The following video is the first part of 6 in a BBC special hosted by philosopher Roger Scruton on Beauty, the contemporary world’s apparent rejection of it, and the imminent need for its return. Personally, I am not completely convinced of all his points, but the general arc is salient and thought provoking. I certainly believe capital “B” Beauty is necessary, but Scruton’s Kantian and Neo-Platonism are limiting; these under gird a beauty that exists only in its idealism. To my understanding, the idealistic in beauty (though surely not to be excluded only eschewed as the only end) resulted in the 20th Century’s rejection of that capital “B” Beauty which he vehemently shuns. We often forget that capital “B” Beauty can be found in “ashes and dust, blood and bodies” as well as broken bread and a creation that includes its brokenness. After all, as believers, are we not to find the ultimate Beauty as Christ’s most ghastly sacrifice: macabre, despairing, and gruesome (not in spite of it but because of it)? Still, the essay will stir us to think and there exists plenty in it that speaks to truth and is worth fighting for.
In talking about poetry with people, inevitably I hear, “I don’t get it.” For sure, poetry can be resistant to immediate interpretation, but isn’t this true of all art? T. S. Eliot once wrote, “If I understand a play the very first time, then I know that it isn’t a very good play.” Is this because art is elitist? No, but understanding cannot be bought with a credit card; it must be purchased with hard work. And haven’t we all performed activities with our bodies that demonstrated the presence (and ache) of heretofore unknown muscles? Such is the case with engaging art; it utilizes portions of one’s being that maybe were not known to exist: especially the often atrophied muscles of imagination. But I digress, for this article is about one specific artist, poet Kay Ryan—the current poet laureate—and her book Elephant Rocks, and the one simple reason why her poetry should entreat a first then closer look—it is fun.
Immanuel Kant speaks about the nature of play in art; how true it is, as long as we do not consider it the exclusive aim. What drew me to Milton was his playful combining of Greek and Christian mythologies; to T. S. Eliot his playful, modern often shocking metaphors of life, love and nature; to Gerard Manley Hopkins the playfulness of his near dancing rhythms. Kay Ryan plays, too; consider this verse:
Bestiary
A bestiary catalogs
bests. The mediocres
both higher and lower
are suppressed in favor
of the singularly savage
or clever, the spectacularly
pincered, the archest
of the arch deceivers
who press their advantage
without quarter even after
they’ve won as of course they would.
Best is not to be confused with good—
a different creature altogether,
and treated of in the goodiary—
a text alas lost now for centuries.[1]
It isn’t until the second to last line that one realizes they might have mispronounced the title. What else was missed? And it begs a second reading. Of course, as one reads it again, maybe the distinction between best and good becomes a bit more apparent. Plainly, Ryan suggests that the good are not frequently categorized or chosen as the best. I think of the naturalist with his species and genus; I consider the phrase, “only the strongest survive”, and I wonder as to its veracity. I ask do I want to be good or a beast (may be the title wasn’t mispronounced after all)? The playfulness of the poem belies a weighty set of questions.
Throughout the book, Ryan looks at the very ordinary and guides us through its enchanted landscapes to find both elations and revelations.
A Plain Ordinary Steel Needle Can Float on Pure Water
Who hasn’t seen
a plain ordinary
steel needle float serene
on water as if lying on a pillow?
The water cuddles up like Jell-O.
It’s a treat to see water
so rubbery, a needle
so peaceful, the point encased
in the tenderest dimple.
It seems so simple
when things or people
have modified each other’s qualities
somewhat
we almost forget the oddity
of that.[2]
The fun of her rhymes (Jell-O and pillow), off-beat word choices (cuddle sounds so much like puddle), and misplaced adjectives (rubbery water and peaceful, tenderest needles) all contribute to a sense of play and the pure charm found in this witnessed oddity. She sees like a child something of wonder that must be passed on, and even if that sense of surprise at seeing the unexpected is all that the reader derives, is it not a worthwhile poem? But everything in this poem is precise including the delivery of its fine point; the language changes here, becomes more terse—more plain—and resonates cleanly at the pricking end of the needle.
Not every poem in the book is a treasure, but they are all at least fun (read them aloud, the sounds are great). This is part of the work, though—sifting to find the genuine nuggets. Of the 60 or so poems, I marked 22 of them as “something special”. Honestly, this is a good number of poems in a single volume for me to enjoy; when I closed the end board of the book I found my self quite pleased and fully inspired. I encourage you all to pick it up and have fun, but don’t always expect to “get it” the very first time.
[1] Ryan, Kay. Elephant Rocks. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1995, 18.
Homes of My Past is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4th 2009.
The first thing noticeable about Rachel Lockridge’s paintings is the extreme vertical orientation of the pieces. They are in the most elementary critique simple, architectural paintings, and as such a horizontal direction seems far more a propos—assuming that the buildings are the subjects. These are not skyscrapers piercing the clouds; they are residential buildings gathered close to the ground, towered over by the local flora, and dwarfed by the vertical: the endless blue sky, the billowy clouds and the infinite regress beyond.
The philosopher, Paul Crowther, tells us that “a work of art enables the self to move beyond and outside itself toward another object”—providing a reconciled relationship with the world; “it is the space between Self and Other, the metaxu, the rich between.”[1] It is this space—this between—where we discover Lockridge’s true subject; it is the space, itself. For in it she finds reconciliation in all its forms; most notably though with her own, small world.
The space can dwarf us; it can make us feel so insignificant—so trivial. Or worse, it can prompt us to consider the emptiness, devoid of signs. We might walk away considering nihilism or a hopelessness rooted in our own smallness: our quaint dwellings swallowed up or unconsidered by the grandness of the infinite. This is the tension in her paintings—irrelevance, but looking closer it isn’t the sky that imposes this message rather it is the earth-brown homes firmly grounded and lost in the soils that they rest upon which forces us to consider the Biblical message “from dust to dust”. The giant mouthed sky 2/3 of each painting is not the threat, it is earth-boundedness which paws at each of us to make us its own.
The sky on the other hand, is richly textured with washes of paint: sometimes with clouds rising like steeples other times like panels of stained glass interacting with the delicateness of light. There exists a serenity in them that smacks not of emptiness but presence. If it is not seen at first it is because the presence itself seems allusive at times, but allusive because of its pervasiveness—the way something that is always around seems to disappear or at least becomes unnoticed simply due to its ubiquity. Alexander Schmemann writes:
All that exist is God’s gift to man, and it all exists to make God known to man, to make man’s life communion with God. It is divine love made food, made life for man. God blesses everything He creates, and, in biblical language, this means that He makes all creation the sign and means of His presence and wisdom, love and revelation.[2]
The largeness of the sky and its ubiquity do threaten but not the human element in the image; rather it threatens the earth-boundedness. Meaning trumps irrelevance in her paintings
And this is what Lockridge is hinting at: the home as sanctuary; a place where God is felt, communed with and made known; significance and meaning; a scene simple, straight-forward, and everyday that points back to God—providing value. It is always there but often our views need re-orientation. All the cosmos is a sanctuary from the most grand to the most banal if the lens is turned just so. Lockridge turns the lens to redeem her little insignificant patches of soil—what she calls “nostalgia…leaky windows and dirty sidewalks, the loud neighbors and pungent curry simmering next door.” A lens turned horizontal makes these just nostalgia with no greater purpose, but Lockridge sees God in everything and wants us to re-orient our lenses to move “beyond and outside” with her to see “His presence and wisdom, love and revelation” in nothing but the leaky windows and pungent curry sauce of the everyday: the divine food in the unexceptional.
[1]Daniel Siedell, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Grand Rapids Michigan: Baker Academic Press, 2008), 27.
[2]Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 14.
What I’m Afraid to Look At is part of the Homesick exhibit at the Art Gallery inside LifeLink Church (1015 S Cooper St, Memphis, TN 38104); it is on display through November 4th 2009.
The 16th century Baroque artist, Caravaggio, lived by the motto Nec spe, nec metu which translates, “Without hope or fear.” Certainly, his contemporaries may have mistaken his bravado as indicative of some fearlessness, but on the other side of 5 centuries with the panoptic perspective that the corpus of his work provides, we can see it for what it truly was: a covering for the great fear that ate away at his soul. His life running and the pathos that he shared for the street urchin, sinner found in his paintings culminating in his final self-portrait “David with the Head of Goliath” help give us the reality and depth of this fear.
In the movie Donnie Darko, Donnie cries out “Why should we care about dead rabbits!” when discussing in his English class the book Watership Down. Why indeed; for rabbits have no fear of death; no fear at all, so their fate according to Donnie is inconsequential. The movie states that fear is an indigenous resident in our humanity, and unlike the animal kingdom, who engages their fear merely in the Darwinian concept of flight, our humanity comes face to face with fears so large, so powerful, so pervasive that they cannot be evaded; they swallow not only us but like a black hole everything that enters their orbit. Donnie realizes he must face them. Donnie Darko engages the reality of repressed fears and the many masks used to cover them up and flee from them. “Why do you wear that silly rabbit suit?” Donnie asks Frank the demonic looking 6 foot tall rabbit; to which Frank replies, “Why do you wear that silly man-suit?”
Masks, veneers, threadbare coverings—these are the first impressions when looking at Jessica Erickson’s exhibit: “What I’m Afraid to Look At”. Behind pie crusts, icing, diapers and wallpaper in idyllic settings in soothing pastels and muted colors we find hidden refugees, mutilated bodies, graveyards and viruses painted with coloring dyes. These are obscured enough to keep the focus not on the object of fear but on the covering each wears. Each is textured, rough and homespun—some created with homemade paper finely detailed and pressed with stampings, others from remnants as if found in some spare room craft drawer—all with the meticulous care of any creative and intent child. They are personal pieces, purposeful and constructed; such is the way we erect means to evade our fears; we use what is at hand, dress them up elaborately and hope they won’t peek through, but eventually they do regardless of how they are regaled. The contemplative observer should pause and note their own means of avoidance; they should ask, “How have I attempted such insulation?”
Erickson does not end her statement here; she calls her work momento mori, or “Remember you will die”, which historically are artistic works meant to help remind people of their own mortality. Her titles tell us that our mortality is at risk when we face displacement, disease, death or victimization. Thus, when confronted by these we seek the solace of our craftmaking psyches and the escape provided via them, but there is no escape. It lurks everywhere: in the innocence of childhood, behind the window looking in, in the fixtures we use to light our houses, behind the wallpaper and in the food we eat; our mortality is omnipresent, and the elaborate measures of our flight are—regardless of how clever—mere foppery. Consider the following poem:
Dear Atom Bomb,
I confess—you were my high school obsession.
You bloomed inside my chest until I howled. You shook me
with your booming zillion wattage. You were bigger
than rock and roll. I lost days to you, the way you expanded
to become more than even yourself. In Science-class
movies, you puffed men like microwaved marshmallows,
raked blood from their insides, and always I could feel
your heat like a massive cloak around my shoulders.
You embarrassed me. You were too depraved for dignity,
not caring whose eyes you melted, whose innards oozed;
you balled up control in your God-huge palms
and tossed it into the stratosphere. Oh, Atom Bomb,
I miss you. These days my mind is no incandescent
blur but a narrow infrared beam spotlighting
bounded fears: cancer in a single throat; a shock
of blood on the clean sheets; a careless turn from
the grocery store lot into the pickup with the pit bull
in the bed. Oh, Atom Bomb, come back. Take me away
from the twitch in my leg, the cracking lead paint,
the lurking salmonella. Sweep me up in your blinding
white certainty. Make me sure once again that
I’ll live till the world’s brilliant end.[1]
When one fear is gone another supplants it; we cannot shake them off. We can only come to terms with them. Erickson begs us to reconcile with our fears and our mortality.
In Aronofsky’s The Fountain, Tommy and Izzi quest to escape death through the Fountain of Life in one episode and in a more modern episode through science and medicine; these become their mechanisms for coping—their elaborate hoax for avoiding reality. It is in this single-minded pursuit that instead of prolonging life or overcoming their transience that the life they have is stripped of any value. Tommy away from his love invests his days isolated and alone unable to enjoy the very thing he wishes to save. The climax comes only when Tommy realizes the truth of the Grand Inquisitor, “Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement…All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul.” Only after this realization is he capable of fully living.
The awfulness of this may cause the dilemma that Ransom faced in C. S. Lewis’ Perelandra:
My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful.[2]
Consider truth here instead of goodness; it is the category that Erickson deals in and which to us may look as dreadful as Ransom’s “good”. And just like Lewis she does not give us a trite answer; for to do so would appear as much a fraudulent escape as she has already urged us to question. She emphasizes, instead, the truth of mortality, the reality of fear and its inescapable quality. She shows us a lens where by children prompt the macabre, where we eat the dead and where we are stalked by disease; it is gruesome; it is certain! What she does in a very Schafferian manner is force us to face this dilemma in order to ask the question, “What now?” Bravado means nothing, escape is impossible, fear prevails. Donnie is right; only in fear is there consequence. For fear forces one to engage in questions that truly matter and look for answers in transcendent categories rather than in masks of our own making. What the artist has done, is present us with a means not to name our fears—or fight them or solve them—but to grow accustomed enough to them that we might discover what’s beyond them—as the artist writes: “a truth that is stark and rich, bitter and sweet.” She asks us to remove our silly rabbit suits, to hold the mask like David presenting Goliath’s head and to discard all ten feet of its bluster.
