A marker for a new beginning

This post is written with a degree of trepidation. After a gap of almost a year I plan to start again. The last year has been a mad one but I am about to enter a very different phase of life and I hope to have more time for reflection and writing.

I plan to write shorter, more reflective, more regular and, hopefully, more interesting and useful posts. I will aim for most of them to be just a few hundred words with occasional longer more academic ones.

My content will encompass:

• Exploring some themes of contemporary thought that reframe how we engage with landscape and with place
• How these might effect how we relate to the environmental, political and cultural situation we live in
• How they might open up a non-theological way of religious thinking, beyond theism and atheism
• And most importantly, how I am grappling with embodying all of this, how to live it.

My hope is that atleast some of this will be of interest to some, and dialogue might build up around my rather tentative thoughts.

So a new cairn is built in my virtual / physical life – lets hope the path beyond it travels some distance this time!

Painting with light, writing with pictures

A white room, simply thought. Altar facing the rising sun, facing east. Murals: black lines on white tiles, like calligraphy: St. Dominic stands like a tree; Mary, flowering from the stem of Jesse standing amidst the flowers of the meadow, holds the feminine in the place of God; and Christ’s rough-drawn ascent to the cross troubles the serenity all around. Windows: through perfect coloured glass nature falls as light onto the white, on to the quiet drama of the opposite walls; the blue of sky and sea, the green of plant life and the yellow of the sun. A rhythm of threes: three murals, three windows, three doors, three lights, three colours.

Matisse created the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, not far from Nice, at the end of the 1940s in the last four years of this life. Of it, he said:

I regard it, despite all its imperfections, as my masterpiece … as an effort which is the culmination of a whole life dedicated to the search for truth. What I have done in the chapel is to create a religious space… To take an enclosed space of very reduced proportions and give it, solely by the play of colours and lines, the dimensions of infinity.

To stand in the simple white room was to be in a cool, calm place even thought the air was sweltering; to watch the light was like watching a butterfly wing somehow suspended outside time. It did feel, as Matisse said, like the fulfillment of his life’s work. A work that required a religious setting even as it transcended it. The religious motifs on the white tiles become the site of the projection of the natural world, the movement of the sun, the passing of the days and seasons, the changing garden beyond the windows. The language of the chapel is the language of the natural world – sea, sky, sun, plants, deserts, flowers, stone – even St. Dominic tree-like and Mary in the midst of flowers – only the scenes of the crucifixion stand apart.

It recalls the Rothko chapel in Houston – Rothko having said that without Matisse’s Red Studio there would be no Rothko. Both chapels created by artists who operated beyond / without faith but the impact could not be more different. In Rothko’s, you confront the abyss, the nothing at the heart of things; sitting on low Japanese benches with the light filtering through the roof lights, your meditation is on the mysterious, groundlessness of existence. In the Vence chapel, in the dance of light, there is a delicate interplay of sky, earth, humankind and god, opening up a place, a moment that is greater than any of them, yet somehow dependent on them all.

The Crossing out of Religion and the Poetics of Place – 1

Some time around 1996, I read John Muir’s First Summer in the Sierra and Henry Thoreau’s Walden, and I guess some sort of re-orientation happened. A little later came Thomas Berry’s flawed but thought provoking The Dream of the Earth and finally in a Dublin bookshop in 2005 I came upon the poems and essays of Kenneth White (who deserves and will get atleast one full post, and from whom my blog title comes).

The wrestling to make sense of the life changing encounter that had occured earlier in my life, that I had reasonably called God, and the desire to live some sort of ethical life continued, but somehow I now felt that any debate or discussion that did not occur in the context of a non anthropocentric position within nature, however persuasive, was inevitably starting out from the wrong initial co-ordinates.  Beyond that I was persuaded by White that human culture in its essence must ground itself in a delicate, lively engagement of ‘mindscape with landscape’ which he names ‘geo-poetics’. And for White, this engagement wasn’t a purely philosophical one but a simple direct one, free of all notions of God, spirit, metaphor or allegory.

Alongside this tragectory of thought, in the last couple of years the whole theological turn of continental philosophy, and the possibility of a religion without religion, opened up by Marion-Levinas-Derrida-Caputo-Vattimo-Zizek-etc-etc has captured my imagination, and plenty more on that another time, but these lines of thought operate in a different space and if they engage with the natural world at all, as far I can see, they only do so as a form of the ‘other’ to which we must offer care, i.e., it exists as object rather than some sort of ‘ground’. My final post on my old blog joking introduced Caputo to White in the hope they could work it out together!

However, rather than leave others to work it out, the object of my MA dissertation will be to attempt, in the context of Heidegger’s thought, to site the discussion of god that occurs ‘after the death of god’ in the context of our lived experience through what Heidegger would call ‘poetic dwelling (White would use the expression ‘geo-poetics) in real, geographical places. In the second post of this name I will roughly outline the path that I think the dissertation will take (and explain the title!) and then in occasional posts in the future offer up aspects of the work as it progresses.

Failures of Feeling

I have an unfinished entry on Heidegger and our relationship to the earth which has been waiting its final paragraph for weeks, but bloglines drew my attention to this today and one sentence so struck me that it gets in first.

Jeanette Winterson has been one of my favorite writers for years. For anyone who isn’t familiar with her story, she was adopted and brought up by extreme fundamentalism pentecostal parents and left home at 16 with the knowledge that she was gay. She was never reconciled to her ultra extreme mother, who she only ever refers to as Mrs Winterson.

Her father died over Christmas and the article below reflects on that event movingly but for me one sentence  struck me so strongly :

When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.

Nothing more to add – but do read the column.

And if fancy trying her her novels, try Lighthousekeeping or go further back to The Passion or Art & Lies.

A community of the question

This quote is from Derrida’s essay on Levinas ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ in Writing and Difference.

In the garden we are in the process of reviewing what defines us and whilst this paragraph is actually talking about the community of philosophers in/after the end of philosophy, for me it captures perfectly the nuanced situation that projects like the garden must maintain -  obligated to decide and to act but never in a way that closes the question, always moving forward in a way that leaves the open open.

“A community of the question, therefore, within that fragile moment when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the question. A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality, but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet found the language it has decided to speak, is not yet sure of its own possibility within the community. A community of the question about the possibility of the question.”

I know this seems so vague but I really feel the journey we are on is this fragile and  I fear the temptation to settle for easy short-cuts.

Rothko – The Director’s Cut

Having had chance to reflect on the Rothko show at Tate Modern, it gets to be the first post on my new blog. Any who know me will know of my obsession with Rothko over many years – for me, in its best moments, his painting opens up wordlessly  a territory that, without wishing to hurriedly name it, is a sort of pole star in my life.

In their essence, for me, his facades (they are not paintings really) are about what you feel standing in their presence, the way you encounter them, the way they change the atmosphere in the  room.

That said I found this review which captures a lot of what I felt about the current exhibition  – The Seagram Series: The Director’s Cut.

Beyond that I wanted to open up just one consideration which articulates why I consider his work so important. Here are two quotes from Rothko :

“The people who weep before my pictures, are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationship, then you miss the point.”

“When I say that my paintings are Western, what I mean is that they seek the concretization of no state that is without the limits of western reason, no esoteric, extra-sensory or divine attributes to be achieved by prayer and terror. Those who can claim that these [limits] are exceeded are exhibiting self-imposed limitations as to the tensile limits of the imagination within those limits. In other words, that there is no yearning in these paintings for Paradise, or divination. On the contrary they are deeply involved in the possibility of ordinary humanity.”

In other words, his life’s obsession was to create  works that create an experience in the viewer that he was happy to call religious but at the same time he considered this experience an entirely human, material experience with no transcendental dimension / explanation lying beyond it. He didn’t call it a ‘religion without religion’ but for me his work points out a space worthy of further exploration for those of us seeking to create artistic contexts under that banner.

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