Celebrating Easter with three makers--

To celebrate Easter, here are a few images from contemporary makers I have explored and admire, masters of religious art... None of these celebrated Easter earlier today, as they are all Eastern Orthodox congregants. While I am not Orthodox, I would say that I have leanings in that direction (particularly toward the beauty, the densely visual and narrative quality of their churches, and the love of early writers), and I was for a time on the board of an Orthodox contemplative center. I'll have to write about that some time...

The first is a mosaic by Aidan Hart, a wonderful all-around maker of church furniture and decoration, and a writer whose book Beauty Spirit Matter: Icons in the Modern World is a splendid, ravishing thing. You may think it strange, but I have found his writing about church decoration to be generative for my writing--and that's a rare quality. I recently wrote a poem beginning with a line quoted from Aidan Hart, and another structured by his advice to iconographers. Writers, of course, are magpies, and pluck up glittering bits of inspiration where they will, sometimes in surprising places.

                                                                             * * *
                                                One of two new Aidan Hart mosaics for

St George’s Orthodox Church, Houston, Texas

Read about how they were designed and made

at Orthodox Arts Journal

            Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song
            Pleasant and long:
            Or since all music is but three parts vied
            And multiplied;
            O let thy blessed Spirit bear a part,
            And make up our defects with his sweet art.

                   from George Herbert (1593-1633), "Easter"

Here's another image I like--a chandelier by the wonderful Orthodox architect, Andrew Gould, installed in his home church in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. Long ago, I used to spend a good deal of time in Mt. Pleasant and Charleston, and some day I'd like to do a Gould-tour of the area, jaunting about to see his clever churches and houses and the wonderfully imaginative wine store... 

I love the way he nestles new homes into historic communities by creating a sort of narrative around them, establishing a place and time and story for each. In fact, I love the way narrative interpenetrates the work of all three makers here. It rises up naturally as a response to bedrock narratives and also to traditional ways of incorporating narrative into church buildings.

Read about the image here: 

"Chandeliers made by Andrew Gould,  

New World Byzantine Studios, installed 

at Holy Ascension Orthodox Church"

        Looke downe, thou spiest out Crosses in small things;
        Looke up, thou seest birds rais’d on crossed wings;
        All the Globes frame, and spheares, is nothing else
        But the Meridians crossing Parallels.
        Materiall Crosses then, good physicke bee,
        But yet spirituall have chiefe dignity.

              from John Donne (1572-1631), "The Crosse"

And here is an Old Testament prefiguration of the resurrection, the "sign of Jonah," as the now-a-tad-wiser ship's passenger returns to light and air from the belly of the fish. It's by the only North American practitioner of icon carving, Jonathan Pageau, who works in wood and stone but is also well known for his talks on how to read as symbolic events and scripture and the works of the church fathers. As that fits rather nicely into my own way of looking at the world, I find him interesting in several ways.

* * *

Take a visual ramble

around Jonathan Pageau's gallery HERE

For good company to go with the image of Jonah in those complicated waves, here's a crumb of Father Mapple's sermon from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, published in 1851 : “Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters--four yarns--is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah’s deep sea-line sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is that canticle in the fish’s belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us, we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful men, and a lesson to me as a pilot of the living God. As sinful men, it is a lesson to us all, because it is a story of the sin, hard-heartedness, suddenly awakened fears, the swift punishment, repentance, prayers, and finally the deliverance and joy of Jonah."

All three of these makers have articles at Orthodox Art Journal, as well as online homes well worth exploring. (I have pilfered the images from OAJ and Pageau Carvings and have put some trust in kindly forbearance.)

Aidan Hart articles at Orthodox Arts Journal

Aidan Hart's online home, Aidan Hart Icons

Andrew Gould articles at Orthodox Arts Journal

Andrew Gould's online home, New World Byzantine

Pageau Carvings

Jonathan Pageau articles at Orthodox Arts Journal

And his Symbolic World

Enjoy! 

Happy Easter--

Easter Triduum greetings--

A lovely crucifixion in linden (12" x 16″) by the interesting Montreal icon carver, Jonathan Pageau. From "Understanding the Icons of Holy Week," https://www.orthodoxartsjournal.org/understanding-the-icon…/.  You may meet facets of him at Orthodox Arts Journal, twitter, and YouTube. Go to his gallery at Pageau Carvings to see more of his art. I'm fond of his writings and podcasts about symbology, perhaps because--human weakness!--I find them congruent with my own thoughts.

Ekphrasis for Triduum

Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles
by Meister des Hausbuches, 1475 (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin)
Wikipedia, public domain

*

And here's a little ekphrastic poem....

The Thursday of Mysteries   

   After Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles

              Meister des Hausbuches, 1475

Dim clashing measures like muffled cymbals

As halos make the music of the spheres…

The apostles are crowded on the pews,

Some watching and some not as Jesus Christ

In his halo leafing with three branches

Gestures upward and to the water bowl

That is like another halo, fallen

To the floor and waiting for the maundy

Foot of innocent and guilty alike.

The room looks like some holy carpenter’s

Medieval caravan, all fitted out

With paneling and mullions with crown glass;

In the unfolding distance, see the stairs

Slanting leftward over the black archway

That might mark entrance to a waiting tomb.

There’s Judas, all his facial lines tugged down,

And on a shelf a platter like some lost

Halo, unneeded, there for change of mind. 

                                      reprinted from Mezzo Cammin 

"For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning,
 that we should love one another."
 #SriLanka 

#Pittsburgh 

#Christchurch

A Causley poem for Holy Week

Composer Jussi Chydenius's 

setting of "I Am the Great Sun" by Charles Causley,

a poem inspired by a seventeenth-century Normandy crucifix.

Hofstra Chamber Choir

David Fryling, Conductor

* * *

          I AM THE GREAT SUN

          I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
          I am your husband, but you turn away.
          I am the captive, but you do not free me,
          I am the captain you will not obey.

          I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
          I am the city where you will not stay,
          I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
          I am that God to whom you will not pray.

          I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
          I am the lover whom you will betray.
          I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
          I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

          I am your life, but if you will not name me,
          Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

* * *

Thanks to a years-back recommendation from editor John Wilson, I've long been fond of Cornish poet Charles Causley--loved and admired in his lifetime by Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin--and this poem is one of my favorites. The sonnet is simple and profound, using a parallelism that invokes the Hebrew poetry of the Bible, particularly the beautiful language of the King James version, but also grasps at the idea of God as "the great I AM." 

Its Elizabethan-sonnet rhyme scheme is curious, eight of its lines depending on final identical rhyme that again invokes God. The six remaining lines add only one more final rhyme sound, so Causley gives us only two sets of end-word rhymes, both ending the lines on long vowels. Each line is a full, complete thought, framed by "I am" and one of those two long-vowel rhymes. 

Looking closer, we see that Causley has chosen to expand the scheme by rhyming the words that precede "me," the identical rhyme sound of eight lines. So we meet internal rhymes "see/free," "believe/leave," "hear/cheer," and "name/blame." The accent falls strongly on those penultimate words. Identical sounds also occur inside quatrains; particularly noticeable is the repetition of "do not" and "you will not" and "you will," reinforcing the idea of human free will, choice, and the swerving away from God that marks and informs the poem. 

The tightness of the rhyme scheme makes the couplet feel especially surprising because it breaks the shape of prior lines, completing the thought in two lines, and tying up the poem with another two-word rhyme-plus-identical-rhyme in "name me" and "blame me." In those last lines, the poem enters--just barely, and not with confidence--into a realm where another path is possible.

On the other hand, "if you will not name me" is an interesting thing to say in the final turn of thought. Recalling that "I AM" is one of the names of God, the reader may well think that he or she has indeed been naming God, though in fact naming God and admitting the rejection of God at once.

If you don't perceive why this is a remarkable poem, I suggest that you try reading it aloud three times. (Remember that you are speaking in the voice of God. As the poem was inspired by crucifix-and-inscription, you can even imagine that you speak the words from the cross.) And then if you don't feel in your bones that the poem is good, well, I guess it is not for you. Or as we might say, "I am your poem, but you do not know me."

* * *

Donation site for The Friends of Notre Dame: 

http://www.notredamedeparis.fr/friends/donate/

Resurrection light

This oil by Bramantino (1455-1536) portrays
an unearthly Jesus who has passed through agony
and the realm of death. He is the man who bears
the marks of suffering on body and in face,
and is also the Christ of the Trinity. Silvery,
transfigured shroud, moon-luminous skin,
and sorrowful eyes--the eyes have seen all.
Below the right hand is the abyss of death.
Behind, a  ship's mast reminds the viewer
of Golgotha's cross and also of imminent departure.
In the sky is a moon, which I fancy
looks rather like the eucharistic host,
a reminder that the resurrection of Christ
remains in the mortal world after the Ascension.
Via Wikipedia, public domain.

The Easter Wreath

Victorious cross with laurel wreath, Chi Ro, and grieving Roman soldiers.

WIKIPEDIA: "Anastasis," symbolic representation of the resurrection of Christ. Panel, Roman lidless sarcophagus, ca. 350 A.D. From the excavations of the Duchess of Chablais at Tor Marancia, 1817-1821.  /  One of the oldest Christograms is the Chi-Rho or Labarum. It consists of the superimposed Greek letters chi (Χ) and rho (Ρ), which are the first two letters of Christ in Greek. Technically, the word labarum is Latin for a type of vexillum, a military standard with a flag hanging from a horizontal crossbar. A Chi-Rho Christogram was added to the flag by the Emperor Constantine I in the late Roman period. Therefore Christogram and labarum were not originally synonyms.

9:00 p.m. What a lovely Easter Day it was . . . I posted this image elsewhere, and it's interesting to see what people chose to comment on--the symbology of birds and wreath, the spread of Christianity (Roman soldiers), and also the Chi Ro said to be dreamed or seen by Constantine before the battle of Milvian Bridge. The accounts by Lactantius and Eusebius vary, and they are interesting--see the Wiki-version here.

Falling toward Easter

CARROLL AT EASTER

As it is a busy week in the snowdrifts of upstate New York, I shall just wish friends and passers-by a happy and blessed Easter-to-be.

And if you are in need of some writing advice while I am out-of-the-palace, please take this: "'Begin at the beginning,' the King said, very gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"

That is, of course, from the immortal nib of a pen held by Lewis Carroll or Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, the kaleidoscopic, the myriad-talented, and the Reverend. Ah, to be born under the tilted grin of a Cheshire moon, caught in the branches of the Daresbury parsonage tree!

I am glad of his tenderness for little girls because he gave me a gift at an early age that has served me all my life and given me much joy.

***

HOMOMONOJOT

Here's an on-line poem of mine that just popped up today: "Homomonojot" at The Round Table Review (U. K.) If you're wondering where the name came from, it is a portmanteau word (thank you again, Lewis Carroll) that puts together bits of "homonym" + "monometer" + "jot." Does that sound a little smart-alecky? Blame it on the one-stress lines. Thanks to Jon Stone for suggesting that I submit to The Great Monometer Challenge.

***

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT

The contemporary Alice falling into a marvelous rabbit hole can be found on DeviantArt; it is by "Tahra" or Kyoung Hwan Kim of South Korea. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Art & Tenebrae

As the usual martyrdoms have been fearsome of late—much of Yeats’s “rough beast,” much torture and death, the beheading of three young girls walking through a cocoa plantation on their way to school, and the heartbreaking scene of children rising up to slaughter their teacher and then burn her pulp of a body because she had touched a satchel containing a book belonging to another religion—I call it good to reflect on the inheritance passed to us by our ancestors.

For centuries past, artists in the West (and often elsewhere) created out of a Judao-Christian landscape. Not so long ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “I believe there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, and more perfect than the Savior; there is in the world only one figure of absolute beauty: Christ.” A dominant Christian worldview held that, despite the frail fabric of human nature, good and evil could be discerned and brokenness in the world redeemed and healed. For many artists in ‘developed’ countries, that lens for accurate seeing and restoration has been lost.

Every artist and lover of art ought to think about these things. Does one perform a metanoia, and turn one’s face away from trends and toward the handed-down vision of the timeless? Does one build an entirely different worldview? Or does one simply slide on into the gulfs of not-quite-thinking, never really being conscious of having a worldview at all? The last of these is a mushy state, and a shadowy destroyer of art and culture, quite prevalent in the West.

Me, I’m still thinking about the words of Tenebrae that stream forth in the darkness, closing with shivers of thunder. Afterward comes silence that waits on the footsteps of beauty.

***
The image of shadowy forms passing in front of an Easter bonfire were captured by Radu Lucian of Bucharest, Romania, and are used courtesy of the photographer and www.sxc.hu.

***