Caravaggio and the Imagination
Over at Nancy Nordenson’s “Just Thinking” website (http://justthinking.typepad.com/nordenson/2012/01/caravaggios-angels.html), she describes going to art lecture about the Baroque artist Michelangelo de Mersi Caravaggio. Actually, this talented writer and friend (who is well worth reading) is “just thinking” about the imagination, a topic I have been ”dwelling in” these last weeks.
As it turns out Caravaggio has been a favorite artist of mine for years. I wrote my first SPU workshop piece about encountering (upended actually) Caravaggio’s St. Matthew series that still exists where it was created on the walls of the Contarelli chapel. (Within Rome’s Church of the French Congregation ) I agree with Nancy that one of Caravaggio’s “hooks,” his appeal to generations of viewers, was his use of visual metaphor. The artist at work concentrates on the “angel appearing on the canvas” while only partially aware that he dwells in a host of subsidiaries–ideas from books, people, and places seen in the past, previously painted angels–all integrated by his imagination into the always imperfect painted artifact. I am reminded that all artists never have “down” time. All that I read, see, or do–despite how disparate or removed from my intended project–increases my subsidiary awareness or my “tacit knowing.” It is the integration or looking through my subsidiaries, my previous “knowing,” that allows me to re-form and “create.”
But seeing Caravaggio’s work also reminds me that my imagination is also a mysterious passage that allows me to touch a bigger reality. By all accounts Caravaggio’s life was a moral train-wreck. But oddly, this fact comforts. As I struggle to fashion a written or visual metaphor, seeing his exquisitely rendered felon now with wings (most of Caravaggio’s models were “criminals or street people”) or the dead Virgin with dirty feet reminds me that my imagination is not my own. Both the gift and the operation come as grace.
More Thoughts on Solitude
MORE THOUGHTS ON SOLITUDE
Over at fiction writer and fellow Seattle Pacific University M.F.A graduate Ross Gale’s blog he thoughtfully discusses the writer’s need for solitude. Susan Cain’s article about the rise of Group Think published last week in the NYT piqued Ross’s interest and it is worth quoting a few of her words:
“Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, . . . ” Susan Cain
I have found solitude essential for my life as a physician, artist, and writer. (I am not unmindful that I have chosen three vocations most resistant to groupthink.) The years in the M.F.A. program taught me to value and treasure solitude and the blessings of not having to multi-task. However, in these halcyon days of near 24/7 Internet connectivity, I fear even the rare provision of solitude is not enough.
Today in his blog, James K.A. Smith correctly points out that distraction, in particular the distractions of increased Internet connectivity, requires a new iteration of virtuous habits to combat electronic “sloth.” Smith is ostensibly offering an ironic critique of the software program Freedom. For those not familiar with the program, this ten-dollar product provides the artist or writer a self-imposed time-out by restricting their personal computer’s access to the Internet. And like an errant child leaving his or her room prior to the imposed time, there are consequences for forcing the program to access the Internet before the appointed hour—the writer must reboot the computer.
Smith correctly points out an external restraint like Freedom is no substitute for internal virtue. And while I think developing moral virtue over connectivity and social media is an important good, I would caution against using the benefit of increased productivity, even imaginative artistic ends, as a sufficient reason for Internet discipline.
It is in his last paragraph Smith alludes to a more profound and I think more compelling reason for practicing Internet virtue.
”So in some ways, to call this software “Freedom” is a kind of functional, unwitting Augustinianism. But I doubt its creators–or many of its users–are interested in signing up to be consistent Augustinians (cue young enthusiasm for Ron Paul here). But their willingness to submit to constraint in order to be free might be a backhanded clue to what it takes to be human.” (James K.A. Smith)
Some of my most thoughtful and creative friends have recently restricted their previously exuberant enthusiasm for social media. This was, for most, a utilitarian decision, deciding the gain for their writing or art outweighed any loss. Shortly after making these counter-cultural changes, many friends noted—often with surprise–that opting out or decreasing the time or frequency of their computer use resulted in an increased richness in their relationships with family, friends, and spouse.
I am not a computer Luddite; I use and will continue to use Facebook and Twitter. I depended upon Freedom this last year in order to write my thesis on schedule. But Smith is right to challenge me to discipline my computer habits. I need to do this not because it is the latest new thing in order to become a better writer but because my “willingness to submit to constraint” may actually make me free and more importantly, to be more fully human, more fully the creation God intended.
CHRISTMAS EVE–2011
In the midst of food and friends and family–all the delicious things of Christmas— I am reminded that all is not right with the world or with me. Those of us who have now lived over a half century know that although the season magnifies good memories and allows us to see our blessings, it also brings into focus hurts and sadness and those things that cannot be changed or seem an encroaching darkness. To express faith in the God of Christmas while living in such a world it is necessary to also acknowledge uncertainty. Indeed, as I grow older I am more intimately aware of the many things I cannot know, facts once assumed I now cannot confirm. For every joy I hold dear I must acknowledge a suffering; in pursuing beauty I run from the ugly, and in declaring my faith in the infinite loving God who entered space and time I must also concede the possibility that I have deluded myself, that the life I lead is a pointless speck in a dissembling universe.