In late October I visited Boston College with a class in which I'm currently enrolled. The Jerusalem and Athens Forum is a great books program at Gordon College that seeks to bring together questioners and seekers of every sort and every age. We visited the art gallery at Boston for an exhibition, which was at the time running a showcase of works by Georges Rouault. Rouault is a curious artist to study; while many of his pieces are set to religious tones and carry redemptive themes, the art itself often seems desperate, in many places the paint reaching as much as an inch off the canvas, as if he was struggling to create as quickly as he was seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, smelling, his works bearing the brunt of his soul's weight, panic and seeking. In an obscure corner of the lower level I found a case in which had been placed several pieces of illustration--Roualt putting to paper what French writer and poet Charles Baudelaire had so gravely described in his much-chagrined "Les Fleurs du mal," a work unabashedly full of sin and pain and ugliness and eroticism--all things the common sense of decency has deferred to the shameful category of "unmentionables." But perhaps it is the ugliness and sin in our lives that makes them meaningful. WHY WHY WHY? Why is Aldous Huxley so darn right? Goodness only when there is sin, freedom only when there is real danger, God only when there is poetry.
I think the best question I've ever been asked was posed by dear old Mr. Smith--that man certainly knew his way around the seeker's psyche. While reading through Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," he asked what in this wide world makes me angry, makes me happy, makes me feel free, makes me feel so caged I could scream. What makes me feel like an old fish at the end of a thin piece of line? the fisher(wo)man reluctant to take pride in her catch once she's seen its eyes mirroring her own? Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow! What is it that makes me alive, for good or bad?
Is there some sinful thrill in desiring a life of tension, if it makes things seem more real? Of what am I afraid? Of unhappiness? Of feeling insignificant, useless, lost, lonely? Of not knowing how to repent, or for what TO repent? Of forgetting how to trust, to love, to hope?
I'd let the fish go for any of those reasons. For all of them.
Our sins are obstinate, our repentance is faint;
We exact a high price for our confessions,
And we gaily return to the miry path,
Believing that base tears wash away all our stains.
(Baudelaire)
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1 comment:
You do an incredible job of depicting what it means to live in a life of tension, and the apparent paradox of it.
Though I don't want to accept such a dualistic view of life, I can still completely relate to the feeling of the meaning it gives; the satisfaction there is in witnessing great acts of love and kindness when able to contrast them with the opposite.
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