Hallowe'en

Happy Hallowe'en

It's October 31st,  Hallowe'en. (I keep wanting to put an okina instead of an apostrophe, so habitual has become my habit of trying two spell Hawai ‘an properly). It's the anniversary of my father's death, in 1986.  He died when I was thirty three, thirty one years ago. He's been gone for almost half my life--dying when I was the age Jesus was when he died. This holiday used to bring me childish pleasure, now it ushers in the season of death.  Our big accident, mom's and mine, happened Thanksgiving week end. She died from the injuries she sustained in it on Christmas Eve of 2009, eight years ago. So much for the autumnal holidays. Autumnal is right. This holiday calls up demons. This holiday melds the mask to the face.

This time of year I often feel my anger, such as it is, burbling up, asphalt through mud and water.  Anger on my parents' behalf. Anger at myself for my imagined disappointing them. Anger at myself for disappointing myself.  It comes up from underneath the guilt of failure, the shame of disappointment and frustration not mastered.  It's the depression of the beginning of the end of the year, even here in Hawaii where seasonal change is much more subtle. It's hard to peel the mask off.

James Ensor, The Entry of Christ into Brussels, 1889, 170" x 200", The Getty, Los Angeles

The masked masses of Brussels conduct a mardi gras parade led by death and Bishop Santa Claus.  Jesus is all but lost in the middle background, haloed and on an ass, flooded in the midst of a sea of caricatures and clowns under the banner "Vive La Sociale", all bearing down on the viewer, threatening to overtake her.  The huge painting was rejected by Les Vingt, an alternative arts organization which Ensor helped to found.  Though it had prominent place in his home and studio, it was never again exhibited publicly until 1929.  Just the same it became, in its impastos smeared with a palette knife, jarring chromatic contrasts, and harsh caricatures of the artist's public, foundation for European Expressionism in the twentieth century.

Rembrandt van Rijn, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, oil on panel, 58x46cm

⁸The LORD hath purposed to destroy the wall of the daughter of Zion: he hath stretched out a line, he hath not withdrawn his hand from destroying: therefore he made the rampart and the wall to lament; they languished together.^a

⁹Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the Gentiles: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the LORD.

¹⁰The elders of the daughter of Zion sit upon the ground, and keep silence: they have cast up dust upon their heads; they have girded themselves with sackcloth: the virgins of Jerusalem hang down their heads to the ground.

¹¹Mine eyes do fail with tears, my bowels are troubled, my liver is poured upon the earth, for the destruction of the daughter of my people; because the children and the sucklings swoon in the streets of the city.

The painting is not an illustration of the text, but inspired by it, creating visual tropes for Jeremiah's internal state. The Old Testament reading from the daily lectionary (in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (and yes, part of my spiritual practice is to pray in the morning over the daily lectionary readings--the Psalms in {very halting} Latin, the Old Testament and New Testament readings in the King James version {because that's the version with which I grew up, and I still find it's language lovely, beautiful, even, pointing to the holy, redirecting my attention from the quotidian language of my every day life}, and the gospel readings in French. Paintings often become a point of meditation for me in this process.) But the Lamentations express in the repetitive, psalm-like ejaculations of grief, Jeremiah's agony over the realization that his prophecies have actually come to fruition.  I can't escape the parallel with the current state of our country, though I'm conscious to resist the presumptuous parallels that the Puritans--and more recent politicians--drew between Israel and Jerusalem and the North American English speakers who became the United States of America. The fall of Judah (Israel had already split off and was suffering its own fate) came as no surprise to Jeremiah.  It was only shocking to his hostile audience, his fellow citizens. 

The painting is small, a little over two feet high, one that I found on my own while wandering in the gleaming forest of the Rijksmuseum's collection in 1973.  Like the portrait of his son, Titus, as a monk, that I've talked about here before, it's an intimate history painting.  A single figure, no action, with the spectacular destruction of the city in flames on the left--just glimpsed in the distance--reclines on, on what? we aren't really shown a furnishing.  Rembrandt only provides diagonal bands of light and dark in his characteristic, dramatic chiaroscuro (contrasting clear/obscure, light and shadow) spotlighting the bald crown of the prophet's head and his hand, limp in impotent despair. He can't resist the gleam on the temple vessels as on the prophet's pate.

I'm sympathetic to arresting grief.  And I love Rembrandt's explorations of internal states in the simplest of dramatic, but often not melodramatic turns, and the subtle moments of emotional transition. My first unschooled responses to the painting, my sympathy and admiration, were enhanced by my undergraduate teacher Ann Millstein, a recent Harvard Ph.D. at the time, who provided me an intellectual and historical foundation for the uninformed meanderings and responses from the year before during my year in Holland and my subsequent years in Boston.  The painting is from Rembrandt's earlyish period.  He's still fascinated by minute representations of texture and narrative (all the more minute in this small size).  But his spiritual penetration and sensitivity is patent early on. 

The Tempietto, Donato d'Angelo Bramante, in the Courtyard of St. Pietro in Montorio, on the Janiculum  in Rome, 1502 ff.

This is one of my favorite buildings of all time.  It's little, and a little out of the way, up a short flight of stairs from the street on the Janiculum, one of the hills which rise to startling vantages on the outskirts of the core of the ancient city and the Vatican.  I first heard of it, and saw it in the book of an undergraduate mentor, the architectural historian, Bates Lowry.  I was enthralled by the building and by his analysis.  I'd never heard of architecture spoken of in this way:  

It's a centrally planned building, a radically simplified and spare fever dream of Bramante's proposal for the evolving rebuilding of the new St. Peter's around the fourth century St. Peter's Basicilica in the Vatican. In plan it's a perfect circle inside a larger perfect circular Doric peristyle (colonnade) capped by a balustrade (row of balusters--like elongated, inverted amphorae).  In elevation (the face--or façade of the building) it's a cylinder of columns, screening a taller internal cylinder capped by a dome.  The circle was a desideratum of particularly church architecture in the high renaissance--the years around 1500 in Italy, say.

The Tempietto's function is a commemorative mausoleum, an ancient form for tombs, with its focus on the middle. It stands in t cramped, undistinguished courtyard beside the church.  I first saw it in person with Yvonne Mazurek, the art historian from SYA in Viterbo (a little over an hour north of Rome), and other friends, when I was speaking there.  I've seen it and photographed it a couple of times since (though my own photographs, are presently unavailable--long story, one I'm working very hard on).

Perhaps even because of it's small size, it was able to be built readily of load-bearing stone masonry--one of the purist expressions of an "ideal" renaissance architecture vision.