Christianity in a Box

A brief rant and apologia for my post tomorrow (on Palm Sunday) that will combine Scripture with a review of a ‘secular’ film. Sorry, no Saturday science post today; it will resume in two weeks.

I do not think there is such a thing as ‘secular art.’ There is art that uses recognized religious subjects and is destined for churches, chapels, and private shrines, and there is art that uses other subjects and is destined for concert halls and parlors. However the use is divided, this does not mean that art in the latter category is purely ‘secular’ in intent. Is there anything secular about “Contessa, perdono” in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, or some of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic landscapes, or parts of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or Terrence Malick’s take on the Battle of Guadalcanal in The Thin Red Line? ‘Secular’ subjects used to be featured alongside ‘religious’ subjects frequently: fieldworkers stood near prophets and saints in medieval cathedrals. There’s nothing non-religious about the ‘secular.’

Rather, the divide is between the sacred and profane in art (and I will not now delve into how/why this divide occurred - perhaps after Easter I will do so). The artist can use a religious subject (Berlioz’s use of Dies Irae in Symphonie Fantastique, Bacon’s Study after Velasquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ immediately come to mind) and be profane, and the artist can use a secular subject and aspire to the divine. The older dichotomy, Apollonian vs. Dionysian (before redefinition by Nietzsche) is also helpful. Does it appeal to the divine, or to sinful human appetites? And is art that portrays the sinful less ‘worthy’ of view by Christians because it is reflective of fallen humanity?

There are a group of Christians who want to be exposed to no art unless it is ‘religious’ art with blatant religious themes, or so watered down it is completely innocuous entertainment (art that cannot move someone is not art). Perhaps it is my bias as a systems neuroscientist and my knowledge that a human being is an organism run by neurons communicating with other neurons, that informs my belief that there is no such thing as a ‘religious’ theme. The story of humanity is the story of Christ’s life, from birth to Passion, death and resurrection. Human life is ALREADY a religious theme – it became so when God formed man in His Image and breathed life into him. There is no story, no aural journey, no pictorial that can be separated from Our Creator and Savior. “All things came to be through Him, and without Him nothing came to be” (John 1:3). Art, as a reflection of the aspirations of humanity, always has an attitude towards the Divine and can never be indifferent to God – even if it appears so, God has different ways of reckoning (Rev 3:15-16). I think those who want to place art into a secular category and therefore dismiss it are attempting to hide from humanity.

I’ve heard this argument used: by being exposed to only religious themes, one is seeking to form the conscience. One’s conscience has to be formed separate from humanity? One must be cut off from human life in order to be Christian? Does NOT seeing or hearing really protect one against temptation? The art isn’t the problem; the indulgence in sinful thoughts is. It is a different mission to enter the desert for discipline than it is to enter it to hide from Satan – Satan can find even Christ in the desert. (Those communities that seek to shut themselves off from the rest of the world, be they cults or the Amish, have frightening reports of sexual abuse, particularly of children; let’s not go into the various misdeeds that occur within religious communities.) The problem is not out there in the works that our neighbors produce; the problem is in here.

And yet it seems to me that some want Christianity in a box that they can polish like a pretty trinket and humanity in a squeaky-clean form, and anything less than those presentations of both is inherently bad. Well, fallen humanity is messy and dirty and in need of a Savior. And art, when it works, is the remembrance of Eden, the internal longing for a Savior, and the hope for the Age to Come. It speaks the words: this is how far we have fallen into iniquity, Christ come! or this is what Heaven may be like. We think, we feel, we yearn with our brothers and sisters for what God has in store for us. And in good art, those experiences are poured out for the rest of us to contemplate and be moved. Don’t run away from art, or avoid it because you think it will somehow taint you. As in all things, it is Christ in you that matters.

Women and the Curse of the Fall

A rambling meditation on women and men

Your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall be your master. – Genesis 3:16

In Genesis, Woman exists before Eve. Woman is the partner of man, his complementary help-mate. In the second account of creation she is formed from the side of Adam; who was Adam before? Rashi wrote that Adam was androgynous before the creation of woman - God created Adam in His image, incorporating the masculine and feminine. In the Bereshit Rabbah commentary, woman is attached to Adam, but in such a way that he cannot see her and be made whole until she is separated from him, and can see his mirror image. Once he sees her, Adam calls her "woman, for she was taken out of man." It is only after the Fall that Adam re-names the woman Eve, "because she would become the mother of all the living." Woman: identified as part of the man who makes him whole, his inspiration and helper; Eve: identified through procreative ability, bound to longing for and submissiveness to her husband. The latter is God's curse for women.

[Note: I much prefer reading midrash for notes on women than that of the Church Fathers. At least when reading writings in the Jewish tradition, I can easily dismiss the misogyny. When misogyny is found in the writings of saints in one's own Church, I want to hurl objects.]

Women have struggled with the tension, as Croce writes of, "sexual complicity in conflict with individual freedom.” Perhaps this is why I have always thought of male and female celibacy so differently. For men, celibacy is discipline, restraint, and bearing the burden of lack of biological progeny. For women, celibacy is freedom, a return to Eden, unburdened of the longing for a man. In the consecrated life, it's also the gift of Christ as spouse, so that the admonishments of Colossians 3:18, Ephesians 5:21-32, and 1 Peter 3:1 no longer seem overwhelmingly cumbersome.

Every man has a Don Quixote in him. Every man wants an inspiration. For the Don it was Dulcinea, a woman he sought in many guises. I myself think that the same is true in life, that everything a man does, he does for his ideal woman. You live only one life and you believe in something and I believe in a little thing like that. It has worked so far. It will last me. - George Balanchine, 1965.

It has always fascinated me that some men long for the original woman, the woman separated from his side. We can enter into the dangerous territory of men who place women on pedestals, and the virgin/whore complex, and yet there is something elemental and primitive about a man's longing for his muse. In the literature of every age, there are mortal men who desire and aspire to conquer women or women-like creatures. While there are several meanings to this including their unattainability (tied to the taming of nature), there is also the longing for the help-mate and inspiration. The desire to proclaim the words of Adam to the chosen woman, "this now is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." The love for the Blessed Virgin in plastic art and hymns is tied to this - she who is Woman in John's Gospel and Vision.

I want to see the world through you; for then I shall not be seeing the world but only you, you, you! I have never seen you without thinking that I should like to pray to you. I have never heard you without thinking that I should like to believe in you. I have never longed for you without thinking that I should like to suffer for you. I have never desired you without thinking that I should be allowed to kneel before you. - Rainer Maria Rilke to Lou Andreas-Salomé, found in Holthusen’s Portrait of Rilke: An Illustrated Biography (1971). Andreas-Salomé, by the way, was a muse for Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud.

But how does a woman carry on the life of the muse, without being overcome by the longing 'to be weighed down by the man's body' as Kundera writes? How does she not turn into a Medea? There is the awful example of Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel, lovers for ten years. There are also the attenuated careers of women like Clara Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. However, they were artists in their own right. [See Kavaler-Adler’s The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (1996) for a full run-down on object relations psychotherapy to understand the sense of self and separation from the male ego that must occur for women artists to gain control of their lives according to this theory.] What is the average woman to do? How is she to be Woman to a man?

[Note: Camille Claudel (1988) directed by Bruno Nuytten, with Isabelle Adjani and Gérard Depardieu is a fine film. However, there are two significant disappointments with this film: the failure to address the influence of Claudel on Rodin’s artwork, which according to some critics, may have been profound., and the psychology behind Claudel’s breakdown – this is beyond a woman who is angered that her lover continues to have other affairs.]

Aimai-je un rêve? - Mallarmé, L'après-midi d'un faune

In Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), James Stewart seeks to re-create a lost-love (played by Kim Novak). In so doing, questions arise as to how much we ever know and love our beloved. Do we subtly train our lovers to be who we want them to be, do we make them into figments of our imagination who we love only as projections of ourselves? Were Adam and woman originally a complete and complementary projection of each other?

Now Jocasta kneels on the floor at the foot of the bed and then she rises with her leg close to her breast and to her head, and her foot way beyond her head, her body in a deep contraction. I call this the vaginal cry; it is the cry from her vagina. It is either the cry for her lover, her husband, or the cry for her children. - Martha Graham on her dance Night Journey, in her autobiography Blood Memory (1991)

The cry for the lover, the need for a man (even if that man happens to be one's believed-to-be-dead son, taken as lover and husband). Can women escape the curse of Genesis, other than through the consecrated life? In the third episode of Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973), after Johan (Erland Josephson) has told his wife Marianne (Liv Ullman) that he is having an affair and is leaving her that very morning to be with his mistress, after the outbursts and crying, she calmly helps him pack his things. She reminds him that he forgets his toothbrush. This is one of the oldest questions of woman to man: how can you live without me? We are symbiotically joined, how can you turn away?

Give me children or I shall die. - Genesis 30:1

Rachel's cry to Jacob earns her a rebuke, for should she not know that woman has a purpose other than procreation and that children are only God's to provide? The meaning of barrenness is only understood through the light of the New Testament's Virgin and Church. And yet women are still confined by the Fall into their role as Eve, with their procreative abilities paramount in importance.

Leila (1996), directed by Dariush Mehruji, is an Iranian film set in modern day Tehran (so husband and wife do not physically touch, and she is dressed in a black chador throughout). Leila (Leila Hatami) and Reza (Ali Mosaffa) are a married couple, happy and in love. But after a year of trying for children, they discover that Leila is infertile. Thus begins the dilemma: should Reza, an only son, take a second wife (this is Iran and Islamic culture, after all) in order to have a son of his own for the family? Reza's mother (Jamileh Sheikhi) batters her daughter-in-law with fears that Reza will come to not love his own wife if he does not have a son of his own. Reza attempts to re-assure Leila, "All I want is your happiness." Nevertheless, Leila decides to encourage Reza to take a second wife. As he interviews women that a matchmaker has set up for him, she takes strolls in a park or along the sidewalk alone, made unimportant by her infertility. After meeting each prospective bride, Reza picks Leila up and they joke about the qualities that the woman had until one day Reza expresses his approval for a woman he has interviewed. They marry, and as Leila listens in the darkened guest bedroom as her husband and his new bride walk up the stairs of their house (the new bride's dress percussively hitting each step, like the pounding of Leila's fearful heart in her own ears), to the room where their marriage will be consummated, she bolts and leaves. She cannot share him afterall, and cannot sit in silence with the person who she has become: a shadow of her husband.

On the face of it, this is a feminist movie about the denigration of women into child-bearing vessels. However, it is also about two people who are totally in love, and yet, as Jane Shapiro names it, practice "intimate terrorism." They are so concerned with the other that they become passive aggressive. They dare not speak completely truthfully. Yes, Leila's mother-in-law is practically a Gorgon Greek chorus standing in for Iranian society, but the heartbreak of Reza and Leila is in how they subtly turn on each other. She fears losing him, she longs for him, and he fears disappointing her. A woman locked in the curse of the Fall.

Yes

For A.V.

Worlds rise and collapse under the weight of a Yes. Humanity falls with a Yes (Adam and Eve to the serpent) and is redeemed with another Yes (Christ and the Blessed Virgin to God). People fight wars over when and where who said Yes. An entire industry depends on women joyfully saying Yes. The survival of the human race depends on the Yes. Yes may be the most powerful word we have. It is forever open to possibilities.

There are all sorts of ways to say Yes: they can be playful, excited, joyous, full of sighs, resigned, angry – is there any other word indicating affirmation that can contain so much?

According to Evan Zimroth (Collusion, 1999), Yes please and Sorry, my fault are the only two phrases a ballet student should ever utter in the studio. A Yes allows someone else a measure of control over you; it allows them to know your needs and desires. This is what I want. That is what I think. It also carries with it grave responsibility, Yes what I've said is true.

People will hold back on saying Yes out of anger and spite, in order to maintain individual control. There’s nothing like a two-year-old child, learning that he can change the world around him, who refuses to say Yes. Out of anger towards Agamemnon, Achilles doesn’t say Yes soon enough to save the life of a beloved friend:

Look, a world away from his fatherland he’s perished,
Lacking me, my fighting strength, to defend him.
But now, since I shall not return to my fatherland…
nor did I bring one ray of hope to my Patroclus,
nor to the rest of all my steadfast comrades,
countless ranks struck down by mighty Hector-
…But now I’ll go and meet that murderer head-on,
that Hector who destroyed the dearest life I know.
…I’ll lie in peace, once I’ve gone down to death.
But now, for the moment, let me seize great glory! - The Illiad, Book XVIII

But when he finally does, the fall of a civilization and the mythical founding of a new one appear on the horizon.

People who cannot decide to say Yes live between worlds, tortured. See Hamlet. Indeed, the omitting of a Yes is the same as a No.

The Yes can also be unspoken – the heart and soul give the affirmation before the mouth can give the utterance. Juliet is so eager to say Yes she does so before it’s asked of her:

Juliet: What satisfaction canst thou have tonight?
Romeo: The exchange of thy love’s faithful vow for mine.
Juliet: I gave thee mine before thou didst request it,
And yet I would it were to give again. – Romeo & Juliet, Act II

There is even a movie titled Yes (2004), written and directed by Sally Potter. Large parts of it are in iambic pentameter; the plot involves a man and woman from entirely different cultures learning how to say Yes because to say Yes opens up the possible:

In fact I think I'd guess
That "no" does not exist. There's only "yes.”

One author complained that the English Yes was insufficient for the pregnant weight of the word itself. Yes does sound too resigned, too lacking in responsibility; a sí or oui carries with it excitement, expectation, and a sharp demand for satisfaction. My own favorite is the Russian pronunciation da. It's pleasant and warm, but could also stab if spoken harshly.

Of course, there’s the whispered erotic Yes, the breathless Yes.

...as a girl where I was a flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. - James Joyce’s Ulysses (1934)

But the most important Yes is certainly that shared between lovers, whether man and woman ensuring the continuance of the human race, or God and person uniting in communion. The Yes that gives life and contains a promise:

He Who testifies to these things says, "Yes, I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. - Revelation 22:20 (NIV).

Art and the audience, with a big side of multiculturalism

Great art is impersonal art. – Joan Acocella, I think

A few years ago, I went to the Museum of Contemporary Art here in Chicago. My mind was illuminated by these works. There was a video of a woman sucking her own big toe, looped to play over and over again – her raising her right leg and grabbing it with both hands, putting her big toe in her mouth, and sucking it. According to the placard next to this video display, the artist wished to convey male oppression of women.

Another display was of artificial turf surrounded by barbed wire. The dangers of gridiron football? An easy-to-clean yard for chickens? No, it was about environmentalism, as explained to us by the artist in, oh, about 250 words.

A lot of contemporary art is really bad. An artist who needs to explain to the audience what he/she is doing should not be doing it. (And I do not include artists like R. Wagner here - those who want to explain to the audience because of their own egocentrism.) If you can’t communicate through your chosen medium, you’ve failed as an artist and should find another line of work, or non-work.

The quote above does NOT mean that art is not personal to the artist, but that: 1) the artist should not manipulate, explain, or pander to the audience, for such is the realm of popular entertainment, 2) art is communal and therefore does not need to be personalized.

[An aside: I’m really asking for it re how I define art, how I define popular entertainment, and when the two successfully mix and mingle and when they don’t, but I won’t post about that today.]

I’ll post excerpts from Arlene Croce’s essay Discussing the Undiscussable soon.

On a somewhat-related subject, I’ve realized what it is that I really don’t like about Taymor’s The Magic Flute, besides the cutting of crucial arias (to read my comments, go here). It’s the multiculturalism. Taymor has added, more or less undiluted, pieces of Japanese, Indonesian, Jewish mystical, and who knows what other cultures to a work that is completely in the Western tradition, both in music (Western classical) and plotline (Western philosophy). I’m totally opposed to multiculturalism in art, and I can’t recall a work I’ve encountered that I’ve enjoyed (as art, not as popular entertainment.) Taymor’s The Lion King is successful at incorporating some African themes because the material is so weak to begin with (Elton John and Bernard Taupin to a Disney story? Easy pickings). But Die Zauberflote isn’t.

The consequence of multicultural art (and I’m looking right at your “collaborators,” Ravi Shankar! Yep, you know how you are!) is inevitably dilution of all the cultural art forms. The fact is: no multicultural world culture exists. Art is particular to the culture from which it arises. Art is organic: you can’t graft the best from here and there on to each other and expect it to be communicative. It has impact, yes. But in the end, it’s lazy. And it's arrogant and insulting - it suggests that the artistic traditions as they have organically developed are an insufficient means of expression. It also ignores the spiritual nature of art - great art is ritualistic, and ritual is native to a particular culture.

But AG, isn’t jazz multicultural? Actually, much of jazz is solidly in the Western musical tradition. What makes much of it unique is how elements of Western music were adopted and shaped by those whose roots were non-Western, but this was a process that occurred over decades.

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903)

Self-Portrait, 1893-4

I first discovered Gauguin's work in college and he became a favorite. A post-Impressionist, Gauguin's use of curving, distinct lines with bold colors (Cloisonnism) creates a strong visual impact, as does his use of exaggerated proportions. And because I have to bring everything back to ballet, Gauguin became a proponent of primitivism in art, with the ballet "Le Sacre du printemps" being a primary work of this artistic movement. If one ever gets to see the original 1913 choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky with recreations of the sets and costumes of Nicholas Roerich (The Joffrey Ballet has a revival every decade or so), to the famous pounding Stravinsky score, one can see how the shapes of the bodies, the movements (strong lines, turned in, bent arms and legs) and the earthy colors used on the costumes contrasting with the post-impressionist pastoral scenes of the sets reflects this artistic period.

Vision After the Sermon, 1888

(From two letters to Vincent Van Gogh, Pont-Aven, September 1888)
...Yes, you are right to want painting to have a coloring evocative of poetic ideas, and in that sense I agree with you, although with one difference. I am not acquainted with any poetic ideas - I'm probably missing a sense. I find everything poetic, and it is in the deepest recesses of my heart, that are sometimes mysterious, that I glimpse poetry. Forms and color brought into harmony produce poetry by themselves. Without allowing myself to be distracted by the subject, contemplation of a painting by another artist induces in me a feeling, a poetical state that becomes more intense the more the painter's intellectual powers emanate from it....

...I have just painted a religious picture, very badly done but it interested me and I like it. I wanted to give it to the church of Pont-Aven. Naturally they don't want it.

A group of Breton women are praying, their costumes very intense black. The coifs very luminous yellowy-white. The two coifs to the right are like monstrous helmets. An apple tree cuts across the canvas, dark purple with its foliage drawn in masses like emerald green clouds with patches of green and sun yellow. The ground (pure vermilion). In the church it darkens and becomes a browny red.

The angel is dressed in ultramarine blue and Jacob in bottle green. The angel's wings pure chrome yellow 1. The angel's hair chrome 2 and the feet flesh orange. I think I have achieved in the figures a great simplicity, rustic and superstitious. The whole thing very severe....

The Green Christ/Breton Calvary, 1889

(From a letter to Vincent Van Gogh, Le Pouldu, October 1889)
...Seeing this every day fills me with a sensation of struggle for survival, of melancholy and acquiesence in implacable laws. I am attempting to put this sensation down on canvas, not by chance, but quite deliberately, perhaps by exaggerating certain rigidities of posture, certain dark colors, etc...All this is perhaps mannered but what is natural in art? Ever since the most distant times, everything in art has been completely deliberate, a product of convention...in art, truth is what a person feels in the state of mind he happens to be in. Those who wish to or are able to can dream. Let those who wish to or are able to abandon themselves to their dreams. And dreams always come from the reality of nature. A savage will never see in his dreams a man dressed like a Parisian - etc....

(From a letter to Theo Van Gogh, Le Pouldu, November 1889)
...I'm seeking to express a general state rather than a single thought, and at the same time to make another person's eye experience an indefinite, never-ending impression. To suggest suffering does not mean to specify what sort of suffering; purity in general is what I am seeking to express, not a particular kind of purity. Literature is one (and painting another). In consequence, the thought is suggested but not explained...

It's the same with the painting of the 3 stone women holding Christ. Brittany, simple superstition and desolation. The hill is guarded by a line of cows arranged in the form of the calvary. I've tried to make everything in this picture express belief and passive suffering in the traditional religious style, as well as the power of nature with its great scream. I am wrong not to be good enough to express it better - but I am not wrong to conceive it...

You know that I have Indian blood, Inca blood in me, and it's reflected in everything I do. It's the basis of my personality; I try to confront rotten civilization with something more natural, based on savagery...

D'où venons nous? Que sommes nous? Où allons nous?/Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, 1897-98

(From a letter to Andre Fontainas, Tahiti, March 1899)
Color, which is vibration just as music is, is able to attain what is most universal yet at the same time most elusive in nature: its inner force.

Here near my cabin, in complete silence, amid the intoxicating perfumes of nature, I dream of violent harmonies. A delight enhanced by I know not what sacred horror I divine in the infinite. An aroma of long-vanquished joy that I breathe in the present. Animal figures rigid as statues, with something indescribably solemn and religious in the rhythm of their pose, in their strange immobility. In eyes that dream, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma.
...In praise of certain pictures that I considered unimportant you exclaim, 'If only Gauguin were always like that!' But I don't want to be always like that.
...To go back to the panel [Where do we come from]: the idol is there not as a literary symbol, but as a statue, yet perhaps less of a statue than the animal figures, less animal also, an integral part, in my dream before my cabin, of the whole of nature, dominating our primitive soul, the unearthly consolation of our sufferings to the extent that they are vague and incomprehensible before the mystery of our origin and of our future.

And all this sings with sadness in my soul and in my design while I paint and dream at the same time with no tangible allegory within my reach - due perhaps to a lack of literary education.

Awakening with my work finished, I ask myself 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?' A thought which no longer has anything to do with the canvas, expressed in words quite apart on the wall that surround it. Not a title but a signature.

Mahana No Atua/ The Day of the God, 1894

(From a letter to Charles Morice, Atuona, Hiva-Oa, 1903)

...You were mistaken one day when you said I was wrong to say that I am a savage. For it is true: I am a savage. And civilized people suspect this, for in my works there is nothing so surprising and baffling as this 'savage in spite of myself' aspect. That is why it is initimable....In art we have just undergone a very long period of aberration due to physics, mechanical chemistry, and the study of nature. Artists have lost all their savagery, all their instincts, one might say their imagination, and so they have wandered down every kind of path in order to find the undisciplined crowds and feel frightened, lost as it were, when they are alone. That is why solitude is not to be recommended to everyone, for you have to be strong in order to bear it and act alone. Everything I learned from other people merely stood in my way. Thus I can say: no one taught me anything. On the other hand, it is true that I know so little! But I prefer that little, which is of my own creation. And who knows whether that little, when put to use by others, will not become something big?...

(Letters in "Gauguin by Himself" edited by Belinda Thomson, 2001)

In the Darkness: Un-knowing and Becoming

A Lenten Reflection

In the second week of Lent, I’m sitting here writing about art, while many, more spiritually-minded, are staying away from these types of self-reflections or reviews. But in my weakness, I need the distraction, the time to pause, from a few other obligations. (Or maybe I’m establishing that I’m really the worst-type of Novus ordo Catholic: Lent, schment.) Excuse my self-justification for indulging this behavior, and you are of course free to stop reading now.

I have loved two particular stories about darkness and mistaken identity since pre-teen days. The first is the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche, as first encountered in Edith Hamilton’s classic school text Mythology. I was baffled as to how Psyche could not know that Cupid, her husband and lover who came to her only in the darkness, was not some awful serpent who would devour her. After Psyche has betrayed him by gazing upon him as he slept, Cupid delivers a parting line that I loved: “Love cannot live where there is no trust.”

The other story is of that deceiver, Jacob, who uses Isaac’s blindness to receive the blessing meant for his brother, is himself tricked in the dark when he mistakes Leah for Rachel, and wrestles with an angel in the dark. By sunrise he has a new identity as Israel.

Of course, darkness has always held great significance – God separates darkness from light; Christ enters a darkened world. The world again darkens at Christ’s death. The womb and the tomb are in darkness. All manner of scary stories are told “in the dark.” To be in the dark is to be uncertain and vulnerable, in a state where people can make and re-make themselves, as with Jacob and Leah and all our legends and fairy tales of people who can shape-shift once the sun goes down. In the dark, one can lose one’s identity, one can be tricked, and one can emerge in the daylight changed.

Far from being in the dark, I’ve always thought of our modern world as glaringly in the light – we may have bad vision, but we certainly have a lot of brightness. There’s almost nothing that can’t be uncovered and dissected and discussed – we hate mystery. Everything needs to be explained and put up for public discussion.

I grew up during the time that sex, at its most technical and mechanical, began to be discussed on shows that even children (such as myself) would commonly watch. This development was at least partly the response to HIV and AIDS, but certain elements of popular culture also took advantage and began to further endorse a hyper-masculine American culture where hyperactive male sexual expression was the only type allowed. Thus, even the most intimate of activities was put under blinding bright light.

An aside: I’ve always thought that the relationship between the main characters, Paul and Jeanne, in Last Tango in Paris would have at least possibly had a chance if they had engaged in at least some of their sexcapades in the dark. Of course, that it seems they never did has its own meaning.

When we look at our culture, it’s like looking in a mirror – not seeing yourself as you are, but seeing yourself looking at yourself. The great thing about art, when it works, is that you don’t experience self-reflection, but a kind of re-making. For purely practical reasons, of course, we usually experience the arts in semi-darkness (except for sculpture and architecture, of course). But in the darkness of a theatre or concert hall or a museum (except for the modern art sections of the museum, haha), where no one can really see you, you have an opportunity for a type of self-emptying to be filled back up with the beauty and mystery that the artist invites you to participate in. In the dark you can’t see your own reflection. You can only experience, and maybe be inspired. Train yourself to do this in the arts enough, and you may find yourself more easily doing it before God.

If I Were President...by George Balanchine (1904-1983)

If I were president, I would devote at least one speech to a very large section of our population which is not usually thought of or addressed as a separate unit by people in the government - I refer to the intellectuals and artists of the United States and to people who are interested in the intellectual and artistic life of our country, in other words in the spiritual and not just the material values of our existence.

There are a great many of us: writers, painters, sculptors, actors, composers, instrumentalists, and dancers. And there are uncounted millions of those for whom their interest in our creative efforts is as important and sometimes more important than all the other ordinary details of their lives. That is why we would like the president to show an interest in and speak to us about that other half of our life - the nonmaterialistic part of life, which we represent. Actually this very large group of citizens of whom I am speaking has never made any very great demands. None of us is especially interested in money or power, but all of us want to be recognized and given the possibility to create and to enjoy art. Certain forms of art have received wonderful support from the public itself, from private citizens and groups of interested people, who have created libraries and museums and supported symphony orchestras, and we owe them a great debt of gratitude. But writers and artists have never been fully accorded full recognition by a government body or official - and the person who first gives us this recognition will earn our wholehearted gratitude and support.

I firmly believe that woman is appointed by destiny to inspire and bring beauty to our existence. Woman herself is the reason for life to be beautiful, and men should be busy serving her. That is why I feel that if the woman will take into her hands the task of restoring the true purpose and values of life, then the man who in our civilization is caught like a squirrel in the wheel of fortune, will find the strength to escape out of it and bring all his highest qualities to this purpose.

This brings us to the important problem of our children who are our future. Their taste for art should be developed from early childhood. They should learn to love the beautiful and impractical as well as the useful and practical. One should give them fairy tales, music, dance, theater. This is real magic for children, and it is strong enough to overcome many dangers that threaten them, mainly because their minds are unoccupied and their imaginations unfed. Developing these qualities in our children is the first step to promoting peace in the world - by giving them true standards of what is most important in human life. Inner nobility will safeguard them from the cynicism of utilitarianism. Some twenty thousand young children saw special performances given for them by New York City Ballet. It was absolutely extraordinary to see how avidly they devoured these performances. The children must be reached before they are corrupted by life.

In conclusion I would like t osay a few words about my special field of art - the ballet. American people have a special affinity to movement in general and to ballet in particular. They are superb dancers, and their interest in this art deserves to be encouraged and channeled in the right way.

In ballet, woman is all-important. She is the queen of the performance, and the men surround her like courtiers. This is perhaps why I have thought so much about the woman's role and enormous possibility in real life as well as on the stage. (1961)

George Balanchine became an American citizen in the 50s and was the first official visitor to the Kennedy White House. He was also in the first class of honorees for the Kennedy Center Honors (1978), and received the Congressional Medal of Freedom from Reagan in 1983; it was accepted on his behalf by Suzanne Farrell.

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty - if you're vairy lucky and have said your prayers. - Balanchine

I mean here only to encourage people to go out and see dance. Dance is extraordinary in that it is the only occasion I know of, outside of a church service, where people gather to participate in an activity that's been passed down from body to body over generations, where the most important aspect of the performance is that the participants believe in what they are doing, first and foremost, and there is no disconnect between what is thought in the mind and expressed through the body in gesture and form. Dance, ideally, is a seamless coming together of the human body, sound, space, and time. My own favorite dance form, as should be obvious, is ballet. Ballet's realm is above the earth, in the real world of the spirit, not the material world under our feet. It exists in another world of ideal behaviors and attitudes; more than any other Western dance form the goal is to achieve something that the human eye and soul recognize as beauty. The beauty that can be achieved conceals the physical strain and effort of the participants. Ballet movement is unnatural, and yet spiritually it shows how we should be. As Balanchine once said to a woman who asked him if he thought her daughter could be a great ballerina: "Madame, la danse - c'est une question morale."

Or, as Balanchine would say, just go to listen to the music. Balanchine was a huge proponent of 20th century music, and if you go to see a Balanchine ballet, you have a chance of listening to music by Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Weill, Ives, Webern, Pierre Henry, Xenakis, and Schoenberg (actually, Schoenberg's arrangment for orchestra of Brahms' Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor). Just this past season, NYCB was performing Jerome Robbins' ballet In Memory Of... to Berg's violin concerto "To the Memory of an Angel." Robbins, Eliot Feld, Laura Dean, and Lar Lubovitch have all choreographed dances to Steve Reich's music; both Graham and Agnes de Mille used Copland's music. Merce Cunningham has had a long creative association with John Cage; Paul Taylor has choreographed Piazzolla Caldera, many (too many) contemporary choreographers use the music of Arvo Part. Robbins' Glass Pieces and Twyla Tharp's In the Upper Room were recently performed in NY; those are among several ballets choreographed to Philip Glass's music. And I'm only mentioning the use of Bach, Mozart, Gluck, Glazunov, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Delibes and so on. Sheesh, Leonid Massine even choreographed ballets to Mahler and Beethoven symphonies. Get a music education and a dance eduction - two for the price of one! Just go, and bring your friends and your children! And you can ask me questions afterwards....

It is not too much to consider a well-performed ballet a rite, executed and followed with intense devotion, that shares in some sort of moral figuration. The response of the audience to good dancing is a release of body and breath, a thanksgiving that is selfless, generous, complete, and leaves the spectator corroborated in the hope that, despite the world and its horrors, here somehow is a paradigm of perfection. - Lincoln Kirstein (1983)

The “Female Take-Over” or “Male Abandonment” of Arts Appreciation

“You want to talk of Keats or Milton, she only wants to talk of love

You go to see the play or ballet, and spend it searching for her glove!”

Professor Henry Higgins in “Let a Woman in Your Life”, My Fair Lady, lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, 1956

Above is a comical line, but interesting in its implications. Once upon a time, men were the ones who were interested in the arts and comprised most of the audience; women were seen as lacking the ability to fully appreciate plays, ballets, poems, and music, much less able to produce these works of art. However, over the past fifty years we’ve seen “the arts” become a female enterprise at least in its maintenance – the production of art is still largely thought to be a male endeavor.

In some ways, this is not a shock. Once women gain a foothold in an audience or area, the men start to leave in droves (or are pushed out). Career-wise, this can be followed in the gender ratios of men and women in the medical fields and advanced degrees in the biological sciences, among others. It has also been observed in the decline of male participation in Christian churches. There's even a trend in obtaining college degrees. I’m not going to attempt to undertake an explanation of why and how this complex sociological and psychological phenomenon occurs (or why there’s a branch of feminism that teaches “we’re all the same” even though men seem to disagree); I will instead focus on its repercussions.

In small degrees, it’s understandable why men have almost completely ducked out of the ballet audience. Men were once the largest portion of the ballet audience; it was even thought unseemly for women, in some cases, to attend. But since the rise of the Nutcracker in this country (spurred by Balanchine’s enormously successful production in 1954), ballet is seen strictly in terms of the Nutcracker’s adolescent heroine and the confectionary dream-land that she inhabits in Act 2. No matter that The Nutcracker can be an image of idealized childhood (when the production doesn’t make it have pseudo-Freudian sexual overtones of Clara/Marie’s initiation into THAT adult world) appealing to adults and children; it’s most frequent association is with pink and little girls through the multitude of ballet school productions every year. It is also interesting that the male audience for ballet remains strong in other countries, particularly in Russia, so ballet clearly isn’t something only men can enjoy.

When women began to increase their numbers (in attendance or in occupation in a field), there's a tendency for that art form (or occupation) to become associated with the feminine (or effeminate): men in fields that are dominated by women are thought to be gay. The consequences of this are negative for the arts: men still control many of the purse-strings and may be less likely to financially support something they see as a feminine enterprise, and the homosexual stigma on these men who are involved in the arts doesn't make it more attractive.

Also of concern is that, because of the female associations, men never learn to fully appreciate art. For instance, I heard many times in both primary and secondary school that "girls are the ones who are good at literature" (just like I heard many many times in college, from female classmates, that "engineering is too hard; there's all that MATH"). Both the former and the latter begin to sound like mantras, discouraging the opposite sex from interest and pursuit in those fields. In art, as I elaborated below, lack of interest can have dire consequences. We can't get by on only one gender cultivating the arts in our civilization

The Death of Cultural Literacy

That’s a lofty title, but I mean here to discuss our collective amnesia, or ignorance, of art and “high-brow” culture in Western civilization. Sure, we know it exists, know it has some value, know that there’s such a thing as aesthetics, but we seem to not be very interested in it except when we want to appear “cultured.” This topic is large and encompasses many issues, including arts exposure, a warped version of multiculturalism (the “everything is equivalent” variety), technology, mass production, the decline of education, shifts in demographics, etc. But I wish to focus here on what a certain type of education has done to our enjoyment of the arts.

“Everyone wants to know, ‘well, what does it mean?’ It doesn’t mean anything.” George Balanchine, Complete Stories of the Great Ballets (1977)

“I never saw a good ballet that made me think.” Arlene Croce, Afterimages (1979)

Whenever one speaks of the so-called “high-brow” arts, one can sense the dread in companions: “oh no, we will have to figure out vague meanings! My instinctive tastes will be wrong!” I won’t understand it, I won’t get it is the underlying tone. I propose that this response is NOT actually attributable to art itself, but to the fact that we’ve been trained, in some ways, to think that art will make us feel stupid.

No one likes to be told that there are shades of meaning or pleasures that would be derived from reading a certain book, or looking at a work of art, or attending a performance if one only concentrated hard enough. In fact, such an approach to the teaching of art is bound to leave someone anxious about the experience. And yet, that is how “arts appreciation” tends to be taught in this country. It’s always amusing and troubling to go to a fine arts museum and see schoolchildren running around with paper and (eek!) pencil, reading to see what pieces they HAVE TO look at, and what questions they HAVE TO answer.

If it is really real art and fine great art, it must be studied before it is enjoyed; that is what they remember from school. In school the art of poetry is approached by a strictly rational method, which teaches you what to enjoy and how to discriminate. You are taught to analyze the technique and relation of form to content; you are taught to identify and “evaluate” stylistic, biographical, economic, and anthropological influences, and told what is great and what is minor so you can prepare yourself for a great reaction or for a minor one. The effect of these conscientious labors on the pupils is distressing. For the rest of their lives they can’t face a page of verse without experiencing a complete mental blackout. They don’t enjoy, they don’t discriminate, they don’t even take the printed words at face value. For the rest of their lives they go prying for hidden motives back in literature, for psychological, economic, or stylistic explanations, and it never occurs to them to read the words and respond to them as they do to the nonsense of current songs or the nonsense of billboards by the roadside. Poetry is the same thing – it’s words, only more interesting, more directly and richly sensual. Edwin Denby, “Against Meaning in Ballet” (1949)

Some people have a natural knack for sensing, ESP-like, what one is supposed to derive from a particular poem or book, performance or painting, according to the scholars and schoolteachers. I feel no shame in admitting that I am NOT one of those people. Yet I derive a certain sensual pleasure in a wide variety of arts, and my tastes (my natural responses) have been educated by viewing or reading what is considered “good” or “great” over and over (and over) again. What Balanchine and Croce mean in the above quotes, I think, is not that there IS no meaning in ballet, or that one SHOULD NOT think, but that one’s enjoyment of art is first and foremost a sensual response, not an intellectual one.

Why we are taught to dampen our natural response to art through what Denby called the “strictly rational method” is unclear. I don’t know how arts appreciation is taught in other countries, if our method is tied to reinforcement for the single correct answer, or a sense of insecurity that we might be considered unsophisticated bumpkins by our cultural kin in Western Europe. But that it stifles our response to and interest in arts is unmistakable.

Why should we care? The arts communicate our shared cultural values; they are our spiritual and communal heritage. They are reflections of what we have held dear and the ways we have seen the world; they affirm our uniqueness and our contribution. When we lose sight of those, we lose our grip on our own civilization. We lose our place and time in the world - we allow postmodernism in its nihilistic bent to flourish.