I just found this. I remembered writing it, but after I moved out of the apartment I lived in at the time, it seemed to vanish. As if it had never happened.
It had. It is real, and it is still beautiful, and I can no longer remember more about the writing of it than the clues I've left myself, the same clues I've left every reader. I am audience, weighted.
Context: Watched Simon Schama's Power of Art. This was written after the one about Bernini. (As an aside, I should note that I am rendered hopelessly enthralled in whatever Simon Schama is talking about owing to a massive weakness in most of my body parts whenever he starts speaking. I'm okay with it; it's fun. But I'm also big on a certain degree of disclosure.) The show is available at the Lincoln City Libraries. I refer to Martha Nussbaum in the piece. The book I refer to is called Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. It took me almost a year to read, and reading it changed my life.
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And now the time of stillness as I sit and wrestle with my memory of the last 20 minutes. Bernini thawed the chill of this day with its wind and threatened snow and gray showing all the budding flower plants almost, no, not almost, very clearly a shock as I have not even begun to think of what that means as I carry on. How closely studied can St. Teresa be through a television set/camera/commentator? How devastating the thought-notion of creation without access to the inside, the organs forever out of reach beyond her teeth. Beyond her pose what exists to make this real, and there I am lost in the worlds of flesh shown sublime not perfect. Sensuality without death or disfigurement. Michelangelo made marble float in light, Bernini granted it blood and heartbeats. I needed flan after all that Chocolate flan in a box on my counter next to the bag of muffins, cookies and cheesecake that I bought in the bakery where everything smells alive and sweet crusty with honey not cane. I smiled like I'd just been kissed. Words are not marble, no chisel or mallet or smoothing substance will ever render hard stone into such fluid stuff as lives in my hands and my throat getting in the way of every thought feeling action merely by its presence. Every mark in marble is seen, must be accounted for in some way or another and while it may seem presumptuous to speak about an art form wholly unfamiliar to my hands and muscles and language, there is something deliberate in the sculpturing of such as Teresa's ecstasy that sets the tone for the total re-creation of self and habit as Bernini is said to have undergone. We artists create in a sense of odd awareness no matter how adept or prolific or focused we are. It is no small element of that life to be responsible for its definition, no matter what that set of characteristics may be. The world of the bakery a golden yellow smelling warmth sending gifts into the world all gray like a movie, hard angles and biting wind and me typing in fingerless gloves at my table, drinking tea. Waiting for the laundry to be finished so I can start the next load, next chore, next round of this life in the afternoon: Chocolate flan and tea with Rembrandt. There is no asceticism in this nature of my home and body and brain as they wander about, running the internal mental thrums up next to the articulated finger motions, the sounds that do but throw my focus off like a girl in a scary wood. I would know more of the workshops of these artists, their sketches and plans and tools. I would hear the work marble uncovering its inner self in the form of veins and shades where the heat advanced and retreated slowly or consistently between the outside and the center. Where the pressure left its mark.
Thoughts of cities and art and humanity and the sublime and exaltation swirl about, but the DVD player is insistent and there are a least 3 more loads.
I wonder if it is right to continue Nussbaum's arguments about the different ways of experience perfect love into the world of Caravaggio and Bernini? It is impossible for me to see a Caravaggio without feeling weak at the knees, even when I do not know it is his work. The visceral nature of these sublime moments reaches a depth of understanding that I have found in few other ways and never as palpably. I wonder how it is that it is a purer thing to let go your self in witness to some great panorama of oil and light and shadow than it is in the act of sharing that self with another who is presumably sharing with you. I expect that says more about my own human frailty than that of all humans, but I am happy to know a place where it can happen, where the loss of self, even for a moment in awe or forgetfulness is the important part of the work. The artists very likely did, it would be a poor audience that did not show the same respect.
31 March 2009
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