Patience; and Shuffle

One Body

2010-02-03T12:29:00.000-08:00

"It must needs be that there is an opposition in all things. If it were not so...all things must needs be a compound in one: wherefore if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having neither life nor death."
-Lehi

"For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of parturition between us...for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace...From whom the whole body fitly joined together, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love."
-Paul

Lehi and Paul both speak of the idea of "one body," but while Lehi's vision is of an undead zombie-like being, Paul praises the peace and perfection, the edification in love. Why are they so different?

Originally, we are one body but to stay that way is a dead end. This is the body Lehi speaks of, our premortal formlessness where we are everything and nothing, where light and dark mush together and all is fuzzy. The endless, unified ocean of precreation. We must break free from this infantile urobouros and enter the world of opposition in order to come to know ourselves and to grow.

In this world of opposition that Lehi sketches, everything is fragmented and alienated. We are broken to bits by this world, divided from God, from others, from ourselves. It is a painful process, but it's through this that we come to know who we are, who we were, to discover all that was undifferentiated in us before and bring it to light. We go through life and come upon moments of recognition, when we realize that we've discovered something that we never knew was lost until we found it. People, places, art, music, poems, animals, anything can trigger these startling recognitions, and give us a glimpse of a piece of ourselves.

And so we wander through the world, gathering ourselves back together, like Egyptian Isis painstakingly gathering up the body parts of her dismembered husband. And as we piece these fragments back together we become whole again, a whole body, the twain made one. This is the redeemed body that Paul speaks of. We restore the original unity, not through a regression into comforting oblivion, but through the active union of the parts of ourselves we have discovered and reorganized. William Blake called it Organized Innocence--the edenic, golden innocence of infancy is lost to us forever, and for good reason. The new Innocence is achieved through gathering, loving, recognizing, seeking, organizing, creating.

The life-in-death and death-in-life body of Lehi is our unsustainable past; the reintegrated, self-aware Body of Paul is our possibility.

Mountain

2010-01-22T11:31:00.000-08:00

His eyes were as a flame of fire; the hair of his head was white like the pure snow; his countenance shone above the brightness of the sun; and his voice was as the sound of the rushing of great waters
-Doctrine & Covenants 110:3

In Joseph Smith's vision of God, God is depicted like a snow-capped mountain in spring. His head, His mind, contains stored energy, snow, frozen thought, heated by the fires of the sun and melted, transformed into the mighty rushing of great waters that is His voice. He is the God of nature. The God of eternal stasis (immovability of the mountain) and eternal mutability (ever-changing seasons, water cycles, etc.), the interplay of which creates Eternal Life. The Fountain of Living Waters. Stillness, frigidity, and warmth, combine to create energy, eternal delight. The voice of the Lord is action and a source of eternal satisfaction for our thirst, for our longing.
The Lord contains opposites, and created a world of opposition. It's the tension between opposites that produces the energy of creation, the movement of Life.The Lord is still at His center, moving and spinning quickly in His actions and exterior.

Moses sees the Lord as a mountain shrouded in clouds, when he appears on Sinai. The certainty of the mountain and the nebulous unknown of the clouds.

Top 30 Movies of the Decade!

2010-01-07T17:35:00.000-08:00

In no particular order, my 30 favorite films of the decade.

Subject to change without notice.

Spirited Away/Ponyo

Let the Right One In

No Country For Old Men

Where the Wild Things Are

Pan’s Labyrinth

Bee Season

Synecdoche, New York

Little Otik

Grizzly Man

Saraband

Sita Sings the Blues

The Fountain

Big Fish

My Winnipeg

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

The Fall

The Hurt Locker

The Departed

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story

Hot Fuzz

Gran Torino

Happiness of the Katakuris/Gozu

Once

The Proposition

Assassination of Jesse James

Happy-Go-Lucky

There Will Be Blood

Blood Tea and Red String

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Books Read in 2009

2009-12-17T15:25:00.001-08:00

Steve's 2009 book montage

Steve's favorite books »

Psalm 50

2009-12-13T21:12:00.000-08:00

God shines from the perfection of beauty

God calls the earth, and the earth calls back, responding with its own abundance of beauty

Deep calls unto deep, beauty calls unto beauty

Beauty is worship.

God knows all the fowls of the mountains, the beasts of a thousand hills.

The beasts and fowl glorify God through their lives, by fulfilling the measure of their creation, not by sacrifice.

God doesn't need gifts--sing for him with your life, as the birds do instinctively.

Beauty is worship.

Top 10 MESSIAEN

2009-12-10T07:55:00.000-08:00

To celebrate Olivier Messiaen's 101st birthday today, here are 10 of my favorite Messiaen works, generously supplied by Youtube:

1. Quartet for the End of Time (1941)

2. Catalogue d'Oiseaux (1958)

3. Des Canyons aux Etoiles... (1974)

4. Saint Francois d'Assisse (1984)

5. Turangalila Symphony (1948)

6. Vingt Regards: 20 Contemplations of the Christ Child (1944)

7. Chronochromie (1960)

8. Livre d'Orgue (1952)

9. Eclairs sur l'au dela (1992)

10. Harawi: Song of Love and Death (1945)

Citric Acid

2009-05-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

What arguments of pain can withstand

The mere sight of a lemon-tree in the afternoon

Which represents, I've been told,

The love (towards whom, I was not informed)

Of the Virgin Mary? Why

This should be so, I do not know,

Though at times I have felt love flood

The mouth with a gill-gilding tartness,

And I remember me the hard yellow love

Buzzing between unripe virgins--

Lemons were also known to

Cancel poison ingested

From eating off ornate

Silver platters.

Farewell

2009-04-30T16:28:00.000-07:00

The wharf quails a shaggy fist
At the sea's salt-searing whips,
Which tear at the shores,
Lick and lave the leewardings,
As seashells fill up with blood,
And the cormorants' cry
Pierces the leaden air,
Cleaves a line and bites it deep
So the edges burr--
Engrave this knowledge--
The heart's flesh shines like copper,
And song is torn by sea's hands,
Thrown into scaly spittle on the waves,
But still discerned in discrete golden drops.

Never Break That West Wind

2009-04-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

The sky went unrecognized all that morning
And through the afternoon
It was not until evening, the glorious gloaming
That began to slip in under the door,
And to gradually fill the room,
Cyclopean stars opening their eyes
One by one took their places on the loveseat
But I would not open my eyes
I would not look upon that sky
It's intrusion was a profanity to me
And so I let out a long, pleading, yet luxuriant fart
Like the wandering violin line that opens Beethoven's Op. 131,
Solid and lasting, like the art in museums,
And the stars sat politely, pretending not to hear it.

Sestina

2009-04-29T07:56:00.000-07:00

The saw's plucking teeth
Bite into a juicy red-
Wood, with tufts of fur
Clinging to it's weave
And hearts like sharp feathers
Slicing a stiff salt wind

Around my fingers I wind
The slick floss, between my teeth
Tiepolo clouds painted with feathers
And behind my molar a sudden spark of red
Before dawn I weave
Moss with your fur

A delicious mink's fur
Which round your waist winds
Near your neck it weaves
With a gentian between it's teeth
Violet and red
As a cardinal's dropped feather

At the notch of the arrow, the feather
Makes fly the fur
And snow blooms red
Button's stuck--we can't rewind
So we take the tape in our teeth
And shiny black weave

In time to drums, dancers weave
Arms bathed in keys of feather
Necklaces rattle of badger teeth
Bordered with fur
Spatterings of woodwind
The bansuri spewing red

Still sunk in the red
Unpicking last night's weaving
Into a sphere the yarn winds
Oars feathered
The walls must be furred
Prepared for the comb's teeth

At the stitch of the tooth, an underglow of red
Fistfuls of fur into a shawl woven
And a heart pierced with feathers, left flapping in the wind.

Salt Song

2009-04-27T18:34:00.000-07:00

Turning and turning in the radiance
Of cormorants' screams,
Driftwood flesh is bathed,
Salt stings my lips.
I dream of the resonance of the rivers of your hair,
And I stand on the strand
And speak your name to myself,
Before the wind can wrest it from me.
I press wood into my skin
And my eyes make salt
But it is not enough.
Your waters erase my footsteps.
Your kelp shines a net round my liver.
I crave the scrape of your faded fingers.

Speech's Intaglio

2009-04-26T05:53:00.000-07:00

No, let me speak--I've sifted the lights from your hair,
Spread your rye with the stars' jelly,
Shucked the ghosts that seal your eyes' wax
And cast the husks upon the cirrus--
Still that marl-eyed rag-toothed ermine
Quick as a sub-pleural fire-stream runs
Roiling through the burrows of my body,
And when your voice comes to me over the sea
As the copper of morning is bitten
By sunlight's nitric acid,
Wings of your breath
Bevel the edges of the air,
Grating flakes of padparadscha
Which glint upon the fires of your froth.

Aubade

2009-04-25T05:50:00.000-07:00

We smeared our faces with dirt as it began to grow dark.
Reaching a great plain overgrown with broken herms,
Between which spread beautiful rataplanning raspberries,
We pierced our bastions and our apses full.
We sat down upon the storm and began to observe--
I saw a large sandwich of bread and chicken,
She said that she felt a large glass of milk between her fingers;
I felt a bed grow by my side, and there was another beside her.
When we awoke the cornets were high in the heavens,
The knit wood was beautiful in the summer morning,
And the finches were weaving the branches.
Our beds were of the finest flax stitched with leaves and moss.
At first we were filled with wonder.
'But I am still dreaming,' said Lisa.

Tectonics

2009-04-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

From a thousand miles under the ground I tread
You come rolling towards me, you
Who have been approaching for millennia,
You at last sense your birth is near, only a few decades away--
You, eyeless, whose feminine features
Resemble those of the young Mozart,
Though of basalt carved;
My feet feel you walk beneath me--
Sometimes our soles are nearly touching.
When your birthday dawns
You will at last arise to greet me
And eye to eye, brow to brow,
Mouth to mouth, thigh to thigh,
I will dissolve in your igneous.

Absence

2009-04-23T07:18:00.000-07:00

Bald crows totter along the Sun's surfaces,
Thoughts darkly annotated, inside their night they hear
The rumble of our vibrations, storm-bright,
Stepping from Colchis over the black sea.
Winding streets of embodied eyes
Towers of sign pointing to words,
A cloud of dog-like force
Blasts like a wave into my weariness.
I sit in the shape of where you once breathed,
In the hole you carved in the air.
With golden gamelans you dropped blood upon the magnolias--
Read the hieroglyphics of the hen's scratching--
Under your eyelids I unburden light,
Hold pieces of brightness and bathe them in oil.

Meat Love

2009-04-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

I can feel you glowering there through my eyes,
Red man of meat, puppet-sinews pulled taut,
I stamp my foot, shiny steak slapping the linoleum--
If you'd just shift slightly to one side,
I could see who it is standing behind you--
You see through me; but you, Adamah, are opaque.
The work of sunrise, launching it's slicing rays
Under heaven's sixth rib,
Mimicking my grandmother hacking away
In the Christmas kitchen;
The moon-kestrels cry,
The star-geese flock--
They touch the earth like a dolphin's leap,
Then sink in the glow of your body's underworld.

Haiku

2009-04-22T03:36:00.000-07:00

Cicadas still now
Moon, catlike, curls on lake's rug
Red-rimmed eyes open.

Vita Nuova II

2009-04-20T16:54:00.000-07:00

Curled up upon the honeyed crags
As a grouse approaching in the predawn stillness
Bringing purple fruits in alligator luggage,
Turning the shining windmills round and round,
The laughlight of heaven's glance, just so, fellow wanderers,
In May, the volcano-sprouts blossom through the ashes,
And my father, in his pajamas, stands over the earth's book
Turning his blinking eyes to read the puddle which inverts the air:
A god, sunk in ashes, reassembles himself,
A lost ship becomes the sea
Hercules becomes stars and Samson stones
So the grey-spotted land will writhe with ferns,
Will become a purling lake
Become a lake of midday red.

Vita Nuova

2009-04-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

Night endures all day in these glistening nets,
Caught beneath the crushing weight of light--
Half-hued barnacle brethren
Drifting in and out of view
In red darkness over the unborn,
The impenetrable, curled-up unborn child
Whose entrails coyly slither into position.
***
Flies so precariously procreate
Balanced on the blank air
Paperthin wings glistening
Like evanescent covenants
(Light's sleight-of-hand)
Riding the pregnant emptiness
Over the thorns.

Dogs of Love and War

2009-04-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

Beautiful bronze-bodied dog,
I hear your splayed paws slap above me,
Scrape through the hard red clay,
Your nails painted red by the sultry soil,
Your red tongue aching for flesh,
Your red heart quavering obscenely--
I smell upon you her scent,
Feral and as well-known to me as my own
And which others have smelled with their fat nostrils dilated
Filled up with rank knowledge
The knowledge of other bodies upon that body
The knowledge of tongues upon that tongue
The knowledge of the panting of that dog who has unearthed her
And who comes for me.

Morning Music

2009-04-17T07:22:00.000-07:00

The nameless grebe sighs
And mildly wakes the shutters--
The Dream feels cool air on it's face
And expands like a bladder,
As the populace starkly observes
The ritual movements of young girls
And Wisdom, that toothless wolf,
Drinking Spring's delight, holding the cup
Delicately with both feathered hands--
The Sun rues the irretrievable shadows
And the swollen streams burn
Screaming with fullness--
O Jakob!
The Angel is stirring.

Red

2009-04-16T06:24:00.000-07:00

Teeth and fur:
Fur for a coat to cover discovered flesh,
as flesh hides and atones for the glistening red machinery
Of liver, kidneys, heart, lungs like wings,
The sight of which is death--
Teeth for to bite.

The child clasps her leg, red with fear
Faces intrusive
Eyes knocking at the gate
Laughter of shining teeth
His face pressed into her thigh,
Red as Chopin's D Minor Prelude,
Allegro appassionato
And he bites.

After Holderlin

2009-04-15T06:26:00.000-07:00

Spectral birds sustain
Feeble tones
Far too long
In this orchestra--
Plumb orioles
Ruffled for
royal comedie
A yellow
fog-wanderer
plants his feet
beside mine.

Monster Movie

2009-04-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

She dipped her hands into the boiling lead of his heart
--The sound of a moon-mad coyote--
And they came out disfigured, molded to one another,
Encased in a glowing shell which quickly hardened
And grew dark again; the burning smell was inescapable
And clotted in their nostrils. Her tears scored his cheeks with acid intaglio.
Bare and small, she was a small red seed,
Earth-driven and bird-shy, roe of rhododendron,
And he enjoyed her ridged smoothness between his incisors;
The satisfying, subdued snip as she broke in half; then he
Used his fingernails to dislodge bits of her that had become stuck in his molars,
Rolling, for a few moments, these final fragments
Between tongue and teeth, like a jaguar playing with a peccary,
Before consigning them to his endless esophagus;
And when he awoke his body was covered in scales.

Digger

2009-04-13T07:15:00.000-07:00

There was earth inside, so she dug
Furiously under the starlight,
Throwing earth behind her
In arcs up to heaven's vault,
Her fingers caked with Life,
She heard all the words,
She heard the words not uttered,
And she dug until she was out of hearing;
Stridently she whistled the song of Sophia,
And refused to speak--excavation was all her lexicon.
Which direction do you face, digger?
After you've dug through the night
And wearily break through at last,
Will you discover sunrise or magma?

Diminished Seventh

2009-04-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

That morning we woke to soft blue light of dogbreath
And your eyes, dark with sleep,
Closed again in a long rowing motion
Like a mountain shuffling through a saraband...
But the clanging of guitars in the woods kept me awake,
And in our garden, frost had burnished the copper leaves
A sugary-powdery death-dusting
From a long-fingered transparent hand,
Against my ear I felt the chill scrape of
Autumn's lips chapped black with the dry air--
And in their boxes I could hear them thumping,
The children of the sun locked in gladness,
And I touched you and woke you
So we decided to dismantle the piano.

Poem 11

2009-04-11T19:21:00.000-07:00

I think upon your lovely set of teeth
No two exactly alike (like snowflakes, but more resolute)
So useful to man; for precise mastication,
And the playful nibbles of your mouth's coy nictitation,
The downy hairs blinking along your superior lip.
Should these ivory dice be misplaced
Broken or buried,
They will always recover their value to me--
The teeth of ghosts glisten like dried honey,
They stick together as they shut upon nothingness,
Biting beyond desire's crumpled limits,
But a ghost can still lap up milk
With it's rag of tongue, so leave out a bowl.
Some things are in it for the long haul.

Friday's Child

2009-04-10T17:35:00.000-07:00

Scribbling with mens' pity,
Spelling with his bowels,
A boy with flowers for fingers--
Airlifted to Heaven,
Heart shaped like a chapbook
Which he keeps in a wood box
Stowed under God's lovely arm.

At night our names are erased,
Only the owls know them--
He is one those who doesn't know
He cannot still the air by closing his eyes
Or make the streets stand motionless.
And the loves he's learned
Lie planted under the blooms.

A Memory From A Forest Of My Youth

2009-04-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

The lindens were embraced by millions
Of tiny lime-green worms, each fitted
With a stunning vermilion splotch for a head,
Wriggling so delightfully
And re-coloring the bark
Making the tree seem to tremble
With throbbing life,
Like a face holding back a sob--
When they reached the top the worms simply let go--
Dropping like rain upon the ground-leaves
Like a gentle rain in slow triple-time
Like the gentle patter of a gentle rain upon my notebook
And the jay traded his tawdry racket
For a smooth clarinet of gold resin.

Routine

2009-04-08T18:32:00.001-07:00

I rise, alarmed, before the sun,
Give my gastrointestinal tract something to do,
Perform my dental ablutions,
Work, daydream,
Amuse my digestive system,
Resist mind-devouring sleep,
Return home from my journeyings,
Offer up hecatombs to my stomach,
Assist my child in her sleeping,
Fall upon my pillow and observe a string of words
Then lie in delicious warm darkness
Until Hypnos wraps around my head--
Then suddenly
A blue pagoda.

Feathers

2009-04-07T06:59:00.000-07:00

His body covered in feathers, far above
God views the geometry of the world,
Clean and orderly, a ruled grid;
With each step I take toward him,
I feel him make a move toward me,
Like some half-dreamed game of chess with mirrors;
From a thousand miles away he rushes to meet me,
To reunite with his king-stolen child--
Or
Is he simply dropping,
Like a hawk--

I will not know until I feel in my dorsal flesh
The sweet embrace
Of his talons.

Lost in the Woods

2009-04-06T06:18:00.000-07:00

Can you name the one who peers through your eyes?
Have you met yourself--man of meat--walking in the garden?
Heard the footsteps of of the man of stone
Whose soles touch your soles?
You are the Sun's child--Ignite!
Or have you forgotten what it means to stand together in the woods?
To burrow through my breast and place a pine cone in my ribcage?
To walk along the rim of the moonlight, where the darkness
Starts to muzzle it's way in, like a stone-skulled mink,
And hear the tongues of the juniper--
Demanding that we add our bodies to it's stew of humus,
To wrap it's toe-roots around our bones until,
Clogged with clay, we begin to sing.
Already, I begin to feel the feathers fill my mouth--

Falls

2009-04-05T18:57:00.001-07:00

At Bridal Veil Falls,
The goats ate from your hand,
Tongues raspy and wet,
Muzzles velvety,
Bodies covered
In a fine rainbow mist,
Eyes miles apart.
Their desperate begging could be heard
Above the deafening crash of water,
Until one morning winter
Let slip a massive white cavalcade
And erased it all.
The veil had fallen.

Nocturne

2009-04-04T14:30:00.001-07:00

Transparent nighthawks mournfully blink open
First and innermost
As the sun wearily shuts
It's shaggy Cyclopean--
When the Giants' Bread
Is to lost Heaven's rafters,
Whose fiery light glances from
The glistening entrails of ended song,
The first bright anvils of youth;
Crumbs gather into clouds
Centuries in diameter
Massive clouds which fitfully solidify
Into a stillness of lead,
Wingbeats begetting silence.

The Problem With Light

2009-04-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

The problem with light
Is that, in bursting down from the heavens,
It alters all it sees--
It creates colors,
exaggerates forms,
hurts your eyes
and braises your skin;
The hapless heliotropes
Are jerked this way and that
From morning to night
And their necks get sore--
But at nighttime, sealed up, they dream,
Seeing with the eyes behind their eyes,
Because darkness is truth.

Outside

2009-04-02T05:25:00.001-07:00

She lay in tatters now, her liver in tatters,
Though flocks of birds tried to sew her, reassemble her,
Using bits of string from their defunct autumn-nests,
Weaving in lavender and mint to keep pests out,
Feathers and string which became her body,
Her body whose surfaces
I had so longed to break through,
Tapping along the exterior,
Listening for a hollow place to excavate--
Her body upon which had once been inscribed
That ghostly braille palimpsest
Which I had tried for so much of my life to translate,
Feeling it wispily, with paper fingers,
As she lay beside me in the red moonlight.

Origin

2009-04-01T09:12:00.001-07:00

Beyond Jordan toward the sunrising
And all the way down to the plains of the sea
We watched them rolling,
Mobs of spherophile scarabs,
Exoskeletons glittering hard in the light;
Clicktering alchemists transmuting shit into wonder,
Embracing Ezekiel's anguished diet
(Since New Year's, at least),
The forms of eternity straddled between their thighs
As though giving birth to a planet
Only to take it back to the sea of it's forelife--
We sat together, you and I, in our delicious brooding chamber,
My head rested upon your breast I could hear
Your heart like a muffled mariachi.

Sacrificial Rites in Picasso and Stravinsky: Part 5 (The End)

2009-03-15T05:00:00.000-07:00

Stravinsky's Oedipus is also an example of a character who has stepped beyond the bounds of the permissible. Mellers claims that Stravinsky's ritual is both negative and positive; Negative because the terror and violence in the ritual seemed directly to parallel the death-struggle of our deracinated civilization which was then erupting in the first of the World Wars; positive because this primitive vitality served as a reminder of the instinctive passional life that modern man had lost.

In Oedipus' opening aria, as he promises to deliver his people, he overflows with confidence in his own abilities as a hero and solver of riddles. The irony here is pointed, as Oedipus will, in fact, deliver his people by removing the cursed presence that causes the gods to plague Thebes. What he does not know is that this curse is he, himself. Oedipus' fame lies in his ability to see into dark riddles yet he is unable to see his own destiny until it comes howling down on him. Oedipus later laments as he lists his sins: "I was born of whom divine law forbade / have lain with whom divine law forbade / have slain whom divine law forbade / All is I now made clear!" The Speaker labels him "foul beast, incestuous parricide, and madman," and the chorus is hardly more encouraging as they drive him from Thebes: "Behold! Oedipus the king appears--a most foul monster, a most foul beast." Here the description would be equally apt for Picasso's Minotaur. Oedipus is a breaker of supernal boundaries and must be sacrificed, in this case not with blood but with exile, a scapegoat staggering with the guilt of Thebes on his back. In exhibiting the unacceptable behaviors of sexuality and aggression, Oedipus is unfit to live any longer with the companionship of his people. His very presence has brought the vengeance of the gods upon Thebes and his exile is a necessity that the civilization may continue. Mellers says that "Oedipus's final arioso is closer to liturgical chant than it is to the heroic music he has sung previously. Or rather one could say that at the end he rediscovers the music that was implicit in his first utterance, which is now purged of egoism and self-will." Through the sacrificial nature of Oedipus's horrific enucleation, the hero has achieved a kind of expiation for the guilt of his disgraceful crimes. But the Chorus's final driving away of Oedipus, while not necessarily forgiving, is not cruel either, but filled with a gentle pity. The music is calm and even tender as Oedipus, the self-sacrificed, stumbles off stage and into his long and lonely exile. Again, Mellers is insightful:

"The rite has always been, with [Stravinsky], an act of incarnation, it has been a historical necessity; the consequence of an agonizing awareness of the 'human predicament.' ... Stravinsky has shown us that, even in our bruised and battered world, the heart may still sing in the sustained lyrical period, the pulse beat in a rhythm that is not motorized, but fluid and compulsive as the sea."

Oedipus is a figure not only of pathos, but also of nobility. His sacrifice in Stravinsky's work may be viewed as a kind of spiritual fulfillment-the truth may not have made him exactly free, but it has allowed him to rise to a plane beyond egoism and personal heroics. He inhabits, alone, a visionary place of the blessed, comforted only by the knowledge that he has performed well what was demanded of him.

Picasso and Stravinsky explored the nature of sacrifice in modern life in their works. For them, it is a necessary component of civilized life, and while destructive in nature, is a vital aspect of creation and harmony. In rejecting the base and devouring it, a liberation, though limited, is attained. This liberation is what Picasso and Stravinsky yearned to achieve through their journeys into the aesthetic past. By stepping down from the forefront of the modernist army they came into a place where they could experience greater freedom through order. Both artists performed a sacrifice of the chaotic in order to find the solid ground of classical endurance.

Sacrificial Rites in Picasso and Stravinsky: Part 4 (Minotaur)

2009-03-14T05:35:00.000-07:00

What is being sacrificed and why? By the early twentieth century, ritual sacrifice had obviously been long absent from mainstream religion. The concept of the animality of man and the supremacy of the baser portions of human character, as enumerated by Darwin and Freud, led to a fascination with the primeval and the "ugly." Many European artists turned to non-Western sources, such as African totemic art, in an attempt to find a primal means of expression not tainted by hundreds of years of repressive civilization. Frazer's incredible study, The Golden Bough, transcribed primitivism into the turn-of-the-century intellectual scene. The Minotaur figure is an example of the human monster as portrayed by Picasso. He is literally half man and half beast, and often possessed with a violent energy. Here, the left side of the work depicts horse legs and human legs, while the right side swaps to a bull's head and a human head. The Minotaur himself is animated with a dangerous vitality--the "perversity of man's passions" that Mellers has pointed out as an element of heroic opera. The monumental thick lines offset by the frenzied tufts of hair create a surging strength that is outrageous in its intensity. The Minotaur struggles to break through the confining boundary box of the image, the restrictions of society. This is the animal drive, a raging possessiveness, aggressive and sexual, which thrashes through a being; and this being is the sacrifice required by the gods. It is only by annihilating this chthonian aspect of Nature that human civilization can hope to exist. Order must overcome the chaotic subterranean forces so that people may continue to live with each other. Through the purging of base and aggressive tendencies, mankind is able to free itself into the world of moderation and clear skies so dear to the Classical mind. This objective makes ritual sacrifice comprehensible and perhaps inevitable. Internal sacrifice in the modern world becomes a necessity in order to obtain deliverance from the flailing forces of nature.

Picasso characterized his own work in sacrificial terms: "In the old days, a picture went forward to completion by stages. Everyday brought something new. A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case, a picture is a sum of destructions." The sacrifice and its aftermath in Picasso's Vollard Suite clearly take place in the plates depicting the Minotaur. Picasso explicitly identified himself with this mythical beast: "If all the paths I've taken were marked on a map and joined up with a line, it might represent a minotaur." Picasso acknowledges his affinities with the brutality of the Minotaur and this brutality will have to be surrendered in order to achieve classical serenity. When we first meet him, the Minotaur is confident and rammed full of vitality. In images like plates 84 and 87, the Minotaur is at the height of his strength. His brawny supremacy controls all around him in a possessive manner, and he dominates his scenes with a rugged power. Like Oedipus, he is confident in his prowess and unashamed to demonstrate it.

In plates 89 and 90 the sacrifice takes place. In Plate 89, the Minotaur has been stabbed and is in his final throes. His figure is still vital but is now desperate and despairing. The wound, significantly, is in the heart, a traditional site of passion.

Plate 90 depicts the performer of the sacrifice: an Apollonian young man kneeling beside the awkwardly crumpled Minotaur. The raging Minotaur is at rest only in death, and his powerful limbs contort pathetically, limp and lifeless in contrast to his earlier energy. The Apollo figure bears the sacrificial blade in his hand and appears to have just pulled it from the death wound. This shining young bringer of light, order, and harmony has slain the vertiginous passionality that threatened to destroy his orderly existence. Also significant is Picasso's setting for the sacrifice--publicly enacted in an arena, or theater, rather than in the darkness of the labyrinth. Civilization has made an offering to appease the gods, and the artist has sacrificed natural impulsiveness for controlled serenity, with Order as his muse.

Another version of the sacrifice, clearly relating to the Oedipus myth, is poignantly depicted in the image of the blind Minotaur. Here, rather than a blood sacrifice, a blinding and exile has been required, and a little child leads the blinded Minotaur-Antigone to the Minotaur's Oedipus. The ritual of sacrifice is still present, however. On the wall to the left of the figures hangs a painting, which is an earlier work by Picasso flipped upside down. It is a picture based on Jacques-Louis David's Death of Marat (a neoclassical work) and depicts a figure holding a large knife over a prostrate victim. An overpowering sun-eye-god symbol explodes through the window, looking down with approval. The Minotaur himself is at once pathetic and transcendent, like Oedipus as he dies at Colonus, in Sophocles' version of the myth. His head is raised in a simultaneous expression of anguish and mystic fulfillment. The Minotaur here is no longer that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, but he is nonetheless a figure of dignity. He stands straight and erect, and does not appear to rely on his feeble staff for any support. His head is proportionally enormous, emphasizing reason over bestial nature. The Minotaur has sacrificed animal drives and is led now, not by them but by a personification of innocence and purity. This achieved innocence is what Picasso sought to attain to in his long and diverse artistic career. Like Stravinsky, he was interested in casting aside the violence of modernism and liberating the restraint and purity of the art of the past, an art beyond self-aggrandizement and marked by an acknowledgment of divine necessity.

Sacrificial Rites in Picasso and Stravinsky: Part 3 (Detachment)

2009-03-13T05:00:00.000-07:00

Vollard Suite, Plate 57

The ritual of sacrifice as performance is also emphasized in both works. Picasso's suite contains an extraordinary number of spectator images, and this is one of its driving themes. In plate 57, for example, a couple watches serenely as a rampaging bull gores and tramples two horses. A closer inspection reveals that this wild scene is merely a sculpture in the studio, complete with its supporting base, rather like Oedipus' "living statues." Picasso firmly establishes the odd division between action and spectator. A ritual is a performance, and a sacrifice demands an audience. Classicism, emphasizing order and reason, prefers a philosophic, detached outlook, and the emotional disjunction between audience and enactment here well illustrates this stoic nature of classicism. Thus, in the Vollard Suite, it is very rare to find the onlookers in any degree of emotional excitement. The reaction, when it is not indifference, is more likely to be calm pondering. This concept of unemotional and removed performance is key to neoclassical expression. Picasso performs a ritual of his own in the creation of these pieces. Lisa Florman writes of Picasso's work that "the 'Blind Minotaur' series [is] less an illustration of a sacrifice than its performance or enactment. . . the Minotaur. . . [is] the equivalent of the 'sacrificed god' of mythology." The creation of Picasso's neoclassical art is in itself a ritual sacrifice.

In Oedipus, the role of the Speaker mediates the action for the audience in a similar manner, and causes the art to become similarly self-conscious. The Speaker has been compared to a dry sort of tour guide, reciting facts in a monotonous and detached manner rather than with a rush of poetic wordplay and visible emotion. After Jocasta commits suicide, the Speaker dryly says, "And now you will hear that famous monologue: 'The Divine Jocasta Is Dead.'" This neoclassical distance between action and reaction is realized in the Speaker's disinterested lecture. Ritual performance here, as in Picasso's listless onlookers, is emphasized, stressing classical impassiveness and aloofness. The drama is ritual and its creation involved a stylistic sacrifice on the part of Stravinsky.

Sacrificial Rites in Picasso and Stravinsky: Part 2 (Questions of Genre)

2009-03-12T05:00:00.000-07:00

In attempting to establish the genre of these works, we may begin an approach to their meaning. The genre of Picasso's Vollard Suite is ambiguous, as is that of Oedipus Rex, and scholars question whether Picasso's sprawling group of one hundred loosely related images can be accurately called a suite. The prints are so heterogeneous in terms of style, technique, process, and subject matter that it is often difficult to follow Picasso's train of thought through the series. However, consistent themes are explored throughout. The figures are similar to those one would find painted on an antique vase, though filtered through Picasso's own idiosyncratic personal style. The stylistic influences of past artists are as apparent here as they are in Oedipus, and range from Greek antiquity to Goya, with rest stops by Titian, Rembrandt, and Callot, among others. The hearkening to past traditions lends an air of authority and occasionally austerity that increases the hieratic quality of both works. The genre of both could be named, among other things, ritual.

The genre of Oedipus Rex is similarly disputable. Oedipus subtitled an "opera-oratorio in two acts," and is sometimes fully staged as an opera, and sometimes performed without costumes or sets, as an oratorio. Wilfrid Mellers calls it a "heroic opera" in the Handelian tradition, and goes on to say: "A real heroic opera. . . was simultaneously a ritual of humanism . . . and a drama dealing with the perversity of man's passions." In Stravinsky's work ritual and rawness are often combined into a modern vision of sacred drama; as in Le Sacre du Printemps and Les Noces. The secular and the sacred intermingle until they become virtually indistinguishable. Styles in Oedipus also shift and interact in bewildering ways-including Handelian da capo arias, Verdian operatic motives, Eastern Orthodox liturgical masses, and Italian operatic composers such as Meyerbeer and Verdi. Stavinsky does not imitate these various classical styles so much as he assimilates them to his own personal aesthetic. The regulations of these older styles contribute to the hieratic nature of the work. This ritual aspect is further underscored by setting the music to Latin texts, a language Stravinsky described appropriately as "a language not dead, but turned to stone." And the Speaker's introduction to the work could be used to sum up the entire effect of this neoclassical influence: "[it] preserves only a certain monumental aspect." This melding of diverse styles into a synthetic unity is a hallmark of Stravinsky's neoclassicism. Stravinsky's opera-oratorio is to be staged in a highly hieratic way, with monumentalized masked figures and little movement, resembling the solemnity of religious rites. The stage directions specify that "only [the characters'] arms and heads move. They should give the impression of living statues." Picasso's Suite can be seen as a literal illustration of this note, and both works are highly stylized and even archaic. The neoclassical formality allows both works to proceed in a ritualistic and even sacred manner to their final sacrificial climaxes.

Sacrificial Rites in Picasso and Stravinsky: Part 1 (Introduction)

2009-03-11T06:00:00.000-07:00

SACRIFICAL RITES IN PICASSO AND STRAVINSKY:

If civilization requires such sacrifices, not only

of sexuality but also of the aggressive tendencies

in mankind, we can better understand why it

should be so hard for men to feel happy in it . . .

Civilized man has exchanged some part of his

chances of happiness for a measure of security.

-Sigmund Freud, "Civilization and Its Discontents"

Mind's meat heart's blood

All that we've seen and known

Treasured up rejected

Will now become his body

Devour my life each prays.

-James Merrill, "The Minotaur"

Pablo Picasso and Igor Stravinsky each defined twentieth-century art in their respective fields. Almost exact contemporaries, their careers were both dizzyingly metamorphic and ceaselessly innovative. Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) shocked many and altered the history of art in revolutionary ways, while Stravinsky's radical Rite of Spring (1913) caused an infamous riot at its premiere and went on to become a touchstone of modernist music. In the mid 1920s through the mid 1930s, however, Picasso and Stravinsky explored worlds very different from the harsh revolutionary realms of their earlier works. During this time, both artists shifted to a more seemingly old-fashioned, "neoclassical" style, drawing on past achievements and synthesizing a variety of styles into an aesthetic unity. This looking backward upset many in the avant-garde and some perceived it as a betrayal of modern progress by blase bourgeois caution. These judgments now seem superficial--the "neoclassical" works of both Picasso and Stravinsky, while bowing to the traditions of the past, were in many ways unlike anything that had been seen or heard before. Picasso and Stravinsky became synonymous with their respective disciplines through a series of very personal, astonishingly protean metamorphoses, always with a countenance turned simultaneously to the time-honored past and the cutting-edge avant-garde--innovation through tradition. Both artists' excursions into the past came as a natural part of their aesthetic development and led them into innovative and fascinating new areas of exploration that would alter their art. A comparison between two characteristic neoclassical works--Picasso's Vollard Suite (1933) and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex (1927)--is useful and instructive in examining the similarities and differences between the sea changes undergone by these two seminal artists. Both of these works deal with sacrifice, ritual, and performance. Picasso and Stravinsky each performed a stylistic sacrifice of their former, more primitive and "wild" avant-garde approach and replaced it with a more restrained and "civilized" style.

Der Doppelganger

2009-02-01T09:21:00.000-08:00

I was just coming out of the market on the corner between 8th Street and Claremont when
I bumped into somebody's doppelganger,
Not my doppelganger, I would have recognized him in a second, but it was somebody else's, so
I asked if he needed directions because he looked sort of disoriented,
But he interrupted me and started telling me about this duel he was involved in
A lady's honor and a something about a necrophiliac duck
And if I could be his second, and I smiled at this because it struck me as humorous
That a doppelganger of all people would be looking for a second and I was going to make
An amusing remark on this point but his eyes were so coldly earnest and the way he agitatedly
Pulled at his moustache made me wonder if doppelgangers had very highly-developed
Senses of irony, so we looked over his guns, pearl-handled and very pretty, but
I know little of firearms and my ice cream was melting in my bag so I had to go
But he stood there watching me leave and with those haunting chords, he said we'd meet again--so far we haven't.

2009-01-29T09:20:00.000-08:00

It's like when you look through the windows in an old Dutch gambrel
The lumpy windows that were made by actual people back when a glazier was a kind of artist
His hands rough and his glass smooth, his neck oily and refracting light
Showing you how he saw the world and you looked out every morning through his lens
To see the world the way he saw it,
Which was lumpy. Or like how as you get older your eyes change
Everything changes but your eyes turn yellowish,
The lens it is that turns yellow and hard like glass,
And old women turn their hair purple to counteract the yellowing,
The royal purple of the Imperatrix tempus temporis,
Purple being the opposite of Werther's fatal yellow breeches
As Goethe instructively diagrammed for his patient friends.
I haven't criticized any projects; I came out and spoke in favor of these
And the others as well--my world turns yellow like yours, we all soak together in time,
The last soft tortilla fragments basking in the lumpy salsa bowl.

Firewall

2008-08-10T10:01:00.000-07:00

In The Book of Zechariah, two angels measure the city of God, attempting to define and bound it, but finding that the City will be so overflowing with multitudes that it shall be inhabited as a "town without walls." However, the LORD will be a "wall of fire" round about and a "glory in the midst of her." Though there are no walls limiting the Celestial City, the fire of the LORD both animates and restrains it, an outer flame with an inner, echoing glory, and God in the center and the circumference. The fire is of the creative rather than destructive variety; the same beatific flames which entwined around the Bush on Mount Horeb. The "glory" is the restored Presence of God which the anguished Ezekiel witnessed as it departed from the holy city.

In the City of God there are no external, literal walls of worldly boundary--only the fiery walls of Vision--of God's Glory as His Presence dwells within the limitless City. This reciprocal relationship of inner and outer fire must be reproduced within each of us in our dealings with the Divine.

The Way in the Sea

2008-08-08T09:38:00.000-07:00

Thy way is in the sea
And thy path in the great waters
And thy footsteps are not known.
-Psalm 77

The sea is the kingdom of Leviathan, the universe of chaos and decay--of a primitive and terrifying homogeneity. It is a "unity" which is pre-existent, and it denies selfhood. The path of the LORD does not skirt gingerly around chaos and darkness, but cuts straight through it, as when the LORD divided the Red Sea for Moses and his followers. Division was produced by inscribing a line into chaotic endlessness and portioning it into two areas--creating a boundary.

The creation of the world was a process of repeated divisions, or breakings, of primal chaos. The elemental and original face of the deep (or face of the waters) was repeatedly shattered to produce our world of boundaries. The original Face of God was shattered into infinite shards. Our world is based upon the tension between chthonian pandemonium and the divisional order of creation. Neither is sufficient in itself. The road to eternal Life leads us on a march through chaos and death.

Leonardo on Shadows

2008-08-06T11:07:00.000-07:00

Shadow is of the nature of darkness.

...

Light is of the nature of a luminous body;

One conceals and the other reveals.

They are always associated and inseparable from all objects--

But shadow is a more powerful agent than light.

...

Shadow is the counterpart of the luminous rays

Which are transformed into back into shadow.

Shadow is the diminution alike of light and of darkness;

It stands between darkness and light.

A shadow may be infinitely dark,

Or of infinite degrees of absence of darkness.

...

The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness

They may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased.

Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form--

The forms of bodies could not be understood but for shadow.

...

Shadow partakes of the nature of universal matter.

All such matters are more powerful in their beginning

And grow weaker towards the end.

I say at the beginning, whatever their form or condition may be

And whether visible or invisible.

For it is not from small beginnings that they grow to a great size in time,

As a great oak which has a feeble beginning from a small acorn.

Yet I may say that the oak is most powerful at its beginning,

That is where it springs from the earth, which is where it is largest.

Darkness, then, is the strongest degree of shadow

And light is its least.

Therefore, O Painter, make your shadow darkest

Close to the object that casts it,

And make the end of it fading into light,

Seeming to have no end.

…

When the light is below the sphere

The shadow is thrown up towards the sky

And finding no obstruction on its way

Is lost...

-from the Notebooks (selections from Sections 118-125)

"Unable to resist my eager desire and wanting to see the great of
the various and strange shapes made by formative nature, and having
wandered some distance among gloomy rocks, I came to the entrance of
a great cavern, in front of which I stood some time, astonished and
unaware of such a thing. Bending my back into an arch I rested my
left hand on my knee and held my right hand over my down-cast and
contracted eye brows: often bending first one way and then the
other, to see whether I could discover anything inside, and this
being forbidden by the deep darkness within, and after having
remained there some time, two contrary emotions arose in me, fear
and desire--fear of the threatening dark cavern, desire to see
whether there were any marvelous thing within it ..."

I think this image perfectly sums up Leonardo--peering into the
darkness with fear and desire. No artist was so drawn to the
shadows of existence, the blurry edges where boundaries are lost
and darkness threatens to swallow everything. In the end,
the darkness did swallow him up, and Leonardo ended his days
haunted by apocalyptic visions of Deluge.

Psalm 46: It's Melting Time

2008-07-29T12:47:00.000-07:00

This psalm evokes the recurrent Biblical images of chaos-sea and order-walls, exploring the theme of boundaries. Images of roaring waters are associated with raging warfare, emphasizing destruction and chaos. Waters are tied to chaos because they are unbound, primeval, disorganized--water is the ferocious and impassive source from which creative life springs. The story of Yahweh and the sea monster Leviathan is scattered throughout the Bible, and like the manna of Leviathan's shattered head (Psalm 74:14), it nourishes and enriches the text.

When the LORD utters the words, "Be still," the whole earth melts. The melting process involves dissolving the boundaries between things so that they merge together. Ice cubes are rigidly bound individual pieces of water, but when they melt they lose their defined shapes and descend into formlessness, merging together into a puddle and making it impossible to know where one cube ended and another began. When we hear God's voice ("Be still"), things melt away to reveal the unity behind apparent multiplicity. God's voice dissolves boundaries.

However, God also creates boundaries. In the next verses, the psalm speaks of "a river whose streams make glad the city of God." The city image is one of a complex organization opposed to nature, while the river is the flowing, boundless water of chaos-nature organized into a directional pattern, bounded on either side by banks. It is an image of organized chaos, of organized innocence. The total image is one of high systemization nourished (and made glad) by the living waters of organized innocence. As I conceive it, the city is surrounded by walls, boundaries that separate and strengthen it. The river rushes through the gates and around the gardens within, providing life, growth, and change. At the center of the city of God, in the holy-of-holies, is the LORD himself ("God is in the midst of her"), an internal creative fire. Essentially it is a wild chaos of water outside and an untamed flame within, surrounded and separated by the walls of restraint. It is a cartography of the divine man utilizing the subterranean wonder of messy life and the endless expanses of the heavens--bounded, vivified, and holy. God shows us the essential unity behind the many facades of life, then shows us how to draw from this boundless unity and drink from the waters of Life.

*By the way, to anyone who cares, the phrase "It's melting time," comes from Ibsen's Peer Gynt, where the wryly grim Button Moulder threatens Peer with identity-dissolution.

Jan Lenica (1928-2001)

2008-07-28T14:04:00.000-07:00

Jan Lenica began as a brilliant poster artist and became a brilliant animator.

Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)

2008-07-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Ariosto's Orlando Furioso a couple of days ago, and it's my new favorite book. Ariosto's poem is a miracle of lightness, speed, and brio. His very name gives a clue to his primary characteristics--it's related to arioso, which means (in Italian) "airy" and is also a musical term referring to a brief song between a recitative and an aria ("Melodious, graceful; a short composition in the style of an aria but less symmetrical in its construction"). Ariosto's writing is all about brief, songful, asymmetrical moments gracefully crammed between beauties--his poem races gorgeously from one wild moment to the next. Imagine all the brightest and most "airy"qualities of Byron, Spenser, Calvino, and Cervantes jumbled deliciously together, and spiced with a dash of Kafka. It's little wonder so many other artworks sprang from such fertile soil--from further poems and books to Italian operas to paintings and engravings. C. S. Lewis (whose literary criticism generally rankles me) wrote that an ignorance of Ariosto would "rob us of a whole species of pleasures and narrow our very conception of literature."

The Furioso doesn't really begin or end--it is a gleaming chunk of life. It is all about pursuit, opening with a frantic chase and ending with a fleeing, howling spirit. It is filled with an infinitude of zany episodes; a trip to the moon (to recover Orlando's lost mind--everything we lose on earth pops up on the moon), the flights of the ludicrous hippogriff, angelic fistfights, the exploits of the fearless women warriors Bradamante (everyone's favorite) and Marfisa, an enchanted steel castle of endless mirrors and unattainable objects. The Furioso is about the labyrinthine impossibilities of desire and the wild weavings of destiny, told in a wry tone that jumps so quickly from person to person and scene to scene that the reader is soon swept up in Ariosto's ironic whirlwinds of Amor. Ariosto himself never gets caught up in his own whirlwinds, however--he remains serenely on the outside of his book, a master puppeteer.

This brilliant book has had many admirers and inspired artists over the 500 years since it's publication in 1516. Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata is a child of the Furioso. Spenser's Faerie Queene directly imitates the Furioso, while Ariosto's tongue-in-cheek moments of chivalric lunacy provided an example for Cervantes' sublime Don Quixote. Voltaire claimed the Furioso to be the equal of the Iliad, the Odyssey and Don Quixote all rolled together. Hegel took serious note of the work as a philosophical demonstration of the fallibility of human perception. The urbane, ironic style of Byron's Don Juan owes an immense debt to Ariosto. Calvino wrote a delicious trilogy of novels (The Baron in the Trees, The Cloven Viscount, and The Nonexistent Knight; collected as Our Ancestors) as a delightful homage to Ariosto's genius. Sir Salman Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, appears to be inspired by Ariosto as well. It has been a favorite of Spanish-language authors from Lope de Vega and Cervantes to Borges and Garcia Marquez. Dozens of Baroque operas emerged from Ariosto's shining volume--from Handel's Alcina, Rinaldo, and Orlando to Vivaldi's Orlando Furioso and Rameau's Les Paladins, to name a few. Here, for your viewing pleasure is a random assortment of wonderful images inspired by Ariosto's masterpiece. Tiepolo, for me, captures the pristine air of Ariosto's lyrical world perfectly (he devoted several frescoes to the Furioso in the Villa Valmarana), but some of the others (such as Dore) conjure up the bizarreries that makes this world unsettling.

This is truly the kind of book that one can read from every day, like the Divine Comedy or Finnegans Wake or the Bible. It is what Anthony Burgess fondly termed a "bedside book;" a book to live with and grow old with. It fashions a mercurial world of passion, mobility, wonder, longing, vivacity, and humor--an uncanny, shifting world that may change the way you view the world you happen to live in. I hope our world never forgets Ludovico Ariosto, but if we do, I'm sure he'll be very happy living on the moon with all of our other lost treasures.

"J. J. Grandville" (1803-1847)

2008-07-13T10:46:00.000-07:00

J. J. Grandville was the pseudonym of Jean Ignace Isidore Gerard (1803-1847), a fantastical French illustrator who later inspired the Surrealists. He was born into a theatrical family and inherited the name Grandville from his grandparents, who had previously used it on stage. He made his name as a caricaturist, with memorable lampoons of his contemporaries, such as his famous image of the bombastic tendencies of Hector Berlioz's orchestra.

His genius bloomed into its fullest fruition in 1829, with Les Métamorphoses du jour, a series of seventy satirical scenes depicting human-animal crossbreeds.

I don't know whether Grandville ever met Gerard de Nerval, but they should have been pals. Surely, Max Ernst must have pored over Grandville's ouvre.

Later in his career, due to renewed censorship laws, Grandville shifted into book illustration, fashioning superbly-crafted images for literature like Fontaine's fables, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and Don Quixote.

Wonderful as these are, his real genius lay in the bizarre and witty juxtapositions of his earlier work. Sadly, Grandville lived out his final years in a psychiatric asylum after his child choked to death beside him at the dinner table.

There is a nice tribute to Grandville's art on the great Bibliodyssey, along with links to more of his work.

Carlo Carrà (1881-1966)

2008-07-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Over the course of his seventy-year career Carlo Carrà leaped from one aesthetic movement to the next, like the daredevil chamois of his north-Italian homeland. His childhood was spent among these rugged climes, where he worked alongside his artisan family before journeying to Paris at the age of twelve. In Paris, he found work as a mural decorator throughout his teens, contributing to the pavilion paintings of the monumental 1900 World's Fair, which saw the then-temporary construction of the Eiffel Tower. He traveled across the continent, from mural to mural, consorting with pledged anarchists, and finally arriving home in Milan, where he would remain for the rest of his life. He immediately enrolled at the university and, together with his radical friends (most notably Umberto Boccioni and Filippo Marinetti), helped formulate the Futurist Manifesto of 1909, which rather monstrously stated, among other things, "We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman." It is this stage of Carrà 's career for which he is currently most remembered, particularly for his lavish "Funeral for the Anarchist Galli," a mechanically frenzied canvas depicting a police raid and subsequent riot in which Carrà was personally involved.With the outbreak of World War I, the Futurist movement lost its steam, presumably due to the long-delayed satiation of their gluttony for violence. Several of the Futurists enlisted--Boccioni, one of the leading lights of the movement, died when he fell off his horse during cavalry training.
Carrà, perhaps disturbed by the non-theoretical violence unfolding around him, shifted from the fast-paced caffeine-fueled aesthetic to an atmosphere of stillness and solidity. He moved from what were essentially modernized history paintings into the genre of still life (or "dead nature," as the Italians call it). His still life paintings are quirky and surreal, with forced perspectives, bizarre juxtapositions, decorative patterns (presumably recollections of his apprentice days in Paris), half-finished artworks, and lots of mannequin heads. They all seem take place on little constructed stages, and the theatrical-artificial aspect of the paintings is never allowed to recede, despite the general realism of the objects themselves. It all seems to be in the process of being organized, and despite the clutter all is still and immovable--a collection of treasured, enigmatic objects gathered from a lost (though internal) civilization. Carrà himself spoke of the simplicity and pureness of ordinary things, and how their contemplation "points to a higher, hidden state of being."
These wonderful pieces helped launch a new movement in Italian painting--pittura metafisica, or "Metaphysical Painting," which Carrà created along with Giorgio di Chirico. Although their collaboration lasted only a few brief months, the dreamlike nature and alternative logic of their images paved the way for the Surrealists and the Dadaists in years to come, while their stillness and formal beauty pointed towards the neoclassical art that would be popular in the 1920s.

Following his experiments with pittura metafisica, Carrà further pursued the serenity he had found there. Turning backwards to early Renaissance masters like Masaccio, he developed a new style that, for the first time, required no official name to legitimize it in his mind. He began to paint the village life of the Northern countryside in which he spent his boyhood. Carrà's paintings from these decades radiate a calm and peace that is the polar opposite of the frenzied Futurism of his youth. They ache with yearning for the simplicity of the Golden Ages of the mythological past.

To me, the paintings of these final decades display Carrà's genius to the fullest. Their beauty is heartbreaking in its quiet intensity, as Carrà finally achieves the peace that has so long eluded him.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part Seven: Fourfold Vision

2008-04-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Ezekiel describes the Cherub as having four faces and four wings. What exactly these four aspects represent is never stated clearly, but the subject offers a bountiful source of meditation. Here is one idea: each of the four faces may correspond to a different realm of nature—lion (wild), ox (domestic), eagle (air), man (man). And in fact, each of these four animals is lord over its realm—the lion is king of beasts, the ox is the mightiest of the domestic creatures, the eagle is king of the air, and man has dominion over them all by virtue of his intellect. What is important, beyond any specific ideas attached to each of the animal faces, is the fact that there are four of them, each unique, and each presumably facing in one of the four cardinal directions (as in Genesis).

In the divine Man, these four natures, at variance with one another, work together in unity. Like the energy produced from the opposing winds in the whirlwind, these four spirits whirl about one another to create a massive energy of coordinated opposition. No one of the four natures is supreme—rather, it is the space between them that renders spiritual vitality possible. If the lion, for example, were to gain ascendancy over the other three, the balance would be thrown off, and the creature would dissolve itself into chaos. All four are necessary and must be kept whirling against one another within their limits, creating a spinning order like a gyroscope. The four wings emphasize this motion, and the importance of their unity (they are “joined one to another”) is also pointed out. Further, Ezekiel describes wheels covered with eyes which roll along with the Cherubim, stating that “the spirit of the cherubim was in the wheels.” The wheel is elaborated as having a “wheel in the middle of a wheel.” This suggests, once more, the idea of coordinated opposition as the wheels spin, one within the other. Together, the faces, wings and wheels suggest a whirlwind motion, echoing the previous verses. This is the nature of spirituality—a constantly striving, opposing, changing, twirling nature, never at rest and never off balance. The life of the flying spirit can never hold still—to stop moving would be death and spiritual entropy. Ceaseless mobility is required—the root of repentance is to change, and we must continually transform and keep in motion for our spirits to live. This is why the LORD issues the ultimatum: repent or die. That is simply how our spirits are structured—the LORD is not threatening to kill us; rather, he is pleading with us to save ourselves by protean metamorphoses from the relentless decay of the cold, entropic, universe.

The feet of the Cherub are straight and hooved, offering a balancing vision to the frenetic energy of the four faces/wings. The feet sparkle like “burnished brass” and when the Cherubim move, they go “straight forward.” The whirling spiritual energies are channeled into disciplined, purposeful, controlled movements.

The appearance of the Cherubim is described as “like burning coals of fire,” and like “lamps.” The fire goes up and down in the midst of the creatures, rather like the purifying fire infolding itself, which I previously touched on. And again, it is in between the creatures that we find the fire. The Cherubim are filled with bright spiritual fire, which burns against the ashes of the universe of death. Victor Hugo, who later published a volume of poetry entitled The Four Winds of the Spirit, partook of some of Ezekiel's prophetic spirit when he expressed this concept with passionate clarity:

Well have I filled my drinking cup; you dash
Your wings at it, yet none of it is gone.
My spirit has more fire than you have ash
And more love than you have oblivion!

Ezekiel’s vision is of a being in perpetual motion, animated by coordinated opposition, seething with inner fire, and governed by brazen discipline. Ezekiel’s fourfold Cherub is his image of the Human Form Divine.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part Six: Human Form Divine

2008-04-23T11:16:00.000-07:00

Inside the cloud, or whirlwind, Ezekiel perceives a “fire infolding itself,” along with a “brightness” in th midst of the fire “as the color of amber.” The fire, like the opposing ruah of the whirlwind, create sin itself an energetic vortex of circular inward motion. The fire also reinforces the purifying aspect of the Presence of the LORD. The Psalmist sang, as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God (Psalm 68:2).” The dross is burned away, and only the strongest portions remain—Ezekiel looks to the LORD with his own answering flame.

The brightness Ezekiel witnesses is also indicative of the power of the Presence of God, but it is not God, whose appearance has yet to come. The brightness is the color of amber, fossilized resin of ancient time. Amber is a distillation of life, marrow of a tree, perhaps also old life to be supplanted by new life. The brightness will soon be replaced by diviner presences, and then the actual appearance of God Himself. The brightness actually makes it difficult to perceive God at first. I am reminded of Blake’s memorable quatrain:

God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

Ezekiel, as a visionary of the highest order, certainly dwelt in realms of day, if anyone ever has.

And indeed, when the cherubim appear, they do display a “human form.” Ezekiel writes: “out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man.” Ezekiel’s Cherub is in the form of a man. In interpreting Ezekiel’s Cherub, then, we are interpreting Ezekiel’s vision of what Man is. Divine Man is God’s Throne.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part Five: Whirlwind

2008-04-19T11:06:00.000-07:00

As Ezekiel stands at this border between present captivity and nostalgia for former freedom, the heavens are opened. This is significant—Israel is closed in, hedged up, locked away, and bound up in exile. The heavens open to release the captive from their chains and offer a new kind of freedom. It is then that the vision begins, with a whirlwind coming out of the North, the traditional direction of God’s realm (Psalm 48:2). Whirlwinds also act as heralds announcing the imminent approach of the LORD in Elijah’s theophany on the mountaintop, and later carries him to the presence of God in a heavenly chariot. It is the impassive whirlwind which delivers God’s message of the nothingness of man to a terrified Job (and it is also a “great wind from the wilderness” that kills his children). Isaiah also describes a whirlwind, in terms that bear a marked resemblance to Ezekiel’s vision: "For behold, the Eternal will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind" (Isaiah 46:15). The whirlwind coming from the north is the terrible and majestic power of God flowing from the source of His Presence. Whirlwinds are employed as images of awesome and destructive force throughout the Bible, often utilized to destroy the wicked in an overwhelming force of shattering divinity. The fact that Ezekiel remains standing at this point without being dissolved says much about his toughness of character. An encounter with God strips a man of his superficialities and communicates directly and awfully with his center. If there is nothing at his center, he is destroyed. The power of God, like a whirlwind, blasts away and dismantles anything merely ostensible or unstable. The whirlwind strips away Ezekiel’s external husks so that his central seed is exposed to the full power of the LORD directly. The heavens were opened, and now Ezekiel himself has been opened. The doors to his "little sanctuary" have been blasted off their hinges.

The whirlwind is further described as “a great cloud,” a phrase surely meant to remind readers of the “pillar of cloud” described in Exodus (13:21-22). This pillar of cloud served as a guide to the Israelites on their forty-year journey through the wilderness between the captivity of Egypt and the freedom of the Promised Land. The “great cloud” of Ezekiel’s vision also appears as a guide between the realms of captivity and freedom. The captives in Chaldea were sorely in need of a guiding presence as they wandered through the wilderness of exile and captivity. The cloud also serves to cover the terrible presence of the LORD, in order to protect mortal eyes. Direct contact with God would mean an instant melting away for anyone unprepared for such an encounter. God hides Himself within symbolic forms as a boundary, protecting our own frail frames from disintegration (cf. Exodus 19:24).

Whirlwinds often arise in desert areas and indeed take the form of a pillar of cloud. Such a whirlwind is created when local winds start to spin on the ground. This causes a "funnel" to form, which moves over the ground, pushed by the winds that first formed it. The funnel picks up debris as it moves over the ground, becoming a visible whirlwind, with a vortex at its center. A vortex is a spiraling flow with a circular motion. Interestingly, there is also a type of galaxy called a “spiral galaxy,” which is characterized by a thin, rotating disk, and created by a similar phenomenon, albeit on a cosmic scale. Since the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, the galaxy in which we live is essentially a gigantic whirlwind. So, the whirlwind may be seen as a microcosm of the entire universe, or, conversely, a macrocosm of the individual man. If we study the formation process of whirlwinds in biblical terms, we begin to understand more of what this powerful image suggests. In Hebrew, the same word (ruah) is used to describe Spirit, breath, and wind. Because a whirlwind occurs when opposing winds (ruah) meet, we learn that the opposition of mighty spirits creates a circular, invisible form of incredible power. The powerful metaphor of the whirlwind emphasizes the nature of coordinated oppositions which we will discover in the fourfold Cherubim—opposing forces creating spiritual energy. Nahum tells us that “the LORD hath his way in the whirlwind (Nahum 1:3).” In the form of these spirits whirling in a divine counterpoint of opposition is inscribed the pattern of the universe, of God Himself, and of the godly man.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part Four: Between heaven and earth

2008-04-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

Ezekiel stands on the banks of the river Chebar. The river flows as a watery border between freedom and captivity. Babylon lies on one side, along with captivity and chains, while somewhere on the other side of the line shines the memory of Israel, the beloved holy land. Ezekiel will constantly find himself not on one side or the other of anything, but always between. Later, Ezekiel will be lifted up by a lock of his hair, again by God’s own hand, “between the earth and the heaven” in his terrifying visionary tour of sinful Jerusalem. The space between the wheels of the divine chariot will also prove important. Indeed, the word between is used more often in the Book of Ezekiel than in any other book in the Bible, appearing on practically every other page. Visionary experience occurs between heaven and earth, because it is not the same as literal quantifiable experience, nor is it a wholly transcendent "spiritual" otherness, completely foreign to our worldly existence. It is a unification, finding a connection between the mundane and the sublime, breaking a wall and replacing it with a bridge. The ability to flit back and forth between realities like a hummingbird is the special gift of angels, children, and prophets. The spaces between things are as vital a part of reality as the things themselves, and in the connections formed thereby, the most vital expressions of life may be found. As long as things remain unconnected, they remain broken. The dualism between literal experience and spiritual experience is a false dilemma in many ways, perpetuated by the discrete-ism of Enlightenment science. For science and history turn hard literal nuggets called facts into fetishes. A literalist, mechanical view rejects unquantified spiritual experience as subjective and unverifiable. They would contend that Ezekiel’s visions all took place inside his head, and diagnose him with bipolar disorder or some manner of schizophrenia. An equally distorted view would be to reject the literal, ignore contradictory evidence, and only follow whatever one deems as purely “spiritual feelings”, regardless of anything outside oneself. The literal is outside, the spiritual inside.

Encounters with the divine take place between the inside and the outside, on the border between the literal and spiritual, the border between Babylon and Jerusalem, between earth and heaven. It is on this border that true living occurs, all creativity and all acts of Imagination. Ezekiel’s vision was not literal—the other captives on the bank saw nothing—nor was it entirely spiritual—Ezekiel did not have a “feeling” that he should do something. Rather, he had an encounter with divinity. His vision occurred in the realm of Creative Imagination—beyond body or mind or spirit but just as pragmatically real and solid as any or all of them. The visionary realm is located precisely between the literal and spiritual, and contains aspects of both.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part Three: Little Sanctuaries

2008-04-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

At this point we must engage with Ezekiel’s gigantic cherubinic vision by the river Chebar, and grimly say, with Esther, “If I perish, I perish.” Ezekiel begins his vision (and his book) with a very brief prologue. He starts out by specifying the precise moment in time and exact location in which he received his prophetic call: “in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar.” This precision emphasizes not only the importance of the call to Ezekiel, but also the essential "nowness" of its nature—he was prophesying to his particular people on this particular day. Ezekiel addressed himself not to the past or even the future so much as the present. In verse two, Ezekiel goes over the time again, emphasizing the length of the drudgery and misery of the captivity. The captives have been waiting moment by moment, day by day, month after month, for deliverance. Ezekiel was already a priest at this time, and so was a kind of representative of the Israelite people as an aggregate. He had been brought, with many others of his people, to Babylon as captives following the destruction of Jerusalem. This exile, an event the prophets of the time (such as Jeremiah) had been discussing for decades, created an enormous shift in worship practices. Previously, the Israelites had gathered to the temple on the holy days to offer sacrifice and participate in ritual purification. Now, with the temple destroyed and the holy city occupied, a new, more internal form of spirituality was required. Ezekiel addresses the problem thus:

“Thus saith the Lord GOD; Although I have cast them far off among the heathen, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come.”

In spite of the fact that the absence of a temple, or sanctuary, nullified many aspects of their religion, Yahweh would become a “little sanctuary,” or temple, within each of His scattered children. Rather than being cast out from spiritual experience, Israel had merely to adjust it’s spiritual expectations. No longer would the sacrificial order of temple ritual be necessary—instead religion had migrated inward as Israel had migrated outward. Ezekiel further clarifies the new concept:

“I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh.”

The stony heart of communal temple ritual (the temple was constructed of stone) was replaced by the fleshy heart of internal, individual religious experience. The exiled Israelites, cast out of their beloved and holy land, each carried within them a piece of God, and in Him could find their “sanctuary.” Like all of us, exiled from the presence of God, the Israelites have been granted an inner light with which they may commune with the distant divinity.

The hand of the LORD lights upon Ezekiel and opens the heavens to reveal the magnificent vision that is to come. The hand of the LORD acts in many different ways throughout the Bible. In this case, is it ordaining him to his prophetic call? Smiting him with the fury of vision? Pressing him down with it’s extraordinary power? Lifting him up, nearer to the presence of God? Embracing him with divine love? The hand, as a symbol, generally refers to the possibility of action. The hand of the LORD is upon Ezekiel to impart to him the powers of godlike action—the ability to prophesy, or proclaim, the grandeur of God’s vision.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part Two: Eden, Etc.

2008-04-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

The term "cherub" comes up in the Bible almost from the outset, with the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. After Yahweh creates the universe by organizing it from primordial chaos, He plants a Garden called Eden. This garden is a paradise of blurry innocence. There is no aggression, no death, and no sexuality. There are no hard edges to identity, and indeed Adam and Eve are originally created together as a sort of hermaphroditic man-woman creature (cf. Aristophanes' delightful riff in Plato's Symposium), before Yahweh separates them into a two distinct individuals. Adam and Eve live in an infantile state, like blissful babies who are not aware of any selfhood or otherness, having no needs beyond the giant, engulfing warmth of the mother’s breast.

In addition to the many pleasant trees and plants in the garden of Eden, there are two trees which possess supernatural powers—the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” In partaking of it’s fruit and opening their eyes to knowledge, Adam and Eve lose their innocence and transform their idyllic world into a harsh kingdom ruled by the bloody tyranny of nature. When they are cast out of Eden and into this bleak world, and Yahweh reasons thusly: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:” and elects to place at the east of the garden of Eden “Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way of the tree of life.” The “Cherubims” turn every way, presumably in the four cardinal directions, as did the four rivers which sprang from the center of Eden. The design of this creature, or creatures, is to block Adam and Eve from sneaking back into Eden, eat from the Tree of Life, and become immortal in their sinful state. Boundaries are created around the once free and open garden, and mankind is blocked access to his original innocence and to eternal life. The only thing standing between mankind and immortality is the terrifying Cherub, who faces us no matter which way we turn.
Cherubim are frequently mentioned in relation to the ornamentation of the temple, particularly with the Ark of the Covenant, the holy repository of the Tablets of the Law. In Chronicles, the inspired David instructs his son and successor, Solomon, to fashion “the pattern of the chariot of the cherubims, that spread out their wings, and covered the ark of the covenant of the LORD.” Two cherubim were to be fashioned of gold to adorn each side of the “mercy seat,” which sat atop the ark. The word used in the text to designate this piece of divine furniture is kaporet, or “atonement piece.” The word probably descends from kaphar, meaning “to cover.” The Ark, complete with kaporet, resided in the center of the Temple, the holy of holies, which Yahweh had filled with a divine cloud of light as He entered in to accept its dedication. This kaporet, then essentially constituted the throne Yahweh’s divine chariot, with the cherubim acting as exalted steed to draw it forward. It is upon such a throne, in visionary form, that we must suppose Ezekiel beholds Yahweh above the Chebar. The Cherubim, then, may be considered a synecdoche for the Chariot/Throne of the Presence of Yahweh.

Notes on Ezekiel's Cherub Part One: Introduction; Madness

2008-04-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

Ezekiel was a monumentally powerful and undeniably bizarre personality. He must have left his contemporaries, in and out of Israel, absolutely bewildered and frankly disturbed. His closest analogue in today’s world seems to me to be the idiosyncratic and iconoclastic “performance artists,” who perform such hijinks as climbing up walls and defecating on spectators. Yet Ezekiel proclaimed some of the most shattering truths and envisioned some of the most supreme images to be found in the entire Hebrew Bible. For centuries, the rabbinical schools have forbidden the study of his book to anyone under the age of thirty—the age of Ezekiel himself when he experienced the spectacular vision by the river of Chebar. Even after age thirty, there remain passages which are singled out as being inappropriate to interpret at any age—Ezekiel’s visionary force is apparently deemed strong enough to shove the unprepared over the brink into an abyss of madness. I recognize that I , perhaps rashly, disregard this counsel with the present outline of my thoughts at the tender age of 25. Be that as it may, I have found Ezekiel’s splendors too fascinating not to be tempted into responding to them, and in particular to the captivating figure of the “covering Cherub.”

To establish what a cherub is, is a task that could easily fill volumes and stretch over lifetimes, but which I will endeavor to sketch in very roughly. Yahweh is referred to throughout the Tanakh as dwelling “between the cherubim,” and indeed this description becomes something of a divine moniker. But what precisely is the Cherub and what does it represent? The imagery of the Cherub appears to have evolved from Assyrian and Babylonian origins. The term cherub (pronounced kay-roob) is cognate with the term karabu meaning 'great, mighty' in Assyrian, and 'propitious, blessed' in Babylonian. In some regions this Assyro-Babylonian term came to refer in particular to spirits which served the gods, in particular to the shedu (human-headed winged bulls). A number of scholars have proposed that cherubim were originally a version of the shedu, protective deities sometimes found as pairs of colossal statues either side of objects to be protected, such as doorways. In the 1930's, a wonderful ivory carving was discovered at Megiddo (which later became an important Israelite city) depicting a creature very much like Ezekiel’s Cherub, strolling through a garden of palms. The carving dates from the 8th or 9th century BCE, about two or three centuries before Israelite habitation. I like to speculate that artists trained in these Megiddan workshops were later employed in the construction of the ornaments of Solomon’s temple. Shedu and karabu eventually evolved into cherubim. These apparently sphinx-like creatures appear to have been representations of power, might and majesty, inspiring awe and even fear in lowly beholders. Millennia later, artists of the Italian Renaissance transformed these fearsome beings into diminutive putti— the winged, rosy-cheeked babies which now adorn countless greeting cards, in what was surely one of the oddest transmutations in Western civilization. Most importantly to the task at hand, cherubim appear throughout the Hebrew Bible, and are usually associated with the presence of Yahweh. Ezekiel certainly offers the fullest and most complex view of these divine beings, and I will return to him more fully after having made a preliminary perusal of some other biblical passages of relevance.

Gingerbread Men

2008-02-27T13:22:00.000-08:00

In the 14th Psalm, the singer rebukes those who "eat up the people as they eat bread." Eating the people implies a relational distance between self and other, an objectification. Rather than recognizing people as fellow travellers up the hill of life, we treat others as things outside of ourselves to be looked upon unsympathetically and used to further personal gain. When we view others in relation to what they can do for us, rather than how we can relate to them on a basic level, we are eating them up like bread. Usually, we are not consciously doing (or even wishing) them harm, we simply do not engage in recognition. We are commanded to love our neighbor--not to just ingest him and be done. We are to relate to others, and recognize in them the divinity that we must also recognize in ourselves.
The Proverbs contain further insight, denouncing those "whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men." The speaker continues with the famous horseleach's daughters (whose "quantum of wantum cannot vary," as Beckett's Wylie proved) eternally crying "Give, give," followed by a chilling list of "three things that are never satisfied, yea, four things say not, It is enough: The grave; and the barren womb; the earth that is not filled with water; and the fire that saith not, It is enough." There is an abyss in each of us which rages and will never be filled; Blake called the human heart a "hungry gorge." Giving in to the demands of this endless hunger will get us nowhere, as it's appetite is infinite and undiscerning. We must create, renew, and relate, rather than merely consuming all around us. The world is where we make ourselves and bind up that which is broken by loving and creating. When we mindlessly devour those around us, our world ceases to be holy--it becomes a buffet.

Metamorphosis

2008-02-21T12:19:00.000-08:00

And until you have possessed
dying and rebirth,
you are but a sullen guest
on the gloomy earth.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Life is a process of metamorphosis, a series of deaths and transfigurations. This is where life's richness lies, and without change it is a slimy shuffle across the surface of this gloomy rock. We move in cycles of growth and decay--end and beginning are dreams.
We live fully day by day, we enjoy greatly and we suffer greatly, with others and alone. If we do not live, fully and intensely, during our mortality, then why should we expect to live after it?

Eden, Zion, Paradise

2008-02-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

The road to Paradise is not a return to Eden. The covering cherub blocks the way because we cannot go backward--we must progress, individuate ourselves, and grow through metamorphosis. We must move from formless unity to organized harmony. The paradise to which we march, therefore, will be a celestial city and not a primeval garden of pleasant "nature". In Eden, we are innocent and unformed, amorphous--without form and void. When cast out of this state, we fall into divisions, boundaries--into the world of walls and clocks. We clamber through the thorns of nominalism, learning to recognize true and false, what is similar and different, what is between, and what is our own. To achieve Paradise, we must gather all that is ours, all that has broken apart from us. It is a Restoration; not a rejection of all that has come between the first paradise and the second. It is organized innocence, a return to original oneness strengthened by knowledge of self and other. Zion's walls are constructed from the red clay of Eden.

Wakefulness

2008-01-29T07:27:00.000-08:00

PSALM 17 (King James Version)
"As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness."

This psalm moved me deeply when I read it last week, and it hasn't ceased rolling through me since then. It begins with a repeated heartfelt cry for the LORD to hear, and to answer. It is a plea which echoes throughout the entire book of Psalms (Tehillim)--hear me LORD, remember me. The singer is beset with enemies; he is oppressed and compassed about. It seems that whichever direction he turns, all he can see is row upon endless row of his fat foes, while his Heavenly Friend is nowhere to be found. He proclaims, like Job, his own righteosness, and demands that the LORD give him satisfaction by rewarding him for his goodness.

But suddenly, in the last verse, a change comes over the singer and he ends the psalm with the calmly radiant statement: "I shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness." When he is spiritually awake, fully aware and completely conscious, he will see the face of God, for to the awakened soul, the likeness of God appears throughout His Creation, and everything the singer sees becomes a divine manifestation. If the singer awakens, he will see that the LORD has been beside him, around him, and within him at all times and that he was never alone or abandoned, merely asleep. He will see that those he views as his enemies also partake of divinity and are made in the image of God, each bearing a unique seal of His creative power. His enemies will cease to be his enemies. In his sleeping state, the singer has assumed that his own goodness merits reward, while the actions of his enemies merits punishment, but when he is awake he will see that there is really very little difference between him and his fellows, as they are all children of the same God and each animated by His divine breath. The world and its inhabitants are God's mirror, and His likeness is reflected in its various forms, each varied and individual, but each bearing the stamp of His Presence. When the soul is awake, we may see God's likeness in any direction we turn.

Dragon-Tiller

2008-01-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

The story of St. George's exploits appears in Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century bestseller, The Golden Legend, a collection of saint-legends. In a nutshell, the story is this: In Silene (present-day Libya), there was a poisonous dragon who could only be appeased by offering it human flesh. One day the lot fell on the king's daughter, and she was sent to the dragon's cave for brunch. St. George happened by on the way from his hometown of Cappadocia (Persian: Katpatuka: land of beautiful horses). After discovering the problem, he raced off to the dragon and injured it, after which the princess led the humbled beast back to town at the end of a short leash. St. George then convinced everybody in the city to be baptized, after which he finished off the wounded dragon. It a story about good triumphing over evil.

The above Woodcut shows the scene of Cadmus and the dragon.

The dragon-slaying story had other roots, as well. The St. George story also may have descended from story of Cadmus and the dragon: after finding a nice spot to build a city (Thebes), Cadmus went to fetch water from the well of Dirce, where he slew a dragon dear to Ares. He sowed its teeth in the earth, and out sprang a gaggle of angry fighting men who promptly killed each other (except for 5, who helped him build the city). Cadmus, to atone for killing the dragon, had to be Ares' servant for 8 years before becoming the first king of Thebes. Later, he and his wife were transformed into serpents as a final punishment for killing Ares' darling serpent. In the mids of Italian Renaissance artists, the story of St. George was surely related to the Book of Revelations, where St. Michael the Archangel defeats the serpent Satan in an apocalyptic battle.

Raphael's Michael turns a lovely pirouette on the neck of the serpent-Satan.

The story was of great importance to Italian Renaissance artists. Like the story of David and Goliath, it represented an underdog victory, which had political resonance in the recently triumphant Florence. But more importantly it illustrated the Renaissance ideals of reason triumphing over the bestiality of Nature--the triumph of Order over Chaos. In all of them, the long phallic lance is an important symbol of the male ego opposing the wildness of the the natural world.

Occasionally, as in the case (above) of Leonhard Beck's murdered mother and child, the dragon is feminine, and St. George represents male chastity trampling on unbounded female sexuality. His overcoming represents the overcoming of natural desire and the binding of sexuality within the Church-sanctioned bonds of marriage. The role of the rescued princess is pivotal in this reading: she ‘chooses’ to be with St George rather than the dragon, and in some late medieval versions she is offered to him as a bride. He refuses, of course (he is a representation of chastity, after all), but her future role is clearly indicated--she will be a safely-married woman, not a dangerous, single, sexual female like the dragon. Like Michelangelo's famously female serpent in Eden, the serpent-dragon was a symbol of Mother Nature's poisoned gifts.
Beginning in at least the fourteenth century, the traditional image of St. George and the dragon was of beautiful muscle-toned horse rearing up, shining and impassive St. George gripping a long lance and impaling the ferocious dragon's neck like a piece of butter, often with a lovely princess hanging about somewhere in the vicinity, either distressed with the violence of the apocalyptic battle or, more often, calm in the purity of her prayer. St. George was encased in his ego-armor, his intricately articulated shell of persona. George's armor, finely wrought as a Greek torso and burnished to emphasize it's surface, exalts intellectual beauty over the formlessness of nature.

Raphael's famous image, complete with a very happy horse, is a good example of the Apollonian/Italian view of the story.

Carpaccio returned to the subject several times throughout his life; here is his gory scene with a frightening dragon.

Uccello's wonky two-legged dragon.

As the Italian influence began to creep northward, other artists began to turn to the story as an artistic subject. Generally, a very Italian approach was adopted, albeit within the traditions of Northern art.

Albrecht Durer depicted St. George wearing shining armor (and even a halo!), mounted on a mighty, bodybuilding horse.

Lucas Cranach's polished St. George kills his demonic, bug-eyed dragon without soiling his shoes.

Bernt Notke (a German painter/sculptor) presents an absolutely spectacular Swedish victory sculpture, commissioned by the royalty of Sweden to commemorate their military supremacy over rival Denmark. Made of painted wood, it features a hideously frenzied dragon and a golden St. George.

Albrecht Altdorfer created a wonderful print with a flamboyantly befeathered George slaying a mean-looking beast with a distinctly female torso.

All of the above images are in keeping with the Italian view of the story--George and his horse are bright and pure (their killing is generally rather dainty), while the dragon is a monstrous foe who could snap off the horse's legs if he got a chance. But the last artist I mentioned, Altdorfer, went on to create a fascinating image whose interpretation deviates dramatically from his Italian models.
Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480-1538) studied the art of Cranach, Durer, and Mantegna. Like Durer, he studied in Italy and was fascinated by the Italians' figural ideas. He became more and more Italian throughout his career, and even tried his hand at fresco. But his natural affinity was for landscape, and the raging beauty of the southern German countryside. Landscape tends to overpower figures. His genius responded most vividly to the world of weeds and roots, of looming trees and massive cliffsides--it is the same southern German landscape which so richly informs the tales of Grimm, which were likely circulating in early forms at this time. Altdorfer's is perhaps the first European art since prehistoric times to concern itself directly with mysterious powers of the vegetable underworld--the epic grandeur and monstrosity of inhuman Nature. Altdorfer's art is tortured by a tension between the wildness of German landscape, Nature's ferocious spread, and the refined Italian figural tradition, which he admired but never truly made his own.
This fascinating dichotomy is evident in Altdorfer's 1510 masterpiece, St. George in the Forest. Almost the entire panel is filled with the ferocious wildness of the forest, from which the lumpy, froglike dragon seems to emerge, slobbering with primordial slime. In a little window where the trees open, the light of the outside world burns through. St. George, in contrast to the vibrant Italian imagery we have seen, is not in the act of killing the dragon—rather, he seems to be looking down on it with pity. His lance hangs limply at his side. Altdorfer's George looks tired, his armor is dingy, and the horse seems to shrink back in disgust at the sight of the formless, murky dragon. The figures become lost in the ferocious foliage (ferocious like the dragon traditionally should be) which threatens to choke out the figures themselves (who should traditionally be the focus), and they all seem to merge into monochrome. The knight seems to be musing on something within himself which he knows he must slay in order to leave the dark forest of the unconscious and emerge into the distant light of the ego-world. His armor glints dully, the fragile boundary of his blurry persona. The princess is nowhere to be seen, so what is the purpose of this "battle?"
The "battle" is taking place not on an Italian stage, but in the thick woods of southern Germany, or, more accurately, in the the strangling thickets within George's own wounded soul. Cadmus' destiny was to become a serpent one day--he already had serpent qualities within himself before he slew Ares' beloved pet. Like Cadmus, George must overcome the chthonian aspects of his own nature so that he might emerge intact, able to build a city of Order. It is not an easy task, nor is it a glorious one. Rather, it takes place when George is up to his knees in primeval muck. Cadmus was haunted by his decision for the rest of his life. The name "George" is derived from the Greek words for "earth" (ge) and "work" (ergon), making "George" a tiller of the soil. Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend describes St. George as a "holy wrestler," and goes on to say, "So George is to say as tilling the earth, that is his flesh."
Altdorfer's genius was to internalize the Apollonian drama of the Italian St. George, altering the setting from the opera stage to the choked swamps of George's inner life. It is a movement from the ornate outwardness of Catholic iconography to the inward individual consciousness of Protestantism. By removing the apparent motive for the battle, Altdorfer forces us to reinterpret what exactly is happening. Altdorfer's St. George is struggling with his murky inner trolls--he is loath to kill them, and his only prize is a private one. George the holy wrestler is tilling his own flesh.

Landfill

2008-01-11T21:51:00.001-08:00

Look! It is the consecrated mount
Of suits sans bodies
Footless shoes and neckless necklaces
Empty belts still buckled
to the hard-won third notch
Whispering in ghastly pizzicati
Rustling, shivering in the thin breeze
Patient for their inheritance
Patient as valleymaking drops.

Design

2008-01-11T21:50:00.002-08:00

The angel in the library
Does not see the door—
Does not discern the window-glass—
Flutters desperately from shelf to shelf
Staying near to the ceiling—
Charting divine parabolas
Along the grid of asbestos tile—

The trees are paused in ice
No one breathes
I do not breathe

BUFO AMERICANUS

2008-01-11T21:50:00.001-08:00

Sleeper wombed in warm unlight
Slipperquivering flesh of red unreason
Legs twitching, you groan
and from your amphibious lungs bubble
the mumbled syllables of incoherent prophecy
a bubblebabble of koax and brekkek
gurgling to the heavens...
Do angels stand at the four corners
of your bed, drenched in their scaly commodities,
trumpets at their licked lips?
When you ripplerise you wash away
your frogface, and straightening your tie
step out the door, leaving
wet footprints in the crimson clay.

EXAUDI ME

2008-01-11T21:49:00.000-08:00

And it was there in the firefly-gilded night I saluted you

blazing through my body

strumming like fat thumbs strumming

on the glass bones of my translucent body, sliding

through my eyes and filling my lungs

as fire fills a forest—

What shadings of desire were yours

when you stepped onto this asphalt

the soles of your feet blackening with each step...

Hovering between heaven and earth

Between the terrible crystals and the crystals of my bones

swooping down boltfalling

O cormorant angel

I felt your black skyfilling wing

brush the nape of my neck

at night on Claremont Avenue

under the sparkling bulbs of false light

and my lungs slammed against one another like massive bells—

I knew then that darkness is truth

for only in darkness can a man feel a thing

feel it in all its thingness

not sliding off its surfaces...

For you are the angel of longing,

full of light but shrouded in manifold mantles—

For true light is touched and not seen

True fire flies away from your worldcovering wings;

It is perceived through our eyes, not with them—

I was blessed that night, blessed

not to have been snapped up in your curved bill

as you descended upon gibbering prey mysterious to me...

Covering Cherub, Angel of History

What you do not know, what you must never know

is the purple ocean that boils through the veins of men

the foaming crashing endless ocean that will never be content with its shores

You must never know, O Mighty One,

that when two shattered naked humans meet

in the dark green obsidian of your sky

when they truly meet

They travel backwards into themselves through themselves

burst out the other side bathed in the vermilion sea of newness

discerning the unity the originality lost so long ago

which they have forgotten and you remember

you remember remember for it is inscribed in every filament of your pinions

its memory gallops through the airless bloodless tubes of your veins—

And they have found what you shall never find

for an endless moment

Outside of time where time begets new times

Outside of space where space begets new spaces

Breaking through the walls and the cast-iron moldings and gratings

of this brick-and-gutter world

an instant—an instant between instants—an eternal newness

its duration less than the pulse of an artery

but extending far beyond falsified centuries...

It is this, O angel of faded photographs, that you cannot know

for to know it would be your fall

a snap of northwind would strip you of your feathers

and you would crush the spired city with your drop...

We keep this single secret, you and I,

locked away like a volcano—

Heal us O Lord and we shall be healed—Amen

O LORD, THOU KNOWEST

2008-01-11T21:48:00.000-08:00

Does your seaweed hair in slowmotion unfurl
Overcranked with seasilt
And do your lips moistly part
Like a pungent oyster
Your pearlglistening eyes
Coldly reflecting across their surface
The forgotten face of your brother,
His features blank with unreason—
Submerging, descending
As you rise to meet him?
Can Love journey into such depths
And retain its name—
And can an angel, feathers choked with oil,
Lungs packed with silt—sing of wonder?