Living Wittily

Vermeer and the artist as amateur exegete

This painting by Vermeer is a masterpiece of exegetical imagination. It seems to me impossible to tell where Vermeer's sympathies lie. Traditional interpretations of Christ in the home of Martha and Mary take at face value Jesus' words in praise of Mary and the quite gentle but dismissive words to Martha.

Mary sits attentively at Jesus' feet, listening and learning; Martha is harassed and hassled trying to fulfil the obligations of hospitality and the duties of kindness. The story is often used to illustrate the superiority of the contemplative over the activist, as if devotion to Jesus all comes down to attentive passivity (prayer) rather than distracted activity (service). What is at the centre of Vermeer's painting is a loaf, bread, the substance that nourishes and sustains. And bread isn't made in five minutes - it takes work, energy, time, and the patience to let the yeast work, the oven bake and the loaf to be ready. 

Jesus is pointing at Mary and talking to Martha - who looks not a little miffed that her efforts are so quickly and lightly demoted as distraction, compared to her sister's unhelpful passivity. And for me, that loaf is Vermeer's comment. Not Martha or Mary, not contemplative or active, but the one loaf that signifies the heart and energy of Christian devotion - both prayer and service, what Merton would call contemplative action, and what Dag Hammarskjold  meant when he said of the modern Christian (as true for postmodern ones!), "The road to holiness lies through the world of action".

This is the only extant biblical picture Vermeer painted - but it has a depth and warmth to it that is lacking in some less accommodating interpretations of Mary's piety and Martha's too easy dismissal. Apart from anything else, Jesus is so relaxed - that hand over the arm of the chair and the other open, palm upwards and pointing to Mary doesn't convey tension and criticism, but a conciliatory persuasion. I doubt Jesus ever dismissed the importance of bread, - sure he refused to magic bread out of stones, but he also enshrined daily bread at the heart of the Lord's Prayer, and the breaking and sharing of bread was to become the way he was remembered, celebrated, and yes, served.

I love this painting, not only for its beauty, but for its exegetical fairness to Martha, its softening of the tradition as to Jesus demeanour and tone to Martha, for that loaf, forever the gift of our Lord to a church often too quick to judge, too ready to criticise, and always tempted to overplay its pieties at the cost of its service to others - that loaf is decisive for Christian devotion and discipleship. Did Vermeer mean all that? Almost certainly not. But that's the joy and fascination of gazing for a while at a picture, and allowing it to question and unsettle unexamined assumptions. Vermeer was no biblical scholar - but sometimes the amateur exegete, using the tools of an altogether different discipline, provides the human texture that prevents the exegetical tradition being monopolised by the professional guild.

Hill walking, red kites and a sunny, windy day in the North East.

Yesterday amongst other things we went a walk up Brimond Hill. Nothing ambitious, just a 2 mile walk, half of it uphill, and half of it down! But it was bright sunshine, seriously windy, and at the top a sound recordist for the BBC would have had exactly the sounds needed for a documentary or film that needed the wail and whine and muted roar of the wind. The telephone masts with their enormous drum disks provided a weird wind instrument that varied the note and tone depending on the direction and force of the wind.

Standing at the top you can see a 360 degree view that starts with Aberdeen, the North Sea, the white early warning globes, Inverurie in the distance, Benachie, hills all the way down to Clach na Ben looking like a distant pimple, and so down to the mearns, and then the dip towards the sea again, and Stonehaven beneath the horizon 15 miles sse. A while ago some ill meaning person removed the brass viewpoint information disc which means you have to guess the names of the far mountains unless you are an expert. The photo can be found here which gives a good route guide for mountain bikers.

And on the way up we saw the red Kites patrolling over the fields and trees. Several pairs were recently released near where we live. Their delta tails and pointed wings make them unmistakable - they have only recently been reintroduced to Scotland and most recently Aberdeenshire. Reading about them later, it's obvious what caused their decline and near extinction. In the late Victorian age, and into the 20th Century when grouse shooting was the pastime of the rich and the absentee landlords, 267 of these birds were shot as vermin on one huge estate in several days. I've always been slightly puzzled and more than slightly annoyed at the idea you shoot the birds that feed on the birds you really want to shoot! Such arbitrary values reflect a ruthless kind of stewardship.

There's an environmental brain teaser - how to balance the interests of the leisure seeking human being, with the survival needs of the varied species that share our land. Watching the red kites entirely at home in the gusts and fickleness of a strong North East wind, I was glad to see them be what they are. I might have thought different if I'd been a grouse - but then I'd likely have more chance being chased by the occasional kite for food, than when I'm forced to fly towards 20 shotguns held by people hiding behind screens, and calling it sport!

The photo is from The Guardian, ironically accompanying an article about the systemativ poisoning of red kites, this time in the Scottish Borders. .

Kindle, George Eliot and the Slow Absorption of a Story

Just had a few days at a friends house down in the East Neuk of Fife. Cold and wet, windy and grey, but it was a good rest and I'm home less fatigued than when I left! I took the Kindle with me just to try it out for convenience and flexibility.  I'm slowly making my way through Middlemarch, and one of the great bonuses of Kindle is the way it helps redeem those 5 and 10 minute hiatuses (what's the plural of hiatus by the way?) Waiting for the pizza to heat (12 minutes),  or the 9.00 news to come on (5 - 10 minutes usually, or sitting in the car waiting for Sheila (1 - umpteen minutes), and especially those quarter hours that are just about the maximum period of consciousness between sliding beneath the duvet and the onset of eyelid fatigue swiftly followed by irresistible soporific longings.

The point is - I'm reading George Eliot several times a day in byte sized chunks and enjoying the leisurely meandering more than that determined enjoyment with which I usually tackle a big novel. It's a different kind of read, but just as enjoyable, and maybe the slow literary drip is as effective a way of living in a story as the conscientious page turning that may get the book finished quicker and the story absorbed more effectively - but it may be that rather than us absorbing the story, a slower reading allows the story to absorb us, and draw us in. Anyway, that's my experience so far - and as a stunningly obvious commonplace observation for Eliot fans - she is a wonderfully wise, lucidly sharp, comprehendingly compassionate and critical narrator who knows the depths of, and points with unerring skill to, the machinations and motivations of human behaviour. Her novels are post-graduate courses in moral psychology and moral philosophy - impossible to read and not see ourselves in a different, sometimes better, sometimes more critical, light.

I know there are lots of ways to use Kindle - people now use them as the sermon notepad, lecture notes, PDF readers - I'll probably get round to some of these. But it's as a way of filling the unforgiving minute by spending it in the company of an omniscient narrator that Kindle has so far "done it for me". That cliche would have survived a nanosecond within range of Eliot's editorial pen!