Art and Religion

Thomas Gainsborough-- a painting of his two daughters

The late, great Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Bell, narrates main character Dora’s visit to the National Gallery in London. Her experience of the art– and in particular, this painting– breaks through like a revelation:

“Dora had been in the National Gallery a thousand times and the pictures were almost as familiar to her as her own face. Passing between them now, as through a well-loved grove, she felt a calm descending on her…. She could look, as one can at last when one knows a great thing very well, confronting it with a dignity which it has itself conferred…. Dora stopped at last in front of Gainsborough’s picture of his two daughters. These children step through a wood hand in hand, their garments shimmering, their eyes serious and dark, their two pale heads, round full buds, like yet unlike.

“Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvelous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect…. Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it a part of her fantasy make it worthless…. She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knee before it, embracing it, shedding tears.”

Great art cannot be commodified, reduced, and consumed. We do not take its measure; rather, it measures us.

via Thomas Gainsborough.

 

Cow Milk and the Halloween Fixation

The 19th-century movement of people from farm to city was the beginning of our modern separation from nature and natural processes. Many people don’t know where their milk comes from, and when they find out, their reaction is disgust. And that’s not even to consider the pot roast, the hamburger, or the breakfast bacon.

We’re closer to mud than our waking life ever allows us to acknowledge, and there’s nothing in our culture to remind us of this truth. Separate from food, we are separate from nature’s way– which is also our way– of life and death.

And so our culture that denies mud and death is, ironically, a culture that fears death inordinately. Halloween has become, for some, a ritual enactment of mastery over what is dimly felt as the horror and nothingness of death. Halloween taken to that level becomes a false ritual in a false religion, because the truth is that we are not masters over death. Rather, we are creatures who live by eating, and who die at a time we do not choose.

(I am prompted to think also of what our culture has done to Christmas. That birth had a lot of death in it– death we don’t want to see. More on that in December….)

The authentic religious alternative to the illusion of control and mastery over death, is trust and abandonment: the giving away of the ego-self to a Higher Power. False religion props up the ego-self and defends against death; authentic religion, of whatever kind, calls us to lose ourselves in order to find ourselves, more fully. That’s how nature works: life leading to death; and death leading to life.

 

Death, the Culture of Narcissism, and Loneliness

Death has the final word over narcissism: you can’t be the center of the universe if you don’t exist.

Narcissism is a defining characteristic of American culture in the early 21st century: everyone’s exceptional; the progress of history culminates here; we’ll go on forever. It’s a good way to counter the anxiety of nothingness, to attribute to oneself or to one’s nation the status of divinity. It’s also delusional. A good sniff of ammonia to snap us out of this delusional fog is an hour of reading Ecclesiastes, where human vanity is exposed.

The self-defeating nature of narcissism is that the center of the universe is a lonely place to be, and it’s precisely our anxiety over being alone that drives us to be narcissists. It’s a vicious cycle: loneliness, anxiety, narcissistic compensation, more loneliness, and so on.

Release comes in surrendering to our neediness: in recognizing that we are not necessary beings but contingent, fragile, mortal beings. In surrender we make ourselves available to others; we open ourselves into the vulnerability that makes intimacy possible. More and more, life ceases to be centered on me, and the grip of  loneliness relaxes. Ultimately, relationships are what we have.

Narcissus – Greek Mythology Link.