The terror of neutrality

Francis Alys

Francis Alys seems a little dull after Duncan Ward, however I did go to see the show at tate Modern and I do love his drawings and paintings.

continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:

People argue even today about Teresa of Avila and whether her ecstasies, which she enjoyed five centuries ago, were of a truly divine nature or if they were simply the mistaken result of transposed sexuality. But must it necessarily be so clear cut? Couldn’t her ecstasies have involved something of both spheres?

There is no reason to my mind why a spiritual transport should not be venereal too, and vice versa. If that were allowed then perhaps these high ecstasies, which are so troublesome to fit within the categories we have devised, might be rendered a little more understandable. Rather than polarize the religious impulse and the erotic urge, surely we should be allowed to have both, and at the same time.

Many have been quick to dismiss Teresa’s ecstasies as being “merely” misunderstood sexual orgasms; but even assuming that they were orgasms, they were plainly not just any old orgasms. When Teresa says that “a great force, for which I can find no comparison, was lifting me up from beneath my feet”, or that “the soul is utterly blinded, absorbed, amazed, and dazzled by the wonders that it sees”, then those are momentous things to report, regardless of what really brought them on. Until Teresa’s detractors have themselves achieved orgasms of comparable magnitude they are really in no position to say anything. Teresa has the high ground with her superior experiences and may feel entitled to call them whatever she wants.

But in actual fact, Teresa, in her own writings, placed increasingly little value on the raptures and ecstatic transports she received. Like her friend St. John of the Cross, she repeatedly stressed that the “spiritual consolations” were really only peripheral to the central business of obedience to god, that the receipt of such favours was not to be taken as any sort of index of holiness, and that they could even be spiritually harmful if handled wrongly.

This, though, is where I part company with Teresa. Reading her ‘Life’ was, for me, unashamedly a case of wading through the good Christian teachings to get to the exciting rapturous bits. I regard those as being her most valuable pages, pertinent for believers and non-believers alike (believers in god, in obedience, in ecstasy, in excess…) Teresa does say some very interesting things in playing down the importance of her ecstasies; but there seems little doubt to me as to what her greatest achievements were, and Bernini did not misrepresent her when he sculpted that notoriously sensualized statue in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.

http://www.sanguinearts.org.uk/dunword.htm

continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:

I saw the ecstatic smile on the face of a Chola idol whom centuries of anointing under honey, milk, water, ashes, and sand had worn down the metal of, making the features soft. The priests’ hands had rubbed these substances down over so many times that the eyes of the statue, open at the start, had closed; and when the artisan had come to re-carve the faded features he had kept them in their closed position, chiselling along the single line at the bottom of the eyelid – only on the left eye did the pupil very faintly peep through to show that the eye had once been open. The smile in those eyes was something remarkable, unmistakably the smile that is smiled when the face is anointed in milk, sand, water, ashes, and honey. It can only have been achieved by slow increments, too delicate for any craftsman to carve first time, the smile emerged from a long process of submergence, gradually sweetening, rising up more radiantly every time from under each shower of liquids.

It struck me as being a fine way to treat a statue, to treat it to baths such as this (I understand that the idols are often bedecked in flowers too). I want to be bathed like this – we don’t anoint enough in this culture. My parents are not religious, but they took me to the church to have me baptized when I was born: merely out of formality, or a sense of tradition. The ceremony was not spectacular. A culture shows a deplorable restraint when it thinks it can baptize its citizens with an eggcupful of water over the forehead – a tepid gesture.

I saw another smile, on the Apollo di Veio, at the Etruscan Museum in the Villa Borghese, Rome. Nando Espositi sent me to see it, my friend’s father and a more committed atheist than me. He told me that if he had to believe in a god it would be this one, this god that does not sit in the clouds looking down upon men but who looks you in the face instead, and smiles. And he was right to send me to look at this god because here again was another remarkable smile, magical in its aliveness, beaming benevolently out of a quizzically cocked head. I could see why Nando, worldlier than me, found special appeal in that communicative smile – more gregarious than the enraptured expression on the Chola idol. But both of these smiles were clearly touched with ecstasy: the one gave itself over to ecstasy unsparingly, while the other bore the ecstasy inside it in a more modest manner and kept up a simultaneous dialogue with the world of earthly men even as it glowed with unearthly fire.

People harp on about the Mona Lisa’s smile but why bother with such an anaemic enigma when mystery comes also in expressions of such elevated joy?

http://www.sanguinearts.org.uk/dunword.htm

continued Extracts from Ecstatic Notebook by Duncan Ward:

I purr with pleasure, I try not to cover it up; one of the secrets is not to get ashamed. Ecstasy seems to snowball when encouraged – it needs to be milked for all it is worth.

http://www.sanguinearts.org.uk/dunword.htm