Henry Chichele's Junk

I loved my Kalamazoo paper for this year.  Just absolutely fucking LOVED it!

Which is pretty amazing, since before I wrote it, I'd not written anything in months and was despairing a bit about my ability to write.  I was deep into this curriculum craziness that is going on at my university and was feeling more like a mid-level bureaucrat than a scholar or an intellectual or a writer or a person or...  You may have noticed that I've not even written here since February, when I try to write at least one post per month.  I have to dive back into all that craziness now, but I want to try and capture this feeling first (in fact I fell down the curriculum rabbit hole for about a week and am now coming back to finish this and try and recapture that feeling).

On the one hand, the paper was a tight historical argument about the tombs of Henry Chichele (above) and Richard Fleming understood in the context of Lollard anti-image rhetoric and occasional acts of iconoclasm (given that Chichele and Fleming were both involved in anti-Lollard prosecutions and so would have been familiar with Lollard words, ideas, and deeds).  And at the same time, it made some general claims about life, death, and sculpture.   The links come through the transi figure on the lower level of the tomb, which represents Chichele's dead body, and the Lolllard tendency to identify sculptures as dead things; in combination with the effigy on the upper part of the tomb, which combines signs for death (the horizontal posture) with suggestions of life (the open eyes and active gesture), and Lollard acts of iconoclasm that kill images in order to prove that they were dead to begin with (because they weren't).  The combination of the tombs and the Lollards gave me a way of articulating historically some of the same ideas about sculpture I've worked with here in terms of my own responses as creepiness and in terms of theory as sincerity.

Some quotes from the paper, because one of the things I LOVED about it was the language:

For the addition of the transi effectively emphasizes the fact of death and so highlights the deathly aspects of the effigy, but without eliminating the effigy’s contrasting signs for life.  He is dead, he is dead, he is dead – it seems to say – except in the ways in which he is still in fact just a little bit alive.  Thus we are again doubly haunted, by the tomb’s doubled form, by the presence of death in the transi, and by the presence of life in death in the effigy.  And how much more true would this have been in the approximately twenty years between the creation of Chichele’s tomb in the 1420’s and his death in 1443.  For his tomb announced that he was dead, dead, dead, except that he was still alive! Perhaps even seated in his throne positioned opposite the tomb inside of Canterbury cathedral.

And

The Lollards were thus haunted by images. Their insistence that images were dead, dead, dead – that each was the site of an absence – seems to have been a response to persistent disruptive perceptions of their potential for life – for each to be a presence. And so images had to killed in order to prove that they were dead all along, because they weren’t, or at least not entirely. Or else they had to be punished by burning, either for their disruptive potential liveliness or for their disappointing deadness. And so there are some structural similarities between the forms of Chichele and Fleming’s tombs and Lollard attitudes towards images: both insist on death, the tombs in joining the transi to the effigy and the Lollards in their rhetoric of dead sticks and stones, and yet neither can let go of the signs of life, the tombs through the effigy’s ambiguities and the Lollards through their iconoclastic actions and desires.

The language about haunting in both quotes refers to the theme of the session and to my own provisional definition of haunting as the disruptive presence of that which is supposed to be absent.  I want to turn this piece into article in which this rough idea about haunting is replaced by some theoretical work on zombies, but I have to read up on that first.

The discussion in the session took an unexpected turn in focusing on one detail in Chichele's transi, which I'd not really thought much about, his gesture of covering his genitalia with the shroud.  Its a little easier to see in this detail:

on the right side, the lower bit of cusping in the arch overlaps with his hand which is holding the cloth in place. 

My first though was, well of course his junk is covered up, he was the archbishop of Canterbury after all, he's not just going to be letting it all hang out right there in the cathedral.  But then, if it was just a matter or propriety or prudery, the sculptor could have covered his junk without making use of the dead man's hand.  The shroud could have been there on its own, for example; its not really cloth after all, it's carved stone, and so it doesn't need to be held in place, it's not going to go anywhere. The hand gesture could be artistic convention, since its something like a pudica pose from ancient sculpture.  Although that could suggest some interesting gender-bending, the archbishop of Canterbury as Venus Pudica?  And yet as a dead and decomposing body?

Because the gesture is most interesting to me at least in relationship to the obvious deadness of the rest of his body.  It is the one little sign of life in that otherwise clearly dead body.  It then extends the ambiguity of the effigy into the transi, so that neither is entirely or simply dead nor alive.  Both are both, at least to some degree; the effigy is maybe more alive, but still partly dead, and the transi mostly dead, but still a little bit alive.  And life as signaled in the transi is defined in a very specific way by that gesture.  What does it mean to be just a little bit alive?  Is it to be able to produce life, thinking of the genitalia as life-giving organs?  Or is it to have a sense of self-control, self-protection, self-possession - or simply of self - thinking of the gesture itself more than what it is covering?  

Love

I've loved these since I first saw them: Kate Clark's Ceremony on display at CSU gallery as part of Animatopoeia: A Most Peculiar (Post Modern) Bestiary, an exhibit curated by Art History major Omid Tavakoli (here for the artist's website and here for the gallery's).   Other people kept telling me they found these creatures creepy, but of course one of the things I love about sculpture in general is its creepiness.  And I didn't find these creepy at all, I thought they were so - Nice.  Gentle.  Kind.  Maybe it's the tilts of their heads, all off a bit to the side, as if in sympathy with their observers. Maybe its their skinny little legs, and hooves like pointed toes, that make them seem so delicate and their stances so precarious.

Like this guy, I got up close to peer into their faces and try - but never succeed - in meeting their gazes.  Maybe that's what others read as creepiness, the way the creatures seem to draw you in to look, but then refuse to engage with you directly.  Again, that didn't seem creepy to me.   Instead it seemed, again - Gentle.  Shy.  Sincere, in the way I've used that word in that past here.

I've wanted to write about them, but haven't gotten around to it until now, because this is a crazy semester (hello endless curriculum paperwork).   And because I didn't feel like I had much more to say about them that what I've already said about sculpture in general in the posts I've linked to here.  Only that the combination of the human and the animal in these, and in Clark's work in general, pushes the creepy/sincere combination of proximity and distance that is basic to sculpture, for me at least, in a slightly different direction.  These are close to me in their human faces and their awkward stances even as they are distant both in their animal bodies and in their status as sculptures. 

But in that combination of proximity and distance I also see some basic truths about human relationships: for other people are both as close and as distant as these sculptures, as animals and as sculptures, are to me.  And then I read this, in Barthes A Lover's Discourse, which I picked up at Powell's over Christmas and have been reading before bed:

I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know the other better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge...and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found.  I cannot open up the other, trace back the other's origins, solve the riddle...Then all that is left for me to do is to reverse my ignorance into truth.  It is not true that the more you love, the better you understand; all that the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known; his opacity is not the screen around a secret, but, instead, a kind of evidence in which the game of reality and appearance is done away with...Or again, instead of trying to define the other...I turn to myself; "What do I want, wanting to know you?" What would happen if I decided to define you as a force and not a person?  And if I were to situate myself as another force confronting yours?  This would happen: my other would be defined solely by the suffering or pleasure he affords me.

And so I say again that I love these sculptures.  But not in a loose, sloppy, gushy way.  In a very precise, structural way - as Barthes is writing about love as a structure or a series of structures.   This would be the structure of the last and of many of my relationships.  I have a thing for difficult, even impossible, people.   And maybe that is similar to my thing for sculptures. 

Monolithically

This is the Adamas stone image that I mentioned in the note I added at the end of my previous post.   I've been thinking about it since in relationship to a discussion in my medieval art course earlier this fall.

I taught that course differently this time around, structuring it around the essays in the Medieval Art History Today - Critical Terms volume that was published last spring as a special issue of Studies in Iconography.  In the first half of the semester, I alternated between lectures and discussions of the essays, and in the second half, I only lectured twice and we focused on discussions.  Before each discussion, the students were assigned to do a "reading report" in Blackboard, answering a set of questions about the reading and posing a question or two for our class discussion.  I was able to see these before class and use them to plan the class.

One of the more interesting discussions we had was about Karl Whittington's essay on "Queer."  At this point in the semester, the reading report asked the students to pay special attention to the author's use of previous scholar's work and many of them asked about a word that appeared in one quote in the essay - monolithically.  It's a quote from Eve Sedgewick that defines queer as "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality, aren't made (or can't be made) to signify monolithically" (p. 157 in the Studies in Iconography volume).  After establishing the basic meaning of monolith as one-stone, I paraphrased the last part of the quote as "when the constituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality" don't or can't be made to act like one big stone.  We were then were able to discuss what it might mean for gender and/or sexuality to be like one big stone - and why neither is really like that at all.

For me, the Adamas stone became the image of that impossible monolith: a perfectly round closed sphere, elevated as perfect up on its mountaintop; but isolated there, stranded outside of any and all relationships. 

But is it really?  Looking at it more closely now, I notice how its black outline not only separates from it from the surrounding parchment, but also flows down into the mountain side and then into the frame of the image and even into the form of the initial above.  And so the very outline that at first seemed to set it apart as a closed form in fact creates connections into the world around it.  Nothing lacks connections.  And I notice that the stone isn't internally consistent: inside of that black outline is a lighter parchment patch, but then a darker center, so that the stone has internal parts that are in relationship to one another.  Relationships don't have to be external.  And so the monolith isn't really monolithic - perfect, closed, whole, independent - and the monolithic is again revealed to be an impossibility.

Karl's essay also set me off on a tangent of readings and re-readings - to Karma Lochrie's Heterosyncrasies and from there to the letters of Abelard and Heloise.  The link being Lochrie's reference to Heloise's discussion of the issue of visitors in the monastery - specifically female visitors in a convent of nuns.  Heloise was worried about their presence as being seductive for the nuns since she writes, in my Penguin volume's translation, that "nothing is so conducive to a woman's seduction as woman's flattery, nor does a woman pass on the foulness of her corrupted mind so readily to any but another woman" (p. 161).  So much for keeping your firestones separate! And yet in reading her letters, what struck me more was her confession of her own continuing desire for Abelard, probably because it seems much more personal, where her discussion of the nuns' visitors is shaped by the official discourse of misogyny.  Her description of lost love also resonated with my own feelings this fall.   She writes: "In my case, the pleasures of lovers which we have shared have been too sweet - they can never displease me, and can scarcely be banished from my thoughts.  Wherever I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened longings and fantasies that will not even let me sleep...Everything we did and also the times and places are stamped on my heart along with your image so that I live through it all again with you.  Even in sleep I know no respite.  Sometimes my thoughts are betrayed in a movement of my body, or they break out in an unguarded word" (p. 133).  Abelard's response to her broader question about the nuns' situation - no visitors and keeping silence - advises becoming monolithic - closing and isolating the community and the body - and yet her expression of the unwanted effects of desire of her body and her mind shows that to be impossible.  Again, relationships don't have to be external.

Finally, this fall, even as firestones and monoliths have been on my mind, I've been making paintings of various stones that I picked up last summer on the Oregon coast.  These are done in watercolor pencil on hot press paper.  They are small, 2 inches by 1.5 inch; in part because it's easier to get a saturation of color in watercolor when working small, in part because I like small things, and in part because I want them to resemble the paint chips you might get at a hardware store - while being obviously handmade.  The shapes, then, are not meant to replicate the shapes of the stones.  The only qualities of the stones that I am paying attention to are color and texture.  Here are three, photographed with the original stones.  And while each is a single stone, none has the quality of a monolith, for each has overflowed its boundaries to some degree and each has internal variations and differentiations.

Firestones

A pair of firestones, from a twelfth-century English Bestiary.  And the first interesting thing is simply the appearance of stones in a book about beasts: these are beastly stones, then, and so lively rocks.  And as living things, of course, they are gendered.  One category distinction, that between animate and inanimate, is refused and so that another, between male and female, can be extended.  Their gendering is crucial to the meaning that the bestiary text assigns to the stones.  Kept apart, male and female firestones are perfectly safe; but put together, they immediately burst into flame.  Just so its better to the keep male and female religious apart - and for male religious to keep away from women entirely - otherwise the flames of lust will be ignited.

But.  What is curious to me about this and other images of firestones, is the way they downplay the distinction of gender.  Firestones may be male and female, but in these images they don't really look all that different.  In this image in particular, both have long hair that curls down their backs.  Both have big hands in similar poses that make active pointing gestures.  And both have prominent curved shapes on their chests.   The female, on the right, is identified only by her nipples, and the male, on the left, by a beard  But apart from those small signs, they are remarkably similar.  Could this also be, at a first glance and so for a few moments at least, that supposedly safe single-gender environment?  And nevertheless be going up in flames? 

Another set of firestones, from a thirteenth century Bestiary.  At the top of the page, the two are divided, I would assume into that supposedly safe single-gendered environment.  But if that's what it is, then both are alone there.  And they are divided by a tree, but it also joins them together, and gives the scene a very Adam and Eve in the garden kind of feel.   It could be the moment before the fall, which was also a fall into gendered difference: first revealed by Eve's weakness when faced by temptation and by her tempting of Adam, and then reinforced when he is set to work and her to bear children in pain.  But in this image, both of the figures are picking fruits from the tree - together and simultaneously.   And again, the two look remarkably similar: the one on the right maybe has longer hair, but that's about it.  Below, as the central tree disappears, they wrap their arms around each others' shoulders, while flames shoot up from below.  They are essentially mirror images of one another and so I again see that supposedly safe single-gendered combination itself going up in flames.  Maybe the only safety is in solitude?  

*********************************************

A few more thoughts on these after reading Jeffrey Cohen's post on them over at In the Middle and following up his link to the manuscript from which the second comes.

First, in the manuscript, the firestones images appears on the page before the text on firestones.  The text on the page with the image is actually about death - its the conclusion of a longer text on different words for the dead person, the dead body, the funeral, etc.  What an interesting juxtaposition for these very lively stones.  The text about the firestones themselves, then, appears on the following page and mentions both Eve - as having been tempted - and Adam - as the first to have been harmed by the love of women.   That follows up nicely on the Adam and Eve (or Adam and Steve?) suggestion in the firestones image itself.  Finally, the firestones text appears on the page with another image of a very different stone - the adamas stone - and the beginning of the text on this type of rock.  The adamas image is interestingly different, as Jeffrey Cohen points out, as it is shown as a stone not as a human form and it is shown all alone on the top of a mountain.

Maybe maybe maybe, the layout of this manuscript would allow me to mix and match, though, and see the adamas image as a solitary firestone.  That is, as a firestone kept from bursting into flame by being kept carefully apart - not just from stones of the other gender, but from all stones, and really from everything.   Maybe maybe maybe, this rock's splendid isolation pictures my final thought from above - that the only safety lies in solitude.  But then safety also comes with the loss of humanity, the solitary stone's loss of anthropomorphic form.  And finally then, maybe, the lesson here has to do with community.  That only through interaction with others do we become human, but that always bring with it the danger of it going up in flames.

Endings

I've loved this since I first saw it: it's a late Roman sarcophagus with Dionysus, unfortunately now faceless, gloriously sprawling in the center, leaning on one of his followers, and Ariadne, splayed out, asleep at his feet.  She is going to wake up to HIM.  And since this is a sarcophagus, her sleep has to be read as death, and that awakening as a final one, to - as I always say to students when I teach it - an ecstatic erotic encounter with the god.  And so, suddenly, death doesn't seem so bad.

Right now, though, I'm thinking about it a little bit differently.  Because I'm thinking about how sleep is different from death.  Because sleep, and waking from it, repeat - over and over and over again.  Day after day after day.  Where death happens once (and I don't know what if anything happens afterwards).   So as asleep, Ariadne isn't going to awake just once to her encounter with the god, but is going to do so daily, over and over and over again.  To me, that's even better.

Because I love repetition.  I'll read the same books, watch the same movies and tv shows, over and over again.    I make habits easily: to do something for the first time can be very hard for me, but do the same thing twice and it's already a habit.  I will go on to do it over and over again.   I like days to repeat: all Mondays to be the same, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, etc.  I think that is why I've always liked school, because it sets a pattern for the day and the week and the year, that happen over and over again.  The hardest times in my life have been times without that structure: summers as a child, the year I was out of school between high school and college, the period in graduate school when I had finished coursework and was supposed to be writing my dissertation.  The only way I finally did that was by learning to create patterns for myself; mornings are for writing, afternoons for reading or teaching, repeat over and over and over again.  I still use that pattern in the summers.  And it's one of the things I loved about ballet.  Class is always different, but there is a pattern to the exercises (plie, tendu, second tendu, and so one) and exercises contain patterns that repeat (in fours or eights, en croise, en dehors then en dedans, right and then left) over and over again.  My teacher, Barbara, used to set these crazy exercise that began on the right, repeated about half way through on the left, then had a different ending, and then started all over again from the beginning on the left and ended with the partial repeat on the right.  You had to mark those constantly to drill them into your mind.

And not only do I love repetition, but to me repetition feels like love.  I read this passage from Peggy Phelan years ago and it has stuck with me ever since: "love is, among other things, the performance of belief in repetition - that the beloved with return, that each of you will come again."  (Mourning Sex, p. 150)

The relationship I was in for the past few years was never regular and predictable like the rest of my life - the parts that are in my control.  I never knew when he was going to come.  I would get an email or a text and few hours later he would be here.  But, surprisingly, I didn't mind.  Not knowing when it would happen meant that it could happen at any time, on any day.  It was possible every day.   And if I didn't know when he was going to come, I could count on the fact that was going to come again.  Over and over and over again.

But he is not going to come again this time.  And that is very hard for me to accept.  The idea of getting back together with someone is always very attractive to me, more so than meeting someone new.  But he and I have already done that once and it is not going to happen again -  I struggled just to write that down.  I still want to believe that there is some chance, even though I know better.  To have to let go of any hope of his return feels like a death to me.  Total.  Sudden.  Inexplicable.  Unredeemable.

Pax Oregonia

Enough said.

Haunting

This is one of my own photographs from my time in Paris that I've altered quite a bit, trying to get it to look something like the photographs by Eugene Atget that I saw at an exhibit at the Musée Carnavalet.  Its close, but not perfect.

The Atgets were remarkable for the sense they gave of the historicity of the city - of its past as both distant and somehow present at the same time.   Of the city, then, as somehow haunted by its past.  Many of the sights he photographed no longer exist after a century or more of urban renewal projects.  And yet the Marais - the area right around the Carnavalet - escaped most of that and so looks more like Atget's Paris than much of the rest of the city.  So you can walk out of that museum and still see something like what you saw in his photographs inside.  The photographs were intended to document the old city even as it disappeared and so to capture it for the future.  But they are now visibly old too, sepia toned and mounted on grey cardboard.  And so you have these old things, documenting a still older city, but a city that you can still see around you in parts of the city as it stands today.

One aspect of the Atget photographs that I was not able to replicate here is the presence of the blurred forms of people who must have passed by during their relatively long exposures.   Atget's images, and so the city as represented by them, seem haunted by these fleeting Parisians.  Their presence makes these photographs become images of time as well as space or place.  And that time has passed, even if the places still exist, at least in part.  Seeing them just barely there in the photographs is like seeing the past made present, and seeing it disappear, both at the same time.

I would have liked to somehow include myself in this image as one of those blurred forms, first because it would do well in capturing my experience of this actual place.   Its the doorway into a church, Notre Dame des Blancs-Manteau, which has a statue of the Virgin and Child in a niche above the doorway.  I had walked by here several times without noticing it, until: on the Sunday before my last week there, walking to a yoga class in the rain, I heard the sound of voices intoning something together, coming out of the open doorway.   I looked to find the source of the sound and then looked up and saw Virgin and Child.  It was a perfect moment.  I went back later to take photographs of the doorway, but had a hard time finding it again at first, and then never was able to get that perfect moment back - of course.  The city was still there, but the moment had passed, except for the traces it left, this time in my memory.  I feel haunted by it.

At the same time I feel like part of me is now haunting this place and Paris in general.  And so I'd also like to insert myself as a blurred form into the photograph to show that part of me that got left behind there.