New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

It is a strange business – how, in one sense, we can ‘know about’ something for many years and yet, in another, not ‘know’ it at all. I have long been aware of ‘Der Blaue Reiter’, ‘The Blue Rider’ movement, and its radical artistic adventures in the early twentieth century. Individually, I have enjoyed many of the works of its main contributors: the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc and, with less educated conviction, the artist-composer Arnold Shoenberg. Then, suddenly, I find these prophetic artists seeming to say everything I have ever wanted to say – although I have never known quite how.

Some background might be useful. Undoubtedly the visionary inspiration for ‘The Blue Rider’ came from Wasssily Kandinsky, although from the start it was an essentially collaborative venture, and would never have left the starting gate without the committed involvement of many other artists, mostly painters and musicians. The name was the title chosen by Kandinsky and Marc for the movement’s first and most famous publication, ‘The Blue Rider Almanac’ of 1912. This is a picture of the cover, an original design by Kandinsky for general use as a symbol of the movement:

The Almanac was a bibliographical expression of the rationale underlying a number of exhibitions staged under the same name. The movement was essentially eclectic - hence the unusual juxtaposition of painters and musicians. More than that, however, ‘The Blue Rider’ deliberately avoided identification with any one off-the-shelf artistic style – and this was the first feature forcibly to strike me in its potential to dialogue with more recent movements and ideas.

Kandinsky was clear in his conviction that rigid alignment to any single artistic style seals a death warrant on genuine creativity. He spells this out in considerable detail in his now famous treatise, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’ – one of the few major texts out of the western world exclusively dedicated to a dialogue between art and spirituality. In it he suggests that, at any given moment of cultural history, there are rarely more than a few artistic pioneers who actually live on the leading edge, at the top of the artistic pyramid, as it were. These few are those who are able to cut themselves free from the shackles of all previous styles and schools of thought, and are genuinely able to ‘do a new thing’. They put down markers ahead of their time, and effectively create the possibility for new cultural futures. Contrastingly, the majority of artists, working within one or more already established styles might seem to create the new but, in reality, their work is no more than a fresh example of something that has already become dated and lifeless. They seem to put down markers too, but these are already behind the crest of the advancing cultural wave.

This is an fascinating model for understanding the continuing movement of artistic styles, and goes some way towards explaining one of those things which has remained a mystery to me for many years – precisely why it is that new artistic expressions generate such extreme vitriolic responses, not only in the public at large, but also in the more rarefied communities of the art establishment. It has happened over and over again with each new generation of artists; even though it is also well understood that the same works of art, pilloried in one generation, will almost certainly become the priceless and sought after treasures of the next. The pattern has been repeated generation after generation, though rarely with greater force than in the turbulent years around the turn of the twentieth century. I have written elsewhere (‘God and the Art of Seeing’) about the scathing reception given to Edvard Munch’s painting, ‘The Sick Child’, in Norway in the mid-1880s; and the venomous reception given to Monet’s now world famous images of water lilies and haystacks is now well-documented as one of the conundrums of art history.

I had already learned to recognise a familiar sociological motif at work in this phenomenon, the creation and preservation of a closed circle, an establishment – but Kandinsky, I think, offers a more subtle window of understanding. It is not just that the boundaries of the establishment and its club are threatened; more than that, genuine pioneers are doomed to be misunderstood, because they are actually thinking what up until then has remained literally unthinkable. Because what they are thinking has not previously been thought, there do not exist any readily accessible conceptual categories with which to facilitate its reception. (I am reminded here of Kuhn’s analysis of the way in which revolutions take place in models of scientific thinking, paradigm shifts as he calls them.) Cultural critics, exclusively drawing on categories derived from the past, simply do not have the apparatus with which to interpret and therefore appreciate the arrival of the genuinely new.

By commending freedom from commitment to any single artistic style (the Almanac brings together and affirms examples of works of art from many different eras and many different locations) Kandinsky is encouraging an attitude which is, at least, more likely to be able to embrace the genuinely new and to experiment freely beyond the boundaries of local fashion. Examples, peppering the Almanac, are described by Kandinsky as ‘the best’ from the leading edge in earlier specific times and places; his message is that their value deserves to be honoured, but that it would be foolishness to extol them as ‘the best’ for our own unique time and place. They did their pioneering work in their own time and place, but most of their creative potential is now exhausted. This is a very strong statement concerning the contextual nature of aesthetic values.

All of which fascinates me enormously when I begin to think about movements within religions, and the passionate commitments people make to religious and/or spiritual styles – past and present. I am reminded, for example, of the derisory anger which my own enthusiasm for the early charismatic movement in the 1970s generated amongst more traditional Baptists; and I am also reminded of my repeated discovery of ‘sects within sects’, dedicated groups of followers of this or that, still passionately committed to forms of believing which belong to moments in the Christian era now long dead. It makes me want to do a Kandinsky. I want to create a ‘spiritual almanac’ which affirms and commends a wide variety of spiritual resources from a great range of times and places. I want, for example, to commend and to enjoy the icons of early Christian centuries, to be moved by the wild and sometimes terrifying writings of so-called ‘desert fathers’, to benefit from the quiet reflectivity of contemplative mystics, men and women, throughout the centuries; I would even like to discover how to participate in the exuberance of contemporary pentecostal praise - and so on, and so on. The freedom to affirm and commend all these might then, in turn, free me to be able to recognise that as yet un-named somewhat, the special gift for this particular time and place, which I am in the gravest danger of overlooking whilst I remain too embroiled in a single style from the past. I might miss what Kandinsky described as the ‘spiritual in art’, and which today some Christian prophets might choose to describe as ‘what God’s Spirit is doing in our time’. All of which feels remarkably at home in the period we tend to label postmodern – as if we had really significantly moved on from early twentieth century. I am not so sure that we have.

In this ‘breaking with styles’, emphasised by the creators of the Almanac, something quite extraordinary was taking place. The overall direction of ‘The Blue Rider’ movement was clearly orientated towards an affirmation of ‘the abstract’ - something which had not consciously found favour in the cultural history of the west for more than a millennium. In this context, ‘the abstract’ must not to be heard in negative terms, a bid for all that is obscure and inaccessible to interpretation; rather, it should be heard as a massively positive bid to undermine the dominant post-Enlightenment paradigm with its sterile, and too often exclusive, commitment to analytical reason.

It is easiest to illustrate this from the work of Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg first met Kandinsky back in 1911 and each, it seems, immediately recognised in the other something which could draw them together in a single movement. Schoenberg was not entirely unknown as a painter, mainly of portraits, many of himself - though painting was never his strongest mode of artistic expression. He is best known for his experiments with ‘free’ or so-called atonal music – that is, with music which has freedom from the formal conventions in western harmonic traditions. In one of the Almanac’s short essays, by Kulbin, entitled ‘Free Music’, it is argued that, by breaking with the particularity of one harmonic tradition, music is merely re-claiming what has remained unscathed in ‘nature’ despite the development of human cultural history. “The music of nature is free in its choice of notes – light, thunder, the whistling of the wind, the rippling of water, the singing of birds. The nightingale sings not only the notes of contemporary music, but the notes of all the music it likes.” The remarkable thing is that a culture constrained by a very particular harmonic tradition should continue to extol the song of the nightingale as something of peculiar beauty. In commending atonal music, Kulbin enumerates many of the delights in store for the open-eared listener, singling out the distinctively new experiences generated by what he calls “… the close connection of tones and the processes of close connection.” I think it was these ‘close connections’ which, at first, I found most difficulty in appreciating; but with the passage of time, I now can find these quite extraordinarily moving.

In his own celebrated essay in the Almanac, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, Schoenberg himself goes on to argue that music must also resist every compulsion to be programmatic, to replicate, as it were, patterns already laid down in the other arts. So in setting words to music, Schoenberg deliberately refuses to conform to stereotypical assumptions. Traditionally musicians had often felt obliged to match words expressing urgency with rapid tempos, and words expressing restfulness with slow and sombre tones; rather, Schoenberg argues that music must be free to create its own forms of expression, breaking its slavish congruence with other media, and opening up fresh potential to complement and enlarge the possibilities for inspiration.

The reception of ‘free music’, of course, had all the hallmarks that I have already associated with the work of painters, and Schoenberg’s music was rubbished by most of his contemporary critics. The Almanac argues, not entirely surprisingly, that the professional cultural critic, already tied in allegiance to particular styles, is precisely the person who is least likely to be able to ‘hear’ the prophetic inspiration (Kandinsky’s ‘inner sound’) in new forms, be they visual or musical. The ear of the critic has been so ‘tuned’ to the styles of previous times, that there is now no way for ‘the new’ to be heard. As Kandinsky also put it, the critic is a theoretician, and the theoretician is a person capable of little more than discovering ‘mistakes’ in the genuinely ‘new’, however inspired this ‘new’ might be. The theoretician is structurally bound by the ‘rules’ of the past, and is disabled for doing other than negating that which is emerging in the present with genuine significance for the future.

I have no difficulty in relating all this to my own slow and sometimes reluctant journey towards an appreciation of ‘modern’ music. Today I value a measure of freedom to hear the previously unhearable, to be free to test everything for what it is, good or bad, riding as loose as possible to inherited conventions.

Everything Schoenberg affirms about music, Kandinsky parallels in his own crucial essay within the Almanac, ‘On the Question of Form’. Kandinsky is effectively declaring his own right to paint atonally, abstractly, playing the palette of colours and shapes with fresh freedom, expressing real moments of the human spirit which cannot be contained in any previous conventions of concerning form. Kandinsky claims this as the only way to release what he calls the ‘inner sound’.

Breaking the ‘rules’ of form is what, of course, the critics cannot bear. Franz Marc’s horses are the ‘wrong colours’; Schoenberg’s musical phraseology, in his ‘Herzgewächse’ (‘Heart’s Foliage’) for example, does not sufficiently correlate with verbal tones in the libretto. But that is the very point; in a fresh, although internally coherent way, the music provides the possibility of a new, equally valid, depth of insight as yet unheard in the history of music.

One fascinating conviction expressed in the Almanac, and shared by artist and musician alike, is that, in their new-found freedom, they are re-discovering things already known by the majority of children in their infancy, but strangled out of their artistic vocabulary by the processes of formal education – usually by the age of six! Kandinsky is ruthless on this point. He writes, “For every fire there is a cooling off. For every early bud – the threatening frost. For every young talent – an academy. These are not tragic words but a melancholy fact. The academy is the surest way of destroying the power of the child. Even the greatest, strongest talent is more or less retarded in this respect by the academy. Lesser talents perish by the hundreds. An academically trained person of average talent excels in learning practical meanings and losing the ability to hear his inner sound. He produces a ‘correct’ drawing that is dead.” Am I hearing a description of theological education trapped in that cul-de-sac generated at the pinnacle western liberalism? Even Kandinsky is not reluctant invoke the teaching of Jesus and the New Testament for support, pointing out Jesus’s specific allusion to the openness of children to God’s coming kingdom – the starting point for a very stimulating conversation concerning the relationship between artistic and religious forms.

From a religious perspective, I am fascinated by two powerful implications of the Almanac’s analysis of western culture. The first is simply this insight into the freedom of the child to ‘see’ and to ‘hear’ the truth, the prophetic word of God’s Spirit. This is something I have also found amongst people labelled as ‘learning disabled’ – and I find myself musing, as does Jean Vanier on the basis of massive experience by comparison with my own, just who it is in our culture that is disabled in their learning – by a lack or a surfeit of it.

The second runs a little further with this powerful affirmation of ‘the abstract’, peaking in the early twentieth century, and energised by a forceful rejection of the exclusive dominance of the analytical method – which, since the Enlightenment, had posed as the key to all significant truth claims. What ‘The Blue Rider’ group do with such skill is to expose this intellectual blind alley for the dead end it had always been. Whether we look at the playful coloured shapes of Kandinsky, or listen to the ear-stretching tonal games of Schoenberg, the common claim is that these artefacts are able to touch ‘depths’ in the human spirit, which have largely remained untouched by the dominant western cultural inheritance for many years. Tapping back into ‘natural’ forms and ‘primitive’ styles, largely untouched and certainly undervalued for many centuries, these artists speak into their own time and their own place with unique power.

One thing, of course, which they would not want us to do is to idolise their own heavily contextualised achievements in such a way that these too should become dampers on our own contemporary creativity. The invitation from ‘The Blue Rider’ is to ‘ride again’, and again, and again …

All of which, it seems to me, speaks volumes to any who are seeking to explore the potential of contemplative prayer – to which I so frequently return. As I have written in earlier blogs, a clear pre-requisite for such an exploration is liberation from the exclusivity of western obsession with ‘conceptual’ patterns of thought. Until it is possible to think again as a child, and to discover the role of the pre-conceptual and even the non-conceptual, in a fuller vocabulary of human knowing, God will not merely remain a mystery, God will remain a nonsense.

Once again I am reminded of a repeated caution in the writings of Thomas Merton. Merton reminds his readers over and over again not to become reliant on any one ‘mechanism’ of prayer or any one spiritual discipline. It is not that these disciplines are irrelevant - far from it they are essential equipment for the exploration; it is rather that they do not of themselves a guaranteed pathway to enlightenment or deeper insight. Insight only comes as a gift of God’s Spirit and, as such, will only come unsolicited, free from the constraints of any pre-determined conceptualisation (as free as the blowing of the wind, says Jesus in the Fourth Gospel). What we need, then, if we are to discover prayer that has contemplative depth, is a freedom akin to that affirmed in the birth of modern abstract art, which learned again old lessons about ways that deep truth is disclosed, revealed even. Rarely does fresh revelation depend exclusively on old forms, be they geometrical patterns, musical scales, or liturgical prayers. New wineskins will be in constant demand, as old ones will never be able to contain the ferment of the new wine.

I like all that – and could preach a pretty respectable Christian sermon on it too!

Just a little bibliography:
‘The Blue Rider Almanac’, first published 1912 (Tate Publishing 2006)
Wassily Kandinsky, ‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’, first published 1911 (Dover Publications 1977)
‘Schoenberg, Kandinsky, and the Blue Rider’, Scala Publishers, 2003

No, I have not become so ‘apophatic’ that I have finally disappeared into virtual silence – but I have struggled to give voice to this next blog. Sabbatical days continue to be highly creative, but I seem to have run against a writer’s block, and I am wrestling to start the flow again.

I have been exploring all manner of fascinating things, but a major focus has been the work of the painter, Mark Rothko, whose paintings first impacted my thinking many years ago. Rothko has frequently been adopted by those who feel the lure of the apophatic way, and my own judgment is that his paintings have immense potential as inspirations for contemplative prayer – though this is quite a change from my initial estimate of his spiritual significance.

When I wrote about Rothko’s work in a paper I prepared earlier this year, I introduced him like this:

“My first conscious, and extremely memorable, encounter with the paintings of Mark Rothko happened in the Liverpool Tate soon after my arrival in Manchester in late 1980s. Several things come to mind as I recall that occasion: I was bemused; I was also a little angry. Why would the Tate dedicate a whole room, a substantial portion of its special exhibition area to nine immense, seemingly empty canvases? Entitled the ‘Seagram’ murals, each one is nearly nine feet high and the largest is fifteen feet wide. They form nine vast areas of colour, typically in blacks and dark maroons? Originally painted in the 1950’s they were acquired by the Tate in 1970 and hung in a specially designed room, now relocated in the Tate Modern, closely following the painter’s precise instructions concerning both shape and light. Why was I angry? I suppose I thought they were a ‘waste of space’!

A ‘waste of space’ – now there’s an interesting concept, one that, since those dismissive days, I have come to think about in very different ways. I increasingly feel that this little phrase symbolises something really quite destructive, right at the heart of our western culture? Space – be it the area between buildings, the interludes between entertainments, the thorough-going silence when we hear nothing and we say nothing – has become, almost by definition, wasteful. And the Rothkos buy into such ‘wastefulness’ big-time. Not only the scale of the room they occupy, but the very idea of exhibiting huge areas of seemingly undifferentiated colour. Surely anyone could have wasted space like this? And to make it all the worse - the Tate actually paid for them, large sums of money!

There is, however, just the possibility that ‘space’ is the hidden treasure we most badly need, in return for which selling up almost everything else would be a small price to pay. And there is just the possibility that Rothko was making a profound and prophetic gesture, offering us a gift, something to which we do well to attend.

I have never forgotten that first immersion into the dark colours of the Rothko Room at the Liverpool Tate. The memory still has a haunting quality suggesting that something important was happening within me, even if I did not understand just what it was at the time. I have stood in that room several times since, now back in its London home. Each time it is a significant, if still bemusing, experience. So that, now, I have a strong urge to return and stand there again – and again – and again – each time, perhaps, with a little more understanding. And the anger is no more!”

I wrote those words – or some words very much like them - back in February and I have read and thought a good deal more about Rothko in the intervening months. Not only that, I have twice re-visited the Rothko Room in the Tate Modern and taken more time (or do I mean space?) than ever before to try and take it all in. Actually, on the first re-visit, I gave myself 100 minutes, during which I kept a running diary of how my experience unfolded – and, in retrospect, the account is really quite fascinating, if not a little scary.

Perhaps I should provide some more background before I offer my diary (and some accompanying pictures). The room in the Tate Modern is large and is entirely dedicated to Rothko’s murals. It has no windows and the lighting has been carefully regulated following the artist’s instructions. The pictures are so large that if you stand a short distance from them and allow your gaze to melt into them, you soon find yourself, as it were, passing through into the picture space – a space where all manner of unpredictable things can happen.

I am not alone in writing about experiences of Rothko in this way – though it soon becomes clear that not everyone experiences these pictures in the same way. The pictures capture people quite differently, and sometimes not at all – I was merely interested to see how and where they might take me. It had long seemed reasonable to me that they should have the possibility of becoming building blocks for a non-conceptual spiritual exploration precisely because they do not demand a pre-defined response from the viewer. What they offer is an open space, a visual silence, within which all manner of communication can happen in potentially surprising ways. I suspect that I can be numbered amongst more receptive viewers, but I am quietly confident that for many an open-minded viewer they could easily become an interesting and significant point of entry into the experience of contemplation – setting us free from the constraints of all those conceptual formulations which pretend to provide us with a shortcut to spiritual insight.

I reproduce here thumbnails of the nine pictures which fill the walls. I am only putting them up as thumbnails: partly because of copyright, and partly because anything less than full size does not do the capturing thing anyway – so, if this begins to grab you, there is no alternative but to take a trip to London.

Below is a small Word file with a map of the room, showing the layout of the murals. The numbering is my own and just a way to cross reference to the notes in my diary.

ROTHKO_ROOM_-_layout.doc

No1

No2


No3


No4


No5


No6


No7


No8


No9


One last pre-amble. I had heard others refer to the stirring sexual energy of these pictures, but had not at all anticipated quite how energetic they might be. I have actually felt quite inhibited about putting this little diary up on the blog – one reason for my writer’s block - because, no doubt, it says things about me as well as about the pictures. A month later, I think I just need to go for it; it was such a good experience I really would like to share it.

***************

My diary of the 100 minutes reads like this:

“I arrive at the Tate Modern around 3.30pm on Friday 12th May 2006, and head directly for the Rothko Room. My plan from the start has been to spend a significant amount of time there – though at the start I remain unsure just how long will be appropriate. In practice it becomes quite hard to make the decision to leave, which is why part way through I set myself a 100 minute limit. Although nearly two hours, my time there slips by almost unnoticed. I estimate, however, that during the same span, something like a thousand other people pass through the room, most staying for no more than a minute, and only a few hovering to take in anything of deeper significance. I keep continuous notes, identifying changes in my perception and any new discoveries I make over the period of time – very much like the dialogue which becomes possible when we offer our attentive gaze to an icon.

3.38
I arrive in the room. A young, very attractive, couple are hovering near the centre, wound together like Hindu statues, evidently engrossed both in the gazing and in each other – a very innocent and really rather beautiful example of love-making one with the other as they gaze, repeatedly whispering observations and insights, often stroking each other gently and caringly. The sexual motif is up and running quicker than I had expected, and it is hard not to feel left out in the presence of their evident bliss. What a superbly appropriate activity for this context!

3.46
As I do my own gazing, No4 begins to change, losing its brighter redness and becoming very dark. I begin to see some vibrating movement in the central space. The inner edges of the darker surround become very sharp in focus. I now begin to experience for myself that this whole environment is very pleasing indeed and, gently, sexually arousing.

3.53
No8 loses all its colour differentiations, the verticals at the sides are becoming like monumental pillars marking the portal into a broad landscape.

3.56
The red centre of No9 becomes highlighted and emphatic, with vertical lines/bands moving side to side.

No2 is the least defined of any of the canvases, variously resembling ferns, foliage, vertebrae, etc.

4.00
No3 becomes disturbingly vaginal – which inevitably reminds me of the couple who are still very much enjoying their togetherness around the centre of the room.

Nos5/6 - No5 is hung immediately over No6 at the end of the room farthest from the door - and remains for me the least interpretable. As I watch, the upper canvas gains a kind of heavier weightiness, and the tentative line from the upper left, pointing down, feels to be very significant for the overall effect.

People with not unattractive bodies keep coming and sitting by me or near me, radiating their body heat. Only when they open their mouths does the spell get broken. Typically, one of them is discussing getting out of here as soon as possible - to buy some chicken burgers!

4.10
I begin to experience generally much more movement in many of the backgrounds.

4.13
From near the door No4 now begins to stand out very bright in its centre panel. It is interesting to run the eye Nos2-3-4 and move towards the brightness.

4.25
At this point a complete prat of a guide strides in with forty people in tow, and they litter the place, showing various of levels of disinterest. She brashly talks facts, tedious and uninspiring facts - where, when, who, the decision to give them to the Tate, historical categorisation (modern, contemporary with Pollock), suicide – as if all this says something usefully definitive about the canvases.

She never once shows any inclination to hint how or what it might be possible to see with commitment to a suitable kind of looking. How very sad! Not a hint of the holiness of it all – no cross-reference to the Rothko Chapel in Houston. All she can manage is to compare the canvases to prison windows. How depressing – and never once a mention of anything sexual, despite the continuing activities of the couple, who seem totally oblivious to this mass invasion.

And before you know it, whiz-bang, off they go to another gallery! Thank God for that!

Someone sitting with their partner, a little longer than the average visitor, does manage to vocalise in my hearing the slightly more hopeful line, “I like this.”

Nos5/6 remain unimportant to me. I can see a contrast between the hazy, vague edges to the colours in the upper panel, with the sharpness in the lower, but I cannot seem to do anything with it.

4.36
With an appropriate gaze, I can now lose the colour differentiations in No9 altogether, and it all becomes very mobile.

4.42
Nos1 and 9 are now presenting much brighter pillars of colour at the centre – but it is No4 which increasing becomes the richest window of all, as if out onto another world.

Another party comes in – much more sensitive to the whole context, but again the guide never hints at anything spiritual or sexual that might be going on. Is she repressed or just embarrassed? Again she introduces ideas of windows, prisons, feelings of enclosure; but not even a hint of transcendence – now beaming at me through No4.

4.49
Perhaps Nos5/6 are, after all, actually the anchor points of the whole room.

What about: Nos1/9, set either side of the door, as striking portals onto the whole scene, a kind of Sylla and Charybdis; then Nos2/3/4 on one side a path to brightness and affirmation; Nos7/8 inviting two deeply contrasting ways of seeing the whole extravaganza.

Or what about Nos1/2/3/4 essentially female; Nos 9/8/7 essentially male and 5/6 as some kind of unitative resolution.

Or how about this as a way of describing the whole sequence:
No1 startles the viewer into attention;
No2 has that furry, pubic sort of feel, vaguely arousing (embryonic, sinewy);
No3 has something decidedly oral about it;
No4 the climax, orgasmic - the possibility of a window into another world;
(So 1/2/3/4 all very female)
No9 a very different phallic announcement;
Nos8/7 the two ways of seeing the world (No8 with its sense of light, an open vista, full of hopefulness; No7 with its more sinister vision of death and despair.)

4.57
I do believe I am seeing a lurking breast in the lower left of the centre panel of No4.

I am beginning to see Nos5/6 differently now – a kind of horizontal lying together, female over male, post-coital tranquility.

5.05
I am beginning to feel very much at home in this space, deeply comfortable. The intensity of the charged sexual atmosphere now gives way to a more profound peaceful and sense of security.

No4 has now an even brighter red, definitely vaginal. And No3 becomes ever more sharply focused in its pubic allusion.

So how about this as a possible process for seeing:
No9 is the entry point, providing a sharp encounter and an initial shock of arousal;
Nos8/7 offers two radically different alternatives; which window shall I choose? Hope (No8) or despair (No7)? I will choose hope! Which takes me to:
No1 which offers a strong sense of female presence, him/her together;
No2 suggests the pubic region and provides distinct visual stimulation;
No3 is all very oral;
No4 is orgasmic;
And No5/6 suggests post-coital bliss – together, her over him.

5.18 (100 minutes later)
Time to leave – and as I leave a woman takes a seat and begins to breast feed her baby in this holy place – all of which, I have to say, feels rather wonderful.”

***************

Well, I did post a warning before I began! Though it should not be at all surprising, of course, to find such a close conjunction of spirituality and sexuality. Something like it has been in the writings of Christian mystics throughout the whole span of Christian history. From time to time it has been suppressed more strongly that at others, most notably in the Victorian era – but suppression is pretty unlikely to close it down.

One way into this powerful meeting of spirituality and sexuality can be focused around the concept of ‘desire’. The mystics repeatedly tell us, with vigour, that God is only taken seriously when we make God the supreme object of our desire. But an object of desire is unlikely to sustain its attraction without some reward of pleasure – to hold absolute centre stage, being found at prayer, taking shelter in the house of God, will have to be a pretty stunning experience. But in the modern world, there is so much to suggest that the experience will be almost the opposite. Religion looks so tedious, and not a little boring, certainly in its institutional manifestations. Where modern western people experience the arousal of desire is not in an invitation to pray, but in an invitation to sexual union. But what if the two are so intimately related that, without in any way denigrating the enormity of sexual pleasure, it becomes possible to show that union with God can also be a source of immense pleasure - on an orgasmic scale. They would be queuing at the church box-office!

But this is precisely what many of the mystics seem to be saying and, in so doing, merely reflect the glorious ambiguity of so much scriptural writing. Surely the rich sexual language of 'The Song of Songs', and many of the 'The Psalms' is no accident of semantics – it is testimony to the intense and comparable satisfactions experienced through both prayer and sex. How sad that so many commentators have felt the need to defuse it all with measured allegorical and symbolic interpretations!

A really significant message for our time is that, whilst sex alone can lead to an immense anti-climax, dissatisfaction and disappointment, giving priority to prayer and union with God not only has the potential to deliver its own intensity of pleasure, but in turn can transform embodied sexual experience as well - overcoming the frustration caused by sex’s ultimate failure to deliver lasting satisfaction alone.

The truth of this was demonstrated for me quite shockingly when I came upon some of the very late drawings of Pablo Picasso. I have long thought of Picasso as one of the most extraordinary artistic giants of the 20th century, and had marvelled at his capacity to sustain creative energy (notoriously sexual) decade after decade, through times of immense personal and social change. What I had never seen before was the immense despair drawn deep into his very late works, as he experienced the onset of sexual impotence and, as he saw it, with impotence the end of meaningful life. At the very pits, he draws himself as a monkey, brush in hand, painting a beautiful model, who he is convinced will no longer see anything in him to be desired or loved! God forbid! My admiration of Picasso’s achievements remains undiminished, but my determination not to depend for meaningful life on a less-than-ultimate desire is greatly increased.

All of which makes evident sense. How could it be other? Surely the creator deserves ultimate priority over everything else in creation? Not, however, obliterating the creature and creaturely pleasures, but enriching and enhancing all that has already been built deep into the fabric of this extraordinary creation.

And I am daring to suggest that the culturally strange experience of ‘space’ provided by the paintings of Mark Rothko is one way to begin to discover some of the truth of all this. Rothko’s murals can provide a remarkable focus for spiritual reflection, an invitation to taste the joy of life within a divine horizon – an opportunity for pleasure which is simultaneously spiritual and sexual, a full celebration of being human (of which we need in no way be ashamed!), out in the light, in clear and open space, delighting in the presence of God.

I want to explore in much more detail some of the implications for Christian spirituality of taking the ‘pre-conceptual’, even the ‘non-conceptual’ option – as I began to introduce it in my last blog. At a theoretical level this might look like a pretty heavy enterprise - but there is good news; this can be broken down into some very accessible exploratory excursions, which will lead us into a variety of fascinating theological adventures.

The basic question is this: what are we going to do when the words run out? Or, to put it another way: what are the options once we decide that the deepest levels of truth – the kind which will be needed if we are to talk about God – are simply not amenable to exhaustive explication in words as we typically know them?

Well, the blanket term for those who have travelled this way ahead of us, and have made this decision against ‘words alone’ is the ‘apophatic tradition’, and some Christians have been interested in this tradition from the earliest days.

The topic is so wide-ranging, however, that we could run with it in many different directions. We might, for example, simply go visual – in which case we shall need to explore something of the controversies around icons, and we shall want to look at the potential spiritual significance of other kinds of painting and general ‘objets d’art’, such as the work of recent artists like Mark Rothko and James Turrell. We might, however, go thoroughly philosophical - and begin to trace patterns of ideas which certainly go back into Neo-Platonism, at and around the time that Christianity was born; and we might drop in on any one of a number of Christian writers who have found their way into Christianity through more mystical styles of believing; or we might even listen to some of the early twentieth century existentialist philosophers who, in their own distinctive way, encouraged something of a revival in these modes of thinking. We might also, however, go poetic. There are a number of religious-minded poets who have forcibly recognised the power of the apophatic tradition, the ‘via negativa’, as it is also called. I particularly have in mind the poems of R S Thomas as also, indeed, Thomas Merton, a prolific poet as well as committed exponent of contemplative spiritual disciplines.

So the irony cannot have gone unnoticed! It is not at all difficult to pile up a vast quantity of words, all seemingly in the cause of this non-verbal tradition!

My own first reaction to this irony is to enjoy a quiet chuckle – but then, on further reflection, I want to put down a marker which recognises that the apophatic tradition is not at its best when delivered as a stand-alone feature. It really does need its opposite number, the ‘kataphatic tradition’, in order credibly to make its way. Between the two of them, however, they can energise a dialectical movement which is immensely potent for revelatory disclosures and otherwise hidden depths from the world of human experience.

Our difficulty in the west is that, having sold out so strongly to the kataphatic over so many years – what with our preaching, our teaching, our written liturgies and our hymnody – that the only way we are likely to head somewhere new is with a massive shot of the apophatic antidote to set, as it were, the theological pendulum swinging another way. And that is what I am about to do - though we can take it in small doses and begin each unit with a thoroughly grounded artefact, like a story or a picture.

In this particular blog, I start in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, who I myself found surprisingly lucid on these matters. In the early pages of his classic text ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre is exploring why, in his own experience, something which is not conceptually accessible, a kind of ‘nothing’, can actually have as much if not more significance on his life than something which is in-your-face all-present-and-correct. But being a novelist as well as a philosopher, fortunately he gets us there with a cracking good yarn!

I am returning here to a paper I wrote about a year ago – but I feel I can now re-tell it with greatly increased conviction. Sartre invites his readers to accompany him on a visit to his local café in Paris – where I can easily imagine him engaged in amazingly intellectual conversation with his friends. On arrival he finds that one particular friend, one whom he fully expects to be there, is nowhere to be seen. So Sartre then proceeds to explore just how deeply significant the ‘absence’ of his friend really is –indeed how his absence, in its own strange way, actually makes his friend thoroughly present, maybe even more strongly than had he actually been there! The absence of his friend influences his feelings, his activities; in fact, it influences his whole life very deeply indeed.

Analysing this experience can help us to understand why some spiritual experiences of absence, as with God’s absence for example, seeming an experience of nothing, might become the most significant way that we are aware of a presence.

Clearly there has to be something about the absence of Sartre’s particular friend which makes the experience more significant than the experience of many other absences which, in theory, could also be credited to this café at that moment (for example, the absence of all those people, unknown to him, who live in England and have never even thought of visiting Paris). Can we identify, then, some structural conditions which make this particular absence so special?

Sartre identifies four factors, some of which are more obvious than others. First, he shows how the dimension of expectation is clearly significant – he arrived at the café with an expectation of meeting his friend, something which he brought to the experience as prior knowledge and prior relationship. Second, he identifies the importance of wonder - wonder in the sense of questioning, that is, rather than the sense of awe. Third, he names the experience of fear - why is my friend not here; has something gone wrong between us? Fourthly and finally, he points to the role of imagination – Sartre can imagine the alternative possibility – namely that his friend is actually present.

All four of which immediately begin to help me with my analysis of why a perceived absence of God might be highly significant for my counter-experience of God’s presence. First, as above, an expectation of God’s presence, whether I am a believer or not, has already fed deeply into my culture, through the inheritance of a faith community and its stories. I come with real expectations, however limited these might be. Second, I certainly come with questions; these have actually been heightened in recent centuries in company with the ascendancy of critical reason. Third, I come with fears: at root my fear of my own finite limitations, in time and in space, both of which repeatedly threaten me with the overwhelming possibility of meaninglessness. And lastly, I also come with a certain capacity for imagination, an intuition of the possibility of holy presence, even if it is too often eclipsed by my counter-culture of doubt.

In practice, I might even be tempted to condense Sartre’s four into a more famous ‘Corinthian three’ – I come to my experience of God’s absence already shaped by ‘faith, hope and love’ – and these profoundly transform the possibilities for my apparent experience of emptiness. I could even argue that they open the possibility of an unprecedented fullness. Actually, elsewhere in the same text, Sartre has the line ‘Fullness is emptiness given direction’. I might be confronted with what looks at first sight to be a devastating absence but, if I am simultaneously fed by a rich tradition which offers direction, perhaps this can be the very place where fullness will make itself known in greatest measure. That is, I think, what many mystics and the exponents of contemplative prayer are trying to tell us.

Not bad, eh! It was philosophy alright, but we snuck in through a thoroughly recognisable story, and it soon began to open up a whole new platform on which to build our further reflections. Watch this space, at this moment deceptively empty, and find out where it will take us next.