a lucid depiction of the change that has come about. Magazine advertisements only fifty years ago were still for the most part fairly stark and largely text-based. Many were accompanied by images, but that was the crux of it: the image accompanied the text, it was secondary. Its purpose was to flesh out the message. Today, the image is the message. Very few words appear alongside the image, and these are often peripheral. Certainly instances can be found in which words alone appear, but they are arranged in such a way that they actually become another image – they are largely a design element.

This paradigm shift does not, in and of itself, have any sort of inherent moral prescription attached. Art is like a firearm: nothing can be done without the intent of the person firing it. Those behind the art that enters the culture are alone the source of any message, good or ill, that is delivered. *2 Thus, the artist’s own spiritual condition ought to be scrutinized because it is a source of inspiration for cultural change.

Something that is so ubiquitous, as well as religiously significant, should certainly be a matter of interest for a Christian, any Christian. The issues discussed below are not merely abstract or theoretical; they have very practical applications. Christians must be able to understand the world they have inherited as its stewards; they must face its challenges head on; they must not allow the light of their witness to be blotted out by the darkness surrounding them. Most importantly, they must not allow the bushels that cover the light to be of their own construction. The prevalence of post-modernistic thought has opened an opportunity through its acceptance of spirituality; Christian artists do not need to flee from its every aspect as they have at times in the past. The art field is ripe for harvest, a harvest that only awaits Christian involvement.

It is the theological context of Paul Klee’s statement that renders it especially significant for Christians. Klee refers to the internal state of the artist, which directs the purpose and ideas behind his artwork. His art is born out of the need to make these concepts visible. This urge or compulsion to create stems from man’s reflection of God’s nature: man is essentially a type *3 of God and as such displays many of the same characteristics, often involuntarily. This phenomenon is given the name imago Dei, which literally means “the image of God,” and is best identified with God’s revelation of the nature of man in the early chapters of Genesis. “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” says God, and later commands man to “subdue” the earth and all in it, providing the divine imperative for man to take stewardship of all around him (Gen. 1.26-28). This means that man was created to be like God, and that man is like God, even after the Fall. God is the Creator, so man, likewise, must create; he has no choice.

The result of the imago Dei is that a person’s creations will inevitably reflect himself, will reflect what is inside. God continuously “outpours,” as Harold M. Best describes it, those elements contained in His nature, His internal makeup: He always shows love, always justice, always mercy. Every element of His being is revealed constantly through His creation. *4 Worship is simply the name we give to our own revelation of what is internal to us; what is inside regulates and determines the nature of the worship. If the inner core is rotten, rottenness will be displayed. If it is consecrated and holy, the worship will evince that. “Thus,” writes Best in Unceasing Worship, “the full significance of an action is lost if we forget that continuous outpouring is the grounding concept for it. We act because we worship, not the reverse” (112).

This implies that whatever an artist has inside of himself will naturally be manifest in all he does, including his artwork. *5 The imago Dei holds true for all people and all areas of their lives. An artist’s work often represents his “theological reflection” as William Dyrness puts it:

Theological reflection is simply the practice of naming and describing the major commitments that guide thought and action. Artists especially may think they have no need of such “abstract” work, but whether they realize it or not, they inevitably have basic commitments that determine the direction and flavor of their work…. (87)

It is important to stress that these “basic commitments” are made with or without the artist’s full, nuanced knowledge of it, in much the same way that all men know God (but do not necessarily understand their knowledge) and thus make a choice to receive or reject Him.
Paul Klee seems to have grasped a part of this, warped and distorted by sin though his understanding was. Art makes visible. The true artist does not merely copy something that exists outside of himself. The true artist infuses his work with whatever is inside himself, bringing together the internal and the external in a deeply spiritual manner. Someone who paints or draws or sculpts what he sees can certainly create something that is beautiful, but if he has not considered what he is signifying, if he has not considered the content of his work and has concentrated only on its form, he is not being honest in his work. Purely copying is not “high” art. High art occurs when the artist fuses form with content, generally with some level of awareness that he is doing so. Note that he is at least aware, he does not need to strive to achieve this amalgamation. In fact, by trying too hard the balance between form and content can be destroyed. Artist Makoto Fujimura elaborates on this point from the perspective of the Christian artist:

A question may be raised here: “Are you trying to depict God (content) through your works (form)?” And the answer is “No.” I cannot depict God (and I believe any attempt to do so will lead to breaking the second commandment), and I do not need to. Christ is the ultimate and only true fusing of content and form. But because of Christ, we are free to create works on the foundation of Christ. We are free to be his creatures, living under the sovereign rule and power of the Creator. We are free to see natural forms and human experiences as an extension of Christ’s rule and reality. When we create, we can create without trying to fuse content and form but to base our works on the notion that the fusing has already occurred – that this ultimate fusion can power our art. (52)

High art, then, takes into account or is aware of the spiritual element in art, the content which is derived from the artist’s internal.

High art is thus a potential powder keg ready to ignite spiritual change, change (for better or for worse) in both the hearts of individuals and the culture at large. Since artists are aware of the spiritual dimension present in their work it becomes necessary to carefully examine that awareness in light of the effects it produces. This is because the artist’s internal does not exist alone, it does not inhabit a vacuum; he or she is placed in the context of the surrounding world. The internal exists within the context of the external, and each influences the other. As an artist or group of artists creates they outpour what is interior, the results of which are seen and absorbed by those around them, spreading the art’s content. Soon it has impacted at least a portion of the artists’ external context, and other artists (and non-artists as well) have incorporated these influences into their own internal make-ups. A cycle of spiritual influence forms. We can thus see that Klee’s idea, that art creates these influences by making the artist’s worship visible, has great implications for the spiritual wellbeing of the culture at large.
On a more particular level, the implications of this idea for specifically secular artists like Paul Klee must be examined. How do they interpret it, in what way does it influence their work, and how do they reconcile it with their worldview? It is most effective to answer these questions through a brief survey of the life and work of Klee and his immediate contemporaries.

Paul Klee’s writings, and the artistic movements of which he was a part, provide fundamental clues as to the kind of worldview to which he subscribed. He was a teacher at the Bauhaus, at the time a radical new school of art and architecture that influenced much of the Modernist movement and successive art theory. Most of what is called in the vernacular “modern art” (and especially modern architecture) has its roots in the Bauhaus, and quite a few sub-movements germinated in the school.

One of these was Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a group headed by Klee’s Bauhaus friend Wassily Kandinsky, one of the first artists to successfully employ a completely abstract style. Paul Klee was a member of the group for a time due to his shared interest in symbology as an artistic method. *6 In this style the symbol or group of symbols’ collective meaning forms the message of the work. Some symbols are common, such as the number three, a skull, a phallus, the sun, but others may easily be broadened to include more mundane objects for which the significance can be somewhat ambiguous. Klee retained a focus on symbology while Kandinsky moved more toward pure abstraction, *7 yet both continued to share a sense of artistic elements, such as color, as imbued with a spiritual substance, as symbolic in themselves. However, neither’s art lost contact with a certain level of physicality; rather, they preferred to ground their art in the world, to make visible in an oblique way and invoke a spiritual connection between art and viewer.

Wassily Kandinsky wrote a short book on art theory’s involvement with spiritual matters. Concerning the Spiritual in Art is the fruit of his years of teaching advanced theory at the Bauhaus, writing for Der Blaue Reiter’s Almanac, discussing theory with the composer Arnold Schoenberg, and other important advances in his thoughts on artistic creation. In it, Kandinsky’s discussion ranges from the importance of color to the dichotomy of internal and external beauty. He raised a vital point in reference to the latter when he wrote, “the internal beauty is achieved through necessity and renunciation of the conventionally beautiful. To those who are not accustomed to it, it appears as ugliness; humanity in general inclines to external beauty and knows nothing of internal beauty” (35). This idea is so fundamentally important because it causes the viewer to pause and re-evaluate his or her interpretation of an artwork; could an initial interpretation of ugliness in fact be a more poignant reminder of beauty, beauty of a kind other than its traditional conception?

Furthermore, Kandinsky wrote extensively on the impact the spiritual element in art has on the individual, as well as the surrounding culture. He stated that “man withdraws his gaze from externals and turns it inwards. Literature, music and art are the most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt…they turn away from the soulless life of the present toward those substances and ideas that give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul” (33). He then honed in on the community’s response to the spiritual prompting, adding the caveat that the artist himself must first have a message before his art can assume it:

…[art is] alike in its material and spiritual life…art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the development and refinement of the human soul, to raising the triangle of the spirit….And sometimes when the human soul is gaining greater strength, art also grows in power, for the two are inextricably connected and complementary. Conversely, at those times when the soul tends to be choked by materialist lack of belief, art becomes purposeless, and it is said that art exists for art's sake alone. The relation between art and the soul is, as it were, doped into unconsciousness….The artist must have something to communicate, since mastery over form is not the end but, instead, the adapting of form to internal significance. (74-5)

Kandinsky saw this “internal significance” as vital to his artwork; it was this type of thinking that Paul Klee had in mind, and we can see that his own theory of the spiritual in art to a large degree reflects his association with Kandinsky. “[The artist’s] position is humble….He is merely a channel,” wrote Klee (Paul Klee 15). What is the artist channeling? How does he or she channel it? What is the result? Klee poetically answers:

But our pounding heart drives us down, deep down to the source of all. What springs from this source, whatever it may be called, dream, idea or phantasy [sic] – must be taken seriously only if it unites with the proper creative means to form a work of art. Then those curiosities become realities – realities of art which help to lift life out of its mediocrity. For not only do they, to some extent, add more spirit to the seen, but they also make secret visions visible. (Paul Klee 51)

This begs a further question, that of the nature of these “secret visions.” To help illuminate their source and purpose, Werner Haftmann, author of The Mind and Work of Paul Klee, draws many parallels between the thought processes of Klee and the late eighteenth century German “Renaissance man” Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Haftmann divulges the ultimate origin of the inspiration of Klee’s visions: the unconscious.

“Goethe, like Klee, knew that during the process of sorting and arranging unconscious forces inside us are brought into play. For ‘man…must retire again into the unconscious, for that is where his roots are’” (159).

Haftmann also makes a similar collation between Klee and Goethe’s search for insight, that each looked within himself for his guiding light. Where is the difference between looking to the self and looking to one’s unconscious? The unconscious is only a specific part of the self, and, as Goethe asserts, “is where [man’s] roots are” (emphasis added). To heed one’s self can include a conscious search for inspiration within himself as well as an unconscious quest. Either way, for Klee, one must look to himself for guidance.

Paul Klee…set out to achieve something proclaimed by Goethe in his ‘Maxims’: ‘Seek within yourself. There you will find everything. And you should rejoice if, outside of yourself, or whatever you like to call it, you find something in Nature which says “Yes” and “Amen” to everything that you find in yourself. We know of no world except in relation to man; we want no art which is not a likeness of this relationship.’ (Haftmann 161)

The nature of Klee’s secret vision is thus evident: it stems from the self, and ultimately the unconscious. But what was it, how did these elements form an actual, manifest desire? A final note from Haftmann answers: “He regarded art as a means of expressing a moral attitude, of realizing ever-growing spiritual aspirations…” (165). The operative word is “realizing.” Klee sought to incorporate whatever he found in himself into his art, to fulfill the inclusion of his “ever-growing spiritual aspirations” in his work. To create at a spiritual level was Paul Klee’s purpose, his dream, his vision.

Unfortunately, as can be seen with Klee, it is only to one’s own power and intuition that the non-Christian artist is able to turn; there is nothing beyond his own spiritual power to which he can look for guidance and purpose. The external only carries the pooled influences of other internals like his own – not only is god vague (if present at all), he is at most secondary to the artist’s own self. This leads to an empty existence. For one to make his passion and purpose the act of creating in order to influence others by connecting on a spiritual plane, only to then realize that one’s own influence should have as little effect on another’s internal as his does on one’s own would be devastating. It seems as though change really is enacted, but it does not make sense. Non-Christians’ art reflects this conflict. *8 William Dyrness writes that their response often consists of trying to mask it somehow, paraphrasing scholar Trevor Hart:

What is the ‘value added’ [Hart] asks of artistic creativity? Secular artists seem to believe that they can add to creation by transcending its limitations….Wassily Kandinsky sought to express the soul of nature and humanity by abstracting these elements from their usual setting. (93)

Artists not embodying a Christian worldview can only face the spiritual element in art by abstracting *9 it (as Klee and Kandinsky sought to do) and rendering it into a flawed creation, due to its source: one’s self. The only other option outside of Christianity is to lower oneself to some level of delusion. Writes Fujimura, “Christ-suppressing expression…leads to disintegration of expression and identity….[it] pretends to be truthful but reduces God to a concept” (Fujimura 54-5). Expression and identity may not be completely destroyed, but they have disintegrated. The God-shaped vacuum makes itself known in art as well as all areas of life. This is one reason why Kandinsky’s thoughts on internal beauty, how it often at first appears to be ugliness, have been so misrepresented and abused. A mentality of laideur pour laideur, ugliness for ugliness’ sake, can develop out of the dilemma of what to do with this spirituality; in such cases the art simply reflects the dishonesty and rebellion of the artist’s soul. Outside of Christianity, the internal is ugly.

It is thus under the banner of Christianity only that we can fully explore and exploit Paul Klee’s statement to its fullest potential, to the point at which it seamlessly syncs with the reality of God’s Creation. God formed the universe and all the laws that govern it; this is why any other system of belief ultimately breaks down. The only options are blindness or truth. Yet, even through blindness is the truth often displayed.

[Jacques] Maritain is helpful for pointing out the deep connection that exists as a result of God’s continuing presence in creation based on the incarnation, and the way the best art celebrates what he calls this ‘connaturality.’ But if this ‘connaturality’ is a kind of natural or inevitable reality, one wonders how even modern artists are able to deny it. Can this connection be broken, even by those who deny God? (Dyrness 89)

The answer to Dyrness is, of course, “No.” How much more, then, can Christians deny that their own art makes visible some part of God’s presence, His presence as seen through a Christian lens? Klee’s idea of making visible here casts light on the reason that Christians can best reveal God through their art. *10 It is simple: the artist makes the internal visible through his art. Christ inhabits a Christian’s internal, and so a Christian’s art will make Christ visible.

But will Christ alone be made visible? Does He encompass all of the Christian’s internal? Yes and no. As Christians do not suddenly evince pure truth from the moment of justification, the effects of man’s fallen nature will also be revealed. The most common illustration of man’s total depravity is a glass of water that contains a drop of dye, representing original sin, dispersed all throughout, completely homogenized. Yet the same analogy can be employed for Christ’s redeeming power. Just as sin stained every fiber of man’s being, so also does Christ’s blood soak into every aspect of a Christian’s life. The process of sanctification is the changing of the water’s color. And so it is that, even while the sequelae of sin continue to appear in a Christian’s art, Christ’s redemption and Christ Himself should and are also made manifest.

This, of course, does not mean that a Christian’s art must be “nice,” or that it should take a falsely optimistic view of the world. *11 The world is fallen. Yet God still receives great glory in spite of this, and so a Christian’s art can reflect the reality of depravity with the same outcome. As Kandinsky asserted, art does not need to be “pretty” in a petty or superficial or even traditional sense. True or meaningful beauty *12 should be determined realistically, should be rated according to the reality in which man exists. This is perhaps easiest to notice in the literary arts. Death of a Salesman and especially Waiting for Godot, as pieces of literature, are excellent examples of this type of beauty. *13 In the visual arts, Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon also illustrates the same. *14 All of these works are, it is true, by artists well-established in their secularity, yet this does not mean that followers of Christ cannot use similar methods. A work of art that at first seems “ugly” could actually be a poignant and beautiful expression of truth that gives great glory to God.

Does this imply that Christians should consciously work to make their art a revelation? The answer is another “yes and no” paradox. Klee was correct, to a certain extent, in his ruminations on the role of the unconscious; it too has a part to play. The conscious side of art often is involved in determining the content of the opus, or at the least how the form relates to the message. As Theodore Prescott notes, this conscious aspect of art means that the artist’s identity is not necessarily dependent on his oeuvre, or vice versa. Yet the unconscious, while not being the source of revelation, can be an invaluable tool for the act of revelation itself. God can infuse an artist’s work with content that was hidden from the artist himself. It then flows out on its own. Abstract painting is an excellent study in this quality, paintings in the vein of Makoto Fujimura or Barnett Newman. *15 Poetry exemplifies this as well. André Malraux wrote “one cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say” (qtd. in Bartlett 707); yet this does not necessitate an exhaustive knowledge of what one is saying. Thus, Christians should be aware of and focused on the spiritual significance of their work, but need not stifle it with undue attention. A Christian does not need to fear the unconscious thoughts that go into his art.

Neither does he need to fear external influences. Creation is not limited only to the internal; Christ indwells the hearts of those whom He has called, but that is not the only place in which He is to be found. Because of the cycle of influence between the internal and the external, a crucial integrant of the nature of art is the relation between particular and universal. It is necessary for artists, the particulars, to correlate with the universal, which is God and His work in Creation. A Christian artist, benefiting from God’s direction in both the internal and external, has nothing to fear or lose.

A Christian does, however, have much to lose if he or she examines all that has been discussed above from a purely theoretical point of view. With even a cursory examination of our culture it becomes evident that these topics are highly relevant to everyday interaction with art, communication, and the world at large. Our society is increasingly influenced by the visual. Still, this is not in itself important or a matter of concern; the significance is contained in the nature of art and its ability to impact the culture in which it is created and for which it is created.

Because art does contain a spiritual dimension, the spiritual condition of a culture will be affected by it. With the arts’ growing engagement of further areas of our lives it is imperative to possess an understanding of the internal-external cycle discussed above. It is not limited to the “art world.” Francis Schaeffer, in The God Who Is There, wrote about his observation of the impact an exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam had on ordinary people, people who did not even really understand what they saw. In spite of their incomprehension, not one left unaffected.

The fact is, art will affect the surrounding culture. So what are Christians to do in light of this? The first steps should be simple awareness of art’s great influence, and of its spiritual element. The true calling, then, is to respond in a way consistent with the Christian mandate to be a good steward. A Christian, and a Christian artist in particular, ought to use his knowledge of art’s spirituality to alter the external in a positive way so that others will benefit.
The arts have been a dark realm for the past century and longer, and it is only recently that Christian involvement has become significant and has grown. Why has there been a gap? Where did Christians go? The simplest answer is that they ran away. As postmodernism first made itself known through the art scene (although it was not the popular, commonplace ideology until a bit later), many Christians were suddenly perplexed. That generation had been raised on arguments against modernism, which denied that anything had a spiritual quality of any sort; when the arts began to display a postmodern worldview by suddenly not only allowing but demanding spirituality, *16 the reversal caught Christian artists by surprise. When we realize that all most Christians knew were ways to cope with an anti-spiritual bias, their collective reaction is unexceptional in retrospect.

Many did what seemed safest: they simply continued to do everything the way they had been. But, as Father Gerald Vann points out, Christians are neither promised nor called to safety, but are commanded to engage the culture (5). The liberal and evangelical Christians at the time chose caution and familiarity, and it has been a struggle for Christian influence to stay abreast of the culture ever since. However, the tide is now turning. Postmodernism’s stipulation that spirituality be taken seriously is, ironically, partly to blame for reopening the door to Christianity’s involvement in the arts. Christian artists have begun to find themselves welcome in the discussion on religion and spirituality – not, of course, as any ultimate authority, but at least as participants in a forum that they can exploit for the Gospel. A forum that is rightfully their own.

Because secular artists like Paul Klee have had ideas that entered onto Christianity’s own turf, Christian artists ought to be able to easily dialogue on matters of art theory; in fact, as bearers of truth, they should be seen as authorities on matters of revelation in art. Only they are able to know absolutely the true nature, in its nuanced state, of what is being made visible. This knowledge cannot be left to stagnate. In a world that knows not the light, Christian artists can connect with the world through their art by ripping apart the bushel and making visible the light that is within them, by making visible the Light that is Jesus, the Christ.

Notes

*1 Referenced in further detail on page 7.

*2 There is a popular phrase, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” Art itself does not make or break a culture, that responsibility belongs to the artists behind it.

*3 In the biblical use of the word: here, “type” should be seen in the same light as “analogy,” as in “Adam was a type of Christ.” For more on this and a concise overview of the nature of man as created in the image of God, see Grudem 442-50.

*4 For further explanation of the idea of God and man’s continuous outpouring see Best 17-26; for information on the communicable attributes of God see Grudem 185-221.

*5 This is done in varying degrees; artwork or craftsmanship will most likely not reveal the artist or artisan’s entire reflection of God, just as not every book of the Bible contains all of God’s revelation. The imago Dei will certainly be seen in a piece of art, but could be present anywhere on a spectrum from a large to small amount.

*6 Symbology should not be confused with abstract art, even though it was the logical precursor. It is instead a modus operandi in which the subject of the artwork is a symbol, an object that has traditionally had a certain meaning attached to it. For examples, see Klee’s Death and Fire or Zitronin.

*7 For quality examples of pure abstraction, see Kandinsky’s Composition V, Mark Rothko’s No. 10, or Clyfford Still’s Untitled, 1953.

*8 More obvious examples would be art done by the Dadaists or some elements of the Pop art movement; see Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even for examples of Dada; see Jasper Johns’ White Flag or Figure 5 for examples of a synthesis between Neo-Dada and Pop art; see Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can or Marilyn for examples of Pop art.

*9 The action of making something abstract; not an artistic method, style, or movement.

*10 This is opposed to non-Christian artists, whose revelation of God will generally be more imperfect than that of Christian artists. Christians, in all areas outside of art as well, hold much more potential to display the different aspects and attributes of God.

*11 On the other end of the spectrum, neither does it mean that all Christian artists will produce the best art, or even that they will all necessarily produce great art.

*12 Beauty, by nature, cannot be exhaustively defined, of course. However, there are means by which it can be rated, and it is this quality of beauty that is under discussion here.

*13 These are both noted for their beauty in the areas of language and technical excellence, as well as character development (at least for Death of a Salesman, if not Waiting for Godot) and penetrating portrayals of human nature, particular when it evinces the effects of the Fall.

*14 Again, a display of human nature and the double sided quality people have: some of the prostitutes look clean and attractive, while others among them are hideous, and still others have elements of both.

*15 See Fujimura’s Water Flames – Vermillion I, Newman’s Adam or The Stations of the Cross series.

*16 This was not a timid request; as Kandinsky wrote in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, “at those times when the soul tends to be choked by materialist lack of belief, art becomes purposeless…” (74; see page 7 of this paper for further context). The materialistic foundation of Modernism appalled many artists like Kandinsky around this time, who placed great import on spirituality.

Works Cited

“André Malraux.” Qt. 10. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. 16th ed. 1992.

Best, Harold M. Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2003.

Dyrness, William A. Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue. Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001.

Fujimura, Makoto. “That Final Dance.” It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God. Ed. Ned Bustard. Baltimore: Square Halo, 2000. 49-60.

Giedion-Welcker, Carola. Paul Klee. Trans. Alexander Gode. New York: Viking, 1952.

Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994.

Haftmann, Werner. The Mind and Work of Paul Klee. New York: Praeger, 1954.

The Holy Bible: Authorized King James Version. Grand Rapids: World, 1989.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular 1912. New York: Wittenborn, 1947.

Klee, Paul. Paul Klee on Modern Art. Trans. and comp. Paul Findlay. New York: Faber, 1941.

---. Schöpferische Konfession. Ed. Kasimir Edschmid, 1920. The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings and Writings by Paul Klee. Trans. and comp. Norbert Guterman. New York: Abrams, 1959. 5-10.

Prescott, Theodore. “Who Do You Say I Am? Artist & Christian: Two Identities, One Person?” It Was Good: Making Art to the Glory of God. Ed. Ned Bustard. Baltimore: Square Halo, 2000. 89-111.

Schaeffer, Francis A. Art & the Bible: Two Essays. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1973.

---. The God Who Is There: Speaking Historic Christianity into the Twentieth Century. Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1968.

Sharma, Omprakash. Art in Art. Delhi, Ind.: Abhinov, 1994.

Vann, Gerald. “Modern Culture and Christian Renewal.” Image. 52 (2007): 3-6.

On Nationalism, Allegiance, and the Artist's Place

2007-03-18T16:46:00.000-04:00

"- The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."

Yes, and to be "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life."

Excerpts taken from pages 220 and 240 of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Poem by Roger Williams

2007-02-17T23:05:00.000-05:00

The Visitation

1. The Distant God

You were remedial, you are a keepsake,
the embodiment of what was never laid to rest,
the body that was never found.
You went to pieces
(the dignified indignities name names).
It seems you were always
where you were wanted
but never where you belonged,
and you are never who you would have been
but who we would have you be.
We must live long if we are ever to live up to
all we have to live down.

2. The Fallen God

I had been expecting someone resolute
or at least a resolution.
I thought I would rise up
as a comeuppance
just as I feared
John Wesley’s fear –
not of falling into hell
but of falling into nothing.
It may not be faith
but I do believe
if the world has fallen
it has fallen no further.

3. The Proximate God

It seemed to me to live betwixt –
in flues and caves
and the linings of the earth.
(I have heard it called inner spirit
as if there could be any other.)
I must have passed through it for years
without knowing it was there,
different or indifferent,
as sheer as the difference
between the flower
and the efflorescence,
the bloom and the bud.

4. The Risen God

When I heard God was dead I ran to the window.
I grant that the mind is stunned and flesh is loaned
but those are circumstances, not life itself.
Even as announcement passes for annunciation
and senses fade as they fill, the dead unreel.
I would swear they didn’t pass through life,
life passed through them.
On good days I re-believe – they fall to earth
and wake to think this is their home and realm.
Wraiths are strung with brawn, colts gambol
in the old sweet fields, maidens dream in the butteries.
You could almost call it sublime.

– as appeared in Image, Number 52.

Excerpt and a Poem: "Cry, The Beloved Country" & "A Man in His Life"

2006-11-30T23:50:00.000-05:00

We do not know, we do not know. We shall live from day to day, and put more locks on the doors, and get a fine fierce dog when the fine fierce bitch next door has pups, and hold on to our handbags more tenaciously; and the beauty of the trees by night, and the raptures of lovers under the stars, these things we shall forego. We shall forego the coming home drunken through the midnight streets, and the evening walk over the star-lit veld. We shall be careful, and knock this off our lives, and knock that off our lives, and hedge ourselves about with safety and precaution. And our lives will shrink, but they shall be the lives of superior beings; and we shall live with fear, but at least it will not be a fear of the unknown. And the conscience shall be thrust down; the light of life shall not be extinguished, but be put under a bushel, to be preserved for a generation that will live by it again, in some day not yet come; and how it will come, and when it will come, we shall not think about at all.

- Cry, The Beloved Country, by Alan Paton

A Man in His Life

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest,
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
What he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and in its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches already pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

- Yehuda Amichai

Excerpt From 'The Crossing'

2006-09-03T18:53:00.000-04:00

He leaned and stubbed out the cigarette in a clay bowl on the table.

I am here because of a certain man. I came to retrace his steps. Perhaps to see if there were not some alternative course. What was here to be found was not a thing. Things separate from their stories have no meaning. They are only shapes. Of a certain size and color. A certain weight. When their meaning has become lost to us they no longer have even a name. The story on the other hand can never be lost from its place in the world for it is that place. And that is what was to be found here. The corrido. The tale. And like all corridos it ultimately told one story only, for there is only one to tell.

The cats shifted and stirred, the fire creaked in the stove. Outside in the abandoned village the profoundest silence.

What is the story? the boy said.

In the town of Caborca on the Altar River there was a man who lived there who was an old man. He was born in Caborca and in Caborca he died. Yet he lived once in this town. In Huisiachepic.

What does Caborca know of Huisiachepic, Huisiachepic of Caborca? They are different worlds, you must agree. Yet even so there is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is necessary. Every last thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can ever be done with the telling. Of the telling there is no end. And whether in Caborca or in Huisiachepic or in whatever other place by whatever other name or by no name at all I say again all tales are one. Rightly heard all tales are one.

The boy looked into the dark disc of liquid in his cup that was not coffee. He looked at the man and he looked at the cats. They seemed to be sleeping to a cat and it occurred to him that the man’s voice was to them no novelty and that he must talk to himself in the absence of any godsent ear from the outer world. Or talk to the cats.

What about the man that used to live here? he said.

Yes. This man’s parents were killed by a cannonshot in the church at Caborca where they had gone with others to defend themselves against the outlaw American invaders. Perhaps you know something of the history of this country. When the stones and rubble were cleared away the boy lay in the arms of his dead mother. The boy’s father lay nearby and he tried to speak. They raised him up. The blood ran from his mouth. They bent to hear what he would say but he said nothing. His chest was crushed and he breathed blood and he lifted one hand as if in farewell and then he died.

The boy was brought to this town. Of Caborca he remembered little. He remembered his father. Certain things. He remembered his father lifting him in his arms to see puppets performing in the alameda. Of his mother he remembered less. Perhaps nothing. The particulars of his life are strange particulars. This is a story of misfortune. Or so it would seem. The end is not yet told.

Here he grew to manhood. In this town. Here he married a wife and all in God’s good time was himself blessed with a son.

In the first week of May in the year eighteen eighty-seven this man takes his son and sets out on a journey. He will go to Bavispe and there leave the boy in the care of an uncle who is also the boy’s padrino. From Bavispe he will continue on to Batopite where he will arrange for the sale of sugar from certain estancias to the south. In Batopite he will stay the night. This is a journey i have thought of many times. This journey and this man. He is youthful. Perhaps not thirty years of age. He rides a mule. The boy rides in the bow of the saddle before him. It is in the springtime and the wildflowers are blooming in the meadows along the river. He has promised to return with a gift for his young wife. He sees her standing there. She waves goodbye to him as he sets out. He has no likeness of her other than that which he carries in his heart. Think of that. Perhaps she is crying. Standing there watching him out of sight. Standing in the very shadow of this church that is doomed to fall. Life is a memory, then it is nothing. All law is writ in a seed.

The man had arched his fingers above the table to place the scene. He passed one hand from left to right to show where things had been and how it must have been with the sun and with the rider or with the woman where she stood. As if he’d shape out in the present air the spaces where such things had been.

At Bavispe there was a fair. A traveling circus. And the man held his young son aloft under the paper lanterns as his father before him so that the child might see. A clown, a magician, a man who held up serpents in his naked hands. The next morning he departed alone to Batopite as told, leaving the child behind. And there in Bavispe the child died, crushed in the terremoto. The padrino held the boy in his arms and wept. The town of Batopite was spared. Even today you can see the great crack in the mountain wall across the river like an enormous laugh. And that was all the news they had they had of the disaster in Batopite. Nothing else was known. Returning to Bavispe the following day this man met a traveler afoot who told him the news. He could not believe the man’s words and he urged the mule on and when he arrived in Bavispe all was in ruin as the traveler had told and death was everywhere in great abundance.

He entered the town already in terror of what he should find. He heard gunshots. Dogs ran out that had been at the bodies in the rubble and scampered past him and men with guns ran out and stood in the street shouting. In the alameda the dead lay on mats of river reed and old women dressed in black walked to and fro among the rows with green fronds to keep the flies away. The padrino came to him and wept at the mule’s stirrup and could not speak but only took the reins in his own hands and led him sobbing. Through the alameda where lay dead merchants and farmers and the wives of merchants and farmers. Dead schoolgirls. Lying on reeds in the alameda of Bavispe. A dead dog in a carnival costume. A dead clown. Youngest of them all was his son crushed and lifeless. He dismounted and there he knelt and clasped the bloody ruin of the child to his breast. The year is eighteen eighty-seven.

What thoughts must have been his? Who cannot feel his anguish? He returns to Huisiachepic bearing across the mule’s haunches the corpse of the child with which God had blessed his house. Waiting for him in Huisiachepic is the mother of the child and this is the gift he brings her.

Such a man is like a dreamer who wakes from a dream of grief to a greater sorrow yet. All that he loves is now become a torment to him. The pin has been pulled from the axis of the universe. Whatever one takes one’s eye from threatens to flee away. Such a man is lost to us. He moves and speaks. But he is himself less than the merest shadow among all that he beholds. There is no picture of him possible. The smallest mark upon the page exaggerates his presence.

Who would seek the company of such a man? That which speaks in us one to another and is beyond our words and is beyond our words or beyond the lifting or the turning of a hand to say that this is the way my heart is, or this. That thing was lost in him. So.

The boy watched him. His eyes were bright and he had placed one hand palm upward on the table as if within it lay the very thing lost. He closed his fist upon it.

We lose sight of him for some years. He abandons his wife in the ruins of this town. Many friends are dead. Of his wife nothing more is known. He is in Guatemala. He is in Trinidad. How could he return? Had he but saved some part of the burial of his past then perhaps there would have been no need to come with flowers and grief. And yet as it was there was no part of him left to do so. You see?

Men spared their lives in great disasters often feel in their deliverance the workings of fate. The hand of Providence. This man saw in himself again what he’d perhaps forgot. That long ago he’d been elected out of the common lot of men. For what he was asked now to reckon with was that he’d been called forth twice out of the ashes, out of the dust and rubble. For what? You must not suppose such elections to be happy ones for they are not. In his sparing he found himself severed from both antecedents and posterity alike. He was but some brevity of a being. He was a trunk without root or branch. Perhaps there was yet even then a moment when he would have gone to the church to pray. But the church lay in pieces on the ground. And in the darkened chancel within him had the ground also shifted, also cracked. There also was a ruin. A waste had opened in his soul and perhaps he saw with some new clarity how kike the church he was himself but a thing of clay and perhaps he thought that the church would not be raised again as to do such work requires first that God be in men’s hearts for it is there alone that it truly has its being and there failing no power can bring it back again. He became a heretic. So.

After many a youthful wandering this man appeared at last in the capital and there he worked for some years. He was a bearer of messages. He carried a satchel of leather and canvas secured with a lock. He had no way to know what the messages said nor had he any curiosity concerning them. The stone facades of the buildings among which he went on his daily rounds were pitted with the marks of old gunfire. In places above the reach of people to collect them there yet remained smeared here and there the thin dark medallions of lead which had been rounds from machinegun emplacements in the streets. The rooms in which he stood waiting were rooms from which men in high office had been dragged to their execution. Need one say he was a man without politics? He was simply a messenger. He had no faith in the power of men to act wisely on their own behalf. It was his view rather that every act soon eluded the grasp of its propagator to be swept away in a clamorous tide of unforeseen consequence. He believed that in the world was another agenda, another order, and with this power lay whatever brief he may have held. In the meantime he waited to be called to he knew not what.

The man leaned back, he looked up at the boy and smiled. Do not misunderstand me, he said. The events of the world can have no separate life from the world. And yet the world itself can have no temporal view of things. It can have no cause to favor certain enterprises over others. The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one. There is no favoring, you see. How could there be? At whose behest? This man did not cease to believe in God. Nor did he come to have some modern view of God. There was God and there was the world. He knew that the world would forget him but that God could not. And yet that was the very thing he wished for.

Easy to see that naught save sorrow could bring a man to such a view of things. And yet a sorrow for which there can be no help is no sorrow. It is some dark sister traveling in sorrow’s clothing. Men do not turn from God so easily you see. Not so easily. Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from. To imagine otherwise is to imagine the unspeakable. It was never that this man ceased to believe in God. No. It was rather that he began to believe terrible things of Him.

By now he is a pensioner in Mexico. He has no friends. By day he sits in the park. The very ground under his feet is composted with the blood of the ancients. He watches passersby. He has become convinced that those aims and purposes with which they imagine their movements to be invested are in reality but a means to describe them. He believes that their movements are the subject of larger movements in patterns unknown to them and these in turn to others. He finds no comfort in these speculations I can tell you. He sees the world slipping away. All about him an enormous emptiness without echo. It was at this time that he began to pray. From no very pure motive perhaps. But then what would such a motive look like? Can God be cajoled? Can He be pled with or asked to see the reason in one’s argument? Can anything from his own hand do aught to please Him more than had it acted otherwise? Can He be surprised? In his heart this man had already begun to plot against God but he did not know it yet. He would not know it until he began to dream of Him.

Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied. Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him bent at His work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of His own presence. Weaving the world. In His hands it flowed out of nothing and in His hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly. Endlessly. So. Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to His own selfordinated duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was a thread that was he and he woke weeping.

On a certain day he rose and put his few possessions into an old valise he’d kept beneath his bed these years and descended the stairwell for the last time. He carried his bible beneath his arm. Like the peregrine minister of some paltry sect. In three days time he was in the town of Caborca of sacred memory. Standing there by the river squinting up in the sunshine where the dome of the broken transept of the church of La Purísima Concepción de Nuestra Señora de Caborca floated in the pure desert air. So.

The man shook his head slowly. He’d taken up his makings from the table and begun to roll another cigarette. Very thoughtfully. As if its construction were a puzzle to him. He rose and went to the stove and lit the cigarette with the same blackened splinter of wood and inspected the fire and shut the stove door and returned to the table and sat as before.

Perhaps you know the town of Caborca. The church is very beautiful. By the flooding of the river through the years much has been destroyed. The sanctuary and two bell towers. The rear of the nave and most of the south transept. What remains of it stands on three legs, so to speak. The dome hangs in the sky like an apparition and so it has hung for many years. Most improbably. No mason could devise such a structure. For years the people of Caborca waited for it to fall. It was like a thing unfinished in their lives. Events of doubtful outcome were made subject to its standing. It was said of certain old and venerable men that when they died the dome would fall and they died and their children died and the dome floated on in the pure air until at last it came to bear such import in the minds of the people of that town that they scarce would speak of it at all.

This was what he came to. Perhaps he did not even consider the question as to how he had been brought to this place. Yet it was the very thing he sought. Beneath that perilous roof he threw down his pallet and made his fire and there he made ready to receive that which had eluded him. By whatever name. There in the ruins of that church out of whose dust and rubble he had been raised up seventy years before and sent forth to live his life. Such as it was. Such as it had become. Such as it would be.

He drew slowly on the cigarette. He studied the rising smoke. As if in its slow uncoiling lay the lineaments of the history he told. Dream or memory of builded stone. He tapped the ash into the bowl.

The people of the town came and they stood about. At a certain distance. They were interested to see what God would do with such a man. Perhaps he was a crazy person. Perhaps a saint. He paid them no mind. He paced and muttered into his bible and he thumbed the pages. Overhead in the vault were frescoes depicting the very events he pondered. On the west wall of the dome the clay nests of golondrinas mortared up among the fading vestments of the saints. From time to time in his circling he’d pause and hold his book aloft and thump at a page with his finger and address his God at large. This is what they saw. An old hermit. A man with no history. Some said a holy man come among them and some a lunatic and many were scandalized who’d not heard God addressed before in such a manner. Not seen God bearded in His very house.

It seemed that what he wished, this man, was to strike some colindancia with his Maker. Assess boundaries and metes. See that lines were drawn and respected. Who could think such a reckoning possible? The boundaries of the world are those of God’s devising. With God there can be no reckoning. With what would one bargain?

They sent for the priest. The priest came and spoke with the man. The priest outside the church. The solitary parishioner within. Beneath the shadow of the perilous vault. The priest spoke to this misguided man of the nature of God and of the spirit and the will and of the meaning of grace in men’s lives and the old man heard him out and nodded his head at certain salient parts and when the priest was done this old man raised his book aloft and shouted at the priest. You know nothing. That is what he shouted. You know nothing.

The people looked at the priest. To see how he would respond. The priest studied the man and then went away again. The conviction with which the old man had spoke had jarred his heart and he weighed the old man’s words and was troubled because of course the old man’s words were true ones. And if the old man knew that then what else must he know?

He returned the next day. And the day after. People came to attend. Scholars of the town. To hear what was said on either side. The old man at his pacing in the shadow of his vault. The priest outside. The old man thumbing his book with a terrible dexterity. Like a money counter. The priest countering from those high canonical principles to which he gave such latitude. Both of them heretics to the bone.

He leaned forward and stubbed out the cigarette. He held up a finger. As if to countenance caution. The sun had entered the room by the south window and certain of the cats had risen to stretch, to rearrange themselves.

With this difference, he said. With this difference. The priest wagered nothing. He’d nothing at hazard. He stood on no such ground as the crazed old man. Under no such shadow. Rather he chose to stand outside the critical edifice of his own church and by this choice he sacrificed his words of their power to witness.

The old man by whatever instinct stood on ground at once blessed and fraughtful. This was his choice, this his gesture. All agreed his testimony was a powerful one. The strength of his conviction was plain to them. In his words there was little measure and little of restraint. In his new life the libertine was out. Do you see? By his arrogance he had engaged the living thing. On that perilous ground he had made of himself the only witness there can ever be and if some saw in his eyes the rapture of madness what else would one look for who had enjoined the God of the universe on ground of that God’s own choosing? For that is always the nature of such ground, perilous and transitory. And it is indeed so that you must make your case there or nowhere.

And the priest? A man of broad principles. Of liberal sentiments. Even a generous man. Something of a philosopher. Yet one might say that his way through the world was so broad it scarcely made a path at all. He carried within himself a great reverence for the world, this priest. He heard the voice of the Deity in the murmur of the wind in the trees. Even the stones were sacred. He was a reasonable man and he believed that there was love in his heart.

There was not. Nor does God whisper through the trees. His voice is not to be mistaken. When men hear it they fall to their knees and their souls are riven and they cry out to Him and there is no fear in them but only that wildness of heart that springs from such longing and they cry out to stay his presence for they know at once that while godless men may live well enough in their exile those to whom He has spoken can contemplate no life without Him but only darkness and despair. Trees and stones are no part of it. So. The priest in the very generosity of his spirit stood in mortal peril and knew it not. He believed in a boundless God without center or circumference. By this very formlessness he’d sought to make God manageable. This was his colindancia. In his grandness he had ceded all terrain. And in this colindancia God had no say at all.

To see God everywhere is to see Him nowhere. We go from day to day, one day much like the rest, and then on a certain day all unannounced we come upon a man or we see this man who is perhaps known to us and is a man like all men but who makes a certain gesture of himself that is like the piling of one’s goods upon an altar an in this gesture we recognize that which is buried in our hearts and is never truly lost to us nor ever can be and it is this moment, you see. This same moment. It is this which we long for and are afraid to seek and which alone can save us.

So. The priest went away. He returned to the town. The old man to his testament. To his pacing and his argufying. He’d become something like a barrister. He poured over the record not for the honor and glory of his Maker but rather to find against Him. To seek out in nice subtleties some darker nature. False favors. Small deceptions. Promises forsaken or a hand too quickly raised. To make cause against Him, you see. He understood what the priest could not. That what we seek is the worthy adversary. For we strike out to fall flailing through demons of wire and crepe and we long for something of substance to oppose us. Something to contain us or to stay our hand. Otherwise there were no boundaries to our own being and we too must extend our claims until we lose all definition. Until we must be swallowed up at last by the very void to which we wished to stand opposed.

The church at Caborca continued to stand as before. Even the priest could see that the ragged pensioner encamped in the rubble was all of parishioner it was ever likely to have. He went away. He left the old man to his claim there under the shadow of that dome which some said could be seen to yaw visibly in the wind. He tried to smile at the old man’s posture. What news of God that this church should stand or fall? What more than the wind’s whim whether the faltering dome should prove sanctuary or sepulcher to a deranged old anchorite? Nothing would be changed. Nothing known. In the end all would be as before.

Acts have their being in the witness. Without him who can speak of it? In the end one could even say that the act is nothing, the witness all. It may be that the old man saw certain contradictions in his position. If men were the drones he imagined them to be then had he not rather been appointed to take up his brief by the very Being against whom it was directed? As has been the case with many a philosopher that which at first seemed an insurmountable objection to his theories came gradually to be seen as a necessary component to them and finally the centerpiece itself. He saw the world pass into nothing in the very multiplicity of its instancing. Only the witness stood firm. And the witness to that witness. For what is deeply true is true also in men’s hearts and it can therefore never be mistold through all and any tellings. This then was his thought. If the world was a tale who but the witness could give it life? Where else could it have its being? This was the view of things that began to speak to him. And he began to see in God a terrible tragedy. That the existence of the Deity lay imperiled for want of this simple thing. That for God there could be no witness. Nothing against which He terminated. Nothing by way of which His being could be announced to Him. Nothing to stand apart from and to say I am this and that is other. Where that is I am not. He could create everything save that which would say Him no.

Now we may speak of madness. Now it is safe to do so. Perhaps one could say that only a madman would pace and rend his clothes over the accountability of God. What then to make of this man with claim that God had preserved him not once but twice out of the ruins of the earth solely in order to raise up a witness against Himself?

The fire ticked in the stove. He leaned back in his chair. He pressed the tips of his fingers together five to five and flexed his hands thoughtfully against each other. As if testing the strength of some membranous proposition. A large gray cat came up the table and stood looking at him. It had one ear missing almost entirely and its teeth hung down outside. The man pushed back slightly from the table and the cat stepped down into his lap and curled up and subsided and turned its head and gravely regarded the boy across the table in the manner of a consultant. A cat of counsel. The man placed one hand upon it as if to secure it there. He looked at the boy. The task of the narrator is not an easy one, he said. He appears to be required to choose his tale from among the many that are possible. But of course that is not the case. The case is rather to make many of the one. Always the teller must be at pains to devise against his listener’s claim – perhaps spoken, perhaps not – that he has heard the tale before. He sets forth the categories into which the listener will wish to fit the narrative as he hears it. But he understands that the narrative is itself in fact no category but is rather the category of all categories for there is nothing that falls outside its purview. All is telling. Do not doubt it.

The priest visited the old man no more, the story stood unfinished. The old man of course in no wise ceased to pace and rail. He at least had no plans for forgetting the injustices of his past life. The ten thousand insults. The catalog of woes. He had the mind of the injured party, you see. Nothing was lost to him. Of the priest what can be said? As with all priests his mind had become clouded by the illusion of its proximity to God. What priest will denounce his robes even to save himself? And yet the old man was not so far from his thoughts and one day they sent for him and they told him that the old man had fallen ill. That he lay on his pallet and poke to no one. Not even God. The priest went to see him and it was as they said. He stood without the transept and addressed the old man. He asked if he were indeed ill. The old man lay staring at the fading frescoes. At the coming and going of the golindrinas. He cast his eyes upon the priest and his look was haggard and hollow and he looked away again. The priest seeing opportunity in the weakness of others in the human way took up where he’d left off those weeks before and began to disclaim to the old man concerning the goodness of God. The old man clapped his hands to his ears but the priest only drew nearer. At last the old man staggered up from his pallet and began to scrabble up stones from the rubble and to pelt the priest with them and so drove him away.

He returned in three days time and spoke again to the old man but the old man no longer heard him. The food, the pitcher of milk – which the people of Caborca had become accustomed to leave for him at the edge of the shadowline – these remained untouched. God had outwitted him, of course. How could there have been another possibility? In the end it seemed He’d turned even the old man’s heretical usurpations to His own service. The sense of election which had at once sustained and tormented the pensioner these years now seemed fulfilled in a way he’d not foreseen and before his troubled gaze stood the truth in its awful purity. He saw that he was indeed elect and that the God of the universe was yet more terrible than men reckoned. He could not be eluded nor yet set aside nor circumscribed about and it was true that He did indeed contain all else within Him even in the reasoning of the heretic else He were no God at all.

The priest was greatly moved by what he saw and this surprised him. In the end he even overcame his fears and ventured in beneath the dome of the ruinous church to the old man’s side. Perhaps this gave the old man heart. Perhaps even at this late juncture he thought the priest might bring the structure toppling down where he himself had failed. But the dome of course only hung in the air and after a while the old man began to speak. He took the priest’s hand as of the hand of a comrade and he spoke of his life and what it had been and what it had become. He told the priest what he had learned. In the end he said that no man can see his life until his life is done and where then to make a mending? It is God’s grace alone that we are bound by this thread of life. He held the priest’s hand in his own and he bade the priest look at their joined hands and he said see the likeness. This flesh is but a memento, yet it tells the true. Ultimately every man’s path is every other’s. There are no separate journeys for there are no separate men to make them. All men are one and there is no other tale to tell. But the priest only took his telling for confession and when the old man was done he began the words of absolution. At this the old man seized his arm midway in its crossing there in the still air by his deathbedside and stayed him with his eyes. He let go the priest’s other hand and raised his own. Like a man going on a journey. Save yourself, he hissed. Save yourself. Then he died.

Outside in the weedgrown streets all was silence. The man passed his cupped hand over the cat’s head, sleeking back its ears. The good, the damaged. The cat lay with its forepaws curled against its chest, its eyes half closed. This is my warrior cat, the man said. Pero es el más dulce de todo. Y el más simpatico.

He looked up. He smiled. The storyteller’s task is not so simple. You will have guessed by now of course who was the priest. Or perhaps not so much priest as advocate of priestly things. Priestly views. This priest for a while yet would try to cling to his calling but in the end he was no longer able to bear the look in the eyes of those who came to him for counsel. What counsel had he to give, this man of words? He’d no answers to the questions the old messenger had brought from the capital. The more he attempted even to formulate them the more they eluded his every representation and finally he came to see that they were not the old pensioner’s queries at all but his own.

The old man was buried in the churchyard at Caborca among those of his own blood. Such was the working out of God’s arrangement with this man. Such was his colindancia and such perhaps is every man’s. at his dying he had told the priest that he’d been wrong in his every reckoning of God and yet had come at last to an understanding of Him anyway. He saw that his demands upon God resided intact and unspoken also in even the simplest heart. His contention. His argument. They had their being in the humblest history. For the path of the world also is one and not many and there is no alter course in any least part of it for that course is fixed by God and contains all consequence in the way of its going and outside of that going there is neither path nor consequence nor anything at all. There never was. In the end what the priest came to believe was that the truth may often be carried about by those who themselves remain all unaware of it. They bear that which has weight and substance and yet for them has no name whereby it may be evoked or called forth. They go about ignorant of the true nature of their condition, such are the wiles of truth and such its stratagems. Then one day in that casual gesture, that subtle movement of divestiture, they wreak all unknown upon some ancillary soul a havoc such that that soul is forever changed, forever wrenched about in the road it was intended upon and set instead upon a road heretofore unknown to it. This new man will hardly know the hour of his turning nor the source of it. He will himself have done nothing that such great good befall him. Yet he will have the very thing, you see. Unsought for and undeserved. He will have in his possession that elusive freedom which men seek with such unending desperation.

What the priest saw at last was that the lesson of a life can never be its own. Only the witness has power to take its measure. It is lived for the other only. The priest therefore saw what the anchorite could not. That God needs no witness. Neither to Himself nor against. The truth is rather that if there were no God then there could be no witness for there could be no identity to the world but only each man’s opinion of it. The priest saw that there is no man who is elect because there is no man who is not. To God every man is a heretic. The heretic’s first act is to name his brother. So that he may step free of him. Every word we speak is a vanity. Every breath taken that does not bless is an affront. Bear closely with me now. There is another who will hear what you never spoke. Stones themselves are made of air. What they have power to crush never lived. In the end we shall all of us be only what we have made of God. For nothing is real save His grace.

- excerpt from The Crossing, book II of Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy

Two Great Books

2006-09-01T15:08:00.000-04:00

...He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

Those lines are from All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy. I read it while I was at the beach, and it was excellent. Poetically written with beautiful language, yet still a depiction of a raw reality - similar to Peace Like a River, by Leif Enger, but even more so...don't let the title fool you. I highly recommend. The story follows a boy of sixteen, who with his seventeen year-old friend journeys from Texas to Mexico on horseback in 1949. The boy should be 40...both because of how he faces life, and because of his life. But the plot is almost secondary to the emotions it conjours up within the reader...all throughout there is a great sadness or gloom that never breaks forth. It builds but never really climaxes (that's an arguable point, but that's how I felt). I have never read a book that matches so well the pitch of true despair, breaking the glass wall that we put up against what we read. Simple resignation...the reader asks what purpose is, and is told it has no nature at all. My heart wept.
Read it.

I also just finished reading The Great Snow, by Henry Morton Robinson. Written in 1947, it tells a tale of the entrapment of a wealthy lawyer, his wife and son, and his sister in law and her painter boyfriend in the lawyer's manor during a 20 day snow storm. It is a modernist work, and so has at times a little nihilistic edge, especially when it comes to love...however, it often rises far above the mere materialism of modernistic thought. It is extremely well written and offers in many occasions fresh insights into matters ranging from the place of art and the role of the artist to the simple, never-ending industry of humanity and its will to survive. "The people are like blinkered nags trotting over mean cobblestones - but nags with a strain of the old Winged Horse in them still. The artist's job is to remind them of those forsaken pastures on the slopes of Helicon. He must tutor their limited senses, purge their appetites, and teach them how to live, not at the base but at the peak of life." Well rounded characters create dialogue such as that, and there is no authorial intrusion of which I can speak. How much Robinson agrees or disagrees with any of the characters, how much he believes of what they say, how much they speak for him is hard to tell. Tightly woven, all incidents, all words spoken relate to each other and symbolize something...to say what would be a sad spoiler, though. Read it.

There are some cautions...I mentioned the tint of nihilism given to matters of love, but as stated above, it is difficult to determine the weight or truth value given to this perception. The book includes a mentionable amount of sexual activity, but not at the, ah, descriptive level as say a Tom Clancy scene. And unlike Clancy, none of it is gratuitous. Again, everything is so tightly woven that it needs to be there for characters to develop and for the author to make his point. Scattered language is included, but no constant strings of it fly about, and it never rises above an occasional "goddamn."

All of the above cautions are redeemed by the excellent quality of writing. Read it.

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. VIII

2006-08-02T16:54:00.000-04:00

Read this and tremble.

"....But if the divinity is true it is certainly terribly revolutionary. That a good man may have his back to the wall is no more that we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents forever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point - and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of the phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, 'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.' No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

- GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, ch. VIII