![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
In 1988, I curated my first exhibition (for Untitled Gallery, a little space in Atlanta’s Little Five Points, on the appropriately or ultimately inappropriately named Euclid Avenue, the straight main drag of one of the least straight neighborhoods in the ATL, in several senses of the shifting idiom). “Angels and Erasures: A Show About the Possibility of the Sacred” was full of bodies illuminated by their own light, sort of reflecting the mysticism of Scotus Erigena that I had learned from Ezra Pound and from the Troubadours he revered and reversed, for his blend of sexuality and disembodiment was a different animal in every respect.
There were a couple of unconventional pro-Christian paintings by Lyn Miller, one of a guardian angel hovering over a mother and child (but there was something disturbing about the relationship of the Bodiless Power of Heaven and the two bodies peacefully embedded in slumber) and the other a portrait head of Jesus framed in sharp shards of broken mirrors. But by and large, through my own choice, the mood was more of flesh becoming light and transcending its own embodiment. (I could say more, if I could locate the images of the paintings themselves, which I am sure I can track down if I keep at it.)
The relationship between the light-infused or effusive bodies in my exhibition and the Rainbow Body of Tibetan Buddhism or the Transfiguration Body infused with the Light of Tabor in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is a topic to which I hope to return. For now, I want to move on to contemplate “All That Is Holy,” a 2018 exhibition curated by Christopher Hall for Blue Mark Studios.
What strikes me about this exhibition (I omit from consideration Hall’s own immense oeuvre of drawings incorporating variations on the world’s iconography of all possible traditions) is that except for the sculpture of Deborah Hutchinson, there is no real consideration of the possibility of transcendence in this lifetime, of moments of transfiguration in which the flesh is immersed in a marginal experience derived from beyond itself, although what that “beyond” is can still be kept fruitfully in question. I made no effort to define it in my own show, only to present it in its assorted manifestations.
Most of the artists in “All That Is Holy” appear to be concerned with burlesquing or unmasking the conventions of Christian religious practice, revealing the sordid sexual underpinnings of pretentious images of piety or affirming the possibilities of a sexuality detached from the repressions of a churchly upbringing. One artist, Elyse Defoor, deals with the symbolism of marriage in which female sexuality has historically been bridled as the putative virgin becomes the bride, and the gorgeousness of fabric turned into a symbol of hoped-for happiness that is seldom fulfilled in the male-female relationship that follows. Once again, religion is a this-worldly device for managing unruly energies, and lights from above on the road to Damascus or robes shining brighter than the sun on the Mount of Transfiguration are experiences relegated to the lives of Paul and Jesus, as out of the question for would-be believers today as the New Testament’s raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead would be for modern believers and skeptics alike.
And yet religious history is full of what I and a few other folks have termed Really Weird Shit. The prevailing assumption is that not one word of this type of tale is true, for human culture is full of folktales and whoppers, and lying and dissimulation is one of the marks of civilization as we know it. (Uttering conscious untruths is, anyway; I question whether dissimulation is strictly a human trait; when Wittgenstein wrote “Why can’t a dog lie? Is he too honest?” he was correct in assuming that the ability to speak an untruth is a distinctly human trait, but if lying depends on language, dissimulation does not, as anyone knows who has witnessed a canine fearfully trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with the catastrophe for which it expects to be punished.)
The narratives are doubtless exaggerations, or interpretations after the fact, squeezed into the categories inherited from the experiencer’s culture. But strange things have happened throughout history, and those who have experienced them often have no categories that quite fit the experiences they have had. Some of the more imaginative and/or systematic of such experiencers have been the founders of religions that then were taken on faith, and misconstrued in good faith, by those who never had such experiences but were prepared to believe the ones who told of them. And generations later, art history would analyze critically the farrago of symbols of sick sexuality that are lampooned in “All That Is Holy.”
But the question of what, if anything, lies out there on the margins of consciousness is a topic that has come to fresh contemplation in the era of psychedelics and the neuroscience of mystical experience, and Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions is a text with which I have been struggling for over a year. There is an essay to be wrested from a confrontation between Terry Eagleton’s acerbically revisionary survey Materialism, in which the New Materialists are skewered as gleefully as the Old Transcenders, and Kripal’s opus, which sums up the conclusions he reaches in half a dozen previous books regarding the validity of marginal experiences and the likelihood that we are not what we think we are, at all.
Right now I can’t get further than this preliminary note, which I am posting for the sake of having it out there alongside my other numerous failures and false starts in this department. I am intrigued by the lack of interest in the whole question, or outright hostility to it in an era in which fundamentalism or heavyhanded literalism reigns in religion and systematic skepticism alike. We are not good at doubting our own doubt or our own belief, since if we could see our own errors we would not be making them, but rather making up spur of the moment explanations for why they are not errors at all, but paradoxes, or subjects for further investigation.
There were a couple of unconventional pro-Christian paintings by Lyn Miller, one of a guardian angel hovering over a mother and child (but there was something disturbing about the relationship of the Bodiless Power of Heaven and the two bodies peacefully embedded in slumber) and the other a portrait head of Jesus framed in sharp shards of broken mirrors. But by and large, through my own choice, the mood was more of flesh becoming light and transcending its own embodiment. (I could say more, if I could locate the images of the paintings themselves, which I am sure I can track down if I keep at it.)
The relationship between the light-infused or effusive bodies in my exhibition and the Rainbow Body of Tibetan Buddhism or the Transfiguration Body infused with the Light of Tabor in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is a topic to which I hope to return. For now, I want to move on to contemplate “All That Is Holy,” a 2018 exhibition curated by Christopher Hall for Blue Mark Studios.
What strikes me about this exhibition (I omit from consideration Hall’s own immense oeuvre of drawings incorporating variations on the world’s iconography of all possible traditions) is that except for the sculpture of Deborah Hutchinson, there is no real consideration of the possibility of transcendence in this lifetime, of moments of transfiguration in which the flesh is immersed in a marginal experience derived from beyond itself, although what that “beyond” is can still be kept fruitfully in question. I made no effort to define it in my own show, only to present it in its assorted manifestations.
Most of the artists in “All That Is Holy” appear to be concerned with burlesquing or unmasking the conventions of Christian religious practice, revealing the sordid sexual underpinnings of pretentious images of piety or affirming the possibilities of a sexuality detached from the repressions of a churchly upbringing. One artist, Elyse Defoor, deals with the symbolism of marriage in which female sexuality has historically been bridled as the putative virgin becomes the bride, and the gorgeousness of fabric turned into a symbol of hoped-for happiness that is seldom fulfilled in the male-female relationship that follows. Once again, religion is a this-worldly device for managing unruly energies, and lights from above on the road to Damascus or robes shining brighter than the sun on the Mount of Transfiguration are experiences relegated to the lives of Paul and Jesus, as out of the question for would-be believers today as the New Testament’s raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead would be for modern believers and skeptics alike.
And yet religious history is full of what I and a few other folks have termed Really Weird Shit. The prevailing assumption is that not one word of this type of tale is true, for human culture is full of folktales and whoppers, and lying and dissimulation is one of the marks of civilization as we know it. (Uttering conscious untruths is, anyway; I question whether dissimulation is strictly a human trait; when Wittgenstein wrote “Why can’t a dog lie? Is he too honest?” he was correct in assuming that the ability to speak an untruth is a distinctly human trait, but if lying depends on language, dissimulation does not, as anyone knows who has witnessed a canine fearfully trying to pretend that it had nothing to do with the catastrophe for which it expects to be punished.)
The narratives are doubtless exaggerations, or interpretations after the fact, squeezed into the categories inherited from the experiencer’s culture. But strange things have happened throughout history, and those who have experienced them often have no categories that quite fit the experiences they have had. Some of the more imaginative and/or systematic of such experiencers have been the founders of religions that then were taken on faith, and misconstrued in good faith, by those who never had such experiences but were prepared to believe the ones who told of them. And generations later, art history would analyze critically the farrago of symbols of sick sexuality that are lampooned in “All That Is Holy.”
But the question of what, if anything, lies out there on the margins of consciousness is a topic that has come to fresh contemplation in the era of psychedelics and the neuroscience of mystical experience, and Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions is a text with which I have been struggling for over a year. There is an essay to be wrested from a confrontation between Terry Eagleton’s acerbically revisionary survey Materialism, in which the New Materialists are skewered as gleefully as the Old Transcenders, and Kripal’s opus, which sums up the conclusions he reaches in half a dozen previous books regarding the validity of marginal experiences and the likelihood that we are not what we think we are, at all.
Right now I can’t get further than this preliminary note, which I am posting for the sake of having it out there alongside my other numerous failures and false starts in this department. I am intrigued by the lack of interest in the whole question, or outright hostility to it in an era in which fundamentalism or heavyhanded literalism reigns in religion and systematic skepticism alike. We are not good at doubting our own doubt or our own belief, since if we could see our own errors we would not be making them, but rather making up spur of the moment explanations for why they are not errors at all, but paradoxes, or subjects for further investigation.
