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.