anannoyingoath

[anannoyingoath]

In those days, John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”

...

“I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me;    I was found by those who did not seek me. To a nation that did not call on my name,    I said, ‘Here am I, here am I.’ All day long I have held out my hands    to an obstinate people, who walk in ways not good,    pursuing their own imaginations— a people who continually provoke me    to my very face, offering sacrifices in gardens    and burning incense on altars of brick; who sit among the graves    and spend their nights keeping secret vigil; who eat the flesh of pigs,    and whose pots hold broth of impure meat; who say, ‘Keep away; don’t come near me,    for I am too sacred for you!’ Such people are smoke in my nostrils,    a fire that keeps burning all day.

...

This is what the Lord says:

“As when juice is still found in a cluster of grapes    and people say, ‘Don’t destroy it,    there is still a blessing in it,’ so will I do in behalf of my servants;    I will not destroy them all. I will bring forth descendants from Jacob,    and from Judah those who will possess my mountains; my chosen people will inherit them,    and there will my servants live. ...

When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”

Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.”

...

“See, I will create    new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered,    nor will they come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever    in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight    and its people a joy. I will rejoice over Jerusalem    and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying    will be heard in it no more.

“Never again will there be in it    an infant who lives but a few days,    or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred    will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach[a] a hundred    will be considered accursed. They will build houses and dwell in them;    they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit. No longer will they build houses and others live in them,    or plant and others eat. For as the days of a tree,    so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy    the work of their hands. They will not labor in vain,    nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord,    they and their descendants with them. Before they call I will answer;    while they are still speaking I will hear. The wolf and the lamb will feed together,    and the lion will eat straw like the ox,    and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy    on all my holy mountain,” says the Lord.

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Matthew 3:1...Isaiah 65:1-5, 8-9...Matthew 11:2-6...Isaiah 65:17-25

[anannoyingoath]

The end has come. We welcome it in a minor key, at a tempo barely quicker than one beat per second. Unknowable to those not familiar with the album that this song comes from, the guitar chords at the beginning are an inverted reprisal of the same which begin the album, joined by lyrics like "Black horse leaping where the frogs withdrew" which calls six songs back to "Black horse reaping of the crops we grew." In this song, the entire album is recapitulated, condensed, and expressed.

Anticipation of The End (0:00 to 2:18): Calm, detached, complaining-but-only-to-oneself. "Of course this is how it has to be," the composition says with a clear and somber set of whole notes on the guitar. They are playing the "slow decline." Everything in life dies, the enormous variance in life, change, mutability is just the steady process of death. Our singer knows this extends beyond the natural world and into the social when he sighs, "God gave Noah the rainbow sign / no more water is the H-Bomb next time?" The social realm does not only contain the same death drive as nature, but actually is the accelerator of it. “Pale horse vows" taken within the chaotic flux of mutability and decline with a "smile at a church nearby" only exasperates the sense of impotence at the forces of death which carry us along. We lose our hair, our food goes bad after some time, the nations of the earth threaten the planet with nuclear war. "Six-point starred ink flag next time?" In the nuclear war, it doesn't matter who shoots first, they're just the second to die. The interlude beginning at 1:47 is itself pale, tragic, almost despairing.

Announcement of the End (2:18 to 3:21): The melody drops out; guitar feedback is all that is left. Atonal. Cold. Suddenly, an in-breaking of revelation at the kling of a ride cymbal's bell, with a derivative form of the reprised melody on guitar. But even it fades; only feedback, rising, until---! 

שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל ה' אֱלֹהֵינוּ ה' אֶחָד....... قل هو الله احد الله الصمد  

"Hear O'Israel, the LORD is our God, the LORD is One...He is Allah, One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge." 

The End (3:21 to 4:40): At the word of God, the band explodes; the guitars trudge out a funeral dirge of power chords while the drums seem to fling the massive crunch further into oblivion with each massive crash strike. The garbled voice of the singer's dead father dissolves into the din, while a second guitar laughs or cries like a hyena at the whole circus. We learn that everything we have been doing has been for the army of the 'Scarecrow lord.' Our singer almost screams, "There's nowhere to hide from the judge's face!" Good riddance! 

The Beginning (4:40 to 6:06):  And yet, during the cataclysm, "daylight is breaking." A new thing. The calamity of guitars and drums subside; the father's voice is intelligible. Our reprised melody, returns, it's emotive motion directed upward. Changed, but recognizable. In the end, something is hidden. Something secret, special, treasured. The vocalist to his father: "Let's keep that silly punchline between me and you / little Haroon (Arabic for Aaron, the name of the singer) / and the man in the moon." It will not be nothingness after the apocalypse. 

[anannoyingoath]

José Clemente Orozco, “The Raising of Lazarus” 

José Clemente Orozco, the keenest and often the most unsettling of the great Mexican muralists, presents us with a another sign of the end. “The Raising of Lazarus” is an example of Orozco’s less frightening side, though even this piece’s atmosphere is shot through with the grotesque. And why should it not be? The painting, overwhelmed by bleak, chalky whites and dramatic shadows, depicts something impossible: a man has been raised from the dead. The crowd of onlookers surrounding Christ responds appropriately. Eyes are bulging in disbelief, hands are raised as if to protect their countenances from having to face that which threatens to shatter the givenness of reality; so they cover their faces not merely in fraught unbelief, but in terror that all which once was is now lost, and yet—there he is! Behold, the man! Or, the dead body? Is he a even a man? Orozco paints him like a wight, more similar in form to certain contemporary depictions of the Norse draugar, and yet he is the source of the second-purest white in the composition, after Jesus. We might assume that, if we treat light traditionally, such as a symbol of knowledge, holiness, or transcendence, that it is the right-angle formed by the risen man and the Christ (the Man to be risen) which contains the densest concentration of truth or understanding that the scene is communicating. This hypothesis is supported by the overall composition of the piece: the semicircle of astonished onlookers surrounds the right-angle of bright figures (the man raised and the Man to be raised) but Christ's form, bisected violently from head to toe by a deep cerulean shadow which constitutes his posterior, suggests that this is not merely a moment in which the revelation of truth comes about non-problematically. Jesus, flatly-shaped and formed by a stark binary of dark and light, effects the resurrection of the dead man with a wobbly outstretched hand, and the crowd stares at the former corpse. Not a single eye is on Jesus (a detail in which Orozco agrees with Rembrandt but not with Benjamin West or Giovanni di Paolo in their depictions of the same event). Christ’s form is “black and white,” but what is happening couldn’t be more “shades of grey” to the onlookers. These details, as well as Orozco's penchant for criticism, suggests that what is going on in this painting is indeed a new knowledge, but not the full knowledge.

[anannoyingoath]

Vasily Kafanov, “Mirage in Fog” 

Vasily Kafanov, a Russian-born artist currently living in New York, has given us our third and final vision of 'the end.' It takes the form of a large (48''36'') canvas of mixed media, depicting a soft and blurry perspective in total greyscale which peers out at the foggy setting from within what appears to be a semi-circular columnar structure, like an aqueduct. The border of the rectangular canvas is a dark shadow, and the canvas itself appears to have been laying folded in tight squares (a 6x4 pattern, resulting in 24 small squares), whose stark, textured lines contrast sharply with the foggy content of the strange and apparently antique cityscape that the perspective yields to us. The shadowy 'aquaduct' bends across the middle of the canvas, its columns creating four arched colonnades within which stand four fountainlike figures. These figures are discernibly anthropomorphic (despite the smog) with heads, arms, torsos and legs. Their loose, hanging sleeves even seem to be visible, particularly on the three figures from the right. This is because their 'arms' are outstretched; do they face the viewer, or outward to something beyond the thick mist? They stand on the next-to-last row of squares before the absolute bottom of the canvas, and within this last row of squares is a mirrored and even foggier reflection of the cruciform figures, suggesting water, glass, or some other reflective material for a floor.

The lens of squares---so regular, ridged and geometrical---and the vaporous, smoky figures and architecture seen through them, create a tension in the piece between clarity and opacity. The entire view is notably translucent. The presence of this tension as a visual theme in the painting is further supported when one looks closely at the canvas itself. Within each square can be seen a complex---and often organized---group of textures, splatters, scratches, crinkles, and fissures. Not unlike how one can recognize forms or concepts by gazing at various cloud, rock or star formations, there are numerous places in which vaguely recognizable symbols and shapes appear. Particularly striking is the group of textures and shadows clumped in the top-center of the painting, which looks arguably like a tree with its root system, floating like a chandelier in the middle of the composition. In the same gaze, the 'tree' also looks like a much larger, inverted cruciform figure, just like the ones standing in the colonnades. When we relate this hazy object back to the figures-with-the-outstretched-hands, we may be able to suggest that they are facing toward it rather than us, welcoming--or worshiping--the tree/figure in the center of the city. In any case, the painting evokes a complex and rich vision of the dyadic relationship between clarity and obscurity, light and dark, knowledge and ignorance, seeing and dreaming, and memory and vision.  

[anannoyingoath]

We live in the last days, say the scriptures. The end is coming. It is hard to really get this, because often we inquire into the biblical narrative seeking out its ‘meaning’ or 'upshot’ for our moral and spiritual lives, mining it for tightly-packed principles, axioms, doctrines, and dogma at the expense of a question which the biblical agents--friends of Christ and Pharisees alike--asked constantly: “What is happening?” Because of its fundamentally dialogical nature, which asks of God these questions and responds to his reply, the 'object’ of all these questions is a single concern, namely, God’s action in, through and with creation. This is why I have selected a series of scripture passages; texts broken up by time, setting and speaker within the texts and broken by the organization of the Protestant Bible between the texts, but a series which nevertheless forms a narrative unity, because God is active and present in all times and all places (Psalm 139 7-12). Illustrated and in dialogue with our three pieces of art, we now turn to exploring this unity.

John’s imperative of repentance in Matthew 3:1 must be understood not as a sterile and abstract proposition (“If you repent, then…”) but as a challenge to the people of God to prepare themselves to accept and receive the end of their world. What would it have meant for the folk, busy in the world with their plans and their families, with provision for the future and orientation toward future goals, to hear that word, “Repent!” “Turn back!” Why? “Something is coming! A Kingdom!” A new order. I imagine an aspiring teacher of the law, hearing the words of John, sighing as the emotional equivalent of the opening melody of "Rainbow Signs" plays in his mind. He asks God, “Why something else? Something I did not know nor expect?” He dives into reflection. His whole life, like ours, has been a struggle to mold the future to his will. He has had to “make something of himself,” to succeed, to control the destiny which pulls him toward some believed-in final achievement. Of course, nothing has gone “according to plan.” It would be enough if only the quotidian aspects of living mocked him by escaping his grasp, but so does the 'world-historical,’ and the history of his people (the people of God). He sings alongside Mr. Weiss during the first movement of “Rainbow Signs”: What of our plans? We control nothing; neither “our fucked-up Napoleon of St. Helena hairlines” nor the movement of nations conquering and dominating other nations. They are all “clouded rearrangements of sounds we knew,” God's judgement and action for our busy lives is “our own private Waterloo.” But why? And must it be so? In the midst of this realization, “daylight is breaking!” In the moment of despair, of seeking meaning in humanity’s impotence within the chaotic manifold of personal and world history (the history of failed plans), God’s voice breaks to interrupt the young man’s solipsistic whine, like it does at 2:18 of “Rainbow Signs.”

God breaks in to show that we ought to welcome the end. “I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me,” says the Lord through the mouth of Isaiah (65:1). “Why?!” screams the aspiring, planning man, in impotent anger. “Your kingdom will come and change everything!” God’s answer: “I am ending your order because you turned it into your order, not the order I instructed you to create alongside Me” (vv. 2-7). God did what Israel did not expect. But he did not do what they were unable to have expected. This is because God’s people were tasked with a certain way of being which would express itself in a certain tenor or realm of action. This realm of action is not a mere 'realm of activity,’ impotent and self-referential, which is often translated in scripture as ‘idleness’ and is typified in contemporary examples by the “theme park” or “infinite re-playability” philosophy of video game design. Rather, it is the fluid set of human actions which in virtue of their qualitative relationship to their creator have a fructifying effect on all of creation. Thus to fail in this task would be to partake in actions whose effect is the desolation of creation. Out of sync with themselves, creation and God, the acts of God become unintelligible to the people of God. Thus at the pronouncement of failure by God in Isaiah, as in “Rainbow Signs,” the true nature of Israel’s activity is revealed to all. It has been a wielding of “the sanctified sword” for the sake of the “scarecrow lord.” The young man, with his plans for control, is confronted with God’s voice, which shows his plans for what they were. He must experience this existentially as nothing less than the end of the world, his world, which was never his in the first place, but which he allowed to form his deepest self.  

But because of his commitment to his servants, God does not annihilate (Is. 65:8-9). Nor does he spurn those who truly repent. What does it mean to repent in this context? It means being willing to relinquish control of one's own life, to the point of death. But now it is hopefully clear that whatever stance one takes toward the ‘death’ or the ‘end’ of the life of control, the life of repentance is neither simply being delivered into nothingness, nor is it absolute knowing. It does not mean that God’s plans become intelligible to us as if they were our plans. They exist “in a mirror dimly,” and we can still not get the whole picture, like the crowd in Orozco’s painting and like the tension between clarity and obscurity in Kafanov. Orozco’s crowd, like John in Matthew 11:2-6, see the miracle but not sure what to make of the future. They would act in faith if they boldly approach the throne of God and ask him, “Are you the one who is to come?” (Matt 11:3).  God’s response is fascinating: “What do you hear and see?” He shows us what particulars will point to us the universal truth: “The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (v.5). The one who does not admit (im)possibilities to their physics nor their metaphysics (which would threaten control) can not understand how God answers the messianic expectation, the fulfilled promise of the truly, universally new, by pointing to “the blind, lame, leprous, deaf, and dead” (they have names, faces, families, histories!) who are healed and raised. They, like Orozco’s crowd, will see the dead man be raised but will not make the connection to the One who raised him. In repentance, the death of our lifeworld and the end of all things becomes the lifeworld of God’s activity, and the question “what is happening?” asked during the “slow decline” of the world is answered when God guides our physical senses as well as our hermeneutical attitudes which read the world. He reveals in this actions of the person of Christ, which can be seen and heard, and which we know through testimony and through the continuing work of the Holy Spirit in the world, that these particulars are connected to and the beginning of the promise for a “new heaven and a new earth” (Is.65:17).

When we think about how Christians relate to the future, which is in God’s control but is not wholly inscrutable to us when we live a life of repentance, we find that relating to the future means answering the question “what is going on?” by referring to the characteristic action of God in the world. Where are the dead being raised, the sick healed, and where is the good news being preached to the poor? Where do we see and hear of action which takes as its object the patient and humble participation with God in bringing about the “delight” of Jerusalem, the place of bodily health, God’s shalom, and the end of alienation in labor and between humans and nature, other humans, and God (Is. 65:20-25). In this way we can “be glad and rejoice forever” at the end of worlds (‘worlds’ in our phenomenological sense) because we know that God is bringing about something new, and we know that something new is not a loss (v.18). But we only relate to the new as the viewer of the scene in Kafanov. As with his painting’s interplay of clarity and obscurity, we are guided best by God when we are comfortable with God leading us to places in which we cannot make our perfectly what is happening around us, but which God in his mercy teaches us about our true selves by allowing just enough vision we need to participate in the bringing about of God’s future.