Word Gems: Art

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Word Gems

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Art

"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last." John Ruskin

"To seek for the beautiful is its own reward." Nina Fawcett

Editor's Essay: Higher Creativity: Liberating The Unconscious For Breakthrough Insights

Editor’s Essay: Weaponized Art: Part I: Art as Calculation to Overwhelm and Intimidate

Editor’s Essay: Weaponized Art: Part II: 30 Masterpieces Of The Ancient World

Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Art

Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon Essay: Art

Kenneth Clark's Civilisation

Vincent Van Gogh: “When facing a flat landscape, I see nothing but eternity. Am I the only one to see it?”

Dr. Joseph Campbell: art and beauty as ‘aesthetic arrest’

Marc Chagall, Lovers With Half Moon

Tom Schulman: "We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.”

Of what use is a newborn baby?

In the movie “The Monuments Men” a small group of WWII soldiers is tasked with saving Europe’s art treasures from destruction by the Nazis. Later President Truman is given to ask, was it worth the life of even one man to preserve a mere work of art? Within a certain context, this question has merit. However, if the underlying sentiment – a primacy of utilitarian function -- is taken too far, it becomes self-defeating. We’re reminded of Ben Franklin’s response to a similar question, “Of what use is a newborn baby?” Clearer minds have realized that life, without a pursuit of the noble, the aesthetic, the beautiful, would not be worth living. Without the higher and more excellent expressions of the human spirit – art, poetry, music, love, romance, beauty, all of the things we stay alive for – humankind will sink into a stultifying and dystopian materialism. And this is why another President, John F. Kennedy, almost as a warning, asserted, "The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."

Benet Haughton, Angel Bearing Flowers, 2011 (Oil on canvas, 36” x 22”)

the beauty of the world, a streaming song, even as God’s ‘love letter’ to us

Hina Khalid writes in Beshara Magazine, "Participating in the Divine Playfulness," exploring the theological aesthetics of Rabindranath Tagore:

One of the most enchanting notes of the world’s polyphonic ‘love-call’ is that of beauty, which silently streams through the spring flowers and the serene night sky. Tagore presents worldly beauty as a constantly streaming song and even as God’s ‘love letter’ to us, which many of us have – unfortunately – not yet read. As a result, the blissful encounter of love to which we are called remains unrealised. God could have set forth a regal display of the divine power, Tagore writes, which would force us to turn to Him, but instead He seeks to gently woo us through the innumerable beauties of the world – the delicate dreaminess of dawn and the soft serenity of sunset. Indeed, God takes the ‘risk’ that these unfoldings of His beauty will be ignored by us and even that we will reject this beauty as ‘futile’. But still, He will not compel us in any way.

'this tender abundance,' this beauty born of a spirit of 'excess'

Outlining this tender abundance, Tagore writes that whilst we must acknowledge and align ourselves with the fact that the sunrise heralds a new day – and pursue our daily work accordingly – we are not under any compulsion to discern the dawn as ‘beautiful and supremely peaceful’. Our loving attentiveness to its beauty is thus entirely free, but this [this free-spirited non-compulsory acknowledgement of underlying and sometimes-subtle beauty in the world] is itself a freedom to which we are, in a higher sense, bound [bound or intimately aligned with, in that we ourselves are expressions of God's delight to freely create beauty; a beauty which is non-utilitarian in nature, for God did not create us as private advantage to Herself] – for it is only in our free submission to beauty’s call that we inhabit the infinite truth of human life and come to know that this existence is, in fact, ‘a birth of joy’.

One type of loving response to this divine call of beauty is crystallised for Tagore in the vocation of the artist. Tagore presents art as a joyful meeting of the divine and the human, which recapitulates in and through time the love-infused lila of the primordial divine artist. Like God’s cosmic lila [playfulness], art has its origins in the realm of ‘excess’, because we create art not as a means to an end but for freely delighting in the beauty of the world. In other words, when we renounce utilitarian or instrumentalist imperatives...

[instrumentalism: the variety of pragmatism developed by John Dewey, maintaining that the truth of an idea is determined by its success in the active solution of a problem and that the value of ideas is determined by their function in human experience]

... in and through artistic creation, revealing the ‘wealth’ of our inner life, we reflect the God who ‘takes joy in productions that are unnecessary to him’.

The artist offers herself and her art to God in perpetual iterations of re-turning, and utters in response to the world’s call...

Endowed with this vision into the plenitude of finite reality, the artist sees more truly, and this is, in short, because she sees with the illuminative lens of love. To see through love is not to veer away from truth but to enter more fully into it, for love, in the worldviews of both Tagore and Pieper, is not a fleeting sentiment or subjective fancy but constitutes the ontological heartbeat of all created reality. As Tagore affirms, love ‘radiantly reveals the reality of its objects’, and, in Pieper’s formulation, the contemplative gaze is only truly itself when it is ‘guided by love… for a new dimension of ‘seeing’ is opened up by love alone’.

This attentive attunement to the truth of things marks, crucially, not a feat of mastery, as though the artist has domesticated the object in her imaginative purview, but heralds an opening into mystery, where the object, and thus the artwork that bears witness to it, tantalisingly resists final capture. What we encounter in art is not an object of the ordinary kind, which we can hurriedly assimilate into our mundane classificatory schemes, but an ineffable horizon of meaning which recedes as it reveals, eludes as it illuminates, and entangles as it enchants. In Pieper’s words:

[…] what do we really perceive when we look at, say, Durer’s ‘Detail of a Meadow’? It is obviously not the blades of grass, which we can observe, even more realistically, also in nature or in a photograph. It is not the blades of grass, not ‘this particular object’ at all… [and] what about songs? […] Of course we hear the words [of the song]! – and yet, provided we witness authentic and significant music and provided we listen in the proper manner, we invariably perceive an additional, most intimate, meaning that would be absent from the words alone.

Tagore echoes this observation of the ‘object-lessness’ of art. Commenting on a poem particularly beloved to him, he writes:

[…] it [the poem] has its grammar, its vocabulary; when we divide them part by part and try to torture out a confession from them, the poem, which is one, departs like the gentle wind, silently, invisibly. No one knows how it exceeds all its parts, transcends all its laws, and communicates with the person. The significance which is in unity is an eternal wonder.

In Tagore’s theological vocabulary, this ungraspable ‘unity’ refers to the atman, the Sanskrit term for the immutable spiritual self which abides within, and yet transcends, all individual beings. Tagore defines the atman as that ‘inner perfection that permeates and exceeds its contents, like the beauty in a lotus which is ineffably more than all the constituents of the flower’. The lotus’s beauty unifies and illumines its individual parts but is not itself one part among those parts, much like, to borrow another one of Tagore’s examples, the melodious whole of a sonata is inseparable from its constituent elements but is not reducible to them.

Albrecht Dürer, “Great Piece of Turf” (1503)

Offering Back to the One

In Tagore’s aesthetic vision, then, the artist transcends her individual self to inhabit the world in attentive love, and her art, nourished in ‘self-forgetful joy’, in turn sets forth the possibility of self-transcendence for others. In this way, Tagore affirms, a true work of art is ‘always speaking’, calling the recipient out of themselves towards the other.

'through her creative offerings, the artist responds to, realises and reflects, the divine, and, in this way, art approximates something akin to worship'

The artist gazes on the world through the eyes of the heart, and through this intensive witnessing of reality, sees beyond the surface of things to inhabit, and to illumine, the silent fecundity of created being. Through her creative offerings, the artist responds to, realises and reflects, the divine, and, in this way, art approximates something akin to worship. The worshipper, like the artist, suspends her quotidian [usual, daily] self-orientation to give herself to the God who is perpetually giving Himself to the world.

Elaborating this mode of self-offering, we repeatedly find across Tagore’s poetry the insistence that, through his creative efflorescence, he is only returning to God that which God has already gifted him. Just as the spring flowers blossom in God’s time and not ours, Tagore’s poems too have their ultimate root not in anything of his making but in the One who implants in all beings their particular perfections. This joyous cycle of gaining and giving is, for Tagore, the archetype of all our finite activities: to harmonise the tunes of our individual wills with the divine will, we must continually dedicate ourselves and our works to the divine singer, in whose breath we live, move, and have our being.

On this note of the cosmic circuitry of receiving and returning, I will let the great C.S. Lewis, who echoes here the musical motifs of Tagore, have the last word:

There is of course a sense in which no one can give to God anything which is not already His – and if it is already His, what have you given? But since it is only too obvious that we can withhold ourselves, our wills and hearts from God, we can, in that sense, also give them. What is His by right and would not exist for a moment if it ceased to be His (as the song is the singer’s), He has nevertheless made ours in such a way that we can freely offer it back to Him.

Marc Chagall biographer, Jackie Wullschlager: "The Nazis had begun their campaign against modernist art as soon as they seized power. Expressionist, cubist, abstract, and surrealist art—anything intellectual, Jewish, foreign, socialist-inspired, or difficult to understand—was targeted, from Picasso and Matisse going back to Cézanne and van Gogh; in its place traditional German realism, accessible and open to patriotic interpretation, was extolled."

Will Durant, The Story Of Civilization: Speaking of ancient Egypt, "The greatest element of this civilization was its art. Here, almost at the threshold of history, we find an art powerful and mature, superior to that of any modern nation, and equaled only by that of Greece... The whole theory of progress hesitates before Egyptian art."

The following is from Excursions to the Spirit World by Frederick C. Sculthorp. In 1934 the author suffered the untimely death of his wife. Grieving his loss, and after chancing upon the famous scientist Sir Oliver Lodge’s book “Why I Believe in Personal Immortality,” he decided to try his luck with a psychic-medium to contact his lost love. The results astonished him. He was given information that only she and he knew about. Moreover, this initial success led to something even more marvelous. Sculthorp discovered, with the psychic’s encouragement, that he too possessed abilities to access the coming dimensions. For the next decades, via “out-of-body” astral traveling during sleep, he would visit his wife in Summerland and, in the process, offered us much knowledge concerning life and society the next world: "My daughter, after passing over [to Summerland], told me that she had to use paints and brushes in the usual way when painting a picture, but later learnt to project the colours direct on to the canvas by thought."

Vincent van Gogh, "Old Man in Sorrow" (On the Threshold of Eternity), 1890

Ernest Becker: Victory "over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science. […] it comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation. […] The most that any one of us can […] do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the Life Force."

Marc Chagall: “We all know that a good person can be a bad artist. But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one.”

Rainer Maria Rilke: “Go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside.”

the sacred meaning of art

In my essay, “The Meaning of Beauty,” I quoted Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg: “Beauty is the translucence, through material phenomena, of the eternal splendor of the One.”

On the strength of this, along with my own meditations, in the “What We Stay Alive For” writing I offered that one’s eternal mate, “in the beauty of her countenance, reveals, as no other pedagogue, the hidden face of God… only for him, her beauty becomes a sacred portal to an inner knowing.”

However, beauty as expressed in the fine arts might also become pathway to mystical depths. I would call this “sacred art,” in that it issues as product of the artist’s accessing Universal Consciousness. We discussed this in the "Creativity” article.

Most art today is not worthy of the term and does not reflect higher levels of awareness; instead, most art seems to reach for the sensational, the gaudy, the carnival, the meretricious. When we view it, there is no calling forth of hallowed wonderment from the depths of being.

From “The Seven Purposes,” channeled comment from the other side: “Art, when it is a real interpretation of life, is a high and noble thing, but the art that is merely self-expression [representing the dysfunctional ego] is a disintegrating force. Too much of it is that now."

Instead, we sense that the artist connived, “ok, let’s see if we can turn heads and raise eyebrows by being outrageous, let’s offend proprietous sensibility, and then they’ll think we’re clever and say we’re ‘creative’.”

Wall Street (1987), Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas)

"This painting here. I bought it ten years ago for $60,000. I could sell it today for $600,000. The illusion has become real and the more real it becomes the more desperate they want it. Capitalism at its finest."

Editor’s note: Gordon Gekko perceives the world as his private arena of ruthless competition and conquest. The father of “greed is good” extends this Darwinian ethic to the aesthetic. He hawks trash-paintings as he does stocks. It’s “pump and dump,” use and abuse, it’s “momentum buying,” its “the last sucker” principle. You create an illusion of sophistication, you hype a non-existent value, you drive it up, and in the ascent all the vapid and vacuous people, wanting to appear refined and anointed, blather about how smart they are. And then the one-way doors to the slaughterhouse clang shut on the lemmings.

In these works of so-called art there is nothing that leads us to higher ground or deeper perceptions, nothing that points us to the inner knowing, there is no “translucence,” no shining through, “of the eternal splendor of the One.” It’s a purely man-made contrivance devoid of co-creatorship with the divine.

‘the cult of novelty’

Painter Jean Auguste Ingres disagrees with ‘the cult of novelty’ that oppresses popular culture:

“Let me hear no more of that absurd maxim: ‘We need the new, we need to follow our century, everything changes, everything is changed.’ Sophistry – all of that! Does nature change, do the light and air change, have the passions of the human heart changed since the time of Homer? To claim that we can get along without study of the antique and the classics is either madness or laziness… It is the doctrine of those who want to produce without having worked, who want to know without having learned.”

Augros and Stancui: “Igor Stravinsky argues that, in music, tradition does not restrict the artist but furthers creativity and guarantees the continuity of the art:

“A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present… Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. It appears as an heirloom… A tradition is carried forward in order to produce something new. Tradition thus assures the continuity of creation.”

Augros and Stancui: “Tradition, as the word’s etymology indicates, is a deliberate ‘handing over’ of something timeless in its truth or beauty.”

one's life as art form

From a grander perspective, however, it’s not just painting and writing, or music and sculpture, that becomes plastic material for the muse – one’s entire life, if properly lived, should reflect a cooperation with the transcendental; one’s life should become a masterpiece of Universal Consciousness’s expression.

I like quoting Dr. Ernest Becker on this vital point, and have done so on the homepage, but allow me to reference his words again:

Victory "over human limitation is not something that can be programmed by science … It comes from the vital energies of masses of men sweating within the nightmare of creation … The most that anyone can do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the Life Force.”

the ‘rudely loud and cheaply lurid’ of ‘realism’ does not represent ‘reality’ but a ‘false proportion’

1913 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), “On Art And Aesthetics”:

It has often been said by its advocates that this show of the rudely loud and cheaply lurid in art has its justification in the unbiased recognition of acts as such; and according to them realism must not be shunned even if it be ragged and evil-smelling. But when it does not concern science but concerns the arts we must draw a distinction between realism and reality. In its own wide perspective of normal environment, disease is a reality which has to be acknowledged in literature. But disease in a hospital is realism fit for the use of science. It is an abstraction which, if allowed to haunt literature, may assume a startling appearance because of its unreality. Such vagrant spectres do not have a proper modulation in a normal surrounding; and they offer a false proportion in their feature because the proportion of their environment is tampered with. Such a curtailment of the essential is not art, but a trick which exploits mutilation in order to assert a claim to reality.

See the following article in which the Nobel laureate discusses art and beauty and their relationship with ultimate reality.

Editor's Essay: Noting a sunrise as messenger of a new day is not the same as discerning the dawn as dreamily enchanting. The sublime awareness allowing for such is untainted by utilitarian concern. In this spirit of abundance, God creates the world of beauty. Twin Souls, 'made in the image,' recapitulate divinity’s focus on beauty’s deeper meaning, and, as they do, their sparkling love issues as a form of worship.

Weaponized Art: Part I

art as calculation to overwhelm and intimidate

British historian Kenneth Clark's Civilisation is a survey of history by reviewing its art. In chapter seven he examines the “visual exuberance” of sixteenth century Papal Rome, “the most grandiose piece of town planning ever attempted.”

The Protestant heretics of Northern Europe had called into question Rome’s authority. However, instead of negotiating with and meeting the dissidents half-way, the Church doubled down on its absolutist ways, a response history calls the Counter-Reformation.

In effect, the Church’s position became: “You say that we’ve lost the early spirit of Christianity, our humble beginnings, with too much emphasis on materialism? Well then, we’ll show you materialism, with a degree of ornateness and extravagance never before seen in history. In this way, we'll reassert our power and authority in the world.”

READ MORE

Weaponized Art: Part II

30 Masterpieces Of The Ancient World

Professor Diana K. McDonald is an art historian on the faculty of Boston College. She has spent her life investigating primeval art – even from age 6, she jokes, with a trip to Mexico’s art treasures, courtesy of her parents. Dr. McDonald has examined ancient artwork in the museums and archeological sites of more than 40 countries.

In the following discussion, I offer my observations concerning the principle features of ancient art – what it meant to the people of long ago, its purpose, how it impacted the development of civilization, and its effect on the evolution of the human spirit.

READ MORE

Degas: Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago: "...he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always served beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organizing life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence."

Paul Johnson: "...Hemingway's awareness of his inability to recapture his genius, let alone develop it, accelerated the spinning circle of depression and drink. He was a man killed by his art, and his life holds a lesson all intellectuals need to learn: that art is not enough."

the Catacombs reveal an early church, beautiful in its simplicity, before it became 'barnacled over' with 'complex abstractions'; 'one symbol predominates' in the artwork of the time

catacomb art, mid-200s AD, depicts Jesus as
shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders

From “The History Of Spiritualism, Vol. 2” (1926) by the great afterlife researcher, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of "Sherlock" fame:

"The Catacombs, also, it may be remarked, are a proof of the simplicity of early Christianity before it became barnacled over with all sorts of complex definitions and abstractions, which sprang from the Grecian or Byzantine mind, and have caused infinite evil in the world. The one symbol which predominates in the Catacombs is that of the Good Shepherd — the tender idea of a man carrying a poor helpless lamb. One may search the Catacombs of the first centuries, and in all those thousands of devices you will find nothing of a blood sacrifice, nothing of a virgin birth. You will find the Kind Shepherd, the anchor of hope, the palm of the martyr, and the fish which was the pun or rebus upon the name of Jesus. Everything points to a simple religion. Christianity was at its best when it was in the hands of the humblest. It was the rich, the powerful, and the learned who degraded, complicated, and ruined it."

Mark Twain: "We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter."

Charles Kingsley: “There is something very wonderful in music. Words are wonderful enough; but music is even more wonderful. It speaks not to our thoughts as words do; it speaks straight to our hearts and spirits, to the very core and root of our souls. Music soothes us, stirs us up; it puts noble feelings in us; it melts us to tears; we know not how; -- it is a language by itself, just as perfect, in its way, as speech, as words; just as divine, just as blessed.”

Francois Auguste Rodin: "I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need."

Friedrich Nietzsche: "The struggle against a purpose in art is always a struggle against the moral tendency in art - against its subordination to morality. Art for art's sake means, Let morality go to the Devil."

The "Lynx Arc" is 1 million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula. It is the biggest, brightest, and hottest star-forming region ever seen in space, 12 billion light-years from Earth.

Ron Merrill: "Any young person who has studied Heidegger; or seen Ionesco's 'plays'; or listened to the 'music' of John Cage; or looked at Andy Warhol's 'paintings'; has experienced that feeling of incredulous puzzlement: But this is nonsense! Can I really be expected to take this seriously? In fact, of course, it is necessary for it to be nonsense; if it made sense, it could be evaluated. The essence of modern intellectual snobbery is the 'emperor's new clothes' approach. Teachers, critics, our self-appointed intellectual elite, make it quite clear to us that if we cannot see the superlative nature of this 'art'- why, it merely shows our ignorance, our lack of sophistication and insight. Of course, they go beyond the storybook emperor's tailors, who dressed their victim in nothing and called it fine garments. The modern tailors dress the emperor in garbage."

Ayn Rand: "The purpose of all art is the objectification of values."

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death: “Otto Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create—the “artiste-manque,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an external, active, work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large-scale introversions, but he uses them as material.”

Eric Hoffer: "There is perhaps no better way of measuring the natural endowment of a soul than by its ability to transmute dissatisfaction into a creative impulse. The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary, yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction."

Pablo Picasso: "Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors."

Daniel Boorstin: "Artists and writers, I believe, have a special role, creating new questions for which they offer experimental answers. We are tested, enriched, and fulfilled by the varieties of experience. And as the years pass there are increasing advantages to being a questioner. Answers can trouble us by their inconsistency, but there is no such problem with questions. I am not obliged to hang on to earlier questions, and there can be no discord -- only growth -- between then and now. Learning, I have found, is a way of becoming inconsistent with my past self. I believe in vocation, a calling for reasons we do not understand to do whatever we discover we can do... I have observed that the world has suffered far less from ignorance than from pretensions to knowledge. It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan, a heretic, or an unbeliever... If our knowledge is, as I believe, only an island in an infinite sea of ignorance, how can we in our short lifetime find satisfaction in exploring our little island? How can we persuade ourselves to be exhilarated by our meager knowledge and yet not be discouraged by the ocean vistas?..I am, then, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist. If our mission is an endless search, how can we fail? In the short run, institutions and professions and even language keep us in the discouraging ruts. But in the long run the ruts wear away and adventuring amateur reward us by a wonderful vagrancy into the unexpected."

David Letterman: "Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees."

Paul Dirac: "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite."

Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement
produced 1533-1541
situated on the wall behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel

psychological bulwark

The Counter-Reformation, often dated from 1545 with the Council of Trent, witnessed the RCC embarking upon colossal art projects as psychological bulwark against loss of prestige from the doctrinal attacks by the heretics in the north. We reviewed historian Kenneth Clark’s assessment in “Weaponized Art: Part I.”

visual propaganda

Clearly, however, this aesthetic extravaganza - as art historian Professor Diana K. McDonald used the phrase - of “visual propaganda” began a little earlier with “The Last Judgement.”

Nearly a decade in the making, financed by the offerings of impoverished fearful true-believers, Michelangelo’s famous fresco features over 300 humanoids, with males and angels painted as nudes.

sent to paradise, but in a close call

What is this painting about? The title gives it away. We find a none-too pleased returned Christ holding the center, with dear Mother Mary flanking, exercising regal dominion.

Editor's note: See discussion on the development of the "Mary doctrine" at the bottom of the Sensibility page.

Like Dr. Viktor Frankl’s depiction of the concentration camp, the Nazi commandant lifting an ominous finger for each arrival, pointing toward the right or left, to the gas or to hard labor, so too this “rule with an iron rod” Christ sends the hapless either to eternal damnation or, in a very close call, to paradise.

how nice to be reminded during mass

And notice the forum in which RCC upper-management decided to feature this monstrous iconography: right over the altar, strategically positioned, so that no one could miss it and for the eye to be continually reminded of dire fate should one be tempted to get uppity and wander off the plantation – like those Luther-heretics in the north, you see.

There is so much wrong with this painting in terms of errant representation of reality, flim-flam "scare me to death" posturing, patently bogus proposition, that one hardly knows where to offer comment. But we’ve already done so in a thousand pages of Word Gems analysis.

Little wonder then that the enlightened Michelangelo, now in the afterlife, overwhelmed in dismay and grief at having been bamboozled by Big Religion’s propaganda, has decided to spend the next many hundreds of years offering reconstitutive artwork which sets the record straight. See the afterlife testimony concerning Michelangelo's work over there.

Editor's note: This is not unusual. From many afterlife reports we learn that "the famous" of this world very often continue with their art, music, writing, or other expressions of beauty, and much of this effort is to offer, to others and to themselves, a form of recompense for a misguided direction while on planet Earth.

James Stephens: "Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before, but in saying exactly what you think yourself."

Jackson Pollock: "Every good painter paints what he is."

James McNeill Whistler: "An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision... As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color."

Kandinsky: "There is no must in art because art is free."

Giorgio DeChirico: "To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and commonsense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams."

Picasso: "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."

Howard Ikemoto: "When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college, that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, 'You mean they forget?'"

Francisco Goya: "Fantasy, abandoned by reason, produces impossible monsters; united with it, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of marvels."

Michaelangelo: "The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection."

scientists, poets, painters, and writers are of the same family, all are artists, searching for the beautiful in nature and yearning to re-present it

Isidor Rabi, Nobel laureate in Physics and the former Chairman of the Physics Department at Columbia University: “We don't teach our students enough of the intellectual content of experiments -- their novelty and their capacity for opening new fields. My own view is that you [need to] take these things personally. You do an experiment because your own philosophy makes you want to know the result. It's too hard and life is too short, to spend your time doing something because someone else has said it’s important. You must feel the thing yourself.”

Gary Zukav: “Unfortunately, most physicists are not like Rabi. The majority of them, in fact, do spend their lives doing what other people have told them is important. That was the point Rabi was making. This brings us to a common misunderstanding. When most people say ‘scientist’ they mean 'technician’.

technicians are not scientists

"A technician is a highly trained person whose job is to apply known techniques and principles. He deals with the known. A scientist is a person who seeks to know the true nature of physical reality. He deals with the unknown. In short, scientists discover and technicians apply. However, it is no longer evident whether scientists really discover new things or whether they create them. Many people believe that 'discovery’ is actually an act of creation. If this is, then the distinction between scientists, poets, painters, and writers is not clear. In fact, it is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call commonplace and to re-present them to us in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded. Those people in whom this gift is especially pronounced, we call geniuses. The fact is that most ‘scientists’ are technicians. They are not interested in the essentially new. Their field of vision is relatively narrow, their energies are directed toward applying what is already known.”

Editor’s note: On the WG site, one finds much discussion concerning a clash between technicians and the true scientist. On the pages concerning “Evolution” or “Quantum Mechanics” or the “Afterlife,” we witness the efforts of “technicians” defending the status quo, “following orders” of conventional interests, hindering the work of “scientists,” those seeking for the truth and the beauty of how nature and reality authentically operate.

Vincent Van Gogh: "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to; the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures."

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec: "In our time there are many artists who do something because it is new; they see their value and their justification in this newness. They are deceiving themselves; novelty is seldom the essential. This has to do with one thing only; making a subject better from its intrinsic nature."

John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780: "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

Louise Nevelson: "I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within."

Abraham Moslow: "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be."

Emerson: "Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance."

Martha Graham: "There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction; a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others."

Albert Einstein: "After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well."

Albert Einstein: "I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."

Albert Einstein: "True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist."

John Ruskan, Emotional Clearing: "Artists can run into problems with their work... problems begin when the artist tries to establish a sense of social identity and acceptance through the art. The motivation shifts from pure self-expression to concern with whatever is being gained from the work... [resulting] in hampered creativity and eventual self-defeat."

Eckhart Tolle: "All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness."

Jean Cocteau: "Art is science made clear."

Lawrence Durrell: "Music is only love looking for words."

Albert Einstein: "It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."

John F. Kennedy: "The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation's purpose - and is a test of the quality of a nation's civilization."

Editor's last word: