4 At Play with the Overly Revealed of the Lord
To a certain point, Ruskin celebrated the “booby capital-ism”, too. And see here how he wasn't against "pee-pee capital-ism", either. File under: The Grotesque. Grotesqueness was one of the six things, along with changefulness, savageness, rigidity, redundancy, and naturalism, R-Tool admired in gothic architecture in The Stones of Venice. If I am tolerated to return as a guest-blogger in the future, my plan is to discuss each of these six things as they manifest themselves in good poetry. For the rest of this week, I’ll focus on “grotesqueness”.
Grotesque: grotto-esque. A style of painting, sculpture, and ornamentation in which natural forms and monstrous figures are intertwined in bizarre or fanciful combinations. This is from old French and Italian, grottesca, the feminine form of grottesco, “of a grotto”, a grotto being a small cave, a word derived from the Vulgar Latin, “grupta” or “crypta”, which means hidden, to hide. Crypto, crypt, and grotto are all derived from the same Greek root: kruptos.
When effort, thought, and emotion are in harmony, as they were in the building of the great cathedrals of Europe, the resulting art makes its deepest and most permanent impression.
People say, I wish I lived in the hippie 60’s or I wish I lived in the roaring 20’s, and they must think I’m a freak when I say, I wish I lived in 1140. Those dark-ages days when effort, thought, and emotion were in harmony. Okay, sure, they had a couple of rounds of the Black Plague, and, okay, if you are different from us, we’ll have you ritually tortured and killed, but guess what? Been there, doing that. The 12th century, if I’m reading history books right, enjoyed quite a bit of peace, free-thinking, and opportunity for travel and self-improvement. It was the great era of cathedral building, storytelling, and, by corollary, a lot of boob statues appearing in church.
I started taking a lot of pictures of the incongruities found in the Catholic countries of France and Spain, through which I was walking, in which unsacred and sacred items rubbed up against each other in what to me was a rather comical, if quotidian, way: Crucifixes erected over junkyards, basketball hoops bolted into church walls, an air freshener under the Virgin Mary, “Ave Maria” muzak in a bar. A carpenter keeps his lunch cool in a holy water fount and reads the newspaper on the altar while he fixes the church door; gypsies using the cathedral doors as a soccer goal, the statues of two saints are used to tie a clothesline for the drying of underwear. And yes, that really is a chicken in church (I can't stop myself…It's a Church's Chicken!) I call such stuff “Our Lady of the Dumpster”, because years ago I took a picture of a lovely street corner grotto with a statue of the Virgin Mary much cared for, votive candles surrounding her in perpetuity. Below her, in the photo, a hideous overflowing garbage dumpster added another offering of incense.
At some point, I realized that this incongruity was not an incongruity at all, but a normal part of life in medieval Europe—that the sacred and the profane lived harmoniously, not incongruously, because frankly, they do belong together, and there was a time in history, a time known as the dark ages, when everybody was more or less pulling together with similar effort, though, and emotion. I don’t want to be an apologist for religious intolerance, but if you are Jewish and have been in Israel or Muslim and have been to Dubai, you know the relief of being “on the same page” with everybody else. In Spain, in France, even the atheists are Catholic.
There are enthusiastic poets who allow the sacred and profane to rub shoulders in their work, and you know their names. Hart Crane's "Lachrymae Christi" is about hooch (and as you can see here, churches have the best booze). “Oh that Walt Whitman,” my colleague Mary Kinzie said, sighing a little, “always on the make.” Emily Dickinson guards her enthusiasm, like a dog that knows the truth but doesn't tell, with her hefts of cathedral tunes and her brain funerals and her loaded-gun life. And let’s go out with a little James Schuyler, who knew from grotesque when he wrote,
“…Spring comes
And the winter weather, here, may hold. It is arbitrary, like the plan
Of Washington D.C. Avenues and circles in asphalt web and no
One gets younger: which is not, for the young, true, discovering new
Freedoms at twenty, a relief not to be a teen-ager anymore. One of us
Had piles, another water on the knee, a third a hernia— a strangulated
Hernia is one of life’s less pleasant bits of news—and only
One, at twenty, moved easily through all the galleries to pill
Free sleep…”
-from “Hymn to Life”