The Mighty and the Maudlin: Metaphysical Politics

[walterrhett]

The Allegory of War, c.1640s

(This is experimental writing that combines poetic form and ideas into an illustrated essay of insights about living. Click the pictures to enlarge for full effect.)

Not politics, but painting makes me reflect upon our dilemma of decay. The best painters create an image of Life weaving the maudlin around its mightiest days. Life laughingly reminds us that what comes together rarely fits together.

The old Dutch painters with their crowd scenes and outdoor panoramas or crowded shops were gifted with a magnificent vision and a hundred inside jokes.

My favorites are Pieter Brueghel, the Elder and the Younger, from 15th and 16th century Flanders. Their peerless countrysides are packed with people, processions, carnivals. They paint vibrant communities of people who bring their life, work, and engagement to the captured moment. Their landscapes stretch from the familiar square to a horizon place beyond our sight but curious to our heart. What's there? Is the unseen edge a place of mystery whose margin is hope or fear?

The people in their paintings do not yet know they cannot escape what is here. That makes what the artists are doing in the paintings less obvious: even as the people are going about everyday living, they are also trying to preserve or alter the world.

Hope, or fear? I want to reconcile twin, conflicting odds. To embrace them both. Like the images in the paintings, I want the familiar to offer assurance and comfort. I want the flow of time to accent what I know. I want fear to be far beyond the horizon, something considered at another time, but it creeps in. Fear has a hard eye.

In my reverie, how do I find direction without being lost, move back and forth with ease? Therein lies the beauty of the Brueghel paintings: their effortless back and forth, their blending of the comic with the cosmic, their bouncing the utter impossibility of no escape against the urge to temporary freedom, to run away, over the hill, to a new tomorrow, a new day. To know in that day the path to hope or fear.

Amiri Baraka, the poet, puts the problem this way:

Who you know ever Seen God
But everybody seen The devil

Baraka probes deeper:

Who make  dough from lies and fear

Do I captain a tragic flaw or am I my worst enemy or am I just following the herd? Suppose my truth is your lie and my fear is the source of your courage? Does the comfort of the herd lead to a foreign place dressed in the garlands of illusions I am unable to escape? Have I purchased a strange freedom? What do I expect of others who journey in the same sunshine and storm?



An Iranian poet cries in haunted celebration:
No one will introduce me to the sunlight

Perhaps I can double down; the Elder Pieter Brueghel painted more than a hundred proverbs in a single scene.

The famous Fleming Proverbs are mainly about folly, the foolish persistence of foibles that seed our vision and deeds.

Pieter the Younger painted skulls in front of unbeaten drums next to lifeless body armor, piled in front of dogs fighting for dominance and submission. What an amazing allegory of grace! In desolation, we speculate and measure our hope and fear: How many gone? How many still blind? How many will never see? How many will be lost or saved?

A day of reckoning is coming and good and evil have not changed sides or become allies.

While laughter is living, the paintings of Pieter Brueghel, Elder and Younger, speak to the bemused; the denied understanding that underscores living: repentance requires reconciliation before the setting sun. Every sin has a moral answer. That answer must be expressed as a living deed, or it is scorned. But few even consider the question, or lay the right stones to lead to the answer. The folk in the paintings of the Old Masters rely upon their own reasoning and reckoning. It's easy to see in their reverie, they excuse or deny or embrace the case hope makes plain before them.

Things are a drag lately . .
Beyond your voice is a place I know that sings and sings

(Above, The Allegory of War, The Seven Acts of Charity; below, The Dutch Proverbs.)



Easter Sunday, at Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, DC. My daughter was baptised at Shiloh.