Author: admin

Guernica – the novel and the painting

Guernica, Dave Boling, (Picador)

This is a
carefully researched novel about Basque village life in the 30's seen through
the eyes of three generations, culminating in the atrocity that was Guernica.
Picasso's presence is woven throughout, and the novelist makes him neither hero nor villain, but
simply what he is; an artist who lives with the ambiguity of his own life story
and the politics of his time. His painting of the raids on Guernica (which is
brilliantly repulsive in conception and creation) is an example of art as moral
outrage and political protest – and of how the representation of human anguish
when it is well done as in Picasso's Guernica, is potent not by its power to
attract, but by its power to repel. The medium conveys exactly human recoil
from the evil the painting depicts.

It’s an interesting
thought, that art, so naturally identified with the creation of beauty, grace
and human loveliness, is equally potent in depicting ugliness, violence and
human suffering. There are some paintings that are hideous both in their
content and in their execution, and that makes them great art because they
compel attention to the human experience of that which dehumanises, degrades
and violates. In class last year when looking at artistic representations of
Jesus on the cross, there were several images which students found repulsive,
even upsetting, there was “no beauty that we should desire him”. Crucifixion is
utter unremitting cruelty, and some artists refuse to surround such inhumane
infliction with light or hope or theological concessions. Likewise, Picasso in
his painting of the atrocity of Guernica, was unsparing of the sensitivities of
the public viewers of his art. There are times when art speaks truth, the
representation of a subject contributes to its reality, the medium successfully
conveys the message, the viewer is forcibly confronted with what we would
rather not see and think, and thus moral judgement is demanded by the stark
uncompromising portrayal of moral evil.

There is no
comfortable distance from which to view Picasso’s Guernica. It is an offence,
searingly effective, and the depth of negative reaction to its images and
overall composition is precisely the intent – a jolt in the nerve centre of our
moral perceptions and political complacency. This novel doesn’t operate at this
kind of level, at least not self-consciously. But by giving human face and
character to the villagers, by drawing us into the family life of the Basque
people, and by making us care for the outcomes in the stories of their lives,
such personal and moral reactions are inevitably evoked. Near the end, there is a beautifully conceived insight into how human beings deal with loss and love. It comes as a comment on how two men coped with the violent deaths of their wives and children in the bombing raid:

"…if you lose someone you love, you need to redistribute your feelings rather than surrender them. You give them to whoever is left, and the rest you turn towards something that will keep you moving forward."

So the novel is a romance and a lament, a celebration of human courage and consolation, an affirmation of the love that humans have for each other and the finite miracle of love that survives brutal death; but all this set against the chronic capacity of human beings to hate, or worse, to not care about the consequences for other human beings of military action and political violence. And Picasso's painting, now an iconic image, an artistic monument of 25 feet by 12 feet, ensures that the name of a the small historic town of Guernica is not forgotten. And Picasso's poignant image of the dove flying over broken weapons of war is also a necessary and urgent reminder that human creatvity, industry and reason, can also be persuaders and builders of peace. This is a fine novel, about a remarkable painting, a flawed artistic genius, and an act of human barbarity that changed the nature of war.

The book ends with the following few lines. It isn't a spoiler to quote it. The opposite in fact, it's an invitation to read the book, and enter with moral imagination the experience that inspired a masterpiece of poltical protest, moral outrage and symbolic resistance to war.

Picasso is sitting in his favourite cafe in Paris. He is approached by a German officer.

"One officer who considered himself culturally advanced approached the artist as he sipped his coffee at a table beneath the green pavement awninga. The officer held a reproduction of the mural Guernica, barely larger than a postcard size.

'Pardon me', he said, holding the card out. 'You did this didn't you?'

Picasso put his cup delicately on its saucer, turned to the picture, then to the officer, and responded, 'No. You did.'

23 July 2010
A Week of A J Heschel: Thursday

Everything depends on the person who stands in front of the classroom. The teacher is not an automatic fountian from which intellectual beverages may be obtained. the teacher is either a witness or a stranger. To guide a pupil into the promised land, she must have been there herself. When asking herself: Do I stand for what I teach? Do I believe what I say? she must be able to answer in the affirmative.

What we need more than anything else is not textbooks but textpeople. It is the personality of the teacher which is the text that the pupils read; the text that they will never forget.

The Insecurity of Freedom, 39-40

22 July 2010
A Week of A J Heschel : Wednesday

What do most of us know about the substance of words? Estranged from the soil of the soul, our words do not grow as fruits of insightas, but are found as sapless cliches, refuse in the backyard of intelligence. To the man of our age nothing is as familiar and nothing as trite as words…we all live in them, feel in them, think in them, but failing to uphold their independent dignity, to respect their power and weight, they turn waif, elusive, a mouthful of dust….

Words have ceased to be commitments.

Man's Quest for God, pages 23, 25.

21 July 2010
A Week of A J Heschel : Tuesday

Let justice roll down like waters
and righteousness like a mighty stream (Amos 5.24)

Righteousness as a mere tributary, feeding human interests, is easily exhausted and more easily abused. But righteousness is not a trickle; it is God's power in the world., a torrent, an impetuous drive, full of grandeur and majesty. The surge is chokedm the sweep is blocked. Yet the mighty stream will break all dikes…. In the eyes of the prophets, justice is more than an idea or a norm: justice is charged with the omnipotence of God. What ought to be shall be!

The Prophets, 212-213.

20 July 2010
A week of A J Heschel: Monday

We live by the conviction that acts of goodness

reflect the hidden light of His holiness.

His light is above our minds

but not beyond our will.

It is within our power to mirror his unending love

in deeds of kindnes

like brooks that hold the sky.

God in Search of Man, page 290

19 July 2010
The biggest book I’ve ever bought! :)) – and the artist as alternative exegete

Two books recently bought. One huge, as in mega-big. I didn't look at the dimensions when I clicked. (36x43x3). Don't care. It's a coffee table book, which could also mean put legs on it and it is big enough for a coffee table! But it is a gorgeously produced, outrageously sized, sumptuously heavy, ridiculously unwieldy, impossible to read in bed, but impossible not to read, study of Johannes Vermeer and His World. And the price is £15 from Amazon! There are 10 posters for framing included and I reckon any half decent print shop would charge you more than £15 for one of them, let alone the book and the set.

There is one painting in particular I want to spend some time with – Vermeer's interpretation of the Martha and Mary story. Of which more in a later post. But this volume is a labour of love; each of the confirmed Vermeer paintings is reproduced, with good background notes, exposition of key details, and building up to an education in the understanding and appreciation of artistic development from gift to genius. What becomes progressively clearer in studying the paintings is the way the eyes of the subjects are portrayed. How they look, the direction and focus, the use of light, each draw the attention of the viewer, and thus influence the way we look, and point us towards what we ought to see. In other words the artist is providing his own hermeneutic, and with Vermeer that includes provoking and directing emotional attentiveness "by rendering visible particular moods and feelings". One of the unmistakable responses to a Vermeer masterpiece is precisely this, the artist setting the emotional climate in which the painting can best be appropriated, and doing so by taking control of how the viewer looks and what it is the artist wants the viewer to notice.

Exegesis of a text requires, and is inevitably accompanied by, a set of hermeneutical assumptions, strategies, principles – which are themselves influenced by the capacity of the text to speak for itself. There is an equivalent process, when the text is not in words but in image. Visibility, seeing and reading the non-verbal text, is with an eye to apprehending the truth, the is-ness made visible and comprehensible not in words but in that emotional and spiritual intuition of the viewer that recognises the rightness, the fittingness, the yes factor in what is being viewed.

This is an important resource for theological nourishment, as well as a crucial insight for theological understanding. Much hermeneutical activity which surrounds the exegesis of words composed into texts, strongly focuses on meaning and truth. The equivalent hermeneutical activity in art focuses on the response of the viewer to beauty, and the search to understand the process by which the apprehension of beauty opens the mind to truth of another order. This painting is a pictorial exegesis of a gospel incident that has been deeply influential in the development of Christian spirituality, especially the unhelpful distinction between the active and the contemplative life. Vermeer portrays both women as having Jesus' attention, and there is little sense of one being preferred to the other. The active and the contemplative, the kitchen and the prayer stool, food and conversation, Martha and Mary, are equally disciples, and feeding the hungry Jesus is as important as listening to Jesus' words. Dag Hammarskjold, that surprisingly perceptive Christian and Secretary General of the UN, understood the given and creative tension of Christian obedience, that "the way to holiness lies through the world of action".

And Thomas Merton, who to my knowledge didn't write on this gospel incident, though one of the greatest apologists for the contemplative life in silence and solitude, nevertheless linked these spiritual disciplines of passive waiting (Mary) to the richer textured realities of active obedience in the world (Martha), and to demonstable Christian practices which embody and enflesh the virtues of peacemaking, love and social compassion. His finest writing is found in the collision, or perhaps the conflation, of contemplative and political theology, the fusion in his spirituality of prayer and protest, the insistence that true communion with God and love for the world are to be found both in the inward cohesion of a contemplative community, and in the outreaching and scattering of that community in Christian witness to a broken God-loved world. And it is not unimportant that some of his most telling statements are not in words, but in photographs, poems and calligraphic art. And some of his most piercing images are literary and in his best known essays. For Merton, word and image are equally effective conduits of those truths that shape and inspire patterns of behaviour and practice that are demonstrably Christian.

16 July 2010
Holidays and the homeward flight of the goose

Came across this in a book I didn’t intend to
look at today, but which was in a box I was moving. Some time ago I’d
marked this sentence about holidays.

“a time of physical and emotional well-being
when the self’s normal defences of tension, focus, image and desire are
in abeyance, a time when everything that has been planted can safely
creep up through the soil and begin to live in our consciousness."

Another wise writer spoke of the frustration and waste of what she called "unassimilated experience", by which she meant, too much living with no time for reflection, learning and adjusting our inner world to the happenings of the oputer world as they impinge on us.

Holidays have always been a mixture for me. I don't quickly adjust to being off. Some call it workaholism, but that isn't how it feels. More a way of life that is engaged, involved, structured and focused, and if a holiday is about change it means making time to disengage, reduce involvement, step outside of structure and widen focus – and that can take some time. A bit like taking off your specs and letting your eyes adjust; or coming to the end of a long run and slowing down, then walking, before stopping.

Kylie Minogue, not renowned for metaphysical gymnastics, once quipped, "I have had a holiday and I'd like to take it up professionally." I don't doubt she could afford it, but could she live with it. I could neither afford nor live with it. But I do recognise the need to create time and space to assimilate the experience of a busy life; and I too have planted thoughts that need a chance to "safely creep up through the soil".

So this year a longer than usual holiday, much of it spent in and around our new home here in Aberdeen. A sense of place, of roots, of connectedness, breaking in the new home like new shoes and the same aim – to feel comfortable walking the journey. Whe Jesus said "Come ye apart", it wasn't a statement about life falling to pieces or personal disinitegration. It was an invitation to step aside for a while; to stop long enough to ask what it is we are doing and why; to recover a sense of proportion and perspective and understand again that the world, even our own small worlds, get along quite well without us. Indispensability is the temptation of the proud, and I reckon most of us have a rich seam of that running through our egos.

Mary Oliver knows what I'm talking about:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

If our searching and longing, our waiting and hoping, our desring and expecting were distilled into one phrase, for me that would be it – finding and "announcing our place in the family of things." O for the wings of a dove? Nah. I prefer the beating purposefulness of the Canada goose, honking its way home and using its wing-beats to make it easier for the others around it.

This weekend the holiday starts.

14 July 2010
Incarnational Theology and the Conceits of Art

The recent visit to Edinburgh and the National Galleries I was looking for nothing in particular except the Botticelli mentioned in a previous post. But I came across a couple of other paintings including this one, a work by the enigmatic and mysterious artist (or artists) known as the Master(s) of the Embroidered Foliage.

Close inspection shows why the name has become attached to paintings in this style. The foliage is painted to make it look like embroidery, and the effect gives the work a depth and texture that sets the central figure in what looks like a living landscape, and yet which is so different in style the human figures are made to appear more real, more immediate. The landscape intentionally appears as a human contrivance, embroidered foliage, a conceit that depicts the miracle of natural growth as the natural response of an organic creation to the One who gives life, calls to life, indeed is born as living flesh into the world.

But then, by placing the Virgin and child in the centre, on a bench with a richly embroidered back, and set against a landscape painted also in embroidered patterns, the realism of the mother and child, captured in subtle delicacy of colour and expression, is further emphasised in a way that carries profound incarnational implications. The real natural world is depicted through an artificial conceit, and the supernatural birth is depicted with realism and a degree of artistic sensitivity that it forces a contrast, and thus compels attention to the living centre of the painting.

The child's hand turning the page, pointing to the text, suggests the child and mother in a joint act of reading, interpreting, fulfilling. But it seems it is the child's hand turning the page, an act of precocious, even authoritative guidance – and the mother is looking at the child, not the book. Perhaps to the mother the child is the real text, the subject of whom the book speaks. The developed theology of the incarnation wrestles with immense and complex questions of humanity and divinity coinciding in the birth of Jesus. Nicea and Chalcedon stand as formulaic and historic statements, as the best the tradition could offer in words, reconciled to the limitations of language and vocabulary, and recognising that intellectually construed concepts always fall short of the divine realities expressed in the central doctrines of Christian faith. Incarnation and Christology, the relations of the Triune God, the initiating and inviting grace of God reaching out in a love impassioned purpose, eternal and yet scandalously specific in historic occurence. "The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in christ reconciling the world to himself…but when the fullness of time had come, God sent his son, born of a woman…."

13 July 2010
The Amazing Ubiquity and Ambiguity of “Amazing Grace”

The hymn Amazing Grace is amazingly ubiquitous. I've no idea how many renderings of it there are. But without straining a single mental muscle I can list the following which I've heard at least once, and one or two of them countless times

The Pipes and Drums and Military band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards

Judy Collins

Jessye Norman

The Blind Brothers of Alabama

Elvis

Susan Boyle

Paul Potts

Aretha Franklin

Mahalia Jackson

But the most spectacularly over the top rendering I've ever heard is on the Lesley Garrett CD Amazing Grace. By over the top I mean no criticism whatsoever. For once a full orchestra, a soprano showing off, and creative choreography does justice to a song written out of appalling human abuse, and yet which celebrates a faith in which the gift of God is the power of love to restore and renew human brokenness, to break down dividing walls of hostility, to begin the work of the reconciliation of all things in Christ.

I know no better portrayal of John Newton's lifelong sorrow for his own actions than Albert Finnie's anguished and sympathetic portrayal in the DVD of the recent film. The sorrow and anger of the converted slaver, the inability to erase the past, the felt insufficiency of personal forgiveness from God to complete the circle of reconciliation, until there is forgiveness from those who have been wronged, and until the wrong itself is abolished, highlights a crucial theological and pastoral insight. Forgiveness by God can never exclude the necessity of that kind of repentance that brings us to those we have wronged to state the wrong, to confess our sins against them, to say we are sorry, to ask what would heal or help restore a relationship so damaged, and to give ourselves to the abolition of such patterns of behaviour as caused the wrong in the first place.

Given such human misery inflicted by the slave trade, and a Gospel of utter surprising love, and the tragedy of human history that can never be reversed, more is required in the singing of Amazing Grace than anodyne and safe renderings that are musically competent, even brilliant. I'm not even sure that the hymn is best sung as a congregational praise song, unless there is an awareness not only of its provenance, but of the complicity of Christianity in human trafficking, and an open knowledge that such trade was providing the economic sub-structure of an empire that still shapes contemporary attitudes to the worlds and cultures of other people. Something needs to jolt us awake to what is being sung, and to our capacity to be blind, culpably and callously blind to the suffering of others, often enough only because it is culturally approved and economically convenient.

The track in the Garrett version begins with African voices singing Alleluia but in rhythms reminiscent of the workforce, the clanking of irons is heard here and throughout the first sections, and the first bars introduce the wistful sound of wind instruments rising in aspiration and longing before the first words are sung. The slow build of the song towards the climax begins with solo voice, then the rhythm and clicking of African percussion, before a soprano descant and then the choral voices offer a supportive base for soprano pyrotechnics which are not the least out of place – there is a soaring hopefulness and triumph that simply defies the inhumanity out of which this hymn emerged.

Amazing Grace is one of the few hymns that needs more than one rendering to come anywhere near doing justice to the ambivalence of its provenance and the intensity of the personal experience of conversion out of which it came. For quite other reasons the version by the Blind Boys of Alabama is equally compelling – arranged and sung to the tune House of the Rising Sun.
It too explores the ambiguities and certainties of a hymn which it seems is popular well beyond the evangelical circles out of which it came and within which it still resonates in personal experiences of God. And it does so within the musical idiom of African American people, for whom the words touch deep into their personal and social history. How there can be congruence between a hymn written by a converted slave trader, and the great, great, great, great grandchildren of people stolen from their home of land and family, is one of the mysteries of that grace that is sung about in this hymn. Maybe there is no congruence in grace – it doesn't fit with our human standards of guilt, just deserts, cruelty, inhumane thoughtlessness – it contradicts and seeks to transform them.

I reckon a whole seminar could be built around exploring the text and sub text of this hymn, based on the way people have sung it, and hear it. A time of learning when we are honest and open to the ambiguities out of which this anthem of grace came, which emerged from such tragic times. yes, and which is sung in times still tragic, with our own sins of oppression, and perhaps our own blindness to our complicity in the structures of sin that condemn countless millions to the slaveries that are essential to globalised markets on the current models.

Does anyone else know renderings of Amazing Grace that you have found are as richly textured in musical and spiritual reach? Just decided I'd like to do such a seminar or retreat evening.

11 July 2010
Prayer and the humility to shut up.

This has been on of those weeks that we all have to work through once in a while. Been in Fort William, Paisley, Elderslie, Westhill, Manchester and now back in Westhill. Each place on that list represents a different bed each night! No wonder I is confoosed and discombobulated 🙂 But what a rich and full week. An Induction of David, one of our students, at Fort William at the start of the week, and a meeting with UK College Principals in Manchester the last two days. And in between the Graduation ceremony for 8 of our students. Now that is some considerable compensation for the past week's experience as a nomad, a man of no fixed abode. That said it's a miracle I haven't walked into a wall, or fallen downstairs, or walked by accident into the wrong room. So after the next week i have a lengthy holiday much of which will be at home getting used to Aberdeen again for longer than a few days at a time.

Here's a Mary Oliver poem for no other reason than I read it on the plane earlier and know exactly what she means.

Praying

It doesn't have to be

the blue iris, it could be

weeds in a vacant lot, or a few

small stones;just

pay attention, then patch

a few words together and don't try

to make them elaborate, this isn't

a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which

another voice may speak.

(Thirst, Bloodaxe, 2006), 37.

She is right. Praying isn't only, perhaps isn't primarily, our voice speaking. It may be, perhaps it must be, another Voice speaking and us listening for it, and to it. The willingness to not speak, to be silent, and to listen, is a disposition requiring more humility than we can often manage. So how many times have my words, my praying, interrupted and overspoken that other Voice? How many times has God told me to shut up and listen, but I couldn't hear the whisper for my own chatter?

9 July 2010