mystical landscapes

visiting toronto from mumbai recently, i treated myself to the mystical landscapes exhibit at the art gallery of ontario. aside from any specific surprises, disappointments or expected delights, some more general impressions:

canada’s troupe (including carr and the group of seven) plunge into god as well or better than most of the rest of that presented world

the extra-thick crowds around van gogh, while not unjustified (the represented starry night is powerful) and not as wholesale an absurdity as the gaggling routine camera competition around the louvre’s mona lisa, remind of something mostly to be forgotten

humans (and other animals) – while thick as art voyeurs on the exhibit floor – are almost entirely absent from the art. yes, we can say this emerges partially from the period – mostly a century ago, the selection process, in which a certain strain of artists struggled with the increasing potency and pervasiveness of a technocapitalistic society by withdrawing from its human and industrial faces. but it is not just this (and related factors)

the divine vision – almost however we define it, palpably elusive in definition though it must be – places the human alongside the myriad creatures, without ascendancy … and how then can it appear in greater proportion than the entirety of creation – almost [but not quite] nothing, an aspect among teeming aspects of the creator, oneness, the universe, thingness, irreducible and vast complexity, love (call it what you want)

starry night has, for example, some humans, blurred individuals, hardly individuals, forms of sorts really, in the foreground, but small, more like re-shaped stars … and those other stars (the original ones, our likely destiny), those popping out like thoughts in god’s universal mind are the backdrop and centerpiece of the drama, the settlements and affairs of earth like icharus rippling into the sea in auden’s poem or bruegel’s painting … a reality to be sure, but one like a shutter being closed or opened on some lane in a village beside drying laundry in dusty-sunny air, clouds working nonchalantly as they do on their important projects

and now? a century later? 6 billion more humans, the urbanized percentage having risen from 13 to 58%,12 cities with more than 1,000,000 humans leaping to over 400, technology our skin and consciousness, god in an unmarked grave, capitalism like nero in an rpg of rpgs, art a useless caboose, a used tampon, a credit limit of vision, a dream journal, a cosmic rosary, a desert song … now … where are the mystic landscapes and those who paint them? with the soul made of garbage rather than numinous emptiness, how shall we ascend descend migrate to the forbidden light?

around the time nietzsche went mad, georges-albert aurier wrote – and this quote is prominent in the ago’s exhibit –

we must become mystics again. mysticism is what we need today; only mysticism can save our society from brutalization, sensualism and utilitarianism. the noblest faculties of our soul are atrophying … we must react.

is this sentiment even translatable in 2016?

(the journalistic reports on the exhibit in the dailies suggest in their expected prose thudding lightly across pragmatic landscapes that mysticism isn’t for everyone – a little out of place really – but that they’re glad at least the results exist even if the origins seem somewhat off to the orthodox)

does the more contemporary reel-unreel short shot in kabul (on the ago’s 5^th floor presently) hold hints?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IuEM4w7Gbc

do the films on https://vimeo.com/videovectors ?

the paintings in http://bernardlegay.fr/ ?

the sounds on https://thenidus.bandcamp.com/ ?

the dancing dead, holding hands across the waking world?

February 10 - Saint Wystan, Poet

Rev. Dr. George Bicknell loved boys.  He’d watch them from his voyeuristic perch in the Worcester Cathedral tower, lips chomping as if young flesh were a fresh invention and not a steady supply from the fathomless pit of lust.  Each Sunday he’d look forward not to the comforting snores of the congregation or the weekly conjugal tedium with his wife at Vespers, but the sight of the choirboys squirming in their confinement while he spewed rote lies about forgiveness into the apathetic air.  One day, he couldn’t take it any more--the hairless salt of sweet boyflesh would be on his tongue by nightfall or he’d end his meaningless failed forgettable life.

There was one … an image of uncooked innocence reading by a gravestone--as if God were complicit in his desperation and had, right now, just for him, created a lamb to be sacrificed on the searing altar of sex.  Laden with the cruel confidence of desire, armed with the subtle words of his profession, he led the boy to a hut by the Severn where he repeatedly stabbed him with passion’s steel tyranny.  Reason, compassion, balance--they were absent … only the dark stench of possession.

When the rampage was over and his blood had fallen to a human temperature, he saw that the boy was dead.  Realizing what he had done, he stumbled to the Cathedral and impaled himself on a cross.  Three days later, on February 21 1907, a passerby looked into the hut and found a newborn baby, whose name was Wystan Hugh Auden, whose words lead to the land of the dead.

Most modern poets have forgotten music.  Their palettes have one or two colors, their kits three or four tools.  They strut their mushy minds, consumed with ejaculating their names into great vats of ears--regardless of the quality of their verse or souls, or the souls of those at the bottom of their narcissistic fountain.  They think the world was created in 1922, that the infinite is a mathematical set and not the impossible wound that bleeds all human song.  Their social conscience is themselves, their moral vision their genitals, their idea of a poetic education an English degree, a few workshops and weekly inebriation at literary readings.  No one can sanely connect their ideas to their behavior.  They’ve lost the knowledge that the world is the poet’s only teacher and they would do better to be friends with prostitutes and gardeners than the literary dilettantes they think are grand.  Perception is analysis, wisdom consensus, progress publication.  Unimaginative, imperceptive, equating eros with coitus, locked in themselves like a garbage barge in a suburban swimming pool, they produce worn photocopies of lukewarm commonplaces in clunky adjective-infested stanzas of stale mediocrity, which they celebrate noisily as divine achievements in their undisciplined cloisters.

St. Wystan was not such a poet.  St. Wystan was not such a man.

He was turned to stone and fashioned into a grotesque on the western side of St. Stephen’s Cathedral on September 28 1973 and elevated by the Council of I to sainthood on April 27 1992.  We honor the saint today because this was the day at the age of 35 that he acknowledged his relationship with Chester Kallman was a failure, making the rest of his life a quiet squeal of pain.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.