Gambling with Beauty

Not being a pagan, I appreciate pagan art in a sadly inadequate way - for its aesthetic value alone.  While the Aphrodite of Rhodes had earned first place in my goddess roster, this summer she was ousted by a weathered Aphrodite of Rome.  I suppose a good pagan might say, "Let him appreciate her; it's the first step."  It's a risk I'm willing to take (especially seeing that such beauty was ably absorbed by the religion to which I happily subscribe).

It just puzzles me why so many venture the same gamble with Christian beauty.

Metaphysical Summer

Attempts to overcome metaphysics having been shown to be themselves irrepressibly metaphysical, metaphysics is again in the air.  Consider Dan Siedell's compelling review of Gabriel Bunge's The Rublev Trinity. Siedell quotes philosopher Jean-Luc Marion's Crossing the Visible, where he suggests that Nicaea II, the council that vindicated icons, "formulates above all and—perhaps the only—alternative to the contemporary disaster of the image." Siedell then takes the philosopher's insight into firm art historical terrain:  "The icon is the theological foundation of all painting, secular and religious."  We can hope any who missed this crucial insight from Siedell's God in the Gallery will get it this time around.

The fiercely brilliant (and if you doubt that adjectival combination, read the last paragraph of this review) art critic Maureen Mullarkey provides a remarkable testimony to just such an insight.  After years of hesitation, and despite extensive experience in New York both reviewing and creating contemporary art, Mullarkey has come around to seeing the wisdom of the Byzantine aesthetic.  Spend a considerable amount of time not just reading Patristics, but marinating in the Orthodox liturgy, and you'll likely agree.

What does this have to do with metaphysics?  Everything.  Interest in the icon is not just for those who like painting.  The wisdom of Byzantine art was not in its style but in the iconic, symbolic horizon to which that style successfully testified.  Fruitful as the icon may be for painters and art historians, it would be a mistake, one almost laughable in its small-mindedness, to limit the Byzantine iconic perspective to the realm of "art". Consider a not so familiar passage of John of Damascus:

We see images in creation which faintly reveal to us the reflections of God, as when, for instance we speak of the Holy and eternal Trinity imaged by the sun, or light, or a ray, or by a spurting fountain, or a gushing stream, or a river, or by the mind, or speech, or the spirit within us, or by a rose bush, or a flower, or a sweet fragrance (De imaginibus oratio I).

No narrow "art theory" there.  Icons are merely the fish that swim in that ocean.  (An ocean, incidentally, in which the Protestant Jonathan Edwards swims just as happily.)  The word for that ocean, following Aristotle, is "metaphysics." Like all words that have been around for a while, it's been abused and misused, but it's eminently recoverable.  Abusus non tollit usum.

The thing that Siedell is after, that Mullarkey intuitively grasps, and that Damascus and Edwards effortlessly understood, is a thick metaphysical horizon.  Make no mistake, the word is getting out on this.  In the latest Mars Hill Audio journal, Ken Meyers interviewed Stratford Caldecott, James Matthew Wilson and Thomas Hibbs to discuss the kind of realism that can sustain such metaphysical grit.  I highly recommend shelling out the few bucks to listen in, but the same idea is on offer, at considerable length, in one of Wilson's essays, entitled Saint Augustine and the Meaning of Art.  Even if symbolism and meaning have been systematically eviscerated thanks to a fashionable academic cyclone that has long since passed, there is nothing about such a turn of events that prevents the immediate recovery of the previous symbolic arrangement.  In Wilson's memorable words:

The meaning of the world that we usually describe as constituting culture, or a culture... does not depend primarily upon our social conventions. Rather, the signs of a culture are founded on natural signs, and, indeed, are themselves natural signs in whose fashioning our intellects cooperate, and for whose knowledge and joy they exist. Given how destructive the wars and social changes of the last century have been—above all the change in thought that has tried to reduce even the human person to a fungible fact for exploitation—we should take great comfort in that fact. The meaning of things, which our cultures may embrace and develop, nonetheless does not depend on us for their existence. And so, when we see a painting or some other work of art—the remnants, say, of some half-ruined memorial statue, in some empty square, at the edge of a red-light district in Brussels—we are seeing not the illegible signs of a lost culture. We are seeing a sign whose meaning has, for the moment, been lost to us, and whose intelligibility only awaits someone with reason, sense, and patience enough to uncover it.

Call them Neo-Byzantine, Edwardsian or Maritanian, there seem to be an increasing number of such someones.  But - and this is Wilson's point - it wouldn't even matter if there were not.

Greek Rainbow

Greek Orthodox Motivational Poster

(It's funny because it's Mt. Athos.)

The Italian Cougar Town

Having acquired some respect for Italian cinema thanks to Gabriele Salvatores' Happy Family, a lighthearted (and inescapably theological) meditation on authorial creation that ran circles around bloated American attempts at the same such as The Truman Show; and having recently shared an Alitalia flight with Tilda Swinton, I was spurred to don beret and summer scarf and march downtown to the Princeton arthouse with Denise, my wife partner, to see Luca Guadagnino's Italian film, Io sono l'amore (I Am Love), starring my plane friend Tilda (there was only a thin first class curtain between us).

"With its close-ups of gorgeous cooking, 'I Am Love' could easily be categorized as a foodie movie," writes The New York Times. The statement is admittedly qualified, but still, this is like suggesting that those interested in a carefree vacation in Japan might benefit from watching Hiroshima.  Such soft commentary calls for some aggressive counter-interpretation, so here goes: I Am Love is "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" in arthouse clothing.  If the theater had pillars, we'd have been clinging.  The film's "prawnographic" scene has generated some buzz, where the chef with whom Tilda will soon have an affair makes her an exquisite dish of prawns. How odd to watch the white witch of Narnia, who offered Turkish delight to Edmund, consume her own fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, to equally devastating effect.

This is not a film about "repression and breaking free" as wikipedia tells us (despite my futile attempt to add some nuance to the entry).  I Am Love is instead a critique of what R.R. Reno calls the Empire of Desire, not a call (like every other film) to submit to imperial demands.   Sometime in the Middle Ages, I imagine an enterprising cleric may have conceived of a sin prevention machine, in which individuals could be placed to convince them not to steal or murder. It took the technology of film to be actualized, but the anti-adultery machine has been perfected, and its name is I Am Love.  Be ye warned, the film contains some borderline pornography (in addition to prawnography), the redemptive factor being its inescapable (and perhaps intentional) ugliness. Insects pollinating flowers are spliced into one particular bout of outdoor copulation, which is not - as some might assume - an endorsement of the "naturalness" of this affair, but a mockery of humans who act like insects.

Tilda Swinton's character was reduced by the film's events (which I shall not here reveal) to a human skeleton, one that she played consummately well.  Swinton seems to be able to manage non-traditional relationships in her own life more successfully than her character did; but no matter - art, in this case, trumps life. Whereas the American Cougar Town takes affairs of older women with younger men to be a comedic setup, I Am Love employs same scenario to traumatize its sophisticated audience into respect for traditional sexual mores. We can sermonize about the deleterious social effects of Cougar Town all we want (and to little effect), but just as the only answer to The Wrestler is the parallel story of a similar man's redemption on offer in Crazy Heart, so the only proper answer to Cougar Town is a film that shows the real consequences of the same behavior, absent the laugh tracks.

Still, I Am Love offers no solution, just an instructive vacuum.  [The closing cave scene is not "resolution," by the way, but Canto V.] As the credits rolled, following ten or so minutes of silence the likes of which I haven't navigated since Requiem for a Dream, I cast off my beret and summer scarf, and asked Denise, my partner wife, "Where do I get my soul back?" Interestingly, she had a ready answer: By reading Tony Woodlief's memoir Somewhere More Holy. America may have given us Cougar Town silliness, but it gave us a Woodlief family as well, who navigated the same tragedies related by I Am Love with the help of a God who really is.

Score!

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Helpful thoughts, by the way, on DFW from Jennifer Gaertner, not to mention David Lipsky's new book.

Wordless Wednesday

Christ among the herbs