We Embrace

I ask
I try
To see a reason
I kneel
I bow
To your fragrant body
Your warmth envelopes me
Enraptures me
Like the sea you caress me
I hope
I yield
I release all I hold dear
I am born anew
From darkness
Into light
We embrace
The velvet night

Joe Battle 4/23/2012

Two of my favorite childhood activities

Two of my Favorite Childhood Activities

1. Building with crush proof boxes my Dad brought home when he returned from a months long cargo run at sea.

2. Rowing my boat around the lake in New Jersey I vacationed on every summer.

My dad was a merchant seaman. He'd be gone for months at a time. In those days he'd smoke cigarettes which came in crush proof boxes. He use to save the boxes and on his return give me quite a collection. He never stayed home long, only a few days, then he'd return to sea to support his family.

I played for days building bridges, buildings, and whatever else my young mind could invent. This activity was innately purposeless and completely voluntary. It had an inherent attraction based on a blending of the natural Lego style of building and it's connection with my dad.  During those periods of building I experienced a timeless time, free of any other distractions. Hours passes without my knowing. I was completely absorbed in those moments of play, and felt close to my dad who was away. I lost consciousness of myself as a separate individual being absorbed in my creative act. I improvised from moment to moment visualizing real structures into existence, past the truth of simple cigarette boxes. Finally I felt drawn to continue this activity over, and over, again because of the many satisfying personal rewards this experience gave me.

The Lake: I was an only child. I learned how to play by myself. I was never lonely. Just the opposite was true. A wondrous world lay waiting to be discovered without anyone else in between describing it to me in their voice. Every summer of my youth was spent at a lake in the mountains. I stayed with my Uncle and Grandmother in their home. It was a fanciful place because it was a traditional log cabin. It was built in that rustic style previously common in the mountains. It was made from whole logs smooth cut from mature trees. His home was on the point of the lake with water on three sides. Many times, in the early summer evenings, I'd row my small boat out onto the lake close to the cabin. My uncle loved to play piano at that time of day. I still remember how his playing drifted out over the water. I'd set the oars of my boat and listen to the water lap against it's hull combining with the jazz, or classical, melodies my uncle played. It set a certain lyrical mood to the end of the day which still lingers in my thoughts.

Alone, as the day ended and twilight overtook the sky, I was lost in the immediacy of those moments in a certain way which is no longer available to me as an adult. This was play done for it's own sake, for the experience of the moment. It was totally voluntary on my part. No one told me to be there. No conditions were framed around my acts. I was inherently, naturally, drawn to participate in this activity. I cannot describe why I was drawn to do this. I can only speak about the effect it had on me. This effect was truly one of a loss of self, unaware of the passage of time, of living purely in the present, free from any constraining framework, and free of schedule or commitment. One movement, one direction, was as likely to occur as any other. The combination of my uncle's structured melodies and my random rowing set a spontaneous, always flowing, pattern of experience, a pattern I always wished to repeat. A pattern which was never exactly the same.

I Play Two Childhood Activities, identifying and explaining the patterns of play involved.

One word. Lego. Yesterday my 9 year old son and I played together. Lego comes in theme sets. Using pieces from many different theme sets we built our own. Death Star blocks combined with Jungle Palm trees and thatched huts, while X-Wing fighter parts fit surprising well into Hobbit themed worlds. 

Overall the experience was one of focused fun. It was remarkably similar to my childhood building. Both materials divested themselves of their original purposed meaning finding new symbolic form in our spontaneous and unstructured journey. My childhood building took the form of classic solitary play. I was completely engrossed in playing. I was in my own world not often distracted by other's activities in the home. This time my son and I  engaged in associative play, interested in each other, we were involved in a strong social interaction while we played. We transitioned into cooperative play when organization became a strong part of our play, we had a goal, which was to create a shared vision, and we adopted roles acting as a team.

Later we rowed our canoe on the lake in front of our home. What a marvelous feeling to do with him what I'd done as a child. For a time I resisted the temptation to share my childhood experience and immersed myself in the moment with him. Many ducks swam close by waiting for any food we might have. After a while they wandered off leaving soft wakes behind. The evening sun began to strike brilliant colors in the sky reflected in the water. 

     I describe what if felt like to play my favorite childhood activity as an adult. 

As I rowed i was a Kinesthet, loving the movement of my body immersed in the rowing sport. 

Later, as I shared my early experience with my son, I became the Storyteller using my imagination to recreate that time from long ago and pull it forward into the present experience for us to share. The timelessness of true uninterrupted play became intuitively evident in those tranquil moments of rowing and storytelling.

Joe

My Sons and Daughters.

“Lay down together in the tall grass my sons and daughters.  Feel the soft wind caressing your face and rustling your hair. The air around you is full of the sweet smell of flowering trees. You are warm with the thrill of life within your bodies. I am privileged to be alive to share these feelings with you.”

Joe Battle

Text embedded in my digital paintings:

Text embedded in my digital paintings:

For human beings throughout history, love has been considered a mystery, for it is an emotional experience that is both transcen­dent and personal at the same time. Love is perhaps the most familiar yet most unknowable of our emotions. It can transport us beyond our ego and fill us with bliss and compassion, but it can also be a crucible of rawness, pain, and illusion.

Particularly in an intimate relationship be it romantic or everyday love's power can magically expand our humanity. At its very best, passion is spacious, open, compassionate, and even joyful. Yet how ironic that, as imperfect human beings, we yearn for "per­fect love," for it will always elude us—the experience of love, whether painful or joyful, is always perfectly imperfect; this is love's paradox

 "If you can­not fall in love, you cannot get enlightened." For it is this state of leaping into the chaos of love—of being open, uncertain, and vulnerable---that becomes a stepping-stone to our highest self. When we truly love another person, we "lose ourselves," or our self is somehow transcended—even in a moment of wild carnal desire, some tenderness for our beloved arises and it cracks our heart open and changes us forever.

If we can remember the fragility of love and see our beloved through the lens of impermanence, appreciation naturally arises; in Japanese this is known as mono no aware, the beauty of the transitory, be it a flower or love itself. As with all of life, within the seed of love is the seed of sorrow and death, which heightens its poignancy. Through loving one other person with this "bro­ken heart," we have the rare opportunity to learn to focus less on our self and more on others—and that is the beginning of "true" love.

(Based on my research into the poetry of Love)

Saudade, the Place of Longing, and Duende, the Inspiration of Ecstasy

Saudade, the Place of Longing, and Duende, the Inspiration of Ecstasy

"In Search of the Sky" 

"Life is something that should not have been." (Schopenhauer)

Saudade and Duende are intertwined in deep felt artistic performance. Saudade can be described as "the love that remains" after someone is gone. And as a vague and constant desire for something that does not, and probably cannot, exist. (Bell) It is unattainable love and unrequited love. Duende can be understood as experiencing deep feeling, and even if only for a brief moment, existing in a profound emotional state. Duende has inherent within itself the pure authenticity of creative expression.

Francisco Lorca traces duende to the ancient culture brought by Romani from which Iberian and flamenco traditions arise. These are the ancient Oriental songs brought to Europe through North Africa into Spain by the gypsies, who trace their lineage to the ancient Aryan of northern India. Lorca believes duende is a primeval and prehistoric motivator. It is that ancient remain of an age now forgotten in the dim mists of time. It is remembered only in the emotive aspects of song and performance.

Flamenco is the ideal vehicle for this evocation of deeply felt archetypal artistic expression. As the guitarist plays, for this brief time together, artist and listener transcend the ordinary and enter the sublime. The world around can fade in bright moments of pure bliss. A deep overwhelming primal need will find its satisfaction. An ecstasy uncoils from a hidden core. Starting deep within it blossoms like the warmest memory of all past forbidden pleasures. This is what great art can achieve. And this achievement is done in concert. Without the interaction of the two the one cannot flower. And it is in this flowering that the true intrinsic, unknowable, and unspeakable, beauty of the human situation is apparent.

Duende is the essence of suggestion. It rises from inside the human heart as a passionate response to music, dance and theater. Conversely it also uniquely inhabits the gladiatorial performance of the bullfight. Bullfighting is the sole remaining Roman blood sport within the modern world. Its origins are pagan and remote. Duende is a bodily reaction to an artistic performance that is particularly expressive.

Four elements can be isolated in Lorca's vision of duende. These elements are irrationality, earthiness, awareness of one's own mortality, and an intimation of the diabolical. (Maurer,1998) The Duende is a demonic earth spirit who helps the artist understand the limitations of intelligence, who brings the artist face-to-face with death, and who helps him create and communicate memorable, spine-chilling art.

Lorca parallels the deepest and most expressive style of flamenco "Siguiriya" to the cries of Euripides’ Pentheus when beheaded by his mother, Agaue, when she is under the primeval influence of Dionysus.  Dying Pentheus becomes the embodiment of humankind’s encounter with that primeval current which is manifest as Duende. In this birth of Greek theater Pentheus tries to tie Dionysus but he rather binds up a bull. So it is in man’s struggle with the bull, embodied in the bullfight, that death in its most ancient form is confronted. “The bull has his orbit, and the bullfighter has his, and between these two orbits is a point of danger, the vertex of the terrible play.” (Lorca)

Pentheus plunges a knife into Dionysus and the blade passes through shadow, because after all, death is the shadow of life. In the end Pentheus reaches for his mother's face pleading with her to recognize her son. He reaches out to stroke his mother's cheek and begs her not to kill him.  In his final moments Pentheus understands the full extent of Dionysus' powers, the power that death has over the living. Agaue driven mad by Dionysus proceeds to rip her son to death. Wanting to see what is forbidden traps him. Likewise it is the folly of humankind in wanting to understand its true nature in the unfolding of time, in the unending cycle of birth, life, and death, which traps us in mortality.

Duende is a dark counterpoint to Apollo's light. It is that music and song in which we hear our death calling to us.  We sense the gleam of the knife, we smell the blood.  Reflecting on key images of Western music's two-part invention – the duende of the tortoise and the radiance of Apollonian emotional geometry – we are reminded that originality is truly radical, that it comes from the root, from the mythic origins of art. In Greek myth Apollo kills a tortoise to create the first lyre. (Zwicky,2005)

We all experience within us what the Portuguese call ‘Saudade’. It is an inexplicable longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul. It is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration. It is the breeding ground for the sad song and the love song. Saudade is the desire to be transported from darkness into light, to be touched by the hand of that which is not of this world.
The love song is never simply happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain.
Those songs that speak of love, without having within their lines an ache or a sigh, are not love songs at all, but simply romantic silliness. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad. The compulsive modernity of today's artistic expression is littered with them. The true love song must resonate with whispers of sorrow and the echoes of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker reaches of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, magic, and joy of love. So within the fabric of the love song, within its melody and its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering. (Cave, 2007)

Saudade lives in the transcendence of deep song. How rightly we call it that. It is deeper than all the wells of earth and seas that surround the world. It is more profound than the heart that creates it, or the voice that sings it. This is because it is almost infinite. It comes from remote races and crosses ancient burial grounds. Its scorching wind stirs hearts across the ages. It comes from the first sob and the first kiss. (Lorca) In our darkest hours the radiant light of life shines brightest.

  

Andromeda is a spinning firestorm in the night sky.

 Andromeda is a spinning firestorm in the night sky.

A dwarf sits under a bridge smoking a reefer. He watches the slow-moving water swirl and eddy around his feet. A hunchback looks out, over the top of the railing, gazing down at the beautiful creature he sees below. Ten thousand fairies dance on the head of a pin. The sun spins out of control ejecting solar flares. Beyond the morning a chocolate cookie falls off a child's tray. The baby crawls away to avoid a spray of gunfire. The burning pellets pierce his flesh. He is born anew from warmth and oneness into pain and bright light. Black Angels storm through luminous night, raging to the heavens their lonely plight. Madness crawls around behind their fiery eyes, like maggots searching for a sweet surprise. Hornets sing a haunting song. The dwarf decides he must move on. He removes his clothes and wraps a golden chain around his legs. Jumping in the water he floats in clouds so high. Each lining is sewn with bloody entrails from an Aztec sacrifice. He craves a sausage sandwich, with sweet relish, and the eyes of a beautiful woman gazing back at him.

Blood smeared on the chemist's slide. Silken sheets beneath she writhes. Come and sleep with me my dear, crimson concrete flowing near. Coming together we two meet, Bodies alive with our heat. Your armor shines resplendent. It is a glimpse into a hidden shrine. It holds a brilliant mystery. Andromeda is a spinning firestorm in the night sky. You cut off one breast. Your arrow finds the heart of your enemy. Your bow is strung to make a piercing cry. It is the last sound you prey will ever hear. Their last light is your shadow in their eyes. Rivers of blood pour through sand.  Frozen sulfur drips yellow icicles. Orange eyed panthers stalk the night, the smell of fresh kill on their breath.

Stay out of my swim lane asshole the buoys are there for a reason. The butterfly is the most beautiful stroke the human body can perform. Eels and octopus are best with wasabi and pickled ginger. The stingray swims with the moray eel. What a boring fucking life you lead you fucking bitch, lost in your bi-polar episodes. Where does darkness end and day begin?  Stepping into the light, you blister and burn, this reflective of your psychosis. Everyone calls you normal. We all have two faces, don’t we? I wish I had never known your private persona. The depths of hell reveled to me in your embrace.  I fucked you and poured myself into your body.  You kept me there for your own foul purpose. Can children of the dammed be embraced in glory? 

But I digress.

In the time between the ticks of a clock she rides his dripping body. The sun is unrelenting accusation. The wind is cooling salvation. A dark moon rises over a black lagoon. The night bird screeches hunting.  She sighs. It is an exhale of release. All mankind’s hope rides on her perfumed breath. Crows feed freely on a battlefield. She wants the ring and so cuts the finger off to acquire it. Raised high it reflects god-rays to the heavens.

The jester awoke with morning light. He took a hat from the ancient gallery. He walked into town. He came to a window. He looked inside. He saw his mother gazing at her own reflection. She was trying to not to cry. “Where did my youth and beauty go? So very precious was it to me. Now I have lost all that I came to love” He moved toward a window and he looked inside. He found his mother sleeping there and he began to cry. His face contorted with the time a guitar sang a screeching rhyme. His ears are filled with dirt and mud. His eyes look inward, pulsing blood.

They are not two but three as one. The taste of him is salty on their tongues. The heat of his flesh is overwhelming on their lips. The scent of his body fills their senses. All the rest fades away. All that remains is him, only him. In this moment his need becomes their need. They feel the beat of his heart and the strength of his life as their lips caress down his beautiful body. He is that mysterious primitive essence which completes. They yearn for this which is not part of them to become them. He touches their soft hair each in turn. He pulls them towards him to feel their warm breathing against his stomach. He guides their hands to stroke his core sending waves of sensation in a circle between them. Like shining rain in a thunderstorm ecstasy spills from one onto the other.

Every road leads back to you. Every Journey lies in you. Lead me home my lover Savior. Lead me home my sweet Redeemer. Lead me home and I will rest in you. 

Luminous Angels mock my journey. My voice becomes a coarse whisper. “I find it soothing,” she says, as she draws me near. Can I survive the experience of this life? Hang the laundry on co-axial cable to dry in the sun. Glue a wing back on a fairy so that she can fly again. I run with a herd of wildebeests. We charge through a cloud of dust raised by a thousand hoofs. We surround our young to protect them from lions. When the butcher Sherman led his mercenary army to the gates of Atlanta, only women, children, and old men stood against his hoard.  Only the old and infirm are left to feed the predators.

Rewind 

Sharing a view of the city at night; the cars below us flow around the buildings like a river of light. In the morning in Baja, we swim with dolphins, we hear them laughing in the waves next to us. Sunbathing on an isolated beach, coconut oil drips on hot sand, the salt dried on your shoulder is sweet to my lips. We swim in the blue pacific. Raising my arms, diamonds of sea spray caught in the sunlight cascade down onto us.

Once, in the town of San Miguel Allende, in the Mountains of Northern Mexico, Kayla, Dee Dee, and I ate mango together. The sweet juice ran down our faces. Laughing they told me if I could learn to coax the sweetness from a mango I would understand how to coax the sweetness from their sex. In the ocean, Kayla strapped a knife to her leg when she wore her bikini. She always swam topless. Her breasts were magnificent. At sunset Dee Dee preferred her Bombay Safire Gin stirred gently in a gold rimed martini glass, with ice and one green olive. In the evening Kayla wore black leather and loved my Galliano. Dee Dee was elegant in a red lace gown and favored my Armani. I loved them both but Kayla was my favorite.

Epilogue: 

"For better or for worse I only stop to look back at times like this. Mostly I live in this moment, right now, and I'm grateful for it. I know that most of this life lies behind me, but what I live for is today, and for the tomorrows that remain. My eyes are bombarded by the sights of this beautiful world. Every breath has the rich fragrance of trees and flowers. I'm privileged to be alive to share these wondrous feelings with you. I toast our fallen comrades, all of whom live on in our hearts. 

I can honestly say that I've lived my time here fully. I hope that you'll live the rest of your time to the fullest. I don't see any other good way to go." 

~ Tony Curtis, from "American Prince"

The rain comes..

The rain comes...

(A storm is gathering. An actor stands amid a scene of destruction)

Embers drift down in the air surrounding him

Hot melted steel, twisted and deformed, is all around him.

(Close up on actor’s face and upper body)

He pauses to form a “four in hand” knot in his striped tie

The leading edge should reach down to his belt just so.

Lucky Thirteen is the metal buckle on his belt.

(Close up on the actor’s belt and then his hand as he removes the embedded stones.)

Ruby dice form its skull eyes

He tosses them into the fire.

Looking back at him they begin to soften and decay.

(His interior dialog…)

“What song shall I sing?

As I now await the Radiant Face of God.”

Glowing embers mix with long black curls of ash.

They drift down around him in the hot air.

(He senses a female voice coming from a distance…)

It is the sweetest torture any man can endure.

He yearns for the rain to quench the fire of this exquisite longing.

(Actor’s interior dialog…)

“Love is the rarest of perfumes.

It is that ephemeral dream which we all share deep within.

It takes only that one who is different, and yet the same,

to free the fantasy into the light of day.”

(Actress enters the scene. Approaching him she draws her face to his…)

She takes his breath into hers

She releases herself into him with a long sigh.

(She arches her body away from him while still in his embrace…)

She reaches for that very private place.

She goes to where the rest of the world cannot find her.

He is there with her.

He holds her tight in an embrace.

Moments pass like the ages of the world.

The sound of her breathing is the sweetest music a man can hear.

(Immersive sound field is saturated with her lyrical breathing…)

His head rests on her soft body.

She strokes his hair and whispers a gentle question to him.

(Her voice is softly intimate and barely discernable…)

“Whatever you wish of me I will do.”

The rain comes...

(Strong backlighting into the rain…)

Like tears in the rain...

In my charcoal silk suit, with a red satin scarf
I knelt in the mud, in a river of blood
In homage to my Lord.
Rain falls heavy in the dark night
Each great drop like the crack of a gun
Wild things cry around me
A cold wind enters me
I sense myself balanced on a razors edge
In a torrent, rain pours over me
It cascades down across shoulders, arms, then hands
Dripping from my fingertips
Washing away my indiscretions
My many thoughtless and selfish sins
Thru the dark night I await the rising of the Sun
I look for the light to fill me with virtue
I long to be refreshed
Rising from the mud I stand tall
A red star is dying in the dark sky above me
We are brothers together before our Lord
Like tears in the rain... 

 

The "Sound Gate" Project



The "Sound Gate" Project

The "Sound Gate" Project

We are drawn to the Gate.

As we enter it senses us,

Reacting to each individual differently,

Sensing how each stands within the interior light,

It responds with a gentle sigh or the soft intake of a child’s breath.

We feel the impulse to touch its reflective surface.

We see our own image reaching towards us.

It senses our touch and responds with music or the sound of rain.

We are lost in the moment.

And for a time viewer and artwork blend in an embrace of the senses.

Can Steel sigh?
Can it laugh when we touch it?

We live in an age when sculpture can no longer sit by quietly, like the rocks of the fields. We must breathe life into our work if it is to truly serve us.

 

Once I saw a Blue Jay flying across my vision.

It landed in the grass before me. Is this not the most beautiful of sculptures?

One which lives and interacts with the world around it?

Can I make steel sigh, or laugh?

I believe I can.

Joe Battle 2/18/2014

In the cool morning...

    In the cool morning I remember a small cabin hidden deep in a eucalyptus forest. A secret place high on the mountain. Where Gabrielle and I would ride our horses for a private rendezvous.
    Her blond hair spilled down her back as she rode ahead of me. The high mountain air was always fragrant with the smell of the sweet surrounding trees.
    When she drew me to her I was lost in those bright moments, and in the sunlight shafting thru the trees around us.

Life is a mist.

The young girl turns fitfully in a dream. The soldier cleans his weapon. I light a cigarette. The moon rises.The beautiful woman takes another's child as her own.

Beyond the Rain

Somewhere beyond the rain, like fireworks on the forth of July, I see the past before I hear it. And I call it the present. As I reach out to touch her the immanence of her being eludes me. She is a singularity of essence which embracing leads to destruction

Transcendence and Immanence

"Thomas Aquinas, for instance, argued that although after creation there are more beings (plural) than before, there is still no more being (singular), because all that exists other than God shares in the one being of God, although in a particularized way. Jesus Christ is believed to be the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, but incarnate in the humanity received corporally from the Virgin Mary and a divinely-created human soul. Thus, transcendence and immanence interpenetrate in an exceptional manner in the Christian faith, practice and theology. The mysterious and paradoxical nature of Christ provides a bridge between the infinite Deity and finite man."

Advaita..."I wonder about this.."

Advaita (non-dual) mysticism maintains that every seemingly separate person is in fact a thought, dream, or experience of God; God creates and becomes / experiences each creation, deliberately limiting it to a specific identity in space and time to undergo a particular life experience. In Advaita, it is God who experiences every pain, suffers every indignity, dies every death, and experiences the illusion of being each separate individual.

I wonder about this..

Shining Rain

Shining Rain

"Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them."  David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742

“A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do…”   “Eye and Mind”, Merleau-Ponty

I have come to understand that there is central dispute among art historians and critics about who actually creates a work of art. The question being this, is it the artist or the viewer. I must ask….. “Why so serious?”  Heath Ledger as the Joker, The Dark Knight, 2008

In fact we must surely say it is the interaction of the three factors involved which is the creation of art.

“In this tranquil space a viewer approaches the icons. She kneels before the alter. Immersed in this environment, surrounded by light, she is not alone. They are not two together but three as one. These three are artist, image, and viewer. The strength of this iconic gesture is almost overwhelming. The scent of this creation fills her being. All the rest fades away. All that remains is the image and the space enfolding them. In this moment its need becomes her need. She feels the beat of its heart and the strength of its life as her eyes embrace it, and through her eyes her soul. It is that mysterious primitive part which is unlike her, and yet completes her. She yearns for this which is not part of her to become her, like shining rain in a thunderstorm light spills and falls from one onto the other. Viewer, image, and maker are as one. For this brief time together they transcend the ordinary and enter the sublime. The world around is lost to her in those bright moments of pure bliss. Her deep overwhelming need finds its satisfaction. Her ecstasy uncoils from a hidden core. Starting deep within it blossoms like the warmest memory of all past forbidden pleasures. St Theresa understood this. This is what great art can achieve. And this achievement is done in concert. Without any of the three the one cannot flower. And it is in this flowering that the true intrinsic, unknowable, and unspeakable, beauty of the human situation is apparent.”   “The Menil Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum, an Essay in Aesthetics” Joe Battle, 2009

White Light and the Color Spectrum

“In regards color we might all understand that we are all together reaching for a definition of something that's basically indefinable. But that the reaching itself is the essence of a definition of being human. The word essence is not a broad term but a specific term. So if I say, “the essence of being human”, it is a specific laser light shining on a true intrinsic meaning. if we look at it in that way the meaning of it is really the search and the struggle to find a definition of how we interpret color. Physical sensations, like the light entering our eyes, or the taste of food we will attempt to interpret into deeper meaning. Dogs see in black and white, while honeybees sense the movement of quantum particles. We are in fact human. It is our nature to define what that means, how we look at the universe, how we interpret the universe. Otherwise, we are just living, getting and experiencing the light, unreflective, like an animal.”
                                                        Joe Battle at café Brazil, 2-2010

"God is Love", Thoughts on Aesthetics

In my garden a lyrical sound came to my attention. Like a heart beating impossibly fast, the sound of hummingbirds’ wings is high and rhythmic. What is the source of all these wondrous creations? Why did God make the universe? Without hesitation my 11-year-old son replied, “God created the universe out of love”. This parallels my own thought that God was lonely. So then from this desire to share His great happiness and His love the Creator of the Universe began the unfolding process of existence.

You are of course thinking that you have to believe in God to even answer such a question, because you cannot prove the existence of God through empirical thought.” You might say I only believe in science because through inductive and deductive reasoning I can come to real provable results. In that regard may I point to this small fact, that all science is based on belief. “Science is based on this one belief, a first principle, that the human mind is capable of discovering and understanding all the working principles of the universe,”( Dr Philip Snider, University of Houston Biology Dept.) This hypothesis cannot, of course, be proven. So we see that “belief” in science is similar to “belief” in God, in so far as neither can be substantiated. Is this not, after all, the very definition of the word “belief.”

To phrase this in a slightly different manner, most think that science and religion are opposed because they come from different basic premises, but in fact they are the same. You might say that I cannot prove God exists, but I believe that God exists. In the same manner the basic principle of science is that the human mind can know the unknowable. This basic believe has yet to be proven true. A belief is something which cannot be empirically proven. We take a belief on faith. These two words belief and faith are intertwined. In other words that the human mind, thru scientific evaluation, can discover everything there is know about the universe and also understand that knowledge. Hmmm I wonder.

Dr. Daniel Price, (University of Houston Honors College), famously commented, “.....isn't that a sweet way to look at it. ‘God is love.’ What a sticky, emotional idea that is, and also fairly recent I might add.” (I am of course paraphrasing Dr. Price)

Daniel in your recent showing of “Natural Born Killers” what was the one thing that was strong enough to kill a demon? Do you remember what the psychopath said? Coming from the depths of his insanity there arose his greatest insight. The only thing able to overcome the demon was “Love”. So, from the mind of a madman, comes the simplest of truths. This truth is that “love” is not sticky sentimental emotion but rather that most powerful strength emanating from the human spirit.

Wars waged throughout history, employing techniques of violence and destruction, always yield results which eventually crumble. Conquered peoples have risen up and had revenge on their conquerors. The greatest empires built on violence have all faded. They ebb and flow across time like the sea onto the sand.

The most enduring concept human kind has contributed to its own existence is the concept of “Love”. Perhaps one might say this is new in western culture. A mere 2000 years ago Christ brought this message to the West. The Gautama Buddha, 500 years earlier, delivered it to the Orient. Buddhists speak of the four Noble truths, and an eight fold path. Christ asked us to love one another. Both these great thinkers have spoken simply of the concept we call “empathy”. Empathy is of course the wellspring of love for others.

Hinduism, with its roots extending far into prehistory, and its traditions passed down orally for 5000 years, focuses on “daily morality”, “karma”, and “right living”. Within these three concepts is the core concept of Love”.

Great nations, great empires, all seem to have God on their side. When in truth God is on the side of the individual. God is within the individual. The individual is part, and the same, as is that eternal Spirit to which we give the name God. Modern intellectuals tend to shy away from using the word God. I understand their inclination. They are hesitant to put their faith in any other than themselves. This is the bias of analytical thinking.

Personally, on the field of athletic competition, I have learned one thing. When I put my complete faith in myself I fall short of my goals. When I allow my faith to reside in a power greater than my own I succeed. In other words, when I accept that my analytically based physical training has limits but my spiritually based belief has no limits, I am able to succeed beyond my wildest dreams. Scripture tells us God would never put a dream in our hearts without also putting the ability there to achieve that dream. All we need to do is believe. This is the simplest of acts. And yet it is the most profound.

A man is living one moment, dead the next. What is the difference in that physical being we see before us? He may still be warm, his blood may still be flowing, and he may even have some brain wave activity. It is his eternal Spirit which has left his mortal body. This is why the man is now dead. And no matter what we might do to revive him our efforts would be futile.

Is there a high art, low art? What is art? Is art that which touches us deeply? Is it those things made by human hands, inspired by human hearts, which touch the human spirit, how we define art? If the human spirit is a part of the spirit of God then isn't the creation of art that loveliest of endeavors.

Joe

I was held in the arms of an angel.

There is this beautiful woman who sings in the choir at my church.

I mean she is exceptionally beautiful. She dresses with style and class. She is lovely of face and form. And she sings like an angel.

When she lifts up her voice in the Alleluia hymn she becomes radiant. From the pews she brought me to tears many times with the emotion in her voice.

Yesterday I got to stand tall and sing with her. Then during the sharing of the peace when everyone shakes hands, and says “peace of the Lord” to one another, as I extended my hand she drew me to her in a lovely warm embrace. Wow! I was held in the arms of an angel.


Sometimes in our darkest hours the radiant light of life shines brightest.
 
Joe

The Unspeakable Beauty of Being

The brilliant warm light of a spring day casts dramatic shadows on the high rock wall surrounding the Menil Byzantine Fresco Chapel Museum. Looking up I see silhouetted a small building which has the outline of a Cypriot Chapel. To the eye the angles of the building are, however, decidedly modern. I wonder at this contrast. Walking up to the entrance of the building I pass a shallow black reflecting pool. The soft sound of a small fountain, light glinting off dark water, I feel my mood being manipulated by this space. I pass from a day full of natural light into a spiritual space imbued with a softly radiant ephemeral glow. I enter a world which is separate in time and space from my own.


I begin to realize that my journey to this spot began from a point far distant and converged to this central location. Inside the chapel modern architectural lines are again mixed with medieval proportions. I am immersed in a fluid experiential environment. Perhaps, as the great Erwin Panosky acutely observed, the use of geometry and perspective in art enables the human spirit to become a vessel for the divine. Within the house of these Holy Icons doors previously closed across my heart begin to open.

“In June 1983 the Menil Foundation was shown photographs of 13th century frescoes that had been cut into 38 pieces and removed from their original site near a Lysi, in the Turkish occupied section of Cyprus. They were going to be sold individually for profit and dispersed. Struck by the beauty of the photographs, the foundation asked its Washington attorney to investigate the origin of the frescoes and discovered that they came from Cyprus.
The Menil Foundation contacted both the Republic and the Church of Cyprus. With their knowledge and encouragement the foundation paid the ransom to the feeds and received possession of all 38 fragments which were then entrusted to an expert icon restorer in London,” From, A Byzantine Masterpiece Recovered, the Thirteenth-Century Murals of Lysi, Cyprus. Annemarie Weyl and Laurence J. Morrocco

The geometry of a building is first felt on an intrinsic level. By this I mean that we do not initially, consciously, think in terms of the geometry of the structure we have entered. Our first reaction is based on visceral feelings about the space and the light within it.

Kandinsky wrote, in “Concerning the Spiritual in Art”
“…a child, for whom every object is new, experiences the world in this way: it sees light, is attracted by it, wants to grasp it, burns its finger in the process, and thus learns fear and respect for the flame. And then it learns that light has not only an unfriendly, but also a friendly side: banishing darkness and prolonging the day, warming and cooking, delighting the eye. One becomes familiar with life by collecting these experiences and storing away this knowledge in the brain.”

Perhaps we might all agree that geometry and light within a space are one and the same. This is because architecture shapes the three-dimensional environment while affecting and presenting the light within it. This is done mainly through the placement of stained-glass windows. So in this regard I must also comment on the obvious, that light within a church is always rich with color.

Kandinsky goes on to say …
"In general, therefore, color is a means of exerting a direct influence upon the soul. Color is the keyboard. The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano, with its many strings.
The artist is the hand that purposefully sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key. Thus it is clear that the harmony of colors can only be based upon the principle of purposefully touching the human soul.”

The church is the temple where the soul communes with its eternal God. If the colored light of the spirit touches directly one’s soul, and the Creator pours his light through the windows, then doesn't the geometry, which forms the space, create a fitting vehicle to facilitate this exchange?

Perhaps we might refer to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Famous Last Words”, where he postulated about perspective in the following manner…
“…. man began to measure the universe in terms of his own direct experience of life and death, and then he went on to the great work of creating good and evil. In the light of day, he said ‘white’ and in the darkness of night, he said ‘black’ and always remaining at the center of things he created perspective. The world was seen in terms of vanishing points and points of view with respect to the position of man's eye at about 5 feet above ground level and from that point he created high and low.

Past and future, near and distant, profound and superficial, true and false, single and multiple, subjective and objective, static and dynamic, these are a few examples of the complex of antinomies that has grown up around the human being as the fruit of his mind. In constant and ever more gigantic expansion, the process began with the first men who walked the earth, and it has continued until today…”

The content of a constructed architectural space, one might say, is a subject matter introduced by intellect and feeling with meaning. In short, content is the meaning made visible. This is what Henri Matisse was getting at when he said that drawing is "not an exercise of particular dexterity, but above all a means of expressing intimate feelings and moods." So too the softly lit and warmly colored ambiance surrounding the icons in the Byzantine Fresco Chapel facilitates communication of the spiritual intent of the makers. Is there a high art, low art? What is art? Is art that which touches us deeply? Is it those things made by human hands, inspired by human hearts, which touch the human spirit, how we define art? If the human spirit is a part of the spirit of God then isn't the creation of art that loveliest of endeavors.

I have come to understand that there is central dispute among art historians and critics about who actually creates a work of art. The question being this, is it the artist or the viewer. I must ask, “Why so serious?” When in fact we must surely say it is the interaction of the three factors involved which is the creation of art.


In this tranquil space a viewer approaches the icons. She kneels before an alter. Immersed in this environment, surrounded by light, she is not alone. They are not two together but three as one. These three are artist, image, and viewer. The strength of this iconic gesture is almost overwhelming. The scent of this creation fills her being. All the rest fades away. All that remains is the image and the space enfolding them. In this moment its need becomes her need. She feels the beat of its heart and the strength of its life as her eyes embrace it, and through her eyes her soul. It is that mysterious primitive part which is unlike her, and yet completes her. She yearns for this which is not part of her to become her, like shining rain in a thunderstorm light spills and falls from one onto the other. Viewer, image, and maker are as one. For this brief time together they transcend the ordinary and enter the sublime. The world around is lost to her in those bright moments of pure bliss. Her deep overwhelming need finds its satisfaction. Her ecstasy uncoils from a hidden core. Starting deep within it blossoms like the warmest memory of all past forbidden pleasures. St Theresa understood this. This is what great art can achieve. And this achievement is done in concert. With out any of the three the one cannot flower. And it is in this flowering that the true intrinsic, unknowable, and unspeakable, beauty of the human situation is apparent.

As I leave the Menil Fresco Chapel I realize I have left another world behind. My body and spirit were in tenth century Byzantium, on the island of Cyprus. One thousand years ago I knelt in a small stone chapel, spiritually engaged with the myth of the Christ. I step out into the bright light of 21st-century America. Enveloping me is the perfume of an ancient, almost forgotten, time. I walk on into the day and that lingering sweet fragrance slowly fades.

I am left with a poignant longing to return to the chapel.

Joe

Who creates the Work of Art?

Rudolf Arnheim, in "Art and Visual Perception", comments that "the forces to characterize the meaning of the story (of a work of art) come alive in the observer and produce the kind of stirring participation that distinguishes artistic experience from the detached acceptance of information"


James Elkins in "Critical Theory 22", points to this concept, "works of art have nothing to say except what we say to them they do not speak for themselves, viewers speak for the works, for example viewers put meanings, depending on their experiences, into the works they look at this position called reception theory holds that art is not a body of works but is rather an activity of perceivers making sense of images. A work does not have meaning in itself; it can mean something only to someone in the context"

I know also that there is a continuity of symbol over the millennia of human culture. This symbol is both art object and spiritual icon. I have experienced this at the Catholic mass. When at the moment the Priest holds the pure circle of the Host, named Christ, high above the congregation I am transported back to a time in Ancient Egypt as the Pharaoh Akhenaten stood to worship the disk of the rising Sun, named Aten-Ra. These simple gestures, seemingly separated by time and space, are in fact the same moment. This is the preeminent critical gesture. It is the intuitive, elemental, symbolic act. It is the essence of being human.

In “Eye and Mind” Merleau-Ponty tells us that, “A human body is present when, between the see-er and the visible, between touching and touched, between one eye and the other, between hand and hand a kind of crossover occurs, when the spark of the sensing/sensible is lit, when the fire starts to burn that will not cease until some accident befalls the body, undoing what no accident would have sufficed to do…”

I have come to understand that there is central dispute among art historians and critics about who actually creates a work of art. The question being this, is it the artist or the viewer. I must ask, “Why so serious?” When in fact we must surely say it is the interaction of the three factors involved; artist, artwork, and viewer, which are together the creation of art.

Joe