Refractions 25: Traveling in China with Father Dowling

Traveling in China with Father Dowling


The road back from Xian airport felt dusty to my skin, even riding inside a comfortable bus for the US delegation. The pale sky seemed weighed down, thick with coal fumes from the nearby factories. Bicycles crisscrossed the road, even on the highways, farmers and workers somehow managing to swerve in and out, and from what we could see from the inside of the cool, air conditioned bus, their breathing seemed labored and resigned to the heat. We were on our way to Beijing, after an exhilarating day in Xian, visiting the terra-cotta warriors from the Qin Dynasty (211-206 B.C.).

Refreshing also were the conversations that I had on the bus, with fellow delegates from the President’s Committee on the Humanities and Arts (PCHA). I was there to represent the National Council, with Eileen Mason, the deputy director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Marc Pachter, the head of the Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian (expect our conversation will be a future Refractions piece); Irene Love, a world renowned archeologist; Henry Moran, the director of the PCHA; and Adair Margo, the head of the delegation and her husband Don. Bruce Cole, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with his wife Doreen, James Billington, from the Library of Congress, and his wife Marjorie accompanied us. And then there was Ralph.

Ralph McInerny has taught for over forty years at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center. You might know his name, or know of his fictional character, as he has authored twenty-six Father Dowling mystery novels. I found out that Ralph even came to read and sign books at the local Mysterious Book Shop right near my loft in Tribeca. A Thomas Aquinas scholar, I began to grill him with questions after finding out about his connection with Jaques Maritain; and to my delight, he was also a scholar of Dante (see my “Water Flames” exhibit, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, www.saratecchia.com.)

Maritain’s “Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,” one of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, given in 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, has been a seminal work for my journey of creativity and faith. I have carried it around with me since college, and this French philosopher/theologian has sown seeds of faith and an integrated view of art and theology into my life and my work. It is not surprising that the Maritain center at Notre Dame chose someone like Ralph who is equally versed in Aquinas and Dante, as well as the genre of mystery novels. Maritain’s theology recovers art and poetry from being a specialized category exiled from the intellect, into an indispensable, central catalyst of the mind. Maritain, in doing so, to the chagrin of many academics then and now, validates “the Virtue of Art.”

"The activity of the practical intellect divides into human actions to be done…and the works to be made; in other words, it divides into moral activity and artistic activity…Art is a virtue – not a moral virtue…Art is a virtue in the larger and more philosophical sense the ancients gave to this word; a habitus or 'state of possession,' an inner strength developed in man…Art is a virtue of the practical intellect." (Jacues Maritain, Creative Intuition)

The "habitus" of an Aquinas scholar could include mystery novels, or to consider all creative activities to be a significant intellectual work. Whether art and poetry, a Sunday afternoon baseball game or gourmet cooking, we do not need to segregate art and creativity into a corner, an exiled “extra” of our lives.

Ralph confided to me, though, that he really began to write mystery novels as a side business; to put his kids through school. I told him that my wife is a mystery novel fanatic, and knew of his books. I, on the other hand, first “met” Father Dowling as Tom Bosley, in a TV mystery show in the Eighties. “They loosely based it on my novels,” he said in his jovial voice, “but paid me well.” Having a son at NYU, I nodded, knowing that a financial opportunity a purist may resist, a parent grabs onto for dear life. I began to even ponder what kind of a mystery novel I would write…"Murder at NYU" (a parent gets mysteriously murdered on his way to paying his son’s tuition)?


* * *

When we arrived in Beijing, it was Saturday. Ralph had asked one of our interpreters if there was a Catholic church nearby the hotel. They rushed about to find one, and they did, and found that they had a mass on Saturday evening. “If we rush, we can still make it.” Off they went, out of the VIP lounge at the airport, where we waited for our bags. He took one of our interpreters with him.

Later, I asked the interpreter, Jesse (a name given to her by her college English instructor), of her experience going to church with Ralph. She told me that she had a friend who got married there, so she recognized the place. She asked Ralph, though, what the difference between a Church and a Temple was. Not having gone outside of China, she really did not know the difference, she said.

How do you explain to a well educated Chinese, the difference between a church and a temple? Ralph told me that he began to explain, but the conversation soon turned to how she suddenly became a widow recently, losing her husband in a car accident. She had since become a Buddhist: “ I before believed in utopia, now I follow in Buddah’s ways to find peace.”

Father Dowling, Ralph’s fictional character, would have found himself drawn to this conversation. Instead of asking probing questions about someone’s present, though, he would have found something in common with someone’s past first, especially in someone’s loss and anguish.

As an “archdiocesan marriage tribunal, specializing in the misery of others,” Father Dowling spent much of his early career counseling broken marriages. But then he found himself carrying their anguish in his heart, silently. “He began to drink…A final binge, a cure, and then, as though into exile, he had been sent to St. Hilary’s in Fox River, a city west of Chicago. Fifty years of age, a failure in the eyes of many of his friends, he had come to see this parish as the sweetest consolation. God is merciful.”


Reading Ralph’s books now, (purchased at the Mysterious Bookshop with my wife’s help) I realize his books read as an interior journey of faith and brokenness—to capture the real mystery hidden within the very heart of a human being.

As we traveled about China, I began to see China as a mystery, a beautiful mystery.

Here’s a country that would spend a third of their GNP on preserving Xian and the thousands of terra-cotta warriors buried beneath the tomb mount, but at the same time creating a dam to wash away an ancient village. China is a country that would re-build the main road in Beijing to Beverly Hills glamour, providing thousands of workers with jobs, but would force people into retirement at 55, to make room for younger workers, and then displace these younger workers in order to make room for the tourists as the Olympics open. Their parks were filled with the over-55 group of ex-workers, kicking around a feathered version of a hackey sack, playing and singing all day to pass the time. Here’s a country that is investing toward a huge cultural infrastructure, supporting their own artists both at home and abroad, but at the same time carefully censoring the internet, the news and the media. A country that would print Bibles domestically (not many Americans know that for many years they printed their own Bibles for Catholic Churches, but forbade the foreigners to carry them in to China), and yet persecute and arrest Christian leaders in rural areas. They also highly value harmony between people and nature, and yet have one of the worst pollution problems in the world. We asked one of the officials, while riding through the glitzy Beijing streets full of smog, if a marathon can take place in the polluted air: “oh, they will shut the factories for two months before the Olympics.” No other country can be so confidently matter of fact about moving 500,000 workers out of the region to make room for tourists. Today’s China can afford to do so, and has the governmental control to carry that out.

We toured the “Egg,” the brand new Performance Center in Beijing, and one of the delegates who has been involved in building arts centers like this in the US commented to me: “There’s no way we could do this…we don’t have access to enough concrete!” Touring the center, which seemed overly extravagant, even at the half finished state, we were told that the center will be done this fall… which prompted another comment: “There’s no way our unions would allow us to build so fast!”

Each day, The China Daily was delivered to our hotel rooms. We noticed that there were front-page articles about the places we were to visit, often on a specific issue we were to discuss that day. At the end of our tour, when we saw the “Egg” was the subject of a top article with headliner indicating that the construction was on schedule, we realized we were in a bit of a Truman Show. The Chinese could re-create a city in several years, build the largest performance center in the world in a short time, and control everything about how it is reported to impress a small foreign delegation. Shaking our heads, we all had to admit, however, that we were still quite impressed.

From their perspective, to be fair, the US, too, must be a mystery. We speak of freedom of speech as our highest humanitarian virtue, and our internet pages are filled with pornography and other explicit forms of dehumanization. We are a nation swimming with individual wealth, and yet have no national insurance and a high percentage of homelessness. We are an advanced nation of educational opportunity, and yet have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world. We are a country of innovation, in technology and the arts, and yet the first time we broadcasted the Superbowl live to China, Janet Jackson’s famed “malfunctioning bra” incident represented us instead. We bicker about the cultural budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, when the budget remains tiny compared to other nations, and a mere half of a baseball player’s (Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees) salary.

And if you were to read China as a mystery novel, the opening chapter would be on the Cultural Revolution, exiling thousands of families into forced encampment. The trauma left deep wounds that still exist in the lives of people in China. The Cultural Revolution was their Ground Zero.

The vacuum that this Ground Zero has left in their culture, is now being filled by their fantastic drive to bring the world to the Olympics (’08) and then to the Expo (’10). The museums and arts districts are getting support and infrastructure, making even New York artists envious of China’s bourgeoning arts scene. On the way to Beijing, David Fraher of Arts Midwest, passed out a magazine article called “China’s New Creative Class,” highlighting “the next cultural revolution” from China’s creatives like Ou Ning (curator, designer), Lin Jing (furniture and ceramics maker) or Ji Ji (graphic designer). Apparently, the race is on for the creative domain as well, to see which culture can take the lead.

When we met and spent time with their Minister of Culture, Sun Jiazheng, we realized why they were making such a headway into a cultural development.

Minister Sun charmed us, a Renaissance man, who freely quotes philosophers and poets, and humanized every meeting by taking off his tie and his jacket, shaking every delegate’s hand personally. But it was his own poetry, shared at the banquet on the last day of our visit inside the Forbidden City, Jin an Fu Palace, that truly moved me. Our delegation head, Adair Margo, insisted that he share a poem he quoted at the table. He seemed reluctant, saying “such a sad poem should not be part of a grand celebration between two nations.” He explained that the poem was written after his friend, a Japanese author/composer and president of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Association, Ikuma Dan, suddenly passed away during his visit to China. He brought the poem to Sakuma’s gravesite in Japan, to read at the site.

April comes to Tokyo
The cherries should be at the height of their bloom
I’ve come to see the flowers
But spring came early and they faded too soon

April comes to Tokyo
This should be a glad reunion
Friends from afar once more together
Instead we stand bereft by your grave

Oh, honored colleague!
The blossoms have fallen, but spring still comes in all its splendor
You left with no warning; with whom can we share
The fathomless depths of our loss?

Graveside Reflections, April 2002, from "Dream and Pursuit" by Sun Jinzheng

It would have been a courageous enough act to reveal such a personal journey in public. But his offering was even more daring to me because of the current tense relationship between China and Japan. Even a few days before, the Japanese papers were full of questions regarding Prime Minister Abe’s response to Yasukuni Shrine, a Japanese holy site where many war criminals are buried and honored, including those invading China. Further, the Chinese have demanded an inquiry into the forced prostitution of Chinese women by the Japanese military in the 19th Century.

In that setting, Minister Sun’s poem was not just a balm to soothe such historical wounds, but a principled reconciling act based on common humanity, casting light into the divide.

Art moves into the chasms of past injuries, inspecting and noting each detail of a heart’s wounds. At the same time, Art and Poetry can feed us the manna of hope to malnourished, distrusting souls due to abuses of the past. In the age of terrorism and fear, that is why we need poets and artists. Artists have the potential of creating in love, providing an imaginative vision for their culture, a holistic language to deal with a fragmented, oppressed past. The result should be an even deeper longing.

Thus, Jaques Maritain wrote: “Poetry is spiritual nourishment. But it does not satiate, it only makes man more hungry, and that is its grandeur." That hunger cannot be filled by even the greatest of banquets in a Forbidden City. In Minister Sun’s poem for the Japanese composer, I felt a certain longing. There’s a mystery there, not a mystery of “who-done-it,” but a longing for a true Jin an Fu (a Place of Eternal Happiness), to finally resolve the irreconcilable brokenness within our hearts for eternity.

Mystery novels seek an answer for every wrongful death. But, really, every death demands an answer whether by murder or by accident. Jesse, our interpreter who met sorrow and death in her young marriage, began to search for peace in the midst of her tears. Father Dowling would always offer clues to such a journey, to re-discover the path home, not just to solve the crime, but for a spiritual home. For often, even in a mystery novel, the accidental turn of events can overwhelm the logic of the analysis of evidence. The Spirit of God, the true detective of our souls, searches via our creativity, a journeyer’s void within.

When Minister Sun read the lamentation poem, Jesse had to translate the poem impromptu. One of the assistants, rushed on stage with Minister Sun’s book in which the poem was translated to help Jesse. Jesse closed the book, gave it back politely to the assistant, and proceeded to begin to translate the poem with her eyes closed. Refracting in each word, carefully and tenderly given to us, both Ralph and I felt the weight of life and death. Father Dowling would have noticed that moment, too, as he, too, would peer deeply into the pain and sorrows of a poet grieving for a friend, and an interpreter grieving for a husband. That, more than even the splendid banquet, would reveal the mystery of our being, being transcribed and etched in our hearts, one word at a time.


Makoto Fujimura

Creating into the Void

Dear Refractions Readers:


This photo is from St. James Castle, Kinsale, Ireland.

My next Refractions essay on China trip will be uploaded soon (hopefully). I am pleased to announce that NavPress will be publishing past Refractions essays into a book, so I'll keep you updated on that.

I just spoke at my home church The Village Church. It is on Genesis 2, on a poet named Adam and why we need to be (even if you are not an artist) creating into the void...

William Blake wrote: "There is a Void, outside of Existence, which if enterd into 
 Englobes itself & becomes a Womb… " ( Introduction to Jerusalem)

Indeed, even in Eden there was a void...

Take a listen, if you are interested, at

http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/2007/09/creating-into-the-void/

Happy September!

Makoto Fujimura

Installation in Kansas City

Happy Fourth of July!

My recent installation photos in Kansas City are available at:
http://flickr.com/photos/jtoddm/sets/72157600258648228/

You will see a major installation for the brand new headquarters of DEMDACO.  The image moves from "Shalom Vision" (left) to "Golden Splendor,"(right)  taking the theme of "The world that ought to be,"  and our struggles to journey there.

DEMDACO is located at:

5000 West 134th Street
Leawood, KS 66209


Please make an appointment with Sharon (sharon.tompkins@demdaco.com) if you want to visit the painting.


I will be traveling to Kansas City later this month to spend time with a fellow National Council Member Joan Israelite and the the Chair of National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia.


Enjoy!

Refractions 24: The Resonance of Being

The Resonance of Being





In July, 1973, I landed in Newark Airport with my father, one of the leading phonetics research scientists in the world. Just before the airplane skidded onto the runway, feeling a bit queasy, I looked toward the east and saw the Twin Towers, freshly built.


My father was one of many pure research scientists recruited to work at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He was to create their linguistics department, and ended up spending over 15 years there. The AT&T divesture would split the company in 1984, ending an era of the highest accomplishments in the areas of pure research in the modern times. He left then to head up the phonetics research department at Ohio State University.


Max Mathews, my father’s boss at Bell Labs, picked us up that hot day from the airport. Out of the window of their boxy sedan, my eyes were filled with green: the trees and grass seemed so sumptuous and luxurious to me. I saw an old man with a corduroy hat, mowing the lawn. I had never seen anyone mow a lawn in Japan. I stayed with the Matthews for the summer, while my parents got ready to move to New Providence, N.J. Though this land seemed so new, and the language seemed so foreign, I was merely reacquainting myself with the country of my birth.


When I was born in Boston, in 1960, my father was finishing up his post doctorate thesis at M.I.T. at the Research Laboratory of Electronics, where Noam Chomsky also had his office. Since then, he had always planned on coming back to the States. Even with his tenured position at Tokyo University, he knew he would not be able to quell his mission to pursue pure research. He would become the first tenured professor at the prestigious university to abandon his post, to the outrage of many of his fellow academics.


He had a humble beginning at Tokyo University, though. As an undergraduate student, in post-war Japan, he almost failed out as a physics major. His caught the attention of one professor who was creating a new area of information science research, and he began to do rudimentary studies with him. As it turned out, that was the best milieu for my father to exercise his enormous creative and linguistic gift.


He and my mother had another reason for coming to New Jersey. My brother and I were to be raised bilingually and biculturally. We were always told of this, even as small children. That eventually we would move back to the States, and my mother told us, though it would be a hard adjustment, would be better than staying in the regimented, exam-filled environment in Japan. My parents, it seemed, saw this as their primary mission for us.


* * * *


I ended up earning pocket money by mowing lawns on bright Saturday mornings in New Providence the first few years. I would soon find out that I was highly allergic to grass. That discomfort, of course, did not stop me from working around the yards of my father’s colleagues.


My father also hired me to create spectrographic prints as my summer job. I would put thermo-sensitive paper around the drum of the device. As the drum rotated, the voice data would translate itself into a visual dance in front of me, the needle jumping up and down like a seismic meter. The needle also made this faint scratching sound, and smelled like burning rubber. I made hundreds of these prints, so that my father could catalogue the patterns. He was working on a computer simulation of the tongue*.

Bell Labs was a bit like Starship Enterprise. The main building had gigantic wings spreading over the green hills. The copper roofs of the building seem to hover in the vast landscape, and they gleamed in the rain. When I went to help my father in the morning, I remember the hallway wings filled with conversation. Once, when I picked up my father at night, I was surprised how many scientists were there late at night. Bell Labs was the birthplace of many inventions, including the transistor, and laser technology, not to mention UNIX and C computer languages. When my father worked there, there had already been seven Nobel Prizes given to Bell Labs scientists. I suppose at that level of intellect and creativity, a regimented time schedule would not be needed. Today we are still benefiting from what my father and his colleagues developed in the Seventies. We will, no doubt, soon run out of that Research & Development capital. Looking back, Bell Labs was one of the most creative zones in the world.

At night, at Max and Marj’s home, they had gatherings of researchers who often brought in violins, and played chamber music. Often Lillian Schwartz, one of the world’s first artists who utilized computer morphed images (http://www.lillian.com), stopped by. She created a portrait of Lincoln with blocked shapes using computer analysis, which hung in Max’s living room. Max often took out a machine that he invented that turned violin music into trumpet blasts, delighting us. These things were just a normal part of the milieu that I grew up in. My brother and Max’s children talked about computer programming, and later attend colleges like M.I.T. and Stanford University.

For lazy summer afternoons, for lunch, Marj would often heat up Campbell Tomato Soup, and Grilled Cheese Sandwich. I’d never had those in Japan. I got used to it after a while, even learning to use the electric stove, and eating them before going out to use the long tree swings set up in the front yard, getting rope burns into my hands, swinging from a huge oak tree.


* * * *

The scientists were convinced that they would be able to simulate human speech completely as to be indistinguishable from the actual voices within a decade. I avidly perused (could not read English that well then) Popular Mechanics magazine sitting around in the Mathews’ home, imagining what the world would be like by the time I was thirty. There was an assumed optimism in the air, symbolized by the World Trade Centers, a twin confidence in information technology and commerce.

In Jeremy Bernstein’s “Three Degrees Above Zero; Bell Labs in the Information Age” (which my father signed and gave to me, one of the first published copies, in 1983), he mentions my father’s young colleague:

Mitchell Marcus, a thirty-three-year-old linguist and computer scientist at the Linguistics and Speech Analysis Research Department of the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center in Murray Hill, conjectured that it might be within ten or fifteen years. He noted, “We are going to have fairly soon enormously powerful machines with the hardware almost for free. They will be in our TV sets, in our Waring Blenders, and in our microwave ovens, and the right way to communicate with many of them will be to talk to them.” (pg. 49)

Mitchell was one of the young scientists my father recruited to work for him. Mitch left his post at MIT to come to work for my father. I asked my father what his hiring policy was. “You take your time to get only the best, and you give them complete freedom once they arrive.”

Mitch Marcus: “I just didn’t believe I would have carte blanche (at Bell). It took me awhile after I got here to realize that it really is true.” (pg.66)


It is strange to think that while these things were going on, my father never tried to teach me, or attempted to groom me to understand scientific thinking. It seemed that he also gave me and my brother carte blanche, too. It was not until I was in college that I started to inquire about his work. While he drove me from home to college (Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA), we spoke about these things. I felt I had come to know my father as a person for the first time. Before then, he was a distant, but a generous, figure, one that a teenager would looked up to as brilliant, but bit of a mystery.




* * * *



In 1980’s, at the age of early 50’s,my father began to send a series of notes to his colleagues questioning the basic tenets of acoustics research, as he found them flawed and inadequate for the goals pursued. In my simplified understanding (over-simplification, I am sure), what the early research assumed was that by segmenting speech patterns, you could have enough data to rebuild speech. It would be a bit like dissecting a frog, and stitching it back together, only to expect it to jump again -- A typical reductionist/modernist assumption.


My father’s Converter/Distributer theory (C/ D theory) assumes that computer technology is now capable of anticipating contextual patterns of speech, and able to simulate an architectural structure to account for the morphing of speech production. Rather than the segmental approach, he calls his new thinking prosodiic, as it accounts for the complexity of speech and language. But it would take years of research to get to a point of presenting his new ideas to the linguistics/phonetics community. My father, who rarely had problems finding support for his research in his life, was in for a battle. Many tenured professors, I am sure, found his simple claims rather threatening to their own assumptions. He could not find funding, and found himself fighting the establishment of the research world, the very establishment he had helped to build. After my father’s many futile attempts to secure funding for his new research, my brother, a successful entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, stepped in to fund a post for a graduate student at Ohio State, to help my father compile enough data to be able to begin his research.


Now retired from Ohio State, he has been doing a research stint for International Institute for Advanced Studies in Kyoto. Recently, he was updating me on his recent findings and presentation he had been preparing for a major conference. I asked him what he was interested in pursuing for the next six months at the institute. He listed off five issues he was concerned with, including how we need to begin a movement of a non-air conditioned world (just plant more trees, he implores), re-examining the basic premise of Kanji representation in Japanese computer software, and the overlap of the architectural structure to evolutionary studies to account for complexity and mystery of living beings. Apparently, he has not slowed down at all, even after his supposed “retirement.”


In Creativity in Science, Dean Keith Simonton notes: “Highly creative individuals are said to have a flat hierarchy of associations in comparison to the steep hierarchy of associations of those with low creativity.” (pg. 105, Creativity in Science, Cambridge Press) And creative scientists display a definitive “associate richness” of divergent thinking. My father’s mind works in this divergence, while noting prosodic details of reality, but often going beyond the normative associations. He has the ability to seek and detect the underlying assumptions, a quality that Thomas Kuhn mentions in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” an ability that is essential in major paradigm shifts in scientific thinking.


“Discovery commences,” Kuhn notes (pg 52, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition, University of Chicago Press) “with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated the paradigm-induced expectations that govern normal science.”


* * * *

During my recent collaboration with Susie Ibarra at Brecht Forum, I found myself thinking of my father, as a great influence of creativity, and the thoughts that may lead into great paradigm shifts in sciences and in the arts. “The awareness of anomaly” must exist in the process of creation whether in the arts or in the sciences. When I told my father that I wanted to pursue being an artist full time, he immediately replied “Oh, that’s what I wanted to be!” He even bought a painting of mine that was selected for an invitational exhibit in Hartford, Ct. in 1984 for $100, but I did not know about it until I visited his home later. He was my first patron.


In the collection of portraits in Tokyo University hallways, my father’s portrait is included. But we need to note that it was a self-portrait, painted by my father himself. Yes, when asked by the University to hire a portrait artist, he hired himself! Such was the vision of a self-assured man who I consider now to be an artist, as well as a scientist. Adventurous and even mischievous, my father now, going on eighty, continues to research in Japan. Refracting in the layers of his research and his life is heard a resonance of his creative impulses. In my art, too, his influence constantly flickers, like the needle of a spectrographic drum spinning around and around in front of my eyes.

*Automatic tracking of tongue movement in speech utterances by a computer


Makoto Fujimura, June, 2007

Susie Ibarra + Makoto Fujimura Collaboration May 5 at 9pm

Photos from our recent collaboration at IAM conference (www.iamny.org has more photos). Taken by Alissa Wilkinson



Susie and I are working toward her Carnegie Hall debut in October (I will prepare the accompanying visuals, and possibly even paint live there as well). This collaboration will be much more spontaneous and experimental in nature. Plywood Film has been documenting the process of our collaborations since last year, and they will be taking footage at The Brecht Forum as well.

Makoto Fujimura

------------


Saturday, May 5

9:00 pm

NEUES KABARETT @ THE BRECHT FORUM

Susie Ibarra Drum Sketches

World Premiere, Brecht Forum Commission

Solo Drumset, Kulintang & Percussion with Visual Art by Makoto Fujimura

"Billowy cerulean, incendiary scarlet, and icy silver leapt from the exquisite paintings [of Makoto Fujimura] lining the gallery walls. Perched among them, Susie Ibarra coaxed sound from two small cymbals, rubbing them together before rolling her snares-off drum, eliciting the full range of sound and texture afforded by this austere set. Her elegant, minimalist musical statement harmonized with the visuals that inspired it and exuded the focused artistry and controlled technique that have made her one of the most highly regarded and sought-after drummer-percussionists in creative music.

Since asserting herself as a leader and composer in the late ‘90s, Ibarra has fostered an interest in cross-media artistic collaboration, such as the 2005 Sara Tecchia Gallery exhibit of painter Makoto Fujimura described above.

Inspired by visuals and drawing from a broad range of musical influences--from classical and opera to punk, free jazz, and Asian gong music--she has forged a sound as both a percussionist and composer that is unique." - Sean Fitzell

Admission $10

451 West Street, New York, NY 10014 - (212) 242-4201 - email: brechtforum at brechtforum.org

Check out www.susieibarra.com, too

Refractions 23: The Game that is Designed to Break our Hearts

Last summer, the year that the Saint Louis Cardinals won the World Series, I found myself sitting in their brand new Busche stadium, at seats A1 and A2 with my son Ty. I could smell the freshly cut grass, impeccably manicured in front of us, mixed with the rubber scent of a sparkling red dugout and seats. The Cards were playing the Dodgers that day, an unforgivably hot day in Missouri, and the American flag they foisted up got tangled up in the yellow arms of the crane, flailing about in the arcing symbol of St. Louis, seen behind center field. We watched Albert Pujols sway back and forth in front of us, with his massive arm resting on a giant’s bat. David Eckstein bounced around the bases, and I whispered to Bill DeWitt, the owner of the Cards, who had invited us, “he is one of my favorites.” Eckstein would go on, a diminutive player never expected to be a major leaguer, hustling about to win the MVP in the World Series. We got to enjoy two games in two days, the first day in the comforts of the box seats. It ended on a good note: as they swept the Dodgers, manager Tony LaRussa looked across from the dugout at us and winked.

I had come to know Kathy DeWitt as we served on the National Council on the Arts together. An ever-friendly lady, when we took cabs from the hotel to the Nancy Hanks building on Pennsylvania Avenue where the National Endowment for the Arts offices are located, she seemed to always end up chatting with a taxi driver in her affectionate raspy voice,, her curious eyes darting about. “Baseball,” she would tell me as we discussed baseball, which was often, quoting the former commissioner Bert Giamatti, “is a game that’s designed to break your heart.” I had promised we would come and visit, and here we were, a last trip my son and I would take together before he became an NYU undergraduate.

Getting out of the taxi, as we headed up to our Council meetings, Kathy and I would often discuss the NEA’s longitudinal study on America’s reading habit, called Reading at Risk. What came out, as one can imagine, is a precipitous and alarming decline in reading at all levels. The Arts and Civic Engagement document resulted, giving hard data behind what we presumed to be true: readers are more engaged in all spheres of life. But what surprised us was that the data revealed a curious correlation between the act of reading and attendance of sports events. That fact intrigued both of us. Listed under #2 of the 10 key findings is “Literary readers and arts participants engage in sports more readily than non-readers and non-participants.” (http://www.nea.gov/research/ResearchReports_chrono.htm) lLiterary readers are nearly two times as likely to attend sports events.

Dana Gioia, the visionary Chair of the NEA, then proposed to us an initiative called the Big Read, “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.” Created was a network of cities and libraries to choose classics of American literature, like “The Great Gatsby,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Fahrenheit 451,” “My Antonia,” or “Their Eyes were Watching God.” We would ask the mayor of that city to call for the entire city to be its own book club, and the NEA would provide resources that include radio programs and comprehensive audio guides (Sandra Day O’Connor, Robert Redford and Robert Duvall would take the lead in narratives, http://www.nea.gov/national/bigread/BigReadSampler.wma). Extensive teacher’s guides would be provided as well. Now in over one hundred communities, with over a dozen classics, The Big Read initiative has succeeded beyond even the Council’s expectations. The results indicate that people are hungry for responsible stewardship of culture, and right attention to the arts in education.

***




I had told Kathy that Ty and I became Yankee fans because they had brought the parade into our street. When the Yankees won the World Series against Atlanta in the fall of 1996, that was shortly after we moved into New York, and Ty got to attend the victory parade on Broadway right outside of our home. You could say that was the day we were baptized into the myth, that somehow, year after year, the Yanks would win again. For Ty, this parade and many to ensue, would enable him to play hooky from school (with the blessing of Mayor Giuliani), and this marked his childhood in New York City.

Kathy and I agreed that baseball seemed, of all the sports, to be the most subtle and art-filled (soccer would be a close second). I remember certain moments, like the infamous “flip” of Derek Jeter, against Oakland, in the playoffs of 2001. Our family was displaced in Chelsea, staying at a friend’s apartment after 9/11. That may be why I remember that moment, feeling that nothing could be so triumphant after all that we had gone through on those dark weeks, and the Yanks were about to see their first round series slip away in Oakland; but then Jeter came out of nowhere, a shortstop intercepting an errant throw by a rookie outfielder five feet from the home base, flipping the ball backhand to the catcher Posada, turning the series around, and turning my heart, for a brief moment, to the normalcy of that thrill. There was certain magic there: How did Jeter know that that ball was going to be thrown errant? The runner (Jeremy Giambi, not the slugger Jason, but his brother), certainly did not, even though the play was taking place in front of him, for he did not even slide into home base. He was, just with the rest of us, astonished that a shortstop would even be in that position to make that play. But Jeter did, and Posada simply had to catch the ball and tag out flat footed Giambi, and the Yanks came back to win the series. Baseball, it seemed, like in Malamud’s “The Natural,” filled my mind with the possibility of mystique, and as beautiful as art, like the stadium lights being turned on.


In reading great literature, the reader, too, can expect a “flip” in even a greater potency for change. Eudora Welty, in writing about another great southern master Katherine Mansfield, notes that at the end of one of her stories: “There is no collision. Rather, the forces meeting in the public gardens have, at the story’s end, passed through each other and come out at the other side; there has been not a collision, but a change – something more significant.” (Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story) Jeter’s instinct created no collision, but a simple re-direction of a baseball: an author can do the same, but words have power to re-direct powers and “come out at the other side.” Art and literature can capture the transformation of a character, depict unexpected outcomes, thereby moving us toward a new trajectory. If Jeter’s flip caused a baseball series to turn, an author’s words, a maestro’s baton or a painter’s brush can cause our lives to turn to a complete new direction. Thus artists have the power to re-direct, but to what end?



Jeter’s heroics did not end victorious in the World Series that year. In fact, the Yanks never won again after 2000. We haplessly watched the ball bounce over Jeter’s head in Arizona, as the Yanks lost the World Series in game seven, bottom of the ninth; we could echo Kathy’s words that it is indeed a game designed to break our hearts, especially in our post-9/11 depression. Literature, too, sinks deeper into the heart of the darkness, leading us to seek out with Gatsby, the “green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.”

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter – tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning ---
So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby




***

“No batting practice today,” the attendant told us as he checked our field passes, “too hot”. We hovered near the home plate, looking at the expanse of Bermuda grass, when we noticed Bill coming out of the dugout. “Sorry about that…the players decided to bat inside…come on, let’s go in, too.” Ty’s face flushed as we entered the blast of cool air, being blown out to the dugout with force defiant to the sun; he could not believe he was entering the inner sanctum of the baseball world, his sandals flapping behind me to echo inside the corridors.


Inside the sparkling clubhouse, we chatted with So Taguchi, their sole Japanese player. “It’s Brad Penny today,” he told me in polite Japanese as he stretched, “so I have a day off.” As a specialist that gets to hit only with left-handed pitchers, he would welcome a day off, and a conversation in his native tongue. Bill rushed off and disappeared for a moment, and returned with two balls, with a logo celebrating the new stadium, and a pen; “here…I figured you guys would want these signed.” Then, a visit to greet Pujols, and the young catcher Yadier Molina, would follow, and also an introduction to an friendly Jim Edmonds. “Hi, I’m Jim Edmonds!” he engulfed my hand with his, as if we did not recognize one of the best outfielders in the game today. Then we peeked in at the manager’s office, and chatted with Tony LaRussa about my painting at the St. Louis Art Museum. “My wife loves to go there,” he said, “next time, I have to stop by the Japanese section, then.”

Bill gave us a full tour of the stadium, taking us to each area of a huge entertainment complex. What astonished us, and Ty would comment on this repeatedly later, was the fact that Bill had to carry his own ID and had show it to get into each area. Many of the workers did not recognize him; but, of course, once they saw the identification, they hurried to make sure that their boss was well attended to. The first day, when we exited the box seats after we watched the game, we actually walked down with the fans, exiting down the ramps. No one recognized us.

“Steinbrenner would never do that.” Ty commented. “The Boss would have a helicopter landing on the top, and a secret entrance.”

***


So it was, for perhaps a day, we had become bona-fide fans of the Cards. So Taguchi even got to bat that day, dashing to right field as Brad Penny exited. Refracting in our conversations as Ty and I headed home were a wise owner and his creative wife whose zest and passion filled the box seats in St. Louis, as well as taxi rides in Washington D.C. As Council members, Kathy (her term was up this year) and I (a year left) do often get to sit in the front of the arts scene, observing and learning about the arts, and applauding the remarkable turnaround of the NEA. I am privileged to know other passionate advocates for the arts, and be invited into their journeys. But what would remain deeply etched in our hearts from our St. Louis experience may not be the clubhouse encounters, or balls signed by a remarkable group of players, but the opportunity to witness a humble owner who had to carry his ID in his own stadium. Rather than looking for that ultimate “green light” with Gatsby, and seek after an elusive crown, perhaps we should emulate an owner whose goal is to see the fans have a good time, and join them as they exit the stadium. Perhaps that is a parable of the responsible stewardship of culture that allows each gift to be most fruitful. We would never sit in A1 and A2 ever again, I am sure, especially in New York, but after those hot days in St. Louis, we decided to believe that a good team and a good owner could actually be victorious, and not break our hearts.

Makoto Fujimura
www.makotofujimura.com

Being a Child of the Creative Age

Being a Child of the Creative Age
Makoto Fujimura, International Arts Movement's Redemptive Culture Conference, 2007, at TriBeCa Performance Center, Ground Zero.




Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
He is called by thy name,
For he calls himself a Lamb.

Songs of Innocence, The Lamb, William Blake


Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame they fearful symmetry?

Songs of Experience, The Tyger, William Blake



1. Inviting Monsters into our Hearts

A child uses all of her senses to discover the world. She picks up and finds fascination with a dandelion, feels the bumpy bark of a tree, tastes the baseball, smells the fallen leaf.

If you asked a room full of kindergarteners “Raise your hand if you are an artist!” Almost every child would raise his hand. But if you ask a room full of adults, almost every adult would not. (At a conference full of artists like this, you might say we are not just a gathering of artists, but a gathering of children!)

And if you are an artist, you know you are seen as out of the main stream, as avant -garde, but you also have been treated like a misfit or patronized like a child. You struggle to find meaning and significance in that gap between the two seemingly irreconcilable worlds. “Grow up and do something useful for society!” The world seems to place in opposition pitting the Innocence against the reality of the Experience. We are caught between being able to have that curiosity, inquisitiveness and emboldened sense of discovery of a child and the reality of the “adult world”, a reality that forces us to realize that we all indeed live in fear, in a ground zero of some kind or another. In our conversation to create a world that ought to be, we must start at that zero point of devastation.

In a recent Fresh Air broadcast of Guillermo Del Toro, Terry Gross interviews the writer/director of Pan’s Labythinth (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7000935). A remarkable film. Not what you would call a family film, but as a kind of Narnia for adults, it delves deeply into the mystery of redemption within the cruel setting of the Spanish civil war. Terry Gross interviewed Del Toro about his upbringing, in which his strict Catholic grandmother tried to exorcize him twice because he was drawing monsters. He was forbidden to imagine a fantasy world. That was his “ground zero.” So he grew up having to bifurcate his moral sense of duty to his family, and his growing imagination. He was lead to believe that he could not have both imagination and religion, that the two worlds could not be reconciled: so he chose to journey on the path of imagination, leaving religion behind him.

Some of us identify with Del Toro, thoroughly. We feel that the church has tried to “exorcise” us of our imagination. Del Toro states “I invited Jesus into my heart as a young child…but then I invited monsters into my heart.”

International Arts Movement exists for this type of wrestling of faith, culture and humanity. It starts with the admission that living and creating in ground zero means you live with both Jesus and monsters.

Wrestling in this way, we give ourselves permission to ask deeper questions. What if the monsters do take over? That would be a concern of parents in this room for their children. That may be our current cultural condition of fear. But, in reality, I think the situation is reversed: monsters have already taken over in reality, and the only hope we have is to imaginatively work backwards. We are to take charge of the situation, and we mediate both the sinister and the good. Just like in Pan’s Labyrinth, we need to know we have a greater inheritance waiting for us.

Some have called the 21st Century the “Creative Age.” Phil Hanes, philanthropist and arts advocate, at a recent National Council on the Arts meeting, began a discussion on how we need to prepare ourselves as a nation to address this shift. Richard Florida, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Pink and others have noted similar shifts in culture: The Information Age is behind us, and yet we, in America, are educating our children to thrive in that past. The skills and knowledge for Information Age are now outsourced, but we are ill equipped to lead in the age of imagination, the age of synthesis. While a hard term to define, The Creative Age will certainly mean one thing: we would have to reconcile living with both Jesus and monsters in our imaginative territories. We have to reconsider the artists’ role in society, in our education of our children: and we need to redefine how we see ourselves, all of us, as creative human beings who need art in our lives so that we can preserve a child’s innocence in the midst of horror and unspeakable evil, and help them to prosper and thrive in the creative age.

In St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he exhorts us:


“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. 19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.”



Thus, if the whole creation longs for the revealing of God’s children, we see that creativity, too, longs for some reality. Creativity longs for our “fittingness” in God’s plan of redemption. But this “frustration” causes setbacks, and birth pangs.

In Eden, Adam the poet names animals, and then discovers his need for Eve. Before the Fall, Adam’s creativity revealed his inner lack. After the Fall, then, the whole creation longs for a redeemed humanity to appear, not to return us to the Edenic state, but to move us into a better longing, for the New Creation. Our longing is not just to be restored to the fullness of our being, our longing is for the glorious freedom of the children of God and for liberation of our creativity and Creation. Our longing is for nothing less than a coronation/wedding celebration. The glorious freedom is in anticipating what that day will reveal in us and in our creativity.



2. From Being an Orphan to a Bride:



In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic tale, I see a (romantic) parable for us for the Creative Age. Now, I have known about Jane Eyre for a long time now, as this book had a transformative effect on Judy, my wife, when she encountered it at the age of 13. I heard from her how God filled her heart via the voice of Helen, a little girl (probably about 13) who befriends Jane in the school for orphans. Helen sows seeds of belief into then very bitter Jane. Jane had a right to be bitter, rejected by her cruel aunt who adopted her, and bullied by the new siblings; she was not only cast as an orphan, and falsely accused in the process, and some often used Biblical reasons for doing so. But Helen spoke of forgiveness and her confidence in God, even though she was treated just as unfairly, and even as she lay dying of typhoid fever, caused by less than adequate facilities at the school.



Recently, I watched with my wife the Masterpiece Theatre production of Jane Eyre, which, by the way, sadly, but typically, took out Helen’s exhortation to Jane (although I did like the casting of Ruth Wilson as Jane, and Toby Stephens as Mr. Rochester). I realized, though, how this powerful story, written before the Enlightenment schism, anticipates the modern dilemma and opens new vistas. Jane Eyre is a story of an orphan who finds herself becoming a bride of inheritance, even a double inheritance. She perseveres betrayal, neglect, and abuse and breaks through class barriers. It is a parable of liberation of humanity from “our bondage to decay” to that “glorious freedom.” She is also an artist, learning to draw at the school where she was exiled as an orphan. Written in first person narrative, the depiction of her world is done via a first-rate artist’s eye. In short, if you have not read Jane Eyre, take my advice: “Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay.” Actually, I am quoting Charlotte Bronte here, speaking well of her Yorkshire native William Wilberforce.

“Beg, borrow, or steal it without delay;” she wrote, “and read the Memoir of Wilberforce,--that short record of a brief uneventful life; I shall never forget it; it is beautiful, not on account of the language in which it is written, not on account of the incidents it details, but because of the simple narrative it gives of a young talented sincere Christian."
http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/egaskell/bl-egaskell-cbronte-8.htm



Charlotte Bronte, consciously or unconsciously, fuses this Wilberforcian idealism into her creativity. In her novel, she makes art with the belief of liberation for all people. This is precisely why we need to be speaking about her at this conference. She incarnates our common call to “create the world that ought to be,” and speaks through Jane Eyre’s voice.


It humbles me to think that I have been married to Judy for over 20 years now, and have never read the most influential book in her life. When I told her this, she, with her typical gentleness, countered by saying “That’s why it’s so worthwhile to stay together. It may take 20 years to start to read each other’s books…we’re just getting to the good part!”

Jane Eyre is equally as patient, a plain governess who determines her path of forgiveness, choosing to love her enigmatic, brooding employer Mr. Rochester, despite his inevitable downfall. There’s quite a drama in this rich landowner conspiring to hide his past, and the disastrous path that he paves for himself. But somehow, throughout, he acknowledges Jane, an orphaned woman without glamour, a woman of intellectual and creative thirst, as his equal.

But because of Rochester’s failures, she is exiled and again abandoned, to be one without family or friends. If you know the story, she then gains the favor of a missionary suitor, St. John Rivers, who takes her in when she is at his door, in near starvation. He then discovers her to be a determined force. St. John Rivers wants to marry her to take her to India, to be a missionary although neither loves the other. Jane would tell Rochester later, her true love, trying to allay his jealousy: “He (Rivers) is good and great…but as cold as iceberg.”

I find it curious that Charlotte Bronte sensed in the early 19th century that just like St. John Rivers, the church will manifest the effects of the enlightenment: theology veering towards depicting the gospel intellectually and only as a set of facts or information, but not communicate with the heart. The church is “good and great… but as cold as iceberg.” Bronte, throughout the novel, ties in Jane’s spiritual state with her creative, artistic state. Jane is an artist, cast away by society and circumstances from her true love. And the missionary can only present a sound, rational argument why she should join him, and this without love.

This disconnect is, also exemplified in works of van Gogh, where the church is still present in the Starry Night, holding the image together visually. But the Spirit has left the church, swirling into Nature. Her lover Rochester is the emblem of that Nature, swirling in her mind as her salvation. But Rochester, once a wanton world traveler, now is haunted by dark secrets. Though initially, Nature taps into her hunger, Nature herself fails ultimately, as Rochester fails her. But even in a severe, literal hunger that Jane experiences, Bronte also paints a landscape of hope.


I was recently going through the Biblical book of Joel, which I find to be a stark reminder of the catastrophes all around us, and those to come. I had put a post-it note on Joel 2 that I had forgotten about. I wrote: “The world is 90% catastrophe, but 100% grace (not 10%). “

Theologically, the whole world, after our expulsion from Eden, is ground zero. But art can refill the world with the aroma of grace.



There’s grace at work deeply imbedded in the novel, Jane ultimately using words reminiscent of Helen to cry out to God in her wilderness. She is exiled from both the world and her lover. Meanwhile, Mr. Rochester has literally been blinded from tragic consequences, though he finally begins to “see” his real wretched state. Jane would chose to return to him. “It is time some one undertook to re-humanize you,” and she begins to comb his tangled hair.

Re-humanize: what a wonderful word. Rochester needs to be re-humanized. Jane needs to inhabit that enigmatic, but now repentant heart. Just like Mr. Rochester, we need to be re-humanized. This culture needs to be re-humanized. Culture has been a tangled “shaggy black mane” like Rochester’s, that Jane has to comb out, blind to it’s own misery. Modernism has resulted in a tangled mess, or perhaps a neatly categorized supermarket of ideas, as in this photo (http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/07/22/28891.html) re-presented in Andreas Gursky’s “99 Cent”.

As a result of the enlightenment’s tendency to seek specialization, and minute categorization, “ it knows more about the little things and less about the big things. It knows more about every thing and less about Everything.” (Peter Kreeft, pg 108, Seel). Without the macro perspective, the grand narrative, our tangles get smaller and tighter, and as a result our creative expression has had to focus on the details, like here in Yayoi Kusama’s painting (http://www.exporevue.com/magazine/fr/kusama.html).


Technological advancements, certainly, lead to better living conditions and longer lives, and we should be thankful for that. But it also means the expansion of not just supermarkets, but of ground zeros. We find ourselves there alienated and smaller and smaller, and our injuries greater still. Just like Rochester’s limb, at the end of Jane Eyre, culture has been disfigured by the horrid fires of Hiroshima, and the poisons of the Holocaust, the twin emblems of the 20th century. These ghosts still haunt our post-modern, and now post-human realities (here captured as Willem de Kooning’s “Woman I” http://www.moma.org/ecards/write_ecard.php?object_id=79810).



Artists, the “the canary of the cultural mine” (Marshall McLuhan), know and sense this reality of being disfigured and cut off, orphaned by society. They feel that beauty, and pleasure, are both tainted and cannot be trusted. They embrace everything “anti” but rarely have much to say about what they are actually for. I was recently at the Veritas Forum at Columbia University where I was asked to debate feminist/activist artist Coco Fusco. At the end of the night, I felt very saddened by the fact that our dialogue seemed to be stuck on the NEA related culture wars of 15 years past. But the church, seen as the main source of cultural hegemony and oppression, has not provided her an alternative vision. The church has not romanced artists. As a result, the artists are left alone to defend themselves in culture, and do not have many Helens to speak God’s hope into their hearts.

Like Jane Eyre, we are to face a ruined heart and a ruined condition, our ground zeros. Mr. Rochester is disfigured, in misery. Astonishingly though, she tells Mr. Rochester as she combs his hair: “You are no ruin, sir – no lightning-struck tree: you are green and vigorous.” She, by saying this, forgives. She not only gives a nod to Eden here, but foreshadows the New Creation to come. She is able to do this because, somehow, she keeps her innocence and purity intact, while recognizing fully the fallen reality. It was indeed during the deceptiveness of her lover that caused the actual lightning to strike on the tree she refers to. It was God’s judgment. She sees now with a refined purity of having gone through the fire of betrayal, and having come through without dross. She stands faithful.


In his book, “Breaking Ground,” Daniel Libeskind, the architect chosen for Ground Zero master design, also stood in the pit of Ground Zero, and facing, and laying his hand on the slurry wall, and heard an Augustinian echo, “Take it and read it…take it and read it.” “Take it and read” the slurry wall of your ground zero. “Take it and read” the faces of those who lost their lives there. He called his Berlin office and told his staff to scrap everything they had done up to that point: “The slurry wall is an engineering marvel, a metaphoric and literal stay against chaos and destruction. In refusing to fall, it seemed to attest, perhaps as eloquently as the Constitution, to the unshakable foundations of democracy and the value of human life and liberty.” (pg. 43, Breaking Ground)

Artists, we are called to create in our ground zeroes, too. We need to be a voice of faith there. Yes, we have been alienated and orphaned. It is time to regard the age at hand, and take individual steps to move beyond the post-modern fog into the Creative Age. It is not time to remain bitter, but it is time to bring the words of Helen into our bitter culture. Helen embraced, even in her illness, the deeper voice of her God for her friend, Jane Eyre. You, along with other entrepreneurs of the age, are asked to hold your gaze true to your original call. Though the conditions are bleak, it is still our call to listen to the voices speaking through our slurry walls, our limitations and our boundaries. The Creative Age exists because of the opportunity presented by the crisis of our age. We face a precipice of despair and fear, a culture at a loss to offer what it means to be a human being. This culture herself is orphaned, and cannot see beyond her misery. We at IAM can see our “slurry wall” in front of us, a wall that somehow withstood the onslaught of ideological attacks that claim bondage to our souls. Within, there are millions of faces, victims of dehumanization, the holocaust, and the fragmentation of our time. It is time to read those faces, and build on faith. There’s no other choice; To love is to remain human. We need to romance the culture in this present crisis. Woo her to love, and not fear. To do that is to be a true artist of the Creative Age.


Artists have the empathetic capacity to embrace humanity even in the most destitute of times. But to do so, we have to see, like Jane, in a disfigured man a “green and vigorous” reality. She did not create reality, but she saw the greater reality. It is imagination guided by faith that taps into the New Earth and New Heaven. We need to note that she saw her own heart as disfigured, too, and she had to go through the fire of sanctification herself to know and recognize another cry, the cry of Mr. Rochester, out of that fire. Charlotte Bronte created a parable that echoes Romans 8. “Our sufferings are not worth the future glory…” We are destitute and orphaned, yet Christ sees a royal wedding and a coronation to come.



Artists need to remember that the reality of faith unlocks creative vision. Christ has been disfigured and orphaned for us. The great Artist, the Author of Life, who the prophet Isaiah speaks of as “crushed for our inequities” (Isaiah 53:5), released our souls from our own “bondage to decay.” The Spirit gives birth to creativity. God’s love flows into our hearts, via our creativity, to the world. In Christ you are part of the ekklessia, the new kind of community, that Jesus died for. You are not only invited to a wedding; You are the bride of Christ. Even if your stand alone, in you ground zero, you can stand like Jane Eyre, with a wedding dress.




3. The Bible begins with Creation, and ends in a wedding.



What does a wedding require for a Bride? We are to anticipate that day with all of our resources. We are always thinking of the Bridegroom. A wedding has all the genres of the arts represented; Dance, spoken words, art, culinary expertise, fashion and music. Children of the Creative Age are really wedding planners. We are to present the best, to spend the rest of our time preparing for that reality. This anticipation will usher a new age, and a new purpose. But it will cost, and it will require sacrifice. Do not listen to anyone who tickles you with a notion that we are a generation of Indigo children, and evolving into a new, and higher consciousness. No, instead, we are the children of God in a disfigured age. Our call is to love in that condition. Our call is to see through the disfigurement and tragedy.

Mr. Rochester cannot fully comprehend how Jane would be as “happy as I can be on earth,” to be with him. “Because you delight in sacrifice?” he asks.

“Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value – to press my lips to what I love – to repose on what I trust; is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.” She, apparently, loves him more despite his infirmities.

This is the heart of the New Creation. This parable gives us artists a new paradigm to consider. How do we love a disfigured world? How do we give sacrifice, without being conscious of it?

This sacrifice, that is no sacrifice to Jane, is precisely what we need now for true, lasting beauty, to re-humanize. Beauty is not cosmetic. Botox will not result in happiness. Jane Eyre is telling us we need to love even more our wrinkled faces. It is through this path that we will see creativity that not only restores but also redeems. We need, as the children of the Creative Age, not only to create in love, but to create what love means in this culture. By doing so our art will begin to re-humanize the world.

4. Enchantment of Jesus

So how do you indeed live with monsters and Jesus in your heart at the same time? How do we remain innocent and pure in the age of wickedness? We must live with groaning and expectation of Romans 8 at the same time. After all, our world is broken but also enchanted, in the sense of the medieval word for gospel – “Good Spell.” We have been cast a good spell by the words and breath of Jesus. The arts need to cast good spells into the world that is dying and cynical. Do not “throw out the baby with the bath water”: Jesus, the babe, is the source of life and art that no religious water can tarnish. So it is no surprise that all the tales of old that we were enchanted by as children, like Beauty and the Beast, seem to fit into our journeys. It is no surprise at all, that as we venture forward, we seem to give a backward glance, as in to this marvelous image of coronation by Fra Angelico (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/Gowing/Fra-Angelico.jpg).

In a world that ought to be, we will have monsters dancing in our cosmic wedding. Our Experience, even our greatest of fears, will be rewoven into the texture of God’s design for the Innocent. You are not an orphan, but a prince and a princess of God. We are to receive more than a double inheritance. We need to begin to live like a bride expecting a great, cosmic wedding. We need to begin to act like Jane Eyre, the first child of the Creative Age.

---------------

This keynote was delivered at a recent International Arts Movement conference. Other keynotes by Daniel Libeskind, Jeremy Begbie and others will be made available soon at www.iamny.org

*Image above: Still taken from Distintegration Loop by William Basinski (www.mmlxii.com/)

Here's a wonderful image from a sketchbook of John Hendrix (www.johnhendrix.com). He sketched this image as I spoke.

Refractions Volume 22:Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury

Operation Homecoming: Epistles of Injury
Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 22




I recently found myself at New York’s Symphony Space, listening to the voices of soldiers. As a National Council on the Arts member, I was representing the National Endowment for the Arts for the release of “Operation Homecoming” (Random House, edited by Andrew Carroll). The N.E.A. gave returning soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq an opportunity to write down their war time experiences in workshops lead by Pulitzer winning Vietnam era writers. With actors highlighting the evening, (Matthew Modine, Joan Allen, and, most memorably, Stephen Lang) and sitting next to one of the soldier/writers, I had a strange and uncomfortable revelation: a revelation that surely had been bubbling up in me in recent years -- How much of the world’s art and literature is linked to wartime experiences?

The writings of soldiers, or writing about wars in general, has indeed defined our literature and the arts, from Homer to Dante to Hemingway. If you remove works of art that do not in some way relate to, or respond to wars, our cultural landscape would be full of holes (think of Picasso’s “Guernica”). Perhaps that's what Jesus meant, when he warned us “such things (wars) must happen.” He did not validate wars by saying this, but he wanted to make sure we understood the inevitability of them: that our inner malaise will surely be translated into greater conflicts. But to have the Prince of Peace tell us that wars must happen is more than troubling. Must we be haunted by wars as part of God’s plan of redemption? Must art exist as primarily funerary?

In modern times, Rothko, Mondrian and other 20th Century masters wove the horrors of the atomic age into their work, as if to visit Hiroshima over and over again. Rothko gave that post-Atomic glow an ethereal transcendence even as Mondrian stubbornly, and valiantly, insisted on the order of grids against the approaching chaos. In both cases, they were exiled to New York, because of the dark specters of evil marching into their homelands. Surrealism (as the recent MOMA/National Gallery exhibit showed) screamed against the insanity of fear birthed in the trenches of WW1. These artists are often remembered for their anti-patriotic rants, or at best being ambivalent observers, and most definitely being anti-establishment. It is ironic that they are now seen as the establishment in the institutions of museums and academia. But the best of arts still can rise above the institutions and establishment that gave permission for them, or the conflicts that they escaped. The arts speak into a void, creating a moment of clarity, a pause in the frenzy.

Then there are the J.R.R. Tolkiens and C.S. Lewis of the world, whose front line experiences gave birth to the most resonant, faith-filled literature of our last century. Tolkien imagined through the dark trenches, surrounded by dying friends, and chose to speak directly against his own fear by naming one by one characters and places of imagined reality that would later form the basis for The Lord of the Rings. Lewis too, injured in the war, later recounts that his journey from atheism to faith was paved by his sense of loss, inconsolable violation (“the problem of pain”, he called it) that he felt in his bones. Having gone through such horrors is no guarantee of a recovery of faith, but it does suggest that faith and culture are linked to the crisis that surrounds us.

T.S. Eliot would have found this dialogue not so unfamiliar. His war-time journey to write the “Waste Land” could also describe our survey of Darfur and Afghanistan. In the “Four Quartets,” he describes “The unimaginable Zero Summer” of the atomic devastation but ends hopefully in the “still point of the turning world”, producing a rare articulation of the heart’s navigation from fear to love. But today, in the shadows of our current chaos in Iraq, and bullet holes in an Amish school still fresh in our minds, such sentiment can come across as too optimistic and even unkind.

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I read recently that most of early Christian art (at least the examples that have survived) were funerary in nature. Apparently, even in the world of faith, art is obsessed with death. Surely, it would be the darkest of confessions for any artist working today to admit that his/her visions are driven by the haunts of war and death, and, like Dante, that imaginative reality is filled with a vision of purgatorio. On the contrary, our recent contemporary art scene is rushing to escapism, lacking in engagement with the present darkness, and even without the disciplined skill to describe the horror. So such a confessional would seem welcome in today’s climate of superficiality. Pausing to listen to the writings of soldiers in “Operation Homecoming,” though, I have begun to see a glimpse of a new kind of realism.

These men and women chose to write staring into the abyss: to record both their fears and hopes, in this time of certain chaos, grieve over lost lives and opportunities; but they also speak well of their pets and ordinary sun-lit days. Theirs is a stark realism, observing the life surrounding the turmoil, wrestling against the fading memories of loved ones, comrades, and the stenches of war. So many of Operation Homecoming pages are filled with emails, which like radio dispatches, they will remain deeply etched in our minds as immediately potent. These are voices that are directed toward our private spheres, but now allowed to be make public: They deserve our hushed attention for their honest grappling with inner turmoil. Their accounts are true “Survivor” tales but without any shred of sensationalism. Told sometimes gingerly, sometimes in expletives, the soldiers seem to dwell, after a while, in my consciousness as my imaginary neighbors, people whom I might encounter in my street, or kick a soccer ball around with. I am surprised at how much humor fills these pages, not the sanitized kind, but the raw, grimy kind that belongs in beer halls and late night comedy shows. Refreshingly free of showmanship, in our glitz-filled cultural universe, their writings serve more than to recount the war: they speak into our lives with authenticity, and remind us somehow that, despite it all, humanity can still reign in a cruel kaleidoscope of fear called war.

There are poignant lessons, of a soldier writing home as he flew over Iraq, a geography lesson that span some 3000 years. “Have you heard of Mesopotamia?” writes Lieutenant Colonel Cohoes to his sons, “ Two great rivers of the word, the Tigris and the Euphrates, flow together here then empty into the Persian Gulf….King Nebuchadnezzar (I can’t say it either) build the hanging Gardens of Babylon about 2,600 years ago.” Of course, in the reading that took place at Symphony Hall, Matthew Modine could not pronounce “Nebuchadnezzar,” either.

There’s an account of a soldier of Korean descent who recounts his adoptive American father and grandfather fighting in their wars. Echoed throughout the book is generational lineage to wars, that it is not an isolated experience to one generation. Then there is Christy De’on Miller, in an essay she called “Timeless,” a single mom/soldier mourning over the loss of her only son, Aaron:

At times I believe I can learn to live a life without my son. After all, I must. I am certain there are other mothers who have lost their boys – car accidents, war, illness – who can shop for dinner at the local grocer’s without the macaroni-and-cheese boxes suddenly causing them grief. Moms who can roll sausage balls without tears; perhaps the festive food would even cause a smile. But the memory of him is planted in everything around me. Inside of me. So much is gone. Him, or course. But so much of him has been lost, is fading, breaking down. His blanket, his watch, his uniform…

The writings amplify the details of life, not just theirs, but ours. They let us into the writers’ worlds, to share in their grief, their loss, and their confusion.


Here was another revelation, then, after listening to the account after account of Afghan and Iraqi soldiers and their families that I, too, lived in a war zone. A different, milder version for sure, sanitized and packaged better. Photos of the bright new facades of “you can have it all” condominiums, to be completed in 2010, tell us that we are all better in downtown Manhattan. Their airbrushed architectural renderings are what a friend calls “architectural porn”. But nevertheless I live and raise my family in a place called Ground Zero, and reading the book opened my eyes to see the invisible collateral of a war far away shadowing us everywhere. Yes, even if there is no visible war around, there are less visible battles going on everywhere.

There are visible scars in culture though. The battle is about the imaginative territories of hope against fears, the sacrifice of love against a misplaced devotion, the anger of revenge against forgiveness. It is a battle that rages in the minds of youth as they negotiate the labyrinth of a techno frenzied universe, sharing a communion of broken promises. When the manifestation of such collateral damage ambushes us, like in the pastoral Amish landscapes recently, or in Littleton, Colorado in 1998, in a high school named after a delicate wild flower, we are astonished.

John Hewett, the development director of the N.E.A., and who also happens to be an ordained minister, told me a poignant story recently. When the evil struck the sleepy Amish community near Lancaster, when a gunman/milkman systematically shot girls one by one, there was a hidden story, in what he called “A Miracle Nobody Noticed.” He wrote:

I’m convinced most of us get through most days without thinking about God much. I was having one of those days a few weeks ago, until I heard about Marian and Barbie Fisher, two of the ten girls in the West Nickel Mines Amish School. Marian, the oldest, was 13. Her sister Barbie, who lived, is 11. When it became obvious what was about to happen that ghastly morning, Marian turned to the killer and said, “Shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” “Shoot me next,” Barbie said. “Shoot me next.”

Two children willing to lay down their lives for their friends. Wonder where they got an idea like that? That’s another miracle nobody noticed



Perhaps a new renaissance will be birthed out of the “mouths of babes” like these: “shoot me and leave the other ones loose.” Or it may flow out of a grieving mother/soldier like De’on grieving for Aaron, a Marine who lost his life protecting his wounded comrades. Perhaps we will see that whether we are soldiers, or housewives or Pulitzer Prize winning writers (or all of the above), we need to realize that we are not home, at least not yet. That’s the only faith that can compel us to say: “shoot me.” The girl did not complain that “this is unfair,” or argue, “this is unjust:” she just said “shoot me.”


Such fragile, but heroic, voices in the face of violence can easily be ignored, or simply not audible with our doomed ears. It certainly did nothing to stop a milkman from unloading his anger by pulling the trigger. Perhaps such otherworldly gestures look as pathetic, or beautiful, as the string quartet that played on as the Titanic sank. But I submit to you that here, in a miracle nobody noticed, is a bugle call also directed towards us artists. It begins in a belief that our lives are to be lived for others. Arts should let “the other ones loose” from the bondage of decay, apathy and loss. To the extent we are able to do that, to that degree we will see a new language of expression that is not self-centered, but self-giving and generous. Yes, I believe that art can, and ought to, exist apart from wars. But in only place where this has been the case in the history of the world, a place called Eden where a poet named Adam dwelled, is today hidden inaccessibly beneath, or above, the rubble of Iraq.

Operation Homecoming gives us authentic voices that seek be a responsible steward of their experiences. Why would that simple gesture seem so foreign and refreshing? Has our culture become so cynical that we no longer have the capacity to listen without having a wry, critical distance? Or has the media become so profit driven and sensationalistic that they no longer can mediate information responsibly? Because the soldiers have faced certain death, and stood over the rubble that might have crushed them, but having lived, they owned the experience, and chose to tell the tale artfully and carefully. If we all live in a war zone of some kind, should we not do the same? Words alone can impregnate promise or despair in such a precipice: the arts can inspire or despise humanity.

In Jesus’ realism of “these things must happen,” he was also reminding us that our sacrifice, either for just or unjust reasons, would not be the last word. Our efforts, however noble, will not end the cause of injustice. But we are all given a call for self-sacrifice nevertheless. None are exempt, not even a pacifist thirteen-year-old secluded as far away from Iraq as humanly possible. And Jesus knows, first hand, what it means to die an unjust death without picking up a stone, or a spear. Instead, he continues to breath life into us in our funerary songs. By listening to these soldiers/poets, though, we may even begin to feel that life-breath, a hint of a culture of self-giving. Despite the anguish, De’on writes with the same quiet surrender of the Amish sisters :

My faith doesn’t equal that of Job’s. I question. Why has God cut the fruit from my vine? Taken the only child that remained? Left me with no hope for a grandchild? I‘m certain there can be no more. No more children.

And yet I have no particular animosity for my son’s killer. He’s a nameless and faceless combatant to me. Should I ever have the opportunity to meet him, I hope that I’d forgive him. To me, the buck stops with the Father. His power stings at times. But He’s listened to me; perhaps He’s even cried with me. And yes, I do know what I’m talking about here. It’s a belief, man. Aaron’s words. You either believe in God or you don’t. Yes, I’d forgive. I do forgive. There is absolutely nothing I’d do to keep myself from spending eternity with God and Aaron.

Our path back to Eden is blocked, but there is a way in to the feast of the selfless. Only in these words of forgiveness, utterly stripped down to the core of faith, can echo the Timeless, or the Time-ful, promise of an Easter morning. That is our true Homecoming. Even if the condition is unbearably chaotic, or simply cruel, these authentic voices refracts in our fear dominated cultural landscape, mediating how we can choose to face a new day, and breathing certain hope into our stricken hearts.

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1/13/07 post script: Go and see "Pan's Labyrinth" (though not for children). The movie deals with themes of war and imagination, with echos of eternal longing. A must see.

Yoko Ono and Makoto Fujimura

During my recent exhibit for The City of London Festival (my installation art is documented below), I had a great pleasure of meeting Yoko Ono. We were the two visual artists selected for the festival's theme of Japan. She kindly folded an origami crane to celebrate our exhibits. Video can be seen at http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=7881168191579098779&hl=en

Makoto Fujimura

All Hallow's Exhibit

The All Hallow's Installation in London this summer consisted of three Mercy Seat that used my children’s arm measurements (Ty, 17, C.J., 15, and Lydia, 13) as their “portraits.” (see www.makotofujimura.com, under "essays" for more information on my Mercy Seat series). I also floated "Nagasaki Koi" video on top of the installation (thanks to Meryl Doney, The Hayward Gallery curator who selected me for the exhibit), and also had the video imbedded in the small boat covered with Japanese paper.

I will be using the Hiroshima/Nagasaki images again for my next exhibit in New York City, "Golden Fire" at Sara Tecchia Roma from Nov. 30th to Jan. 13th.

Refractions 21: Come and See: Leonardo da Vinci's Philip in The Last Supper

Makoto Fujimura
Refractions Volume 21
Come and See:
Leonardo da Vinci’s Philip in The Last Supper

Above: Leonardo da Vinci: "The Last Supper”: Philip sits fourth from the right. The top image simulates looking from below




“Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” Nathaniel asked. “Come and see,” said Philip. John 1:46

The glass door automatically shut behind us as the guide motioned us to enter the inner chamber. We waited, and as another door opened, the cool, dry air enveloped us; a contrast to the hot, July heat in Milan. The courtyard of St. Maria delle Grazie sparkled outside in the morning sun, and I wondered if Leonard da Vinci stood upon the same rocks that I saw here, 500 years later.

Because of the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, I had received several inquiries to see if I could comment on the book and the movie, and my mind seemed to wander back to the same problem: “I have never seen Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’ in person…how could I comment on something that I have not seen?” Yes, I own a magnified version of the photograph of the painting (see plate B), represented in a magnificent book by The University of Chicago (440 pages of delight). And I have pondered the image as I have thought much about Andy Warhol’s series by the same title. Yes, I had seen a reproduction of Leonardo’s ‘The Last Supper’.

But I never had stood under it. So I came to Milan, Italy, to stand-under a painting.

“If you want to ‘understand’ something,” said my friend Bruce Herman, “you have to be willing to ‘stand under’ it.” Bruce, an art professor, went on to cite C.S. Lewis’ essay “Experiment in Criticism” in which Lewis, a medieval literature scholar at Oxford University, writes the following:

We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

An Experiment in Criticism, pg. 18, 19 (Cambridge University Press)

In the essay Lewis makes a distinction between “using” art and “receiving” art. He argues quite persuasively that: “‘Using’ is inferior to ‘reception’ because art, if used rather than received, merely facilitates, brightens, relieves or palliates our life, and does not add to it.”

Why is it important to experience a work first hand?

If we base our conclusions on merely what an “expert” has said, or on our own limited assumptions, it merely remains hearsay. We never get to discover, and ultimately create, out of an authentic experience.

Here’s what I discovered standing under The Last Supper: the most important visual catalyst for the painting is not the effeminate John, or Judas, nor even Jesus Himself. In fact, the key figure in kick-starting the visual movement of the painting is Philip.

It is Philip’s outstretched, distressed body and his cinnabar robe that we see first in the painting’s visual theatre. The whole painting is first experienced via Philip’s body. Our eyes go first to him; afterward they traverse to Jesus, the center of the work. Jesus’ mouth is slightly opened (discovered to be so through recent restoration efforts) and his hands are making powerfully emotive gestures. Leonardo was capturing the moment of Jesus’ announcement: “I tell you the truth, one of you is going to betray me.” (Gospel of John 13:21)

Leonardo painted in a grand, dominating scale for a small space. Even standing in the far back of the refectory, it is difficult for the eye to decipher the whole painting all at once. He painted “The Last Supper” in such a way as to force the viewer to enter the painting, physically and emotionally, and to viscerally become part of the narrative.

Only when the viewer stands under the painting can it be seen for what was intended (see plate A). Leonardo had a specific visual message to those who stand under the painting. He had a visual sophistication to carry off what very few artists could even dream to do then and now: he painted the complex psychology of betrayal. It starts with Philip, and ends in a moneybag. Invited to walk into Leonardo’s funhouse of mirrors, we are all meant to be part of this narrative, forever refracting within our own dark journeys.

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As an artist, I naturally try to identify the source of light in a painting, because I know that artists often use light to reveal what they want the viewer to see. In this painting, it would be easy to assume that the light is coming from behind from the windows, through which we see a Renaissance landscape. But the source of light in this painting actually is the face of Jesus reflecting on all of the disciples – all but Judas, who is under-painted with black, denied a brightened countenance.

The source of light points to what anchors the painting: the presence of Jesus. This is emphasized by the use of perspective, a Renaissance invention used to create an illusion of three-dimensionality in a two-dimensional space. The windows and other architectural elements create lines that end up in a single point, called the “vanishing point.” In “The Last Supper”, the vanishing point ends on the forehead of Jesus, the centerpiece of the painting. But if the painting were an equilibrium centered on Jesus, it would not create the psychological tension we feel from it. But the tension is there, and this is because Philip breaks up the visual stasis.

In any reproduction one sees in a book or a photograph (plate B), Philip’s body gets flattened. However, for a trained artist/viewer, the visual response to the actual piece is to see Philip’s body contorted, surrounded by negative spaces. The angle compresses his body and accentuates the movement of his reaction. Leonardo’s genius not only used the vanishing point to anchor the painting, but also to create waves of motion that shock us into shedding visual conventions.

If you are an artist working on a large commission, you know that looking up at a painting distorts what you paint, so you account for that by exaggerating the vertical. In other words, you make the figure taller than it needs to be. What I noticed looking up at the painting is that Leonardo did not make Philip’s body taller, but kept his body twisted, compressed and angular. That is why in reproductions of “The Last Supper” Philip’s body does not stand out.

If Leonardo did not elongate the figure, why does Philip stand out when you stand under the painting?

It took me the whole fifteen minutes I was allowed in St. Maria delle Grazie to understand what Leonardo did. And then the whole painting began to open up to me. In a true visual code, Leonardo reveals both his genius and the true message of the painting.

Philip stands out because he visually breaks the horizontal plane. The top of Philip’s head aligns itself with the perspective lines parallel to the windows. The eye attends to his head, magnetically drawn to the perspective line that juts out from the horizontal line. This only happens if you are standing below the painting . But there is another figure that breaks the horizontal line which is accentuated by the head of Jesus, and that other figure is Judas. “The Last Supper” is to be read from Philip to Judas, through the body of Christ, creating several visual “v’s” and “w’s”.

In the New Testament of the scriptures, Philip is one of the Seven, the closest disciple of Christ. It’s possible that he knew Jesus and his family, and may have grown up with Jesus. Philip is also noted in scriptures for having the ability to point others to Christ. He convinces Nathaniel to “come and see” Christ in the early chapters of the Gospels, and in the book of Acts (the historical document of the early church) he continues to draw many to Jesus, including the Ethiopian eunuch who was found reading the prophesy of Isaiah in Gaza.

It is clear to me that of all four of the Gospels, the Gospel of John is the one Leonardo relied on the most. The Gospel of Matthew reads more like a legal case to clearly convict Judas of betrayal. Both the Gospels of Luke and of Mark seem to focus on Peter, his betrayal compared to Judas, and eventual restoration to become the founder of the early church. But the Gospel of John records in detail what Leonardo depicted, from John’s reclining figure to Judas’ darkness, from Thomas’ infamous skepticism to Philip’s surprise at what Jesus’ mouth had just uttered.

Leonardo was interested in one thing: the psychological depiction of a night of betrayal. John 14:8 records Philip asking a question which reverberates throughout the painting:

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; or at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves. I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14: 8, 12)

Philip asks for evidence, a question that must have also filled Leonardo’s mind. Philip’s comment is one of near frustration, an insider’s exasperation, and therefore even the nature of his request assumes a close, trusting relationship. Jesus responds to the basis of Philip’s question by saying, “Don’t you know me, Philip?” In doing so, Jesus makes one of the most remarkable promises ever made to his followers (more on this later.)

It makes sense, then, that when Jesus reveals that he is to be betrayed by a close friend, Philip leaps out of his chair in disbelief. A pronouncement of a betrayal shocks the trusted the most. To this innocence Leonardo gives the most weight, initiating a shock wave that reverberates throughout the painting, and the corridors of time.

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Betrayal has always defined our lives, and since ancient times artists have given ample attention to this common human experience, in forms like Greek tragedies and Shakespearian plays. But today, we live in the expectation of one betrayal after another, of relationships breaking up, or of another political or religious leader found in scandal. Tabloid accounts of celebrities’ comings and goings amuse us, as we simultaneously bemoan and are entertained by their depth of woes.

Our culture of betrayal goes way beyond individual failures: it is a culture that has lost the belief in the good, true and beautiful. Without the a priori conscience that believes in civilization’s own integrity – that wrong can be righted, and that creativity is a gift to society – no art, and no work of our hands, can be infused with a transcendent vision. The culture of betrayal denies the potential to hope, and is determined to quickly self-destruct.

Our galleries and contemporary museums are full of such vacuous images (not to mention movie theatres and bookstores). But blaming artists is not helpful: no, rather it is more accurate to say that artists are simply reacting to, and honestly recording, the conditions of culture. They are, as Marshal McLuhan would have it, “a canary in the cultural mines.”

Artists smell the poisoned air and sing.

But Leonardo was born in a different time. He was given the legacy of Giotto and Fra Angelico. He had patronage that he could count on from the church and from powerful individuals who also assumed a certain world-view. He had geniuses as contemporaries, including Michelangelo and Botticelli, who also worked from a convention that assumed a direct connection between culture and beauty, goodness and truth.

In a sense, there was an innocence from which the artists of the time could work, but it was not naïveté. Leonardo certainly was not naïve, and he was certainly a religious skeptic. But this commission, only one of two wall commissions he had received, gave him an opportunity to work out of the meta-narrative (the Gospel story) with conviction and force. He could trust that his paintings were meant to last and speak to the generations to come. Because of corruption within the church, of which Leonardo was certainly aware and decried in his notes, and because of the loss of patronage about to ensue, this assumption saw its zenith in “The Last Supper”.

We may never recover that innocence again. In our current culture of betrayal we need evermore to see and stand-under The Last Supper. We need to seriously consider “receiving” the message, as C.S. Lewis suggests, and allowing the work to speak into our lives.

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In the DaVinci Code, the character Robert Langdon, a professor of “symbology,” finds it significant that Jesus and the effeminate figure seated on his right form the letter “M.” Moreover, Langdon believes this second figure is not St. John, but Mary Magdalene, the “bride of Christ,” dressed as a man.

Yes, there is an “M” imbedded in the painting, but Dan Brown does not go far enough in tracing its mystery.

The real “M” or a series of “M”s starting from Philip’s stretched out hand, do not end with John, but with Judas. More specifically, the shock wave ends in Judas’ right hand, which holds the money-bag, symbolically depicting the very coins that Judas would receive to betray Jesus.

Is the figure of John effeminate? Yes. But every male figure that Leonardo painted bordered on androgyny. Leonardo’s depiction of the sexual genre has never been a secret, and even a critique of such in open forums would not have surprised Leonardo. What would be shocking to Leonardo would be if the viewer did not somehow recognize the greatest message imbedded in the painting – that Judas, the seed of betrayal, is in all of us.

Most of the paintings of The Last Supper from the painter’s era depict Judas leaving the room. Yet Leonardo made a radical decision to have Judas to be part of the “inner circle,” placing him, and, by association, us, at the Table. Judas is depicted explicitly as part of the inside circle of the disciples sitting directly in front of Peter, who Christ identified as the “rock” of the early church.

Like Philip, Leonardo, wanted to point to a deeper journey. And when we stand-under this genius work, we too take part in that journey.

The Code phenomenon is not about conspiracy theories, but is rather a symptom of our cultural ills, of how easily we accept distortion and betrayal as normative and necessary. We are trained to cheapen our dialogue to fit our darkened realities.

Today our moneybags are full of flashy, counterfeit sound bites.

Christians must understand that this can easily happen in our worship as well as in popular culture. We want God to be palatable and to fit our needs and realities, instead of practicing a daily discipline. I venture to say that what goes on inside our worship may have a greater impact even upon the larger cultural condition.

Could it be that the reason why we have such a divided nation, insistent on quick judgment, is because the Church does not fully know how to live and exercise grace? Could it be that the reason why we do not have a culture full of beauty is because our worship is not beautiful? Could it be that the cause of our shortened attention span in contemporary society is because the Church has not trained us to listen well?

In our culture of betrayal, we are quick to impose our own views on layers of established systems. Thus, even a work of art is to be distrusted. Rather than trying to “under-stand” the work, we stand over it and dismiss it as unreadable or worse yet, impose a critical ideology upon it without first allowing the work to affect us.

In doing so we miss out on experiencing what the work of art can offer, and consequently we do not journey into the power of genuine art. This lack of authentic encounters leads only to a vortex of distrust, fueled by the media, whose capital is fear. We are drowning in a deluge of despair, and our memories of the good, the true and the beautiful have nearly faded completely.

Sadly, today no one has Leonardo’s ability or skill to ask that complex and deeply layered question in his/her art, even with the advent of moving images. It may be argued that Leonardo was the last painter to have the ability to integrate history, theology, science and art with such mastery. Consider this: can we think of any other artist after Leonardo whose work would be a target for an intriguing conspiracy tale? No one has had the genius, the psychological complexity, nor the level of skill and patronage, not even Picasso, van Gogh or Warhol. Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly notable contributors, such as Grunewald (a topic for future Refractions), Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Gorky and Kandinsky, but none of these artists has the enormous social influence, not just in the arts, but in all human endeavors, that Leonardo has had.

Our wresting against an established system demands that the system has strength enough to withstand the challenge, and at the very least serve as a dialectical opponent. The center must hold in order for the surface tension to break. Thus even in facile intrigue there is always substance underneath. Our critique of contemporary culture must begin with that assumption. And then we must not just engage and critique from that conviction, we must create out of that center.

To da Vinci, such a foundation was immediately accessible. For him to have painted as he did, he had to be convinced of a center that holds.

So who is at the center? Where does the “vanishing point” end?

It ends on the forehead of the Savior.

And that foundation will hold, no matter how full our moneybags get, nor how little it takes for us to engage in betrayal. To Leonardo, the triangular shape of Jesus literally holds the painting in its visual movement. To Leonardo, that foundation was never in question: the question to him was the question of “evidence.”

Jesus exhorted Phillip to “believe” on the basis of the evidence of miracles. Leonardo, of all people, wanted evidence. He looked for it in the stars and sketched it in the sinews of cadavers. He sought resolution in the core of his creativity, and asked deeply phenomenological and existential questions. In other words, Leonardo saw himself at the Table, too, and, like Philip, leaping up at the comment of Jesus. Leonardo, even as a skeptic, was at once in a deep creative engagement with the Savior, and approached God with intellectual rigor and dialogue.

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In this remarkable passage of John 14, Jesus, the miracle worker, tells his disciples, in direct answer to Philip’s comments, that they shall do the “greater work.”

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14: 8, 12)

What were the “greater things” to which Jesus referred? What could be greater than raising Lazarus from the dead, an event recorded in Chapter 11?

Leonardo framed the answer implicitly in The Last Supper with Philip’s earlier words:

“Come and see.”

The greater things were in telling the world to “come and see.” Come and see a masterpiece to consider these eternal questions. And that is what Leonardo determined to undertake in The Last Supper.

The Last Supper may even miraculously outlast celluloid (or even digital) and our 15-minutes-of-fame mindset, as the world deteriorates in front of our eyes. The Last Supper, in that sense, is a perfect complement, or even an antidote, for the twenty-first century cultural landscape, exposing us for who we truly are. Even in a mere fifteen-minute encounter, the work leaves us spell bound for a moment of wonderment.

This is why we all need to travel to Milan, just for a momentary decompression, to stand-under Christ who is about to reach for that bread of communion. Like Leonardo, we may even desire to participate in that evening, in the suffering of the one and only true Artist, and follow him to the vanishing point, the source of our bright countenance.

There, witnessing the earthy vermillion glow of the Milan rooftops, we may find ourselves deeply reflecting on the Gospel of John, Chapter 14, where the Savior’s still voice continues to expose the depth of our woes and the secrets of our depravity. In Christ’s outstretched arms, we may yet find our malaise lifted, our imaginations sparked to do “greater things.”


A special thanks to Dr. John E. Walford of Wheaton College and Dr. William A. Dyrness of Fuller Seminary for their insights to prepare for this Refractions.

Next month...a meeting with Yoko Ono in London!