Theists and Atheists Together, On Our Knees

     I urge a posture-in-common for theists and atheists--kneeling.   Kneeling in itself is an unaccustomed posture for atheists, and kneeling with atheists would be startling for theists.  At the outset allow me to exclude two contexts that I am not addressing here: the sexual and the religious.  I trust there is more need to gloss the second than the first. (If that’s not true ask a peer who has a randy resume; don’t embarrass your parents or your kids).   I do not intend to plead that my atheist friends—longstanding in many instances—renounce their professed denial of the divine. That would be presumptuous on my part as well as futile.  I simply here endorse and bear witness to the commanding power of the ineffable when it is given verbal or visual form.   Great art can and should collapse our resistance to the revelatory. We should be sent to our knees.

     Here are a few beginning points. Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak, January 1904 writes:  "... we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.  ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea inside us." (Emphasis added) 

   That “guide to reading” provides a radical aesthetic and asserts that too often we select to spend our time with the trivial and the transient.  When we do so we freeze more of our inner sea.
   As though responding to Kafka, the speaker in MacLeish’s poem, “The End of the World.” engages with disturbing disaster.

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot

The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb

Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

   Demented?  In a circus, the force of the exotic and the bizarre is always given free rein.  But what we expect to view is something unexpected or unknown.  In this poem we encounter the ultimate unknown, “the black pall/ Of nothing, nothing, nothing—nothing at all.”  The power of that image as developed in the poem is enough for us to pull the atheist at our side to our breast and plead for succor.  If none is forthcoming, we can stay on our knees and call up “The Snow Man” of Wallace Steven’s creation, and reflect that we are:

. . . the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

   What literature presents us with in these examples is the profound complexity of the nature that surrounds us and the nature that is us.  We see this skein—perhaps more concretely—in a pivotal scene in Goldengrove, Francine Prose’s novel about the younger sister of a girl named Margaret who dies unexpectedly.  After Margaret’s death while working in her father’s bookstore (named Goldengrove), the sister, Nico, comes across Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall.”  What follows is the scene almost in its entirety in order to illustrate "Kafka's axe" at work.

   "One afternoon, as I walked down the poetry aisle on my way to the human sexuality section, a thick book caught my attention.  It was an anthology of poems from around the world, and at the end was an alphabetical index of first lines.  On a hunch, I looked up “Margaret.”  I turned to the page, read a few lines, and then reread them, trying to understand and at the same time to convince myself that I must be  mistaken.  I no longer cared if someone walked into the store.  I sank to the floor as I reread the poem.

                           Márgarét, áre you gríeving

                              Over Goldengrove unleaving?

                              Leáves, líke the things of man, you

                           With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

                           Áh! ás the heart grows older                               

                           It will come to such sights colder

                           By and by, nor spare a sigh

                           Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

                           And yet you wíll weep and know why.

                           Now no matter, child, the name:                         

                           Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

                           Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

                              What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

                           It ís the blight man was born for,

                           It is Margaret you mourn for.

     
       I didn’t get it right away or truthfully, at all.  Wanwood leafmeal sounded like some kind of garden fertilizer.  I knew the poem was about grief and mourning and sorrow, about everything and everyone getting older and dying.  For some reason, it infuriated me.  I held the book open before me like a cross to ward off a vampire, like the surprise piece of evidence at my parents’ trial for . . . what?  What sadist would name a baby after such a
depressing poem? . . . I slammed the book shut as if it were the poem’s fault, . . . .

      The effort of wedging the heavy book back onto the shelf left me so exhausted I   I opened my eyes to see my father leaning over me."  

   Loss and longing leave Nico spent.  The poem about Margaret is too close to the bone of her grief.  She’s on the floor, not literally kneeling but keelhauled by words on the page.  She struggles to comprehend the pain of her sister’s passing and the permanence of absence.  Sooner or later we will all be felled by finitude.  It helps to know the blow will come and knock us to our knees.  If we have previously dropped of our own accord to worship or to witness, we won’t have as far to fall.

Spain's Secular Sacraments

España

   "Well, I never been to Spain," chants Three Dog Night.  Was also true of us, so we went.  The tour we were on centered on Andalusia and included a trip to Morocco.  Therefore we ventured not only to an unvisited country but to a new continent.  And then we had a couple of days in Madrid before heading home.

    You're never allowed to come back from a trip uninformed and unillumined so I asked my brain what it learned and it answered me this: religious identity in a "Catholic country" may weaken but the last practices to wane are performances and expressions that partake of ritual. I choose to call these "secular sacraments."  The ones that stood out for me were the flamenco dance, the bullfight, and the art masterworks at the museum temples, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia and the Prado.

     Flamenco is a dance for the hale and hearty and the fleet of foot. It is apasionado--unremitingly so.  In the performance I attended I was struck by one dancer in particular who was dramatically pregnant.  It slowed her down not at all.  And when she wasn't dancing she was singing with a volume that would tumble a wall.  There is an unusual stylized eroticism in flamenco that some people see carried over into the corrida de toros.  I do not.  The bullfight is bathos and brutality.  It has declined in popularity in recent years and been banned altogether in many places in Spain. That's all to the good.  The mythology and faux artistry surrounding this slaughter has been abetted over the years by writers and artists who tried to make high art out of a crude chthonic bloodlust.  Hemingway, of course, interminably so, and Lorca in his turgid and puerile  "Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Mejias."  Picasso was rapt as well, especially in his early pastels but at least he could see the bull and horse destruction, and he used that in a complex way in "Guernica."

     We heard a ludicrous lecture by an old toreador who lauded the mystique of himself and his mates.  No more significant ritual (according to him) in the whole cultural landscape, than the killing of the bull. Pathetic. 

     And then the art, specifically the paintings.  I was overwhelmed by "Guernica."  There is such a difference between mass-produced reproductions and the original work.  As we sought to make our way to the room in which Picasso's huge masterwork is displayed, I noticed that the area we were still a distance from had people grouped only on one side.  Of course.  They were focused on the other wall because on it hung the canvas.  You almost gasp when you see it.  It is merciless in its depiction of the intensity of suffering inflicted by war. 
     Everyone viewed the painting in silence.  The canvas was flanked by two museum staff who halted people who tried to get too close.  There are always those who think they are entitled to special access. 

     Later, in the Prado, we viewed paintings by Velasquez and Goya. These Spanish artists preceding Picasso nonetheless are joined with the modern in rendering the rending of crucifixion. But their focus is on man crucifying God while Guernica sees man crucifying man.  Visual art embodies its own kind of "literacy."  You read the text of a painting by attending to compositional elements of color, form, placement, and countenances caught in a state of calm or conflict.  Either can be revealing, depending on the overall gestalt. 

     These "secular sacraments" conform to the definition of "an outward sign of an inward grace" (or "disgrace" in the case of the bullfight).  They are way stations on the trek to transcendence.  Either that or "our long fool's-errand to the grave," as Housman termed it.  Take your pick. 

Northern Africa





   

     If Spain both meets and mocks your expectations, Morocco will leave you dumbfounded. A different continent and a different world.  Whether up close and personal with the camels, riding on their backs, or moving through the medina, the old marketplace, you feel you have no clue about how to tune in to "a world elsewhere."   Of course, that's why you're there.  To enter into that which you do not know, and by doing so, to grow.