Living Wittily

The biggest book I've ever bought! :)) - and the artist as alternative exegete

Two books recently bought. One huge, as in mega-big. I didn't look at the dimensions when I clicked. (36x43x3). Don't care. It's a coffee table book, which could also mean put legs on it and it is big enough for a coffee table! But it is a gorgeously produced, outrageously sized, sumptuously heavy, ridiculously unwieldy, impossible to read in bed, but impossible not to read, study of Johannes Vermeer and His World. And the price is £15 from Amazon! There are 10 posters for framing included and I reckon any half decent print shop would charge you more than £15 for one of them, let alone the book and the set.

There is one painting in particular I want to spend some time with - Vermeer's interpretation of the Martha and Mary story. Of which more in a later post. But this volume is a labour of love; each of the confirmed Vermeer paintings is reproduced, with good background notes, exposition of key details, and building up to an education in the understanding and appreciation of artistic development from gift to genius. What becomes progressively clearer in studying the paintings is the way the eyes of the subjects are portrayed. How they look, the direction and focus, the use of light, each draw the attention of the viewer, and thus influence the way we look, and point us towards what we ought to see. In other words the artist is providing his own hermeneutic, and with Vermeer that includes provoking and directing emotional attentiveness "by rendering visible particular moods and feelings". One of the unmistakable responses to a Vermeer masterpiece is precisely this, the artist setting the emotional climate in which the painting can best be appropriated, and doing so by taking control of how the viewer looks and what it is the artist wants the viewer to notice.

Exegesis of a text requires, and is inevitably accompanied by, a set of hermeneutical assumptions, strategies, principles - which are themselves influenced by the capacity of the text to speak for itself. There is an equivalent process, when the text is not in words but in image. Visibility, seeing and reading the non-verbal text, is with an eye to apprehending the truth, the is-ness made visible and comprehensible not in words but in that emotional and spiritual intuition of the viewer that recognises the rightness, the fittingness, the yes factor in what is being viewed. 

This is an important resource for theological nourishment, as well as a crucial insight for theological understanding. Much hermeneutical activity which surrounds the exegesis of words composed into texts, strongly focuses on meaning and truth. The equivalent hermeneutical activity in art focuses on the response of the viewer to beauty, and the search to understand the process by which the apprehension of beauty opens the mind to truth of another order. This painting is a pictorial exegesis of a gospel incident that has been deeply influential in the development of Christian spirituality, especially the unhelpful distinction between the active and the contemplative life. Vermeer portrays both women as having Jesus' attention, and there is little sense of one being preferred to the other. The active and the contemplative, the kitchen and the prayer stool, food and conversation, Martha and Mary, are equally disciples, and feeding the hungry Jesus is as important as listening to Jesus' words. Dag Hammarskjold, that surprisingly perceptive Christian and Secretary General of the UN, understood the given and creative tension of Christian obedience, that "the way to holiness lies through the world of action".

And Thomas Merton, who to my knowledge didn't write on this gospel incident, though one of the greatest apologists for the contemplative life in silence and solitude, nevertheless linked these spiritual disciplines of passive waiting (Mary) to the richer textured realities of active obedience in the world (Martha), and to demonstable Christian practices which embody and enflesh the virtues of peacemaking, love and social compassion. His finest writing is found in the collision, or perhaps the conflation, of contemplative and political theology, the fusion in his spirituality of prayer and protest, the insistence that true communion with God and love for the world are to be found both in the inward cohesion of a contemplative community, and in the outreaching and scattering of that community in Christian witness to a broken God-loved world. And it is not unimportant that some of his most telling statements are not in words, but in photographs, poems and calligraphic art. And some of his most piercing images are literary and in his best known essays. For Merton, word and image are equally effective conduits of those truths that shape and inspire patterns of behaviour and practice that are demonstrably Christian.  

A new reading chair for the study - wise stewardship or consumer extravagance?

My study isn't a big room. And I have a lot of books divided between home and College. A study needs a desk, computer and printer, and a reading chair, and wall space for pictures and other sources of inspiration, and a sound system for music. And my study isn't a big room. So choices have to be clever, because I don't want to be "cabined, cribbed and confined" in the very place where mind and heart should relax with space and time for thought.

And yesterday which was supposed to be about something else entirely, I came across  the very chair. Comfort, appearance, size are all yes, and I've measured carefully and checked that it would fit. So reserved till later today till I make up my mind. When does "not cheap" take second place to just right? Is that primarily a financial calculation or an aesthetic one? See this stewardship thing, it complicates the process of deciding what you really want - the thing itself, or the knowledge you've used money responsibly and wisely. I mean, how many chairs are there, and why does this one matter? For some people shoppping is uncomplicated transaction. For some of us not quite so. How many decisions do we make in the process of any particular consumer choice? Or how many choices have to be made before we can reach a responsible decision about money? Don't know. But I need a chair. And by the end of the day I might have one....or not. Then I might regret my decision...or not. And then there's the need to change the car.............any shopping advisers out there?

The ingenious chair pictured is the ultimate reading chair, eh? it's on the Scottish Poetry Library website. Not sure how comfortable it is - anyone ever sat on it, maybe the poets and poetry readers who come in and out of this blog?

Shakespeare disbound and diss-assembled by dissembling book thief

Here's a story to break the hearts of all bibliophiles, infuriate Shakespeare scholars and admirers, and confirm the truth that for some people everything has a price, even a priceless folio. Paste the link below into your browser, a facility the Bard never dreamed of - imagine Shapespeare with an IPad :)) And then weep for the philistinism unleashed by the love of money - and lament the lack of cultural conscience in a person who can bring themselves to.....well, read for yourself :((

http://news.aol.co.uk/man-mutilated-priceless-book/article/20100617111317194947074

On top of this, a new film titled "Anonymous" is currently being produced which plays out the controversy about the authorship of many Shakespeare plays. Was it Shakespeare or Edward De Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford who wrote those great works of genius? In the background of the literary sleuthing is the dangerous rivalry between the Tudors and the Cecils, scheming and plotting over the succession to the throne. And Vanessa Redgrave is an absolutely inspired casting for Queen Elizabeth.

Oh, and I have an opaque blue china decorative plate of the bard in Question, that doesn't seem to go anywhere obvious in the new house. It won't scan so can't show it, but it's an impressive Victorian plate produced by Sampson Hancock and Sons at the turn of the 19th / 20th Century. It will however find a place - a reminder of what can be done with 26 letters arranged into a few thousand words, which in turn are arranged into sentences and scenes and chapters by authorial choices from a near infinite number of options. So a Shakespeare theme seems destined this weekend - I intend to have an early Saturday morning viewing of The Merchant of Venice, lent to me an unconscionable length of time ago, and my favourite Shakespeare play from school days. By early I mean, well, early. Will have watched a play by Will long before breakfast arrives for most other sensible bloggers. 

Books, good books and beautiful books

  There are books, good books and beautiful books. And while the contents are the thing, the physical production is not an irrelevance. Can you imagine reading your favourite book in a brown edged, split spine, dried glue crackling, acrid smelling cheap paperback. Well - yes if it was my favourite book, and the only available copy. But the enjoyment would be seriously diminished.

The ideal book is the one which has just what I want to read, well written, and contained in a volume that is attractively bound, printed on quality paper, a careful choosing of the right font, and even with features such as more than one ink colour. There is an aesthetic imperative in the production of a quality book. I'm much less dismissive of the softback or paperback than I used to be, but I can still be found guilty of paying much more for the hardcover when there is an option. There are well produced softcovers that do survive several readings, and can be opened a few years later without the spine disintegrating and the book being reduced to varied length pamphlets that need an elastic band to hold them together.

All this is because I spent some time over the weekend reading several chunks of Margaret Odell's commentary on Exekiel. That weird prophet, whose chapter one became a chapter in Chariots of the Gods, a best-selling speculative effort by Velikovsky on space ships and bible times, takes a bit of understanding. And Odell is way ahead of others in trying to interpret the outpourings of a man deeply disturbed by catastrophe, and trying to make sense of a God who permits catastrophe within a covenanted relationship with the very people on whom such catastrophe is visited.

But as well as the contents, which along with Kathleen Darr's careful and imaginative treatment in the New Interpreter's Bible are the best treatments around, Odell's book is a joy to use, read and handle. It is in the Smyth and Helwys series. It is inordinately expensive. The volumes are near impossible to source even from Amazon. The publisher's marketing approach is well nigh obstructive. But persevere. Phone Gracewing, the UK distributor. Don't visit their website unless you are an extraorinarily patient and understanding browser. Still. Several volumes including Odell's, are amongst the best exegetical helps around. Who wouldn't want Brueggemann on Kings, Fretheim on Jeremiah, Balentine on Job?

The production is lavish, expensive, includes sidebars, text boxes, varied ink text, high quality binding and paper, and it looks and feels like a volume you won't ever want to lend to anyone. That said, if my favourite book was out of print and my copy was a beat up brown edged paperback, held together with an elastic band, I'm not sure I'd lend it either. But a commentary with pictures! And sidebars. And a searchable CD. Bound in hardback with a distinctive dust-cover! Cherry pick the series, and own at least one if you appreicate high quality production of high quality content.

Novels, and the pleasures of other people's worlds

In the bookshop in St Andrews on Saturday.

Had a book token and a gift token.

Bought four novels and paid 74 pence.

Decided not to take a historical novel about Elizabethan martyrs - the blurb said, "enjoyable, bloody and brutish".

Decided I don't need any more novels about murder, mayhem and maggots.

Tried to buy a children's book, Klimt and His Cat - I do also read children's books though they have to be a bot different - this one is.

Did buy an Alexander McCall Smith for Sheila who has become a fan of this undemanding though not unsophisticated writer who seems to think human nature isn't all bleakness, blackness and bloodletting. I happen to believe he is right.

The one I'm looking forward to reading over the next couple of days, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld - one of those social novels that explores human relationships, politics and how the two inevitably affect each other, for better, for worse and in ways not so easily categorised.

A favourite writer, Daniel Silva, writes about Israeli intelligence, the new Moscow underworld and the web of power, corrutpion and greed that provides fertile soil for terrorist activity.

And I've been a fan of Douglas Kennedy ever since I read The Big Picture, and discovered that he is always rewarding as a thoughtful, knowing and sympathetic teller of people's stories as they try to find their way out of whatever life throws at tem - as the blurb says,' he delivers the message that whatever hole you dig yourself into, you're probably not alone.'

So. Some good reading over the next few days, before the van delivers our stuff to our new house, and the priorities of making home take over from the pleasures of other people's worlds.

Why academic achievement isn't the be all and end all

Not everyone in academia thinks academic achievement is an unqualified good. Rick Gekoski (on page 167) manages to be both self-deprecating and maintain enough self esteem to not write himself off. But this is as salutary a paragraph as any I've come across that honestly looks at the cost and consequence of academic competitiveness in the University.

"I am told that one should feel proud of oneself and one's achievements, but I frequently value the wrong things for the wrong reasons. Pride resulting from, say, academic acheivement, is a kind of false pride based on false goals. Does high academic achievement make one happy, or good? Does it fill you with laughter and goodwill towards man? [sic] Look around the universities and despair. No. I rather prefer moderate, vigilant self-esteem, scepticism directed inwards, self-doubt: those qualities of mind that lead to humility, and to that irony which wryly registers the differences between the apparent and the real. And ironically enough, I still feel proud od my academic achievements, when I'm not mildly ashamed of them".

The dangers of reading philosophy too early

Don't know if this book is fun in a serious sort of way, or serious in a funny sort of way. There is an emerging genre of autobiography by harvesting the insights from a lifetime of reading. Rick Gekoski is an academic, a litrerary critic, a bookseller and collector, and other things besides. He writes with honesty, humour and is good at choosing the things to say about what he has read, and why it mattered. Here is one of his comments on his philosophical phase as a post-grad student, when he read widely in philosophy, symbolic logic, ethics and aesthetics. He realised that he had become intellectually arrogant, argumentative, aggressive and was merely fashioning tools to mask his failings and attack others. The sin of cleverness as a weapon.

"I honed my analytic skills. Honing is a dangerous metaphor here, for in general we are rightly anxious about immature people with knives. You can sharpen a scalpel or butcher's knife, and achieve marvels of accurate surgery upon the living or the dead. But offer a knife - even worse a badly honed one - to someone without skills or the sense to know how to use it, and a lot of misdirected slashing is likely to result." (page 74)

Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry

Didn't say in yesterday's post - Buechner is an ordained Presbyterian minister as well as a perceptive humane novelist and essayist. So quite a lot of his published work is sermons. In an age when publishers are no longer interested in the obsolete genre of the printed sermon, Buechner defies the odds. His sermons read like wisdom literature - at times gently sceptical like Ecclesiastes, or spiritual experience is shaped and Psalmed into praise, or reflected experience is distilled in Proverbs about the fear of the Lord and what makes for the good life, or again, human love is celebrated in unabashed enjoyment as in the Song of Songs. But all of them immersed in the Gospel, and opening up to those with enough faith to know they are desperate, the realities of mercy and judgement and love and forgiveness, the promise of new possibility through the call to enter the Kingdom, and a way of life shaped by cross-bearing and party going celebration.

Here's an example - an extract from a Church anniversary sermon, called "The Clown in the Belfry." :

In the year 1831, it seems, this church was repaired and several new additions were made. One of them was a new steeple with a bell in it, and once it was set in place and painted, apparently, an extraordinary event took place. "When the steeple was added," Howard Mudgett writes in his history, "one agile Lyman Woodard stood on his head in the belfry with his feet toward Heaven."

That's the one and only thing I've been able to find out about Lyman Woodard, whoever he was, but it is enough. I love him for doing what he did. It was a crazy thing to do. It was a risky thing to do. It ran counter to all standards of New England practicality and prudence. It stood the whole world on its head just like Lyman himself standing upside down on his. And it was a magical and magnificent and Mozartian thing to do.

If the Lord is indeed our Shepherd, then everything goes topsy turvy. Losing becomes finding and crying becomes laughing. The last becomes first and the weak becomes strong. Instead of life being done in by death in the end, as we always supposed, death is done in finally by life in the end. If the Lord is our host at the great feast, then the sky is the limit.

Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 115-16.

That's why I read Buechner.

The photo above is of the Congregational Church in Henniker, New Hampshire where my friend Becky (pictured here) is minister. So far as I know she hasn't stood on her head in the belfry yet. Buechner lives in Vermont, just a wee bit up the road!

Making light bigger

Looking through the new Eerdmans catalogue I came across New Tracks, Night Falling, a new book of poems by Jeanne Murray Walker. Walker is the author of six previous collections of poetry, including A Deed to the Light and Coming into History. She is Professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she has taught for thirty years. Among her awards are an NEA Fellowship, an Atlantic Monthly Fellowship at Bread Loaf School of English, (how good is that for the name of a school!), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and the Glenna Luschi Prairie Schooner Prize for Poetry.

There's an effective oddity about some of her homespun images, and as a connoiseur of pizza my mind and heart (and maybe stomach) immediately resonated with her use of spinning pizza dough as an image for stretching out light and hope.(See the publisher's blurb below.)

I also like the image on the book cover. Gonnae get this so I am!

.......

"The poems in New Tracks, Night Falling acknowledge that we are people driven and divided by fear. They talk about racism, war, loss, greed, alienation, our disregard of the earth, and our disregard of each other.

Sometimes we feel like night is falling in the bright light of day. Yet we get glimpses of hope, of what could be:

In this dark time I want to make light bigger,
to toss it in the air like a pizza chef,
to stick my fists in, stretching it
till I can get both arms into radiance above the elbow
and spin it above us.

Hope continually threads its way through these poems. We hear its voice as Walker writes about choices — both those we make and those beyond our making.

And we feel hope rising like bread when Walker focuses on the gifts of potential, resolution, mercy, joy — the new tracks that we can make in fresh snow, on old paths, along the roads more or less traveled. These are stays against the falling night.

With a keen eye for both physical and emotional detail, Walker explores a journey that all of us are on, and she does so in a way that speaks to our deep fears and deeper joys, that engages and inspires. Tempering somber notes with more joyful ones, she reminds us of the good things, great and small, that are still possible in this world."

Dante on the Sin of Usury and the Credit Crunch .

A week ago at the Fabian Society in London Peter Mandelson warned that the recovery from recession would cause a major and painful consolidation of financial services and a reduction of the economy's dependence on such "financial services". Lord Mandelson said in the future there would be "less financial engineering and more real engineering in our economy". Indeed there would be an absolute necessity for the British economy to recover a significantly greater base in manufacturing, in the making of real things, in the production of that which can be traded. Sure money makes money, but it will become critically important to recover a manufacturing base, those people, and more people, who make the products that make the money to make money - I think is the argument.

Speaking a few weeks ago with a retired and previously very senior manager of one of Scotlands now troubled Banks, he was lamenting (that's the right word) the abandoning of traditional banking values and practices in pursuit of financial services and money marketing. Once Banks became more interested in selling credit at higher rates than they borrowed it, they began to lose interest in the depositing and saving customer and more interested in the borrower who is to be persuaded to buy increasingly unrealistic levels of credit. We all experienced it - you are there to do your own business and the teller can't get quickly enough to asking about your mortgage, credit needs - you are no longer a bank customer whose money is to be secured but a money-on-credit consumer from whom the Bank wants to make more money. The result is a global economy dependent less on producing and manufacturing goods, as one in which money moves around, circulates, in arteries increasingly furred up with bad cholesterol / debt.

And so to Dante. One of the serious and enlightening games the mind plays when reading a text that is pre-modern, culturally removed by centuries and geography, translated therefore out of a long gone worldview into the way we view the world, is finding the points of connection that make its insights universal. So I was intrigued to find the following passage dealing with the sin of usury. That's right - the sin of earning money solely by lending it, greedily selling its purchasing function to someone else for a price higher than its face value in hours worked, skills used and products manufactured.

Dante's theological aim is remarkably accurate. Human art, and that represents all productive work by artisans and trade guilds, reflects the Creator God. The good God creates the natural world, and since human beings are made in the image of God, human art expresses and imitates God's creativity. Usury, the lending of money for interest, offends against nature (God's child), and against human art (God's grandchild). It is this view of human work, our innate capacity for creation and stewardship of nature's resources, that Dante sees as the purposive human activity God intends. Amassing wealth by exacting interest is a parasitic activity that produces nothing but money - which will eventually lose its mundane value, and never had any heavenly value. Usury is ultimately an offence against the Creator, the sin of skiving while others do the work and earn the very wealth that is being amassed by credit sellers. Here's Dante's take on the credit crunch - its origins and why it happened.

........

Go back a little to that point, I said,

Where you told me that usury offends

Divine goodness; unravel now that knot.

   “Philosophy, for one who understands,

points out, and not in just one place”, he said,

“how nature follows – as she takes her course –

   the Divine Intellect and Divine Art;

and if you read your Physics carefully,

not many pages from the start, you’ll see

   that when it can, your art would follow nature,

just as a pupil imitates his master;

so that your art is almost God’s grandchild.

   From these two, art and nature, it is fitting,

if you recall how Genesis begins,

for men to make their way, to gain their living;

   and since the usurer prefers another

pathway, he scorns both nature in itself

and art, her follower; his hope is elsewhere.”

(Canto XI, lines 94-111)

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