On art, artists, and Bergman

German poster for The Silence (1963)
Art by Dorothea Fischer-Nobisch

I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then. --from Ingmar Bergman Directs (1972) by John Simon

Isn't that simple and lovely? Long ago, I was obsessed with Ingmar Bergman, and when I bump into his words, I sometimes feel a little melancholy.  How strange it is to think in this tender way of human wholeness in a world that projects a public image that rages for entertainment and dislikes reflection and what Melville called "deep diving."

I took a course on Bergman with poet R. H. W. Dillard when I was in college, and one of the texts was Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. In it, there's a passage where Bergman talks about Chartres, and how wonderfully satisfying it must have been to be an anonymous artist who felt that his gift was from God and so had both confidence and a natural humility. For that artist, being lauded as better than others does not even register as a thought. Bergman expresses longing for a time when an artist might make, say, a portrait head for the cathedral and be pleased with knowing what he had made, and with knowing that it was a piece of a more complex work created by many people for a great purpose. (Perhaps there's a link to the image of Christians as lively stones that make up the church, all part of something much larger--"like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house" NRSV 1 Peter 2:5.) In his own time, Bergman sees the modern artist as bringing all things out of himself, an effort that is lonely, over-obsessed with the individual, and leads to a state where artists "bleat" news of ourselves constantly but are unable to see one another. Artists are not built up into a cathedral in his view but are caught in a miserable pen sheep. In that image from Bergman, each artist appears isolated within what should be a flock. No shepherd appears.

How comic we will appear in a hundred years, with our heavy use of The Ministry of Sanctioned Words (latest installment being the chiding of professors for using "triggering words"--I wrote a piece about it yesterday but decided that one was entirely too satiric for posting!), our ruling passion for celebrities (red-carpet gods of the day in designer suits and gowns), our jettisoning of literature in the academy in favor of theory and an obsession with judging art through various -isms. To be an artist with these sorts of things held in mind means to de-nature one's work, to run after things that don't matter, and to be always self-conscious about political stance--all things that destroy the natural flow of art. How much lovelier it is to grow like a tree among trees by a stream, rooted and flourishing, sending out fresh leaves and blossoms--and all the while, those little green factories in the leaves go on transforming the air so that others may breathe.

The Ministry of Sanctioned Words teaches our children--

MSW proclamation! 

So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk.

The Ministry of Sanctioned Words continues on its mission to tell us what words are acceptable and what words are unacceptable. The Independent (UK) now informs the world  that it will no longer review "boy books" or "girl books" because they know what boys and girls like ought to read better than boys and girls do, and so in future they will only review--tada!--unisex books. Because The Independent knows better than you do what your sons and daughters ought to read. Got that? Good. Now go on your way, confident in the knowledge that The Ministry of Sanctioned Words cares for you and your children and knows what they should think and how they should choose books.

Categories

Plenty of boys and girls would cross reading lines of all sorts--genre, age categories, gender--if we quit categorizing absolutely everything and creating more and more new age levels. I wish children today could browse in a big, chaotic library without divisions and labels. That's the kind of library that was on offer when I was growing up, and I read plenty of varied books of all sorts, including books that The Independent would call "boy books."

The Independent against "boy and girl books"

But let's go back to The Independent and the issue of "boy and girl books." Little Johnny doesn't much like to read and has to be lured into a world he likes? Let's take away the few stories he does like--say, ones with native Americans clambering around on rocks and sometimes shooting things or communicating strangely with bears, a prehistoric boy who learns to carve after he is maimed, pioneer boys who run wild on the prairie... Those happen to be the sort of books my third child liked. My eldest son was a history book reader, but he also liked some historical "boy stories," and he adored Tolkien. Oops. Neither of my sons would be allowed to read what he liked under the rule of The Independent, which is evidently ambitious of transforming into an organ of The Ministry of Sanctioned Words. Meanwhile, my daughter didn't mind reading a boy-dominated book in the least. Nor did she mind a girl-dominated book. She just cared whether the book could be called good, and she preferred fantasy.

The Example of LOTR

Now let's go back to Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, a book that all three of my children liked; it clearly falls outside the category of "unisex book." Tolkien's complex tale is almost completely dominated by male hobbits and wizards, male humans and elves with the occasional side female (okay, Galadriel is powerful, I grant you, and Eowyn seems like a specific person, and Shelob--well, Shelob is quite a "she"), male ents who have lost their entwives, male orcs who never get any wives at all, ticked-off male ghosts, male furrin fighters from distant parts, etc. Auden defended the book as "part of a literary tradition of reinterpreting ancient archetypes to create a modern mythology," but it was primarily a male-dominated myth, despite the presence of a few female characters (The New Yorker.)

A lot of people like The Lord of the Rings. A poll conducted by Waterstone's bookstores and BBC4 found that readers in the UK thought The Lord of the Rings the greatest book of the twentieth century. This finding displeased some and pleased others. As Auden said, some find it "a masterpiece of its genre," while others "cannot abide it") An Amazon poll put the book as the best of the millenium (Salon.) (I somehow can't imagine that degree of rabidness pleasing Tolkien, a student of early languages and literatures.) Yet under The Independent's new rules, Tolkien would not be eligible for review.

Dear Independent, please review on merit

Independent, you are one of many papers I read when I'm on the hunt for reviews; I have read books editor Rebecca Davis. But this change is a bad idea. Why not stick to reviewing books on their merits? Toss out the categories and just divide the sheep (good books) from the goats (not-so-good to downright-terrible books.) Reviewing on merit is an old idea but still a good one--it's like a worn but still-useful proverb. Tried. True.

* * *
The Great Big Book of Snot for Boys

Update: Thanks to the daily Prufrock News, I can tell you that Ron Dreher has already posted a note about this interesting development. Moreover, his post has a much more fetching title: "Stand Up for The Great Big Book of Snot for Boys!" Interestingly, we both have a familial concern for boy books. Studies have shown that boys can be very particular about what they read, while girls tend to be wide readers who will accept what we call "boy books"--I think it was Orange Prize research that showed the same about men and women.

* * *

Coming up. Green men. Have a request?

Coming up next, maybe... A few days ago I wrote a post solving (purporting to solve) that insoluble puzzle, why green men are on churches and cathedrals. I'll upload it in a day or two. And I'm taking requests, questions, and general suggestions for future posts.

* * *

Love or loathe the Ministry? 

Click on the Ministry tag below for more recent developments

in the public sphere and inside the ivory tower--

Zander, Montana, and The Ministry of Sanctioned Words

DERP

* * *
For the latest word-controlling proclamations 

from the Ministry of Sanctioned Words, see here.

As it is the clear and simple duty for poets and novelists in all times and all places to stand for absolute, wild, untrammeled freedom of speech on behalf of their narrators and characters, I draw my weird line in the sand right here in opposing the recent fracases caused by those in the academic community and elsewhere who would strive to create and rule The Ministry of Sanctioned Words. This line has nothing to do with whether banned words are "nice" and everything to do with the power of literature, whose makers have long stood against the dictatorial hive-minds of the world.

* * *

Zander and Montana are texting their friends, talking, and drinking lattes at a corner table in a freshly-renovated lounge at Alastair College.

Zander: Do you ever think about the abyss? I mean, like, space and death and stuff like that.
Montana: I hate philosophy. I went to two classes and dropped. I prefer thingness, you know--like a pebble. Something heavy in the hand. Tactile.
Zander: But just imagine being dead.
Montana: Um. No.
Zander:  Or like the weeping angels got you, tossed you back in time. Use your brain!
Montana [Silence]
Zander: Well?
Montana: I dunno. It's no good.
Zander: What?
Montana (laughs): My brain, you nutcase!
Zander: Hey, shh--you'll be reported to the Ministry of Sanctioned Words.
Montana (drops her phone and fumbles around to pick it up): What Ministry of Sanctioned Words?
Zander: Shh. The Ministry. Haven't you seen the "oppressive impact" posters? At first there were only two or three around campus, but now they're like everywhere. Even in the toilets.
Montana: You're making it all up--maybe not the abyss but the Ministry of Sock-puppet Words.
Zander (lowers his voice): No, you'll get hauled off for questioning if you use words like crazy, girl, you guys, wuss, lame, retarded, gimp--
Montana (shouts): Gimp!
Zander (jerks back and looks around): Shhhh!
Montana (irritated): I'm a budding novelist. I want to write the Great American Novel. How can I do without a word like gimp? It's a really good word. I mean, it's so full of gimposity--it's like essence of gimpness. My characters need to use words with gristle and blood and muscle, not some white-bread, Wonder-loaf words. Would Herman Melville let them take away the gristle words? No, he would not! You are crazy.
Zander: I'm going to have to move to another table if you don't shut up.
Montana: What?
Zander (leaning close and whispering): Shhh. Don't say crazy. 
Montana (stares for a long time before speaking): So what do you say instead of crazy?
Zander: Like, "person with a mental health challenge" or "person with a cognitive disfunction."
Montana: What?
Zander: What what?
Montana: You have a cognitive disfunction?
Zander: Of course not. Didn't you go to the last town hall meeting on campus? About how the culture is racist and patriarchal and even transphobic! Homophobic. Ableist. Symmetricalist. Humorlessnessist. Cellulitist. Orbist. Ageist. Heterosexist! Folliculatist. Honestly, Montana, I really like you a lot, but--
Montana interrupts, making a loud sucking noise with her straw before she crumples up her cup, smiling. She leans close to Zander, making a little twirly motion with her finger close to her ear as she speaks.
Montana: Derp-a-derp-a-derp-a-derp-a-derp.

A Sandbergian Modest Proposal

Jeanne d'Arc on campaign.
Unknown earlysixteenth-century artist.

Bossy is a word that started life referring to a swelling (as, say, a raised area on the skin) or to those nail-like studs on, say, a sixteenth-century shield. It isn't recorded as a name for a cow (round and often swollen creatures!) until the 1840's, and it didn't migrate to become a name for a domineering woman until the 1880's. Is it coincidence that the 1880's were a very important time for suffragettes? I doubt it.

Billionaire Sheryl Sandberg and her famous word-knight followers wish to ban the word bossy, so I hope from her position of might she will forgive me for teasing her a little! Because I expect she'll have the usual absurd results that attend the efforts of people who want to rule our words because language is like water and rushes and falls where it will. But it's curious to see her in armor with her bossy posse, tilting at a windmill. I is, inevitably, a rather ridiculous sight when there are so many problems in this world that are better worth the effort of a quest and campaign.

Language is a greater power than any billionaire can wield. History tells us that where language is forced underground, it will, like water, burst out in some surprising way elsewhere. Who knows where bossy will go next, now that she has hailed its powers in public? I don't give Ms. Sandberg much hope of victory in her knightly quest to pursue and skewer a word.

What's next? Surely a male billionaire will put on cuirass and helm and gauntlets and go tilt at that primarily guy-related term of endearment, asshole...

A Sandbergian Modest Proposal

Elsewhere, pre-teen girls and women are beaten by the police for not wearing the proper hair covering. So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, women's faces must be hidden from the light of day because "the face of a woman is a source of corruption." So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, little girls finish their narrow educations at the age of eight. So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, a young woman was raped and destroyed internally by a phallus in the form of an iron bar. So let's ban bossy.

Elsewhere, three women were imprisoned for years in a private home and one forced to give birth in a toddler's inflatable pool. So let's ban bossy.

Worldwide, women with HIV acquire their disease primarily from longterm partners and the inability to exert any control over a husband or partner's choice not to use protection. So let's ban bossy.

Worldwide, 603 million women live where domestic violence is no crime. So let's ban bossy.

Worldwide, women comprise 9% of the police force. So let's ban bossy.

The man in whitey-tighties--

Source: WHDH, New York Daily News

Looking

Let's talk some more about the man in whitey-tighties on the Wellesley campus. Because I somehow don't think that we've been talking about the right things when we talk about that man, created by Tony Matelli, maker of hyper-realistic sculptures.

You know, I'm glad when people are talking about art in any of its forms, but sometimes that conversation leads into the strangest places. I won't get into that--what's the use? I read the news this morning, all the time thinking about Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, and so I know quite well there is no use in arguing with some of the absurd things said about the sculpture.

Instead, I want to think about the sculpture and see what it is without being influenced by what has been said about the piece and without even having a notion that politically correct thought still rules our world and tells us what to say. I want to think my own thoughts and come to my own conclusions without one jot of influence from the outer world.

In fact, I will look at the sculpture from several different angles. In all of these, I'll try not to be reductive. The chiding comments I've seen about the piece tend toward a not-very-rigorous feminist, academic response and reduce the sculpture to something very narrow, and they certainly don't show art can be myriad in its implications. They attempt to deprive the sculpture of any mystery or strangeness.

What does it mean to show someone walking in sleep?

Here is a sleepwalker. In my head is a great deal on the subject from a man who insisted on living on his own terms, Henry  David Thoreau. I like him, prickly fellow though he is. He's one of my many soul mates in the arts, even though he wouldn't particularly want me to feel so. "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me," he says. We need "infinite expectation of the dawn," lest we be like most people, the "sleepers" of the rail bed that modernity and industrialization race over:

If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

So we have a sculpture of a man, and he is asleep but helpless, hands out. Well, "sleepwalking through life" is a familiar idea. Sleepwalkers have long been an image of a kind of lost shamble through the days that is not uncommon but sad; sometimes sleepwalking can describe a passage in life in which one feels lost and uncertain. The sculpture portrays a man who is, indeed, sleepwalking through the busy--and, we hope, awake--life going on around him, as well as sleepwalking through his own life. Thinking of Thoreau, we can hope that he is struggling to walk, to get somewhere, to wake up!

If I consider the idea of sleepwalking, I tend to see that the figure is, in fact, a pitiable figure, one of those people Thoreau wished to wake. But that's not the only way of looking at the sculpture.

Side note on Thoreau and young women

Interestingly, Thoreau found that young women were among the very few who "improved their time" in the woods and found something worth the search. They were not biased; they were free and curious and could enjoy surprise, even if it was the small beauty of a colored leaf. Why do I mention it? Because there has been a radical gap between those on campus who react whimsically to the statue and those who are outraged, and that is . . . interesting.

Zombies side note

I notice that journalists can't help comparing the figure to a zombie. I suppose this is a natural enough result of the stance, but it's silly to let zombie fashion get in the way of your eyesight and your brain, which has not yet been eaten. I'm not a fan of the way journalists have shaped the story and don't think it has done much good for Wellesley women or for art.

What does his physical appearance say?

Details of the figure's appearance just might have something to say to us. The Matelli sculpture is a bit paunchy, isn't he? No washboard abs here. The man's not fashionably shaven-headed but a victim (everybody's a victim of something these days) of male pattern baldness. Despite what has been said by those who peer through the lens of political correctness, he is not a frightening shape but a more pathetic one, vulnerable and naked. He wears whitey-tighties and so is clearly out of fashion, even when he goes bed. It's hard to determine his exact age in many photographs because his face is slack with sleep, but he appears to be in the zone of middle-age. His hands look older than the rest of him and are a more accurate gauge.

More than simply a target as "white male," he's an Everyman groping his way, betrayed to our gaze in his semi-nakedness.

Unfashionable side note 

So why is the unfashionable so threatening to the young women of Wellesley--the fashionable, the trendy, the young and hip, the cutting edge, the future of our world? What any answer implies is that the unfashionable stands for things that are directly opposed to the fashionable. Different values. Different virtues. Differences. A gap.

How does the sculpture relate to its world?

Another way of seeing depends on context (although it relates to the idea of the unfashionable.) I'm thinking about where the artist chose to place him and what that choice might mean.

Set in the context of a women's college campus, who is he most like? Not the young women. Nor, I would hope, like their professors, though not every teacher is awake. No doubt one or two (I hope no more!) are sleepwalking.

But the Matelli man invokes one thing more than anything else. Parents. He is most like the average, unfashionable, mildly paunchy, balding everyman called Daddy, the man who climbs on the treadmill of labor every day and struggles along with his wife to pay a child's daunting bills for annual tuition and room and board at a private American college in A. D. 2014. (Sure, parents are varied in class and race, and some students are on scholarship. Yet he's still Everyman, exposed in all his and our mortal vulnerability.) For some daughter he may even be a nemesis like Plath's "marble-heavy" Daddy, "ghastly statue with one gray toe." But it's no surprise that he's a shock, an abomination, a trigger: he's our very own.

Myriad-minded art

A piece of art is, or should be, suggestible. In whatever form it appears (and whether you like it or not), art is not a thing to tame, to tie down, to reduce. Allow the work to have as much wildness and as much myriad-minded meaning as it can win for itself--the amount will vary, depending on the artist.

Matelli notes that students are "misconstruing" his work. Misunderstandings about art occur daily, hourly, constantly, though they don't usually make the national news. This curious instance reminds me that Yeats asked of university students protesting against literature in his own country, "Where, where but here have Pride and Truth, / That long to give themselves for wage, / To shake their wicked sides at youth / Restraining reckless middle-age?" Where? Here.