"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images..."
The Decalogue
Thumbnail Picture:
Madonna of the Meadow- Raphael
Music:
Gerald Finzi: Et In Terra Pax
Anton Webern: Five Canons (for Soprano, Clarinet and Bass Clarinet)
2. Dormi Jesu, Mater Ridet
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images..."
The Decalogue
Thumbnail Picture:
Madonna of the Meadow- Raphael
Music:
Gerald Finzi: Et In Terra Pax
Anton Webern: Five Canons (for Soprano, Clarinet and Bass Clarinet)
2. Dormi Jesu, Mater Ridet
The Worship of Images
The moment at which I realised that my friend was made of paper, we had been standing before Raphael’s Madonna of the Meadow in the National Gallery for about five minutes. If you do not know the painting, I would recommend that you immediately rectify this poverty in your experience, and knowledge. Mary, mother of God, is in her usual blue, a capacious blue robe which in its hue and texture apes a flowing stream, signifying thusly the rivers of her grief, as constant as those of weeping Niobe. The triangular, Marian figure is crowned with a cream-coloured shawl. The sleeves of her two arms, the palms on the end of which are joined symmetrically in prayer, are red, a lit strawberry. The meadow in which this Madonna sits, is somehow desiccated, grim, withered. Sparse trees, dried and unfertile earth, a few pallid cows here and there. In accordance with the convention of ecclesiastical Catholic art, Mary is looking down at Christ. The Christchild sits in the dip of her cross-legged lap. If we follow her gaze, directed not out at us but down towards her son, we encounter a sleeping, oblivious, and disquieting infant Christ. His slumber is fraught with premonition. Because Christ was born to die, the scene is oxymoronic, and forlornly proleptic: it is a scene not of joy but of grief, because it is one of death not of life. The positioning of the two figures, and the serene but infinitely solemn knowing in the faces of both mother and son, pre-empts the moment, some three decades away, when the sorrowful mother will gather up her slaughtered son in her arms, once he has descended from the cross.
There was a relatively palpable sense of bustle in the gallery. Crowds of varying piety made their rounds, with particular lone figures lingering before particular pieces, and the fast flash of a camera every so often alertly cocking the head of a security guard who would identify and admonish the offending photographer promptly. My friend was new to London. We were both trying to become painters, both first years at the Academy. But my friend’s knowledge of art was by far the poorer, and it was my mission to make his bank of reference a little more comprehensive. He was taciturn as we went round the gallery, moving through the gleaming halls, each wall more laden, more meaningful, more dizzyingly copious than the next. I demonstrated my knowledge to him all the while, just to emphasise my intellectual superiority in our relatively cool friendship. He wasn’t moved much at first, nothing in particular called to him, nor importuned him with that siren-song that makes one stop, that makes you open your eyes, afresh, a-more-fresh. That is, until we came to Madonna of the Medow: that made him stop and caused a tangible change in his demeanour. I elucidated the work, its typically Marian features.
“Mary?” he questioned.
“What do you mean?” I didn’t understand at first that he was asking for a surname.
“Mary Shelly?” he ventured.
I was perplexed.
“No, not Mary Shelly…Mary, Mother of God. The Virgin Mary.”
He thought for a moment, his big-eyed uncomprehension almost as astounding to me as the canvas we stood before.
“And the little one?” he enquired.
“What?”
“Who’s the little one?”
“Is this a joke?”
It decidedly wasn’t.
“That’s Jesus. Jesus Christ.”
“Oh, I thought that was just a thing people say when they hurt themselves or get surprised or have good sex”.
I went on to describe the legs of the baby, my feeling that the outward spreading of them was of some significance, a contrast to the crucified posture. But my companion had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.
My knowledge was useless to him. I was quite dumfounded. It was hard to believe that such a thing might be possible: someone to whom the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ were novelties. He stood silently before the painting, struck quite dumb, clearly moved. Not to the point of visible crying, but perhaps the dry verge of tears. People joined us, facelessly, their identities evaporated before this painting. Rapture, however informed, uniformly unified us all.
That’s when my friend grimaced and clutched at his head. He moaned a brief grunt of pain.
“Are you alright?” I enquired.
“Yes, yes,” he replied.
He scratched the top of his head, just left of the crown. A strange noise was issued as he scratched. He noticed my mystification and the strange look of enquiry in my eyes. But he didn’t say anything. Without my express purposing, my right hand stole forth and touched his left temple.
“What on earth?” I think I said.
“Be careful,” he said.
I searched his entire person, his cranium, every cranny, behind his weird ears, his flesh, under his clothes.
“You’re made of paper…?” I half-questioned, or rhetorically questioned. Perhaps I was declaring it. My intonation was a little confused, it was hard to know what intonation one should summon under such strange circumstances.
I grasped one of his wrists tightly. The paper body-part crinkled.
“Ow,” he said. He pinched his nostrils closed, and blew. It took considerable effort, but he was successful in reinflating the wrist which had just been contracted, maimed, creased by my squeeze.
“Tell me about Jesus…” he said, a little dreamily.
Without my being aware of it, word had gotten around the vicinity about my friend’s never having heard of Jesus before. I had been too distracted by the more intriguing discovery that my friend was made of paper to notice a murmur rippling around the room in a gradual crescendo. The crowd had gone through a number of stages in response to this scandalous piece of ignorance, not unlike the famous stages of grief: incredulity at first, then humour, then sadness, then anger. They had not, ostensibly, progressed beyond anger. Someone tapped me on the shoulder, my beginning to explain Jesus to my clueless companion an apparent intensifier of the incredulous anger they already felt. I turned around and a little fat woman opened her unattractive, asymmetrical mouth:
“Are you the one who hasn’t heard of Jesus?”
I was ready to cover for my friend, tell the woman something made up, such as that the fellow in question had already left. But my friend quite promptly and unabashedly owned up to his ignorance.
“That would be me,” he said.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” the woman growled. “And that’s coming from a hardened atheist.”
Behind the woman, a mob of angered faces approached. Some were pale with hurt, but most were red with ire. Some were avid with an inclination not unlike curiosity…what else had this man not heard of besides Jesus, what other sparkling specimens of humanity were news to him: Charles Darwin…Charles Dickens…Aubery Plaza…Tony Blair…Father Christmas?
“This is he!” the first woman barked with canine focus and abruptness.
“This is he!” another woman, far taller and more beautiful, crowed with avian declaration.
Unintelligible whispers circulated the room, an aura of scurrilous enchantment. The people were delighted to be outraged.
They descended upon my paper friend like a black flock of vultures, an ensuing and predatory mass. I did not join in with their assaults, their almost perversely rapturous attack- to which my friend submitted with dumb, uncomprehending and uncomplaining acquiescence-, but I watched it from the side, very carefully, jailed there by my powerless impotence. Half of me believed that he deserved it, half of me wanted to step in and help him: and whatever was left wanted to join in with the violence and the beating and ripping. The net result of all these impulses was Hamletian inaction. His butchers, men and women of all ages, orientations, creeds, colours, nationalities, children of all heights and temperaments, had all, evidently, been very hungry for mayhem, and my paper friend’s feckless but hardly malign innocence had been the spark that set it all free and, in so doing, sacrificed his lamb-like being to the lusts of that merciless mob.
When it was over, and he was as torn up as he could possibly be, my friend lay in tattered ribbons upon the floor: blood-coloured strands, flesh-coloured tassels, bowl-coloured folds. I stood over this serious, papery wreckage and felt perhaps as sad as I had ever felt before- maybe even more sad than I had ever felt before. I wanted to feel indifferent. But that was the last thing I was able to feel.
I gathered up my friend in my arms and unravelled a plastic bag. I put my friend in the plastic Tesco’s-Metro bag. I asked the silhouetted security guard to carefully guard this important bundle. He concurred without words or expression: he was a black and faceless form behind which an expansive painting of The Agony in the Garden lay, a blue and sad and counterfeit landscape.
I returned to the gallery with glue and nails and a hammer and tape and pins: an arsenal of adhesives and joining agents. The plastic bag within which packed the paper tatters of my friend, swung from the guard’s grasp. The guard had not joined in with the people’s violence, his being unable to stop it and his spectating it just as I had done seemed to have visited upon him a curse of motionlessness and impotence. His silence was a permission.
It was late and the gallery was nearly silent and unpeopled. The occasional distant step or lonely whisper, audible but not intelligible in the general quiet, dissonantly disturbed the stillness into which the soft hubbub of the city outside was seamlessly woven. I stood before the Madonna of the Meadow one last time, alone, my recent companion now curled up in a shopping bag, nothing but so many bits. I wanted to allow myself to cry, I tried to let the painting move me, wordlessly pled with it, reasoned with it- trying to coax from it- (and so from me) that reasonless, almost wanton release of tears, out of whatever strange magic, whatever blue and silver-grey and corn-coloured shimmer of suffering lay there trapped, alive, and perpetual within that painting. But my heart was as dry as dust, I had lost my faith. Not a single prayer soared, as once it might have done. I’m not talking about the Christian faith, or prayer in the Christian sense, I’m talking about my faith in the whatever-it-is in that posture, that rendering, that shading, that mixing, that look. It sustains me. And it was abundantly clear: I felt nothing, I felt unsustained, the holy whatever-it-was had no more power to sustain me.
So, on the barest wall I could find, in the widest, most deliberate-seeming breadth and spread of space available to me, I re-assembled my friend. My hope was that his deconstructed component parts could be manipulated in an act of odd, secular resurrection. A whole from tatters was produced. Remade, he was terrifying, a pale, uncanny spectacle: his papery majesty had been restored by my dexterity, and yet, because every tear and trauma and rupture was still visible, his coldness, his dead-eyedness, his general deadness, brought about by the totality of all those tears and soilings and creases, cast a chilly spell over his entire being. I spread out the reassembly I had effected of his paper hands and I knocked nails into them. I knocked nails into his feet, and I dashed his side (or so I made it appear with chalk and acrylic paints).
I stood before the image that I had created, a kind of artful, novel graffiti (made with anything but spray-cans), for a long time. The sun sank and the expression upon its face seemed to change. A jigsaw image, I thought, a useless restoration, a fruitless renovation of a thing’s many fragments. There was no life in it. But at least I was moved.
Deep into the night, in the blue, empty gallery, a great and gilded prison in which I had been left, I felt a hand upon my shoulder and breath bestir the fluffy hairs resting in the valley of my nape. The breath travelled to the outer, upper rails of my ears; the hand sank, lower -deeper than the sun, into my back, so it almost hurt.
“Don’t turn around,” the very deep, eerie voice said. “Never turn around. Keep looking.”.
My eyes were full of tears.
“Keep looking,” he moaned, deeply, with great ethereal authority.
My throat fat, it ached with the desire to weep openly. But in odd worship, a worship of images, I let only silence forth.
“Don’t turn around,” He said.
He said no more for a while, though His intense, monstrous presence continued to press almost rudely upon my frame. Little did I know…He was inspecting my work. And the last thing I heard him utter was Can’t say I care too much for all this modern stuff before he walked away and left me quite alone.