The Census at Bethlehem, Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1566

First a disclaimer - I don't know anything about art, I only know of this painting from writing about a poem by W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts", as an undergrad and which alludes to the above painting while being ostensibly about another Bruegel work "The Fall of Icarus".  Larger version of "Census" here.  It took me quite a bit of googling (if that's a verb) to find the Giotto fresco too; larger version here if you click full-screen.  Now that my typically American, culturally ignorant bona fides are established, we may continue.

 Look carefully at the Bruegel picture, see if you can spot Mary and Joseph.  And then do the same with the fresco by Giotto below.

The Adoration of the Magi, Giotto; Basilica of St. Francis; Assissi, Italy; ca.1337

     The differences should be readily apparent; in the Giotto fresco the Holy Family are elevated, all of the figures turn their attention upon them, seven of the figures- the three of the Holy Family, the three Magi, and the attending angel - have stylized halos, all ensuring that there is no mistake about the scene you are looking at.  By contrast spotting Mary on the donkey being led by Joseph (lower right-center for those who've yet to spot it) is like playing "Where's Waldo?", none of the figures seem to notice the seemingly insignificant pregnant couple as they all go about their tasks- bustling about with the census takers, preparing food or shoveling snow, the children skating and sledding over a frozen pond.  Note too the settings,  Giotto's fresco shows an unfamiliar landscape with camels and rich garments surely unfamiliar to the typical Italian peasant of the 14th century.  The Flemish Bruegel's on the other hand looks like a typical winter scene - the snow and architecture clearly more native to Belgium than first century Palestine.  In Giotto there is no mistaking who the child is, in Bruegel Christ comes incognito, as it were, looking at the scene there is no way of telling who the mother is or what the child may become.


  Both pictures are necessary, both say something important and true about the Event.  The early Church, when reflecting on the Incarnation realized this.  They included in the canon two very different Nativities.  In Matthew there are signs in the Heavens, a great commotion over the birth in Jerusalem, and much talk of kings - Christ and his opponent, the sham-king Herod (though not, despite Christmas carols to the contrary, the  "three wise men"; we don't even know that there were three of them, I personally like to think there was a fourth that forgot to bring anything and then, when they reached the house over which the star had stopped, tried to make sure they all went in together so it would look like the gifts came from all of them, but I digress).  Luke shows Jesus humbly born in a feed-trough and worshipped by shepherds, the lowest strata of society.  The Incarnation is something absolutely new, something that changes everything, but it is something you can miss.


   Søren Kierkegaard, liked to talk about the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and man, which is a fancy way of saying that God and man do not exist on a continuum with each other.  The Romans believed in apotheosis, that man could become God, and the Senate began a practice of voting on the apotheosis of an emperor after his death following Julius Caesar's passing, probably seen as merely a stamp of approval or a nice eulogy among the more cynical of their number.  But monotheists don't and can't believe that.  The gap between an infinite God and finite Creation is infinite, not merely some unimaginable number, like, say, the feeling one may get eating a Big Mac under the golden arches and imagining all those billions of hamburgers sold, but qualitatively different; there is no way from one to the other.  All of which is to say that the Incarnation is not something that can be argued; there are no number of facts that one can tote up on one side of Jesus' ledger to "prove" that He is also God.  Jesus doesn't come with a stylized, flat golden halo declaring His presence; He comes incognito.  There's no way to tell who the child born that winter night in a snowy village is just by looking, He can be missed.


 Thomas is probably my favorite of the Apostles, although I realize that is probably not a popular thing to say (on the other hand he probably is more popular than, say, Bartholomew or Thaddeus, because, really, besides the cool name what does Thaddeus have going for him).  John gives us the lovely information that while he was known as Thomas (Aramaic for twin), some people also called him Didymus (Greek for twin), all while neglecting to tell us who this twin of his might be.  I've come to the conclusion that until proven otherwise, I will function as his twin, since he obviously needs one (I mean his whole identity is wrapped up in his twinny-ness - if you make to adulthood and people are calling you twin in multiple languages it likely is pretty important to you).  He gets a bad wrap for doubting, for wanting to put his hands in the holes in Jesus' side (as a side note, Thomas was featured in the first real post on this site, a poem about Jacob and Esau of all things, and I offered a gold star to anyone who could spot him, I'm pleased to here announce that the third twin was indeed Thomas, if you guessed that before reading this then your star is already in the mail), anyway despite wanting to see and feel the holes when Jesus does appear to Thomas there is no indication that he does in fact feel the wounds.  Jesus offers saying, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe,” but Thomas responds, "My Lord and my God."  Something else is happening, I think, and while seeing Jesus may have helped Thomas believe in the Resurrection, even it could not prove the Incarnation, that Jesus was in fact the God-Man, that His death and resurrection would save Thomas and that he too would be raised on the Last Day in a body like Jesus' glorious body.  Tradition holds that Thomas eventually travelled to India and was martyred there.  The Mar Thoma church in Kerala bears his name.

Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, and hope, but it is a time that can be missed, swallowed up by busy-ness or vegetation.  The central Christian mystery, the Incarnation, God among us and for us comes quietly.  The people in Bruegel's painting are all going about their lives, unable or unwilling to realize what is happening in their midst.  And as the Kingdom is not fully realized, tragedy may come and obscure the view, may in fact come on the heels and walk the same streets as the Mystery we have missed.  But it is to us, as Auden said, "not an important failure", the commerce of Christmas, the buying and giving of gifts must continue and we can't be troubled with stopping to help.  There is lovely scene at the end of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer where the protagonist is sitting in his car outside St. Louis Cathedral waiting for someone he is to pick up and watching parishioners as they head inside to receive the cross on Ash Wednesday.  As he sits, a very dark-skinned black man heads inside and after some minutes returns again.  It is impossible to tell whether he has received the sign of the cross on his forehead or not, but he back into the world changed and bearing about on his body a mark of our mortality and the hope of the Resurrection which follows.  The Eastern Orthodox Church often refers to Mary as the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, and describes her as a type of the Christians who would come after Pentecost, who, indwelt with the Holy Spirit would bear God abroad into the world.  It isn't something that is obvious, that anyone can tell just by looking, but as we wait, let us not wait in vain.

Dostoevsky and Dickens

In 1862 Dostoevsky met Dickens in London; some years later Dostoevsky recalled the meeting in a letter to a friend:

"He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge [!?], are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.

Only two people? I asked."

via Brandywine books

After a long absence, I return to complain

  I don't really much blog anymore, but I feel compelled to air my grievances about a show I saw the other night called "A Gifted Man".  The titular "gifted man" is a super-rational, slightly misanthropic neurologist whose wife has died and left behind a clinic.  He works at some sort of sophisticated neurology place (complete with obligatory-goofy-looking-computer-animated-holographic-hand-gesture-reconizing-sciency-deal-that-while-not-serving-any-discernible-purpose-that-couldn't-be-fulfilled-by-a-regular-computer-still-seems-cool-and-futuristic-and-such-and-so-is-obligatory) he built along with volunteering at the poor people's clinic (could these two worlds ever come into conflict and our hero be forced to choose between the oppressed masses and his well-to-do clients? I tremble in anticipation.)  This all complicated by his ability to see and converse with his dead wife which confronts his empiricist worldview as he sees her as a real manifestation of his wife and not a hallucination on his part.  The mechanics of the show don't allow for his wife to be either unambiguously real or a product of his own mind, but if it is only internal, the show is made (slightly) more interesting when one considers his wife's existential crisis (if she actually exists) of being able to observe but having no agency in the world.  Walker Percy talks quite often about people in modern, scientific society wandering around in their bodies like Banquo's ghost at the party - unable to really effect any changes but able increasingly to know everything about the world around them (thanks to science) while not knowing themselves.  This would be interesting if the wife is somehow a sublimated expression of the man's own self cast as his dead wife to engage with dialectically, but if she just a ghost, it's not; I'd think that being ineffectual and ethereal-feeling is pretty much standard operating procedure for ghosts.
   The whole dead wife thing points to the other major conflict in the show - science vs. the "spiritual".  Those scare are there because the "spiritual" in question is New Age-y stuff; in the episode I saw the main character removed the partially absorbed twin from the head of an Indian teenager but was unable to stop the voice said teenager kept hearing in his head.  The voice was finally stopped and removed when a shaman/carpenter performed a ritual to draw the spirit of the voice into a big piece of that rock-crystal candy stuff that's really just sugar and food coloring and not, I would think, inherently magical while he burnt like a fat blunt of  rolled sage in a closed room with some candles in it (seriously).  Oh and the carpenter's last name is Little Creek, so he's an American Indian of some generic, unnamed tribe, likely, which explains his magic, apparently.  And so the plot is  supposed to be this big conflict between these two healers -the neurologist and the shaman - and (BROAD OVER-ARCHING THEME ALERT) faith and science, which the two characters represent.  The problem is that the choice of New Age spiritualism and ground on which they fight - healing- isn't a profitable or interesting intersection between the two.  It is easy to lay them against each other antagonistically  because the battle becomes essentially science vs. pseudo-science.  The shaman is a practitioner in an esoteric field of study, but not, for the writers at least, functionally different than the neurosurgeon; as long as he performs the rituals correctly, the result will come.  The real weakness of empiricism and the scientific method is not its own field, but the many things that fall outside its purview.  The scientific method only approaches truth on an asymptote, its goal is to discover what is not the case.  It doesn't deal with Truth, it approaches facts.  The real problem for it (and thus for scientific societies such as our own) is its inability to describe the actual experience of being human.  Biology, for example, can tell me that I will one day die, but not how to react to or live with that knowledge.  I, for one, don't find science vs. faith nearly as interesting as science as faith and the problems which attend it, but I suppose cliched antagonism is easier to write and make seem superficially compelling.  None of this is to say that there are not real points at which science and faith have conflicts (not Creation as some would assume, but the Resurrection, we know scientifically that you can't come back from the dead- of course I would argue that miracles cannot be studied scientifically- science is only interested in events so far as they are testable, part of class, rather than individual acts that God chooses to perform- but that is the subject for another post which I will likely neglect to ever write), but only that science vs. faith as pseudo-science is one of the least interesting topics imaginable.    

Music: A Better Sort of Post

I realize I haven't done anything on here for quite a while.  My last post was on Maundy Thursday and was itself the first in a long time.  I don't know that I'll be posting regularly anytime soon, but to try and get back into things I've decided to put up some music, because, well I like music - much better than I like reading my own writing.

 I've recently been listening to Van Morrison quite a lot, beyond the popular "Brown Eyed Girl" or his earlier "Gloria" with the band Them.  I started listening to more of his after seeing his performance of "Caravan" in The Last Waltz, the film chronicling The Band's final concert.  I don't know if it was the weird, purple and sequins outfit or the eccentric leg kicks followed by the drunken-looking stumble off the stage, but I decided to look into his music further.

 The first album I bought was Moondance, which contained "Caravan" along with jam band favorite "Into the Mystic" and the title track which, apparently, is a favorite among crappy would-be crooner/easy listening types (cough, Michael Buble, cough). It was a good, enjoyable album, but didn't prepare me for Astral Weeks, his eccentric, critically acclaimed second album.  The songs have this weird stream-of-consciousness feel like they are being written on the spot, but placed over a bed of shifting jazz-inflected strings that seem to respond and move with the words.  It is hard to describe, but I suppose that's why they recorded it instead of simply releasing a press release about how great it was a la James Franco.  The following track, "Madame George", once I understood what it was about, immediately supplanted The Kinks' "Lola" as my favorite song about a transvestite.  Not necessarily my favorite on the album, but gives a good feel for what the rest is like.

Farther off the beaten path by Morrison is Veedon Fleece, a truly strange album that in one of its songs recasts Jason and the Argonauts with William Blake and the Sisters of Mercy playing the respective parts looking for the titular Veedon Fleece, whatever it is.  I won't post that song, but another which does manage to name-check (for no readily apparent reason) "Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Thoreau" - "Fair Play to You".

Moving on, one of my favorite "modern" bands (both in that they are still making albums and don't play in an obviously "old" genre like say, Old Crow Medicine Show or even New Orleans brass bands like Rebirth) is Fleet Foxes.  They remind me quite a bit of Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes) Young in their harmonies (compare for example, sans Neil Young, "Suite -Judy Blue Eyes" to the track below).  Someone online said the opening lines from the new album: "And now I am older/than my mother and father/ when they had their daughter/ Now what does that say about me?" capture the zeitgeist (always in need of capturing that zeitgeist) in the same way CSNY's "Woodstock" did for that generation.  I'm inclined to agree; here's the opening track- "Montezuma".

I always like to post older music on these things though, because I've found it harder to discover the good stuff than with modern music.  Much of it has been so long in the collective memory of older generations that heard it originally that it is taken for granted that everyone is aware of it (did you know, for instance that Elvis made some pretty good music before getting fat and moving to Vegas, I didn't).  Other songs have just gotten lost somewhere along the way as the people who first heard them moved on (to other music) or passed on.  With modern music there likely will be some way to hear about new, good music - through internet radio, blogs, word of mouth, ect, but it is more difficult with old music.  Anyway the final two songs here are ones I heard first within the last year.  The first, is recorded by Bessie Smith,  "The Empress of the Blues", the first of the big female blues/jazz vocalists who paved the way for Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan.  She recorded multiple versions of "St. Louis Blues", the first coming in 1925 with a very young Louis Armstrong on cornet.  The harmonium makes Bessie sound like she lurching along on a broken amusement park ride while Pops sits alongside commiserating on his cornet.  A less disturbing version can be found here with what I assume is pretty rare footage of her performing.  For extra points try and spot the Obama look-alike on sax when they show the band.

Finally, some gospel.  And in case there was any doubt, let me say here: Dorothy Love Coates > Chris Tomlin, et al.

****Special Gratuitous Lagniappe Video*****
Posting that Bessie Smith song reminded me of a great performance by Satch I recently saw on a documentary and subsequently found on youtube, here he is performing "Dinah", complete with proto-chicken-dance arm movements at the beginning.

Self-aggrandizement via hyperlink

I hesitate to do this but a comment I made on NPR's "All Songs Considered" blog made it onto their radio show (and the podcast, which you should subscribe to on itunes, completely independent of any desire to hear this particular show).  They asked about songs that make you cry and a lot of people mentioned "What a Wonderful World".  I wrote in about how "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" reminded me of the storm and all those people from the nursing home they put in the PMAC and they saw fit to include it on the show.  In my defense, let me say that I interpreted "cry" pretty liberally and that if I have ever have cried listening to it, it was surely a single, manly tear like one a Native American chief might cry at seeing pollution. Here's the link. Or the blog post.  But the best thing to do would be to find it on itunes... or ignore this post altogether

Lenten Listening

Said he saw him comin’ with his dyin’ garments on/ said he saw him comin’/ said he saw him comin’, dyin’ garments on. Wouldn’t mind dyin’ if dying was all. –Blind Willie Johnson

Durer, Head of the Dead Christ

I. Lent is a terrible season. Modern usage being what it is, a word like terrible has largely been evacuated of all meaning, profundity, and now is taken as something unpleasant, bad but to a higher degree of badness than bad,. The word, though, comes from a Latin root terribilis, to frighten, to cause terror. In his novel Descent into Hell, Charles Williams tries to reclaim terrible for its root, one of the characters asks the playwright Stanhope (Williams’ representative much like Prospero is for Shakespeare), “If things are terrifying, can they be good?” “Yes surely,” Stanhope responds, “are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?” Lent is a terrible season.

II. The bluesman Blind Willie Johnson seems like a character out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Blind, black, destitute, he lived in a run-down house on a street corner in Depression era Beaumont. Every day, he would go out into the street with his guitar, a glass slide made of a broken bottleneck, and a Bible to preach on the streets and sing wild, frightening songs about Jesus dying on a cross. At some point he was noticed, brought into a studio and paid $5, $10 dollars a side to sing his eerie music into a can to be preserved on cheap acetone. One of his sides, surely unsettling to his producer sitting in the booth, reinterpreted the wreck of the Titanic as an Icarus-like fall, God’s judgment on the overweening pride of the ship’s captain – “A.G. Smith, mighty man, built a boat that he couldn’t understand/ named it a name of a god in tin/ middle of the sea, Lord, He pulled it in/ God moves on the water and the people had to run and pray.” Like all black (and many white) musicians of the day, he received no royalties, only a flat fee; soon he returned to the streets busking and preaching Christ crucified for our sins. One evening in 1945 his house burnt down, having no money, place to go, or way to make a living, Johnson lie down every night in the ashes of his ruined home in the place where his bed one stood. Every morning he would rise take up his guitar and head to a thoroughfare to play his wild music about his wild God giving His life for the folks living in Beaumont, Texas. In the late summer or early fall of that year Johnson caught malaria and died, refused any care at the hospital because of his skin color.

"God Moves on the Water" by Blind Willie Johnson

III. The terror of Good Friday is too often leapt over as we hasten to Easter; Easter itself has become for many day of obligatory church attendance and seasonal candy and, like language, is evacuated of much of its meaning. Music still seems like an entry point, an unguarded door where things can come in. It is hard to listen to Blind Willie Johnson moaning about the crucifixion in “Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground” and not be moved (to terror or pity).

It is hard to listen to Van Morrison, stunned, angry at his dying girlfriend for dying in “T.B. Sheets” and backing slowly away from the horror and the stench and not realize death is a terrible thing, an obscenity.

Johnson’s gravelly voice singing the refrain “I just touched the hem of His garment” in “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” is not the treacly pop of CCM that can easily be dismissed; the man knows where he was, knows what Jesus did for him, knows where he’s headed.

Good Friday, Holy Saturday are places we need to linger a bit, imaginatively enter into, and this sort of music aids in that. Easter Sunday was, is a shock; people don’t rise from the dead, sealed tombs stay sealed, full, and all a messiah dying can possibly mean is that he wasn’t the messiah, God is with the victors. Yet death is swallowed up by victory, the tomb is founded empty and the King isn’t there, He’s on the move, abroad in the world. And we too, need not fear, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ And death shall be no more: death, thou shalt die.”