A LUTHERAN SURREALIST PROVERB

Without error, life would be a mistake.

Makoto Fujimura

I've been arguing on an aesthetics list that the notion of a contemporary Christian art doesn't exist.

Then, I opened this morning's newspaper (Oneonta Star) and there was a headline which read, "Evangelicals Seek Greater Role as 'Creators of Culture'."

In the article was an artist named Makoto Fujimura who is apparently a blue-chip artist and also a Christian. He has a web-page here:

http://www.makotofujimura.com/

His essays are mind-blowing, and his art is too.

The article went over a lot of what I've been doing in almost complete isolation. Rereading Hans Rookmaaker, and thinking about how the Biblical message can be used as a background for the creation of art. There is a place called the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology and the Arts at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena. There is a film studio devoted to Christian filmmaking in Los Angeles. The New York Center for Art and Media Studies is a satellite of Bethel University in St. Paul. Southern Baptist Seminary has opened a center for the study of Theology and the Arts. The article is by Eric Gorski, and is apparently carried nationally, and contains lots of other information. Even if only a small percentage of Christians are interested in the arts since the number of Christians is so high then the absolute number of Christian artists will still be enormous.

It seems that finally the strictures against representation that date back to Calvinism in the Reformation have been removed. Christians are going to get involved in the arts. What this means, and on what terms, is going to be played out over the coming decades. A key player will be Fujimura. It's hard to think how a person could be better positioned. He is immensely eloquent in both written and pictorial formats. He is in New York City. He qualifies as a multicultural so that will muzzle the obnoxious. He comes from an academic background. And he is a true-blue Christian.

"But I am also a human being living in the 2st century, struggling with a lot of brokenness -- my own, as well as the world's. I don't want to use the term 'Christian' to shield me away from the suffering or evil that I see, or to escape in some nice ghetto where everyone thinks the same."

After a century of Sadean horror in the arts and on the battlegrounds of culture, there's a glimmer of hope. Just a glimmer, mind you.

TODAY

Walked down into town with the boys while the girls and their mom went to Albany to get birthday stuff for Lola's eighth.

Went over to the work building which is about a half-hour walk but with the little guys it took about an hour. It's 85 degrees on the town clock at 2:17 pm.

Went up into the 7th floor, boys fighting over who gets to push the buttons.

Boys slapped five with the dean, who head-butted the three-year old playfully, and then did some magic tricks for the kids that showed surprising eye-hand coordination.

We went home past the small library. Went into the library. The kids played computer games at PBS.org. I felt sorry for the books on the shelves, but couldn't interest the kids.

I suppose even paintings can't hold a candle to the moving image.

I was thinking of an altar painting that appears in the Lake Delaware St. James Church that we visited over the weekend. The altar piece is by Pietro Lorenzetti -- I think that the deacon said 13th or 14th century. Just looked it up and it must be Pietro Lorenzetti as the style is so similar, and the surrealist sense of composition so complete. Nimbuses on saints as they approach Jesus at the Nativity. Lots of gold leaf. It wasn't actually the central altar where the painting was displayed. It was in a small area to the left which had a specific name that I forget. The artwork was a very small piece (three feet square, max) in a side chapel of the church established by the Gerry family. The painting is roped off with a velvet rope and you'd need a telescope to see it very well. Still, you can tell it's masterfully done. How could a largely neglected country church afford such a painting? The piece that I publish with this post gives you a sense of the weirdly disconnected feeling of the various figures as if they were all painted separately without an awareness of their inter-relationships. Sienese school is apparently more surrealist like this (reminiscent of de Chirico).

Gerry was James Madison's vice president. His estate continues on here in this county and was funded through a real estate deal in which he bought up a huge chunk of west Broadway long before Central Park, and so when it was made, his wealth increased astronomically. The estate here at Lake Delaware is the repository of a lot of that wealth. The estate has been visited by George Bush's father, and many other dignitaries and is closed to the public except for this massive church that appears admidst the forest on Rt. 28 on the Route to Woodstock. The painting is magnificent, but this older media did not interest my kids.

They sat and watched with great interest however the knights assembled on the front lawn of the church as they whacked at each other with broadswords illustrating fighting techniques from the 4th through 13th centuries. The church was selling antiques through a local festival and the lawn was studded with odd objects such as a cranked cylinder from which lottery tickets were plucked.

The knights were sweaty in their steel mail and heavy helmets. We talked to these knights after their presentation. They were all experts in judo and fencing and said to my kids, "Please don't try this at home."

Right now they're wailing on each other with wiffle bats for the third time today without permission from the King.

2 Polar Bears at the North Pole

One said, "Did you hear that Al Gore invented the internet?"

"Yes," the other one said. "Just in time for global warming."

UNIVERSALISM AS SATANISM

Almost all the Christian churches are sidling toward universalism. That is, everyone will be saved, since there is a loving God. I hate this.

I prefer the old adage, "the fires of hell warm the seats of the church."

I liked the sense of urgency that Satan is on the march and there were a few stalwart holdouts. Today however you rarely hear about Satan. He's considered a medieval relic. In aesthetics you have a similar problem: everything is beautiful, just as everyone is beautiful. Fat is now beautiful, for instance. And since that darned toilet of Duchamp called Fountain (now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a romm of its own), things like plumbing are considered fine arts on many scorecards. So within aesthetics there is a similar move toward universalism.

Everything is beautiful, in its own way, as the song goes.

Every action is equivalent, every belief is equivalent, every person is equivalent. Universalism is a kind of communism. How to maintain standard? How do you say, this is ugly in an objective sense (some sin or another) while this is proper behavior? How do you say, this painting is good (gesturing toward a clown on black velvet by Red Skelton) while this painting is bad (gesturing toward a Leonardo da Vinci) or vice versa? In fact, most people no longer want to do this. They want to say instead that aesthetics or behavior are governed by local conditions. If a bunch of agit-prop airheads decide that, "Kill Jews," is the most beautiful poem, well, then, it is. And it's wrong to discriminate either on an Aesthetic basis or on an Ethical basis. Because everyone is, like, man, like beautiful, baby.

The development of a set of discriminating criteria flies in the face of the sixties. The people of the sixties left didn't want any more discriminating, and they weren't themselves discriminating. Airheads with air guitars. I love everybody equally, love the one you're with, love will solve everything. Mindless love of the hippies, and Jesus has been drafted as a movement image.

After Arman, and his notion of junk cars as beautiful, or Jasper Johns, and his oily t-shirt collage, or Duchamp, and his toilet, or Karen Findlay, and her yam up the wazoo, or Pierre Manzoni, and his cans of Merde d'Artiste, it's almost hilarious to attempt to reassert standards of taste. Similarly, in the churches, it's very hard to mandate standards of behavior as being objectively valid as "good" behavior. At best I think we are going to get "factions," and democracy, and the notion of many rival groups, with a Venn diagram that doesn't allow for any points of absolute agreement. Everything's a shambles, as people lapse into a solipsism without borders or without any kind of contact with reality.

I would like to return the notion to the nation and the nation to the notion that Satan walks among us in the guise of universal love. But I'm a minority of one, crying out like Cassandra before the gates of Troy.

Get your sandals off your feet, and discriminate!

We must be able to distinguish between good and evil. We must be able to distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly. Against universalism, I want to reestablish a new reversal of the universalism that overthrew all standards and all criteria. I don't want to live in the dream-world of surrealism where Sade was the new Shakespeare. I want to go back to Shakespeare. I like the discriminations he made. I like that Falstaff was ostracized, and that MacBeth was killed. They were both dirtbags who today with the new universalism would be simply considered ahead of their time: like Satan himself.

Summer's slipping through my fingers.

Kant's Logic and Yours?

Let's say you fall asleep in the backyard and wake up to a lovely kiss. You have been dreaming that you are kissing your wife, but when you wake up, you realize that a wild boar has somehow gotten into your yard and is kissing your face.

Or let's say you are kissing someone that you are just going out with the first time, and you like it, but then you realize that the person you are kissing is actually a serial killer that is wanted in nine states and you recently saw a documentary about them on Forensic Files.

In both cases, a beautiful sensation is changed by the context in which it's perceived. There is no such thing as a local sensation to the human mind. It must be regarded within as large a context as the human mind can summon, because otherwise we would possibly be killed. In the case of the serial killer, we would almost certainly be killed. In the case of the wild boar, we might find ourselves gored.

Can there be sensation without meaning? Unless we interpret a sensation, it cannot be considered beautiful. And once we put a sensation into a wider context and evaluate it (I'd assume that everyone with an IQ of 30 or above will attempt this), it is only then that we can decide whether the sensation is beautiful. That's the precursor argument to the series that follows. I should probably try to add more empirical examples, but I wanted to see if this much would suffice since I don't have all day and either do you. From these examples, I believe that the following Kantian ladder will hold, and that this ladder will lead us from the most seemingly fleeting sensation right up to the dazzling intuition that God Exists.

***

If beauty relies on meaning to exist, then, unless we live in a meaningful universe, beauty cannot exist.

If this world is random then it is not meaningful.

The only way for this world to be beautiful is if God exists, because only an author with a purposive intention can create a meaningful world.

Therefore, only if God exists can beauty exist.

Beauty, as Kant reminds us, is an intuition of God's existence.

God's existence is the sole guarantor of meaning which in turn is the sole guarantor of beauty.

Without God, therefore, there can be no aesthetics.

Another burning question!

Almost everyone now assumes that W. is wrong in Iraq and we ought to pull out of Iraq. That is, everyone on the left.

I am for W.'s intervention as I am a classical liberal. I think that it is best to make countries free for voting, so that women and the poor can be heard. I like the fact that there is now education for women and girls in Afghanistan. I like that there is more freedom of speech in Iraq. I think they like it, too. There was a huge turn-out in the last vote. In ten more years the transformation will be complete. People scream, "It costs too much." They screamed even more during the American Civil War. Too bad. God demands that people are free.

Of course there are elements that don't like it. Our left doesn't like it, because it makes them look bad. All these years they did nothing, and then wham, W. takes over Afghanistan and puts in a liberal regime, and women can read and write again and belong to the parliament.

I would like the entire world to be liberal and democratic: where there is freedom of speech, freedom of inquiry, and freedom of religion. I would even like to see this in American universities -- where one faction (quasi-Marxist) has taken over, and rules in the name of the People, while suppressing all dissent and having nothing to do with intellectual diversity.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, Jefferson said.

Do we have the right to poke around in other countries and demand that they too recognize the universal rights to literacy, to voting, to freedom to speak? Do we have the right not to demand these freedoms?

The other day at the local pool I was talking to the mom of my kindergartner's best friend. Her husband has been in Iraq for two years. He is in charge of logistics at some place south of Baghdad. The morale of the military over there is good, and they want to finish the job. The Iraqis like them.

It's the foreigners who are blowing up Iraqis in Iraq. They are the same Talibanesque elements who held the Afghanis in bondage for a decade. We should not cave in to such people and allow the Iraqis to have to change one dictatorial yoke for another. Let's finish the job.

We freed Europe from Nazi tyranny, and we freed Asia from Japanese tyranny. Now we must save the Middle East from Islamic fundamentalist tyranny...

WHO CAN PASTOR?

One of my readers asked me about the case of a Pastor Schmeling, who has been asked to step down from his position as a Lutheran pastor because of his homosexuality. I don't know this person, but I have a question in turn to pose.

What is a pastor?

They have to be "called and ordained."

Called.

It means that God Himself has asked them to pastor. I honestly believe this.

I know that I haven't been called to be a pastor. I know quite a bit about Lutheranism, but whatever else a pastor is, they are something along the lines of wizards. But they are wizards who you can rub elbows with, tell jokes with, and perhaps sit down and discuss an issue with, and even laugh together with.

This doesn't mean that I could ever be a pastor. I would be a joke as a pastor.

The pastor must be able to call God into the house. The pastor must transform wine and crackers into the blood and living body of Christ. The pastor must levitate an entire community fifty feet in the air as if the Rapture is actually taking place. And I've known a number of pastors who can do this. My current pastor can do this.

For Lutherans, the communion isn't symbolic. It's real. It is the real blood and flesh of Jesus Christ. This is not a matter of knowledge. It's a matter of experience. Experience at an almost bizarre level in which reason itself is left on the floor as a festival begins in which -- through song, prayer, and transsubstantiation, an entire community is transformed and renewed, becoming one in God.

I don't think this has been happening in the Catholic churches where child molesters held sway. Can the liturgy by itself transform an entire community even when it is overseen by monstrously corrupt predatory beings who are more likely to have Satan in their hearts? Haven't the Catholics FELT the difference?

Christ's disciples were all straight men. None of them were gay. None of them were child molesters. What was Christ looking for?

I don't know what it is.

I can't even understand what's happening to me in the church. It's as if some kind of electricity is pouring through the rafters, and I am lifted out of myself into true communion. I don't even think a woman could oversee this process. It requires someone with a deep voice, like the deep voice of a sportscaster blandly announcing the 17th foul ball of a very good batter for the Phillies. Who would this be?

It wouldn't be me.

I would bet that it would be at most one in 500. Perhaps there are anomalies and there are some women or gay men who can do it. Lutherans (ELCA) allow women to do the job. About half of the ELCA thinks that gay men should also be able to do the job. But I think it's not a matter of inclusion and it's not what people think, it's what God thinks. There are some people who are chosen to do it. Why?

I have been to some churches where the transformation just simply doesn't happen. I have been to a Presbyterian church, and an Episcopalian church, and nothing happened. The service ended, and I was the same as I went in except my wallet was a little lighter. These were very nice men, and they seemed to me to be straight (one had on a wedding ring and talked about his wife), but they didn't have what it took. Some churches claim that everyone can pastor. The Unitarians take turns, I'm told, with everyone in the Congregation taking turns to be pastor! The Mormons do this, too. That's very inclusive, and in today's terms, that's dandy. Some other denominations do accept gay pastors. The Episcopalians have a gay bishop. I went to a Lutheran church and a female pastor talked about the laundry, and how going to church was just like doing the laundry.

Well, not for me. I mean, going to church for me is like being hit by a car bomb and ending up fifty feet in the air, totally transformed. Meanwhile, the pastor will go on reciting the verses, guiding me through it, juggling the congregation's souls as if we are two hundred and fifty balls, and he doesn't drop any of us.

It's a miracle.

I for one know that I have been excluded from this post and I'm glad. I also would not like to be Moses thankyou very much, or Job. I don't know if God only accepts heterosexual males for such positions. He seems to say so by example. The choice of Christ's dozen disciples also seems to argue for this. But he doesn't take all men. He has never even whispered or slightly inferred that I might be able to take on this role. And I have God to thank for this!

I think it's probably so that many different kinds of people can do most jobs from which they've been traditionally excluded. I think that women and gay men can be great poets, for instance. Emily Dickinson was a genuine poet. Walt Whitman was a genuine poet.

Lately there has been an enormous push to ordain women. The Catholic held out. Most of the Protestant denominations caved in. Then the next step was gay men. Will some denominations allow animals to pastor? If not, why not? And should we go back to the drawing board and to St. Paul, and argue that women can't handle this role, and also invoke Leviticus, where God says in the first person He's not inclined to love homosexuals? If it's true that only straight men can pastor that would be an anomaly of a kind that isn't understood by our inclusive democracy. Why Bishop Tutu and not Paris Hilton? Why Jesse Jackson and not Phyllis Diller? I can't explain it in such a way as to turn aside the envy of the professional resentment groups. Perhaps it has something to do with the pastor as bridegroom, or as needing some kind of soul that is the key to some process that otherwise doesn't take place. My hunch is that that's right, but what do I know? I'm not ordained, and all this is just speculation. That men are key because they are bridegrooms of some kind for the church is however my feeling about the symbolism of the thing. I don't think anyone knows but God, and maybe everyone else is wrong, and maybe God has a few surprises at the end when He sits us all down to explain it all. For people who don't think that God exists that would probably not be worth waiting for. For people who do, I think we had better be careful.

There are some who don't care about the church and don't get anything out of it and for them it's just a bunch of jibber jabber and even a porpoise could pull it off. But I think that since a porpoise can't even read the Bible, it would be very difficult for me to understand what was being said. I mean, this is a very precious thing, and if we wreck it, or somehow offend God, I think He will turn His back on us, and the world will end in fire and blood.

I'm not sure about Pastor Schmeling. His life is in the balance. Let others make the call, as they have already done. Let him go over to the Episcopalians, who I'm sure are very fine people, or let him worship next to me, another layman.

I can't explain much about the church. I just go, and I tell you, it works for me! There's not much else I can tell you. I would probably try a woman as pastor, especially if she was real conservative in everything else. I can tell you in advance I would be against a porpoise as pastor (I know the PETA people are already in a huff!) because even though some porpoises probably live a life full of purpose and piety I would feel funny eating green jello next to one.

Over the last couple of days we drove to the New Jersey shore. Riikka had the idea that the beach was going to be fun.

I was nervous. I didn't know if I wanted to drive in those thickets of thruways, and I had the nervous idea that someone would attack our small children and I wouldn't be able to defend them as I stood there shirtless.

The beach turned out to be ok. No one attacked the children. My child Lola met another child named Lola and that child named Lola threw sand in my face when I announced that we had to go.

We also climbed to the top of the Cape May lighthouse (199 steps).

One could see parasols along a twenty mile section of the beach, and some ugly inland lagoons with large white ugly birds nesting on them.

We also went to a dry town (no alcohol) named Ocean City. Lots of families out with strollers and ice cream. I drank a lemonade that cost 2.50.

Tristan spent the day jumping in and out of the rolling waves with his friend Michael. Lola built sand castles with the other Lola. Julian and Sofia played in the sand.

The only surreal thing that took place was single-prop planes pulling large banners across the sky. They advertised cell phone deals it seemed. This went on all day. At first it was magical, then boring, and finally, I didn't pay attention. I found starfish in the tidal pools, and threw a beach ball with Sofia. I waded into the breakers.

We stayed at a place called Economy Motel (poetic name) that cost 119 dollars with tax. It included a breakfast which consisted of coffee, a Danish, and a newspaper called the Star-Ledger.

PERCHANCE TO SLEEP

Julian slept
But first he asked
"Where's mommy?"
"In bed."
"Where's Timmy?"
"Asleep."
"Lola?"
"Asleep. Everyone's asleep but you."
He rolled on his back & fell asleep.

He slept like a cue ball in the corner pocket or
The erasure of a building.

His eyes.
His nose.
His mouth.
I wanted to kiss him
But didn't wish to awaken him
I tiptoed out to write this poem.

August 10, 2006
(written while visiting brother thus disturbing the usual sleeping arrangements.)

When I started this blog my initial idea was the progressivism inherent in the early surrealist movement could be resuscitated. What happened to the avant-gardes of the 1920s?

Partially they were torpedoed by the economic collapse of the 1930s. Desperate measures set in. In Germany and Italy fascism seized control of the governments and began to liquidate opponents. By 1940 the German avant-garde had been silenced. By 1942 the French avant-garde had been silenced.

In Russia the avant-garde had an initial early role to play. But by about 1933 they were completely silenced by Zhdanov's directive in regards to social realism. In effect, this silenced all experimentalism even into our own times.

The market collapse of 1929 led to an all or nothing sense that desperate measures were needed and experimentalism was sacrificed on the altar of pragmatism.

Surrealism had been a wild novelty fitting with the 1920s. By 1930 novelties were no longer needed. What people needed was bread rather than circuses. And the surrealists almost disappeared from the klieg lights. In the 1930s the surrealists tried to make an alliance with Russian communism but they were merely conscripted and put to work in tasks they didn't appreciate, and the alliance fell apart.

In the 1940s the surrealists under Breton had decamped to New York leaving the underground fight in France to the existentialists. When Breton and his group returned in the 1950s and 1960s it was to a French art world that had been overtaken by Sartre and his cohorts. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were supporters of the Soviet Union under Stalin, and later supporters of China under Mao. They gave way to the Tel Quel group who openly championed Maoism. Even Michel Foucault, according to the Miller biography, supported Mao in 1970.

Breton knew better and had already denounced Maoism in the 1950s. But he didn't have anything to offer in its place. Or did he? Increasingly mystical in orientation, Breton had taken up tarot cards, and he spoke with others of their astrological signs. Although he still met with Leon Trotsky in an attempt to forge an alliance with the left, they ended up discussing whether dogs had intelligence, and the discussion went nowhere. Upon his return, Breton ended up writing a third manifesto which cited a bizarre Mexican spirit of sorts that would later be celebrated by Carlos Castaneda. Breton guttered out into the occult.

A career that needs to be rethought is that of surrealist Philippe Soupault. I always felt that in his work was a surrealism that could possibly resuscitate an alliance between progressive thought and the arts. But his thinking, if one can call it that, was never very cogent. Instead of building powerful intellectual structures he had intuitions, mere wisps...

Can one situate an entire movement on wisps?

Soupault lived into his nineties and during that time published something like 70 books. There are novels, books of poems, memoirs, art criticism, and journalism. His intuitions were always right, or nearly always right, but he didn't have the intellectual strength to make those intuitions persuasive. In the early 30s he was on an elevator with Adolf Hitler and wrote an article, "Hitler, c'est la Guerre!" He was correct. His intuition told him at the time that had he been able to assassinate Hitler he would have been able to stop the second world war. But he didn't have a gun, and Hitler had a bodyguard, and the moment passed. Soupault ended up as a prisoner of war in Tunisia and was given electroshock torture.

Soupault wanted to keep poetry free of politics and thought of it in an existentialist sense (Kierkegaardian as opposed to Sartrean). He wrote of angels and trains, and wrote a bestselling book of poems for children in his 80s. He never took up the cult of the Marquis de Sade. He had a black secretary who became a famous poet in his own right. Soupault was one of the first to introduce William Blake to the French left, as well as James Joyce, and he was a close friend of William Carlos Williams. But what were Soupault's politics? It's not clear. Late in his life he worked for UNESCO, and he seems to have been against any form of nationalism. Is that good?

The avant-garde of the 20s went bad in America, too. Pound caved in to fascism. William Carlos Williams never had enough of a politics or economics to do more than distantly allude to it. He doesn't offer a model. By the fifties the Beats had taken over, but their NAMBLA orientation is repulsive. The Tangiers scene was a cover story for sexual exploitation of children. Can this be excused?

Today the avant-garde is at best a joke trying to get the media's attention. Andy Warhol's hijinks, and his closing the gap between marketing and fine art in his most famous images lead us to a conclusion that that road goes nowhere in terms of building an authentic politics. Zizek is a joke, at best. Paris Hilton's desperate regard for attention is no different than Zizek's, and Zizek's is no more compelling than Paris Hilton's. They are equally vapid.

The Democratic party is a communist ditty repeating the scapeogating mantra of race, gender and class.

Where can a universal politics be found? On whose shoulders shall it fall? Just as God chose Abraham, and Jesus chose Peter, on whose shoulders can the progressive politics of a neo-surrealism fall? Is the figure of Philippe Soupault too slight? There seems to be no one else in sight.

As identity politics appears to falter at its own inner contradictions (it's racist and sexist and classist in its very structure when what we need is a universal), the Democrats will seemingly disappear into the quicksand of paradoxical infighting, as upper class women and African Americans increasingly leave the party to go under in the quicksand of contradictions. This leaves only the Republican party. Perhaps they will win long enough to hold off the feministas and their matriarchal self-righteousness and bizarre groupthink and sentimentalism long enough to formulate something that might function as a new universal standard.

I have long sensed that in the Christian project is something that is worth saving. A regard for the poor. A regard for the marvelous. A regard for art. A love for this world. In all the desolation since the Great Depression and the floundering of humanity under communism or its materialist cousin capitalism, Christianity appears to offer a renaissance not so much under its captain Jesus, but in its first lieutenant Martin Luther and his contemporary epigones such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.

Can something of the initial 20's be resuscitated after the debacle of the 30's? If so, I suspect it is in the career of Soupault that a flare can be found to light the way in terms of an aesthetics. Soupault celebrated friendship, and was a cosmopolitan who spoke several languages (his wife of 50 years duration was a German citizen). In terms of a theology, it is in Lutheranism with its two kingdom's ideology. Will it lead only to passivism? No, but it will put a brake on too much revolutionary fervor that will allow it to be captured by a new Stalin or Mao or Castro or Ceausescu.

I see no true alternative to Lockean liberalism as the politics of the avant-garde... But wish that there was something from the wilder and woolier twenties that could be revived.

Ideas?