small and compact and meaningful

Terunobu Fujimori, Tokyo, Japan - Beetle’s House from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

This Beetle House is small but it has that sense of simplicity and spaciousness that I feel is when my soul is headed.

What is this?

Welcome to Hatsune Miku. She isn't an anime character, nor is she a real singer. She is a Vocaloid voice created to run in a computer. However she sings in tune, in the right places. She's not a recording as such. She even sings with a Japanese English accent! Is this art? Does it have any claim for a place or is it simply a distraction as entertainment.

Refractions of light

I'm starting to review books and this is my first for Navpress.

Often the internal life of an artist is not easily accessible and yet Makoto Fujimura in Refractions: a journey of faith, art, and culture allows us to meet him in a very intimate way. I have followed his blog for a while and this book is a gem. He is an artist working in the space between the East and the West and working with mineral pigments, which catch the light and bend it in many ways, just like the essays in this book.

Makoto Fujimura is one of those one in a million people. As a visual artist, as Japanese American, as someone living in the shadow of Ground Zero, as man of faith and committed to community and culture, it is possible find at last someone, something authentic. One small flash of that authenticity is “Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us”.

Refractions is not something you read through and feel you’ve done the book. It is not a work of fiction nor is it a textbook about faith, religion or art. It is about the internal spiritual journey, seeing, thinking, reflecting and refracting.

A Challenge

I'm preparing for a summer conference teaching on "the spiritual life in all its fullness through the story of Jonah". I have written a small skit/drama where Jonah is talking about his Ninevah experience and he sounds like a teenager. (This is in the style of Armstrong and Miller WWII comedy sketches - be warned the language is offensive to some in the Youtube clips.)

Rosanne who is reading it for me commented "You know I think Uncle Jonah on first read sounds irreverent - which shocked me a little - although maybe Jonah really did have that attitude.. was that intended?"

When reading Jonah 4 I find that Jonah knows good doctrine but doesn't really know or understand the why of the love of God. So Jonah seems to me to be immature and like many teenagers inconsistent especially when it comes to authority. I hope Jonah in my drama is a little shocking especially for those who are over familiar with the story because I'm trying to reach beyond a children's Sunday school class understanding.

I believe good art, drama, and music should challenge us in someway and yet for the artist, writer, or composer the challenge is to maintain a sense of the aesthetic. This probably the case in postmodern architecture. The move from Modernism and functionalism to first putting elements including the classical in juxtaposition with each other to now trying to find a new way of speaking. The city is full of examples of this. Go and stand at the North East corner of King and University and you'll see what I mean. Also then perhaps the Lee Chin Crystal at the ROM is the most recent dramatic attempt though the aesthetic has been sacrificed because glass has been replaced with metal.

Did you notice the cellist in the picture? He's playing left handed. Knowing that, you're forced to check the other players. Jonah in the skit is written to do that to ourselves.

All Roads lead to Rome

Drawing and telling stories and perspectives. David Macaulay's interesting lecture is fascinating. In my Critical thinking course I've had to think about how I read and how I present information,and how I deal with points of view, assumptions, and the layers.

Just how do you explain things in your life? How do you explain your life and existence to other? How about in the context of a book? Well your point of view is a major player and each point of view reveals layers. How do you explain what you believe?
See it (here) if the player below doesn't work.

Heart's capacity

I continue to be struck by the awesomeness of God.

I've been meditating on Psalm 103 for a few days now. The poetic paraphrase I've been using began "My soul is for your blessing". I struggled for a long while because it effectively states I exist or am made to be blessed, my purpose is to be blessed. Personally I find this is extremely difficult to accept! I fought with this idea for sometime and especially when the normal translations say "Bless the Lord, O my soul!"

But David Dickson in his commentary (published in the 1650s - yes 350 years ago) wrote:

In the prophet's stirring up of himself to praise God, learn[ed] 1. The sense of God's goodness to a believer is very blessedness felt, flowing from God, the fountain and cause of blessedness. 2. When a believer is satisfied with God's goodness, he cannot satisfy himself in the expression of his sense of it, or of his discharge of thankfulness for it; but stirreth up his own dull spirit to the work of praise. 3. In praising God special care is to be had of the sincerity of our heart and affections.

As I sat in silence this morning I felt the need to really draw a response and the image comes from this time. Words don't really express things sufficiently for me, this picture is closer. Yesterday I expressed this another way in my spiritual directors together meeting. It's like a analogy but similar to the feeling when you inflate a balloon with one breath, except its going in rather than coming out. All I can say is thank you God.

Ten hours straight

Well I've had my first square meal since Monday, vegetable. chicken and rice cooked in a soup stock with creamed corn (3 cereal bowls full). Before that I had 5 bowls of chicken congee over 4 hours. Things have now changed considering in the last 3 days I'd consumed 2 slices of dry toast, one can of Campbells vegetable soup, a cereal bar, a packet of seaweed, and half a litre of concentrated Ribena (in hot drinks). Still it's good to start kicking again and I'm 6 pounds lighter than Monday.

Why the strange diet today? Well I've just completed 10 hours of video editing. I reviewed 5.5 hours of tape and chose the clips and then edited them to my sound score I'd created, mangled, assemble and put together. I am frequently amazed how things come together. word, images, and music. Given that the limits of my technology and software forces me to imagine a visual sequence, somehow put together something that matches that approximately in audio and then merge the two together using the score and video soundtracks. It is a process impossible to be analytical, it is only something you can feel and intuit. During the 10 hours I only stopped to pick up a bowl of food or move laundry on but kept at it, eating when I felt hungry, which was most of the day!

The fruit of my labour is 6 minutes 33 seconds of video for my international students event over Christmas. Perhaps you see that my personality type is INFJ thats J with a big "J". Even with bppv, some messed up blood sugar, and some problems regulating body temperature, I have to reach that blissful feeling of completing something, at least one small step. There are many more steps, and hurdles to jump but there is a good sense of moving again.

However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me—the task of testifying to the gospel of God's grace. Acts 20:24

Lullabye For A Stormy Night

well now I am grown, and these years have shown that rain's a part of how life goes, but it's dark and it's late so I'll hold you and wait 'til your frightened eyes do close, and I hope that you'll know... that nature is so the same rain, that draws you near me falls on rivers and land, on forests and sand, makes the beautiful world that you'll see in the morning ... everything's fine in the morning the rain'll be gone in the morning but I'll still be here in the morning - Vienna Teng Lullabye For A Stormy Night

(My ears are still full of Vienna Teng a good voice and very thoughtful lyrics hear this song here NB Vienna Teng wrote this song when she was 17! - If you're interested you can find downloadable live recordings at the internet archive here)

Years ago, I was extremely interested in a young woman but we were on different continents. We were far apart. At this time I came across this picture in a book published in 1919 together with the translation of a Chinese poem from the 6th century: The Ferry written by the Emperor. Both touched me deeply

Of marsh-mallows my boat is made,
The ropes are lily-roots.
The pole-star is athwart the sky:
The moon sinks low.
It's at the ferry I'm plucking lilies,
But it might be the yellow River-
So afraid you seem of the wind and the waves,
So long you tarry at the crossing

I don't think she ever understood the poem and picture when I shared it. Somehow the possibility failed, making the physical crossing happened but there was no willingness to cross over other divides. But looking back I would not be where I am now, doing what I do now, unless that failure happened. But I'll still look back when I hear songs like this.

For I know the plans I have for you," declares the LORD, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jer 29:11

The Temptation of St Anthony

I have discovered that Dali's painting and others were painted as part of a competition!

Max Ernst was in fact the $3,000 prizewinner in this "Temptation of St. Anthony" contest. The sponsors of the contest appear to have been a movie company and they persuaded 12 artists to paint what they thought St. Anthony saw. This winning picture was used in a movie, Bel Ami or The History of a Scoundrel and strangely had nothing to do with St. Anthony. Runners-up included Belgian Paul Delvaux; Ivan Le Lorraine Albright; and of course Salvador Dali.

There is a long history of paintings on this subject and the monsterbrains blog has excellent information and links. (here) I've always had an interest in St Anthony/Antony not just because he is my namesake but I suspect because of his asceticism. As an introvert, solitude is something I desire and yet it is the deepest battle requiring great exertion of will. They say the closer you get to God the more you are target for the Devil and temptations. Wikipedia has a nice summary of Athanasius' biography. (here)

catastrophes

It is true that Nietzsche, instead of driving me further into atheism, initiated me into the questions and doubts of premystical inspiration, which was to reach its glorious culmination in 1951 when I drew up my [Mystical] Manifesto . . . Nietzsche awoke in me the idea of God. Dali 1952

Dali as a surrealist developed his strange method of image portrayal by searching for images from beyond conscious human intellect: paranioac-criticism. This paranoid-critical method of painting was a deliberate detailed reproduction of subconscious images from dreams or spontaneous or self-induced delirium. I am strangely attracted to Dali's work ever since I saw some of his crucifx images and since visiting the Dali Universe exhibition in London. This picture is from a series entitled Catastrophes. For me these are a collision of ideas and Tolkien is very helpful.

... I coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effect because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth, your whole nature chained in material cause and effect, the chain of death, feels a sudden relief as if a major limb out of joint had suddenly snapped back. It perceives – if the story has literary 'truth' on the second plane (....) – that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story – and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.- The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, # 89 (7-8 November 1944).

The unnamed image is from Dali's series called Catastrophes. There is a certain sharpness and severity which is contained within a sense of being bracketed or put in parenthesis. When things go wrong for us and life is difficult perhaps to the point of almost unbearable what are we to do? Perhaps the secret is the act of putting things in parenthesis that catastrophe can become eucatastrophe. I can't date this image but at some point in time Dali's worldview changed and he found belief, faith, God (read more here). That doesn't mean Dali became a conformist or anything like that, but he was still pulling apart the world around him but with a greater sense of meaning. In his 1942 autobiography he is reported to have written :-

And what is heaven? Where is to be found? Heaven is to be found, neither above nor below, neither to the right nor to the left, heaven is to be found exactly in the centre of the bosom of the man who has faith! At this moment I do not yet have faith, and I fear I shall die without heaven.

By 1951 and the Mystical Manifesto Dali moved from artist depicting the existential angst of the absence of God to painter of signposts grabbing at the edges of perception and sensibility, the place where catastrophe and eucatastrophe meet: The place of Faith, Hope and Love

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali's The Temptation of St Anthony

Years ago I read The Life of Antony by Athanasius. A fascinating story of his struggles with himself and his desire to follow and be faithful to God. Antony/Anthony was the founder of Christian monasticism and asceticism

Dali reused a number of key themes from the history of art. The Temptation of St. Anthony is one used by some of the more fantasy-oriented Renaissance artists (e.g. Matthais Grunewald). In this version, the saint is walking through the desert when he is confronted with a number of temptations. The first a monstrous horse often a symbol of power or strength and them a number of elephants on stilt-like legs. There carry different temptations, including the golden cup of lust and perhaps symbols of greed. There are many Freudian interpretators out there but I find Athansius' biography more helpful. He was being tempted by "memories of his possessions, the guardianship of his sister, the bonds of kinship, love of money and of glory, the manifold pleasure of food, the relaxations of life , and finally, the rigor of virtue and how great the labor is that earns it...".

After two long conferences this month where my sleep patterns have been severely disrupted, I've just returned and slept 3.30pm Wednesday to 10.30 am Thursday. And last night I slept a further 10 hours. We all have our temptations to deal with and their desire to turn us from the path of virtue. They may not be the same but they come at us steadily and we struggle with each of them in turn.

The Scream

I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting -
suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. Munch

Here is a copy of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" - sometimes called "The Cry". If I were looking for an evocative image to portray raw angst of life
this is it ...

This reminds me so much of the other side of Jean Paul Sartre's nausea for whom the idea of other people was hell and for Munch raw existence without connection is also hell. It's interesting that this painting is part of a greater series of painting he did, The Frieze of Life, a series of paintings he produced in the 1890s. The Frieze symbolically examines the journey from love and passion, to jealousy and melancholy, to anxiety and death.

Just examine his biography. Munch's life was full of anxiety. When he was 5 years old, his mother died of TB and his favorite sister Sophie died nine years later. Then he was 25, his father died and yet more happened. After his father's death, his sister, Laura, went mad and was committed to an asylum. I find for myself a link to Nietzsche's death of God and through Munch's being influenced by a nihilist philosopher, Hans Jaeger.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness ... Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder....My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art.

Munch I think was part of the expressionist period of art history where the artist does not reproduce reality like a photograph but is recording the raw emotional impact on his own consciousness.

I suspect that Munch found this fear necessary to be creative. What sort of fear might be creative or even essential to the human person?

For me I am influenced by Paul Brand's ideas about both the negativity and positiveness of pain. This has been real for me across my life and I met him many years ago in my godmother's home. Few people would count pain as a blessing His publishers assert "But his fifty-year career working with leprosy patients in India and the U.S. convinced Dr. Paul Brand that pain is one of God's great gifts to us. As an indicator that tells us something is wrong, pain has a value that becomes clearest in its absence. Those who feel no pain reap terrible consequences."

I suspect fear is what drives us both positively and negatively. The beginning of Wisdom is fear of the Lord says the Bible. Fear and despair can drive us to seek meaning and purpose in life. Without this we become dead inside.

I prefer strangling and death, rather than this body of mine. I despise my life; I would not live forever. Let me alone; my days have no meaning. "What is man that you make so much of him, that you give him so much attention, ... Job 7:15-17

Totally unconventional

I've been interested in the wilder and unconventional aspects of Andy Warhol for sometime and particularly the spontaneous elements when he, with film clips etc, together with the Velvet Underground improvised together in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI) multimedia performance art show. I happened on a PBS show about him and this event really caught my imagination. What also caught me is that the EPIs took place in 1966-67 and many elements now form an accepted part of art installations. Yet much of the worship arts and content of spiritual events do not have a participatory spontaneity within their practice.

It seems that that Warhol was a Eastern Rite Catholic and attended church regularly, though his lifestyle and values were less than conventional and many would say unChristian. I was interested to note the claim that in Warhol's eulogy John Richardson depicted his faith as devout: "To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for the priesthood". You may like him, or hate him, or like me simply be challenged to think more about life because of him.

I am still interested in the participatory spontaneity as a possibility within the worship arts and sometime ago I produced a backing track for part of a larger Passion/Easter reflection project which I hope one day will happen. Elements I had planned were words and phrases from Isaiah 53 to be called or shouted out and images and film reflecting the passion of Christ to be blended with this, together with other possibilities.

(click here for streaming audio)

A matter of style

from http://tijil.org/gallery/d/214-1/cellist.jpg

For a moment What a surprising incongruous image! and I love this from Tomas' collection. I don't know whether he drew it or got it from some where else. The drawing style is of course Asian manga/anime but the instrument very Western and high art and the girl is drawn very street style.

In a life on another continent I was a bureaucrat and strangely I often went to work in a green army jacket and jeans. On it I wore a patch which said Don't follow me, I'm lost too! If you know me already, you would know that there a contrariness in me. If you asked me a question presenting a black and white situation, I will often bring in the grays. One of my close friends told me that if he wanted to explore the options he would come to me but if he wanted to make a decision then he wasn't sure.

The Greeks had a wider vocabulary for many concepts and love is probably the most well-known because of CS Lewis who listed storge, phileo, eros, and agape . For wisdom Aristotle presented two intellectual virtues: sophia and phronesis. Sophia is what we usually translate as "wisdom". Thus philosophy is love of wisdom. Sophia is the ability to think well or critically, and is used in our study of the world and the way it is; sophia involves deliberation concerning universal laws and truths. Phronesis is sort of more pragmatic and a way of being in the world. It is the ability to think about how and why we should act in order to change things, and especially to change our lives for the better. I have heard common sense and prudence as words used to translate phronesis. Aristotle said that phronesis isn't simply a skill, in fact it involves the abilities to both to decide how to achieve a certain end, and to reflect upon and determine that end. (This latter point is under dispute because I think it brings Aristotle much closer to Plato.) Phronesis requires time and thus is not truly common sense.

I think juxtapositions which set things or ideas in opposition are often unhelpful. However incongruities can bring the norms and values of the world to sight. The wisdom of phronesis is not based on conformity. Human existence is hugely ambiguous and even the Christian faith is based more on phronesis than sophia because it is based on a transcendent relationship lived out in concrete realty.

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

With Open Hands

Henri Nouwen's With Open Hands was an important catalyst to integrating visual journalling into my spiritual life. Before I started I had not really drawn since I was 11 years old and these images come from January 2003 many many years later.

My spiritual director suggested that the activity of journalling itself focuses and therefore concentrates the drawing itself. Around the same time I was reading The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. A monk who worked in the kitchens and yet over 17 years learnt to find God there. The book records "It was a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times ... prayer was nothing else but a sense of the presence of God." For drawing the hands and reflecting about what I was reading was to discover something I already knew well which was "Letting go and letting God" but to transfer it. This was, in the words of my old pastor Patrick Brock, the 18 inch drop, namely from head to heart.

Correcting corrupted images

A key moment in my formation was the realisation that an understanding of God as father is frequently shaped by childhood. My divine image was marred by earthly experience. Henri Nouwen's book The Return of the Prodigal brought my own personal exploration and study of Rembrant's painting. The father has one hand of strength and power strongly holding and other of gentleness almost consoling.

Furthermore one of my personal struggles is that sincerity is not enough, and proficiency is required. Recently Nodame Cantibile which exists as a Japanese manga, anime, and live drama has opened me to myself, bringing old experiences of making music and loving music for music's sake. I find myself in so much of it. Set in a music college it says much not just about music but it begins with music and moves off into life. Music is a metaphor for life and living. It raises old questions about conflicting loves and what is a deeper love, it asks questions such as what is important whether to play music as I like it rather than first taking music seriously for music's sake in order to bring pleasure and joy. It brings to the front the links between technique and inspiration. The Nodame story is more than a romantic love story but also one where the love of music is a key and this is paralleled in a love of life and love in life. Even then the childhood experiences hamper and limit development and opportunity until dealt with. In my experience of parents it was a father who pushed and demanded and a mother who persuaded and consoled. Yet God as divine parent is both. Nodame Cantabile reminded me of the importance of striving for technique is as important as the ability to sing i.e. the expression of the soul of music. All art has its techne and psyche sides. (technical and soul) The spiritual disciplines present one side and movements of the spirit the other.

Sometimes we need the power of God and other times we need the shelter of the wings of God. We need a transcendent relationship if we are to live in this world, but we also need to love the experiences or at least find the experiences of the love of God here in the world. We need to take life seriously (the father's left hand) to enjoy life (the father's right hand) , otherwise we're stuck in hedonism or stoicism.